Just today I learn that the American philosopher Herbert Fingarette died last November. Fingarette taught a friend of mine and it was through him that I discovered something of Fingarette's work, particularly that on Confucius. But I was also very taken with many of the insights found in his  “The Self in Transformation” (Basic Books, New York 1963), especially the words which for a long while now have appeared in the header of this blog: "These studies are outcomes rather than realised objectives. In making the journey, I have no aims. These studies are intellectual footprints, not blueprints." The Aeon webpage has just posted a very poignant and moving short film of Fingarette musing on the meaning of life and death just before hi...

Greta Thunberg

READINGS: Jesus Blesses Little Children (Mark 10:13-16)

People were bringing little children to [Jesus] in order that he might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.’ And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

An edited version of a speech given by Greta Thunberg at Davos in January 2019 (text also printed at the end of this address. Do please take the time to read it as her words are very important to hear, more important, indeed, than this address. . .)


To begin this address, which is essentially an expression of support for, and celebration of, the inspiring examples of environmental civil disobedience carried out this week by our schoolchildren, I think it is important for us here to locate the matter of environmental activism in the sphere of religion because, first and foremost, we are a religious community, albeit a rather unusual one.

Spinoza in the Exeter Meeting House

A key religious and philosophical figure within the Radical Enlightenment tradition to which this Unitarian Church belongs is the seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Indeed, in our beautiful eighteenth-century meeting house in Exeter — alas now a Wetherspoons — you will find a stained-glass window dedicated to this gentle and thoughtful thinker who lies at the heart of not only liberal religion in general but also at the heart of the Deep Ecology movement. As the historian Frederick C. Beiser says:

Spinoza’s famous phrase “deus sive natura” made it possible to both divinize nature and naturalize the divine. Following that dictum, a scientist, who professed the most radical naturalism, could still be religious; and a pastor, who confessed the deepest personal faith in God, could still be a naturalist (Frederick C. Beiser, “After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840-1900", Princeton University Press, pp. 4-7).

In one way or another this project is still underway in this community and, as most of you will know, the English of the phrase “deus sive nature” — “God or Nature” — has been used at the beginning of our Sunday morning service since 2008:

Let us begin by resting together quietly for a few moments in the presence of God or Nature.

However, the phrase “God or Nature” can, for a casual visitor, make it sound like we can’t quite make up our mind whether it’s God or Nature we are coming consciously into the presence of; it could be one but, perhaps, it’s the other: “Who knows — so let’s equivocate!” But those of you with a little Latin will be aware that “sive” is the “or” of equivalence and Spinoza was most certainly not being equivocal; he is saying that “God” is “Nature”, “Nature” is “God” and, because for him everything is a mode of God or Nature and interconnected, human beings should, therefore, treat all other modes of creation with an attitude of reverence.     

This means that the proclamation of Jesus’ — whom Spinoza admired above all other human teachers — that there is no greater commandment than that we should “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and “our neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:30-31) is also a proclamation to hear the command as we must love Nature with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength and your neighbout as yourself.

The love of God-or-Nature (in which we, ourselves and our neigbour are comingled) and of the need to protect “her” against the continuous, violent assault being made upon her is (or should be for us), quite simply, a religious matter from top to bottom.

But, as we are now coming to know ever more clearly, we have not succeeded in halting this assault. True, many individuals and groups have tried and are still are trying with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength to stop this violence but as a class of people called “adults” our results have been often been pitiable.

We seem to be mired in an abstract and detached world of endless, mere hope-mongering talk about the value of tweeking this or that bit legislation in order to do a little bit of tinkering here and there while outside our very doors the machinery of capitalism goes on relentlessly devouring the planet. This simply cannot go on that as the remarkable sixteen year old Swedish school strike and climate change activist Greta Thunberg said at Davos in January this year:

Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

Her words are, as Jonathan Freedland noted in the Guardian yesterday, “a terrible indictment of the rest of us. They are a mark of our failure” and this should remind us that our children’s action on Friday both here and around the world “is only necessary because we have failed to act. As one placard at the Belgian protests told politicians: ‘I’ll do my homework when you do yours.’”

We adults have clearly not been doing our homework about in what consists a true and meaningful hope for thefuture of our planet and this failure has revealed another painful truth, again expressed by Thunberg but this time at the UN climate change conference in Poland in December 2018 when she said to we adults: “You are not mature enough to tell it like it is – even that burden you leave to us children.”

Mindful of this failure and trying better to heed Jesus’ call to love God-or-Nature with all my heart, soul, mind and strength and my neighbour as myself, on Friday morning I felt religiously compelled to get up earlier than normal so as to be able at least to display some kind of visible solidarity with the striking children who were to begin their march into town at the Shire Hall. When I arrived at about nine-twenty there were, perhaps, only about twenty children there with a few of their parents. And then, slowly but surely, up Castle Hill came more and more children until by nine forty there were at least a couple of hundred children present ranging from primary school age to sixth-formers. Gathered around the entrance to the Shire Hall they began chanting “Hey ho, fossil fuels have got to go” and all around they were waving home-made banners reading “Rebel for Life”, “Take back control of our future”, “We have no planet B”, “Bankers bailed by govt, where’s the action for our climate crisis?”, “Change the leaders, not the climate”, “Change the politics not the climate”, “Trash the world, lose the world”, “Save our home”, “What future are we learning for?”, “What I stand by is what I stand on”. “The future is inside us it’s not somewhere else”, “Theresa, if you really don’t think you can afford it, perhaps get your mates to pay their taxes and use your husband’s arms money to help”, “So severe the kids are here”, “I want you to panic” and many, many more besides.

Never before have I so forcibly felt the truth of Jesus’ words that unless we adults change and become like children, we will never enter the kingdom of heaven. I had to ask why is it, at least on this matter urgent beyond all imagining, we adults find it so difficult to be as clear-eyed and passionate as Greta Thunberg and our own striking, marching and chanting children who have been inspired by her? As George Monbiot writes:

Every day at home, we [adults] tell you that if you [our children] make a mess you should clear it up. We tell you that you should take responsibility for your own lives. But we have failed to apply these principles to ourselves. We walk away from the mess we have made, in the hope that you might clear it up.

Given that it is adults, through our various governments, who have contributed so much to, and continued to walk away from, this mess, how dare a No.10 Downing Street spokesperson patronisingly say to the children “It is important to emphasise that disruption increases teachers’ workloads and wastes lesson time that teachers have carefully prepared for” and that this lesson time “is crucial for young people, precisely so that they can develop into the top scientists, engineers and advocates we need to help tackle this problem” when government has consistently failed to apply these principles itself. I was delighted when Greta Thunberg replied to this churlish and “childish” statement with some rather more adult, mature, balanced and wise words:

British PM says that the children on school strike are “wasting lesson time”. That may well be the case. But then again, political leaders have wasted 30 yrs of inaction. And that is slightly worse.

Anyway, I find myself compelled to agree wholeheartedly with the two hundred academics who signed a letter of support published last Wednesday saying that

. . . we offer our full support to the students – some of whom may well aspire to be the academics of the future – who bravely plan to strike on 15 February to demand that the UK government takes climate action. They have every right to be angry about the future that we shall bequeath to them, if proportionate and urgent action is not taken. We are inspired that our children, spurred on by the noble actions of Greta Thunberg and many other striking students all around the world, are making their voices heard.

I, too, support our children in their actions but not simply for reasons that may be called purely pragmatic and scientific but also for profound religious reasons because, to return to where I began this address, when viewed through the intuitive insights of someone like Spinoza we discover we can see our children as responding powerfully to the timeless call of Jesus of Nazareth, to love God-or-Nature with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength” and “our neighbour as yourself.”

In so far as we want to have a chance to enter the kingdom of heaven that is a healthy and sustainable world for all we really do need to change and become like children because it is they who are showing us the way to go, namely, that we must act as we would in a crisis. We mst act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.

Wonderful and inspiring to see so many young students here in # Cambridge outside the Shire Hall turn out for the # schoolstrike4climate Bravo! # ClimateChange # ClimateStrike # climatemarch # FridaysForFuture # YouthForClimate Click on a photo to enlarge

READINGS: Luke 10:25-37 (trans. by David Bentley Hart)

And look: A certain lawyer stood up to test [Jesus], saying, “Teacher, by what deeds may I inherit life in the Age?” And he said to him, “What has been written in the Law? How do you read it?” And in reply he said, “You shall love the Lord your God out of the whole of your heart and in the whole of your soul and in the whole of your strength and in the whole of your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.” And [Jesus] said to him, “You answer correctly; do this and you shall live.” But he, wishing to vindicate himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbour? Taking this up, Jesus said, “A certain man was going down from Jerusalem, and he fell among bandits, who stripped him and rained blows upon him and went away leaving him half dead. And by a coincidence a certain priest was going down by that road and, seeing him, passed by on the opposite side. And a Levite also, coming upon the place and seeing him, passed by on the opposite side. But a certain Samaritan on a journey came upon him and was inwardly moved with compassion, and approaching bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, and setting him upon his own mount he brought him to a lodge and cared for him. And taking out two denarii on the following day he gave them to the keeper of the lodge and said, ‘Take care of him, and whatever you spend beyond this I shall repay you on my return.’ Who of these three does it seem to you became a neighbour to the man falling among bandits?” And he said, “The one treating him with mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”


From “The Ethical Demand” by Knud Eljer Løgstrup (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, pp. 11-12)

In E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End we have the account of a rift between Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters. Their respective milieus were as different from one another as they could possibly be. Leonard was a penniless office clerk whose married life was very drab and whose entire existence would be bleak indeed were it not for his consuming interest in culture. However, he was not equal to this interest; his hunger for books and music was and remained artificial. The Schlegel sisters, on the other hand, had never known anything but economic security. They were fairly wealthy. Since they had grown up in an atmosphere of cultural appreciation and had become the centre of a large social group where these things were discussed, their life was rich in terms of experience and delightful variety.
    On an altogether casual occasion Leonard Bast came into contact with the Schlegel sisters. He received an invitation to an afternoon tea with them. It turned out to be a fiasco. Leonard was disappointed in his expectations for the afternoon. He had hoped to discuss books and to keep his visit with them in a romantic vein and at all costs to keep it from getting mixed up with his routine, uninteresting life at the office.
    The Schlegel sisters had an entirely different purpose in inviting him, however, a very practical purpose, namely, to get him out of the firm in which he was employed inasmuch as they had secret information that the firm was about to go bankrupt. And they had another, an indirect, purpose too: to help him in his interest in culture, because though his love of books was artificial they detected that underneath there lay a desire for authenticity.
    The ensuing conflict was inevitable. It could not be warded off. For the Schlegel sisters’ idea in issuing the invitation was entirely different from Leonard’s idea in accepting it. The two parties were blind to one another’s world. Leonard’s anticipation of an afternoon devoted to the cultural aspect of his life blinded him to the Schlegel sisters’ desire to help him. Disappointed and embittered, he was carried away with outrageous and stupid accusations that they had low motives in inviting him, namely, that they wanted to use him for spying upon his firm. As for the Schlegel sisters themselves, not until afterwards did they have any inkling of the two worlds in Leonard’s life and of how important it was for him to keep them isolated from each other.
    Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters disagreed about many things, but it was not an objective disagreement which caused the collision between them. Nor was the collision caused by one of them committing wrong and the other being wronged. Rather it was because Leonard was disappointed in his expectation that the Schlegel sisters would satisfy his cultural craving by engaging him in conversation about books. This they did not do. And morality struck like lightning.




Following a couple of points made during the conversation at the end of last week’s address I introduced to you to something explored by the Danish philosopher and theologian Knud Eljer Løgstrup relevant to our British and American cultures’ current highly fractious and polarised situation in which people have started condemning each other in truly unhelpful, judgmental moral terms. One common way this is revealed is when someone says, “Well, you voted for X, therefore you’re a morally bad and stupid person.”

The important point raised in our conversation last week was that right at this moment what we desperately need to see — and our wider cultures desperately need to see — is that just because a person voted in a different way to ourselves this simply does not make them a morally bad and stupid person.

Løgstrup begins his important and most influential book, “The Ethical Demand” by speaking directly to this point:

“We need to explain why conflicts which in themselves have nothing to do with morality or immorality, with right or wrong, but which are entirely due to a difference between our respective spirits and worlds — why these conflicts nevertheless turn into questions of sheer morality and self-righteousness and cause reproaches and accusations which are plainly unreasonable” (p. 9). 

Løgstrup feels that the answer is to be found in an understanding of trust which he thinks is “is a characteristic of human life” and “that we normally encounter one another with natural trust” (p.8). He goes on to note that:

“Human life could hardly exist if it were otherwise. We would simply not be able to live; our life would be impaired and wither away if we were in advance to distrust one another, if we were to suspect the other of thievery and falsehood from the very outset” (pp. 8-9). 

But what trust always does is lay us open, it makes us vulnerable and it is for this reason that Løgstrup feels we “react vehemently when our trust is ‘abused,’ as we say, even though it may have been in some inconsequential matter” (p.9).

Whenever we trust someone there is an expectation that something will be fulfilled. In manifesting that expectation Løgstrup realised we have already “surrendered oneself to the other person — even before it is certain that there will be any fulfilment” (p. 10). Of course, we all know that there are times when our expectations of another are not fulfilled and that this is disappointing to us. But Løgstrup points to a deeper disappointment. He writes:

“[W]hat is worse is the fact that in the manifestation one has laid oneself open. One’s expectation, exposed through its manifestation, has not been covered by the other person’s fulfillment of it. And it is this exposure which causes the encounter to erupt in moral reproaches and accusations” (p. 10).

This is a vital point to grasp so I’ll repeat it in a slightly different way: the difficulty is found not so much in the other person’s apparent failure to fulfil our expectation but in our discomfiture concerning our exposure, in our having laid ourselves open and it is this which causes the encounter to erupt in moral reproaches and accusations.

Here’s Løgstrup again:

“When one has dared to come forward in the hope of being accepted, and then is not accepted, this gives the conflict such an emotional character that even though no one has done anything wrong, one must turn it into the kind of conflict that results from the other person’s having committed a wrong. One finds it necessary to invent a suffered wrong by which to motivate his strong and deep emotional reaction” (p. 10). 

Now the failure of expectation — either ours of the other person, or the other person’s of ours — the failure of expectation is often nothing to do with “morality or immorality, with right or wrong” but rather to do with “a difference between our respective spirits and worlds.”

Løgstrup chooses the incident from Forster’s “Howards End” we heard in our readings because it illustrates this perfectly. There were no major questions of morality or immorality, right or wrong in the encounter between Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters but there was, however, a major difference between their respective spirits and worlds and so a major difference between their respective expectations once they had chosen to trust each other in their different ways. Those respective expectations were not, as we know, fulfilled and so the emotional shock of having laid themselves open was felt and, even though no one had done anything morally wrong, the situation became one where it was necessary to invent a suffered moral wrong by which to motivate their strong and deep emotional reactions.

Now, in our current polarised situations do we not see something very similar going on? Aren’t we all at times behaving somewhat like Leonard Bast and the Schlegel sisters? We each have our different respective spirits and worlds and so a difference naturally also exists between our respective expectations when we all laid ourselves open in trust in various recent political processes. Our respective expectations were not, as we know, fulfilled and so the emotional shock of having laid ourselves open has been deeply felt and, even though most voters had done anything morally wrong, it became necessary for us to invent suffered moral wrongs by which to motivate our strong and deep emotional reactions. And now, as we all know, it’s all got very nasty indeed.

Now Løgstrup sees the answer to this kind of dynamic in a recovery of trust based on Jesus’ proclamation to love one another. Jesus encourages us never to love an inherited, second-hand picture of another person, but always to love (and therefore trust in some way) the actual person as they are before you in actual situations. Jesus’ example of this dynamic at work is, as you know, the Good Samaritan. It’s important to be fully aware that the first hearers of Jesus’ parable were NOT Samaritans so Jesus is putting his hearers in the ditch as the injured person who, to their surpise, were going to be helped and tended to by a person whom they tended to picture as being morally, religiously and morally wrong-headed (and perhaps also stupid in some fashion). But, face to face, person to person, they find something very different — the true neighbour.

A more modern version of this dynamic is found in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” in the example of Charles Myriel, the Bishop of Digne. (I here quote at length and gratefully from Robert Stern’s paper ‘Trust is Basic’: Løgstrup on the Priority of Trust pp. 25-26). You will recall that the Bishop shows not only compassion and pity towards the ex-convict Jean Valjean . . .

. . . but also trust in allowing him into his home at all, and particularly letting him sleep with access to the silverware owned by the household. It is clear that while the Bishop’s sister Mademoiselle Baptistine is prepared to go along with him out of respect for his judgement and goodness, the Bishop’s housekeeper Madame Magloire thinks that he has gone too far this time, and is profoundly shocked by his actions in trusting Valjean. What seems to be emphasized by Hugo’s narrative, at least from a Løgstrupian perspective, is that while everyone else sees Valjean as what he has done and thus become — a criminal, a vagrant, an outcast — the Bishop (and thus to a lesser extent his sister) see him as an individual human being standing before the Bishop as such. Even Valjean seems shocked by the openness the Bishop shows to him, and seeks to remind him of how he should be categorized:

‘Mme Magloire,’ said the bishop, ‘will you please lay another place?’

The man [Valjean] moved nearer to the light of the table-lamp, seeming not to understand.

‘It’s not like that,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you listening? I’m a convict, a felon, I’ve served in the galleys.’ He pulled a sheet of yellow paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. ‘This is my ticket-of-leave – yellow, as you see. This is why everybody turns me away. Do you want to read it? I can read. There were classes in prison for anyone who wanted to learn. You can see what it says – “Jean Valjean, released convict, born in –” not that that matters “– served nineteen years, five years for robbery with violence, fourteen years for four attempts to escape – a very dangerous man.” So there you are. (Hugo 1983, 85)

The Bishop, however, ignores all this and insists he is not interested, where in a letter from his sister that is then quoted in the text, she ponders on his behaviour, emphasizing in particular that ‘my brother did not so much as ask the man where he was born. He did not ask his story. For the story would have included some account of his crimes and my brother clearly wished to avoid all reference to these’. She gives the following explanation of why the Bishop behaved in this manner: ‘He must have reflected that the man, this Jean Valjean, was sufficiently oppressed already with the burden of his wretchedness, and that it was better to distract his thoughts and make him feel, if only for a little while, that he was a man like any other’ (Hugo 1983, 90). Again, from Løgstrup’s perspective, we might understand Hugo’s point to be that to trust Valjean just is to see him as no longer defined by his past, whereas conversely to see Valjean through the eye’s of the Bishop’s distrustful housekeeper is not really to see the person as such, but all the things he stands for – a convict, a felon, a criminal with a yellow ticket-of-leave. Like Løgstrup’s child, we might also think this gives the Bishop a ‘joy in living, a courage to be’ which the housekeeper, for all that we understand her sensible caution and reasonable doubts, can never possess, partly because she cannot see life as capable of the kind of renewal and reform in the same way as the Bishop can, while also being deprived of the kind of direct interaction with others that his attitude of trust also makes possible.

Løgstrup is of course not claiming that such distrust is never warranted, or denying that it could in some sense become ingrained in a person for good reason; but nonetheless trust is prior to distrust as this could not but cut us off from a better way of relating to others and to life itself.

It seems to me that only way we are going to get out of our current impasse in a decent fashion is for all of us to see that despite all that has happened we can still trust each other to be for each other Good Samaritans, Bishops Myriels or, indeed as Jesus of Nazareth even though what that good is is still perhaps unclear to us.  

True, we have all trusted in various recent political processes, we all opened ourselves up in trust, we all had our expectations, we have all in our very different ways been sorely unfulfilled and disappointed by what has happened and so we have all experienced morality striking like lightning.

But we have to let that painful electrical strike discharge by seeing — with utter clarity and despite our respective hurts and unfulfilled expectations — that none of what has transpired over the past nearly three years means we should believe the heinous lie that because “You voted for X, therefore you’re a morally bad and stupid person.”

We simply must learn again the necessity of meeting and intuitively trusting the other person as Jesus encouraged us to in the story of the Good Samaritan meeting the Jew, as Victor Hugo encouraged us to in the story of Bishop Myriel meeting Jean Valjean and as Løgstrup encourages us to do in his ethics.

Nothing less will do.

Graves & trees in Mill Road Cemetery (click on photo to enlarge)

One of my favourite poems is called “Voices From Things Growing in a Churchyard” by Thomas Hardy. It speaks powerfully and fairly straighforwardly to my strong religious naturalist inclinations. But, because Hardy wrote it at a time when he had let go Christianity as a formal religion to be followed but yet remained committed to a kind of practical, Christian ethics, it is a poem which also speaks to my own rejection of Christian metaphysics whilst still finding myself compelled to commit to trying to follow the ethical example of Jesus as a human being rather than as divine being, even very God of very God. 

I first came across the poem many years ago thanks to my love of the music of Gerald Finzi who set the poem, to my mind, quite beautifully. You can hear a version of that at this link.

Anyway, Susanna and I had to run a few errands down Mill Road this afternoon and we walked back home via the wonderful Mill Road Cemetery. This is a place which, perhaps not surprisingly, always brings back to my mind Hardy’s poem. I didn’t take many photos today for the the light was far from great but the photo at the head of this post did present itself to me and triggered the writing of this post. I hope you enjoy the photo but, far more than that, I hope you enjoy Hardy’s poem and Finzi’s setting of it.

Voices From Things Growing in a Churchyard
by Thomas Hardy

These flowers are I, poor Fanny Hurd,
Sir or Madam,
A little girl here sepultured.
Once I flit-fluttered like a bird
Above the grass, as now I wave
In daisy shapes above my grave,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

I am one Bachelor Bowring, “Gent,”
Sir or Madam;
In shingled oak my bones were pent;
Hence more than a hundred years I spent
In my feat of change from a coffin-thrall
To a dancer in green as leaves on a wall.
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

I, these berries of juice and gloss,
Sir or Madam,
Am clean forgotten as Thomas Voss;
Thin-urned, I have burrowed away from the moss
That covers my sod, and have entered this yew,
And turned to clusters ruddy of view,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

The Lady Gertrude, proud, high-bred,
Sir or Madam,
Am I — this laurel that shades your head;
Into its veins I have stilly sped,
And made them of me; and my leaves now shine,
As did my satins superfine,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

I, who as innocent withwind climb,
Sir or Madam.
Am one Eve Greensleeves, in olden time
Kissed by men from many a clime,
Beneath sun, stars, in blaze, in breeze,
As now by glowworms and by bees,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

I’m old Squire Audeley Grey, who grew,
Sir or Madam,
Aweary of life, and in scorn withdrew;
Till anon I clambered up anew
As ivy-green, when my ache was stayed,
And in that attire I have longtime gayed
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

And so they breathe, these masks, to each
Sir or Madam
Who lingers there, and their lively speech
Affords an interpreter much to teach,
As their murmurous accents seem to come
Thence hitheraround in a radiant hum,
All day cheerily,
All night eerily!

READINGS:

Some sayings of Heraklietos of Ephesos

Whosoever wishes to know about the world must learn about it in its particular details. Knowledge is not intelligence. In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected, change alone is unchanging. The same road goes both up and down. The beginning of a circle is also its end. Not I, but the world says it: all is one. And yet everything comes in season.

Awaiting the quartet . . . Yesterday evening Susanna and I had the pleasure of going to West Road Concerting Hall hear the Endellion Quartet play a concert during their 40th Anniversary celebrations. On this occasion they played Haydn’s String Quartet in F minor Op.20 No.5 (‘Sun’) , Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No.1 Op.11 , and Beethoven’s String Quartet Op.59 No.3 (‘Razumovsky’). Sublime, especially for me, the Beethoven. I thoroughly recommend their complete cycle of Beethoven quartets. It was a very chilly night as we walked home but, along the way, I was tempted enough to stop and take a few photos of some of Cambridge’s old back streets which I post here for your pleasure. All taken with a Fuji X100F Just click on a ...

Readings:

Luke 3:7-14 (trans. David Bentley Hart)

So [John the Baptist] said to the crowds going out to be baptized by him, “Brood of vipers, who divulged to you that you should flee from the wrath that is coming? Bear fruits, then, worthy of a change of heart; and do not think to say among yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as father’; for I tell you that God has the power to raise up children to Abraham from these stones. And even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; and thus every tree not bearing good fruit is felled and thrown into fire.” And the crowds questioned him, saying, “What then should we do?” And in reply he said to them, “Whoever has two tunics must share with him who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise.” And tax-collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what must we do?” And he said to them, “Collect nothing more than you are required to.” And men serving in the army also questioned him, saying, “And we too, what should we do?” And he told them, “Neither extort from, nor falsely accuse, anyone; and be contented with your wages.”


From Aylmer Maude’s (who was on the Fabian national executive from 1907–1912) summary of Chapter 38 of Tolstoy’s “What Then Must We Do?”

What must we do? Not lie to ourselves. Repent, and change our estimate of our own position and activity. Take every opportunity to serve others. No one possesses rights or privileges, but only endless duties and obligations. Man’s first duty — to share in the struggle with nature for the support of life. My consumption of other people’s labour destroys people’s lives.


In his editor’s introduction to his own translation (1899) of Tolstoy’s book, Aylmer Maude quoted the influential and magnificent American author, activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jane Addams (1860–1935):

A young person reading today Tolstoy's ‘What Then Must We Do?’ might find it difficult to conceive the profound impression which it made upon sensitive people when it first appeared. In the late [eighteen] ’eighties there was a widespread moral malaise in regard to existing social conditions, ranging from a mere unformulated sense of uneasiness to an acute consciousness of unredressed wrongs. The abuses connected with the beginnings of machine production had by the end of the nineteenth century been somewhat lessened in England and the United States, but the evil slum conditions in our rapidly growing cities, with all the inevitable results on health and morals, were pressing on men's minds. Social and moral questioning, stimulated by some of the greatest leaders of English thought, had driven deep furrows in the smooth surface of nineteenth century satisfaction with the belief that progress was inevitable. 


As a teenager in the early 1980s I began to explore the area around my home in the small Essex coastal village of Kirby-le-Soken by bicycle. On one memorable summer’s afternoon I cycled over to see the magnificent, medieval Augustinian Priory at St Osyth. Having done that and fortified myself with tea and cake from a comfortable tea-room opposite the gatehouse I decided to spin on to take a look at Jaywick about which I knew nothing except that it was a coastal village on my map which I had not yet visited and wanted to visit. It was a village, no doubt, which also contained nice tea-rooms and, perhaps, a genteel greensward upon which I could rest quietly in the sun. Nothing had prepared me for the shock of what I found as, utterly unkowingly, I cycled into a village that then, and to this day, is considered to be the most deprived area of England. Some of you may recall that only last year a picture of one of the most run down roads running through the village was used in an attack ad by the Trump-supporting Republican US congressional candidate Nick Stella during the 2018 United States elections. The advert bore the words “Only you can stop this from becoming reality.” Strange words are they not from a politician whose political ideology has successfully made real many places in the US just like Jaywick? Alas, what is true of the USA is now true here, too, as any careful and observant traveller around the UK can testify. The Jaywick phenomenon has spread far and wide especially along our coasts.

Anyway, I date the start of my own religious, political and social activism to that visit. How come I had not been told this place existed? — my parents, teachers and school friends certainly knew nothing about it. How was it possible that this kind of extreme poverty had been allowed to develop almost on my very doorstep but, astonishingly, completely out of sight? What social and political policies had made this dreadful thing possible? I was shocked to my core and, inevitably, it made me ask for the first time “What then must we do?” or, as it is sometimes translated, “What is to be done?”

I quickly discovered from some newly made socialist friends that a famous text to read on just this question was Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet with exactly this title. I duly got myself a copy and found that in it Lenin had argued the working class would never spontaneously become political merely by fighting various economic battles with employers over wages, working hours and so on and that, consequently, what needed to be done was to form a political party, or “vanguard”, prepared to spread socialist ideas among the people. I was never entirely persuaded by Lenin’s whole argument but what I did take from the book was a recognition that, alone, I would never be able significantly to tackle the nightmare I’d seen at Jaywick and, therefore, I had to find ways to work and organise with others in voluntary charitable associations, pressure groups, political parties and, of course, religious communities. From that day to this it has been clear to me that organised solidarity with those who have found themselves through no fault of their own marginalised and kept in poverty is essential in any search for a meaningful and lasting answer to the question “What then must we do?”

But I was not only a politically engaged teenager, I was a religiously engaged one who knew their Bible and this meant I was well aware that the most famous and influential answers to the question “What then must we do?” weren’t Lenin’s but John the Baptist’s, many of whose answers propelled Jesus into his own radical ministry of which we are modern-day heirs. I also knew, thanks, in part, to reading Christopher Hill’s work, especially, his classic 1972 work of religious history, “The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution” — which, marvellous to relate, was a set text for my “O” level history course — that these answers had been filtered through the writings and actions of English religious radicals such as Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers and thence into a broad stream of English religious and political thinking that is known today as Christian Socialism.

