The Return of the Hidden God - A series of Advent Talks |
These talks are designed to assist your reflections during the season of Advent but they also have a more general reference to the re-emergence of the sense of God in our own time – for good and for ill.
“Advent” is a word now almost confined to ecclesiastical circles. It is, however, one which reflects the complex way in which we commonly address the future. In the languages which have some relationship to Latin it is usual to have derivations from two words which describe different ways of coming at the future.
“Futurus” - participle of the verb “to be” - gives us words which suggest a future constructed out of what already exists. There are indeed professional “futurologists” who project present trends and speculate about how they will combine or conflict; which will fade and which will predominate.
There is also the word “adventus” which means “a coming”; “an arrival”; “an approach”. Advent is the future which is coming to meet us and which if it is anticipated and sketched with sufficient clarity can have a transforming impact on the present.
In ordinary life we use both these ways of addressing the future. We project present trends but also, often by reference to matters of ultimate concern like death and our hopes for a full and meaningful life, we construct a scenario of a future which is coming to meet us. By doing so, we illuminate the choices which have to be made in the here and now.
Many times in the past century or so in Western Europe by projecting contemporary trends, particularly of church attendance, the obituary of God has been written.
Thomas Hardy penned one such early 20th century obituary in his poem, God’s Funeral. As he conjures up in his mind’s eye the column of mourners at God’s obsequies, Hardy has none of the fierce exaltation of earlier writers like Shelley who celebrated the overthrow of the great tyrant who had for so many aeons frustrated the ambitions of the sons and daughters of Prometheus. Hardy sees the funeral of God as a lamentable but inescapable fact.
“I saw a slowly-stepping train--
Lined on the brows, scoop eyed and bent and hoar--
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.
Whence came it we were tempted to create
One whom we can no longer keep alive?
And tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace we grew self deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed.
Till in Time’s stayless stealthy swing
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.
So toward our myth’s oblivion,
Darkling and languid-lipped we creep and grope
Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon
Whose Sion was a still abiding hope.”
I have quoted Hardy at length because I think that his melancholy conviction is shared by many of our contemporaries. But as we learn from the lesson from the prophet Isaiah set for the main service this year on Advent Sunday it is clear that the occlusion of God has happened before. Isaiah LXIV:7 – The prophet cries out to God, “there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee; for thou hast hid thy face from us.”
Yet despite the obituary notices, God’s death seems to have been announced prematurely. He is not only still with us in the experience of millions of believers even in Western Europe but there are rumbles of the kind that precede a great storm or an earthquake. It is this hiddeness of God and this turbulence which I wish to explore in this series of three talks entitled The Return of the Hidden God.
The hiddeness of God is a phenomenon which is unremarkable for most West Europeans but it is most extraordinary in the history of civilisations to date and still strange for most of the world’s population outside our small appendix to the Eurasian landmass.
We remember vastly less than we have lived and when we do remember a conversation from forty years ago we can be sure that it has a significance - which may not have been so clear at the time.
I remember a conversation from 1965 with my supervisor Peter Laslett. I was an undergraduate studying the history tripos and Peter Laslett was a distinguished Cambridge historian, the son of a nonconformist minister from Bedford, that citadel of nonconformist Protestantism and John Bunyan’s home town. Laslett was the author of the influential book, “The World We Have Lost”, an evocation of ordinary life in the seventeenth century and an early example of the prosopographical approach to history, destined to become more influential with the advent of the internet and its possibilities. During our tutorial he discovered that, despite coming from a non-churchgoing family, I professed a belief in God. He remarked with a certain wistfulness that it was rare to meet people with any sense of the presence of God and that I was “lucky”.
The disappearance of a sense of the presence of God is the most significant fact about contemporary European culture. Certainly Nietzsche thought so but the possibility of God has become so occluded that, to judge by the voices that dominate the media, contemporary opinion has gone beyond Peter Laslett’s wistfulness to a point where it is difficult for many cultural arbiters to conceive of what it might be like to have a lively sense of God’s reality.
Bizarrely of course this has not led to the dawn of the Age of Reason but to a state of new credulity where people do not so much believe in nothing as believe in anything.
I was amused by a tale told in the Economist about the astrology column in one of the tabloid newspapers. One day the usual contributor did not turn up so an ageing hack was drafted in to compose the predictions for the various sun signs. To relieve the boredom he decided to spice up the entry under Cancer. “All the ills of yesteryear,” he wrote, “will be as nothing to what will befall you today.” He did not for a moment think that anyone took the column seriously until the switch board was jammed by panicking readers and he was sacked.
The irony is that it is difficult to challenge such credulity on the basis of any publicly owned truth or sane spiritual authority when we venture beyond what can be quantified or treated to external examination. In the sphere of values or in relation to descriptions of the total nature of the field in which our lives unfold, there is no agreement. Indeed claiming to know about such things is regarded as provocative or even oppressive. The periodic table is commonly regarded as a description of reality whereas the Beatitudes and other expressions of the world’s wisdom traditions are seen merely as the opinions of some deceased sage.
