Abiding in Space-time

        I’ve been thinking about stability and belonging this week, because it’s something that has come up in discussion and in my reading at the moment. An image that’s a little haunting, for me, comes from a nurse friend of mine. She described residents of an old people’s home she worked in who wouldn’t be able to remember their families due to dementia, but would treasure a picture of Jesus and would still makes their daily observances. Another image that comes from a book suggested to me by my new vicar where the author relates the following about his time spent in Johannesburg: 

“In the townships, I found myself giving sick communion regularly to a woman who was 100 years old, and lay all day on a bed in the corner of a tiny sitting room with her family running in and out around her. One day, she described her memories of being a girl of about 10 and taking food to British soldiers who were hanging out in caves. I suddenly realised she was remembering the Boer War. Her Eucharistic communion in the Church had been the accompaniment to a life of – to me – unimaginable length in which the world had undergone two World Wars, the splitting of the atom, the moon landings, not to mention the beginning and now the end of apartheid. A sort of ‘Eucharistic heartbeat’ had been the accompaniment to this long life. It was the fruit of a stability that the Church had maintained for her, as it does for many others.” 

-          Pp 37 – 38, Abiding by Ben Quash    

To me, these images speak of the power of belonging and the sense of stability that comes of placing oneself squarely in thrall to something larger, bigger than oneself. They got me thinking if I had something equivalent – something to measure out the moments of my life and to bracket my whole contribution to existence. If I’m something of scientist-in-training, I don’t see much of myself in the poor caricature of the scientist who is in LOVE with SCIENCE and is kind of a withered, autistic version of Spock. I think the scientific method is the best tool we have for evaluating answers to certain kinds of questions, but a canon of facts accepted at a given time is not something to have allegiance to or to align oneself with on principle.

   

         There are, however,  a couple of ideas that are a-religious - if not non-religious -  that do, for me, provide a sense of place in a larger phenomenon and go some way toward undoing that painful existential knot in my upper back that goes unnoticed until something has abated it. Once upon a time, I made my way once a week to talk to someone supposedly in the know about Buddhism. We were discussing antidotes to ‘conditional thinking’, the sense of concrete, black-and-white reality we give to distinction and divisions that we make in relation to our experience of the world. I was asked to contemplate a leaf outside the window, not as the simple ‘leaf’ construct I instinctively perceived, but to try and see, simultaneously, all the previous temporary associations that its materials had taken part in previously. All the streams and clouds and bladders, and winds and lungs and words that the water and the air sustaining the foliage had been part of. From my lowly plane of existence, I can only experience a cross-section of the wider phenomena. 

         I imagine a higher perspective, where the fleeting construct before my eyes is but a cross-section of a larger pattern, and I find this reassuring for some reason. I’m aware this a way of imagining His point of view used by some writers (I want to say C.S. Lewis in Miracles but I don’t have a chapter and page to point to). I don’t believe that the comfort is necessarily tied to the question of whether there is or is not a being to which this perspective belongs, or to it being a true or actual description of the way the universe is. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nathanheeney/8161412920/

      The image, where my time and my doings in the world form but a facet in a great 4D crystal made up of space and time, that has - and will - always exist, is enough. For me. How about you? 

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I was a stranger, and you took me in

 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

For I was hungry, and you gave me food: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in:

Naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came unto me.

-          Matthew 25:34-36

  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pasukaru76/4777196383/

Putting my metaphorical money where my virtual mouth is, I went to my first Holy Communion at a local Anglican Church the other week, and also had good chat with the vicar. It was both more and less than what I expected, and my prejudices were confirmed and challenged in equal measure. I’ve been mulling over the range of impressions I have of the experience, each of which will no doubt be fodder for future posts. There was humour, definitely. The eagerness to impress and hook new and – heavens! – young blood was obvious. The experience of having to pray and sing things I didn’t know the words to in the midst of a very grey congregation where I my voice seemed to cut through everyone else’s mademe smile too. On the other hand, the welcome was clearly heartfelt and genuine, as was the comfort derived from the service and the community at the church, in addition to the obvious commitment and pride that goes into the churches impressive ‘secular’ charitable endeavours. The food bank operating out of the church is very impressive, as was the commitment of the congregation to be a hub for this kind of service. 