As I began to read histories of that broad movement, again and again, I came across someone whose religious writings became ever more important to me, Leo Tolstoy. I discovered that in 1886 Tolstoy had written a book which was not unknown to Lenin and which bore the same title “What then must we do?” or “What is to be done?” Tolstoy’s book had a huge influence around the world — but particularly in England — it inspired many people to commit to various versions of Tolstoy’s own form of pacifist, Christian anarchism.

My visit to Jaywick ensured that, as a young person reading Tolstoy a century later, there was in fact very little standing in the way of the book also making a profound impression upon me. Again, to quote Jane Addams from Maude’s preface to Tolstoy’s book, I had seen in my own neck of the woods a first glimpse of the same disturbing contrast Tolstoy had seen “. . . between the overworked and the underfed poor on the one hand, and the idle and wasteful rich on the other” and that this “was felt as raising unanswerable questions . . .. We told ourselves in vain that the situation was over-simplified and that [Tolstoy] had made it more logical than life warrants.”

And now, in 2019, I find that every time I step outside the door of the Manse or the church I’m finding strong echoes of my (politically/theologically) foundational visit to Jaywick resonating on every corner of this city as I see an ever-increasing number of people on our streets sleeping rough in the doorways of an ever-increasing number of empty shops whilst a new type of idle and wasteful rich promote policies — economic and social — that are overworking nearly all of us and causing many, many more people to find themselves socially and financially marginalised, cripplingly poor, underfed and reliant on food banks and charities such as Wintercomfort. Once again I find I am forced to ask “What then must we do?”

Now, I truly and whole-heartedly applaud the generous donation to which we have all contributed — in my time here it’s the largest amount we’ve ever collected for our Christmas collection — and, naturally, as our chosen charity for the year I also applaud the work of Wintercomfort. In a time when there is less and less support from government for the most vulnerable in our society every little helps — it is something to be done. However, we all know in our heart of hearts that giving donations to aid charities in their work (no matter how large the donation, no matter how fine the charitable work) forms, at best, part of what Erik Olin Wright calls an “ameliorative struggle”. This is all well and good, but we clearly need also need to begin actively to engage in another struggle which attempts to do more than merely make things a little better “in the meantime” by affecting a deep, structural change in the way we organise ourselves, religiously, politically, financially and socially.

For me this present need has been no better nor more succinctly articulated in recent weeks than by the Green Party leader Caroline Lucas who bravely spoke truth to power by unexpectedly beginning a speech to a conference attended by those wanting a second referendum by offering “a genuine thank you to the 17.4 million people who gave the Establishment such a well-deserved kicking in [the referendum of] 2016.” She continued:

Thanks to you [ — the 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit that is] the crisis at the heart of our democracy — and the intolerable levels of inequality and insecurity experienced by so many — can no longer be ignored. The place that we’ve been brought to by the outcome of the referendum is difficult, dangerous and divisive. But we mustn’t let that obscure the truth, or distort our analysis. Many people took the question they were being asked to mean “Should the country go on being run in the way that it is?’ And they voted “NO!” with a collective howl of rage. That response was justified then — and it’s justified now. For some, it might have been mixed up with fear, even bigotry, and an impossible longing for the past. But there was — and is — a core message at the heart of the Brexit vote. That the status quo in this country is intolerable for huge numbers of people. That the social contract is broken and the power game is rigged. It is right and reasonable to be furious. The questions we must ask going forward have to start with that acknowledgement. And with a powerful commitment not even to try to go back to the way things were. There has to be something better. Better than both the inequality and the powerlessness we’ve been grappling with for decades and that still haven’t been resolved — A democratic failure as well as an economic one.

I think Lucas is right, and right way beyond the concerns of any party politics or simple remainer/leaver arguments, because things have to change across the board and about this none of us can any longer have any doubt. The question “What then must we do?” is now pressing upon us from every direction of society and we know our ameliorative struggles via charitable giving and our charities do not provide the needed, long-term, structural answer we are really seeking. The status quo ante will not do.

It will come as no surprise that I still maintain many of the answers we seek are to be found in better heeding and practicing the peaceful, but still revolutionary social gospel offered by people like John the Baptist, Jesus and Tolstoy which, if we are honest, is something we have never yet properly tried. As Tolstoy put it I think this means doing a number of basic things, we must not lie to ourselves; we must repent, and change our estimate of our own position and activity; we must take every opportunity to serve others because no one possesses rights or privileges, but only endless duties and obligations; we must remember that our first duty is to share in the struggle for the support and maintenance of our own and other people’s lives; we must come to see that our endless, thoughtless consumption of other people’s labour is destroying people’s lives. I think we need to see and do these things and many more besides and as a minister of the Gospel of Jesus — albeit an highly unconventional, atheistic one — I recommend them to you all my heart, mind and strength and will continue to bring them into any public or private conversation about what we must be doing.

But whether or not you agree with me about some or all of these specific answers be assured something will be done by someone so it’s up to us together to make sure that what is done is done with the intention of building a peaceable, Republic or Commonwealth of Heaven on Earth and not the deliberate creation of more and more places like Jaywick which only serve to deepen the divide “between the overworked and the underfed poor on the one hand, and the idle and wasteful rich on the other”.

On Holocaust Memorial Day it is vitally important also to remember the way ethnic and identity divides also always threaten to develop in horrific ways during times of deep national stress such as that we are experiencing at the moment.

As John the Baptist, Jesus, Tolstoy and Lenin asked in their times and places so, in mine, I ask again: “What then must we do?”

And as for ceremony, already the leaves have swirled over

Some of you may have heard that last week the poet Mary Oliver died, aged 83. As many of you will know, over the nineteen years of my ministry with you I have brought many of her poems before you for consideration because she is a contemporary poet whose work is of the greatest help to those of us trying to articulate a meaningful religious naturalism in an age and culture where belief in the metaphysical god (and gods) of old continues to leach slowly away.

I think her poetry operates as religious naturalist poetry because in her work as a whole — and often in single poems — she found ways to give us access to two vital, sacramental energies that used to be bound up indissolubly with belief in god and/or the gods. The first energy is that which can limit us in the face of hubris; the second is that which can transform us in the face of complacency and/or despair.

I’d like to try to illustrate this using her poem “Encounter” (which you can read in a moment) and to do this I feel it might be both helpful and appropriate to begin by telling you a personal story I haven’t told before about the moment when these two sacramental energies found in her poetry were first properly and powerfully earthed in and through my own religious life.

West front of Binham Priory church (Nov. 2018)

It is generally thought, and was thought by me for many years, that the ability to do theology — that is to say, to utter words (logos) about god (theos) — and to be a minister of religion, is necessarily connected to the ability to believe in god. The corollary of this, of course, is that if you stopped believing in god you couldn’t any longer meaningfully be either a theologian or continue to be a minister of religion. In the early 2000s, at the very start of my professional ministry, I had to start admitting to myself that simply I did not — could not in fact — any longer believe in anything like the god of monotheism. It will come as no surprise to admit that this was a somewhat discombobulating time for me and, symbolically, things came to a final head for me in November 2007 whilst Susanna and I were staying in Wells-next-the-Sea on the north Norfolk coast.

The old high altar is just beyond the pier behind the tree (Nov. 2018)

Bleak and solemn it was on the day I cycled over to Binham Priory to see the church and ruins of the Norman Benedictine priory founded in 1091. Those of you who know the site will recall that the original east-end of the church where the high-altar was once situated is now wholly exposed under the rounding dome of the sky and it was there I tried, one last time, to pray to god in the forlorn hope I might be able to recapture at least something of my earlier faith. My prayers failed and, as I stood there in the open ruins in a cold, cold winter wind, I certainly felt my inward religious heart to be at least as cold as were my extremities. Poignant doesn’t begin to describe it because standing there in those freezing cold ruins I could see clearly that my days as a theist were over and I was powerfully aware that an important ending had occurred.

It’s always a wise idea to sit down as soon as possible after an existentially important event like this. So found some shelter in the lee of one of the ruined walls of the priory and attempted to warm myself up a little with the help of a flask of tea and a whisky mac poured from my little hip flask.

When I felt sufficiently restored to face the chill wind once again I got back on my bicycle and headed home westwards where, at Westgate, I took the left hand fork which leads to Wighton across open fields along a long stretch of road bounded by hedges. I wasn’t cycling fast — the wind was too strong for that — and so I was easily able to see lying on the road ahead of me a small, still dark shape. I slowed down and stopped. It turned out to be a small brown mouse, obviously dead. He didn’t seem to have been run over so perhaps he’d simply died whist crossing the road or, what was more likely, had been accidentally dropped by a buzzard, a number of which were circling overhead. I quickly cycled on but had travelled only a few yards before I stopped and turned back. It simply didn’t seem right to leave him there out alone on that barren and cold road. So I picked him up and gently launched him into the leaf litter under the hedge and, as I did this, half remembered lines of Oliver’s poem suddenly flashed back into my consciousness and I can still remember — and feel, right now — an unexpected tingle of religious warmth and hope come back into my, by now, very cold being. Warmed by the thought that I done right by the small brown mouse I cycled on back to the cottage determined to walk up to the local hostelry later that evening, log on to their wifi — then a new luxury Wells — and read again the whole poem. Here it is:

Encounter
by Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

I lift the small brown mouse
Out of the path and hold him.
He has no more to say,
No lilt of feet to run on.
He’s cold, still soft, but idle.
As though he were a stone
I launch him from my hand;
His body falls away
Into the shadowed wood
Where the crackling leaves rain down,
Where the year is mostly over.
“Poor creature,” I might say,
But what’s the use of that.
The clock in him is broken.
And as for ceremony,
Already the leaves have swirled
Over, the wind has spoken.

(New and Selected Poems Vol. 1)

Now, remember, what I think I could, and still can, feel in this poem are the two religious energies I mentioned earlier that used to be tied up with belief in the gods: the first energy is that which limits us in the face of hubris and the second energy is that which can transform us in the face of complacency and despair.

As I sat with Susanna in front of the fire in the cosy Globe Inn, it struck me that the first sacramental energy — that which limits us in the face of hubris — is accessed through the poem in a number of ways. The first was through the simple example of the poet herself in the careful and attentive way she walks through the world observing the many things that presence before her — as Oliver says elsewhere “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” She does not charge across the world thinking she has some privileged status above it, but always moves carefully and attentively through or within the world. In doing this she exemplifies a profound lack of hubris and so presents me with a model of being that is powerful enough to make someone like me — and perhaps you, too — strongly desirous of following her example; I simply felt and still feel it would be good to be like that myself. There is no extrinsic reason for this feeling (i.e. no order from the gods/God on high), rather I’m simply brought face to face with a way of being in the world that speaks for me (as a late twentieth, early twenty-first century Westerner) with real authority. I saw and still see in Oliver something like what it seems the crowds saw in Jesus two millennia ago, namely, someone who “taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7:29).

I think the first energy is also revealed by the way Oliver alerted me to the transitory quality of life, not only for the small brown mouse but also, in a gently implied way, for me. In speaking of a broken clock she offers an image which reminded me that it is a condition of the gift of life that we will all break in time and can never simply be rewound or fixed - not by human craftsmanship nor, in the absence of the gods/God of old, even by divine craftsmanship. The world is the way it is and this truth must simply be acknowledged, embraced and celebrated as best one can. This recognition of human frailty and limitation clearly challenges human hubris.

Now, years of traditional religious language use tied up with the imagined perfection of the gods/God often tempt us on first seeing a dead brown mouse (or any other dead being for that matter) to utter words like “poor creature”, implying that something has gone wrong — something which can only made right in heaven or the world beyond — but today I think for many of us an utterance feels increasingly futile and/or use-less — death and dying is not something going wrong, it’s nature simply doing what nature does.

However, although the words “poor creature” and the like no longer seem to attach to anything metaphysically meaningful, the impulse to utter them reminds me of the, perhaps, always existent need to offer some appropriate, immediate, prayerful response to death and here I can begin to turn to the second energy, that which can transform us in the face of complacency and despair.

Again it seems to me that the poet reveals this herself with great natural authority. Her immediate, prayerful response (in addition to beginning to formulate the poem i her mind) is, as we see, to act positively and purposefully as part of the world and not apart from the world by picking up the brown mouse, observing its present state (and so her and our own present state) with an attentive detachment and then launching the mouse into the forest, a prayerful response born not of disgust, despair or disrespect to what she sees but as a beautiful example of her empathetic co-working and co-mingling in the “same” natural fluxes and flows that are evoked in the image of the wind swirling the leaves over the dead mouse, a process which returns (indeed, all things) to the dark, mysterious maternal material of the world which will, in some way and at some later time, be recycled again in the fungus, a tree, a worm, a bird, a deer or in another poet who will see another dead mouse and respond to it in their own way with attentive, prayerful empathy. In short I found Oliver inviting me to see how we are always able to play a positive, purposeful, meaningful and prayerful part in the fluxes and flows of nature out of which we are ourselves made and it is in being able to see this that we can be transformed in the face of complacency and/or despair.

On that cold winter’s day twelve years ago, and every day since — but especially at times like this when we in this community are reflecting on the death of two members, Luisa and Shirley — I continue to find great religious solace in Oliver’s prayerful response to the death of the brown mouse in which she gave, and endlessly gives me, access to the two powerful religious that used to require belief in god.

Twelve years ago, at the altar of Binham Priory, I finally acknowledged I had lost my old metaphysical theistic religion. Yet, astonishingly, only half an hour later and a couple of miles away on an open road, doing the right, prayerful thing by a dead small, brown mouse, aiding the fluxes and flows of nature by casting him into gently the leaves, I took my first, baby steps, as a genuine religious naturalist. It was not so much a grand road to Damascus experience but something much more modest and gentle on the road to Wighton.

Once-upon-a-time I might have said of all this that “God moves in a mysterious way / His wonders to perform” but today, I feel more minded to say instead “Nature moves in a mysterious way / Its wonders to perform.” But as Spinoza suggests in his project to divinize nature and naturalize the divine, perhaps deus sive natura, god is nature and nature is god . . . but unfolding that thought is for another occasion.

Anyway, from the bottom of my still warmed religious naturalist heart, thank you Mary Oliver for giving me access to those two, vital sacramental religious energies at a vital moment in my life when they could so easily have been lost.

Dear sister, may you rest in peace.

READING: From An Enquiry into Human Understanding by David Hume (from Section X)

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can be possibly imagined. Why is it more than probable, that all men must die; that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air; that fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water; unless it be, that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature, and there is required a violation of these laws, or in other words, a miracle to prevent them.

[. . .]

There must . . . be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof, which is superior.


Over the last few years it has been a pleasure to welcome many new people into the church — either as visitors or, of course, as new attenders and members — and, during that time, at least a dozen of them have asked me — in a rather puzzled way — about the shadow of the “cross” that you can see up here behind me in the apse. Most of them have assumed that, once-upon-a-time, there was an actual cross here which, although an attempt has been made to have it removed, has left an indelible mark on the wainscotting. “So what’s the story?” they have asked me and I have told them.

But, it’s been five years since I told it last to the congregation as a whole and, since it contains a significant number of new people people, it’s about time to retell it and put the record straight once again. But, as you will discover, putting the record straight still doesn’t easily put the matter to bed.  

Nineteen years ago this church to work through a significant disagreement over whether it should, or should not, continue explicitly to maintain its deep historical connections with the liberal Christian and Radical Enlightenment tradition or should abandon it entirely in favour of some fully secular, humanist stance. In the midst of our disagreements something utterly unexpected happened, the cross behind me began to appear. I assure you that this is absolutely true. A couple of people, standing overly-enthusiastically on the Christian side of things, and to the surprise of everyone else involved, took this to be a real miracle, an actual and clear sign that “God” wanted this church to stay Christian.

Despite being among those who wanted to maintain our connections with the liberal Christian tradition (a position I still hold to this day) my religious naturalism — which is, as you know, is actually a species of Christian a/theism — meant that such a supernaturalistic reading of this unexpected phenomenon struck me as both completely incredible and utterly unhelpful to the conversation.

Not surprisingly I began to take every opportunity to point out that the cross-bar was caused by our minister emeritus’ (Frank Walker) head where, for twenty-four years, he used to rest it during the musical offering. The vertical-bar, on the other hand, was formed by a wholly coincidental lightening of the wood grain which runs in that direction. I put this latter phenomenon down to the extra use of heating in the church due to the starting of an evening service. All in all, I said, the cross was clearly not a cross at all but just wear, tear and the drying out of wood. I stressed, again and again, the word “just” — just wear, tear and the drying out of wood.

Now those who know me well know that the word “just” is a bugbear of mine. It’s a word that can be used and misused in so many ways, not least of all because it can be used to mean so many different things. For example, it can mean very recently (I just finished reading Nietzsche); exactly (that’s just what Heidegger meant); by a narrow margin (Matthew just missed Luke with the cricket ball); only (Jesus was just a figure in the crowd until he met John the Baptist); quite or very (that statue of Venus is just beautiful); directly (Christ’s Pieces is just west of the church); and perhaps or possibly (the minister’s crazy theology just might make sense).

Now, when I said the cross was just wear, tear and drying out of the wood I was attempting to use the word “just” to mean either “exactly” or “only”. The underlying point I was trying desperately to make was that it wasn’t a cross — it was “exactly”, or “only” wear, tear and drying out of the wood.

But, despite my protestations, as you can all see, the resultant wear, tear and drying out still looks damnably like a cross and, over the years, as the vertical bar has got lighter and lighter, it’s only come to look ever more and more like one and to elicit from visitors and new members a steady stream of questions about it.

Over the years since the putative “miracle of the cross” I have become ever more alert to the fact that neither in the original highly charged context of our own community’s disagreement nor in the more generalised, background European Christian cultural context we live, work and have our being, a short vertical line intersected by a short horizontal line appearing in a church can never be seen as just wear, tear and the drying out of the wood except in the most abstract and technical sense. It will always show up at first sight as a cross. Trying to claim otherwise would be somewhat akin to trying to claim that the “Mona Lisa” is just a bit of oil paint on a poplar panel or deciding to rail at the setting or the rising of the sun.

At this point in my tale we can turn to some words of my colleague and friend, the current German Lutheran Pastor here in Cambridge, Oliver Fischer, which were given here five years ago on Good Friday during an ecumenical service for the city’s various churches. At one point in his sermon he asked the ecumenical congregation to:

“. . . step under the cross and find our own place there. We have to use our imagination to do this, especially since in this church we have no cross in front of us. Although: there is a nearly miraculous story of a cross appearing on the wall of the apse — can you spot it? What an allegory of the cross this is, that is always there. If you choose it or not, we encounter the cross on our way through life and have to bear it ourselves.”

Although there was much in his sermon involving certain Christian metaphysical beliefs that I, personally, could not — indeed still cannot — agree with, I was powerfully and positively struck by the way he used the story of the cross appearing in this church.

His words reminded me that the cross means something in our culture over and above the simply physical and, since it’s cultural, symbolic meaning — for good and ill — is not going to go away any time soon, for the foreseeable future we continue to walk beneath the cross. For some two-thousand years it has indelibly marked our culture and — again for good and ill — the world’s other, non-Christian, cultures. Whenever we see its shape resonances and echoes — both conscious and unconscious — are inevitably set-off in us. In the same fashion we cannot strike a bell without it ringing, we cannot see a cross without it setting off certain resonances in us. To pretend otherwise is delusional.

With this thought in mind I can bring this lesson into the present day context for here in the UK we have clearly entered into a complex culture war where rational thought and argumentation has begun to lose its suasion and is being challenged and, at times, its use is being even replaced by the use of highly emotive — and motivating — symbols of identity such as the Union Flag, the George Cross, the Saltire, the Red Dragon, the Circle of Twelve Golden Stars on a Blue Field etc.. The kinds of symbol that, when you see/hear them, makes you immediately think — or rather feel — X or Y; they are the kinds of symbol that, once they have triggered something in you, you prone to forget the ever-present need forensically and rationally to examine your thoughts and feelings about them. In the context of this address it is to see a cross and not to have the wherewithal to go on to see that perhaps it’s been created, not by God, but by natural causes, through wear, tear and the drying of wood.    

Now these words may initially sound to you as being only intended as a criticism of those whose are allowing themselves (consciously or unconsciously) uncritically to respond to the emotive symbols I have mentioned and many more besides. Well, it is just such a criticism, but it is much more than that too for my criticism is, today, directed at us, we who try our best — or believe we are trying our best — to employ reason and forensic examination in both religion and politics.

The truth is that we who value reason and forensic examination need to see, using these same tools, that emotive symbols — of which the cross is my primary example today — are always remain potentially extremely powerful and that they can never be reduced JUST this or that rational, reductionistic description. Not to see this fact — distasteful to reason though it often is — would be  itself unreasonable and to have failed in our reasonable and forensic work.

To conclude. With the exception of the two people I mentioned earlier, no actual member of this church who has heard the story of the appearance of the cross has ever believed that a miracle occurred, that a supernatural being called God put this cross here. No! Everyone has believed it to be the product of wholly natural causes. We remain, I’m pleased to say, very much children of David Hume.

Perhaps we should consciously allow this cross to stand for us as a salutary reminder that, though we live in a world so much of which can be best understood by the use of reason and through forensic examination, we continue to live in a human, non-rational, cultural, religious and political world where symbols such as the cross (and the flags I have previously mentioned) can be used to trigger us into acting with great kindness, love and justice or acting with great violence, hate, and injustice.

This cross behind me is most assuredly caused by wear, tear and the drying of wood and not by God but, as humans, it can never be reduced to being JUST these things. As my friend and colleague Oliver Fisher wisely put it, whether we “choose it or not, we encounter the cross on our way through life and have to bear it ourselves.”

As to what “bearing the cross” might mean for us today is another matter of course but, whether we like it or not, bear it we must.

“The Lovers” or “The Dustman” (1934) by Stanley Spencer (1891–1959)

READING:

The Epiphany Story told in the Gospel of Matthew (2:1-12) Translation by David Bentley Hart

Now, Jesus having been born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days when Herod was king, look: Magians arrived in Jerusalem from Eastern parts, saying, “Where is the newborn King of the Judaeans? For we saw his star at its rising, and came to make obeisance to him.”

And, hearing this, King Herod was perturbed, and so was all of Jerusalem along with him; And, having assembled all of the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Anointed is to be born. And they said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judaea, for so it has been written by the prophet: ‘And you, Bethlehem, land of Judah, are by no means least among the leaders of Judah. For from you will come forth a leader who will shepherd my people Israel.’”

Then Herod, secretly summoning the Magians, ascertained from them the exact time of the star’s appearance and, sending them to Bethlehem, said, “Go and inquire very precisely after the child; and when you find him send word to me, so that I too may come and make my obeisance to him.” And, obeying the king, they departed. And look: The star, which they saw at its rising, preceded them until it came to the place where the child was and stood still above it. And, seeing the star, they were exultantly joyful. And, entering the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary and, falling down, made obeisance to him; and, opening their treasure caskets, they proffered him gifts: gold and frankincense and myrrh. Having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, however, they departed for their own country by another path. 

Magians — men of the Zoroastrian priestly caste of the Persians and Medes, largely associated in the Hellenistic mind with oneiromancy (the interpretation of dreams) astrology and sorcery. It is a word that never merely means “wise” or “learned” men. 

In 1934 Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) painted “The Lovers” or “The Dustman.” It was the first of what have been called his “sex paintings”, so-called, not because they portray the sexual act in any explicit way, but because in them Spencer “felt free to openly use more private sexual feelings to reach into the imaginative and the visionary”. This desire for a more imaginative and visionary approach to his painting was allied to his decision to leave London and return to live in his birth-place, the Berkshire village of Cookham as an attempt to reconnect with some of his childhood experiences — epiphanies which he called his “Cookham-feelings”.

[NB In this piece I occasionaly rely, with gratidude, upon information and quotes found in this essay by Kenneth Pople (1919-2008)]

Now, although Spencer's strange, mysterious picture is, in part, exploring the idea of the resurrection — the dustman being the resurrected person returning to the joy of his wife — the fact that his friends and colleagues have come to him and his wife to “see this thing which has come to pass” and that, in so doing, have brought with them three gifts — a teapot, an empty jam tin and an old cabbage (all apparently taken out of the collected rubbish) — the painting also clearly offers us a theme worthy of the season of Epiphany.

This English word “epiphany” derives from the Greek word (epiphainein) meaning “to manifest”, or “to display.” The mainstream Christian tradition holds that what was made manifest was Jesus’ status as the incarnation of God and this display, it is claimed, was first seen by the Gentiles (i.e. non-Jews) in the form of the Astrologer priests — the Magi, the three kings or wise men — who brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. These gifts have generally been understood by the tradition to symbolise Jesus’ kingship, his priestly role, and his atoning death — a blood sacrifice — which together, Christianity claims, has saved humankind from its sins.

Now, for good scientific, literary and historical critical reasons which I do not need to rehearse today, we know that the roles of Jesus as a king and priest and the story about Jesus’ atoning death are purely mythical, literary constructs, symbolic back-projections made by certain early Christian communities some seventy to one hundred odd years after Jesus had died and been buried in some, now unknown, Palestinian tomb where, to this day, his bones remain.

Jesus never was a king, nor a priest, and his death was most certainly not a divine, atoning blood sacrifice for the sins of humankind. What has been made manifest to us today — our contemporary epiphany of Jesus if you like — is that he was, and is, for us no more nor any less than an exemplary radical, human religious and political figure who was one of the first people able to begin to leave behind the notion of a “God-in-himself” (the kind of supernaturalist God who requires kings, priests and atoning blood sacrifices) and put in its place the experience of a “God-with-humankind” — or of divinity-with-us — in which everything is dissolved into the simple call to show justice and charity to all people, neighbour and stranger and enemy alike.

Now, given that the symbols of the three traditional gifts are clearly unhistoric, mythical and literary back projections which rely on a supernaturalistic understanding of the world, it seems to me we are wholly justified today, on Epiphany Sunday, in imaginatively wondering what other three gifts might more usefully symbolise the kind of human Jesus naturalistic, historical, humanist scholarship has revealed him to be? Must the answer be kingship (gold), priesthood (frankincense) and atoning death (myrrh)? Clearly the answer is “No!” But what is far from clear is what a more positive answer might be?

Well, as you now know, in his painting, Spencer re-imagines the gifts as a teapot, an empty jam tin and an old cabbage. But what on earth could these things symbolise for us and of what strange epiphany might they be bearing witness?

To get us thinking about this it is, perhaps, helpful to have have a sense of what they meant for Spencer. Here’s what he said about the painting in later life:

The picture is to express a joy of life through intimacy. All the signs and tokens of home life, such as the cabbage leaves and teapot which I have so much loved that I have had them resurrected from the dustbin because they are reminders of home life and peace, and are worthy of being adored as the dustman is. I only like to paint what makes me feel happy. As a child I was always looking on rubbish heaps and dustbins with a feeling of wonder. I like to feel that, while in life things like pots and brushes and clothes etc may cease to be used, they will in some way be reinstated, and in this Dustman picture I try to express something of this wish and need I feel for things to be restored. That is the feeling that makes the children take out the broken teapot and empty jam tin.

Spencer also tells us something more about the dustman. On Spencer’s return to Cookham it seems that the village was still very rural but there were now rubbish collections and he tells us that he became so “enamoured of the dustman that I wanted him to be transported to heaven in the execution of his duty.” The art critic Kenneth Pople (1919-2008) suggests that Spencer seems here “to be saying that he wanted his picture-dustman to be representative of the joy he himself felt at being uplifted into his Cookham-heaven by his new experiences, and so to be emotionally part of himself.”

In the end, it seems that Spencer didn’t feel he had entirely succeeded in doing this and he explicitly said he had not got all his “beloved self into it somehow, and I am afraid everyone will wonder what it all means, just as I do myself.”

So let’s accept the challenge to wonder what on earth it all means and see if our wondering can present us with a few interesting and, perhaps, even useful Epiphanytide questions, thoughts and even some tentative (if always provisional) answers.

Let’s begin with the claim made by Kenneth Pople, that:

In composing the picture, [Spencer] cannot conceive an alternative other than to expect the viewer to be intelligent enough to appreciate that the imagery is representative of a universal hope and joy.

For me everything hinges on Pople’s claim that Spencer’s imagery is representative of a universal hope and joy. Perhaps it is but perhaps it’s not. Given this doubt, before proceeding any further, it’s important to remind ourselves of one of the oldest and most durable philosophical divides that exists in the western tradition of philosophy and religion — realism verses nominalism. Although it is much more complicated than this, the basic argument can be summed up as follows: Realism holds that universals are just as real as physical, measurable material. Nominalism holds that universal or abstract concepts do not exist in the same way as physical, tangible material.