Now is this the shape of things to come for the whole world? Is the eclipse of God, the necessary prelude to the creation of any modern society? Or is the experience of West Europeans a peculiar adaptation not destined to survive in a world in which God and the religious institutions which claim to point in his direction in the U.S., Asia, Africa, and even Russia and Eastern Europe seem to be more salient and un-ignorable than they were when my conversation with Peter Laslett happened forty years ago?
What are the reasons for the hiddeness of God in Western Europe? It is true of course that my conversation in 1965 took place a mere two years after the watershed year of 1963. Then as Philip Larkin famously asserted “sexual intercourse was invented”. Although the full significance of 1963 was not clear to me at the time as a very provincial schoolboy, it was the year in which Pope John XXIII died having summoned the Second Vatican Council. C.S.Lewis the influential Christian apologist also died. The Beatles were catapulted to stardom and John Lennon was reported as saying that the band was more popular than Jesus Christ. Bishop John Robinson’s demythologising book Honest to God was also published that year and soon ran into 9 impressions.
In reality of course 1963 only published certain trends which had been gathering strength for a very long time.
In the first place the catastrophe of the European civil wars of 1500-1700 may not be present to the conscious memory of most of our contemporaries but the strife which devastated our continent informed attitudes which are still very much with us. Our own civil war in the 1640’s was something of a side show but still 100,000 people were killed, a substantial proportion of the adult male population.
Our West European Enlightenment emerged out of horror and disgust at what religious fanaticism had done to our continent. When I studied history dilute Marxism was still the fashion and so the religious character of the European Civil War was obscured. Contemporaries, however, were in no doubt. It is not just a coincidence that it was during the last decade of the horrifying Thirty Years War [1638-48] that Galileo published his “Dialogue concerning Two New Sciences” and Descartes his “Principles of Philosophy” while Newton was born. Richard Tarnas in his fine book “The Passion of the Western Mind” sums up the consequences of this period thus - “The fragmentation brought about by warring Christian absolutisms argued the need for another type of belief system more rationally persuasive and less controversially subjective.”
In 17th century England, this endeavour was not at first seen to be incompatible with being a Christian believer as Isaac Newton certainly was, albeit of a rather unorthodox kind, as you can see from his voluminous writings on the Book of Daniel.
There is another example just down the road. Sir Christopher Wren’s father was ejected from his home and living by enthusiastic Protestants during the Civil War. His uncle, Bishop Matthew Wren spent 15 years in the Tower for the same reason. As you can see from Pepys’s Diary the early years of the restoration of the Monarchy after 1660 were haunted by the fear that sectaries of various kinds would rise again. Wren’s answer is in St Paul’s and the City Churches. His God is a God of beauty and order, quite like an architect in fact, and not a God of volcanic irrational enthusiasm. A bishop was among the prominent founders of the Royal Society and this symbolic of the fact that in England the divorce between a scientific approach to life and faith was never so pronounced as it rapidly became on the Continent.
In much of the rest of Europe, God was identified as the ally of obscurantism and of the various absolutist regimes. In consequence, the revolt of the many against the single will of the ruler was often accompanied by a rejection of the theological underpinning of absolutist ideology.
One of the reasons why the political culture of this country is different from that of our Continental neighbours is that religion has not in recent times been a major defining issue in the battles between left and right. This arises from the failure of the three main Christian combatants in England to achieve what they all desired, which was to create a religious monopoly.
Prelatist, Puritan and Papist fought themselves to a standstill and, without any of them intending it, opened the door to pluralism. When it became necessary to confront the injustices of the established political and economic status quo in the 19th century, the early Trades Unionists like the Tolpuddle Martyrs were not Marxist agitators but Methodist lay preachers. In England, however much you disliked the Established Church, it was never necessary to oppose Jesus Christ if you were agitating for change.
In countries which combined an authoritarian tradition with a religious monopoly, where Christ seemed, bizarrely, to be an ally of the status quo then in those countries, Russia, Prussia, France, Spain and Italy, religious monopoly spawned large, left wing, atheist parties. By contrast, in England the membership of the British Communist party has at no point ever equalled the membership of the Lord’s Day Observance Society.
The experience of the US has been very different. America was populated in part by people seeking religious freedom of expression, people who had passed over into the Promised Land through the baptismal waters of the Atlantic. The very different historical narrative of the US goes a very long way to explaining why there is such a sharp divergence between Americans and Western Europeans in the matter of the forms of faith.
It is of course true that the great killers in 20th century Europe were the secular Messianic states, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia with their pseudo-scientistic visions of how to build a secular heaven on top of a vast graveyard. But still obstinately, despite most recent evidence, the orthodoxy of the Pig and Whistle is that “the worst wars in history have been religious wars”. And it is true that you do not have to be an atheist to sympathise with Jonathan Swift’s lament – “how is it that we have enough religion to hate one another but not enough to love one another”.
Philosophical developments have also contributed to the eclipse of God. The God seen to be compatible with the ordered Newtonian universe was more like the god of the ancient philosophers, the Unmoved Mover, than the dynamic God of Covenant and Promise, encountered in the Bible. In the Bible God is before the beginning. He is the pre-comprehensible ground of all that is. He is the subject whose name revealed to Moses is simply “I am”. Eccentrics may doubt his presence – “dixit insipiens”, the fool hath said in his heart that there is no God, scoffed the Psalmist – but He is the Creator of the deep structure of the world and the source of reason and understanding of the laws which underlie nature.
