Christ's Pieces in the late Friday evening sun Greetings once again from Emmanuel Road after a month spent in the heart of London. As always I trust that this finds you well (enough) as this challenging event continues to unfold. As you already know from an earlier piece written for you during this lockdown, I think this event has brought some further, significant challenges to the maintenance of any kind of supernaturalist belief and it has left me convinced more than ever that  only a fully immanent, naturalist and materialist religion is worth any salt, and it is certainly the only one I as your minister can from now on bring before you for consideration.   But, in addition to this obviously theological/philosophical matter, the eve...

Arlington Square Gardens, Islington Greetings to you all once again.  As always I trust you and yours remain as well as you can be under the current circumstances. I have greatly valued and enjoyed talking to those whom I have managed to contact this week and I very much look forward to being in touch with the rest of you [that is to say members of the church and folk on our mailing list] once again in the coming couple of weeks. As you will now all realise, my hope to be in touch with you all at least every two weeks has not come to pass because a fortnight ago I had to go down to London with Susanna to help to look after her dying daughter. Inevitably, this has taken up nearly all of my days and energy. The sad news I bring this weeke...

READINGS: Matthew 27:33-56 ‘Toward A Theology of Hopelessness’ by Miguel De La Torre Following on from this reading (and I ask you please do take the time to read it) I need to add some words from the blurb of De La Torre’s book ‘The Politics of Jesús’ to explain why, throughout the piece which follows, I spell Jesus’ name in it’s Hispanic form as Jesús: While Jesus is an admirable figure for Christians, ‘The Politics of Jesús’ highlights the way the Jesus of dominant culture is oppressive and describes a Jesús from the barrio who chose poverty and disrupted the status quo. Saying “no” to oppression and its symbols, even when one of those symbols is Jesus, is the first step to saying “yes” to the self, to li...

An eerie New Square Like (I am sure) many of you, there are moments when, whilst outside on my statutory, single period of exercise a day, the strangeness of what I am experiencing suddenly hits me and then I find myself struggling to find the precise language with which to describe it. As a recent article by Kaidi Wu (‘Hypocognition is a censorship tool that mutes what we can feel’) puts it: It is a strange feeling, stumbling upon an experience that we wish we had the apt words to describe, a precise language to capture. When we don’t, we are in a state of hypocognition, which means we lack the linguistic or cognitive representation of a concept to describe ideas or interpret experiences. Blossom on De Freville Avenue It’s a rem...

My temporary office in the church common room

After a long and challenging week (as I know it will have been for all of you) and having spent an entire day (Saturday) from dawn until dusk writing the following piece I find that, as 9pm approaches, I can no longer tell whether it contains anything more than mere, arrant nonsense. It’s certainly a flawed and far from perfect or finished piece. However, in the hope that it contains one or two useful goads to further thought in these difficult times, I hold my breath, ask for your forgiveness and patience, and press publish . . .

In a quiet moment last week (of which there were more than usual) I took some time to read an essay (Oakeshott as Philosopher by James Alexander) about the English philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) in which was quoted something from his earliest book Experience and Its Modes: ‘it is impossible to think in advance of experience, and no experience is merely empirical’ (Experience and Its Modes, Cambridge University Press, 1933, p. 117). Just to remind you, ‘empirical’ simply means that which is concerned with the observation and experience of actual events/things rather than trying to understand those same events/things firstly (and perhaps only) through the lens of some predetermined, abstract theory or ideology.

Before proceeding I should be clear I’m not suggesting that what follows is what Oakeshott actually thought but only those thoughts Oakeshott’s quotation has prompted me to think about in this new, disturbing and still unfolding experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Oakeshott’s words spoke powerfully to me as someone whose job requires me to produce some meaningful (and, hopefully, useful) copy each week and to deliver it up, in the moment, to an audience of some sort or another—until recently as an address in the Cambridge Unitarian Church on a Sunday morning and now only by email and via my blog.

For ministers of religion and politicians (‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ alike) the major temptation upon finding themselves in a new and challenging situation like this is, all too swiftly, to present to their audience some confidently and authoritatively expressed, soothing ‘big-picture’ about what the situation means for us—a picture primarily based, not upon actual events themselves, but upon their own preferred, predetermined, abstract theories or ideologies.

Probably like many of you, this week I’ve seen/heard online quite a lot of religious and political material like this and, to be frank, all of it has made me uncomfortable and some of it has made me more than a little queasy, especially those utterances which have called upon a supernatural god to provide help and salvation for us. For good or ill, I neither can nor wish to offer you such confident, authoritative and (superficially) soothing words. I think it’s far more honest simply to admit at the outset that not only do I have no sense of, or belief in, such a supernatural god (a sense that, for me, has only been deepened by this pandemic), neither do I have any firm and fixed ideas about what this event means for us now or will mean in the future, either as individuals, as members of a small liberal church community, as citizens of this or that village, town, city, country or, of course, as denizens of planet earth. In a wholly non-glib way all I can really say with confidence and authority is that ‘time will tell.’

The reason for saying this is because, as should be plain as a pikestaff, actual events are driving innumerable coaches and horses through aspects of everybody’s social, cultural, religious, political, national, financial and economic predetermined, abstract theories or ideologies. I hope it goes without saying that a fair few coaches and horses have recently driven roughshod through some of my own long-held theories and ideologies—the truth is, of course, that no one will escape experiencing something of this.

Given that such a global pandemic hasn’t occurred since 1918 (and never under the conditions that currently obtain in our modern, inter-connected, hyper-mobile world) it is surely right to say that thinking about what this event means cannot be occur before our experience of it. Consequently, it seems to me that, before I even vaguely begin think about (let alone speak or write about) what the current situation means or will mean, or what I believe (or hope) will (or should or may) come afterwards etc., it’s vitally important for me, for us all, properly to enter into this experience now and so allow it to teach us some necessary lessons.

Although there are surely others, it seems to me that we enter into this experience in at least two primary ways although, as we shall see, they are not really separate ways at all but, instead, intimately entangled and moving lines of thought/action.

The first way to enter into this experience now is a way of action. Observing the way nature is naturing in the form of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the first necessary action for most of us to undertake (counterintuitively to so many people in this age of excessive and obsessive activity and consumption) is to be doing ‘nothing’ by staying at home and keeping apart from others as much as is humanly possible. It is through this kind of active-inaction that (again counterintuitively in our age) we simultaneously find ourselves able to continue actively to show our love to one another. Not, of course, through a loving, physical proximity to each other (marked by a handshake, a hug, a kiss, a drink down the pub, a party in a restaurant or park, etc.), but through an active, loving, physical ‘distance’ that, almost paradoxically, is joining many of us exceptionally closely in a spirit of love and compassion. It’s worth noting the strange truth that although we now find ourselves at a ‘distance’ and ‘far’ away from each other, through our renewed communications via email, telephone, blogs and video conferencing, in some very significant ways we’ve never been so ‘close’ or so ‘near’ to each other than we are at the moment. In short, for our own and other’s health and well-being (especially those involved in our essential, key services), this active-inaction is one key way we are currently being called upon to enter fully into this experience now.