By the way don’t get confused here because, in modern parlance, nominalists are what we would commonly call “realists” and realists are what we would commonly call “idealists”!

So, firstly, let’s look at the painting as realists (that is to say idealists). In this case the imagery in Spencer’s painting is likely to be understood as pointing to some underlying really-real universal hope and joy that exists beyond our everyday, natural hopes and joys. Also, the dustman’s this-worldly uplifting by his actual wife is only made truly meaningful because of the existence of a universal uplifting in another world by a divine universal figure such as God the Father or Christ. Given that it is a woman who uplifts the dustman it’s important to note that Spencer was quite happy to depict Christ as a woman, most famously as he does in his painting “The Resurrection, Cookham” (1924–7). Lastly, from a realist (that is to say idealist) viewpoint, the three gifts would also only be truly meaningful if they also corresponded to some really-real universals in that other world. The question is, then, what really-real universals are being symbolised by a teapot, an empty jam tin and an old cabbage?

Leaving that question deliberately unanswered let’s now look at the painting as nominalists. Firstly, in this case we may say that the joy and hope depicted are not made truly meaningful by the existence of some universal joy and hope somewhere else but by where they are actually being experienced — i.e. in the people Spencer is depicting. We are seeing in those people the only kind of joy and hope there is — and it is enough. Also, the dustman’s uplifting by his actual wife is not made truly meaningful because of the existence of a universal uplifting in another world by a divine universal figure such as God the Father or Christ but by his wife’s actual uplifting of him in this world. We are seeing here the only kind of uplifting there is — and it is enough. Lastly, from a nominalist viewpoint, the three gifts are not made truly meaningful because they correspond to some really-real universals in this other world they are meaningful precisely as an actual teapot, an actual empty jam tin and an actual old cabbage — and they, too, are enough. In short, a nominalist — and I confess to being such a creature (although, following Quine, with some caveats) — is likely to be congenially disposed to some memorable words by Friedrich Nietzsche found in his preface to “The Gay Science”. He writes: 

Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: for that purpose it is necessary to keep bravely to the surface, the fold and the skin; to worship appearance, to believe in forms, tones, and words, in the whole Olympus of appearance! Those Greeks were superficial - from profundity! And are we not coming back precisely to this point, we dare-devils of the spirit, who have scaled the highest and most dangerous peak of contemporary thought, and have looked around us from it, have looked down from it? Are we not precisely in this respect Greeks? Worshippers of forms, of tones, and of words? And precisely on that account artists?

With Nietzsche’s words I can return directly to my own opening question about Epiphany and whether or not the answer must be kingship, priesthood and death. At the outset I simply said no more than “No!” But now I can fill out my own, positive answer but, naturally, I look forward to your own as well.  

In the context of Spencer’s painting and his three gifts of a teapot, an empty jam tin and an old cabbage and following Nietzsche’s lead I suggest that we should enjoy them, not as symbols of other universal things, but as the things themselves, as simple teapots, jam tins and cabbages, all of which have their own beauty, worth and utility. And, I would suggest, that the strange epiphany to which they are bearing witness is the realisation, again to cite Nietzsche, that we can simply enjoy the “bloom and magic of things close and closest to us” (Friedrich Nietzsche: “Human, All-Too Human” trans. R. J. Hollingdale, CUP 1996, pp. 8) without any need for another world nor for a supernatural God “out there”. This living epiphany is the one we express week by week in our opening words:

> Divinity is present everywhere. The whole world is filled with God. But, in certain places and at certain times we feel a specialty of presence. May this be such a place and such a time.

In Spencer’s painting we see depicted the epiphany of a group of ordinary people feeling just such a living presence in the bloom and magic of things close and closest to them — including a teapot, an empty jam tin and an old cabbage — and it is a joy to behold.

May I suggest then that these gifts are not about kingship, priesthood and an atoning death but speak generally of an egalitarian eating and sharing together with superadded (Epicurean and Lucretian flavoured) sense that death is always part of the endless recycling fluxes and flows of the natural world. And may I also suggest that the dustman, the figure in this painting analogous to Jesus, can stand as a representation of nature as the ultimate recycler and restorer present everywhere, all the time to “whom” we are always already bringing our own gifts.

This means our epiphany, with its three unusual gifts, is one of a communal and ecological life — surely an epiphany suitable for our own age.

Happy Epiphany!

Trough sarcophagus in Rome showing Jesus being baptised by John

The picture at the head of this blog is of the relief found on the right front of a trough sarcophagus in the left side-aisle of Sancta Maria Antigua Church inside the Roman Forum, Rome, Italy. Dated between 250 and 275. We see, on the left, a scene depicting Jonah, then “Philosophy” with an opened scroll, “Piety” with upraised arms, and “Humanity” with a shouldered ram and, on the right, we see a bearded John the Baptist, clad in pallium without tunic (like a Cynic philosopher), with his right hand on the head of a smaller, nude Jesus to left. The dove descends almost vertically above Jesus’ head. John stands on land, and Jesus is to his ankles in water.

READINGS: Two sayings of Jesus and an accompanying commentary by John Dominic Crossan in his “The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images” (Castle Books, 1998) 

What did you go to the desert to find?
    A reed that bends with the winds that blow?
What did you go to the desert to find?
    A man who wears the clothes of kings?
What did you go to the desert to find?
    A prophet?
For sure, but also more, far more than just a prophet

Into the Desert (see, e.g., Matthew 11:7-10). John the Baptist was one of several populist and activist prophets who, in that first-century occupied Jewish homeland, attempted to reenact the Exodus as archetypal deliverance from foreign oppression. Most of them led large crowds from the desert across the Jordan hoping that God would intervene decisively against the Romans, so that they could once again possess their Promised Land as inaugurally of old under Moses and Joshua. They were normally unarmed, since they expected a cataclysmic intervention by God to effect what human weapons could not achieve. John the Baptist shared that ideology but not that strategy. Instead, he sent individuals, rather than led crowds, from the eastern desert and through the Jordan, and thereby planted ticking time bombs of apocalyptic expectation all over the Jewish homeland. Jesus began his public career as a follower of the Baptist and must have therefore expected the imminent advent of the avenging God preached by John. But instead of God came Herod Antipas, and John was executed without any divine intervention. This saying is Jesus’ defense of John and must have been uttered very close to that tragedy. Which do you want, it asks: Antipas or John? The pliant kingling dressed in royal robes or the desert prophet of the apocalyptic God?

In all the past
    no one in human history
        is greater than John the Baptist
In all the future
    any one in the Kingdom of God
        is greater than John the Baptist 

Greater than John (see, e.g., Matthew 11:11). This saying gracefully but definitely contradicts the preceding one. Sometime after John’s execution, and possibly even because of it, Jesus lost faith in God as the imminent apocalyptic One and came to believe, instead, in God as the immanent sapiential One. This God is known not through a future cosmic cataclysm but through a present lifestyle here, now, and immediately. His preferred term is the Kingdom of God, that is, the manifestation of God’s presence through both individual and social, religious and political, styles of life appropriate to a world under divine rather than human control. What was needed, Jesus now claimed, was not a revelation (in Greek: apocalypsis) about the future but a wisdom (in Latin: sapientia) about the present.


There will be few of us here today who are able to look into the coming year without feeling huge concern, even fear, in particular about climate change and Brexit. It is certainly the case with me and I confess to finding myself, on occasions, tempted to cast around the various newspapers and journals in order to find someone whom I can trust is able to tell me what is certainly going to happen in the coming year.

Hermes talks to Jason

This desire, always present but particularly so at the moment, reminds me that the desire for prophets is a very ancient human one indeed. It’s worth remembering that our religion and politics (which constantly overlap) have often thrived and painfully fallen thanks to words uttered by this or that prophet. In the days following Christmas as I was beginning to muse on this subject, Susanna’s grandson and I re-watched bits of Harry Harryhausen’s wonderful stop-motion film from 1963, “Jason and the Argonauts”. You may remember that the story unfolds in the way it does thanks to King Pelias’ (mis)interpretation of the prophecy given to him by the god Zeus via a prophet priest who, it turns out, is really Hermes, the messenger of the gods. Pelias forgets that Hermes — from whose name we get the word “hermeneutics”, i.e. the art of interpretation — always passes on his prophetic messages in ways that are never clear and straight-forward and which always require subtle, reflective, open interpretation and re-interpretation in the light of events and our encounter with others. In other words even Hermes (who the myths tell us speaks directly with the gods) is never capable of telling us what is actually going to happen and this means that his prophecies are not really prophecies at all — at least not in the common understanding of the word — instead they are goads to ongoing, creative, open reflection and interpretation. You’d have thought we would have learnt this lesson by now but no, for time and time again kings, emperors, priests, politicians, and even ordinary folk like us, continue to fall prey to the temptation to believe that there are some people who can prophesy clearly and flawlessly.  

Given that on Christmas Day I said from this lectern that when the Gospels are stripped as best they can be of their unhistorical and supernatural elements, Jesus offers us a humanistic teaching which remains utterly relevant today, it seems appropriate to seek to draw a lesson about prophets and prophecies from the earliest years of Jesus’ adult ministry. I do this because, as I also noted on Tuesday, our first minister here, J. Cyril Flower, wrote in 1920 that when we “catch a glimpse of the real man of Galilee, and give ear to [his] teaching” then “like the seed growing in secret” it remains capable of germinating in our hearts and able to “revolutionize our social life, our industrial order and our religion” (p. 9).

Taking him seriously I'd like to try to plant a revolutionary, germinating seed in your — and indeed my — heart, one that will, I hope, begin to show some green shoots during the coming year . . .

Immediately before Jesus began his own ministry he, too, as we heard in our readings, was enamoured of a prophet, the famous John the Baptist. As John Dominic Crossan observes — in an echo of so much of the prophetic, national populist rhetoric we are hearing at the moment — John the Baptist was amongst those who were prophesying to his hearers an “archetypal deliverance from foreign oppression.” John the Baptist believed he knew what was going to happen and he expressed his belief in such a confident fashion that many people who were hungry to know what was going to happen — including Jesus — were quite prepared to believe and act upon John’s prophecy that their oppressed land would, thanks to the direct, apocalyptic intervention of God, suddenly become their Promised Land. It didn’t matter how much chaos was created because it would all be a sign that their avenging God — we might say vengeful “ideal” or “fantasy” — was at work. But, as we know, what came was not the Promised Land but the rule of Herod Antipas who, in turn, executed John the Baptist and, it seems, later played a key role in the execution of Jesus.

The discovery that one has been following a prophet whose prophecies have been utterly discredited is always traumatic event but, oddly, we know it cuts in at least two very different ways.

Some people, instead of beginning critically to question the truth of basic idea about the efficacy of prophets and their prophecies, astonishingly simply go on believing in the same prophet or to go on and seek out some new (better) one.

However, other people, do begin critically to question ideas about prophets and prophecies but this latter group can then itself be subdivided. There are those who decide that everything prophetic is untrustworthy and should be avoided but this approach, alas, all too easily leads to people beginning passively to acquiesce to the current status quo, saying to themselves and others that “TINA - There Is No Alternative”. But, as I pointed out at the beginning of Advent, there are others, such as Jesus, who have been able to say, “TATIANA — That, Astonishingly, There Is AN Alternative.” It is to see that there is a way of being prophetic but without any further need for either prophets or prophecies about an always unpredictable future.

As we heard in our reading, following his disappointment with John the Baptist, Jesus says:

In all the past
       no one in human history
            is greater than John the Baptist.
In all the future
       any one in the Kingdom of God
             is greater than John the Baptist.
      
It is a saying which clearly suggests that in the kingdom Jesus thought we would all be living in a prophetic fashion that dissolved the need for future-orientated prophets like John the Baptist. This occurs because God, and the Kingdom of God, is now not for Jesus some future, imminent being and state of affairs that you need a prophet to see and prophesy about but, instead, something immanent, known “through a present lifestyle, here, now, and immediately.”

As Crossan realises, Jesus comes to feel that

What was needed . . . was not a revelation (in Greek apocalypsis) about the future but a wisdom (in Greek sapientia) about the present.

To use more modern language to describe the matter Jesus seems to have seen that one could entirely dispense with prophets and prophesies and yet still be prophetic if one lived in a way that prefigured the kingdom of God in the communities in which we actually find ourselves. As Justin Meggitt notes in a chapter recently published by the University of Stockholm called “Was the historical Jesus an anarchist? Anachronism, anarchism and the historical Jesus” (pp. 124-197), Jesus seems to have realised the importance of ensuring that the means one employs in living now must be consistent with the desired ends, that is “the outcomes are prefigured by the methods”.

But to be prophetic without prophets and prophecies like this one must also take care to dispense with the temptation to fall prey to the lure of any form of utopianism, utopias being, of course, another example of the future-orientated prophecies uttered by prophets. Again, as Meggitt notes:

Although utopias can have their uses — they can inspire, encourage, provide a pleasurable escape — they can also be coercive and that is why, on the whole, they have been resisted by anarchists; utopianism enforces others to live in a certain way, and a utopia envisaged as a single, totalising endpoint will necessitate manipulation to fit a predetermined plan. As Marie Louise Berneri demonstrated in her analysis of utopian thought from Plato to Huxley, they are inherently authoritarian. For anarchists, the details of such social order need to be determined by those that that are dominated. Their ethics are:
      
          Reflexive and self-creative, as they do not assess practices against a universally prescribed end-point, as some utopian theorists have done, but through a process of immanent critique (pp. 148-149).


Lots of people will still resist the idea that this is the kind of thing being advocated by Jesus because, as Meggitt notes, “it is often assumed that the historical Jesus had a clear idea of his intentions and understanding of the implications of the kingdom of God from the outset” (p. 149). But, when one takes care to go back to the textural sources themselves and successfully avoids making the kinds of doctrinal assumptions made by later Christianity, what we discover is a strong sense that Jesus was himself “a figure open to reflection and revision in the light of events and encounter with others” (ibid.).  Think here particularly of his encounter with the Syrophonecian woman.

We sense this most powerfully in Jesus’ parables which, once again to cite Meggitt, “are figurative and affective” and are in “a form that does not compel the hearer to arrive at a narrowly predetermined understanding of what is being conveyed” (p. 150)

Again and again we find the prophetic message in a life lived in the here and now that proclaims with the human Jesus, again and again, TATIANA! — That, Astonishingly, There Is AN Alternative to the present situation.

As we prepare to enter into what seems highly likely to be an exceptionally fraught and difficult period of history, I would strongly argue that we in this community need to stay firmly focussed on the business of creating together, in the here and now, the kind of non-prophet but still prophetic community Jesus envisaged, one which open-endedly prefigures an egalitarian, non-coercive life by practising an open commensality and consciously remaining ever open to reflection and revision in the light of events and the encounter with others. (To be a place where God happens).

What we absolutely must not do is get caught up in trying to compete in any head-on way with all the wannabe future-orientated wild prophets whose conflicting voices are likely only to increase in volume and vehemence in the coming months. 

Again and again — like a still small voice (1 Kings 19:11-12) speaking in the heart of the political and religious winds, earthquakes and fires of our own age — surely in the coming year we must proclaim that what is needed is not a revelation (in Greek apocalypsis) about the future but a wisdom (in Greek sapientia) about the present.

Our empty glass of wine up-turned on Edward Fitzgerald's grave

Yesterday an old college friend and I took the opportunity of heading out to Suffolk to visit the grave of the poet Edward Fitzgerald in Boulge who, most famously, translated (or rather re-presented a number of versions of) the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám” written by the Astronomer-Poet of Persia, Omar Khayyám (1048–1131).

This poem was first introduced to me by my grandmother when I was a very small boy (indeed, I still have the copy from which she read to me) and it’s basic philosophy, which Fitzgerald in his introduction to his first edition of the poem) described as being a religious skepticism that owes much to Epicurus and Lucretius. As readers of this blog will know this is a philosophy which has had, and continue to have, a powerful effect upon me. 

When I was living in Suffolk nineteen years ago, once every couple of years, I would cycle over to Fitzgerald’s grave, read the poem (or at least a fair few of its verses, and generally in the first version he produced) and, after reading the final verse, drink a glass of Shiraz and turn the glass upside-down on his gravestone just as they/he requested:

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on The Grass,
     And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty Glass!
 
TAMÁM SHUD. [that is, It is ended]

Well, it’s been, long time since I’ve been able to do this and so it was a joy and pleasure to drink Omar Khayyám and Fitzgerald once again.

My friend and I were out in those parts because later on we had to pick up my wife who had spent the day visiting her step-daughter near Hadleigh. Being fairly close to the coast we decided to go on to Felixstowe to walk along the stretch of coastline which inspired M. R. James to write his famous story O Whistle and I'll Come to You my Lad and, before leaving the town, we dropped into the wonderful Treasure Chest bookshop. Very appropriately I found nestled on the shelves a copy of the second printing of the 1955 Folio edition of the Rubaiyat for just £5. Since I did not have this edition in my modest collection I decided to succumb to temptation and get it. And, lastly, as I have been writing this post, it seemed entirely fitting to do it to the accompaniment of Bantock’s sublime work Omar Khayyám.

I took a few photos of the occasion and include them here at the beginning of this post and below for your pleasure. At the very end I also include a photo of the sublime sunset we saw as we were leaving Felixstowe. It was a perfect end to the day’s joyous pilgrimage . . .

All the photos were taken with my Fuji X100F and are straight out of the camera.
Just click on a photo to enlarge it.

The view looking north from Fitzerald's grave

Looking back at Fitzgerald's grave from the north

St Michael's, Boulge from the south-east

A lone chair outside the churchyard

Sunset over Felixstowe

The Christmas Tree in the Memorial (Unitarian) Church READINGS: Luke 2:1-12 Leo Tolstoy’s reinterpretation and representation of the opening of John’s Gospel found in his “The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus” (composite translation by Aylmer Maude and Dustin Condren) In the beginning stood the understanding of life, as the foundation of all things. Understanding of life stood in the place of God. Understanding of life is God. According to Jesus’s proclamation, it stands as the basis and source of all things, in the place of God. All that lives was born into life through understanding. And without it, there can be nothing living. Understanding gives true life. Understanding is the light of life. It is the light that shines in...

A rainbow over the Memorial (Unitarian) Church, Cambridge

READINGS:

Luke 17:20-21

Jesus said: “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”

James Martineau cited in J. E. Carpenter’s “James Martineau”
(Philip Green, London 1905, p. 404)

The incarnation of Christ is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally and God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there, and humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine.

From “A Common Faith” (1934) by John Dewey (2nd ed., Yale University Press, 2013, p. 47)

We are in the presence neither of ideals completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are merely rootless ideals, fantasies or utopias. For there are forces in nature and society that generate and support the ideals. They are further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidarity. It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name ‘God’. I would not insist that the name must be given.

From “A Theology of the Event” by John D. Caputo in “After the Death of God” by John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo (Columbia University Press, 2007, pp, 47–49)

One way to put what postmodernism means is to say that it is a philosophy of the event, and one way to put what a radical or postmodem theology means is to say it is a theology of the event. Obviously, then, on such an accounting, everything depends upon what we mean by an event, which, for the sake of simplicity, I describe as follows:

    1. An event is not precisely what happens, which is what the word suggests in English, but something going on in what happens, something that is being expressed or realized or given shape in what happens; it is not something present, but something seeking to make itself felt in what is present.

    2. Accordingly, I would distinguish between a name and the event that is astir or that transpires in a name. The name is a kind of provisional formulation of an event, a relatively stable if evolving structure, while the event is ever restless, on the move, seeking new forms to assume, seeking to get expressed in still unexpressed ways. Names are historical, contingent, provisional expressions in natural languages, while events are what names are trying to form or formulate, nominate or denominate.

    3. An event is not a thing but something astir in a thing. Events get realized in things, take on actuality and presence there, but always in a way that is provisional and revisable, while the restlessness and flux of things is explained by the events they harbour.

    4. What happens, be it a thing or a word, is always deconstructible just in virtue of events which are not deconstructible. That does not mean that events are eternally true like a Platonic eidos; far from being eternally true or present, events are never present, never finished or formed, realized or constructed, whereas only what is constructed is deconstructable. Words and things are deconstructible, but events if there are any such things (s’il y en a), are not deconstructible.

    5. In terms of their temporality, events, never being present, solicit us from afar, draw us on, draw us out into the future, calling us hither. Events are provocations and promises, and they have the structure of what Derrida calls the unforeseeable “to come” (à venir). Or else they call us back, recall us to all that has flowed by into the irremissible past, which is why they form the basis of what Johann Baptist Metz calls “dangerous memories” of the injustice suffered by those long dead, or not so long, a revocation that constitutes another provocation. Events call and recall.

    Events are what Žižek calls the “fragile absolute” — when Žižek leaves off abusing postmodern theories he often serves up excellent postmodern goods — fragile because they are delicate and absolute because they are precious. 

    [. . .]

    On my accounting, things take a theological turn in postmodernism when what we mean by the event shifts to God. Or, altemately, things take a postmodem tum in theology when the meditation upon theos or theios, God or the divine, is shifted to events, when the location of God or what is divine about God is shifted from what happens, from constituted words and things, to the plane of events.


As most of you will know, one of the titles Matthew gives to Jesus in his gospel is “Emmanuel” which means “god-with-us” and so, in the religious context, there is no real way properly to honour and celebrate christmas (even the lowercase “c” christmas I’ve been advocating during this advent season) without speaking in some fashion about the “incarnation”, i.e. about the scandalous and, to many of us, the frankly implausible idea that, somehow, God became human.

This task, it has to be said, is a challenge. Still, I’ve never been one to duck a theological challenge and certainly not one which, potentially anyway, may offer at least some of you a powerful, contemporary religious way to travel lovingly and compassionately with friends and family who are seriously ill and, perhaps also dying, including for our own community two beloved members of the congregation, both of whom are in the final weeks and, perhaps, days of their lives.

The most famous and influential late-nineteenth and early twentieth century way the incarnation was talked about in unitarian circles was offered us by one of the great British liberal theologians of the time, James Martineau (1805-1900), who once wrote:

“The incarnation of Christ is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally and God everlastingly. He bends into the human to dwell there, and humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine” (cited in J. E. Carpenter, James Martineau, Philip Green, London 1905, p. 404).

But Martineau’s use of the word “God” was inevitably still powerfully influenced by traditional theism and his belief in “God” — very much a capital “G” God of course — was really the same as him saying that there existed somewhere some actual, divine being and that it was this being which became incarnate in the world. Now I’m sure I do not need to rehearse with you how and why most of us here today — and, indeed, most secular people in Europe and the USA — are perplexed by such an idea.

However, our understandable perplexity about the traditional, Christian interpretations of the incarnation, does not mean we must at the same time entirely jettison Martineau’s basic insight that “humanity is the susceptible organ of the divine” because we can choose to interpret it in a very different way to the way he understood it — as long, of course, as we consciously acknowledge Martineau almost certainly did not mean what we might mean.

We enter into one possible different way of understanding his basic insight via what is called a “theology of the event” which finds its most influential expression in the work of the contemporary American theologian John D. Caputo and which you heard enumerated in our readings. I realise that his way of putting things there may be obscure so let me try to put his five points into my own words.

Firstly, — if and when I use the word “God” — I no longer understand “God” as something present but something seeking to make itself felt in what is present. So, whilst for me it’s not right to say Jesus is “God” (after all I can only encounter him as having been a human being) what makes him special to me is that he lived in such a way that — following John Dewey’s definition — what I am still minded to call “God” still makes itself felt whenever I see, and am in the presence of, people who are living and acting in ways similar to those displayed by the human Jesus. When I see those people expressing in their lives something of that active relationship between the idea and the actual I find myself wanting to say of them, as I still say of Jesus, “Look there! That is what I mean by ‘God’!”

Secondly, it is important for me to distinguish between the name “God” and the event that is astir in this name. So when I use the word “God” here I always try to attached it to events in which we see people called, as Micah summed it up (and as we sung in our second hymn) to do true justice, to love mercy, and to walk with God (and, by implication neighbour). This is why I try to point so regularly to any act of justice, mercy, love in which people are walking in solidarity with one another against the many oppressive political, economic and religious forces that threaten us and say “Look there! That is what I mean by ‘God’!”

Thirdly, I no longer understand “God” as an ultimate thing, a super-being whose existence could be proved (or disproved) by either science, philosophy or theology because “God” is that mysterious, ineffable something which is astir in all things, which is also the very possibility of there being something not nothing. This is why I often point to the interconnectedness of the universe in which, as John Dewey realised, the forces of nature and our ability to work with them are, despite many setbacks, still capable of bringing forth new visions of better ways to be human and in the presence of this that I want to say “Look there! That is what I mean by ‘God’!” 

Fourthly, I have been persuaded that, no matter how beautiful, venerable or persuasive they seem — whether they are Trinitarian or Unitarian, whether they theist or atheist — all theories about “God” can, and must, always be deconstructed. These theories may, and often have had, some temporary ad hoc usefulness, but they must never be thought of as being themselves the event that they harbour. This is why I point with particular approval to any living, always unfinished, unfolding, devolved, horizontal, democratic, non-institutional, non-denominational and non-doctrinal forms of community and say “Look there! That is what I mean by ‘God’!”

Fifthly, I understand “God” as event as something that is always calling me from afar — from something which stands outside me (ek-stasis) — which is always calling and provoking me to live a form of life committed to seeking more justice, more love, more mercy and a continued walking with each other and “God”. Given this it is no wonder that, as far as every earthly, coercive human power that wants to control and dominate others and nature, “God” is indeed a dangerous memory and a radical call to reform. This is why I try to point to any expressions of better, fairer, more just and loving visions of human organization that I come to my notice and say “Look there! That is what I mean by ‘God’!”

I realise tear even after walking through Caputo’s five points in my own words some of you may still find what I am talking about to be too ungrounded and, to use what is at the moment a popular word, “nebulous”. So let me begin to draw to a close by grounding Caputo’s words in something currently very, very close to our hearts about which I spoke about at the beginning, namely our need to travel lovingly and compassionately with seriously ill friends and relatives.

Klaas Hendrikse (1947-2018) in NRC Weekend zaterdag 22 & zondag 23 oktober 2011

The contemporary Dutch atheist pastor who died only this year, Klaas Hendrikse (whose example had a huge influence on my ability to continue to exercise some kind of meaningful Christian ministry) was asked in a public interview a few years ago, in the light of the title of his book “Believing in a God that does not exist: the manifesto of an atheist pastor”, what does he mean by “God”? He began by saying that:
cise some meaningful form of Christian ministry),

If you are sitting down and ask yourself the question, “Where is God?”, [the answer is that] he is nowhere. But if you get up from your chair and go into the world, into life, there God may happen.

Note well that he said “God may happen” and not “God may exist” — Hendrikse, too, is talking about God as an event. Hendrikse then turns his attention to an example of where this happens in his own life.

If I as a priest have to talk to people who are close to leaving this life, close to dying, I go into a room and I don’t know what I will see there. I have nothing with me, just Klaas, that’s all. I can only do that because I trust that something will happen. There is no recipe, there is no answer to questions, there is only trust that something will happen. And it doesn’t happen always, of course. [But when it does] . . . I will never say when I am talking to somebody, “Here, here is God”. No. It is a way to give words to what happened there afterwards — there WAS God.

Like John Dewey before him Hendrikse did not, as I do not, insist that the word God must be used to describe this type of event. But, as someone like Hendrikse, an individual who is also a minister in a church rooted in the Christian tradition I do use the word God to talk about this kind of event because it is an intrinsic element in my personal, and our corporate, native language.

Anyway, in my pastoral rôle, for many years now I have done just as Hendrikse has done and, after talking with many of you, I know that you also do likewise. We don’t take in with us any prepared words of our own, or prayer books, or ready-made liturgies, instead we simply take in ourselves trusting that something will happen. It doesn’t always, of course, but over the course of the days, weeks and months each of us has found that something does, at times, happen.

In those moments we don’t feel the need to say to our dying friends and relatives “Here, here is God”, but afterwards, many many times, I have found myself saying — as perhaps you have found yourself saying — “there WAS God”.

In those precious moments (events) we have all received in one way or another fragments of holiness, glimpses of eternity and brief moments of insight. And, whenever we have been able to gather them up for the precious gifts that they are we have found ourselves renewed by their grace and able to move boldly into the unknown, ineffable mystery that in which we live, move and have our being. And in those moments (events), I would argue, we have found a contemporary way to affirm that the incarnation of Christ is always-already true, not of Christ exclusively, but of humankind universally and God everlastingly. This is because God, when understood as an event that may happen, has always-already been dwelling in the human, and humanity has always-already been the susceptible organ of the divine.



As I noted above Klaas Hendrikse was very important to me because he provided me with a practical, and for me compelling, model of how to be a Christian atheist pastor. The announcement of his death in June of this year was, therefore, a sad moment for me. May he rest in peace.