                The theme of the service was surprisingly apt. The reading was Matthew 25: 31-46, ‘The sheep and goats judgement’, from which the excerpt above was taken. The verse is concerned with the coming judgment, and – as the vicar told it – the point was that superficial religious observance is insufficient to ensure a place on the winning team when the end of days arrives. Rather, an active charity and love was required of Christians, and that we were to love one another as we should love Him. The vicar concentrated, oddly enough, on the welcoming strangers part. Not chosen for my benefit - unless they really do have special line to the Big Guy. There was another bible reference that I really liked: 

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

-          Hebrews 13:2

 

Definitely felt the feelings I associate with religious experiences – which, despite my atheism, I have had – but which I’d only previously known in Buddhist meditative contexts or while mulling over some whopper implication of a scientific observation. There’s a sense of calm, effortless joyfulness and unpredicated appreciativeness. It gives you a kind of mental spaciousness, and I don’t (just) mean airheadness. No, it’s not faithful feelings I can’t do. Instead, its committing to a cosmology, a sense of reality – be that a particular relation to the world, or to a personal god - that doesn’t ring true for me. I find easy, and I share, the comfort in religion as a choice one can make about ones relation to the world. I find it difficult to accept as a description of the universe in its own terms, given that – to me – it is so clearly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. 

Maybe I should understand faith in similar terms to the way I have come to  – relative to my younger self – understand romantic love, after having had the (er...) benefit of a serious relationship for some years now. I find a lot of adolescents, and adolescent adults, understand love as something that happens to you, something that the universe arranges and that you have no part in creating. For me at least, love is something you choose to be able to commit to, to be ready for and worthy of. Perhaps faith is something you’ve got to engage with in the same way. William James, talking about the active acquiescence of religious life, makes a distinction between agreeing to, and agreeing with. 

            Perhaps. But, for me at least, I’ve yet to make the acquaintance of a metaphysic I could meet halfway.


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Lie back & think of England: the church, the state & all the interesting bits of gay marriage

"Religion in its quintessence is a relation between God and man; it is perversion to make it a relation between man and man…"  - A Modern Utopia, H.G. Wells

My brother became a swinger, recently.

That is, he’s joined a swing dance club at uni with a lady friend of his. Once upon a social gathering, Group A were making much of this as a topic of fun, as any right minded group of friends and siblings would do. Group B were digesting the momentous-whether-you-like-it-or-not news that the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill  - which proposes to introduce gay marriage in England and Wales - had been approved by the House of Commons by a pretty nifty margin of votes. One of the people at said gathering, not so heartened at the news as myself, got their conversational wires a bit crossed. The new law, they said, was like if my brother decided that he wanted to dance only with men, so everyone else in the club had to as well. Rubbish, said we, as quite clearly the proposed laws merely make it possible that he can do so if he so chooses, whilst taking an important step toward stopping the objections of others from preventing him. The new law allows those denominations at are okay with it – Quakers, Liberal Jews, Unitarians etc – to hold same sex marriage ceremonies in their places of worship. But - in what is a messy but entirely appropriate compromise by a state in terms of meeting the needs and aspirations of two of its constituent communities - other religious groups that have objections are exempt.

Now, we could rehash the tired arguments about scriptural support or condemnation for homosexuality and so on. However, I propose we could acknowledge that marriage - whatever certain people have construed it to have been – is now both a religious and a civil construct. Rightly, the secular state has decided it’s not its job to decide one way or another if a given religious group should permit such a thing. Rather, it has laid the groundwork so that they can, if they feel they can get on board with what most people clearly regard as an idea whose time has come (also, this).

For me, there’s a more interesting nugget of religious-flavoured intrigue in the devilish detail of the new law.  

 

 While in theory it’s up to individual religious groups – or their high level decision making bodies – to choose, the law actually specifically bans the Anglican Church from performing same sex marriages. The reason for this special mention is that as the Established, ‘official’, church it is intertwined with civil structures, and may thus have been open to legal claims that it is bound to marry all-comers. Given that the bill still has to make its way through the House of Lords, it’s worth pointing out a specific form of this state-church fraternisation. The House of Lords includes 26 bishops of the Church of England, the so-called Spiritual Peers, or Lords Spiritual. Even if we leave aside the issue of an unelected upper house, a majority of polled Britons disagree with the political power vested in these bishops.

 

Indeed, the distribution of faiths or no-faiths as revealed in the recent census (See Table, below) would seem to beg the question of whether it is appropriate or representative for not only a single religion, but a single denomination, to have access to the legislature by right. Representatives of other faiths have beenappointed to the House of Lords, but none are there by right in the same way, and in any case I’m not sure sharing out the suspect entitlement is necessarily the best way to approach this issue. 25% of 26 Lords Spiritual of No Religion, anyone? Rather, the million dollar question is how comfortable you feel with the idea that anyone should automatically get to play a direct role in matters of state, purely on the basis of which church they represent? 

Christian	Buddhist	Hindu	Jewish	Muslim	Sikh	Other Religion	No Religion	Religion Not Stated
59.3	0.4	1.5	0.5	4.8	0.8	0.4	25.1	7.2

 

Percentage of People in England and Wales that Identify as a given religion (or lack thereof)

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