Before going on to a second way to enter into this experience now it’s also worth noting—hard though it can be to acknowledge and internalize when so many lives, including our own, are at risk—that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is in fact playing a crucial part in this discovery of a new way of showing compassion and love to each other. For us to move forward wisely from this point it seems to me vital, therefore, that we do not come to see the virus as an some alien, external, ‘unnatural’ enemy, but to see it as playing a natural, active part along with ourselves in our world’s ‘conversational’ way of coming to be. Of course, there are good reasons why we are right to seek out strategies and, hopefully, vaccines to ameliorate its worst effects upon us. But, at the same time, I remain convinced we must gracefully and gratefully allow the ‘voice’ of the virus powerfully and creatively to inform our national and global conversations about how we might best organise our highly interconnected, highly mobile human societies in the future. SARS-CoV-2 is a partner in this conversation—a scary and dangerous partner to be sure—but a partner nonetheless.

The second way to enter into this experience now is a way of observation and reflection. Again these are both kinds of active-inactions. At this moment in time, as nature naturing in the form of the SARS-CoV-2 virus teaches us the importance of stepping back (at least temporarily) from each other’s obviously physical forms, might not nature simultaneously be ‘encouraging’ us (figuratively speaking, of course) also to be stepping back from and letting go of many of our old, previously held, abstract theories or ideologies about the world in order that we can, a) better observe and see what is actually happening (perhaps we should remember here the Chinese proverb that the best way to clear a muddy pond is to leave it alone) and, b) to reflect on what possibilities and opportunities for our future ways of being in the world may or may not, in time, genuinely be developed into actuality? As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi notes ‘we should never forget that the present constitution of the world contains many different (conflicting) possibilities, not only one.’ The modest hope here is that these two things will help us be ready to take advantage of those moments when we can genuinely begin to extract and implement what we feel to be the best of the many immanent futurabilities that are always inscribed in the present (cf. Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility, Verso Books, 2017, pp. 2-3). Of course, there is no guarantee that our own preferred, possible outcomes will come to pass rather than those we fear and would surely loathe but, without doubt, we’d be foolish not carefully to have made our observations and reflections so that, if and when, a propitious moment obtains we can quickly put our shoulders as firmly and confidently as we can to our preferred wheel’s direction of travel.

OK, so far, so good. But what about the second half of Oakeshott’s sentence in which he wrote ‘no experience is merely empirical’? Well, I take him to be reminding us that, although proceeding ‘as if’ there exists a genuinely ‘detached’, apparently ‘passive’ way to observe the world in order to discover what it is all about and what it might be teaching us about reality is, at times, a helpful, enabling fiction, it’s not wholly true.

The nineteenth-century French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–1878), who almost certainly believed in this fiction, once wittily said ‘When you go into the laboratory do not forget to leave your imagination in the ante-room with your overcoat; on the other hand never forget to take it away with you when you go home’ (quoted in The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry, Maurice O’Connor Drury, Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 264). However, our contemporary sciences have slowly but surely helped us see that everything, but everything, is always intra-acting with everything else, that there is no absolute separation between the laboratory and the ante-room/wider world, and that we are always in the world fully wrapped up, so to speak, in our (human) overcoats because there is no ante-room in which to hang them at the beginning or the end of the day. The truth is that we are always bringing something to the world in the form of ourselves that will inevitably affect, in often invisible and unexpected ways, the way the world is unfolding.

As the American feminist and physicist Karen Barad (b. 1956) has noted, we have been realising more and more that the world is not made up of discrete and essentially inert things about which our observations can ‘simply “disclose preexisting values” or properties but, in fact, [our observations] also always play a role in constituting them.’ In a recent paper Gamble, Hanan and Nail go on to observe:

‘Barad argues that since there is in fact no strict or fixed boundary line dividing even a scientific laboratory from the rest of the world, humans can therefore never observe the universe as though from outside of it. Thus, she argues, “[t]o the extent that humans participate in scientific or other practices of knowing, they do so as part of the larger material configuration of the world and its ongoing open-ended articulation.” As such, humans (like everything else) always partly constitute and are partly constituted by that which they observe’ (Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan & Thomas Nail (2019) WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?, Angelaki, 24:6, 111-134, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2019.1684704).

This pandemic and our current scientific knowledge are, together, reminding us in some deeply challenging ways that our world is intra-active (see three-minute video explained below) all the way up, down and around and that we can never truly isolate ourselves from any other thing, whether that’s each other, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the spring blossom bursting out around us everywhere, the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, thin sects, plants, fish, coral, rock, soil, air, sun, water or anything else, ad infinitum. In short ‘No property of any discernible thing that is—whether its physical features, agency, or even its speech or thought—entirely precedes or remains unchanged by its actions or encounters with other things’ (ibid).


In the twinkling of an eye and at the same time, all of us across the planet earth are suddenly faced with the pressing need to find new ways in the present to live fully, justly, decently and compassionately together with all things in the full knowledge that we and all things are all, always-already, in this together and that there never has been, is not, and never will be any such thing as genuine self-isolation from any other thing. It has been impossible for our species as a planet-wide collective to think this in advance of our actual experience of this global pandemic and we are all suddenly discovering, first-hand, every minute of every day, that this experience is not merely empirical—only about putative, cold, static, flat facts concerning independent things existing ‘out there’—but, for us, existential and intra-acting through and through.

Whenever the restrictions on our movements and physical proximity are finally lifted then will be the time to sit down together once again and see what the experience of this has meant to and taught each of us. It is only out of this kind of compassionate conversation born of shared experience that the best possible human futures might just, in time, come. But, as I say, time will tell, time will tell.

Venus in the backyard of the manse

Last year on Mothering Sunday I gave an address called ‘The maternalizing of matter and the materializing of the mother’—A poetic, supreme fiction for our age and, should you wish, you can read it again at the following link:

The maternalizing of matter and the materializing of the mother—A poetic, supreme fiction for our age.

The Roman poet, Lucretius (c. 99BCE – c. 55BCE), is through and through a materialist (although one of an unusual kind) and so for him there is no supernatural realm. Instead, the immanent, constant, self-creative movement of matter is all that is necessary for the world to be all that it is and is becoming. Stated so boldly, some people find this a cold and bleak way of understanding how the world is, but Lucretius’ genius was to offer this insight in a poetic way that helps us begin to intra-act creatively and compassionately with matter through its poetic ‘face’ (species) as a kind of mother. Lucretius’ primary ‘face’ (or ‘icon’) for this eternally moving, creative, material mother/mothering is the goddess Venus.

But, in holding Venus up as a goddess in this fashion, Lucretius does not depict her as some kind of actual supernatural being standing outside nature making/ordering the world but, instead, as a material symbol/icon through which we can more easily meditate upon the way the material world continually makes and remakes itself without the need for gods. We may say that Lucretius’ depiction of Venus in his poem is a kind of poetic supreme fiction which aims both to help us understand, and be passionate about, the way nature natures (natura naturans) and also how her mothering hand, which is always-already making and touching us and all things, simultaneously, is also always-already being touched back by what it touches (cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty quoted in Thomas Nail: Lucretius 1, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p. 88).

As you will read in the Mothering Sunday address I noted above, Thomas Nail reminds us that Venus is

. . . the mother [māter] of Aeneas [one of the mythical founders of Rome], from which the Latin words māteriēs [material] and māteria [matter] also come. Māter is also the tree or matrix, the source of the tree’s growth, whose Indo-European root is described by the Greek word hūlē, meaning tree and matter. First philosophy, for Lucretius, begins with the mother, with matter itself, with the creative power of matter itself to produce all things, the aeneadum (ibid, p. 23).