By contrast the God who fitted into the mechanistic picture of the universe drawn by Newton was not so much a subject as the object of human thought, and an object who ultimately became redundant.
This translation of God into an object follows from the mode of reasoning which was classically expressed in the work of Descartes. His method involves a disengagement from the world and body and the assumption of an instrumental stance towards them. Anyone trained in this way of reasoning becomes progressively less aware of being a creature, a participant in the web of life in an animated universe. Instead we become more prone to regard every thing other than our self as mere matter to be used to realise our desires. In the end we come to regard even ourselves and our bodies in this light.
Our era is characterised by the relocation of the focus for unity and the meaning of being from God to the unifying rational mind. But the world unified by our “own private store of reason” ceases to be a shared context for human society.
So disengagement marches with individualism, and a conviction that I do not need my neighbour to be fully myself. The individual is progressively induced to see the other as a means to an end or an impediment.
The concept of truth which attracted Descartes, understandably in view of the violent controversies of his own day, involved a process of making secure deductions from that which is present and unconcealed to the attentive mind, “quae menti attendenti praesens et aperta est”. Therefore whatever else lays claim to being present and being beyond doubt, like the idea of God, must be present in me.
The Biblical God however breaks upon human beings from without and announces himself. Abraham! Leave your city and your household gods. Moses! Approach this bush which burns but which is not consumed. Samuel! Listen to my voice. Zacharias! Mary! God discloses himself and is not dependent on our thought. Indeed “Si enim comprehendis, non est dues,” in the words of St Augustine. If you can contain him in your mind then he is not God.
The contemporary obstacles to the thinkability of God lie both in the concept of God developed under the influence of a mechanistic picture of the universe and also from the Cartesian concept of thought as a process of making secure that which is present and unconcealed to the attentive mind. Faith offers a freedom to go beyond one’s present self and to embrace a self definition which does not have to revert to the self grounding of the human ego.
Indeed the teaching of Jesus Christ is more radical. If truth is a process of making secure on the basis of the resources which lie within us open to the attentive mind then it is almost inevitable that human beings following such a method find themselves surreptitiously occupying the place of god. Jesus teaches by example that the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god. As it says in the letter to the Christians of Philippi, “He did not snatch at equality with God but came in the form of a servant and humbled himself”. Faith reaches beyond the bubble of the self - O Lord make haste to help us. O God make speed to save us. This is a liberated way of being human - I am addressed and I am addressable.
But in this exchange we can hide from him and he can be hidden from us. William Blake the poet said “we are put upon this earth a little space to learn to bear the beams of love”. Strangely however from early years we are at work building beam proof shelters and ego shells. Already in the Paradise Garden, the archetypal humans, following their bid for equality with God, hide themselves from the presence of the Lord amongst the trees of the garden, discover shame and begin to wear masks. Incidentally, the insensitivity of the modern Western ear to symbolic language constitutes yet another invisibility cloak.
God is occluded for those whose awareness has been reduced by an excessive reliance on what can be measured and counted, by a cramping faith in number divorced from harmony. This happens from time to time in human culture. As Isaiah lamented, “There is none that calleth upon thy name that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee for thou hast hid thy face from us”. Isaiah XLIV. This is “Deus absconditus”, the hidden God.
Last time, I suggested various reasons why God was veiled to our sight but you will notice that the prophet Isaiah asserts that God as “subject” has hidden himself.
We discussed ways in which ideas about God interacted with the experience of West Europeans in the disastrous civil wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, in which Christians of all stripes were implicated. We talked of a growing sense of the claims of the “many” seeking liberation from the single will of some absolute ruler, how in the struggle a certain idea of God was pressed into service by absolutism and how this idea of God was exposed by the overthrow of the ancient regime. We also looked at the implications for our awareness and our way of being in the world of the adoption of a Cartesian frame of reference. Descartes sought emancipation from external authorities in a way of reasoning which was founded on detachment from the world and the body and which attempted to establish and secure truths on the basis of what is present and apparent to the attentive mind.
It is obvious that the concept of the hiddeness of God in such a scheme makes no sense. At first for many God lingered as an idea in our minds and was defended in terms familiar from the philosophies of the ancient world and then was perceived to be redundant as an object of our thought along side other objects.
Now you may be surprised by this mixture of war, politics, culture and ways of thought and awareness in relation to a subject nearly always presented in terms of the thinkability of God. The truth is that we construct our world views by acknowledging the shortcomings of our existing state of understanding and frames of reference. We identify the inadequacy of the existing world view in terms of its logic and consonance with other forms of knowledge, the discovery of its malign ethical and social consequences fetched fascinatingly from some intuitive sense that there is a truth in these areas to be discovered and that there are more or less adequate versions of it.