I first came across him in a BBC piece which can be found at the link below. It includes a short filmed interview with him and a couple of members of his congregation.

The burial at Shire Hall

This morning and afternoon Susanna and I, along with a four other attenders of the Cambridge Unitarian Church, took part on the first day of local action in Cambridge connected with the Extinction Rebellion, part of a National Day of Action.

The event began in front of the Grafton Centre (Fitzroy St end near Coop bank), then moved to the Grand Arcade (Susanna took part in these events) and thence on to Market Square and Shire Hall County Council offices at the top of Castle Hill where we buried a symbolic coffin and planted a real tree (I took part in these events).

In the Market Square

The procession ended with a funeral ceremony at Shire Hall, mourning all the life we've lost, are losing and will continue to lose because of climate breakdown.

In this post are a few photos I took along the way from Market Square to Shire Hall. Just click on a photo to enlarge it.

As the local Extinction Rebellion Facebook page notes:

We rebel because we love this world. It breaks our hearts to see it ravaged, to watch so many people, plants and animals all over this world already dying, to know that this will soon happen to our children if nothing changes. There is no way forward without giving voice to our grief.

Please bring a wreath, flowers, pictures of communities hit by climate breakdown already, or pictures of extinct/endangered animals to lay on the coffin.

At the Shire Hall

Children and teenagers are very welcome — we’d love to have them there and there’s nothing dangerous going to happen! However, the themes of Extinction and Death will be dealt with fairly explicitly so please consider how your particular children will react to this, and how to help them respond if bringing them.

We demand that Cambridge City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council declare a Climate Emergency and take urgent action to avoid climate catastrophe.

We act in peace, with ferocious love of our world in our hearts. We act on behalf of life.

In the Market Square

➜➜➜ FAMILIES, SAFETY, POLICE AND NON-VIOLENCE

Everyone is welcome to come along to this event and exercise their human right to peaceful protest if they agree to the commitment to non-violence.

Though no one cannot fully predict what the police will do, arrest or attack on non-violent citizens is very unlikely.

If you choose to speak to the police or police liaison officers we recommend you don’t tell them your name or any details. ➜ Please do not tell them or give away the names of other people. Talk to them about the weather, pay-cuts and added job pressure due to austerity, and the need for them to break the chain of command at some point – in order to follow their own conscience and protect what they love too. However, always remember they are paid to do a role in society, and that the role they are in may ask them to turn on you very quickly.

If you are planning to attend please read the Extinction Rebellion Action Consensus: 

https://rebellion.earth/rebellion-day/action-consensus

Also please read this legal briefing:

https://rebellion.earth/legal-briefing/

In the Market Square

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

At the Shire Hall

Along the Roman Road

Today was a pearl of an early winter’s day so I decided to take the opportunity on one of my days off to cycle up to the Gog Magog Hills and Wandlebury Hill Fort and then to walk a little way along the Roman Road to Copley Hill (on top of which is a Bronze Age bowl barrow) to eat a sandwich, drink a flask of hot tea and take in the view.  

Why I chose that particular spot for my lunch today can be explained by the fact that this morning as I had my first cup of tea of the day I decided, for no discernible reason, to listen to William Alwyn’s Fifth Symphony. This symphony, written in 1973, has the subtitle Hydriotaphia which, some of you may know, is taken from Thomas Browne’s book Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk (1658). I dug out my copy and read a few pages of its allusive and frankly hauntological prose and, as I pondered his words, I realised that I really had to make my way to a place where just such ancient burials were actually to be found so as better to carry on my own hauntological and philosophical musings.

Naturally, along the (ancient) way, I took a few photos and include them here for your pleasure. As always they were taken with my Fuji X100F and are all straight out of the camera jpegs (with an occasional crop).

Just click on a photo to enlarge it.

A farmer and his dog on the way across to Copley Hill (on the right covered by trees)

The site of T. C. Lethbridge's excavations at Wandlebury Country Park

In the woods at Wandlebury Country Park

Stonework in the grounds of Wandlebury House

Doorway through into the orchard of Wandlebury House

Doorway through into the orchard of Wandlebury House

Fence in the woods in Wandlebury Country Park

Bench in the woods in Wandlebury Country Park

Coppicing in the woods in Wandlebury Country Park

The sylvan nave in the woods in Wandlebury Country Park

Along the Roman Road

Along the Roman Road

Along the Roman Road

Along the Roman Road

Along the Roman Road

In the grounds of Wandlebury Country Park

Sheep grazing in Wandlebury Country Park

On top of Wormwood Hill (once thought to be a barrow) in Wandlebury Country Park

East window in St Michael's Kirby-le-Soken A couple of times in church in recent weeks I have been asked about my own journey to Christian atheism or, as my last address more gently put it, to the adoption of an “ ecstatic humanism" being, as I am, a skeptic with a naturally religious mind and (I hope) and open-minded ‘reverent’ humanist. Given this it struck me that I might usefully republish the following brief autobiographical piece I wrote back in 2013 for a Unitarian Christian Association publication which contained individual minister's reflections on their own faith.   —o0o—   Taking the time to look back at my own life of faith in order to write this piece I became aware just how deeply it is related to the beautiful...

The Memorial Church, Cambridge in early winter afternoon sunlight

READING

Last week some of you will recall that I introduced you to a passage by the philosopher Henry Bugbee, a key part of which used the word ‘ecstasis’. He wrote:

But patience is not postponement, not falling away from on-goingness; it is the readying to step clean forth (ecstasis), and there ever comes a time when the question sinks home: when, if not now?  

This mention of “ecstasis” strongly reminded me of an essay by another philosopher called James W. Woelfel some of whose words were a great help to me in writing the address I gave a few weeks ago called ‘Mr Chips as a vision and incarnation of a wholly immanent and natural “God”’. Woelfel, too, used the wo
rd in an essay from 1974 called “Ecstatic Humanism with Christian Hopes” which we’ll now hear: 

Found in “Borderland Christianity” by James W. Woelfel (Geoffrey Chapman, 1974, pp. 23-25)

I would describe the perspective to which I have come (and in which I hope I am always growing and remaining open) as an “ecstatic” or “self-transcending” humanism. The Greek word ek-stasis literally means “standing outside of.” We are familiar with the ordinary usage of “ecstasy” to describe certain psychological and physical states in which a person seems to be “standing outside” himself, to transcend his ordinary self. Most of us have probably experienced ecstasy in sexual love, or perhaps when totally caught up in listening to certain kinds of music; and we have at least heard about phenomena such as whirling dervishes, trances of various sorts, and mystical states.
          Following the lead of philosophers such as Paul Tillich, however, I am not using the word “ecstatic” in its ordinary sense instead I am applying its etymological suggestions of “transcending” or “going beyond” to something much broader. In my case, “ecstatic” is an apt description of the kind of humanistic outlook I wish to commend. “Ecstatic” humanism is a humanistic perspective which transcends or goes beyond purely secular forms of humanism. Ecstatic humanism is humanism which, precisely because of its preoccupation with human experience in its fullness, seeks to be sensitively open-minded about the possibility of dimensions of experience and reality beyond our present knowing. Ecstatic humanism tries to remain constantly aware of the limitations of the human situation and human knowledge. Ecstatic humanism makes positive contact with, and learns much from, the religious traditions while remaining “reverently agnostic” about many of their details. Ecstatic humanism is too filled with wonder over the mysteries surrounding our existence to be content with narrow, reduced accounts of man and his world.
          In its attitude of wonder, openness, religiousness, ecstatic humanism also transcends or goes beyond purely secular humanisms in a sense somewhat akin to the ordinary usage of “ecstatic.” Ecstatic humanism is likely to be personally attuned to those aspects of human experience which singularly “take us out of ourselves” — religious experience, love, art and beauty, the devoted search for truth — as especially important clues to the “self-transcending” character of man himself.
          Ecstatic humanism seeks, then, to steer a course between explicit religious belief on the one hand and atheistic or reductionistic humanism on the other. It is decidedly a form of humanism in building its outlook upon the best knowledge we have from human reasoning about our experience. But it is a serious and sensitive attention to man in his “self-transcending” characteristics — religion, values, artistic creativity, knowledge and communication, introspection — which opens ecstatic humanism out onto the religious dimension and forbids it from accepting the truncated outlooks of a purely secular humanism. I am arguing, in other words, that an ecstatic or self-transcending humanism is a more fully adequate humanistic position. It is a humanism which recognizes both the limitations of our human situation and knowledge and the mysterious depths and possibilities glimpsed in our human experience.


For me there is always in play the question of how best to describe where, religiously and philosophically speaking, I am. I’m sure it would be always in play whatever it was I did professionally, but it becomes extremely pressing when one has, as I do, a public-facing religious and ministerial rôle. This is because people are constantly wanting to know what it is I believe and, when they find out I am the minister of this liberal, freethinking church, the first question is often immediately followed with another, namely, “Are you a Christian then?”

Those of you who know me well know that I often reply by saying that I am a “Christian atheist” because I think it is precisely the truth-seeking drive found in Christianity that, over two millennia, has inexorably and inevitably led to the development of a certain species of atheism, an atheism that is, however, still clearly a product of the liberal Christian tradition. As some of you will know, Don Cupitt, the Dean Emeritus from over the road at Emmanuel College, calls this species of atheism “secular Christianity.”

[Another way of putting this is that, when looked at in a certain way, the natural outcome of Christian thinking is atheism and this was why the German philosopher Ernst Bloch could provocatively could say: “Only a good Christian can be a good atheist; only an atheist can be a good Christian.”]

Just to clarify, being this kind of atheist does not preclude continuing to use the word “God” because God is now understood in wholly immanent, this worldly terms. Woelfel reminds us that, in the poetic, mythological language of the Christian atheist, God has died “completely to his transcendent status and identifies himself entirely with humankind and our world” and the “only revelation of God is [now found in] the faces of us unlikely human beings, his only worship our compassionate devotion to one another and to the needs of our earth.” I would argue that this is exactly what Jesus was doing in his own teaching in which everything is dissolved into the call to justice and charity to one’s neighbour.

However, although the appellation “Christian atheist” has the benefit of being both true (for me anyway) and creatively and usefully shocking to those who cannot see that — under certain circumstances anyway — the words “Christian” and “atheist” go together like “love and marriage and a horse and carriage”, I realise it is a term which can often sound overly negative to many people. This has meant I’m always on the lookout for other ways I might describe where I am at and, thanks to James W. Woelfel, I hold in quiet reserve just such an alternative term, “ecstatic humanism”, a description of which you heard in our readings (pp.23-25).

I bring it before you today for consideration because I think it might speak well, not only to many members of this local community, but also to many people in an around this city who might be interested in joining a community such as this. Anyway, I thought it might be helpful for you to have up your sleeve such a term for those moments when you are called upon to describe in general terms what kind this church is actively offering the world.  

It seems likely to me that most people who attend, or who might be interested in attending, this church would be happy to be described [after the interesting British philosopher Ronald Hepburn] as “skeptics with naturally religious minds” or what Woelfel calls “open-minded ‘reverent’ humanists”. Woelfel adds that he also thinks of himself as “kind of ultra-liberal ‘Christian heretic’” (p. 14) and, although I quite like this latter term, I realise this will resonate with far fewer people.

Woelfel’s mention of Christianity here is very important — not because he thinks Christianity is in some fashion absolutely superior to other religious traditions, he does not — but because of the straightforwardly contingent truth that it is “the religion which has decisively shaped and permeated our Western culture and dominates the world of religion by its sheer numbers and influence.” It’s also important because, as he observes, “it is the religion whose origins, history, and ideas the American or European religious thinker is ordinarily the most well-versed.” Because of this Woelfel thinks it is, therefore, the religion “with which most religiously perplexed people must come to grips with in a special way, since it has both created out problems and will probably offer the most natural resources for our groping solutions” (pp. 16-17). 

Again, it seems to me that the special, yet modest, rôle that is played by this church is that it provides a supportive yet critically inquiring community where a certain kind of “religiously perplexed people” can come to grips in meaningful and healthy ways with the implications of being born into a culture which has been so decisively shaped and permeated by Christianity. Importantly, despite this very close relationship with Christianity, this community has never been desirous of producing Christians per se (even ultra-liberal Christian heretics like Woelfel and, perhaps, me) but, instead, genuinely inquiring religious humanists, the very kind of free-spirits and archeologists of morning that my own work has long concentrated upon. 

It is clear that what is going on here is “humanist” in its aims because, to quote some more words of Woelfel, we have long dedicated ourselves to “the growth of humane and scientific knowledge and its application to the rational solution of human problems, the alleviation of human oppression and suffering, the enlargement of individual human rights and freedoms, the widening of educational, social, cultural and economic opportunities — in general, to the enhancement of human life.”

We are a “humanist” community because we try to base our lives and our decisions upon the best knowledge we have of humankind and the world “especially through the sciences, and to seek thoughtful, reasoned solutions to human problems.” We are a “humanist” community because we also look to human criteria in our thinking and living, because we believe “that this is all we have to go on in any solid and public way” (pp. 19-20).
   
But we are also a “religious” community because doctrinally atheistic or reductionistic humanisms always feel to us like “truncated humanisms.” Woelfel reminds us that such truncated humanisms do not seem to us to be

. . . fully humanistic because they are not open to all that man and his encompassing universe possibly are. They are not sufficiently sensitive either to the range of and depth of the human spirit or to the limitations of our situation or knowledge. They tend arbitrarily to draw boundaries around human experience and the world and presumptuously to declare that the matter is closed, the reality completely described and circumscribed (p.21).

As Woelfel notes, this kind of approach simply reveals an “insensitivity to data, to ‘the facts,’ and [an] overconfident reasoning — both of which are aberrations of the humanist approach to knowledge” (p. 21).

In other words, most of us here are likely to be happy to be called “religious humanists” because, like Woelfel, we are people who have found the extremes of either a “religious certitude” or “a purely secular humanism — unacceptable” (p. 14).

Consequently, for Woelfel and, indeed, for me:

A truly whole and adequate humanism is one which, precisely in its absorbing preoccupation with [hu]man[ity], is sensitively open to the possibility that man himself may be more than we think at any given time — that he may, for example, be a creature involved with dimensions of reality of which our knowledge either is ignorant or has only scratched the surface (p. 22).

After my eighteen years as the minister here, a ministry which draws heavily, and rests gratefully, upon the twenty-four years of Frank’s ministry, as well as those of the four previous ministers and one significant lay leader in the person of the founder of this community, Professor F. J. M Stratton (Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge from 1928 to 1947), what Woelfel is describing seems to me to be in general terms pretty much what this community has been offering people in Cambridge for the last one-hundred and four years, namely, an “ecstatic” or “self-transcending” humanism that takes the Christian tradition seriously but without ever allowing itself to be restricted or oppressed in any way by its previous forms, metaphysical beliefs and dogmatic conclusions.

So, to conclude my remarks this morning, let me very briefly return to the reading you heard earlier in which Woelfel outlines this ecstatic humanism (pp. 23-25).

It’s important to be clear that he is using the word “ecstatic” in its straightforward etymological sense of “transcending” or “going beyond.” He uses the word because it’s a position which is simply seeking “to be sensitively open-minded about the possibility of dimensions of experience and reality beyond our present knowing” and of remaining “constantly aware of the limitations of the human situation and human knowledge.”

In a way this is, as many of you will be aware, a restatement of the poet John Keats’ important and influential idea of “negative capability” that, at times, we have no choice but to live “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”.

Both Keats and Woelfel in their different ways and times want to convey to us the idea that, although humanity’s potential is clearly, in huge part, importantly defined by the scientific knowledge it possesses, humanity is defined as much by what it does not possess. This is because to be fully human we have no choice, as Woelfel realises, but to find ways to behold with wonder and awe “the mysteries surrounding our existence” — mysteries which include, of course, “religious experience, love, art and beauty, the devoted search for truth”.

Of course, as “skeptics with naturally religious minds” and “open-minded ‘reverent’ humanists”, we’ll remain at least as critical and inquiring of our religious responses to the mysteries surrounding our existence as we are about our current scientific understanding, but my point today is that in a place like this we are affirming that a truly whole and adequate humanism requires both aspects to be in play in our lives and I continue to recommend it to you.

Wadlow Wind Farm from Mutlow Hill

Yesterday I went off on my bicycle to Fulbourn Fen in order to saunter quietly along one of my favourite paths which runs along the top of Fleam Dyke to Mutlow Hill. It's one of the best places I know in which to enter into a philosophical reverie, a process that was no better described than by Henry Bugbee in his "The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form". Here's the pertinent passage:

During my years of graduate study before the war I studied philosophy in the classroom and at a desk, but my philosophy took shape mainly on foot. It was truly peripatetic, engendered not merely while walking, but through walking that was essentially a meditation of the place. And the balance in which I weighed ideas I was studying was always that established in the experience of walking in the place. I weighed everything by the measure of the silent presence of things, clarified by racing clouds, clarified by the cry of hawks, waters of manifold voice, and consolidated in the act of taking steps, each step a meditation steeped in reality (The Inward Morning, p. 139).

In a fine companion volume to this book, "Wilderness and the Heart - Henry Bugbee's Philosophy of Place, Presence and Memory" the philosopher Daniel W. Conway notes that this passage reveals that:

Walking is not merely a calisthenic propaedeutic to the heroic labors of philosophizing. Rather, walking functions as the engine of immersion, which enables him to take the phenomenological measure of the wild he temporarily inhabits (Wilderness and the Heart, p. 6).

Well, yesterday, was a perfect example of this process, especially since at times, it became very wild and windy.

The five barred gate and beech tree at the end of Fleam Dyke hard by Mutlow Hill

The north western approach to Mutlow Hill from the end of Fleam Dyke

The north western approach to Mutlow Hill from the end of Fleam Dyke

The magnificent beech tree on the edge of Mutlow Hill (to the left)

The sun comes out for a moment lighting up the end of Fleam Dyke.

Sunset over Fulborn Fen

Sunset and its reflections in puddles near Fulbourn Fen

Another photo of Wadlow Wind Farm from Fleam Dyke

The Advent Star now alight in the manse

READINGS: Matthew 3:1-3

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a letter written to his fiancée from his prison cell in Tegel Prison on December 13th 1943:

Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and disrespectful hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them. Whoever does not know the austere blessedness of waiting — that is of hopefully doing without — will never experience the full blessedness of fulfilment.

From The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Reflection in Journal Form (University of Georgia Press, 1958 [new ed. 1999], pp. 221-222) by Henry Bugbee

[I]n all our doing there seems to be this aspect of learning to make answer and of groping for articulation which may thread us on a central strand of meaning capable of bearing the weight of all the disparate moments of our lives. But we are more or less locked in ourselves and at a loss how to make answer with our lives, to sing a true song. Frenetic questioning is of no avail, restless questing in itself aside from the point; these still suppose a case, however necessary they may be to the discovery of their irrelevance. It is in and out of silence, a deep stillness, that the full honesty of the true human spirit is born — and born to sing in word and deed that demand their own increase. This, this song that each of us must find his own voice to sing, and this alone, can incarnate for him explanation of his life. Its active testimony is the consolidation of belief. True response, then, is from silence, the still center of the human soul, and the corollary to this is patience. For the readiness is all. But patience is not postponement, not falling away from on-goingness; it is the readying to step clean forth (ecstasis), and there ever comes a time when the question sinks home: *when, if not now?* This seems to be what Zen is driving at when it demands, say a word, quick! This present moment.
          Is it not more accurate to say that we participate in creation than that we create? Is not creation as it touches us in what we do an interlocking of the resources with which we act, an interlocking of them with that which firms them and claims them as a province assimilated to incarnation?


Over the past few weeks I’ve offered you some interconnected thoughts on why, where- and whenever it turns up, I think we should consider finally letting go of the influential idea that we already know (in fixed and final terms) the ends towards which we believe we are, somehow, inevitably moving.

So, in the run up to Halloween I suggested we should think about letting go of our ideas about all utopian, capital “F” futures in favour of more modest and achievable lowercase “f” futures. Following the example of the contemporary Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi, to do this is gratefully to accept the world’s natural and innate ‘futurability’ which alway allows there to be possible, alternative futures (good and bad, preferable and undesirable) to the ones currently being offered to us by our dominant theologians, philosophers, politicians and economists under the mantra of TINA coined by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “There Is No Alternative.” However, true human freedom from eternal bondage and oppression is found in the world’s natural and innate futurability and, as the Greek economist and writer Yanis Varoufakis has put it, this means we can remind people of the often obscured truth of TATIANA, “That, astonishingly, there is an alternative.”

Then, in our Remembrance Sunday service, I suggested something similar in connection with peace, namely, that we should think about letting go of all ideas about utopian capital “P” Peace in favour of a more modest and achievable lower case “p” peace. Quoting the poem “Making Peace” by the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov I noted that, lowercase “p” “. . . peace, like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words [and actions] of its making.”

In other words I have been saying that any real, peaceful future (lowercase “p” and “f”) is only to be found inscribed as possible in the world as we find it now and in the decisions we take now — the world is not ahead of us. As you may remember, “Bifo” Berardi also reminds us that the task of creating such a peaceful future always begins with the need patiently to observe “the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows, and seek[ing] for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material.” Only following such a period of patient waiting can we hope to begin to  “extract fragments from the magma then try to combine them, in an attempt to reverse entropy: intelligent life is this process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.”

Today, on the first Sunday of the season of Advent (or should advent this be spelt with a lowercase “a” advent?) — the season of patient waiting and preparation for christmas — I want to do something similar in connection with capital “C” Christmas and argue for the need to re-learn the ancient art of patient observation of “the magma” in order to create and celebrate from out of the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows an alternative, lower case “c” christmas which, just like a poem, is not there ahead of itself, that can’t be imagined before it is made, that can’t be known except in the words and actions of its making.

We need to do this because there are many problems with capital “C” Christmas and the biggest one for me is that we nearly always come at it as if we already know what (in fixed and final terms) it is towards which we believe we are, somehow, inevitably moving. You see the capital “C” Christmas is another expression of the problematic capital “F” Future which I think we need to let go.

So before, before we go on we should ask what, for us today, is a capital “C” Christmas?. Well, since it is such a complex hodgepodge of medieval Christian theology, Victorian moral family sentimentality and rampant, neoliberal consumerism, it turns out to be a fiendishly complicated thing haunted by spectres of both capital “C” Christmas past and capital “C” Christmas future. Here are just three of the most obvious layers.

Capital “C” Christmas is haunted by the ghosts of our belief that once-upon-a-time, and one day in some hoped-for future age, there was and will be born an incarnation of a supernatural, transcendental God among us or ‘Emmanuel’, the very Messiah, the chosen one of God — a figure who has and/or will save us from our foolish and sinful selves. The Christian Church has, remember, long told us that, as far as it is concerned, to the solution that is Christ (the Messiah) there is no alternative — TINA.

Capital “C” Christmas is also haunted by the ghosts of our belief that once-upon-a-time, and one day in some hoped-for future age, there was and will be the absolutely perfect capital “P” Peaceful gathering of family and close friends in a house warmed by log fires, decked with holly and ivy, graced with a beautiful tree and filled to overflowing with festive food, wine and song. To this one dimensional image of in what must consist the perfect Christmas gathering our culture insists there is no alternative — TINA

Capital “C” Christmas is also haunted by the ghosts of our belief that once-upon-a-time, and one day in some hoped-for future age, there was and will be found the perfect ultimate gift both to be given and received. To this seasonal call to buy, buy, buy our culture also insists there is no alternative — TINA.

But the truth is, year after year (now totalling 2018) the supernatural messiah never comes, the perfect gathering of family and friends never quite occurs — fraught as it always is with hidden or explicit tensions and disappointments of one sort or another including, of course, death and illness — and, lastly it is also negatively affected by the failed attempt to find the perfect, ultimate gift which often puts a further strain on one’s already stretched finances and, even then, the gift eventually given doesn’t quite come up to the mark and the gift received is not quite that for which one had hoped.

Because we are told there is no alternative (TINA), such a capital “C” Christmas, when believed in and doggedly aimed for, always turns out to be an illusion and leads only to either vague or strong disappointments. But, fortunately, we know we live in a world ruled not by TINA, but by TATIANA that reminds us, astonishingly, there is an alternative, namely a lower case “c” christmas. But what would that kind of christmas be like?

Well, to repeat, it seems to me to be something like a poem, it’s a christmas not there ahead of itself, one that can’t be imagined before it is made and which can’t be known except in the words and actions of its making. So we can’t say what it will be like but we can point to some processes that would allow it to come into being.

It is this thought which brings me back to advent because it is only through a process of patient waiting and observation studying “the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows” that we can go on properly to “seek for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material” — one such possibility that can emerge into modest existence (albeit for just a moment in this and that local community) is, I think, an alternative lowercase “c” christmas.

The first thing patiently to look at and see clearly in the chaotic material of life is that the Advent story as it is recounted in the texts of Matthew and Luke is already deeply problematic because it was written by authors who already believed they knew the capital “C” Christmas towards which all the characters referenced in the story were heading. It is, of course, towards the capital “C” Christ of capital “C” Christmas — the metaphysical saviour from another world who comes with a message to which there is no alternative (TINA). This, of course, only serves to occlude the many other modest, beautiful and creative alternative human possibilities for “salvation” are always already in “the magma” that is “the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, [and] of flows”.

However, notwithstanding the fact that we know the Advent and Christmas story as a whole to be a creative fiction and not an historical truth, let’s imaginatively put ourselves in the shoes of John, Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth, Zechariah, the Magi and the shepherds as if they were real people. The point is, surely, that they didn’t have a clue about to what and where they were heading. It’s not that something was standing in their way obscuring their view of the destination it’s simply that the world is never there ahead of itself — in this sense there never was a capital “F” future for them to see, despite what the Gospel writers claim. 

The characters in the story were, just as “Bifo” Berardi noted, people like us who must patiently observe “the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows” from out of which they were able to “seek for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material.” Following this they, and we, can only ever begin by “extract[ing] fragments from the magma” and then trying “to combine them, in an attempt to reverse entropy.” The genuinely first, lowercase “c” christmas story emerged from “the magma” — it was not and never could have been ahead of itself. It think we really should see this as a reminder that there never is a capital “C” Christmas ahead of us and that we must always slowly, carefully and patiently be making an alternative lowercase “c” christmas, locally evoking it into existence, now here, now there, and always already for the first time.

But something important stands firmly in the way of this creative process regularly occurring in our contemporary culture. It is, quite simply the loss of the ability to wait patiently. This is because, without this skill, there cannot be the necessary, careful, quiet and even silent observation of life’s chaotic material which are the only available materials out of which we can make a new lowercase “f” future, a new lowercase “p” peace and a new lowercase “c” christmas relevant for our own age.

As you heard earlier, the imprisoned German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, expressed this loss of the ability to wait patiently succinctly and startlingly when he frankly acknowledged that “Waiting is an art that our impatient age has forgotten.” What was painfully true in 1943 seems to me to be catastrophically true today.

But, as the American philosopher Henry Bugbee noted, “It is in and out of silence, a deep stillness, that the full honesty of the true human spirit is born — and born to sing in word and deed that demand their own increase.”

With these words we begin to arrive at a sense of in what I think consists the kind of birth (nativity) that can occur in a lowercase “c” christmas. It’s a moment when we and those around us suddenly find our own voices to sing, and it is in this kind of ever newly born choir/community that we find we are incarnating “an explanation of life” which is a thread “of meaning capable of bearing the weight of all the disparate moments of our lives.”  It’s in such a living unfolding community, constantly and consciously being born out of “the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows” that we find a sense of what is meant by the words which begin all our morning services: “Divinity is present everywhere, the whole world is filled with God” and that, astonishingly, there is always an alternative — TATIANA. This ever-unfolding and emerging community will be for us an “active testimony” and “the consolidation of [our] belief” but it is vital to see that all this can only follow on from a patiently engaged in silence in which “readiness is all.”

“But”, as Bugbee insists we remember, “patience is not postponement, not falling away from on-goingness; it is the readying to step clean forth (ecstasis), and there ever comes a time when the question sinks home: when, if not now? This seems to be what Zen is driving at when it demands, say a word, quick! This present moment.”

And so we find ourselves back at this present moment on the first Sunday of Advent.

The lowercase “c” christmas I am recommending we try to evoke into existence and then celebrate here — the only christmas that can to my mind ever be truly achieved and which will never disappoint — is to be found right here, right now in the quality of our patient, careful, quiet, and even silent, observation of life’s chaotic material which, to repeat, are the only available materials out of which we can make a new lowercase alternative “f” future, a new alternative lowercase “p” peace and a new alternative lowercase “c” christmas.

So, be still, for “patience is not postponement, not falling away from on-goingness; it is the readying to step clean forth (ecstasis), and there ever comes a time when the question sinks home: when, if not now?