Nail points out that Venus becomes the material mother-goddess and so the concept of māteriēs ‘both maternalizes matter and materializes the mother at the same time.’

In other words, the mother of all creation is herself made of the same matter that she creates. Her materiality is the same materiality of the world. The mother of matter is the matter of the mother. Her creation is, therefore, the process of matter’s own process of materialization. Maternalization is materialization (ibid, p. 24).

Now you might think that, although philosophically and poetically this may be all very well and good, in the end, it is neither really here nor there as it has no real, practical, pastoral or religious consequences. Perhaps for some this is, and will remain, true but, on Friday of last week I was privileged and honoured to inter in our small memorial garden behind the church the ashes of a young girl called Sophie. The mother, the only person apart from me present, wanted the service to be on the spring equinox (half-way between light and dark, life and death) and for it to be a celebration of the cycles of life in which Mother Nature (māter) takes her own material (māteria) back into herself before gifting that same matter back by creating/sustaining new forms of life. Before we began we planted a daphne (‘Perfumed Princess’) as it was before this young plant that we were gently to lay young Sophie’s ashes to rest. Below, I reproduce the short service we used and I hope that you can see how the opening of Lucretius’ poem, in which he invokes Venus, spoke powerfully to the themes expressed above and served to help us both feel supported as material beings by the touch of Mother Nature’s material, mothering hand. As we touched her—in the form of the soil, Sophie’s ashes, our memories of Sophie (in the material form of our firing synapses), the wind, light, water, the Daphne etc.—she touched us and, in that intra-action (or so it seemed to me), there was the profound experience of knowing that everything touched is always-already being touched back by what it touches. A feeling only reinforced by the fact that, on what was a mostly overcast day, the sun came out and touched us with its warmth and we looked up towards it to touch it with our faces and sight.

At the end of the service we watered the soil around the daphne and above Sophie (an that act that was, of course, another kind of touching and blessing) and then the mother tied two Romanian martinkas (which I know through Bulgarian family connections as martenitsas) around the young plant. I did not know the mother was going to do this until that very moment but it was a truly powerful and affecting act because the symbolic meanings of the martinka/martenitsa resonate so strongly with all the Lucretian themes/ideas expressed above. Here’s the relevant passage from the Wikipedia page:

The newly planted daphne with its two martinkas/martenitsas

The red and white woven threads symbolize the wish for good health. They are the heralds of the coming of spring and of new life. While white as a colour symbolizes purity, red is a symbol of life and passion, and so some ethnologists have proposed that, in its very origins, the custom might have reminded people of the constant cycle of life and death, the balance of good and evil, and the sorrow and happiness in human life. The Martenitsa is also a stylized symbol of Mother Nature, the white symbolizing the purity of the melting white snow and the red setting of the sun, which becomes more and more intense as spring progresses. These two natural resources are the source of life. They are also associated with the male and female beginnings, and in their balance, with the need for balance in life.

In short, Friday’s service, although it was clearly a moment of profound grief and sadness, with spring blossom and flowers blooming everywhere around us in the garden it was also brought a powerful, healing understanding of in what consists our life (plants, earth, sun and humans) together as mortal, material beings. For our own generation now in the middle of this still evolving pandemic—a time that will assuredly be touched by profound grief and sadness—such an understanding of our own mortal, intra-acting material lives has never been more vital.


It is good to be together at this time and place because we need the comforts both of nature and those we can give one another: human concern, support and love. We have been gathered together here on this Spring Solstice by death. But it is not death really, but life, that has gathered us here—the life that was Sophie’s and the life we share. It is because Sophie loved us and we loved her that we honour her memory this way.

In an immediate and very real way, because this is such a final and physical act, this is the most difficult one we must do when someone whom we loved has died. Yet now, as we stand under the rounding dome of the sky, with the resilient and good earth beneath our feet, washed by sunlight and air, we are helped to know, deep in our flesh, the sure cycles of nature, the fit of a human life span into the seasons of the generations, the earth, and the universe and we understand that there is an unmistakable rightness to what we now do.

¶ A moment of silence . . .

¶ Reading: Proem to Book One of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (trans. David R. Slavitt, University of California Press, 2008):

Mother of Aeneas and of his Rome, and of gods
and men the joy, dear Venus, who underneath the gliding
heavenly signals busies the seas with ships and makes
earth fruitful (for only through you are living things conceived
and because of you they rise up to bask in the light of the sun):
from you the harsh winds flee and the skies’ black storm clouds scatter
at your approach; for you the intricate earth sprouts flowers,
wide ocean roads subside into gentle smiling, and furthest
reaches of heaven glow serene in response to your prompting.
In the spring’s first days, the nurturing western breezes breathe
free again, and birds in the air, smitten by you,
warble the news of your coming, as beasts of woods and fields
cavort in the meadows and splash through brooks—and all for love.
Under your spell, all creatures follow your bidding, captive
eager even. Look to the teeming seas, the mountains,
the fast flowing streams, the treetops, or rolling gorse where the birds
flutter and dance the reel of lust as earth once more
renews itself as you have ordained, for you alone
govern the nature of things, and nothing comes forth to the light
except by you, and nothing joyful or lovely is made.

So bearing the naturalness of death to life in our minds we bid farewell to Sophie as we have known her. We honour her completed life and treasure her memory. Now we commit her ashes to the ground in the certainty that the cycle of life continues.

¶ The ashes are scattered . . .

¶ A further moment of silence . . .

We are glad Sophie lived. We cherish her memory. We leave our dead to the keeping of this peaceful plot of earth. With respect we say farewell to Sophie and, in love, we will remember her forever.

Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

READINGS

Matthew 6:19-29 (trans. David Bentley Hart):

[Jesus said:] Do not store up treasures for yourself on the earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves penetrate by digging and steal; Rather, store up for yourself treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves neither penetrate by digging nor steal; For where your treasure is, there your heart will also be. The lamp of the body is the eye. Thus if your eye be pure your entire body will be radiant; But if your eye be baleful your entire body will be dark. So if the light within you is darkness, how very great the darkness. No one can be a slave to two lords; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will stand fast by the one and disdain the other. You cannot be a slave both to God and to Mammon. Therefore I say to you: Do not worry, regarding your soul, what you will eat; nor, regarding your body, what you will wear. Is not your soul more than food and your body more than garments? See the birds of the sky—that they neither sow nor reap nor gather into granaries; and your heavenly Father feeds them; are you not more excellent than they? But who among you can, by worrying, lengthen the span of his life by a single cubit? And why do you worry over clothing? Look closely at the lilies of the field how they grow; they neither labor nor spin; Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his glory was garbed like one of them. 


Fifth Elegy (extract) from the Duino Elegies 
by Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. C. F. MacIntyre)

Angel, if there were a place we don't know, and there
on some ineffable carpet, the lovers who never
could bring off their feats here, could show
their bold lofty figures of heart-swings,
their towers of ecstasy, their pyramids
that long since, where there was no standing-ground,
were tremblingly propped together — could succeed
before the spectators around them, the innumerable silent
       dead:
would not these then throw their last, ever-hoarded,
ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally
valid coins of happiness
before that pair with the finally genuine smile
on the assuaged carpet?