There is often a suspicion, sometimes justified, that believers in God are really trying to put the clock back and return to some pre-modern state of society. Now of course knowledge of other societies does enable us to put questions to our own time and discern the assumptions and the results of historical development which appear to many of our contemporaries to be inevitable and part of the natural order. We should beware of thinking that progress is linear and that we stand on a pinnacle of enlightenment from which we are able to judge all other times and places. But I think that most of us would admit the justice of some of the objections lodged against previous ideas about God and note that the Bible presents us in any case with a different picture.
The Bible flows from a God which “no man hath seen at any time” but a God who has communicated and disclosed himself. Without this disclosure we could know little indeed about him and little about the field in which our lives unfold. We are not in fact able to detach ourselves from this field, to take up a standpoint from which to observe and comprehend the totality of the life in which we are participants.
God is a mystery not in the sense of a puzzle which will eventually yield to the little grey cells of some Hercule Poirot or will be solved in the light of further information. The Biblical God is literally unfathomable by the faculties that he has created. There is no getting behind him and the mystery embraces us.
If we are to respond to the true and living God then we must be alert to prevent any idea about him being substituted for the whole. That is not to say that there are not more or less adequate ways of addressing and referring to God as we have seen or that reflecting on God is a pointless exercise.
God’s hiddeness is often in fact one of the ways in which he exposes the inadequacy of our way of approaching him. Let me give you an example from the life of Jesus Christ. Christians believe that Jesus is the human face of God and that he is indeed a king of a unique kind. This becomes apparent when he is paraded before Pilate and mocked with the salute “Hail King of the Jews”. There is a fascinating verse however preserved by St John in his gospel which refers to an incident in Galilee, the north-country which was Jesus’ home. There was such enthusiasm for him that he “perceived that they would come and take him by force to make him a king so he departed again into a mountain himself alone”. [John VI:15]
Before the Passion and crucifixion the popular ideas of kingship and the divine were inadequate and over dependent on the contemporary models of what kings behaved and were – so God hid himself.
The theme of the salutary hiddeness of God also runs through the accounts of the Temple. In the New Testament there are constant references to the Temple of Jerusalem and its replacement by the body of Jesus himself – John II:21 “Jesus said Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews forty and six years was this temple in building and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body.” The word for temple used in this passage is significantly not the general word “hieron” but “naos” which means the inner sanctuary.
At the heart of the temple, in the inner sanctuary, alone among the temples of the ancient world there was no cult statue or symbol of the divinity but an an-iconic space in which God’s being and presence was hidden. Jesus discloses the human face of God and discloses a fuller vision of God than was entrusted to Moses on the Holy Mountain. But such are the mistaken notions about God which arise from our partial ideas and pictures that they are continually dissolving into his essential hiddeness.
Can we then be certain of anything as we wrestle like Jacob with his angel until the break of day? In the struggle Jacob received a serious wound as did Jesus himself praying in the Garden that the cup of suffering might be taken from him. But although Jacob was not allowed to know God’s name which for the ancient Hebrews stood for the kind of knowledge of someone which gave power over them, he did receive blessing and certitude that he was in the hands of a God of promise and faithfulness. I shall return to these crucial concepts in my final talk.
There are times then for hiddeness and times for “epiphany” which means manifestation. We have experienced a period of hiddeness intimately connected with errors and distortions in our approach to God. Alas the false God is still haunting us – the object of our thought and the confection of our fantasy, the ally of tyrants, the incitement to heretic burning and lethal conflict, ingredients in the hellish brew of false religion.
In this season of advent we address ourselves to the future but the future is of course in reality not open to us but rather behind our backs, out of sight. It is as if we were rowing on a vast body of water in our little skiff. We can see the way we have come and we can also see the signs on the water of the approaching tempest which is coming towards us from the future, from the direction in which we are travelling.
What are the signs which arise from the significant absence of God and presage a storm within which he will once again make himself known – but no doubt in a most surprising way?
God’s appearing in the Christ-child and the advent of the crucified God is so familiar to us that the truth of it sleeps bedridden in the dormitory of the soul. We need the season of Advent to recover the awe and wonder appropriate to the event. God came in the form of a vulnerable child; a truth so unlooked for that most people could not see what was before their eyes. As usual they were looking for a Messiah on a white horse. As he went about among them he had to hush them continually and implore them to wait for the end of the story or they would fall into the old errors, the old pictures of what constituted greatness and they would make the doomed attempt to change the regime without transforming the human heart.
Today I want to begin a sketch of some of the signs on the water which arise from the absence of God and presage the advent of a storm and his re-emergence. We must understand what we have been taught however in the story so far so that we can see and avoid some of the dangers and the debris which will certainly attend this re-emergence.
Let us start with the eloquent absence of God and its implications for our way of being in a world which is generating acute ecological distress.
Behold, I show you a mystery. We have a great deal of knowledge about the facts, the causes and effects of environmental degradation but it seems to be hard to translate this knowledge into the degree of awareness which transforms our way of being in the world; the awareness which generates energy for the profound changes which are needed in the way we live now.
In its last major report in 2001, the intergovernmental panel on climate change predicted a rise in global temperatures of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees centigrade over the period 1990-2100. This estimate, however, only takes account of global warming driven by known greenhouse gas emissions and it may well have to be revised upward, especially if the great peat bog in Siberia thaws, releasing millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere.