Salt’s Hole, Holkham Whilst I was staying in Wells-next-the-Sea last week with Susanna I took a moment on a rainy day to drop into Crabpot Books on Staithe Street. To my surprise and delight I found the massive (and I mean massive) two volume 1962 Dover Edition of Henry David Thoreau’s Journals . I’ve never seen it for sale for under £150 but there it was before me for the astonishing and affordable price of £31.50! Naturally, I bought it, but then had the almost Herculean task of lugging it back on the bus and the train in addition to our luggage. Still, I’m glad I persevered, for as careful general readers of Thoreau will know (from the more readily available selections from his Journals ) they are full of him at his most ung...

Mr Paxton visits Froston (i.e. Happisburgh) Church As a teenager growing up in the 1970s every Christmas I would await a couple of TV reruns on the BBC with great anticipation. One would be a film by Jaques Tati; the other would be a ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’, two of which very quickly became favourites, ‘Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ (directed by Jonathan Miller in 1968) and ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (directed by Lawrence Gordon Clark in 1972). Both of these TV productions of stories by M. R. James’ were filmed in various parts of Suffolk and Norfolk including Wells-next-the-Sea where throughout my life I have spent many a happy holiday hour with my parents, grandparents and, in the last twenty years in November arou...

READINGS:

Peter O'Toole as Mr Chips (1969)

Jesus said: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Matthew 5:9).


I hasten to add that I am not so naïve as to think that the demise of the transcendent God within my own interpreted experience entails the universalized conclusion that he does not exist. I have become increasingly impressed by the inescapably contextual character of all our “ultimate concerns.” I can appreciate the fact that all sorts of people deal with existence in terms of faith in the sovereign God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. On questions of ultimate meaning, none of us knows for sure who is closer to the mark. But in my own ongoing struggle to make sense of the Christian context of life- and world-interpretation, I find basic elements of that context which I simply cannot render coherent any longer, and I earnestly wonder how other persons manage to.


As some of you will know, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” is a novella written by the English writer James Hilton published in October 1934 which tells the story of a much-loved school teacher, Mr Chipping, and his long career at Brookfield School, a fictional minor British boys’ public boarding school located in the fictional village of Brookfield, in the Fenlands. It appears that the model for this school was The Leys School here in Cambridge where Hilton was a pupil between 1915–18. The novella depicts the massive social changes that Mr Chips (as the schoolboys call him) experiences beginning with his arrival at Brookfield in the September of 1870, aged of 22 and running through the First World War and on to his death in November 1933, aged of 85, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power. At the beginning of his career Mr Chips is somewhat conventional in his beliefs and he exercises firm discipline in the classroom. However, after meeting and marrying Katherine, a young woman whom he met whilst on holiday in the Lake District, his views begin to broaden, and his classroom manner becomes less severe. Despite Chips' rather mediocre academic credentials and his view that his own subjects, Greek and Latin, are dead languages, we discover him to be an effective teacher who becomes highly regarded both by the students and the school’s governors.


1917, 1918. Chips lived through it all. He sat in the headmaster’s study every morning, handling problems, dealing with plaints and requests. Out of vast experience had emerged a kindly, gentle confidence in himself. To keep a sense of proportion, that was the main thing. So much of the world was losing it; as well keep it where it had, or ought to have, a congenial home.
    On Sundays in Chapel it was he who now read out the tragic list, and sometimes it was seen and heard that he was in tears over it. Well, why not, the School said; he was an old man; they might have despised anyone else for the weakness.
    One day he got a letter from Switzerland, from friends there; it was heavily censored, but conveyed some news. On the following Sunday, after the names and biographies of old boys, he paused a moment and then added:—
    “Those few of you who were here before the War will remember Max Staefel, the German master. He was in Germany, visiting his home, when war broke out. He was popular while he was here, and made many friends. Those who knew him will be sorry to hear that he was killed last week, on the Western Front.”
    He was a little pale when he sat down afterward, aware that he had done something unusual. He had consulted nobody about it, anyhow; no one else could be blamed. Later, outside the Chapel, he heard an argument:—
    “On the Western Front, Chips said. Does that mean he was fighting for the Germans?”
    “I suppose it does.”
    “Seems funny, then, to read his name out with all the others. After all, he was an ENEMY.”
    “Oh, just one of Chips’s ideas, I expect. The old boy still has ‘em.”
    Chips, in his room again, was not displeased by the comment. Yes, he still had ‘em—those ideas of dignity and generosity that were becoming increasingly rare in a frantic world.

This is one of those addresses which starts with a frank admission of a particular kind of darkness and despair. I do this because I think we always need to be meeting together in the spirit of honest truth seeking and, if there is darkness and despair about, then it must be frankly acknowledged — and even when, at times, there is no obvious answer to them. But, today, how this address begins is not how it ends for I do feel able to bring before you some reasonable and educated hope that can resist, albeit in a modest practical way, the darkness and despair with which I’m going to begin. Whether the hope I bring is enough for you personally is, of course, another matter but, be assured, some kind of hope will be offered by the end.

Last week, Remembrance Sunday, I celebrated with you the fact that in the evening there was going to be an ecumenical service of peace and reconciliation at the local German Lutheran Church in connection with the one-hundredth anniversary of the ending of the First World War. That anniversary, and the fact that we still seem to be heading towards what is to me and I know for many of you a distressing and wholly unnecessary break with Europe, meant I felt it was vital to cancel our own evening service and join this unashamedly European focused act of memorial. I was pleased to be joined by seven other members of our congregation in a gathering of more than sixty people from half a dozen churches across the city. I’m truly glad I went but I have to confess that, although the act of European solidarity did energise and uplift me, the conventional theological and religious content of the service did not. So, what was going on?

Well, as I sat there, I realised it was yet another one of the increasing number of ecumenical religious events I attend where, despite my deep connection with, and (I hope genuine) loyalty to a practical and ethical way of living which centres on the example of the human Jesus (especially for me as mediated through Tolstoy’s “Gospel in Brief”), I was forcibly reminded that I simply no longer hold any Christian metaphysical beliefs and, as a Unitarian (of sorts) certainly not belief in the Trinitarian version of monotheism or, indeed, any version of monotheism. Consequently, the central hope being offered up in the ecumenical service — namely, that the supernatural, transcendent God of Love in the form of the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost would finally be able to save and restore us all following the kind of horrific violence seen in all wars — left me unmoved.

At the time I was powerfully reminded of a short piece written by the American philosopher and theologian James W. Woelfel in 1976 which had a great influence on my own thinking when I first came across it back some fifteen years ago. Woelfel notes that what had caused him to lose his own belief in the God of monotheism was that “there is simply too much suffering” in the world. Here is what he says:

Dr. Bernard Rieux, the narrator of Albert Camus’s challenging statement on suffering called The Plague, sums it up with appropriate intensity and particularity. This world, he says, is “a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” It is a world in which, from many causes, children are too easily stunted, warped, denied, deprived, abused, malnourished, diseased, shot, gassed, bombed and generally robbed of their potentiality. What happens to children is a particularly graphic indicator of the depth of our human bondage to forces within ourselves and our planet.

Woelfel additionally tells us that his own religious despair was “not over finite existence as such, but over the crushingly heavy burden” of what seemed to him to be “nonsensical bondage”. It was “the sheer excess — the disproportion of our human bondages and the absurdity resulting from this excess, the grotesque pointlessness of so much of it” that undermined his “sense of ultimate meaning as transcendent willing purpose.”

I realise this sort of admission can be a profoundly disturbing thing to hear but my strong sense is that, at least at times, many of us here feel the same — I certainly do — and it is clearly something that many, many other secular people also feel in our wider society.  Anyway, last weekend, as we remembered in particular the conflict of 1914-1918, could there be found any better words to describe it than “grotesque pointlessness”?

As I sat in my chair looking around at the sixty other people present I found I could only earnestly wonder, as Woelfel earnestly wondered, how other persons were able to render coherent the underlying supernatural, transcendent theological elements found in the hymns, prayers and collects being used. 

Please don’t mishear me at this point. I’m not laughing at or pouring scorn upon those present who can render these theological elements coherent because, as far as I can meaningfully measure these things, most of the people there I have found to be good and often remarkable, they are people whom I both like and greatly admire. Also, as Woelfel says, I, too, have become increasingly impressed by the inescapably contextual character of all our “ultimate concerns” and I am perfectly able to appreciate the fact that all sorts of people deal with existence in terms of faith in the sovereign God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. So there really is no laughter or scorn here, but only a genuinely earnest wondering about how on earth others can continue to render this God coherent?

This wondering brings me back to my earlier point about my own continuing deep connection with, and loyalty to, a practical way of living that centres on the example of the human Jesus. This is because, these days, it is only through the human that I can find any kind of theological and religious hope which I am still able to render coherent and plausible.

Like Woelfel, and I know many of you, I also find myself “somewhat drawn to certain aspects of what I understand of the world orientation of Gautama the Buddha: the difficult art of learning to accept the quite specific limitations and possibilities of my life without making myself unhappy struggling to affirm beliefs I cannot honestly affirm.” But upbringing, temperament and, let’s not forget, my public rôle as a minister in a church deeply rooted in the liberal Christian tradition, means that, again like Woelfel:

I am still more comfortable dealing with my life-situation in the more familiar terms of the Christian tradition. And at this stage in my pilgrimage, that has come to mean the myth of the God who in Christ dies to his deity and lives only as grand and miserable human beings within this beautiful ruined Eden called earth.

[This is a version of what is known as “Death of God theology” — a broad theological movement to which I myself belong.]

This means that, both for Woelfel and for me, the only possible revelation of “God” is one found in “the faces of us unlikely human beings, [and] his only worship our compassionate devotion to one another and to the needs of our earth.” In short, this “is the only version of the Christian myth that I can find personally tolerable and meaningful.”

Woelfel asks — as perhaps some of you might ask, and certainly many believing Christians will ask — whether any of this is at all biblical? And Woelfel and I answer, of course it isn’t. But, as Woelfel wisely reminds us, “a great deal that passes historically and at the present time for Christian faith and theology is not biblical but an imaginative development or a logical implication out of the biblical sources.”

So now, with this particular a/theistic, and certainly non-supernatural and non-biblical version of Christian myth held firmly in mind — i.e. that the only revelation of God is found in the faces of us unlikely human beings and his only worship our compassionate devotion to one another and to the needs of our earth — I can now turn to the only moment in last week’s ecumenical service that, in theological and religious terms, truly uplifted me and which gave me what felt like genuine hope. It occurred during a fine reading of the passage from “Goodbye Mr Chips” which you heard earlier.

What struck me, really struck me when I heard the passage — almost to the point of tears — was that, in comparison to Mr Chips modest but beautiful act in the school chapel in remembering “THE ENEMY” as well as the English schoolboys who had died, all the supernatural metaphysics on display in the service were, and are, to me as nothing because in that moment in the character of Mr Chips I truly felt I was beholding the only kind of face of the only kind of “God” in which I can now believe. Not, of course, the grand supernatural, metaphysical God of monotheism who was constantly being evoked throughout the service in the various prayers, hymns and collects but, to repeat Woelfel’s words I quoted earlier, a wholly immanent God seen in “the faces of us unlikely human beings” and that the only worship I was then, and am able to now take part in is in “our compassionate devotion to one another and to the needs of our earth”.

In our own frantic, secular age with its threats from various intolerant nationalisms and climate change, do we really need any other incarnation of “God” than that found in the countless numbers of ordinary men and women who, like Mr Chips, never stop keeping before us ideas of dignity and generosity?

So I give thanks to “Mr Chips” who during that evening last week was for me a saving vision and incarnation of a wholly immanent and natural “God”

READINGS:

Making Peace by Denise Levertov

A voice from the dark called out,
             ‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
                                   But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
                                       A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
                                              A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.

(From Breathing the Water, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1987)

Remembrance Sunday by Malcolm Guite
November pierces with its bleak remembrance
Of all the bitterness and waste of war;
Our silence tries but fails to make a semblance
Of that lost peace they thought worth fighting for,
Our silence seethes instead with wraiths and whispers
And all the restless rumour of new wars,
For shells are falling all around our vespers,
No moment is unscarred, there is no pause.
In every instant bloodied innocence
Falls to the weary earth, and whilst we stand
Quiescence ends again in acquiescence,
And Abel’s blood still cries from every land.
One silence only might redeem that blood;
Only the silence of a dying God.

(From Sounding the Seasons, seventy sonnets for the Christian year, Canterbury Press 2012)

—o0o—

For the Unknown Enemy by William Stafford

This monument is for the unknown
good in our enemies. Like a picture
their life began to appear: they
gathered at home in the evening
and sang. Above their fields they saw
a new sky. A holiday came
and they carried the baby to the park
for a party. Sunlight surrounded them.

Here we glimpse what our minds long turned
away from. The great mutual
blindness darkened that sunlight in the park,
and the sky that was new, and the holidays.
This monument says that one afternoon
we stood here letting a part of our minds
escape. They came back, but different.
Enemy: one day we glimpsed your life.

This monument is for you.

Autumn leaves outside the church on Emmauel Road this morning

Today we mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the ending of the First World War which was supposed by some to be “the war to end all wars.” As we know, it was not and it appears that even during the First World War itself it was a phrase which was far from being believed. Indeed, the Prime Minister of the time, David Lloyd George, is even reputed to have said, “This war, like the next war, is a war to end war.”

Given the continuing failure of war as a way to end to wars I imagine that there will be no one here who thinks that wars will ever succeed in ending war and that, therefore, peace must, in some fashion, be the answer. But, in affirming this very general notion, we must be careful not to be idealistic or naïve about peace because it is clear that, so far, neither has peace succeeded in ending war.

The truth of this was powerfully illustrated in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference and its highly punitive Treaty of Versailles which simply sowed the seeds for the rise of the Nazis and the beginning of the next war to end war, the Second World War. As Archibald Wavell, a future field-marshal and viceroy of India, said on seeing what was going on in Paris, “After the ‘war to end war’, they seem to have been in Paris making the ‘Peace to end Peace’.”

This thought has haunted me for a long, long time now because although it is completely clear to me that war will never end war Wavell’s words have often made me wonder about the rôle our understanding of in what consists peace has on the seemingly endless continuation of war.

Put plainly, one hundred years on from the ending of the First World War, it seems to me that there is as much of a problem with our conceptions of peace as with our tendencies to war.

To help tease this thought out a bit it’s perhaps helpful to do something similar to that which I did a couple of weeks ago in connection with our ideas about “The Future” and make today a distinction between “Peace” with a capital “P” and scare quotes and peace with a lowercase “p” and no scare quotes.

By “Peace” with a capital “P” and scare quotes I’m referring to any kind of idealised utopian and absolute understanding of “Peace”, a “Peace” all the qualities and parameters of which you somehow know about long before you get there. For a culture such as our own, inexorably shaped by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, most capital “P” Peaces can be traced back to Isaiah 11 in which the author presents us with a vision of what has become known as the “Peaceable Kingdom” (6-9):

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
   the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
   and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
   their young shall lie down together;
   and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
   and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
   on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
   as the waters cover the sea.


This passage inspired the famous Quaker artist, Edward Hicks (1780–1849), to paint sixty, quite extraordinary versions of this utopian Peaceable Kingdom, one of which I have reproduced in your order of service (see picture on right). The problem is, of course, that such an utopian Peaceable Kingdom simply does not, nor can exist because, being the kind of beings they are in the kind of world this is, humans, wolves, leopards and lions simply do not live peaceably with lambs, kids and calves and it’s always insane ever to let your child play near the hole of an asp or an adder’s den. We may not like it, but hurt and destruction of all kinds — moral and natural, deliberate and accidental — is woven through the very fabric of our world. But, despite this, visions of capital “P” total “Peace” similar to those imagined by Isaiah continue to hold captive huge swaths of humanity who feel strongly that nature should, somehow, not be as it is and that, therefore, nature must either be changed or, given that it doesn’t exist on earth, their utopian vision must exist in some other, supernatural realm such as the kingdom of God. 

But, as someone who thinks we should always be following some strong precautionary principles and proceeding with the greatest of caution when considering changing any aspect of nature’s present way of naturing and who also can no longer believe in the existence of supernatural deities and their perfect, utopian other-worldly kingdoms, I take it as given that all such capital “P” “Peaces” are an illusion and that believing in them and trying to make them real only serves to take our eyes off the possibility of creating much more modest but, ultimately, genuine and realistic examples of lowercase “p” peace in this our natural world.

For me no one has better or more succinctly indicated what is required to create such a modest lower case “p” peace than the Anglo-American poet Denise Levertov (1923–1997).

She is completely clear that, just like a poem, “peace . . . is not there ahead of itself”  — it is not some pre-existent, ideal capital “P” thing towards which we hope, even believe, we are moving — rather it is always and only a possibility embedded the present that needs constantly to be evoked and gently brought into being like a poem.

To help you grasp what I am trying to say a little bit more firmly let me say the same thing about friendship. I am absolutely convinced that capital “F” friendship does not exist; but what assuredly does exist are acts of lowercase “f” friendship. Friendship needs to be evoked and gently evoked into being again and again otherwise it is non-existent. As with friendship, so with peace — they really only **are** where there are found living and ongoing acts of friendship and peace.

We may desire that the poets — and also philosophers, theologians, politicians and diplomats, too — should give us finished visions or “imaginations” of some future, capital P “Peace” to oust “to oust the intense, familiar imagination of disaster” but this has never truly been possible because, as Levertov knows, peace “can’t be imagined before it is made, can’t be known except in the words of its making [with its] grammar of justice [and] syntax of mutual aid.”

The most we can hope for, beforehand, is that we can begin to learn to evoke and gently nurture “A feeling towards [peace], dimly sensing a rhythm”, and it is only when we have begun deeply to internalise this movement that that we can then hope to “begin to utter its metaphors, learning them as we speak.”

As I have said at other times in other contexts, it seems to me that before we even think about making new policies (including peace policies) we need new metaphors — not least of all because the old metaphors of capital “P” Peace have failed to bring real, ongoing, lower case “p” peace. We need a “re-story-ation” of peace.

Any meaningful “re-tory-ated” metaphors for such a peace must be very different from that employed by Isaiah and Hicks. They were imagining a finally finished, perfect state but Levertov imagines it as an ever unfolding sentence in which “A line of peace might appear / if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, / questioned our needs, allowed / long pauses . . .”.

If we could do this then she says, perhaps, just perhaps “A cadence of peace might balance its weight / on that different fulcrum”.

But what does Levertov mean when she says a “different fulcrum”? Different to what? Well, from where I stand, the “cadence of peace” I see and hear performed year after year in nearly all the official, big public, political remembrances is one which leads us, not from war to peace, but always from peace to war. This is because the official public, polical cadence (no matter how moving it can be) is designed subtly to reinforce the basic idea that, actually, wars do create peace and this, in turn, means that the putative peaces we create in public are still balanced on a fulcrum of war.

To illustrate the truth of this I need say nothing more than to note that as our world’s state officials have gathered together in various places this week solemnly to remember the ending of “the war to end all wars” the fulcrum upon which their power balances (the military/industrial complex) continues to allow people and companies knowingly and willingly to sell billions of pounds worth of missiles and bombs to countries like Saudi Arabia for use in places like the Yemen.

This fact alone — repeated every generation so far — surely helps us see more clearly that we need a cadence of peace which balances not on a fulcrum of war but on a fulcrum of peace and our old-school nation-state orientated businesses and politics will never be able to provide us with this.

According to Levertov the fulcrum of peace we both need and seek is “a presence, / an energy field more intense than war” and it is one which can only come into being amongst people who, for whatever reason, have become committed both to restructuring the sentence their lives are making and who are also prepared to allow long pauses  out of which can come (re-story-ative) new metaphors and poems.

Is not Levertov suggesting here that real, lowercase “p” peace, like any word in a sentence or poem is the one properly required only for this sentence and poem, not for the next, and that, like acts of friendship, for evermore and until the end of time we are daily called upon to be writing new poems of peace, letting the rhythm of peace enter into us and vibrate every atom of our body and soul?

The war to end all wars has never, nor will ever come except, perhaps, through a war that destroys the whole world. But the same seems true of all our capital “P” “Peaces” and that they, too, will never end war.

But were we able to live as poets we might still have a chance to bring into being a more modest, lowercase “p” peace, that can energise us and might just “pulse then, / stanza by stanza into the world, / [with] each act of living / one of its words, each word a vibration of light—facets / of the forming crystal.”

I realise that for some this might sound wildly impractical but consider this, what is more likey: that the world could ever come to look like the capital “P” Peaceable Kingdom as depicted by Isaiah and Edward Hicks or that the world could, word by word, stanza by stanza each act of living by act of living, could re-story-ate our world and bring about real, modest, but still powerful lowercase “p” peaces that are much, much more than merely the absence of war.

READINGS: A résumé of the film The Flight of the Phoenix (1965)

When I was perhaps ten or eleven I was utterly captivated by a film made in 1965 (the year I was born) called “The Flight of the Phoenix” which starred James Stewart as Frank Towns, the captain of a twin engined Fairchild C-82 cargo plane.

Whilst Towns and a dozen or so other men are flying across the Sahara desert en route to Benghazi in Libya they encounter a sudden sandstorm which shuts down the engines and forces them to crash-land in the desert and those who were not killed instantly or badly injured necessarily quickly turn their attention to the question of how to stay alive until rescue comes. Although they have a large quantity of dates on board they quickly work out that, at best, their water will last for only a couple of weeks. When help doesn’t immediately come three of them attempt to walk to an oasis. Days later, one of them returns alone to the crash site and very near to death. Despair threatens to set in. However, one among them, an aeronautical engineer called Dorfmann (played by Hardy Krüger), has the crazy idea that perhaps they can build another, smaller aircraft from out of the wreckage and fly themselves to safety in that. It may be a crazy idea but it helps them all begin to focus their remaining energy and hopes on something positive. However, as they proceed with the new plan, Towns and his navigator Moran (played by Richard Attenborough), discover that Dorfmann designs model aeroplanes and not, as they had initially assumed, full-sized aircraft. Although Dorfmann insights that the principles are exactly the same Towns and Moran are, perhaps understandably, horrified at the idea of flying an aircraft made by a man who, as they say, works with “toys”. However, without any other plan to follow Towns and Moran decide to press on without telling the others of their discovery. As you might imagine much of the film’s impact is to be found in its exploration of the wild ups and downs felt by the protagonists. All of that I leave aside for you to discover yourself and I’ll simply skip to the end of the film when the aircraft is finally finished. With an explicit nod to the ancient Greek legend, they christen the ramshackle ad hoc plane, “The Phoenix”. After a few more tense moments as they try to start the engine — they only have seven starter cartridges the first four of which fail — the plane does succeed in taking-off and the survivors are able to fly to a near-by oasis where they experience both the ecstasy that comes with having survived something so potentially catastrophic and also, for Towns and Dorfmann, the consummating joys of reconciliation.


PHOENIX (Gr. φοῖνιξ), a fabulous sacred bird of the Egyptians. The Greek word is also used for a date-palm, a musical instrument like a guitar, and the colour purple-red or crimson.

According to the story told to Herodotus (ii. 73), the bird came from Arabia every 500 years, bearing his father embalmed in a ball of myrrh, and buried him in the temple of the sun. Herodotus, who had never seen the phoenix himself, did not believe this story, but he tells us that the pictures of it represented a bird with golden and red plumage, closely resembling an eagle in size and shape.        
According to Pliny (Nat. hist. x. 2), there is only one phoenix at a time, and he, at the close of his long life, builds himself a nest with twigs of cassia and frankincense, on which he dies; from his corpse is generated a worm which grows into the young phoenix. Tacitus (Ann. vi. 28) says that the young bird lays his father on the altar in the city of the sun, or burns him there; but the most familiar form of the legend is that in the Physiologus, where the phoenix is described as an Indian bird which subsists on air for 506 years, after which, lading his wings with spices, he flies to Heliopolis, enters the temple there, and is burned to ashes on the altar. Next day the young phoenix is already feathered; on the third day his pinions are full grown, he salutes the priest and flies away.
    
The period at which the phoenix reappears is very variously stated, some authors giving as much as 1461 or even 7006 years, but 500 years is the period usually named; and Tacitus tells us that the bird was said to have appeared first under Sesostris (Senwosri), then under Amasis (Ahmosi) II., under Ptolemy III., and once again in A.D. 34, after an interval so short that the genuineness of the last phoenix was suspected. The phoenix that was shown at Rome in the year of the secular games (A.D. 47) was universally admitted to be an imposture.

The form and variations of these stories characterize them as popular tales rather than official theology; but they evidently must have had points of attachment in the mystic religion of Egypt, and indeed both Horapollon and Tacitus speak of the phoenix as a symbol of the sun.


As I mentioned in the readings, I first saw the film “The Flight of The Phoenix” over forty years ago but it is only in the last ten years of my ministry that I have come to interpret its basic story as a parable for something I think always needs consciously to be going on in any religious or philosophical tradition for it to be considered healthy and genuinely trustworthy.

Let me explain.

Although the fact that being a minister of religion with an official rôle in both a local and national church community might suggest otherwise, I’m not, in truth, someone who likes formally joining any kind of group — least of all religious or philosophical ones. They mostly give me the willies — urgh . . .

All in all this means I’ve always been very careful to look into the ins and outs, and the general historical shapes and trajectories, of any group I’ve been thinking about joining. I’m clear that I need to be able to see in them something that allows me to say with a clean heart and full pathos, “OK, I might not agree with everything that has, is or will be going on in this group but if, on balance, their general direction of travel and vibe seems to me to be something I can get loyally behind then I’ll take the risk of joining them for what I hope, and intend will be, the long term.”  

This is one of the reasons why, some five or six years ago, I introduced into the morning service “The Tradition”. It’s so you, too, can get a similar sense to me of this radical, free-thinking, liberal philosophical and religious tradition’s general direction and vibe over the four-hundred-and–fifty years of its existence.

As far as these things go I think it’s a genuinely remarkable and honourable tradition to be associated with and, despite it’s many significant historical and present faults (of which I realise I may at times be a representative example), I can’t imagine being involved — as a minister anyway — in any other kind of religious or philosophical community except, perhaps a generally Epicurean or Lucretian inspired one . . .

Anyway, this mention of “significant faults” is not something I’ve done merely as a piece of rhetorical self-deprecation designed to make the Unitarian tradition (and me for that matter) appear more humble and trustworthy than it actually is. Instead, I mention its less than perfect nature because it helps me point to something much more primordial and structural that is almost never mentioned nor noticed by most religious or philosophical traditions — including, alas, even our own.

Now, before I go on, be warned that in a moment I’m going to present you with a picture, the substance of which is in my opinion, ultimately illusory, but I need to present it to you because it can seem highly plausible and, consequently, it can and often does hold us problematically captive. It’s certainly held me captive at times. But, let me follow the advice of the philosopher J. L. Austin who once said, “There’s the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back” (Sense and Sensibilia, p. 2). Let me begin by saying something that, in a moment, I’ll be taking back.

When, in our culture at least, a person decides to seek out a religion and/or philosophy to follow I’ve noticed many (most?) people generally start out by looking for one which has an established stable theory about the ultimate beginning, end and ethical and physical underpinning of the world with which they agree and which can, simultaneously, also provide them with a gleaming, efficient flying “machine” (i.e. buildings, doctrines, practices, rituals and a hierarchy — pilots and cabin crew if you will) safely to take them on a single-leg, long-distance flight to that ultimate end — some capital “F” Future (see last week’s address), already known ultimate destination often called “The Kingdom of God”, the “Golden City on the Hill”, “Nirvana”, “Enlightenment” or whatever.

Now, in a messy, chaotic and confusing world seeking out this kind of thing is a perfectly understandable activity to engage in. It should come, therefore, as no surprise that, historically speaking, most religions and philosophies (at least those of the old metaphysical kind) have been in the business of assuring us that they do, in fact, provide us with just this kind of gleaming, efficient flying “machine” capable of taking us to the desired ultimate destination and we, in turn, have often proven only too willing to believe what they tell us is assuredly true.

But are religions and philosophies really like this?

Well, once upon a time I certainly thought they were and in my teens and early twenties when I did my first careful looking around and research into philosophy and religion I now realise I was most certainly looking for what I thought was the best gleaming, efficient flying “machine” which could take me
on the best single-leg, long-distance flight to the ultimate end. I read the travel and technical brochures available about various traditions and then chose to book a seat on the gleaming Anglican machine. Having taken my seat I very quickly realised it had what looked and felt like too many significant faults and that I had, in fact, boarded a terribly rusty and ramshackle aircraft which strongly resembled some old,
immediately post-Soviet era Aeroflot turbo-prop — i.e. it was the kind of aircraft which, the moment it begins to taxi to the runway, makes you want to get off, right now. I

Fortunately, in this instance, I was able to get off before I reached the end of the runway and found myself committed to becoming an Anglican priest.