Fifth Elegy (extract) from the Duino Elegies 
by Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Angel ! : If there were a place that we didn't know of, and
       there,
on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed
what they never could bring to mastery here—the bold
exploits of their high-flying hearts,
their towers of pleasure, their ladders
that have long since been standing where there was no
   ground, leaning
just on each other, trembling,—and could master all this,
before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless
       dead:
Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,
forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid
coins of happiness before the at last
genuinely smiling pair on the gratified
carpet?


Given our current situation, with all the worries it naturally brings, it seems to me impossible at the moment to give any address which does not, in some fashion, directly relate in the most positive ways possible meaningfully to the current situation. To do otherwise would be, at least in my opinion, merely to be sticking one’s head in the sand — a foolish strategy at any time, but especially at this moment of time.

Naturally, I do not wish to diminish the very significant, and possibly huge, dark and downsides to what may transpire in the coming weeks and months but I do wish to emphasise the possible and, at times, perhaps actual important and necessary upsides even though, at the moment, they may seem to be extremely limited and apparently insignificant. I think it’s worth remembering the old proverb that the darkest place is at the bottom of the lighthouse, i.e., even as it shines a saving light out into the gloom right where we are standing it is as dark as dark can be.  

Given this fact it is vitally important always to remember another proverb, namely, that ‘great oaks from little acorns grow’ and so my strategy for today, and for the next few weeks, will be to consider, as best as I can, the ‘little acorns’ wherever I find them in the hope that they may, in time, truly turn into great oaks.

So, for the first of my possible little acorns I want to turn again to someone whose work has had a profound and positive influence over my own thinking over the past decade, the Italian philosopher, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi.

In this address, for your own ease of access later on to the ideas expressed here, I concentrate only upon what Beradi says in a short, twenty-four minute filmed interview made in 2011 to accompany his then new book, ‘After the Future.’ You can watch that by clicking the link below.


I should also add that, although this address starts with a rehearsal of some dark but important (if very sketchy) genealogical notes about how we got where we are today, they are there simply to help us better grasp the message of hope Berardi wishes to brings us. So hang in there.

Berardi begins by pointing out that, for our own Western European and North American culture, ideas of in what the future consists have for a long, long time now been tied closely to the hope and desire for more energy, more speed, more strength, more consumption, more things and, alas, more violence; simply put the the idea of the future has all been about more and more and more.

Berardi feels that the early twentieth-century Italian Futurist movement can be seen as our final step into this modern, futurist age.

Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an international artistic and social movement which originated in Italy and which delighted in wholly rejecting the past primarily by embracing speed, technology, youth, violence, war and the what were then very new material objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the modern, industrialised city.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), the movement’s founding figure, brought all these things together in his Futurist Manifesto of 1908 which was to prove highly congenial to the nascent Italian Fascist movement. It’s a nasty document that exalts violence and particularly despised anything to do with women or what it thought was feminine because, for the Futurists, the woman/the feminine was the epitome of weakness and sensuousness, in short, everything that modern energy wanted — and still wants — to forget.

Berardi feels, and I agree with him, that Futurism played a key part in bringing the world to its current state of despair because it helped deliver up to us a futurism without a future. Modern capitalism is, of course, a child of Futurism and we can see this particularly in its obsession with more and more speed and more and more growth which, in turn, has led to the destruction of our world in the name of the future — or rather, it has led to the world’s destruction in the name of its idea of the future.

By 1977 — the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee — many people like Berardi were beginning to intuit that if this was the future then, as far as we were concerned, there was no future. Indeed, for my generation, Generation X, nothing, but nothing, summed-up this nascent feeling better than the Sex Pistols’ single of that year, ‘God Save the Queen’, which contains the oft repeated refrain, ‘no future, no future for you.’


Consequently, as the decades have passed, retrospectively, 1977 has become for many of us the symbolic watershed moment when we were first forced to begin to seek ways to articulate something beyond the future because, for us, the future was over. Here, of course, is the origin of Berardi’s book title ‘After the Future.’

There have been many responses to this feeling and not all of them have been positive — after all the Sex Pistols were themselves far from being noted purveyors of hope — but some responses have been, including that suggested by Berardi. Berardi was amongst those who became aware that, because our very possibility of joy was being destroyed by capitalism and growth, we needed to find ways to live in a post-futurist fashion.

A key act of rebellion was to find more time to live in the present and to choose what he calls the slowness of pleasure. In this he reveals some very strong Epicurean tendencies, the only philosophy which seems to me to offer us a genuine way out of our current malaise. Anyway, at this point in his interview Berardi quotes Jesus teaching about the birds of the air and flowers of the field because, for Berardi, they are unparalleled examples of creatures who don’t work in order to accumulate or possess things but are, instead, creatures who never cease to live in time (in season) and to find their pleasures in time. Bifo’s basic point here is that unlike most other things, time is not something you can accumulate as you can with, for example, gold, money and material things. When it comes to time you can only live in it, taking pleasure in the becoming other of yourself, being yourself without protecting yourself. This, for Berardi, is post-futurism.

To live like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field requires what Berardi calls ‘ungrowth’ — an ugly word that he admits is only an approximation to a better concept we still need to invent. However, essentially, it’s a word which helps us see the need for our society to let go of its obsession with growth and to encourage the kind of responses we begin to make when we realize, truly realize, that we do not need more money and more things and that what we most certainly need is more time, more joy.

Berardi notes that ‘ungrowth’ seems to some people to hint at something ‘less’ but this is not at all the case. It’s a word that seeks to remind us that what we need is not less life or  less pleasure. No! Not at all. It’s a word that reminds us we need more life, more pleasure. But this, in turn does not imply more consumption, more merchandise or more work. Berardi is insistent that we are dying because of the huge bubble of work and that we have all been working too much over the past 500 years. Berardi’s call, delivered straight to camera is, therefore:


It is in this context that Berardi reads the extract from Rilke’s Fifth Duino Elegy that you heard earlier. I realise that on the surface it’s an allusive and apparently obscure text but in the context of Berardi’s discourse I think it’s actually a fairly straightforward one.

What we have is (were it possible) a poet asking an Angel what would it be like were we who are utterly obsessed with the future — that imagined future of more and more and more gain and more and more and more material goods — what would it be like if we (and the dead of countless generations around us) could see, actually see, two lovers consummate their love on that beautiful carpet, both fully in the moment, both fully in time, both fully taking the slow, bodily pleasure and joy in their becoming (each)other? In other words, it is to be asking something akin to what would it be like were we able to live like the birds of the air and the flowers of the field?

What might seeing a couple be like this make us do? Well Rilke suggests, is would make us willing to cast on to that carpet everything, but everything we had accumulated, even our last, ever-hoarded, ever-hidden, even unknown, eternally valid coins of happiness and that act of giving would, finally, bring to our lips and whole being perhaps our first genuine, smile.

Seeing this conjunction of bodies also serves to remind us we, too, have a body and that the deep joys and pleasures this body can bring us can only be had in the moment, in the now, in the encounter and embrace of others. For Berardi this is all about becoming a singularity, that is to say becoming ourselves in the act of being slowly, pleasurably, joyfully intertwined with the other. This intra-connected way of being in the world is in stark contrast to the modern, capitalist obsession with individuality and which has continually encouraged only accumulation and the separation of the self from the world.

Berardi wants us to see that the way we have been in the world for far, far too long has caused us to forget both our body, our place in time and the expressions of love which cannot be accumulated.