At the beginning of this year as a result of the personal prompting of the Prime Minister an international conference was held in Exeter at the HQ of the Met Office. The conference reprised the well known facts about global warming but there were also two unexpected disclosures. First the British Antarctic Survey reported that there was a real danger of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet breaking up. Were it to collapse into the sea it would raise global sea levels by about 16 feet. That puts Westminster but not the City of London at risk. Only four years ago it was stated at the previous conference in the series that the ice sheet was safe for a thousand years. The scientific assessment now is that this judgement is unsafe.
The second warning concerned the acidification of the oceans. CO2 emissions not only have an impact on climate but dissolved in water are causing chemical changes in the oceans detrimental to the small marine organisms at the bottom of the food chain. These are the organisms on which life in the sea depends.
These are not computer generated scenarios but the fruit of actual observation in the real world. More recently there have been reports from the other pole that the Arctic ice sheet is contracting. Signs of irreversible changes in our eco-system are multiplying.
Prophecy should not be strident talk about matters only dimly understood. It must be informed by the best possible science and history which is why the report laid before the General Synod of the Church of England earlier this year and entitled, “Sharing God’s Planet” starts with a brief and clear summary of the facts of the case. If you have not read this excellent and practical document, I urge you to do so.
Consideration of the facts however leads us rapidly to the conclusion that the challenges we face are bound up with our way of being in the world and the character of our awareness. I have tried to show how philosophical and social/spiritual changes have combined to widen the divorce between the human observer and the web of life in which we are, in reality, participants and upon which we depend. Despite the efforts of Darwin to return human beings to the earth and to the kind of creaturely awareness ascribed in the Book of Genesis to “Adam”, the creature fashioned from the dust of the ground, we have increasingly come to view ourselves in the words of Rene Descartes as “masters and possessors of the earth” and therefore justified in treating the world as mere matter to be exploited. This kind of awareness leads to lethal consequences when it is accompanied by a largely uncritical acceptance of a project of growth without limit with no end in view beyond the process itself.
This state of consciousness is increasingly challenged by the ecological distresses to which it has given rise while it certainly does not reflect the Biblical picture of our relationships as human beings, - our relationship with God; the creation and our neighbours. The Synod report makes clear that “creation care” and not simply concern for the environment as a backcloth to human willing, flows from our Christian faith.
One may design a grid to illustrate the various ways in which human beings relate to the material world. Manichees despise matter. Pagans worship matter. Materialists ironically are indifferent to matter. It is Christians in the light of the Word made flesh who reverence matter as a gift and channel of communication with the Creator.
It is important to note that the Biblical tradition goes beyond merely commending care for creation as it is but also enrols human beings as co-creators with God. This is what we assert every time we offer bread as fruit of the earth and work of human hands. The Bible does not imply a rejection of the idea of development. According to the Book of Genesis we are to “dress and keep” creation. This implies a balance between care and development. But maintaining such a balance depends on a lively sense of being alive in God’s world where the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god.
Human beings are hungry and thirsty creatures. When it says in the book of Genesis that God breathed into the first human being and “man became a living soul”, the word for “soul” used in this passage is “nephesh” which also had the ancient meaning of “throat”. Human beings are hungry and thirsty not only for the wherewithal to sustain existence but for meaning and joy in life. For many their search for the wherewithal to satisfy their hunger and thirst is concentrated on acquiring things but for some, often those who in Luther’s words have “sinned boldly”, there is a breakthrough to a deeper thirst which no-thing can slake, only immersion in the living God.
St Francis whose freshness sprang from his immersion in the God of the Bible rather than acquaintance with the god of the philosophers is an icon of this way of being in the world. I suspect that it is significant that he had bourgeois origins and enjoyed a very jolly time as a young man on his father’s money – father being a wealthy wholesale textile merchant.
Francis surprised within himself a longing, a hunger and thirst for joy, for truth, for a depth of compassion which could not be satisfied by having things but which could only be tasted by an immersion in the reality of the living God.
We brought nothing into the world and it is certain that we can take nothing out. This is a fearful truth but if we want liberation from fear then as Philoxenus of Mabbug said we must embrace this reality. “Let people look at their beginning and their end and try to be like that also during the time in between.”
Stripping off the surface self, the masking self with which our ancestors covered themselves so as to hide from the living God in the Paradise Garden, to be in the state in which Jesus presented himself to the Father, progressively simplifying our lives and embracing in all humility our creatureliness, kissing as Francis did the leper - that is the hard way through the barrier of fear to the joy and liberation of which Francis sings.
He followed the way that Jesus Christ opened up. According to the letter Paul addressed to the Christians of Philippi, Christ “did not snatch at equality with God but came in the form of a servant”. In his coming in this form, Christ teaches that the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god living in the delusion that the universe and all things exist for our commodity. On the Christian way there is no evading the challenge to make sense of what this Copernican revolution means for each of us personally.
It is crucial not to be so intoxicated with the beauty of the idea of the self emptying of God and the story of Francis that we fail to take the simple and hard steps to wean ourselves progressively from our addictions and turn ourselves towards the living God.