Discovering this was terribly disappointing but, alas, my disappointment failed to stop me from continuing to seek out that gleaming, efficient flying “machine” and I next thought I had found it when I discovered the Unitarian tradition. I carefully checked it out via books in the library — this was all pre-internet remember — and also by making a few, low-key visits to the local church in Suffolk which eventually encouraged me to commit to boarding it for the long flight. Alas, it was only when I had been in the air for quite a while — and well on the way to becoming one of its ministers — that I discovered it too was a terribly rusty and ramshackle aircraft with significant faults and that neither was she going to complete the journey I thought I was on. After finishing my training I, like the passengers and crew of the Fairchild C-82 cargo in the film, suddenly found myself, figuratively speaking, on the desert floor still, thankfully, alive but now not sitting in a gleaming, efficient flying “machine”, but lying in the midst of its ashes and scattered wreckage.

Having recovered from the profound shock of this crash I began to realise, like Captain Towns, Moran and Dorfmann and the other passengers, were I to survive I needed to put behind me all ideas about making a grand, single-leg journey to some ultimate destination in a gleaming, efficient flying “machine” and immediately get to work on a much more mod
est but still absolutely vital task, namely, that of putting together in an ad hoc way all the available still-working resources around me in such a fashion that I could simply find a way to fly me and the members of the local congregation to the next oasis. Although the aircraft — the Phoenix — we, together, have been fashioning since 2000 from out of the ashes and wreckage is never going to be either obviously gleaming or super-efficient it could still be one which did the required, and beautiful life saving job of getting us all out of the desert and to a place where life we can, once again, live a supportable and genuinely happy and fulfilling religious life together.

Now, having told you this story, here’s where I begin to take much of it back.

This is because, as I have told it so far, the story relies upon the captivating picture that there did, in fact, once exist a real, gleaming, efficient flying “machine” capable of flying to some known ultimate destination. But over the eighteen years of my ministry, as I have got used to trying daily to make with you our own ad hoc philosophical and religious Phoenix from the wreckage/ashes of previous philosophies and religions simply so as to be able to get to the next oasis, I have begun to see more and more clearly that this is really what has always and only ever been being done every day by every religious tradition, church and person. The gleaming, efficient philosophical or theological “machine” never really existed and there never has been some known ultimate, already known destination towards which we are assuredly travelling.

At this point it’s worth consciously recalling the meaning of the latin tag “ad hoc” which I’ve just used — it simply means “for this”. Consequently, in English, it signifies a solution designed for a specific problem or task that is non-generalizable and is not intended always to be able to be adapted to other purposes.

In truth, is this not always the case with all philosophies and religions? Seen in this fashion philosophy and religion’s limited, modest task — though still absolutely vital — has always been simply to help us find in the current context, and using the currently available bits and pieces around us, appropriate, poetic and scientifically satisfactory and supportable ways to go on so that we may reach the next oasis where we hope to be able to rest up a bit, drink a few cold beers, have a good meal and begin to take stock once again before together building (with hopefully always new and honed insights) the next Phoenix in the effort to get through the next day?

As Robert Pogue Harrison (b. 1954) puts it (Gardens—An Essay on the Human Condition, University of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 94-95), we need to recall that our condition is “for the most part an affair of the everyday, not of the heroic, and our minimal ethical responsibility to our neighbour . . . consists not in showing him or her the way to redemption but in helping him or her to get through the day.“

Of course, there remain many religions and philosophies that will continue to tell you that they are offering you a flight on a shiny, efficient machine heading heroically towards assured redemption in some already known ultimate destination. But, in the light of my foregoing words, I’d caution you to treat this claim with the greatest skepticism.

As far as I can see, the only philosophies or religions that seem to be truly worth trusting and following are those where everyone involved is completely aware that they are, in fact, engaged in the incredibly modest, un-heroic but still satisfying and beautiful ad hoc task of making the next “Phoenix” to take as many people as they can to the next available oasis and, as best and joyously as possible, to get through next day.

Usually the Phoenix is understood as being, in the end, a purely mythical bird but, at least in my parable, I want to say that, in fact, it may be the only real bird available to any of us and that it is — when looked at aright — far more gleaming, beautiful and colourful than any of the apparently gleaming, efficient machines you’ll find advertised elsewhere in the religious and philosophical marketplace of ideas.

READINGS: Matthew 6:33-34

From Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (Verso Books, 2017, pp. 2-3)


In 1937 Henri Bergson published the article ‘Le possible et le réel’ (The Possible and the Real) in the Swedish magazine Nordisk Tidskrift. In this text, later included in the book La pensée et le mouvant, the French thinker answers the question: what is the meaning of the word ‘possibility’?

We call possible what is not impossible: obviously, this non-impossibility is the condition of its actualisation. But this possibility is not a degree of virtuality, is not ideal pre-existence . . . From this negative sense, we shift unconsciously to the positive sense of the word. In the first definition, possibility means absence of hindrance; but we are shifting now to the meaning: pre-existence in the form of an idea.

‘B is possible’ means that B is inscribed in A and nothing is preventing B from deploying from the present condition of A. Bergson speaks of pre-existence in the form of an idea, but I don’t want to use the word ‘idea’, preferring to say that a future state of being is possible when it is immanent or inscribed in the present constitution of the world. However, we should not forget that the present constitution of the world contains many different (conflicting) possibilities, not only one.
       Extracting and implementing one of the many immanent futurabilities: this is the shift from possible to real. Futurability is a layer of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality.
    Bergson writes:

Why is the Universe ordered? How can the rule impose itself on the irregularity, how can form impose itself on matter? . . . This problem vanishes as soon as we understand that the idea of disorder has sense in the sphere of human industry, in the sphere of fabrication, not in the field of creation. Disorder is simply an order that we do not seek.

We stare at the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows, and seek for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material. We extract fragments from the magma then try to combine them, in an attempt to reverse entropy: intelligent life is this process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.

You Reading This, Be Ready
William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?


Although it is in fact way more complicated and nuanced than this, Halloween, the night of 31 October on the eve of All Saints Day, was, once upon a time, a night when the ghosts and spirits of the dead were believed to be abroad in our world. By extension, especially in more modern times, it has become an evening upon which people enjoy scaring the wits out of each other through stories, plays and films.

However, although now and then I greatly enjoy hearing or watching a good ghost story — finding in them what M. R. James calls “a pleasing terror” — the possibility of being scared witless by an actual, rather than a fictional, literary or filmic demon, is something I feel is vanishingly unlikely. For me, and I imagine for most of you, these supernatural demons simply don’t exist.

Those of you who know me will know my interest in the ghost story is long-standing and very real but it is driven by purely historical and anthropological concerns. One can learn a great deal about what was going on in the social psyche of different periods and cultures by looking at the kinds of ghost, spirits and demons that were once believed to be abroad in their midst and so I unhesitatingly recommend Roger Clarke’s “A Natural History of Ghosts” and Susan Owens’ “The Ghost: A Cultural History” as introductions to this study. What we find is that every age is haunted by, and fearful of, some spectral something or other and our own age, as you will see, is no different. 

But our age, influenced powerfully by the natural sciences, is a significantly less metaphysical and superstitious one than its predecessors and so it should come as no surprise that we are, today, generally much more frightened by various, this-worldly phenomena and, thanks to many conversations with you and my other friends and colleagues, at the moment I know there are currently two which are quietly scaring us witless.

The first is the increasing feeling that liberal social democracies are beginning to feel very vulnerable and under threat from the various forms of national populism that are springing up at the moment. It is revealing to us that many illiberal “demons” are now clearly out of their jars and they seem unlikely to be going back into them any time soon. In short, we find we are haunted daily by the loss of the hope that liberal social democracies were inevitably moving us towards an ever more open, just, inclusive, democratic progressive and global, cosmopolitan society.

The second fear is caused by our increasing recognition that we are well and truly on the way towards a global, catastrophic environmental crisis and so we find ourselves haunted, not by actual ghosts and spirits of the past (as were our more metaphysically and superstitiously inclined forebears), but by the imaginary ghosts and spirits from a future we feel the world may well now never have.

All in all, in my book anyway, national populism and climate change are way more frightening phenomena than any Halloween tale told to me about putative supernatural beings.

To reiterate, what I’m suggesting here is that the particular kinds of ghosts and spirits which haunt us today are not of the traditional kind, i.e. the souls of those who have died in our past, but spectres of a more modern, even post-modern kind, namely, the souls of ghosts and spirits of imaginary people and possibilities which we feel will now never have the chance to come into being. We find, to our quiet horror, that we are now living in a world in which we can no longer, with anything like clean heart and full pathos, believe in the progress of humankind onward and upward forever and, consequently, we find ourselves haunted by this loss of “The Future” — spelt, please note, with capital letters and surrounded by scare quotes.

But what to do about this state of affairs?

Well, there might be many things one could do and today I’m only going to offer you one very general way to proceed but, before I do this, please be warned about three things. Firstly, it is a somewhat counterintuitive way to proceed and, on first hearing anyway, it might be something that will frighten you as witless as national populism and climate change; secondly, it’s a way to proceed that requires a person to adopt a really long-term view of history and; thirdly, it doesn’t provide any big, simple answers to what we will actually be doing in the future because it’s a way of proceeding simply designed to give us in the present a reasonable educated hope that positive, alternative ways forward are always-already potentially there to emerge and unfold.

So, the alternative positive way to go on can be summed up with one word “futurability”, and here’s the potentially scary bit because, in order to get to this “futurability” we need firstly consciously to rid ourselves of any residual belief in “The Future”. (I mean who wants to be told in the midst of all the aforementioned fears that there’s no “Future”! But those of us — like me — who grew up through the age of punk-rock were already primed to think this thought in 1977 when Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols sang to us the utterly startling and unforgetable lines, “No, future, no future, no future for you.”)

Now what do I mean by “The Future”? Well, “The Future” is a short-hand term that has long been used to evoke the widespread utopian idea which has lain at the heart of our platonic inspired Judaeo-Christian culture for over two-millennia, namely the thought that, despite the occasional setback, somehow we really were on an ongoing and ever upward march towards a future in which all people were, across the board and according to all measures, better off.

Of course, I realise that all talk about being “better off” or “worse off” than previous generations always needs to be taken with extreme caution because these are a highly slippery and problematic terms that  depend on just what and how one choses to measure this or that aspect of the world. It’s important to be clear that, using certain reasonable metrics, it seems many things have got better and have remained so. I’m not disputing this but what I am saying is that “The Future”, the utopian ideal place — the Golden City on a hill — where everything is always guaranteed to be better and more secure for everyone, is simply something in which, like supernatural ghosts and spirits, many of us can no longer even vaguely believe.

And where the “The Future” once was there is now the highly contested open space where our new breed of demons are being offered the opportunity to proliferate like rabbits.

But, according to my own understanding — and to Berardi’s — this contested open space has, in fact, always been there and in operation and that “The Future” has never existed, just as ghosts and spirits and all kinds of other supernatural beings — including god/gods — have never existed. 

Belief in “The Future” has played a dangerous and damaging rôle in making us — and by us I now mean those of a general liberal Enlightenment, social democratic, progressivist bent — forget that the real future (lower case “t” and “f” and no scare quotes) was never a fixed and foregone conclusion upon which we were closing and that, therefore, we always — without ceasing — had to keep working and working hard at bringing our preferred possible future into being. But we believed it was like this and this encouraged us to take our eyes off the ball and, in so doing, we failed to see that as a whole the liberal Enlightenment, idealist social democratic project  was leaving too many people behind by enabling and encouraging, amongst other things, increasing massive disparities in wealth and security and, through a wildly unchecked capitalism, was also seriously degrading the very planet up which everything depends.

Faced with this more and more people who felt left behind by liberal social democracy and it’s unchecked version of capitalism have come to see quicker than “us” something much more primordial and certainly more real than “The Future”. What they have seen is futurability.

As Berardi notes “[f]uturability is a layer of possibility that may or may not develop into actuality” and it’s important to see that this layer of possibility is and always has been present in our world. It helps us see that the real future (lower case “t” and “f” and no scare quotes) is never closed and so at absolutely no point were we, or are we, inevitably heading to this or that exact iteration of “The Future”.

Berardi also notes, however, that “we should never forget that the present constitution of the world contains many different (conflicting) possibilities, not only one”. Given this, in shifting from the possible to the real, our task is always-already to be finding ways to extract and implement one of the many immanent futurabilities inscribed in the present.

This is yet another reminder that the real future (lower case “t” and “f” and no scare quotes) is never fixed. But, but, but . . . keep to the forefront of your mind the truth that there are always going to be people in the world who see their task as being that of extracting and implementing an immanent futurability that we ourselves may loath and detest, for example making real a national populism and/or a way of being that continues to degrade the environment in utterly catastrophic ways. We may be tempted to get on our high horses and say that, in doing this, “they” merely want to bring disorder but that’s not true. We need to see clearly that what they are doing is attempting to bring an order that we do not seek.

As Berardi realises, all of us — including national populists and climate change deniers — are always forced to “stare at the chaotic intricacy of matter, of events, of flows, and seek for a possibility of order, a possible organization of chaotic material.” All of us — including national populists and climate change deniers — are forced to do the same long-term hard work of trying to “extract fragments from the magma [and] then try to combine them, in an attempt to reverse entropy: intelligent life is this process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.”

The local, provisional reversal of entropy is a task never finished and, no matter who might claim otherwise, the real future is never sealed and fixed no matter whether “we” or “they” are in the ascendent or in decline and whoever “we” or “they” are.

It’s yet another reminder that the possibility for different, real futures is always to be found inscribed in the here and now — indeed there is nowhere else it could be and it is in the way we choose to behave in the here and now — whether we perceive we are “winning” or “losing” — that we can find genuine hope and engage in real, meaningful action.

Which brings me back to William Stafford’s poem, “You Reading This, Be Ready” in which he boldly states that there is no greater gift than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around and get to work once again in the never-ending process of local, provisional reversal of entropy.

The future is not fixed no matter how it may seem right at the moment and there is clearly a great deal of work to be done, right here, right now . . .

You Reading This, Be Ready
William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Alas, as a piece it was spoken for but he assured me that, in due course, he was going to make a few affordable copies of it in resin and he'd keep me posted about when one was available. He was true to his word and just this morning with Susanna I went up to his workshop to pick it up, shoot the breeze about letter-related things and, naturally, to say hello to Wittgenstein and my friends once again.

The photo at the head of this post was taken when I got home and the ones below were taken in Eric's workshop this morning.

Eric with the inscription holding up his Albertus typeface tea-towel

Eric and his current apprentice Matt Loughlin with the menu of the Erania Restaurant of "blessed" memory above lettered by Jon Harris

One of Eric's carvings of some of his own words

Wittgenstein's grave recently restored by Eric

Grant Snider's excellent page can be found at this LINK

READINGS:

From Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura [On the nature of things] (1st century BCE) trans. James I. Porter Lucretius and the Sublime in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 173)

A puddle of water no deeper than a single finger-breadth, which lies between the stones on a paved street, offers us a view beneath the earth to a depth as vast as the high gaping mouth of heaven stretches above the earth, so that you seem to look down on the clouds and the heaven, and you discern bodies hidden in the sky beneath the earth, marvellously. (DRN Book 4:414-419)

From Epicurus’ Principal Doctrines (3rd century BCE) trans. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson

11. If our suspicions about heavenly phenomena and about death did not trouble us at all and were never anything to us, and, moreover, if not knowing the limits of pains and desires did not trouble us, then we would have no need of natural science.

12. It is impossible for someone ignorant about the nature of the universe but still suspicious about the subjects of the myths to dissolve his feelings of fear about the most important matters. So it is impossible to receive unmixed pleasures without knowing natural science.

13. It is useless to obtain security from men while the things above and below earth and, generally, the things in the unbounded remained as objects of superstition.

From Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura [On the nature of things] (1st century BCE) trans. Walter Englert

Therefore this fear and darkness of the mind must be
                              shattered
apart not by the rays of the sun and the clear shafts
of the day but by the external appearance (species) and inner
                             law (ratio) of nature (naturae species ratioque)

(DRN Book 1:146-148, 2:55-61, 3:91-93, 6:35-41)
 
Naturae species ratioque

This can be translated as above or, as I am coming to prefer, following Thomas Nail (in his extraordinary book (Lucretius 1: An Ontology of Motion, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p. 67) “the material conditions for nature as it appears.”

Shadows in the Water by Thomas Traherne (1636/37–1674)


We are now firmly in the season of autumn and, with the coming of autumn, there comes the rain, and with the coming of the rain there come puddles.

Spending a great deal of time in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden as I do, at this time of year I quite often see very small children in their new wellington boots discovering the simple delight of being able to splash about in a puddle. It’s an expression of joy that serves to make even the most skeptical, cynical, stoical of people break into an involuntary smile and, as the wonderful cartoon by Grant Snider suggests, as a good Epicurean I’ve managed to maintain my love of puddles for their pure puddliness.

But, aside from the simple joy that splashing about in them affords us, a puddle’s puddliness also offers an Epicurean a powerful reminder about what is for them a profound truth concerning the nature of things.

One of Lucretius’ central, practical pastoral concerns, (inherited from his philosophical hero Epicurus), was to free people from their superstitious fear of the gods. Lucretius could see that, in the end, belief in the reality of supernatural beings who demanded worship and who judged and metered out rewards and punishments upon humankind, in the end, always has less than optimal consequences. In his poem Lucretius offers the reader many striking examples of how people were continually being oppressed and made unhappy and fearful by such supernatural religion and, alas, how they also sometimes even lost their lives thanks to its obsession with power and control. As you heard earlier Lucretius thought this fear (along with, for example, those about death and the possibility of an afterlife) were “shattered apart not by the rays of the sun and the clear shafts of the day but by the external appearance (species) and inner law (ratio) of nature” — naturae species ratioque (DRN Book 1:146-148, 2:55-61, 3:91-93, 6:35-41).

Venus on seashell, from the Casa di Venus, Pompeii. Before AD 79

It is important to realise that (again like his intial philosophical inspiration, Epicurus) Lucretius was himself a convinced philosophical naturalist and so he understood the world to be an entirely natural complex in which all things are continuously being made and unmade as the flux and flows of matter endlessly interact. But despite his thorough-going naturalism in his poem Lucretius reserved a very special and often prominent place for certain stories about the gods — especially Venus. Now why on earth would Lucretius, who is clearly an atheist, do this? Surely this was simply to muddy the waters? Well, many have thought just this but the truth is, in fact, quite the opposite; he does it to help bring people to an even greater clarity about the nature of things than any unpoetic, purely technical and reductionist naturalism ever could. 

Lucretius was, as you may know, not only a fine and original philosopher but also a poet of genius praised by both Virgil and Cicero. As a poet, he understood well that being the kind of beings we are, we are always-already engaging with the natural world as much through our poetry and myths as through the kinds of activities which, in time, became called the natural sciences. He felt that, somehow, they were worth keeping in creative step with each other with each being allowed the space and opportunity appropriately to illuminate the other.

He understood that as we looked at the world and its multifarious phenomena such as the wind, rain, lightning, thunder, the movement of the heavenly bodies above us, the stars and sun and moon and so on, it had been a recurring natural human tendency to see in them the actions of divine, powerful beings. It was as a consequence of this tendency that the enduring myths and poems about the gods were born as too, alas, were our associated superstitious religions.

Holding this in mind we can now quietly turn back to begin to contemplate our puddle, or at least we can when all the excited, wellington boot-clad children have moved on and its surface has stilled once more.

In book four of the De Rerum Natura Lucretius invites us to contemplate this image because it helps him illustrate how the external appearance (species) and inner law or material conditions (ratio) of nature can be held together in a way that both allows us to continue to enjoy some of the poems and myths about the gods our forebears had read of the world’s surface, nature’s face or species but without, at the same time, being lured into believing that they are, somehow, actual beings.

To show you what he means, for full effect, let us now imagine ourselves in the Cambridge University Botanic Garden looking down into a largish puddle with the sun shining overhead in a white cloud-dappled blue sky and with a golden, leaf-bedecked branch over-hanging us whilst a few rooks circle high above that. As we look down into the water at the reflection below we can experience a real sense of awe and wonder at the vertiginous sight we behold as we seem to look down through a hole in the pavement into what can appears to be whole other world below.

It’s the kind of vertiginous view that has always had the power to create in our imaginations all kinds of poetic stories and images that, unless we are very careful, can easily lead us astray. I had Susanna read Thomas Traherne’s poem “Shadows in the Water” because to me — and no doubt to Lucretius were he with us today — it is a classic example of being led quite astray.

Traherne was a devout, seventeenth-century Anglican minister and theologian who was genuinely interested in the natural sciences. However, despite this interest, as his poem suggests, because science was always secondary to his strong, a priori commitment to the existence of a supernatural god he was only too willing to allow himself to read off from the world’s surface — nature’s face or species — a marvellous image which he could then beguilingly turn into what he thought was an index of an underlying (or overarching) supernatural reality, the very home of his “very God of very God.” In this poem, although it is true he brings this idea before us for contemplation in a gentle way — i.e. he doesn’t ram his belief down our throats in an obviously doctrinal or dogmatic fashion — we must not lose sight of his general desire as a clergyman to encourage us to believe in the reality of his supernatural, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god and the existence of another, heavenly world that lies just beneath or behind the thin skin of our everyday world.
  
However, when looking down into his modest puddle Lucretius sees something very different, but to him, and to me, he sees something even more marvellous.

Now, remember Lucretius thought that the kind of fear and darkness of the mind to which Tranherne clearly fell prey would be shattered apart not by the rays of the sun and the clear shafts of the day but only by BOTH the external appearance (species) and inner law or material conditions (ratio) of nature — naturae species ratioque.

So let’s start with the inner law or material conditions of nature (the ratio). We’ll then turn to external appearance (species) and, finally, to why together they gift us something more marvellous and joyful than even someone like Traherne could have imagined.

Remember that in our readings you heard three of Epicurus’ principle doctrines. Well, Lucretius took them with the utmost seriousness because he saw that the natural sciences (φυσιολογίας — “inquiring into natural causes and phenomena”) were particularly well-suited to stop us from being led needlessly astray by the surface appearance of nature into believing in the existence of the gods and, therefore, of easily falling prey once again to the claims of supernatural religion with all its many fears and oppressions. The natural sciences he realised gave us a powerful insight into nature’s ratio, that is to say its inward laws, workings or material conditions, which, in turn, had the power simply to dissolve — or more dramatically, shatter — our fears about the existence of the gods and remove this and other darknesses from our minds.  

Just to remind you, Lucretius thought that everything — without exception — was made, not by supernatural beings, but by the natural fluxes and flows of matter which endlessly went on to fold into atoms which then flowed together and combined to make all the things visible to us in our universe. The natural sciences of Lucretius' and our own day have showed us nature's ratio more clearly than even the rays of the sun ever could; we know that there are no such things as the gods imagined by supernatural religion and that, therefore, we also need never again be fearful of them nor bow to the demands of superstitious religion.

OK. But let’s not forget that Lucretius thinks this shattering is achieved by both the inner law (ratio) of nature and, AND, it’s external appearance (species) — naturae species ratioque.

At this point you need to recall that, as a poet, Lucretius understood well that being the kind of beings we are, we are always-already engaging with the natural world as much through our poetry and myths as through the kinds of activities which, in time, became called the natural sciences.

His own poem, the De Rerum Natura, shows us that, as a poet Lucretius didn’t want to lose all the wonderful poems and myths about the gods our forbears had constructed by reading them off nature’s face — of which the surface of the puddle is an exemplary example. These appearances were for him and us still perfectly capable of telling us all kinds of things (good and bad) about how humans are in the world, they can still entertain us, make us laugh and cry, become the subjects for songs and plays, provide us with inspiring and cautionary stories to help us explore all kinds of moral questions about how best to behave and so much more besides.

Cybele

But, as the example of Traherne shows, these wonderful and potentially helpful and beautiful surface images are often so beguiling that they always threaten to lead us astray. Lucretius was well aware of this danger as his story about Cybele — a close analogue to the goddess Venus — in book two shows. After describing her wondrous qualities as a poetic example of a fully material mother earth, a goddess of mobility, pedesis and politics, Lucretius then says:

“Endowed with this emblem [a crown — denoting her creative and sustaining power], the image of the divine mother is now carried with horrifying effect throughout the earth” (DRN 2:608-9 my emphasis).

In other words Lucretius is saying that when and wherever people have stopped understanding her poetically — as a marvellous appearance read off the surface or face of nature (species) — and have turned her into an actual goddess to whom sacrifice and praise must now be offered, stupid and horrific things inevitably followed. For Lucretius, although nature (in the poetic guise of Venus or Cyble) “is everything, the pure movement of matter; it makes no sense to sacrifice or pray to her” (Thomas Nail, Lucretius 1, p. 236), when people make her into actual goddess she is a disaster, a veritable horror.

The humble puddle is an aide-memoire which offers us a handy, simple and delightful reminder of how to resist taking this wrong turn for whenever a good Epicurean sees someone beginning to take a surface, poetic appearance of nature as being real in the wrong kind of way all they need to do is remind that person of the puddle and that all it takes to dispel the illusory image is to recall the ratio of nature, put one’s finger into the shallow water and wiggle it about. Even better, one might be able to find both a happy child and an Epicurean philosopher joyfully to jump about in the puddle to reveal the nature’s ratio. 

What Lucretius ultimately wants to show us using the puddle is that the reflection of the sky one sees in it is marvellous, truly marvellous—not as an index to another supernatural realm and its gods as it was for Traherne but as both “an appearance of nature and as an index to the wondrous truths of physics” (John I. Porter, Lucretius and the Sublime in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, ed Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie, Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 173).

This morning Susanna and I thought we’d go together to visit the Beechwoods where I went last week (see this post). Our decision to go was taken whilst the morning was still decidedly overcast and grey but, but the time we were getting on the bus at Drummer Street Bus Station the sun had come out and the sky was almost cloudlessly blue changing the mood of the day considerably. On arriving at the Babraham Park and Ride we walked up the Gog Magog Hills along the footpath running parallel to Worts’ Causeway and thence on into the lovely beechwoods. The high winds of last week had brought down a lot of the golden brown leaves which thickly carpeted the wood floor but the many remaining green leaves cast upon us some wonderful dappled sunlight — something for which the Japanese have a splendid single word, Komorebi (木漏れ日).

Anyway, Susanna and I had a splendidly meditative couple of hours strolling quietly and slowly around the woods and, although we stopped for a flask of coffee on an old tree stump we could easily have sat down on a delightfully rustic bench dedicated to the memory of a gentleman called Fred Chambers (there are a couple of pictures below). The dedication underneath his name reads: “Write me as a man who loved his fellow man.” It felt sure it was a quotation so, when I got home, I looked it up and found it to be line very close to one found towards the end of Leigh Hunt’s (1784-1859) short poem called Abou Ben Adhem. I have vague memories of this being recited to me by my paternal grandmother who loved this kind of English poetry that referenced, what was for her an exotic, magical and (Sufi inspired) mystical Middle East — indeed the poem in this vein that she particularly passed on to me was the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the famous translation by Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883).

So, before we get to a few of the photos I took this morning here is Leigh Hunt’s poem for your enjoyment. Abou Ben Adhem is the same person as a certain Ibrahim ibn Adham (c. 718 – c. 782 / AH c. 100 – c. 165) who is an early Sufi saint.

Abou Ben Adhem
By Leigh Hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
“What writest thou?”—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered, “The names of those who love the Lord.”
“And is mine one?” said Abou. “Nay, not so,”
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still; and said, “I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men.”

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

The blue, cloudless sky reflected in the rainwater caught by an autumn leaf

The Beechwoods from the Cherry Hinton Road near the P&R

READINGS 

The text foud on postcards that were distributed to first time attenders to the Unitarian Church in Cambridge during the late 1950s and early 1960s 



Guide by A. R. Ammons

          You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception is no perceiver:
    when you arrive
you have gone too far:
          at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:

you cannot
    turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
          no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless:
    no freedom to choose:

to be
          you have to stop not-being and break
off from is to flowing and
    this is the sin you weep and praise:
origin is your original sin:
          the return you long for will ease your guilt
and you will have your longing:

    the wind that is my guide said this: it
should know having
          given up everything to eternal being but
direction:

how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes
    from one foot to the other:
wisdom wisdom:
          to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:

    wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
          unity cannot do anything in particular:

are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then.


During the last few weeks I’ve been exploring with you some of the implications of a phrase that was first used by our own Cambridge community on its publicity during the late 1950s and early 1960s, namely, the freedom, or right, to be tomorrow what we are not today. It was a phrase that, in part, helped me to the ideas which became my long piece for the Sea of Faith with a similar title which outlines what it is in general terms I’m trying to do here as your minister. In the terminology of my piece in a nutshell it’s an attempt to help create appropriately and genuinely free, religious spirits who not only claim the freedom or right to be tomorrow what they are not today but who, following any encounter with persuasive new evidence from the natural sciences and/or good, rational, philosophical thinking, also have the courage, wherewithal and opportunity actually to change their minds about various things, including their once deeply held ultimate premises.