But our capitalist world — until only a few weeks ago — wanted only our fragments of time (think here of the gig economy with its zero hours contracts and no sick- or holiday pay); it most certainly did not want us as true embodied, social human beings.

I fully realise that current events are deeply frightening and worrying and what transpires may (in fact I’m sure, will) bring us real suffering. I cannot pretend otherwise. But, notice this. In the twinkling of an eye, our capitalist world no longer needs (or can now have) our time and we now simply have to find another way of being together that is not directed at gain, at accumulation, at getting more and things, but which is directed at being together, like Rilke’s lovers on the carpet, lovingly, compassionately and supportively in this moment now.

Shocking and difficult though this moment is and will remain for a good while yet, it does offer us an opportunity to come back together lovingly embraced one with each other on the ineffable, assuaged carpet of this moment now. Give that this is a flu pandemic this embrace cannot be a literalistic one but it can be a philosophical, religious, spiritual, artistic and social one through the sharing of story, poetry and song, perhaps something akin to that presented by great Italian Renaissance author Boccaccio’s (1313-1375) in his famous work, “The Decammeron” set in 1348 whilst a terrible plague running unchecked in Florence. Boccaccio’s response to this was to begin to articulate a simple, civil humanism of neighbourly love which is able confidently to act upon the maxim: Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti — It is human to have compassion for those in distress. [I’ve written about this in another context at this link.] It strikes me that Berardi (and Epicurus) offer us powerful resources to do this in our own time.

But this moment of loving embrace and togetherness that Berardi and I are advocating cannot be accumulated for the future — it can only be expressed in now and in every consecutive moment hence because there is no such thing as love but only acts of love. In the end, as our own religious tradition’s central exemplar Jesus always knew, only love displayed to our neighbour in the present moment will ever be sufficient to save us all.

Lucretius contemplating how nature works Introductory meditation (excluding the Lord’s Prayer) adapted from ‘An Epicurean Gathering’ arranged by me, Lewis Connolly (until recently the minister of the Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House) and Dean Reynolds: The Roman poet Lucretius wrote: In the murk of our darkness, you, Epicurus, raised your blazing lantern to show us the blessings of life. And we follow you, walking with confident footsteps the trails you have blazed, not to be your rival, but in admiration and love, and happy to have your example to guide us. [. . .] And so, we begin to follow Epicurus’ thoughts, his arguments, and his reasons and, as we do, our mind’s terrors abate, while the opaque walls of the world open wide ...

For last Sunday’s service I wrote a piece called ‘A world without gain?—An address for Fairtrade Fortnight meditating on a thought by Karl Polanyi and with an after-thought drawn from Paul Mason’ in which I asked the following question: What would fair-trade look like in a world that had been able to free itself from the motive ‘gain’ as its central principle and which has an economic system run on noneconomic motives and which organizes itself on the principles of reciprocity or redistribution, or householding, or some combination of the three? After giving the address, both in the period of conversation in the service itself and during the bring and share lunch afterwards in the hall, I was asked about what my own practical...

Polanyi teaching at the Workers’ Educational Association, c. 1939 (William Townsend) Mark 8:35-37 trans. David Bentley Hart [Jesus said:] For whoever wishes to save his soul will lose it; but whoever will lose his soul for the sake of me and of the good tidings will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole cosmos and to forfeit his soul? For what might a man give in exchange for his soul?  Mark 12:28-31 trans. David Bentley Hart And one of the scribes, approaching, hearing them debating and perceiving that he answered them well, asked him, “Which commandment is first among all?” Jesus answered: “The first is: ‘Hear, Israel, the Lord our God is One Lord, And you shall love the Lord your God out of your whole he...

A Straw Bear in Whittlesea READINGS: Matthew 13:44-52 (trans. David Bentley Hart) [Jesus said:] “The Kingdom of the heavens is like a treasure that had been hidden in a field, which a man found and hid, and from his joy he goes and sells the things he owns and purchases that field. Again, the Kingdom of the heavens is like a merchant looking for lovely pearls; And, finding one extremely valuable pearl, he went away and sold all the things he owned and purchased it. Again, the Kingdom of the heavens is like a large dragnet cast into the sea and gathering in things of every kind: And when it was filled they drew it up onto the strand and, sitting down, collected the good things in vessels, but threw the rancid things away. Thus it will b...

“Sappho of Eressos”—Roman copy of a the 5th C. BCE Greek original READINGS Two Fragments by Sappho trans. Willis Barnstone Afroditi and Desire It is not easy for us to equal the goddess in beauty of form   Adonis desire and Afroditi poured nectar from a gold pitcher with hands Persuasion the Geraistion shrine lovers of no one I shall enter desire Return, Gongyla A deed your lovely face if not, winter and no pain I bid you, Abanthis, take up the lyre and sing of Gongyla as again desire floats around you the beautiful. When you saw her dress it excited you. I'm happy. The Kypros-born once blamed me for praying this word: I want Papyrus by Ezra Pound Spring . . . Too long . . . Gongula . . . Song by Robert Creeley What do you want, l...

The Plague of Athens READING: Lines 58-78 from Book VI of the De Rerum Natura ( The Nature of Things ) by Lucretius trans. by David R. Slavitt (University of California Press, 2008, pp. 253-254) . . . But people / tend to revert under stress to their earlier superstitions and imagine cruel taskmasters, omnipotent beings we wretches / ought to fear and appease, even though clear logic / sets forth those things that can be and those that cannot and shows us / the boundaries of the different domains that not even the gods / are able to cross. But faulty thinking leads men astray. / What you have to do is spew out all those absurd ideas / and get them far behind, unworthy as they are / of the gods whom they unwittingly insult in a descriptio...

This morning Susanna and I took a slow and pleasant walk to the Cambridge University Botanic Garden in some lovely winter sun. Each season has its pleasures and, as Housman wisely reminded us, we must drink in season and not try to rush the coming of spring or, indeed, rush the coming in of anything. If we can do this there is a chance that we shall live before we die and so, together, Susanna and I did a little lovely living before we die. Along the way I took a few photos and include them here for your pleasure. All taken with a Fuji X100F Just click on a photo to enlarge it    A. E. Housman: Poem XXII from More Poems (1936)  Ho, everyone that thirsteth         And hath the price to give, Come to the stolen waters,         D...

An example of verwindung in the everyday world of ropes READINGS  1 Corinthians 1:25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. Tao Te Ching (from Ch. 78, trans. Addiss and Lombardo) Nothing in the world is soft and weak as water. But when attacking the hard and strong Nothing can conquer so easily. Weak overcomes strong, Soft overcomes hard. From Tanabe Hajime’s God by James W. Heisig: (Nanzan Institute for Religion & Culture, Bulletin 38, 2014, p.40) The Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962) went through a long and complex development in his understanding of the word ‘God’ but throughout his life there seemed to be in play one, basic question. Here’s how...

The post will ‘go live’ automatically at 11pm GMT on the 31st January, at the tragic and foolhardy moment the UK formally leaves the EU. I’m not going to sitting around waiting to press the publish button but will (I hope) be doing something else more useful instead, though what that will be I have, as yet, no idea. It may simply be to be asleep after taking an early night. Who knows.

But whatever I turn out to be doing, the moment itself can only be one characterised by a deep sadness, both for me personally and for many millions of citizens in the UK and the European Union. I resent, with a passion, the fact that my European citizenship has been stolen from me by those who led a campaign that, straightforwardly and simply, lied and dissembled. From my perspective as a disenfranchised European citizen Brexit was, and will remain, an illegal and profoundly immoral project.