Francis calls us to be practical and to return to the body, and to recognise our frailty and our companionship with fellow lepers. If we are called to joy then we make progress on this road by acts of renunciation and simplification.
Any contemporary approach to the ecological distresses of the planet from a Christian point of view requires personal action not only because tactically we ought to put our own house in order before we lecture others which is true but also because returning to the humus and to our bodies is a pre-condition for a strengthening of the awareness needed for greater spiritual adventure in a joyful spirit.
But as we saw in the Jubilee 2000 campaign, the Christian community with allies from other faiths and people of simple good will can make a difference by putting the subject on the agenda and by demonstrating that there is a constituency for change. In this way they can enlarge the room for manoeuvre so that sympathetic politicians can be emboldened to act without placing themselves too far distant from public opinion.
I studied the party manifestos at the last election and the sections on climate change were very disappointing. One manifesto after talking in semi mystical terms about the party’s kinship with nature promised as a first commitment to “end the war with the motorist”. But I expect that action on climate change did not feature very much in the focus groups and other measurements of what we want from our governments. We and our neighbours can change this situation.
So many commentators have looked with hope to the Church and her spiritual resources as a potential ally in the common struggle. One obvious example is the urgent need for a Christian re-discovery of the Sabbath as the crown of creation and a festival of equilibrium and enoughness.
The Genesis narrative asserts that creation reaches its consummation not in the creation of human beings on the sixth day but in the peace of the Sabbath on the seventh. At the same time the Sabbath concept when related to the fallow season for the earth points to the need for respect for our common home and restraint on human intervention and exploitation of the natural order.
Rather than being a mere pause between bouts of activity, the Sabbath was to be a feast of contentment. The rhythm of Sabbath days and Sabbath years reclaims time itself from being a mere succession of passing moments. It gives life a shape which flows from the recognition so powerful in Francis that creation was brought into being not to serve any transient human purpose but to be material for the praise and glory of the Creator.
Creation “wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell” knowing no respite from our demands for “more”. The Sabbath must be re-invigorated not as a nostalgic symbol of the religious past but as an anticipation of the harmony and sustainable equilibrium of the Kingdom. Needless to say our Jewish relatives have much to teach us in this respect.
After a rash of ecological concern in the seventies, the subject seems in more recent years to have receded from view and relegated to the suburbs of our interest. I believe that we are now close to a tipping point in popular consciousness and we must play our part as followers of Jesus Christ in indicating clearly what one person, what single communities can do to develop a transforming awareness of the peril in which we stand and to assist a shift into a way of living wisely.
We all need conversion to God, a turning to face the future behind our backs not once only in words but decisively in a way of living wisely which leads to progressive transformation. Conversion means turning from the attempt to satisfy our hunger and thirst just by being consumers. Consumers are called to grow into citizens and communicants, beings in communion with God’s creation, and then perhaps we shall know the joy which comes with being a true contemplative.
So here we are again sculling on a vast body of water with the future ahead of us yet behind our back, flowing past us into view. We can learn much about Advent, what is coming to meet us from the future, by the turbulence already visible in the moving waters.
God is hidden from our view yet as we have explored together these past two weeks there may be good reasons for this occlusion. Lethal civil wars in which “god” was invoked on both sides; the necessary deposition of a “god” who had been enrolled as the underwriter of tyranny; the “god” who had been confined to an idea in our minds – the true and living God has been so defamed in the past of our North West European culture that unlike the experience of some other contemporary cultures in the world, God has hidden himself from our consciousness. This reminds us of Jesus who was a King but when they came to take him by force to make him a king as they conceived a king should be, he retired to the mountain and hid himself from them.
The true and living God having become hidden, our soul was starved and our worship became stale. It is interesting how the great prophet of atheism Nietzsche spends very little time deploying philosophical arguments against God rather he deplores the joylessness of so many Christians in his day and says “what is decisive against Christianity is our taste, no longer our reasons.”
But the absence of God is itself very eloquent and a human society living without a rooting in God soon exhibits signs of distress. Last time we considered our autistic way of being in the world. By abstracting ourselves from the field in which we are growing we have lost an awareness of being participants in a web of life. Instead, with minds detached from our bodies as from all of nature we have developed an idea of ourselves that we are as Descartes put it, “masters and possessors of the earth”. Without any respect let alone reverence for matter we have become exploitative in a way that has left scars on the planet and imperilled the ecosystem on which we, in reality, depend.
We are just waking up to what is happening and I believe that a new openness to God will be part of the healing which will follow the ills which we have wished upon ourselves. But we must be careful not to once again confect a god out of our own anger and condemnation of others. I have discovered that there are many, very angry people who claim to be committed to peace studies. There are many politically correct people who desire a revolution and sometimes even do so in the name of God but who exhibit the control freakery and the lust for domination which brought discredit on the old notions of God and against which there has been a legitimate protest. The truth about God is a life or death matter and theological errors are literally deadly.