Traditional religious communities and church traditions are rarely, if ever, concerned to encourage such an open-ended way of being because they are generally concerned to defend an ultimate truth which they believe has been revealed to them via some form of scripture, tradition or the insight of certain individuals; more often than not it’s a combination of all three.

The Unitarian movement has been no different in this respect. As a form of Radical Reformation Christianity its ultimate premises, its basic doctrines if you will, were first articulated in Poland and Hungary during the mid-sixteenth century. They were that “God is One” and that Jesus was fully human (albeit uniquely and divinely inspired and given a divine commission by that One God to act as the Messiah of the kingdom of peace). As the centuries have unfolded this doctrine of the strict unity of God has, particularly from the middle third of twentieth century onwards, allowed us to expand our thinking beyond its original, obviously Jewish and Christian beginnings into more pluralistic and universalistic expressions of religion and this is why Cliff Reed begins his book “Unitarian? What’s That?” with these words:

The historic Unitarian affirmation God is One is what gave the movement its name. Today, this stress on divine unity is broadened. Now Unitarians also affirm: Humanity is One, the World is One, the Interdependent Web of Life is One. But while Unitarians may share these affirmations, we do so in an open and liberal spirit. And there is a lot more to us than that.

Understood in the way Cliff does, the traditional Unitarian doctrine of the unity of God (our unquestioned answer) is such a beguiling and attractive idea that I’ve been utterly in thrall to it for most of my adult life. However, although I am still beguiled by the idea of an interdependent web of life the bewitching power over me of the idea of the unity of God has slowly waned.

But this is to get ahead of myself.

What I can say at this point in my address is that Wittgenstein speaks profoundly to my situation vis-a-vis the doctrine of the unity of God — and, I imagine, to many of you — when he says: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (PI §115).

In a Unitarian setting the unity of God lays deep in our language and, in one way or another, it repeats itself to us inexorably as all our hymns today have revealed. To all intents and purposes this mantra is an essentially a Platonic claim that underlying the endlessly changing and diverse appearance of the material world, there lies an eternal, immutable and undivided ultimate unity. Though it need not be, it is often the case that this  ultimate unity is believed also to be perfectly moral and good.

OK, hold on to this thought while I briefly turn to the most important historian of our religious movement Earl Morse Wilbur (1886-1956). In 1920, in his influential lecture/essay “The Meaning and Lessons of Unitarian History”, he realised that, at first sight, “the principal meaning of the movement has been a purely doctrinal one and that the goal we have aimed at has been nothing more remote than that of winning the world to acceptance of one form of doctrine rather than another.” This doctrine was, of course, that “God is One” — with all its corollaries about the humanity of Jesus etc..

But, as Wilbur dug more deeply into the ebb and flow of our history he felt sure that the “doctrinal aspect” of our churches was, in truth, only “a temporary phase” and that Unitarian doctrines were, therefore, only “a sort of by-product of a larger movement, whose central motive has been the quest for spiritual freedom.” Indeed, his essay begins with a clear statement that, “the keyword to our whole history . . . is the word complete spiritual freedom.” The conclusion he delivered to his own day was that, thus far, we had hardly done anything more than remove certain “obstacles which dogma had put in our way” and had only just begun to “clear the decks for the great action to follow.”

These words reveal that Wilbur was a far-sighted man but, as all people necessarily are, his vision could only stretch so far. The limits of his vision didn’t allow him to do in his own time two important things that he could not see were implied by the general trajectory of his own work.

The first was that he was not able to envisage consistently operating, nor see the need for us to operate, outside a generally liberal Christian framework. Here are the very last sentences of his 1920 essay:

Our vital task still remains, in common with that which falls to every other Christian church, the task of inspiring Christian characters and moulding Christian civilization, the task of making men and society truly Christian, the task of organizing the kingdom of heaven upon earth.

Of course, you must yourself decide whether such a description still works properly for you in our own highly pluralistic and scientifically informed age and context but, for me, it doesn’t. Along with an American philosopher called James W. Woelfel (for whose work I have a quiet admiration) I have to say that “in my own ongoing struggle to make sense of the Christian context of life- and world-interpretation [that I have inherited], I find basic elements of that context which I simply cannot render coherent any longer, and I earnestly wonder how other persons manage to” (The Death of God: A Belated Personal Postscript). In a nutshell this all means I simply cannot any longer, with a clean heart and full pathos, put my shoulder against the same exclusively Christian wheel to which Wilbur was able to put his own.

The second important thing Wilbur couldn’t do due to the natural limits of his own vision was to ask the perhaps shocking, difficult and, for a Unitarian (Christian), almost heretical question towards which his own work seems to me to be inexorably heading when he said that Unitarian doctrines were only “a temporary phase” and therefore, only “a sort of by-product of a larger movement, whose central motive has been the quest for spiritual freedom.”

So, with the title of this address firmly in mind, that “more dangerous than an unanswered question is an unquestioned answer”, here’s the potentially heretical question:

Is the doctrine or dogma of the unity of God which has held Unitarians captive for four-and-a-half centuries, in fact, now an obstacle to us and do we, therefore, need to clear our decks of it if we are to enable the “great action” to follow?

Before beginning to address this huge question the first thing to say at this point is that it seems to me we are only being true to “the keyword to our whole history . . . complete spiritual freedom” in so far as we can freely and without fear ask this question and if, in principle — were the evidence to be persuasive enough, of course — to change our minds about the doctrine and let it go in favour of something more plausible. Although I’ve been intimating that, within the Unitarian context, my question might be perceived as being heretical in fact it’s not. Here is the great Unitarian Christian theologian, minister and scientist Joseph Priestley writing in a sermon of the 1770s (“The Importance and Extent of Free Inquiry in Matters of Religion: A Sermon” in P.Miller, ed., Joseph Priestley: Political Writings, Cambridge: CUP, 1993, xxiv).

But should free inquiry lead to the destruction of Christianity itself, it ought not, on that account, to be discontinued; for we can only wish for the prevalence of Christianity on the supposition of its being true; and if it fall before the influence of free inquiry, it can only do so in consequence of its not being true.

For Priestley, Christianity was made up of a system of claims about the world whose truth could only be determined by a preceding phase of genuinely free and open-minded religious and philosophical debate and the gathering and analysis of verifiable, empirical data.

In short Priestley was committed to the possibility that his own ultimate Unitarian Christian premises may, in time, turn out to be false. Indeed I think that, in an age and a time when our forebears’ belief in the existence of a morally good, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient unitary god is becoming less and less plausible to more and more of us we need to emulate the same radical open-minded spirit of enquiry once showed by Priestley and ask ourselves whether or not the evidence and our contemporary experiences indicates we should, at last, let our commitment to the unity of God completely go?

In one sense this address is finished because the primary thing I want to do today is simply to get this question, which Wilbur could not ask, openly out on our common table for consideration and discussion and to show that in asking this we are being entirely consistent with the Unitarian tradition understood as an historical whole.

But, in another sense, it would be unfair were I to finish without giving you at least a brief indication of the “great action” I think which could well follow were we able to let go of the old, Platonic doctrine of the strict unity of God. As you know I’m perfectly capable of running through the various philosophical arguments and scientific evidence for this — and doing it in great detail — but I have only a couple of hundred words left so I turn, instead, to poetry in the form of Ammons’ poem, “Guide”.

In it I understand Ammons strongly to be suggesting that the “great action” which Wilbur dimly intuited in 1920 is courageously to move away from our original sin of believing our origin and end is in the static unity (of God, or the Absolute, or the Platonic Really-Real) and to move, instead, towards an understanding that everything is always-already in complex movement, is always-already interconnecting, interpenetrating and highly plural; it is to see that there is no single origin, no divine single being or particle at the end of the universe; it is to see that where there is no movement there are no things, no materiality, no life and so no knowledge. Ammons’ words (and for me the contemporary natural sciences and Lucretius’ wonderful poem the De Rrerum Natura) suggest to me we should think long and hard about stopping believing in and yearning for this Absolute Being and so finally to “break off from is to flowing.”

This is what the wind teaches Ammons and teaches me — it’s what every flux and flow of nature teaches — that in the static unity of God as our Unitarian forbears understood it and our Christian Platonic culture in general has understood it, we cannot turn around, there are no entrances or exits, there are no precipitations of forms to use like tongs against the formless, no freedom to choose. In that capital “S” Source we find we are really in the mouth of of capital “D” Death.

This strongly suggests to me that by continuing to hold to a doctrine of the unity of God we are not only fundamentally at odds with the apparent nature of things, but we also threaten our other great historic commitment to the freedom and right to change our minds on the basis of good evidence and reason and to become tomorrow what we are not today.

So, to conclude, here’s the question once again followed by Ammons' poem

Is the doctrine or dogma of the unity of God which has held Unitarians captive for four-and-a-half centuries, in fact, now an obstacle to us and do we, therefore, need to clear our decks of it if we are to enable the “great action” to follow? 

Guide by A. R. Ammons

          You cannot come to unity and remain material:
in that perception is no perceiver:
    when you arrive
you have gone too far:
          at the Source you are in the mouth of Death:

you cannot
    turn around in
the Absolute: there are no entrances or exits
          no precipitations of forms
to use like tongs against the formless:
    no freedom to choose:

to be
          you have to stop not-being and break
off from is to flowing and
    this is the sin you weep and praise:
origin is your original sin:
          the return you long for will ease your guilt
and you will have your longing:

    the wind that is my guide said this: it
should know having
          given up everything to eternal being but
direction:

how I said can I be glad and sad: but a man goes
    from one foot to the other:
wisdom wisdom:
          to be glad and sad at once is also unity
and death:

    wisdom wisdom: a peachblossom blooms on a particular
tree on a particular day:
          unity cannot do anything in particular:

are these the thoughts you want me to think I said but
the wind was gone and there was no more knowledge then.

Readers who are in any way sympathetic to my feeling that we (Unitarians) should let the doctrine of the unity of God go might be interested in reading the following essay by Thomas Nail called The Ontology of Motion and also a preview of his forthcoming book for OUP called Being and Motion. He strikes me as someone whose work can really help us clear the decks for the great action to follow . . .

This morning I took a spin up the Gog Magog Hills to the Beechwoods Local Nature Reserve on my trusty Raleigh Superbe to enjoy the splendid autumn sunlight and colour.  It was as perfect an autumn day as one could imagine and, as always, I took a few photos along the way. All photos taken with my Fuji X100F.

Just click on a photo to enlarge it.

The cover art here is entitled Brownian Motion

READINGS

From Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

STONE TELLING IS my last name. It has come to me of my own choosing, because I have a story to tell of where I went when I was young; but now I go nowhere, sitting like a stone in this place, in this ground, in this Valley. I have come where I was going.
          My House is the Blue Clay, my household the High Porch of Sinshan.
          My mother was named Towhee, Willow, and Ashes. My father's name, Abhao, in the Valley means Kills.
          In Sinshan babies’ names often come from birds, since they are messengers. In the month before my mother bore me, an owl came every night to the oak trees called Gairga outside the windows of High Porch House, on the north side, and sang the owl’s song there; so my first name was North Owl.

From A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

No one knows a man’s true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may hear it. In front of other people they will, like other people, call him by his use-name, his nickname—such a name as Sparrowhawk, and Vetch, and Ogion which means “fir-cone”. If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping. Thus to Ged who had lost faith in himself, Vetch had given that gift only a friend can give, the proof of unshaken, unshakeable trust.

From Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought (ETHNOS, Vol. 71:1, March 2006 (pp. 9-20) by Tim Ingold

The Primacy of Movement

The animic world [i.e. in worldviews in which every natural thing in the universe is perceived to be living in some fashion] is in perpetual flux, as the beings that participate in it go their various ways. These beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths. Among the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic, for example, as the writer Rudy Wiebe has shown, as soon as a person moves he or she becomes a line. People are known and recognised by the trails they leave behind them. Animals, likewise, are distinguished by characteristic patterns of activity or movement signatures, and to perceive an animal is to witness this activity going on, or to hear it. Thus, to take a couple of examples from Richard Nelson’s wonderful account of the Koyukon of Alaska, Make Prayers to the Raven, you see ‘streaking like a flash of fire through the undergrowth’, not a fox, and ‘perching in the lower branches of spruce trees’, not an owl. The names of animals are not nouns but verbs. But it is no different with celestial bodies, such as the sun and the moon. We might think of the sun as a giant disk that is observed to make its way from east to west across the great dome of the sky. It could be depicted like this:


But in the pictographic inscriptions of native peoples of the North American Plains, it is depicted like this:


or this:


where the little nick at the end of the line indicates sunrise or sunset. In these depictions the sun is not understood as an object that moves across the sky. Rather it is identified as the path of its movement through the sky, on its daily journey from the eastern to the western horizon.


Spiritus fumans libavii (fuming liquor of livabius) gets its name from the fact that the colourless liquid fumes on contact with air and from the name of its discoverer, the German alchemist and physician Andreas Libavius (c. 1555–1616) who used it in his alchemical experiments during the sixteenth-century.

Now, alchemy was a complex phenomenon that cannot — nor ever should — be reduced merely to being an early form of chemistry. We mustn’t do this because it was a discipline which brought into play various ideas and practices concerning what, today, we might call spiritual growth and development. However, for all this, it is also clearly a meaningful part of the genealogy of modern chemistry.

But the trouble with alchemical names like spiritus fumans libavii is that they are not clear — not “clear” in modern chemical terms that is — they do not make clear the chemical structure of things and it took a figure like Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743-1794) over a hundred years later to develop a system of naming which helped us see that spiritus fumans libavii was better — again “better” simply from the point of view of the developing science of chemistry — better understood as being an inorganic compound of tin and chlorine gas and named SnCl4 or tin tetrachloride. Clarity with regard to its chemical makeup helps a chemist more easily understand and predict how it can be combined with other substances to produce this or that new substance.

But, from another perspective, Lavoisier’s naming system succeeds in obscuring from us three important things, that it is a liquid, that it fumes and also the name of its discoverer. In the mind of a knowledgeable chemist, the first two things may well be implied in the modern chemical name, but for those non-chemists amongst us it can be said that the name spiritus fumans libavii remains, from a certain point of view, a better description of the stuff than the name tin tetrachloride.

My use of the phrase “from a certain point of view” indicates the importance of context and so please don’t hear me as suggesting that one name is more desirable, better or more accurate and clear than  another; all I want to do here is point to the fact that the same thing can have very different meaningful names that are born out of very different needs and ways of naming.

Some names can and do remain in use together — as is the case with spiritus fumans libavii and tin tetrachloride — but some names, such as phlogiston — which was used to name a fire-like element once thought to be contained within combustible bodies which was released during combustion — have completely gone out of use as our scientific understanding of the world radically changed. In the case of phlogiston, once we understood the role of oxygen in combustion the idea of the existence of phlogiston simply made no sense any more and the name needed, gently, be let go. 

This is one of the basic points I wish to introduce in this address, namely, that the naming of things and the parts of things is something which is constantly in flux and flow. Names both come and go as contexts, and viewpoints from within contexts, change as we open up new horizons of disclosure thanks to our endless scientific, poetic, philosophic and religious journeyings through, and entanglement with, the world. As I proceed through this address please keep in mind this idea of journeying through the world because walking and pedesis (from the Greek πήδησις “leaping”) or, Brownian motion, is central to what I want to say today.

So to return to Tal for a moment.

In the context of this service, along the path which she is travelling and from within the horizons of disclosure now available to her she has bravely and gently let go of her earlier names and let come to her the new name and life which, to quote Tal herself, she feels “is characterised by youth, freshness, joy, strength, freedom, creativity, rootedness in the past and hope for the future — a little girl, dancing by a gentle river flowing through a sheltered valley, in the sunlight.”

But, walking on together and changing our perspective and horizons of disclosure once more, with our Lavoisierian inspired scientific hats on, we can also see that, in certain contexts, it would be better to name her — identify her — not by the name Talitha Hope Annan, but by the phenomenally complex name that is her own unique genetic code.

(Get Tal up to unfold chart — at some point in the next day or so I’ll post a photo of this.)

As with spiritus fumans libavii and tin tetrachloride each of her names — Talitha Hope Annan and the complex name that is her unique genetic code — both reveal certain important things even as they obscure others — indeed, rather marvellously and visually very much to the point, the poster of the human genome is so large it is actually capable of obscuring all but Tal’s extremities and Tal, in turn, can obscure the poster! All names reveal, all names obscure.

And so now we begin to see, I hope, that no single system of naming, whether scientific or otherwise, can ever fully and completely name any thing — animate or inanimate. This, in turn, serves to introduce to us the thought that, as we walk through and entangle ourselves in new creative ways with the flux and flow of a world endlessly in motion, it would be wise always to have available to us a variety of namings (public and private, informal and formal etc.).

This additionally reveals, at least to me, the need for a variety of systems of naming which, together, are able continually to remind us that we are ourselves ever-moving, ever-dancing fluxes and flows of Brownian (pedetic) motion and lines of movement and that there exist no eternally fixed entities which could ever be wholly defined, or whose meaning (or potential meaning) could wholly be exhausted by, reductionist nomenclatures whether derived from the natural sciences, systematic theology or analytical philosophy and so on.

At this point I want to turn to some insights offered by the anthropologist Tim Ingold who in his paper, an extract from which you heard earlier, notes that in the animic world everything “is in perpetual flux, as the beings that participate in it go their various ways. These beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths” — beings do not exist at locations, they occur along paths.

Now in animic worldviews, where this last idea is taken to be the case, the names of beings are often clearly no longer those of fixed static entities found at this or that location — nouns — but, instead, expressions of movement that occur along paths, expressions which speak in some fashion about the activity, motion and movement of those same things — verbs. So to the Inuit of the Canadian Arctica a fox is not a fixed thing but a “streaking like a flash of fire through the undergrowth” and an owl “is perching in the lower branches of spruce trees” — remember, of course, that the perching of a raptor such as an owl is always an alert, active state and never simply a static one; even in the apparent stillness of the perching owl there is perpetual flux and flow. Let’s also remember the written names given to the sun by peoples of the North American Plains which are absolutely concerned to present us with the sun as a line of movement through the world rather than as a discrete object (noun) in it.  

Although I am not myself an animist but, instead very much a Lucretian inspired modern materialist, I do myself accept and daily live by what seems to me to be the truth of the idea that beings do not exist at locations but occur along paths. Not least of all I live this way because, as contemporary physics powerfully seems to reveal, at the sub-atomic level even in the most apparently static and stable of things, there is always-already occurring the perpetual flux and flow of matter.

All these things — and many more besides — as they tumble, bump and interact together in endless pedetic, Brownian motion surely encourage us all to take time to consider the consequences of the endless and eternal flux and flow of matter, most importantly that, as material beings ourselves, we do not exist at locations but occur along paths. And, if this is the case, it may further encourage us to ask whether our own static, fixed and seemingly stable given and/or adopted names, are really always doing the best job they might? We may find that it is worth thinking about letting some of them go and adopting other, parallel and interweaving names that can better tell the story of our own Brownian, pedetic movements of becoming as we travel the path of life.

Such a reflection may not bring upon us the overwhelming need actually to let go of our birth names or self- or other given descriptions as Tal has — I certainly feel no need to change my own — but it can surely do us no harm to walk and to dance Brownian-motion-like around our own current names and descriptions to see what new things and horizons of disclosure appear. Indeed, I feel it’s a creative, therapeutic activity that may well do all of us a great deal of good. I would also like to add that this kind of pedetic reflection about names is as true of the name and self-description of our own free-religious, free-thinking community, Unitarian. Does this name still do the job it once did or is it now rather like phlogiston, something with very little modern meaning that should gently be let go in favour of another name? I don’t know, I really don’t know but it’s surely worth asking because, like other kinds of beings, living institutions and communities do not really exist at locations, rather they always-already occur along paths. As Heraclitus once famously said (quoted by Plato in Cratylus, 402a), “All is flux, nothing stays still”, “All flows, nothing stays” and it is precisely in this movement that we can always claim our birthright freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today.

And so, with these thoughts in mind lastly, Tal, I simply want to celebrate with you the fact that your own creative, pedetic, walking and dancing line of motion has entangled with our own community’s interweaving lines in this celebration of nature’s many harvests.

Talk 1—Losing our fear of the gods

(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 18 minutes into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

Today we’ll consider the fear of the gods.

Epicurus believed the gods existed but there is some ambiguity about exactly what he meant by this; one common interpretation is that he thought they were human projections of what the most blessed life would look like. But, in any case, Epicurus felt that most people were fearful of the gods because they wrongly believed them to be powerful, supernatural beings who are constantly concerned about what we do and who, in response to our actions, dispense upon us various punishments or rewards. In consequence, many people have come to believe that they must worship and sacrifice to the gods in order to win, or regain, their favour.

However, for Epicurus, the most characteristic thing about the gods was their imperishable and blessed being which allowed them to live completely tranquil lives, utterly unconcerned about what we got up to. In short, the gods (whatever they were), simply left us to our own devices and whatever happened to us was always and only the result of purely natural forces.

When thought of like this — as supreme fictions, poetic exemplars of an ideal life — the only influence the gods could have upon us was when we sought to emulate their tranquility in our own lives. Indeed, Epicurus once memorably said he was:

. . . prepared to compete with [the god] Zeus in happiness, as long as he had a barley cake and some water (Aelian, “Miscellaneous Histories”, 4.13 [text 159]).

When an ancient or modern follower of Epicurus gratefully sits down to an equally modest breakfast it is worth pondering upon the fact that they do so blessedly free from a fear of the gods.


(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 21 minutes 50 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death. 

Today we’ll consider the fear of an afterlife.

Epicurus saw in his own age, as we see in our own, that many people believed after death there will be for them another life. Uncertainties about what this will be like, and the miseries it might bring a person were, and still are, the cause of great anxiety, and this has always seriously mitigated against achieving a tranquil and fulfilling life in this world.

But Epicurus had an antidote to the fear of an afterlife. His close study of the natural world led him to the, then, radical conclusion that everything (including the gods and ourselves) was made of atoms — although today we might prefer to say the flow and flux of matter in constant motion. This means that at our death who we are is simply folded back into this same continuous material flow and flux, and it was this realization that assured Epicurus there could be no such thing as another life for us after our own death nor, of course, any afterlife about which we need to be afraid.

And, whilst it is true that followers of Epicurus firmly believe there is no other world, in a poetically sensitive way they do, in fact, see another world, namely, this natural world seen through the eyes of reason and science rather than through the eyes of ancient superstition.



(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 28 minutes 10 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

This week we’ll look at the fear of death itself, coming, as it does for Epicurus and his followers, without a belief in an afterlife.

Epicurus addressed this fear firstly by noting that everything which is for us desirable or undesirable, good or bad, produces in us pleasure or pain, either directly or indirectly. He then observes that our own death cannot result in us feeling pain because when we die we are no longer there to feel it. True enough our family and friends may mourn and feel pain at our death but we will not be able to. As Epicurus realised, what point is there then, in being anxious or fearful about something if we know that when it happens it cannot possibly cause us any pain, either directly or indirectly?

This is why Epicureans were widely known to say “death is nothing to us” and sometimes they wore signet rings or looked into hand mirrors with these words engraved upon them as a daily reminder that they had no need to fear death.

But, if death is nothing to a follower of Epicurus, this life, properly lived, does mean a great deal, and it is something to be fully and tranquilly enjoyed with our family and friends before fearlessly “to the wind’s twelve quarters / I take my endless way” (A Shropshire Lad XXXII) as the great English poet and Epicurean, A. E. Housman, once beautifully put it in his A Shropshire Lad.


(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 19 minutes 00 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

Over the past three weeks we’ve briefly considered them in turn. But once these fears had been, or were at least well on the way to being overcome, what still remained was the need for supportive, like-minded, free-thinking friends. Indeed, friendship was central to Epicurus’ thought and life and he once said that:

Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole person, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship (LD, 27).

On another occasion he exclaimed that:

“Friendship dances around the world, summoning every one of us to awaken to the gospel of the happy life” (VC 52).

Epicurus saw that friends helped a person to gain at least two important things. The first was that they clearly helped making the basic necessities of life, such as food, shelter and general protection, easier to get and maintain. The second was that they could help us continue to be fully awake to the benefits of the Epicurean gospel of the happy life, a life blessedly free from fear of the gods, an afterlife,  and death. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that he seems once to have said: 

Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you are to eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf” (Seneca, Letters 19:10).


(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 22 minutes 35 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)


In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death and, as we explored last week, key to achieving this kind of life was friendship.

Clearly this can mean single friendships but Epicurus saw the need and value of larger communities too and he provided this in his own garden academy in Athens. Written above its entrance were these inviting words:

“Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure. The caretaker of [this] abode, a kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you with bread, and serve you water in abundance, with these words: ‘Have you not been well entertained? This garden does not whet your appetite, but quenches it’” (Seneca, “Epistulae morales ad Lucilium”, Epistle XXI).

Both Epicurus’ philosophy and his garden academy provided a hospitable gate through which all people, rich and poor, men and women, slave and free, were allowed freely to come and go where, through a process of mutually supportive philosophical self-cultivation, they were helped to fashion a form of life that, being free from the fear of the gods, an afterlife, and death was, indeed, tranquil and pleasurable and a style of living that others could also behold with pleasure.)

In this kind of philosophical garden community it was — and still is — possible to nurture all kinds of virtues that, to this day, continue to offer us what we can call “the salt of existence”, namely: love, affection, tenderness, sweetness, thoughtfulness, delicateness, forbearance, magnanimity, politeness, amenity, kindness, civility, attentiveness, attention, courtesy, clemency, devotedness, and all the words carrying a connotation of goodness (this list is gratefully taken from Michel Onfray’s “A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist”, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 49).

Talk 5—The Epicurean Garden Academy

(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 22 minutes 35 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)


In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death and, as we explored last week, key to achieving this kind of life was friendship.

Clearly this can mean single friendships but Epicurus saw the need and value of larger communities too and he provided this in his own garden academy in Athens. Written above its entrance were these inviting words:

“Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure. The caretaker of [this] abode, a kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you with bread, and serve you water in abundance, with these words: ‘Have you not been well entertained? This garden does not whet your appetite, but quenches it’” (Seneca, “Epistulae morales ad Lucilium”, Epistle XXI).

Both Epicurus’ philosophy and his garden academy provided a hospitable gate through which all people, rich and poor, men and women, slave and free, were allowed freely to come and go where, through a process of mutually supportive philosophical self-cultivation, they were helped to fashion a form of life that, being free from the fear of the gods, an afterlife, and death was, indeed, tranquil and pleasurable and a style of living that others could also behold with pleasure.)

In this kind of philosophical garden community it was — and still is — possible to nurture all kinds of virtues that, to this day, continue to offer us what we can call “the salt of existence”, namely: love, affection, tenderness, sweetness, thoughtfulness, delicateness, forbearance, magnanimity, politeness, amenity, kindness, civility, attentiveness, attention, courtesy, clemency, devotedness, and all the words carrying a connotation of goodness (this list is gratefully taken from Michel Onfray’s “A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist”, Columbia University Press, 2015, p. 49).

The first talk can be found at this link

The second talk can be found at this link 

The third talk can be found at this link

The fourth talk can be found at this link

The plaque in our Memorial Garden

READING: From “The Basics of the Deep Ecology Movement” by Arne Naess (Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess, ed. by Alan Drengson and Bill Devall, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley CA, 2008, pp. 105-106 [Here is a link to a preview of the the new Penguin edition])

Supporters of the deep ecology movement refer approvingly to a diversity of philosophers, cultural traditions, and religious trends. Some authors ask for clarification: Where is the essence or core? Is there a definite general philosophy of deep ecology, or at least a kind of philosophy? Or is it essentially a movement with exasperatingly vague outlines? I do not think it is desirable to do more than tentatively suggest what might be the essential ingredients of a deep ecology theoretical point of view. In what follows, I formulate some remarks that might be considered dogmatic. They are, however, only meant as proposals for people with a background similar to my own.

In order to facilitate discussion about the deep ecology movement among philosophers, it may be helpful to distinguish a common platform of deep ecology from the fundamental features of philosophies and religions from which that platform is derived, provided it is tentatively formulated as a set of norms and hypotheses (factual assumptions). The term platform is preferred to principle, because the latter may be misunderstood to refer to ultimate premises. Furthermore, the formulations of a platform should be short and concise (as a synopsis), whereas the fundamental premises are Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, or of other religious kinds, or they are philosophical with affinities to the basic views of Spinoza, Whitehead, Heidegger, or others. Different sets of fundamentals are normally more or less incompatible, or at least difficult to compare in terms of cognitive contents. Supporters of deep ecology may have great difficulties in understanding each other's ultimate view, but not sets of penultimate views as formulated as a kind of platform they have largely in common.
 