I don’t really know what can be said that will make the actual moment feel any better and perhaps only music and art can help. It’s in this context that I point readers to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s (1969–2018) last solo composition, a series of pieces for string quartet called “12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann”. They came about thanks to a British philanthropist called Richard Thomas who wondered:

‘. . . if it would be possible to commission a work that was the result of a genuine collaboration between a composer and a painter – not simply one responding to the work of the other. He had collected the work of the German painter Thilo Heinzmann, and asked that artist if there were a composer he’d be interested in working with. Heinzmann immediately named Jóhann Jóhannsson.’

And so Jóhannsson work came into being.


But there was always another important layer to the work as Thomas makes clear in the liner notes to the recording:

‘“For me the essence of the European Union is cultural unity,” he says, “and the way to express that, is to do it.” So here was a project involving an Icelandic composer living in Denmark, a German painter, a British catalyst, and subsequently Echo Collective, the Belgium-based collaborative ensemble that frequently worked with Jóhannsson. 12 Conversations with Thilo Heinzmann became – in part, at least – a plea for a continued commitment to what some have called the “European Project.”’

And, in the end, this plain and simple plea for a continued commitment to what some have called the “European Project” is all this post is and can be given the brute, political fact that the moment of Brexit is now upon us.

This morning I decided to take a short spin over to Girton and then back into Cambridge via Impington Windmill (a photo of which magnificent building heads up this post). The main reason for going out was simply the desire/need to be outside washed by the cold wind and winter sun after too many days spent indoors. But Girton particularly called to me as a destination because my reading of Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s truly wonderful, insightful and exciting book “Pantheologies” had sent me back with a new set of insights/thoughts/questions to the work of one of my own heroes of pantheism, namely the extraordinary, Cambridge botanist and philosopher, Agnes Arber (1879-1960) whose final book, entitled “The Manifold and the One”, I accidentally stumbled across in 2007 whilst staying in Wells-next-the-Sea. (At this link, should you be interested, you can find an address on her and the book that I gave back in 2017.) I recommend wholeheartedly getting hold of a secondhand copy of the “The Manifold and the One” and also reading through the following paper:

St Andrew’s, Girton

Agnes Arber’s grave, St Andrew’s, Girton

Agnes Arber’s grave, St Andrew’s, Girton

St Andrew’s, Girton, looking east

St Andrew’s, Girton, looking west

The Raleigh Superbe outside St Andrew’s, Girton

St Andrew’s, Girton

Houses hard-by St Andrew’s, Girton

Plaque on a bench on Washpit Lane, Girton. Who were these two women who died so young?

The same bench as above, now close to final disintegration

The end of Washpit Lane now terminated by the hell that is the A14

The end of Washpit Lane with a turn-off to farm buildings

The end of Washpit Lane looking back towards Girton

A winter scene on a footpath near Girton

A winter scene on a footpath near Girton

A winter scene on a footpath near Girton

INTRODUCTION This address is in fact two addresses or, to be a bit accurate, there is a meta-address as well as the one obviously given below.  The meta-address concerns the fact that, in liberal religious circles (the one I most often inhabit and in which this address was given) most of our time is spent pro-fanum, i. e. in the precincts outside/before ( pro- ) any holy place/site/santuary ( fanum ) discussing whether, if and how we can/might actually enter, with a clean heart and full pathos, into such a place of faith . We are prone to like having all our justifications and reasons lined up neatly and fully and rationally thought through before we can even deign think about entering such a place. Whilst this critical/sceptical way of...

I'm a member of Clergy Letter Project which has just published a letter on the Climate Crisis. If any readers of this blog are, themselves, members of the clergy (no matter what from what faith tradition) then please consider clicking on the link below to go directly to the website, and/or read the text below. If you are minded then to sign the letter, even better.

http://www.theclergyletterproject.org/Climate_Letter/ClimateLtr.html

The Climate Crisis: A Clergy Call to Action

We are faced with a crisis today.  

A multitude of human activities including the use of fossil fuels, large-scale agriculture, and large-scale land clearance have modified the natural processes that sustain life in every ecosystem and culture on the entire planet.  This is no longer a question for debate.  The question we (humans) must answer—and the impetus for this letter—is:  “How will we respond to this crisis?”  

We call on leaders from all of the many faith traditions and ethical communities throughout the world to unite with scientists, activists, and concerned citizens as one voice in calling for humanity to recognize the crisis, our role in creating it, and our collective responsibility to immediately identify and enact solutions. 

Scientific understandings and religious teachings alike teach us that we are connected as one human family and, further, we are connected to all life.  Thus, our own survival is inextricably connected to the responsible stewardship of the Earth and all its creatures.

The many faith traditions that exist across the world, while differing in specific beliefs and expressions of their convictions, share many common values.  One of those is a commitment to care for the disenfranchised.  We know that the people with the least access to resources experience the greatest suffering as a result of a changing climate.  Ecological insecurity reinforces inequality.  We have a moral and ethical responsibility to advocate for those who are vulnerable and/or voiceless.  

We clergy signing this letter pledge ourselves to express our love for humanity and for all life on Earth by advocating for an immediate change in our behaviors that continue to threaten the health of the planet, its people, and their varied cultures.  We urge you to join us in the education and motivation of our fellow planetary citizens, and to help us unite and to take the steps urgently needed to save our home.

We must remember, in this work, to be kind to one another.  It is easy to let the panic, the frustration, and the pain turn us against one another, to speak in harsh judgment, and to act in self-righteous anger, but we will only move forward together.  It is not only important what we do but how we do it.  We must acknowledge our shared needs and celebrate our differences in meeting them – but do so with a compassionate, honest, and committed regard for the Earth and its inhabitants.  This is what brings us joy in the work and hope for the future.

The climate is changing, but there is also evidence of a changing climate in public opinion and resolve.  People are ready to insist on and be a part of the necessary change.  People are ready to explore what it takes to remake our societies in response to this challenge; to turn the world around.  

Our religious communities should lead in asking a simple question:  How can we be good ancestors?  A powerful question.  A spiritual practice.  A call to action. 

Join us in this work.  The time is now.

On Saturday in the company of an old college friend, Graham, Susanna and I took a spin over towards Peterborough to the village of Whittlesey to take part in the Straw Bear Festival which you can read all about at this link. After spending a very enjoyable morning there we travelled on a couple of miles further to visit the village of Stanground and the church of St John the Baptist & St Michael & All Angels. The reason for this latter visit was because of our shared enjoyment of E. G. Swain’s “Stanground Ghost Tales” (1912) which were set in and around the church. You can read the stories by clicking this link.

I took a few pictures whilst there and post them here for your pleasure.

All photos taken with a Fuji X100F

Just click on a photo to enlarge it.

12th century Saxon, Lampass Cross

12th century Saxon, Lampass Cross

The eastern end of the church. Note the gate on south side. See the story called The Eastern Window.

The east window with John the Baptist in the second light from the right. See the story called The Eastern Window.

