London's Internet Church - 28/02/07

Last time, I suggested various reasons why God seems to be missing from the consciousness of many modern people. He is veiled to our sight but there is also the teasing suggestion to be found in the words of the prophet Isaiah that God himself as “subject” has hidden himself from our eyes.

We discussed ways in which God went missing for many Europeans after the experience of 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, and how in the struggle a certain idea of God was pressed into service by absolutism and how this idea of God was undermined by the overthrow of the ancien regime. We also looked at the implications for our awareness and our way of being in the world of the adoption of a Cartesian perspective. 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”.

Most often we reconstruct 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 using the test of logic and consonance with other forms of knowledge, the discovery of any 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 some particular and local course 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 described by St John as the one whom “no man hath seen at any time” but who has communicated and disclosed himself. Without this disclosure we could know little indeed about God 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 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 then we are to respond to the true and living God then we must be alert to prevent any idea about him being treated as definitive. 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 and picturing 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 inadequate contemporary models of how kings behaved – so God hid himself.
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. This will be a theme of my third talk.

But in this period of hiddeness there are signs which arise from the real absence of God and presage a storm within which he will once again make himself known – but no doubt in a most surprising way? We are coming to see that God is certainly missing and missed but it is vital that we understand what we have been taught 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 exhibiting ecological distress.

We have a great deal of knowledge about the facts, the causes and effects of environmental degradation which are confirmed every day. In the past week for example the “Independent” reported the submergence of a populated island, the first such to be a victim of rising sea levels. It still seems to be hard, however, to translate this knowledge into a degree of awareness sufficient to transform 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 that there is inescapable evidence of the connection between the way we are using the resources of the earth and the impact on the poorest and most vulnerable in the world.

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 in 2005 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. The character of this project should alert us to the way in which we have surreptitiously taken the place of God.

This state of consciousness is increasingly challenged by the ecological distresses to which it has given rise and it certainly does not reflect the Biblical picture of our relationships as human beings, - our relationship with God; the creation and our neighbours. Still less does it relate to the theme of the new creation present in an embryonic form in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The eclipse of lively awareness of God has also brought other consequences in its rain and has given rise to a bias in our civilisation which is glaringly obvious to people from other parts of the world even at the moment when they are anxious to share in its benefits. You will recall the search described by Richard Tarnas for more objective ways of arriving at public truths, less controversially subjective than the versions presented by the warring Christian absolutisms. It was in these circumstances that mathematics established itself as the most reliable way of describing public truth. It is a notorious fact that public bodies find it difficult to deal with issues unless they are capable of being quantified. Numbers have become the building bricks of public policy in a process where there seems to be little incentive to pay attention to the relation between numbers and harmony. Music is of course essentially the marriage of numbers and harmony and it is instructive to note how marginal the role of music has become in our educational process compared to the central role which it used to have in ancient times.

In the daylight world spiritual considerations fade into insignificance before the brute clarity of statistics and the bottom line of balance sheets. You can see the result in our hospitals and in the official approach to health and healing which is being challenged now by a myriad of complementary approaches. We know that a healing ambience – beauty, tranquillity, confidence in the physician and a loving and respectful attention from healers and helpers – has a vital influence on whether or not we get better. But such things are difficult to reduce to numbers or represent on a balance sheet so the insides of our hospitals exhibit a clear preference for number based efficiency and high tech science in an atmosphere which is frequently ugly and hectic in which heroic staff work under considerable stress. Sometimes the other part of the picture is acknowledged in a small inconveniently sited chapel but it is often seen as an appendix. The truth which flows from an awareness of the reality of the spiritual dimension of life is at a discount.

Then take the way we talk about the economy. Listening to morning news broadcasts one hears a litany addressed to our real god, the Economy. The Dow is steady; the Footsie falling; but the Hang Seng is in the ascendant; what will the Nazdaq do? This mystic incantation is how we take the daily temperature of our god.

The trouble with the way in which the economy and its movements are measured is that it is difficult beyond a certain point at which people are liberated from oppressive poverty to relate growing GNP with increasing quality of life or any enhanced sense of well being. This is but one aspect of what I understand the Germans call “das Adam Smith problem”. This is the problem of relating the laws extracted from Smith’s best known book “The Wealth of Nations” with the wisdom contained in his earlier less well known publication “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”.

There are in fact ways in which numbers themselves can be employed to give a more adequate picture of reality. The Prince of Wales last December launched an ambitious project supported by some of the most thoughtful captains of commerce and industry to re-write the accountancy rules so that they come to reflect not just historic costs but also include and direct our attention to future predictable impacts of a business on the environment.

The initiative is called “Accountancy for Sustainability”. The problem remains that in the daylight world it is difficult to account for the spiritual dimension of our lives so it is largely edited out of the picture by people from whom any lively sense of the presence of God is missing.

The dissonance, however, which flows from divorcing numbers from harmony; economic statistics from quality of life considerations; health from a nourishing sense of meaning and relatedness; this dissonance points to a spiritual deficit. Hence there are many people who while they may not wish to return to what they understand of religion with its rigidities and restrictions are attracted to spiritualities which promise some relief from their distress.

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 Spirit.

St Francis was one of those who surprised within himself a longing, a hunger and thirst for joy, for truth, for a depth of compassion which cannot be satisfied by having things but which can only be tasted by an immersion in the reality of the living Spirit.

There is no secure and lasting happiness by accumulating things. 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.

Anyone who has tried it of course and is serious about transformation and not merely the manufacture of comforting states of mind knows that the way to joy is very hard.

Francis like all the genuine guides to the spiritual life 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.

If we really want to enter the courts of mystery then we have to keep company with Jesus Christ who was very reluctant to spell out his manifesto but invited his students to enter into a fresh understanding of common terms by sharing his experience as a beloved son of God. I shall explore this theme in greater detail in my final talk.

But for the moment one thing we could do to open ourselves to a new way of being in the world is to re-discover 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.

I believe that one of the great tasks of the 21st century is to re-integrate the thinking of what one of the most underestimated sages of the 19th century Edwin Abbott, Headmaster of the City of London School, called the “Flatland” with a renewed spiritual awareness of the interconnectedness of mind, body, soul and the Spirit.