I was speaking recently to some young lawyers at the Inner Temple about the place of religion in modern society. On this occasion I was singing from the same hymn sheet with the Chief Rabbi and the Cardinal but still an anxious young man pleaded with the audience not to let religion back into the daylight world. “Don’t let them back into the house,” he said in an unconsciousness quotation from the New Testament because religious people had caused so much suffering in the past. For reasons which I hope that I have explained, the young man’s protest stirred some sympathy in me; even though the dogmatic terms in which he spoke reminded me uncomfortably of some fundamentalist Christians.
It seems to me however that the time has come for what is called in the New Testament metanoia – a turn around and a going beyond our present mindset because we are confronted with such evident distress arising from the absence of the true and living God. But in making this shift and opening ourselves to the possibility of God we should keep close to the humus, humble and mindful of the huge damage that religious people have done in the past.
This year we are celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of the U.N. Charter at the San Francisco Assembly. The energy which created the Charter was informed by the horrifying experiences of World War II and the social spiritual capital of Western culture. It seems to me, however, that the rhetoric of human solidarity which has been such a blessing to the world and which was incorporated in the Charter is losing its power. Mere appeals to ethical fraternity do not seem to evoke the energy which sustains civilisations. Simple ungrounded assertions about human dignity when all sense of the sacred and reverence for the other outside my immediate individual consciousness is fading, seem more and more to be “sad, slight useless things to calm the mad.”
We can all admire the austere faith of atheism whose adherents stand before a meaningless world with courage and lucidity making a meaning out of life for themselves. But as a matter of fact the meaning for human life that has been constructed recently seems a very frail basis for happiness, creativity or sustained fruitfulness. Descartes said famously “cogito ergo sum”, I think therefore I am. The modern equivalent seems to be “eligo ergo sum”, or even “tesco ergo sum” - I choose therefore I am. Our problem now is not so much believing in God as believing in humanity.
Do we really believe in our heart of hearts that this civilisation in its present form is going to endure much longer? Our societies are so very complex that they are highly vulnerable. They are especially vulnerable if individualism breaks down any strong sense of neighbourly solidarity and the rich simply save themselves. This was the real lesson of Hurricane Katrina which remains when all the blame game has been played out.
At the same time, in this period of spiritual destitution, we are confronted by a fanaticism which has its roots in pseudo-religion, in an idolatry which has confected a God out of human anger and a desire for revenge. We have ample evidence of the danger of false and self regarding religion. This is why the great prophets spent so much energy in denouncing idolatry but what follows from this recognition? Are we to ban religion of all kinds from the public square, to seek to relegate it to the margins of life where the credulous and fanatical can speak in words of fire to one another without challenge until the cauldron of their anger boils over? Or will Western Europe read the signs of the times and come to understand that the hidden God is exercising a gravitational pull on our time and that it is time for him to return not as the absolute ruler whose will was annexed to justify the tyrants but as the God of love who showed his power in vulnerability and who is the God of promise and hope? No one has seen God at any time says St John but he has made himself known in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We have a lot of unlearning to do because spiritual truth is not accessible by the way that Descartes has mapped out. We do not so much think ourselves into new ways of living. It is more the case that we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. We do not so much resolve the God-question in our heads. It is resolved in us when we agree to bear the mystery of God’s suffering in the world and God’s ecstasy in the world.
This unlearning begins with a return to our bodies and to our creaturely experience. That is why Jesus teaches that the first step in becoming a human being is to refuse to be a little god. This is a hard saying when the Cartesian way of being in the world which ends in our assuming the role of “master and possessor of the earth” does precisely consist in making ourselves little gods. Unvarnished or unspun “What is” - is the great teacher. That is why Jesus refused the drugged wine on the cross and why we so often resort to drugs to keep our illusions in place. “What is” is the great teacher – which is why Jesus spent thirty years living before his three years of teaching.
Unlearning brings us to the place where we can begin to bear the mystery of God. We can acquire the beginner’s mind and to know the water on which we are sculling as the life of God himself. St Patrick says that the experience of God in Christ points to a God who is with me, within me, behind me, before me, beside me, to win me, to comfort and restore me.
In the course of coming to realise this truth, Jesus teaches that the hiddeness of God plays a significant part. In St Matthew Jesus talks of God’s realm being like a treasure hid in a field [Matthew XIII:44]. God’s reality is like yeast hidden in everyday dough [Matthew XIII:33].
When things are lost however we are required to go on a search like the woman searching urgently for her coin in the story in St Luke [Luke XV:8] or the merchant looking to purchase the pearl of great price. [Matthew XIII:46]. The search demands single mindedness and it is significant that the merchant had to sell everything he possessed to afford that single pearl.
At the same time we are challenged to recognise that in reality it is we who are lost and hidden and that it is God who is looking for us like the good shepherd searching for the sheep that has gone astray in Matthew XVIII:!2.
But the end of our exploring is not in reality to get anywhere but to arrive at the here and now. The image of the journey is only accurate as far as it goes. The end of our exploring is to awake to where we are now. That is why Jesus continually says, keep alert, watch and pray. We are involved in a mass cultural trance so that we only see with the material eye and we are looking for the bottom line in a way that obscures where we are. Spiritual discipline is intended to void illusions and prayer is the great dispeller of illusions which clears the way and gives us the strength to be fully present.