Introduction to the reading I subscribe to a online group called “The Marginal Mennonite Society” — indeed, I consider myself to be a Marginal Mennonite because I find myself very much in agreement with the spirit of their public declaration. For your information and, I hope interest and enjoyment, we’ll read that in a moment. But, having admitted this affiliation, as a minister on the roll of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches it seems important to point out why this is neither odd nor in conflict with my formal status as a minster.  It is because our own church’s origins in Poland during the sixteenth-century are to be found in exactly the same broad, Radical Reformation, Anabaptist movement that g...

Window in St Olaf's Church, Wasdale Head READINGS: Psalm 121 (AV) I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. Mark 1:14-15 The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good new...

The Nativity Set in the Cambridge Unitarian Church INTRODUCTION In my Christmas Day address I explored with you the thought that when we read the nativity stories — and, today, the associated story of the visit of the Magians (see David Bentley Hart’s translation below)— we are not reading descriptions of actual events because thanks to a couple of centuries of good biblical scholarship we are sure as eggs is eggs that this is a piece of pious, poetic fiction; beautiful and compelling, yes, but fiction nonetheless. I suggested, instead, that what we have before us is a story written (or more probably borrowed and adapted) by Matthew which had allowed ‘something [to] well up in the inner reaches of [his] consciousness’ Michael ...

A few photos from New Year's Day on Christ's Pieces, Jesus Green and Midsummer Common, Cambridge All taken with a Fuji X100F, all straight out of the camera jpegs Just click on a photo to enlarge Christ's Pieces Christ's Pieces Christ's Pieces Christ's Pieces Christ's Pieces with the Unitarian Church in the distance on the left Christ's Pieces Christ's Pieces Christ's Pieces Christ's Pieces Belmont Place looking into Jesus Lane Jesus Lane  Public lavatories and hayloft by Midsummer Common  Trees surrounding Jesus College, from Victoria Avenue London Plane tree on Jesus Green  Trees around Jesus College from Jesus Green Avenue of London Plane trees, Jesus Green Avenue of London Plane trees, Jesus Green Trees around Jesus College from J...

Spinoza in a window of George's Meeting House (Unitarian), Exeter READINGS Psalm 74:16-17 The day is thine, the night also is thine:  thou hast prepared the light and the sun.  Thou hast set all the borders of the earth:  thou hast made summer and winter. Night and Death (1828) by Joseph Blanco White (1775–1841) MYSTERIOUS Night! when our first Parent knew   Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name,   Did he not tremble for this lovely Frame,   This glorious canopy of Light and Blue? Yet ’neath a curtain of translucent dew,   Bathed in the rays of the great setting Flame,   Hesperus with the Host of Heaven came,   And lo! Creation widened on Man’s view. Who could have thought such Darkness lay concealed   Within thy b...

‘The Nativity at Night’ (1490) by Geertgen tot Sint Jans

For those of us who have become profoundly sceptical about the historicity of the nativity stories and the many naive, theologically realist meanings given to them by the Christian tradition, one of the simplest ways creatively to enter back into the living spirit of the stories is to remember that they were not written as descriptions of an actual event real or imagined.

To many people this may seem to be bit of an odd thing to say since the stories have gifted us what is an utterly unforgettable and iconic mise-en-scène — literally a ‘placing on stage’ — in the form of the classic nativity scene which is reproduced in paintings, plays and models around the world.

Our back-reading of these stories over some two-thousand years have made them stories seem to us so obviously to be descriptions of this mise-en-scène that we have utterly lost sight of something which was of central importance to their writers, traditionally named Matthew and Luke.

One of four views of Tintern Abbey by Frederick Calbert (1815)

To help you sense what this ‘something’ is (or might be) I need to bring before you the insightful reading of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798’ made by the Britsh contemporary philosopher and Buddhist, Michael McGhee. Here are the poem’s opening eight lines again:

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! And again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain springs
With a soft inland murmur. Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
Which on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion, and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky. 

McGhee observes that the point:

. . . is not that the steep and lofty cliffs should stimulate the idea of a more deep seclusion than the greatest that can be imagined, but that the scenery speaks for, is correspondent with, the possibility of a state of mind and it is that which, if it achieves reality, becomes the object of further comparison . . . [the state of mind] beckons towards deeper experience which in turn resonates with the words: indeed we discover the source of the resonance that beckoned (Michael McGhee: Transformations of the Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice, CUP 2000, p. 126, his emphasis)

I realise that this is quite a difficult paragraph to understand, especially on a first hearing but the key thing to grasp is that McGhee thinks Wordsworth has felt that the physical scene before him corresponds in some powerful way with his ‘state of mind’ and his associated insights into how the world is and his place in it. Wordsworth writes about the landscape, therefore, not in order to describe it to us as a writer of a straightforward guide book might try to do, but in order to set up the possibility that it will resonate with us in a similar fashion such that it brings about in us what he hopes will be the same (or at least very similar) state of mind.

I cannot emphasise enough that the point here is ‘the state of mind’ not the description of the landscape scene. Wordsworth’s wider hope is that if his poem can help this state of mind achieve a certain reality for both him and we the reader then we can begin to talk with each other about that, and this is something we can do anywhere, even ‘in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din / Of towns and cities.’

His further hope is that by comparing our different experiences of this state of mind we will both beckoned towards a deeper experience which continues to resonate with the words of the poem and which, ultimately, may help us, as Wordsworth thought, ‘into the life of things’ and so, perhaps, discover the source of the resonance that beckoned.

In this poem ‘the source’ seems to be something that is pantheistic in nature, perhaps something akin to Spinoza’s ‘deus sive natura’, god-or-nature, whom we evoke at the beginning of every morning service here. In any case, as Wordsworth says Aside from this, for us ‘with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy’ we are, he feels, able to ‘see into the life of things’ and experience, as some lines later in the poem tell us, ‘a sense sublime . . .

Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

On a very day to day practical level Wordsworth felt that all this could bring to us

that blessed mood, 
In which the burthen of the mystery, 
In which the heavy and the weary weight 
Of all this unintelligible world, 
Is lightened.

Anyway, it has long seemed to me highly likely that the writers of the nativity stories were attempting to achieve something similar.

The stories were written because in observing the process that leads up to and includes the birth of any child (not Jesus himself, of course, for the writers were writing many years after Jesus actual birth of which there is absolutely no first-hand account) the authors had themselves experienced ‘certain conditions in which their minds were set in motion’ (p. 124) which, to quote William James from his ‘Varieties of Religious Experience’, allowed ‘something [to] well up in the inner reaches of their consciousness’ (William James quoted by McGhee p. 17). The authors then tried to communicate this whole experience to us through means of ‘aesthetic ideas and images’ centred on this person called Jesus; in other words they ‘gave us an approximation of this experience and, in so doing, gave it the semblance of objective reality’ (McGhee p. 119) — namely a child who was god, a god who was a child, a god who is in the world with us (Immanuel), and our world which, all in all, is in god.

But whether my personal sense of their state of mind is right or wrong, the semblance of objective reality they gave their state of mind were, without doubt, their respective (and actually very different) nativity scenes. The problem for those of us, in a rational, freethinking, Radical Enlightenment inspired church tradition such as this, stems from the fact that the semblances the writers created were so stunning and attractive that over the intervening two-thousand years their aesthetic ideas and images have all too often degenerated into forms of naive theological realism within our culture.

As an intellectual and religious community we have, quite rightly, rejected all such naive theological realisms and this was a very good, and very necessary, thing to do. But the downside of our protestations, and I think it is a significant downside, is that at Christmas (and, actually in many other situations) we have been too quickly led to dismiss stories — like those about the nativity — as being nothing more than pretty but ultimately meaningless and dispensable faulty descriptions of the world.