[. . .]
 
One must avoid looking for one definite philosophy or religious view among the supporters of the deep ecology movement. There is a rich manifold of fundamental views compatible with the deep ecology platform. And without this, the movement would lose its transcultural character. The trans-cultural character of the movement makes it natural that the wording of a version of the platform cannot be the same everywhere. A term like our planet, for instance, is unsuitable where people have no clear notion corresponding to the Western concept of a planet. The discussion has four levels: (1) verbalized fundamental philosophical and religious views, (2) the deep ecology platform, (3) the more or less general consequences derived from the platform—guidelines for lifestyles and for policies of every kind, and (4) prescriptions related to concrete situations and dateable decisions made in them. The term dateable refers to the trivial circumstance that a decision is made at a definite time, even if it has taken a year to arrive at.

The plaque in our Memorial Garden

On every morning order of service, and on a plaque in our Memorial Garden, there appear words attributed to one of the principal founders of our own liberal religious movement, the Hungarian Unitarian bishop, Francis David (1510-1579), namely “We need not think alike to love alike”. I say attributed because this exact phrase can be found nowhere in the written records even though in places he does, most assuredly, echo its sentiment. The closest match to this phrase was in fact uttered by Charles Wesley (1707-1788) the founder of the Methodist Church. But one should not be partisan about such things as it’s a sentiment that should, surely, be spread abroad more widely in our fractious world.

But, whoever first uttered this saying there is a significant problem about how to interpret it today . So, as I have in my last two addresses (HERE and HERE) I’ll begin with a little history to frame the matter.

In the Hungarian Unitarian Church (HUC) during the latter part of the 16th century this sentiment could only be interpreted one way. Having asserted an ultimate premise concerning the Unity of God and the humanity of Jesus the HUC necessarily found itself in conflict with the majority of Christians who asserted the tri-unity of God and the concomitant belief that Christ was the third person of this Trinity. This was an age when such conflicts about ultimate premises were exceptionally severe often resulting in imprisonment, exile and even execution for the minority group. Faced with this possibility (which all too often became a reality) the HUC simultaneously began to preach a doctrine of religious toleration. The sixteenth-century French protestant Sebastian Castellio (1515–1563) summed up this latter issue better than perhaps anyone else when, in 1562, he stated in his Contra libellum Calvini (Against the libel by Calvin) that “To kill a man does not mean to protect a doctrine, it means to kill a man”.

On this basis — i.e. thinking alike in terms of their own Unitarian ultimate premises — the HUC turned outwards to their more doctrinally orthodox neighbour churches and proclaimed: “We (i.e. the HUC that internally thinks alike) do not need to think like you Trinitarians in order that we may all, together, love alike.” The issue we must see clearly here is that the members of the HUC did think (more or less) alike and it was precisely the corporate strength they gained from holding these shared ultimate premises which allowed them strongly to assert the truth of, and struggle for, the toleration of religious differences concerning ultimate premises in the wider, public sphere.

Now fast forward into the civic, highly plural, multicultural setting of the mid-twenty-first century where this same motto, “We need not think alike to love alike”, has, in our own church tradition — and mostly unconsciously —, been turned thoroughly inside out. For we now not only take it for granted that the wider world around us is highly diverse in terms of ultimate premises, but we also take it for granted that, internally, we mirror this plurality of belief — even if it is to a somewhat lesser degree. In our local context in this church we know only too well that, when it comes to ultimate premises, we do not think alike; this person believes in a theistic or pantheistic God, that person is an atheist; this person thinks a Buddhist ontology is correct, that person thinks a Christian ontology is correct; this person is a religious naturalist and materialist, this person is . . . well we could go on and on, ad infinitum.

Without doubt this complex internal plurality of ultimate premises has had powerful knock on effects upon the general ability of our communities effectively to gather together their resources together so as to be able to put a collective shoulder strongly against this wheel or that wheel in order to affect this or that social, political and religious change in the public sphere. These effects will be, indeed are, felt to be both good and bad and there should be no surprise that amongst us views will differ about what effects are good and what bad.

One clearly bad effect — or perhaps it’s better simply to call it a “problematic and noteworthy” effect — is that we are now very, very much slower than we once were about coming to genuinely shared positions about what kind of actions we should be doing in the wider public sphere. Public, corporate action can be put off for long periods of time while we attempt to arrive at some meaningful shared concensus. I simply note that, unlike us, right-wing, hyper-conservative, illiberal groups seem to be much more able to act very quickly and decisively through the formation of their own common platforms (such as the promotion of racist and nationalist policies) which, in turn, can often put liberal and progressive groups like us firmly on our back foot. However, today I don’t want to dwell on this aspect but perhaps we should return to it at another time.

Despite this, one of the good effects — in my opinion anyway — is that our internal plurality of beliefs means it’s now very difficult to imagine us ever again becoming a religious community which could ever become completely committed to promulgating this or that single, totalizing, religious doctrine. As a free-religious tradition we — I think — all now feel strongly that all such totalizing doctrines are, in the long-run, a curse upon humanity and not a blessing. We have come to hold the view that, for the foreseeable future anyway, there will remain in play an enormous variety of different human perspectives on the nature of things and, therefore, we need to find ways to deal with this.

The pressing question that emerges here, is whether there exists a way — a method or process — by which such differences, tensions and potential conflicts in ultimate premises can, in fact, be used to generate meaningful ways by which people holding different ultimate premises can still “love alike”?

CLICK ON THE PICTURE TO ENLARGE THIS DIAGRAM

The answer is, I think “yes” and in passing last week during the conversation after my address, I brought into play the model I borrowed from Arne Naess (1912-2009) which I have used for the last decade in my own teaching, both within this church and in my public role teaching Jewish/Christian/Muslim relations. However, after I mentioned it I realised that many of you in the current congregation won’t know anything about it because the last time I explored it properly in an address was back in 2013. So let me briefly run through it again.

We’ll start at the bottom with level 1. Here you can see just a few of the perhaps almost countless ultimate premises that exist in the world, some of which will be found here. Although many of them will overlap and interpenetrate with each other it is vital to see that none of them can be absolutely reduced to or completely comprehended by any other. Christianity is not the same Judaism nor Islam nor the other way round. Neither is atheism the same as theism or vice versa. At this level it is clear that there is always going to be a great deal of disagreement and structural difference and we need to acknowledge this and not sweep it under the carpet.

Let’s move up to level 2. Despite this we are all aware that these very different ultimate premises are capable of articulating ideas that can can turn into “common platforms” designed to achieve certain things in the world. Notable well known examples of these include, the United Nations, Hans Küng's “Global Ethic”, Karen Armstrong’s “Charter for Compassion”, Médecins Sans Frontières, Greenpeace, treaties like the Kyoto Agreement, our secular democracies, the European Union, the National Health Service and many others. At the local level they might be common platforms to save a local school, building a children’s playground, organizing a better bus service or health care. At this very, very general level — where a common platform is stated in its most simple, concise way — the groups who have generated and supported supported it will, naturally, find a great deal of agreement between them.

Let’s now move to level 3. Here the various groups involved in the common platform that has emerged now have to sit down together to discuss how best to proceed in order to put it into effect. Each group, rooted in and acting out of their own ultimate premises, will have developed, often over centuries, certain deeply held norms and values which help guide them in engaging in what they consider to be appropriate “right” actions. Not surprisingly, at this level, an incredible amount of disagreement can enter into the picture as we try to decide what are the appropriate actions to bring about the shared desired end articulated by the common platform.

Naturally, during the discussions in level 3 some groups will have dropped out, but some will have arrived at a concensus about what action needs to be taken which brings us to level 4, action.

But, once the action has been agreed (whatever it is that is in accordance with the common platform) — via a journey from ultimate premises, through the articulation of a common-platform, through an intense discussion in which our norms and values are in play — the consequences of this action will later on demand a process of philosophical and theological reflection which is achieved by going back down through the levels (see arrow on right of diagram). What ever the final  action was, every group involved has to ascertain whether the action upheld their norms and values, was true to the basic aim of the common-platform and, lastly, whether it was consistent with their ultimate premises? During every journey through this process some change within a group nearly always occurs as it becomes clear that some ideas need to be held more firmly, some more loosely, whilst some may need to be modified or more subtly nuanced, and so on.

It is important to see that this process does not result in the reduction of one set of ultimate premises to another. Rather, firstly, it helps those different groups better to work together at the level of common platforms and, secondly, this better, practical working relationship (i.e. which is a kind of “loving alike”), has the beneficial side-effect of helping these very different groups sit better with their basic differences and disagreements, i.e. it helps a group see, say and mean that we need not think alike to love alike. Another way of putting it is that we learn the important lesson of being able to disagree with each other in better, and ultimately more constructive, ways.

One particular advantage of this approach is that, to use what is I hope an appropriate parallel, it keeps the genetic pool of human thought and action healthily large — different and often helpful perspectives, as well as subtle different nuances of meanings, are kept alive and, therefore, at least potentially accessible to human kind as a whole.

But, and it’s a vital and huge but, any religious or philosophical community goes seriously wrong whenever it seeks — whether consciously or not — to colonise level 2 and pretend that it is, itself, the common platform. There are countless historical examples of such attempts from obviously illiberal positions — for example Nazism, Stalinism, neo-liberalism, various theocracies and many others. But it is often forgotten that liberal religion can also often sin greatly in this regard, especially whenever it starts to believe that it has articulated some genuinely universal ultimate premises and is on the way to creating a pure, universal religion.

It's vital that even a very liberal church such as this one in Cambridge (which consciously emphasizes a certain kind of common platform over personal ultimate premises—see last week’s address) must take care to see that it always stays down at level one with everyone else and, through participating in an ongoing dialogue and general encounter with people who hold different ultimate premises to our own, to let genuinely common platforms emerge.

Naturally, not every common platform that gets put forward by divergent groups holding different ultimate premises is going to one we can support. For example we cannot get behind any kind of racist and nationalist common platform because it runs so counter to our ultimate premises and the norms and values tha come from them. But this truth simply means we are always-already called upon to find ways to work with other groups who hold different ultimate premises to our own in order to generate another kind of common platform that, in this example, is able to resist racism and nationalism and promote a genuine diversity of peoples and a certain kind of cosmopolitanism.

There’s no pancea to be found here, only the straightforward truth that groups who hold different ultimate premises can generate common platforms and so we are able to still say and mean, “We need not think alike to love alike” even though we do not (cannot) mean it in the way we did during the sixteenth-century.

This morning Susanna and I thought we’d take a quiet walk along the River Cam to Fen Ditton and sit by the river at The Plough reading in the sun. As yesterday I took some poetry by A. R. Ammons with me (this time his Collected Poems 1951-1971) and, because the day was such a bright one, it was perhaps no surprise that I found myself staying a long while with a poem called This Bright Day. As I sat with the text, looking now and then up and down river at passing rowers, swans, cormorants and ducks whilst, nearby, the last of the summer bunting fluttered in the warm breeze like Tibetan prayer flags, my phone twitched in my pocket. It was a call from the partner of a very elderly member of the congregation telling me that he had just been told she was now very close to death from pneumonia and asking whether I come to see them later on that day. I said I could and would and realised that Ammon’s poem had suddenly taken on a whole new poignancy for me on this bright day now touched by grief.

This Bright Day
A. R. Ammons

Earth, earth!
day, this bright day
again—once more
showers of dry spruce gold,
the poppy flopped broad open and delicate
from its pod—once more,
all this again: I've had many
days here with these stones and leaves:
like the sky, I've taken on a color
and am still:
the grief of leaves,
summer worms, huge blackant
queens bulging
from weatherboarding, all that
will pass
away from me that I will pass into,
none of the grief
cuts less now than ever—only I
have learned the
sky, the day sky, the blue
obliteration of radiance:
the night sky,
pregnant, lively,
tumultuous, vast—the grief
again in a higher scale
of leaves and poppies:
space, space—
and a grief of things.

This afternoon Susanna and I took a stroll across town to visit the Cambridge University Botanic Garden on a beautiful, sunny day where we took time to linger tranquilly in the sun; Susanna reading Rebecca Solnit's recent book, “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and me reading the poetry of Lucretius and A. R. Ammons. For those interested in such things the connection between these last two writers is very real, indeed, the American poet and translator Richard Howard once said that “Ammons is our Lucretius, swerving and sideswiping his way into the nature of things.”

Anyway, as we sat in the life giving sun contemplating the beautiful garden a few lines from Book Five of the De Rerum Natura struck me as particularly apt:

Piety is not to be seen often with head covered 
turning towards a stone and approaching every altar,
nor to lie prostrate on the ground with open palms
before shrines of the gods, nor to sprinkle altars
with a profusion of the blood of beasts, nor to join vow to vow.
It is rather to be able to look upon everything with a tranquil mind.

(Lucr. 5.1198-1203, trans. Walter Englert)

Talk 4—The importance of friendship

(Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 19 minutes 00 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.)

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.

Over the past three weeks we’ve briefly considered them in turn. But once these fears had been, or were at least well on the way to being overcome, what still remained was the need for supportive, like-minded, free-thinking friends. Indeed, friendship was central to Epicurus’ thought and life and he once said that:

Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole person, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship (LD, 27).

On another occasion he exclaimed that:

“Friendship dances around the world, summoning every one of us to awaken to the gospel of the happy life” (VC 52).

Epicurus saw that friends helped a person to gain at least two important things. The first was that they clearly helped making the basic necessities of life, such as food, shelter and general protection, easier to get and maintain. The second was that they could help us continue to be fully awake to the benefits of the Epicurean gospel of the happy life, a life blessedly free from fear of the gods, an afterlife,  and death. Indeed, it’s worth remembering that he seems once to have said: 

Before you eat or drink anything, consider carefully who you eat or drink with rather than what you are to eat or drink: for feeding without a friend is the life of a lion or a wolf” (Seneca, Letters 19:10).

The first talk can be found at this link

The second talk can be found at this link 

The third talk can be found at this link

Lit candle in the Cambridge Unitarian Church, Emmanuel Road

READINGS: 

The Five Points of Calvinism which both Universalists such as John Murray (1741-1815) and Unitarians such as James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) rejected are often known by the acronym: T.U.L.I.P.

TOTAL DEPRAVITY : Because of the fall, man is unable of himself savingly to believe the gospel.

UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION : God’s choice of certain individuals unto salvation before the foundation of the world rested solely in His own sovereign will.

LIMITED ATONEMENT : Christ’s redeeming work was intended to save the elect only and actually secured salvation them. His death was a substitutionary endurance of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified sinners.

IRRESISTIBLE GRACE : In addition to the outward general call to salvation which is made to everyone who hears the gospel, the Holy Spirit extends to the elect a special inward call that inevitably brings them to salvation.

PERSEVERANCE OF THE SAINTS : All who were chosen by God, redeemed by Christ, and given faith by the Spirit are eternally saved. They are kept in faith by the power of Almighty God and thus persevere to the end.

It was this kind of pernicious and cruel theology that we, as a liberal church tradition, have consistently opposed; a opposition most famously summed up by Alfred S. Cole who, in his Our Liberal Heritage, famously imagined the spirit of the times (the zeitgeist) saying to the English Universalist John Murray:

“Go out into the highways and by-ways of America, your new country. . . . You may possess only a small light, but uncover it, let it shine, use it in order to bring more light and understanding to the hearts and minds of men and women. Give them, not hell, but hope and courage. Do not push them deeper into their theological despair, but preach the kindness and everlasting love of God.”


From “A Theology of Personal and Societal Transformation: The Bicentennial Legacy of James Freeman Clarke” by Paul S. Johnson (Minns Lectures 2010)

In his history, The Unitarians and the Universalists, David Robinson asserts that James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888) was “one of the most important churchmen in nineteenth century Unitarianism and may be thought of as the most representative figure among the Unitarian clergy and leadership.” (Robinson, 1985, p. 234)
    [. . .]
    In 1886 Clarke published a series of essays under the title of Vexed Questions in Theology. The lead essay, The Five Points of Calvinism and the Five Points of the New Theology, contained the five points of Unitarianism for which he is principally remembered. Clarke begins the essay by naming the five points of Calvinism . . .
    [. . .]
    Revolving around the ideas of sin and salvation, these doctrines omit, claimed Clarke, the principle truths Jesus taught—“love to God, love to man, forgiveness of enemies, purity of heart and life, faith, hope, peace, resignation, temperance, and goodness.” Truer to Jesus’ teaching are the five new points he suggests: the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the continuity of human development in all worlds, or the progress of mankind onward and upward forever. These five points, which Clarke hoped would become the basis for a universal religion encapsulate what he had preached and written in his forty-three year ministerial career and thus are very good way of presenting his underlying theology and then relating them to contemporary Unitarian Universalism.


One of the consequences of being asked to write and record the early Sunday morning reflections for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire this month in five, two-and-a-half minute pieces was how it forced me to think clearly about what positive, unequivocal philosophical religion or religious philosophy I, personally, would like to pass on to anyone listening. I realized that it could only be a modern version of the philosophical approach first offered to the world in Athens some 2,000 years ago by Epicurus and then Lucretius. For those interested in hearing or reading what I’ve been saying, you can do that here.

Now, you may wonder, why am I not bringing this message to you today? Well, it’s because the opportunity to write and present these talks had another consequence in that it helped me further clarify the basic difference that exists between the personal rôle I temporarily have on the radio this month and the week to week, year to year public rôle I have here as your minister.

Whether rightly or wrongly, here on a Sunday morning, I have no mandate to offer you only my own preferred philosophical religion or religious philosophy; instead I am required to do something different, something quite unlike that required of ministers in other church settings.

To help understand just exactly what this “something different” is one needs firstly to see that until the early twentieth century things were not as they are now. Then — were Unitarians allowed by the BBC to broadcast, which we were not — the philosophical religion or religious philosophy I would have offered people on the radio would have been exactly the same as that which I offered you week by week from this lectern. This was because then there existed, more or less, something distinctive that could meaningfully be labelled “Unitarianism” — a liberal Protestant, Christian theology which promoted what its adherents believed were the truth and consequences flowing from the unity of an essentially loving God displayed, primarily and most perfectly, in the example of the fully human Jesus.

It’s important to remember that, although our denomination has always refused to adopt creedal statements of belief it has, at times, been happy to use guiding catechisms and/or general statements of belief and the most commonly adopted such statement both in the UK and the US at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was James Freeman Clarke’s very influential “Five Points of the New Theology” which were often framed and hung up in prominent positions in our churches.

This fact serves as a reminder that, until some ninety to a hundred years ago, a person would only become a Unitarian minister and/or join a Unitarian congregation in so far as they already subscribed — albeit completely freely and with a clean conscience — to this commonly held Unitarian denominational position, this “Unitarianism”. If you chose to join a Unitarian church you did so wanting, expecting, to hear this kind of theology preached to you week by week on a Sunday; you wanted the Five Points of the New Theology, you most certainly did not want the horrors of TULIP because you wanted not hell, but hope and courage. In short you wanted Unitarianism and Universalism and not Calvinism.

So, to return to my earlier point if, as a Unitarian minister, you were ever invited on to BBC radio to give a series of Sunday morning reflections you would have known exactly what positive, unequivocal philosophical religion or religious philosophy you wanted to pass on to the world and it was going to be the same one you offered your congregation in church later on that same day — it was Unitarianism — a religion concerned to speak about the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the leadership of Jesus, salvation by character, and the continuity of human development in all worlds or the progress of mankind onward and upward forever.

To be sure arguments were still had in the denomination over various theological details and emphases, and there were occasionally some more serious theological disputes but, in general, there existed a shared faith which was believed to help a person lead a good life and die a good death and able to say all along the way, as Martin Luther was reputed to have said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” It was a religious faith — an “-ism” — which you wanted confidently to share with the wider world.

But this thing which could meaningfully be called “Unitarianism” received the first of two mortal blows, during the First World War. Think about it, given that during this conflict the total number of military and civilian casualties was about 40 million, Freeman Clarke’s five points began to strike more and more people as being hopelessly naïve and fatally flawed. Belief in the liberal Christian, loving kind of supernatural God which was needed to underpin Freeman Clarke’s five points was becoming increasingly untenable and Epicurus’ ancient and famous set of questions began to strike powerfully home once again:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

The different, but intimately related, horror that was the Second World War, with its concentration-camps and nuclear weapons, dealt the second mortal blow to anything that could be called classic “Unitarianism”.

What followed was a slow but inevitable theological fragmentation in which individual ministers, members of congregations and whole congregations were each forced to try and pick up the pieces as best they could from the liberal theological wreckage of the two-world wars and put something together that was felt to be at least half-workable.

I ought to point out here that this was just as true for all other liberal protestant, Christian churches, not just our own Unitarian ones. Conservative churches had, of course, an easier time than we all did because, remember, they still had TULIP to fall back on and, underpinned as it was by a strong belief in a malevolent and brutally judgemental God, they could interpret the two world wars as being God’s just judgement upon humankind’s total depravity. But how could, how would, we liberals interpret it? Could this interpretation be done through a continued belief in and proclamation of an essentially loving God and the Five Points of the New Theology? Whatever you feel should or could have been the case, the historically arrived at answer has proven to be “No”.

Anyway, all this means that since 1945 no minister, no individual member, and no congregation connected with the name Unitarian, has been able to avoid dealing with the consequences of this situation and, at present, I see three ways forward currently being attempted.

The first is an approach which acquiesces to the fragmentary state of affairs but which simultaneously claims there exists — or can exist — a kind of new-age, inter-faith inspired universalist religious approach in which all the diverse and fragmentary religions and philosophies will be shown in truth to be ONE. It is no coincidence that, at present — and not without considerable controversy among us — more and more people calling themselves “inter-faith ministers” are seeking formal positions with Unitarian congregations.

The second is to adopt some clear, narrower doctrinal philosophical stance of some sort or another. Not surprisingly, where this is attempted, for the most part, it turns out to be the current personal religious philosophy or philosophical religion of the present minister. The spectrum of such stances runs from, at one end, to the re-adoption of a clearly defined liberal Christianity (including versions of classic Unitarianism) and, at the other end of the spectrum, to the adoption of avowedly non-religious, secular approaches akin to those found in groups such as the Sunday Assembly.

Clearly both of these approaches have their advocates and, to their supporters they will no doubt, seem to have their clear advantages. Personally, I don’t find either approach at all appealing because, in their different ways, both these options seem to me to be seeking to reintroduce something they hope will become the “new-Unitarianism”. However, I am so suspicious of all collective -isms that I’m fairly certain I will go to my grave trying to subvert them all. They seem to me to be very, very dangerous things. But, as always, in the conversation which follows this address and the musical offering, you are perfectly free to disagree with me about this . . .

However, it is this opening up of my comments to disagreement and critique that brings me to a third and way of dealing with the disappearance of classic Unitarianism which doesn’t, I hope, fall into becoming an -ism and which, for good or ill, is the one being tried here.

It is a project which is designed to do two things simultaneously which are, quite deliberately, in permanent and sometimes seemingly contradictory tension. To talk in American university terms the project here attempts to offer the congregation something in which “to minor”, and something in which “to major”. 

So, firstly, here’s that in which we “minor”.

This church community tries to offer a person some of the, thankfully, still serviceable critical and skeptical philosophical and religious ideas and tools left intact in the wreckage of post-war Unitarianism with which that same person can freely begin to hone a confident philosophical and religious position which they can hold with a clean heart and full pathos and which can ground their attempts to lead a good and meaningful life. Naturally, what this personal philosophical and religious position eventually turns out to be is going to differ from person to person and I hope, you have have found, or be on the way to finding, your own.

But, from the point of view of the public rôle of this church and my duty to it as minister, all these vital, actualized, personal philosophical and religious positions (including my own deeply held one that I am speaking about on the radio) are “the minor” subject, they are secondary to what it is we “major in” together.

This is because, in addition to helping each other to find a satisfactory personal philosophical and religious position, we are simultaneously engaging in the somtimes seemingly contradictory attempt to help each other also to commit to becoming men and women without fixed, final positions, becoming people who truly understand the supreme value of the freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today. Here we are together trying to become men and women ever open to what Henry David Thoreau called the “The newer testament — the Gospel according to this moment”. In other words here, together, we are majoring in becoming appropriately free spirits who have understood the supreme value of being able to change our mind if and when the evidence shows this to be necessary. This includes — of course — even being able to change our minds about our current philosophical and religious positions we’ve spent years honing.

Here, together, we learn that to be a completely unconditioned free spirit, never stopping anywhere at anytime to take a stand on any of important issues of our own day, is to be nothing more than an ineffectual ghost. Here, together, we also learn that to be a person dogmatically and uncritically committed only and forever to this or that -ism (whatever it is and no matter how carefully and rationally arrived at) is to be little more than on the way to demagoguery.

In this pleasant garden, somewhere in between ghosts and demagogues, here we try to grow the strange and rare free spirits which are the hoped-for fruit of the modest project underway here. What’s going on here is not, and cannot be, any kind of -ism — not even a new Unitarianism — but it can, and maybe even will, help you to find a firm enough personal faith which, to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, you can hold against your bones knowing your life depends upon it but which, when the time comes to let it go, you can let it go, let it go.


I tackle this same subject in a more systematic and extended way in my talk for the Sea of Faith conference in 2016 which you can find at the following link:

This morning I awoke to a pearl of an autumn day and so I set off to walk along the river Cam and across the meadows to Grantchester to enjoy a pint at the Green Man and then sit by the river to read and contemplate again the proem of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in the light of Thomas Nail’s remarkable new interpretation of the poem. It has to be said that when you’re sitting reading Lucretius in the sun on the bank of a flowing river, with the wind in the willows, the reeds and one’s hair it’s impossible not to make “a return to the most maligned idea of Western philosophy: movement” (Thomas Nail,  “Lucretius 1: An Ontology of Motion”, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p.22). A beautiful day in every way imaginable. As...

Talk 3—Losing our fear of death (Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 28 minutes 10 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.) In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death. This week we’ll look at the fear of death itself, coming, as it does for Epicurus and his followers, without a belief in an afterlife. Epicurus addressed this fear firstly by noting that everything which is for us desirable or un...

READING: From Leo Tolstoy’s “On Life” (1887) translated by Aylmer Maude (Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 2-4) Let us imagine a man whose only means of subsistence is a mill. This man, the son and grandson of a miller, knows well by tradition how to manage all parts of the mill so that it grinds satisfactorily. Without any knowledge of mechanics he adjusts the machinery as best he can, so that the flour is well ground and good and he lives and earns his keep. But having heard some vague talk of mechanics, he begins to think about the arrangement of the mill and to observe what makes what turn. From the mill-stones to the rind, from the rind to the shaft, from the shaft to the wheel, from the wheel to the sluice, to the dam, and t...

 Talk 2—Losing our fear of an afterlife (Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 21 minutes 50 seconds into the programme and finishes three minutes later.) In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death.  Today we’ll consider the fear of an afterlife. Epicurus saw in his own age, as we see in our own, that many people believed after death there will be for them another life. Uncertainties about what this will be like, a...

A statue of Nemesis READINGS: §78 “Daybreak” (1881) by Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, CUP, 1997, pp. 47-48) Justice which punishes.   — Misfortune and guilt — Christianity has placed these two things on a balance [on one scale]: so that, when misfortune consequent on guilt is great, even now the greatness of the guilt itself is still involuntarily measured by it. But this is not antique , and that is why the Greek tragedy, which speaks so much yet in so different a sense of misfortune and guilt, is a great liberator of the spirit in a way in which the ancients themselves could not feel it. They were still so innocent as not to have established an ‘adequate [i.e. appropriate] relationship’ between guilt an...

The Pashley Guv'nor at Mutlow Hill This morning, for what reason I know not, I got it into my head and heart to go and see how the only examples in East Anglia of our native juniper bushes, Juniperus communis , were fairing on the stretch of Fleam Dyke between Mutlow Hill and Balsham. I got to Mutlow Hill at about 1pm and stopped to have my lunch there in the company of Lucretius' poem De Rerum Natura, and then set off across the A11 to the south-eastern stretch of the dyke. I was pleased to see the juniper bushes flourishing and full of berries and, all along the way in the hot, early autumn sun and in the shade of the trees I found myself (perhaps inevitably) singing to myself Donovan's lovely song Jeniffer Juniper which, if you don't ...

Talk 1—Losing our fear of the gods (Hear the talk for a limited period of time at this link. The piece starts 18 minutes into the programme and finishes three minutes later.) In the 3rd century BCE, the Greek philosopher Epicurus developed a philosophy, the ultimate goal of which was a kind of peace of mind or tranquility that he called “ataraxia”. To achieve this he believed at least three common fears needed to be addressed and removed: fear of the gods, fear of an afterlife, and fear of death. Today we’ll consider the fear of the gods. Epicurus believed the gods existed but there is some ambiguity about exactly what he meant by this; one common interpretation is that he thought they were human projections of what the most bles...