Being fully present and awake involves acquiring the beginner’s mind which is the fruit of much unlearning. We are surrounded by so much information we can be kept almost infinitely amused and diverted. It requires considerable spiritual discernment which is a gift given in our own day only sparingly.
What we call God is a mixture of infantile projections and deep wisdom – weeds and wheat growing together in the field of our own lives. This continues to the end and I believe that the picture of Jesus hanging between two thieves suggests that the final harvest is not for this life. You will also notice that Jesus forgave both the thieves hanging with him even though one was not open to the news about Paradise.
Some so called religious people are so conscious of their spiritual elevation that they are blind to their faults. These faults are even exaggerated by association with a dogmatic view of God and the idea of God becomes a means for the humiliated ego to re-ascend. Some religious people attach themselves so tightly to their last conversion experience that they create an obstacle to the next one.
Jesus’ constant reference to lamps points to our calling to grow into illuminated people, honest about “what is” and able to detect self serving truths and cultural lies, like the lies so often told about what God wants which bear a suspicious resemblance to what we want. If our lamps are not lit through simple prayer and attention to “what is” then we shall be entoiled in group think.
I do however think that there are hopeful signs that people may be once more open to this truth. It is a great privilege to work in London with so many opportunities to take the pulse of the times. I was sitting next to one of those responsible for the launch of the Metro free newspaper. He said that it had been a huge and unexpected success especially with young men whose early exposure to the internet had given them a detestation of spin, a disaffection from the offerings of more traditional newspapers and an openness to publications like the Metro composed largely of straight news stories from Reuters.
I know the reality of what I am saying but only in snatches and with a frequent experience of failure and falling back into the old grooves. Yet it is humbling and encouraging that we come to God not by doing it right which so often inflates us but by doing it wrong and recognising it. We are called to the beginner’s mind and eye which hesitates to judge and which is a kind of second innocence which lies beyond the desert of criticism and the illusion that we get what we deserve. This note is struck in one of the passages set for Advent III in the Book of Common Prayer. St Paul says in his letter to the Christians of Corinth [ICor. IV:1ff] “Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God”. Stewards are required to be faithful to be sure but it is inappropriate to rush to judgement “before the time, until the Lord comes who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts”. Until then says Paul “I judge not mine own self”. Judgement is what happens at the end of the story and if we judge too early we impose a premature halt on what is still unfolding.
We have to live the mystery without yielding to the temptation to go straight to the bottom line or to “cash it out”. The world is the temple of the God who is the mystery of the world and those who buy and sell religion, the merchants of grace who are ritualised and not incorporated in the mystery; they are the ones whom Jesus drives from the Temple. There is a wonderful sermon of Meister Eckhart on this theme. [Volume I, Sermon 6 in the edition of Michael Walsh SJ] “The merchants must go when truth is revealed for truth needs no merchandising.” God who is our life “seeks not his own: he is perfectly free in his acts which he does out of true love. So does that man who is at one with God.”
The image of the river means a great deal to me, not some tranquil purling brook but the mighty Danube on which I found myself in the aftermath of the NATO war against Serbia. Its power was vast. The banks were indistinct and shrouded with trees which reached down to the water’s edge: the depth was unguessable and the waters were dark and heavy with silt and toxins. The river filled me with alarm. I thought of Jonah and how he fled from the presence of God and tried to hide from him. A storm arose on the waters and although the sailors laboured to save the ship, they eventually realised that they must throw Jonah over the side if they were to survive. Jesus talks about the sign of Jonah which will be given “to this generation”.
Jonah went down into the deep waters and spent three days in the belly of the great fish. It is not called a whale in the Bible but of course for a symbolically insensitive generation questions have been asked about the capacities of a whale’s throat and whether a man would really survive in its belly for three days. But here is deep spiritual truth. Jonah chose exile rather than embrace the enemy city Nineveh.
Christianity has often presented itself to the Western world not as a way of seeing all things but as a competing ideology among other ideologies. Instead of leading us to God in new and surprising places it has often attempted to confirm us in our conviction that God is inside our place. Simone Weil has suggested that “the tragedy of Christianity is that it came to see itself as replacing other religions instead of adding something to all of them.”
At this point in preparing these talks I was suddenly confronted with the truth that I had always envisaged myself rowing against the current. The future was behind my back as I sculled, at the source of the stream but then the call came to turn the skiff around and recognise that the future to which the stream was tending lay in the sea.
The Bible is full of God’s call to all human persons but we have so often narrowed the idea of vocation significantly to mean merely a call to religious orders. Now is the time to recover a sense of the call of God in each one of us. He calls us to reflect on his hiddeness and to recognise our lostness. He gives us lamps so that we can unlearn and acquire the beginner’s mind. He teaches us to look for him in unexpected places and people. He stirs us up to be watchful, to be expectant and to look for Advent in this new wired up world rather than a continuation of the same old trends.
If when Christmas comes, we approach the Christ-child in this spirit then God may disclose himself as the God of infinite promise, as the God whose energy is encountered in the darkness of what is, as the true and living God who is the truth but not a self serving truth rather the God and truth who serves and loves for others. I believe that this is certain but beyond all words that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have beheld his glory as of the only begotten from the Father full of grace and truth”.