But what might emerge for us if we could reconnect with the thought that perhaps the writers of the nativity stories (and other examples of religious stories) were not trying to describe or explain things in naive, theologically realist ways, but simply trying to communicate to us a certain, ultimately shared, state of mind?

That seems right to me and so I’d encourage you to contemplate this thought further in the coming months and years.

All I can say on this, as on most Christmas mornings, is that the resonances set up by the steep and lofty cliffs above Tintern Abbey create in me a state of mind that seems strongly related to the resonances set up by looking at the nativity scenes and the associated state of mind they help create in me.

As I read and look at the nativity scene, especially in the picture ‘The Nativity at Night’ (1490) by Geertgen tot Sint Jans — where, you will see, he has left an empty space by the crib-side in the central foreground so you can yourself join the holy family, assorted angels and ox and donkey in pondering the Christ-child — my state of mind can only be described, as I have already indicated, as pantheistic in a way close to that talked about by Spinoza, and so I cannot but help see before me in the Christmas mise-en-scène a motion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.

Was this what the gospel writers actually intended? Was their state of mind and my own the same? I cannot, of course, ever know for sure.

But of one thing I can be absolutely sure. We must never be seduced into thinking that the nativity stories can be reduced to being naive theological realisms. That we are here together this morning indicates that in the nativity stories there is a hum of a creative, natural energy with which we can/do resonate.

So go on, why not risk moving close to the crib once again and see what state of mind the resonance sets up in you? Perhaps, if we’re attentive enough, we might still just sense **the source** of the resonance that beckoned and find ‘that blessed mood, / In which the burthen of the mystery, / In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.

Happy Christmas to you all.

The nativity scene in the Cambridge Unitarian Church READINGS  The Shepherds and the Angels (Luke 2:8-19) In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,  ‘Glory to God in...

READINGS The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) in David Bentley Hart’s translation (2017) And Mary said, ‘ My soul proclaims the Lord’s greatness, and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour, because he looked upon the low estate of his slave. For see: Henceforth all generations will bless me; because the Mighty One has done great things to me. And holy is his name, and his mercy is for generations and generations to those who fear him. He has worked power with his arm, he has scattered those who are arrogant in the thoughts of their hearts; he has pulled dynasts down from thrones and exalted the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. He has given aid to Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, just ...

This morning (Friday 13, 2019) at the Cambridge Unitarian Church we put up our Christmas Tree but, look behind it at the food bank collection box(Trussell Trust) and remember that, as from today, food banks across the UK will form part of the new normal . . .

During Easter 2018 I wrote about the dangers presented by the methods used by Vladislav Surkov in Putin’s Russia. During this General Election Dominic Cummings & the Tory Party have shamelessly begun to use the same methods. For what it’s worth at the following link you can read my old warning: ADDRESS “ After this, nothing happened ” —What Vladislav Surkov’s dark arts can teach us about Black, or Holy Saturday

READINGS: Luke 2:13-14 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” From ‘History’ by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Used as the epigraph to the first edition of Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” (1882) To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.  Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1886 preface to “Human, All-Too-Human” (1879), trans. R.  J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1986). A step further in convalescence: and the free spirit again draws near to life—slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustful...

As my post yesterday will have revealed, I was one of those invited to attend the opening of the new mosque here in Cambridge. However, only yesterday afternoon, I became aware that the ceremony was to be attended by the Turkish President  Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This  meant that, with the deepest sadness imaginable, I was simply not able to attend the event. I was going as the minister of a  local  free-thinking, democratic, liberal-religious community (the Cambridge Unitarian Church) joyfully to celebrate the opening of the building with  local  Muslims. But I could not, nor ever will, take part in an event that willingly draws into the wider Cambridge community a world leader whose entire way of being in the world runs totally c...

The shocking news that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been invited to the opening of the beautiful new Cambridge mosque tomorrow has meant that, with the deepest sadness imaginable, I will simply not be able to attend the event. I was going as the minister of a local free-thinking, democratic, liberal-religious community (the Cambridge Unitarian Church) joyfully to celebrate the opening of the building with local Muslims. But I cannot, will not, take part in an event that willingly draws into the wider Cambridge community a world leader whose entire way of being in the world runs totally counter, not only to everything for which my own religious tradition stands, but also counter to everything for which a modern, democratic, cosmopolitan city such as Cambridge stands.

Naturally, in the future I will continue to engage in a positive and friendly way with the mosque and it's associated communities but tomorrow, I fear, I will be absent from what should have been a joyous occasion for the whole city.

In the mad world in which we live I was deeply concerned that this story might not be true but I have checked on the website of the Turkish President and, alas, it seems painfully true. You can read the page yourself at the following link (or click on the picture below) to read the text.

https://tccb.gov.tr/en/speeches-statements/558/113757/president-erdogan-to-visit-the-united-kingdom

I haven’t posted many photographs recently for which I apologize — I mostly post them on Twitter on this account @caute — but here are a few from today. Susanna and I often visit the Cambridge University Botanic Garden on my days off (Monday and Tuesday) by going via the lovely chapel at Emmanuel College where Susanna does the flowers. This lovely, sunny and frosty early winter morning we did just that and here are a few photos taken both in Emmanuel College and at the Botanic Garden. Enjoy!

The park opposite the Cambridge Unitarian Church this morning In recent days I've had the opportunity to talk at length with a member of the Unitarian congregation here in Cambridge who is a post-graduate philosopher at one of the nearby colleges. The conversation we had was both about conversation itself and also the role of a minister when open conversation is as foregrounded as it is here in the Cambridge congregation (see the morning order of service). During the course of our conversation I mentioned a piece I recently wrote called Being an umpire not a player  which drew heavily on some ideas borrowed from the philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990). Since then we have had a useful exchange of emails and below is my own reply t...

Mary C. Durst, Bathing at Hunstanton Cliffs , Norfolk, 1888 READINGS Isaiah 26.4 Trust in the Lord for ever,    for in the Lord God    you have an everlasting rock. Isaiah 44.8 Do not fear, or be afraid;    have I not told you from of old and declared it?    You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me?    There is no other rock; I know not one.  Isaiah 51:1 Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness,    you that seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were hewn,    and to the quarry from which you were dug. IF ANYTHING WILL LEVEL WITH YOU WATER WILL  by A. R. Ammons Streams shed out of mountains in a white rust  (such the abomination of height)  slow then into upland basins or high marsh  and slowing drop...

Blue skies and sun in the park opposite the church this week To see a pdf copy of the order of service please click on this link. OPENING READING  Matthew 5:38-45 [Jesus said:] ‘You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you. You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for ...

The main cast of characters in Dad's Army  INTRODUCTION  A couple of weeks ago I had occasion to answer a question in the conversation after the address by using a scene from an episode called “A Man of Action” from the British 1970s comedy series ‘Dad’s Army’ in which Private Frank Pike gets his head stuck in the railings of a park gate. Today, I want to use it again in order to help me take a serious look at something about the structure of the ethical demand that was noticed by the twentieth-century Danish philosopher, theologian and ethicist Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). So here’s the story again but, as I begin, I should note that it’s taken from the version aired on the radio rather than the television. You ca...

The Mann Gulch fire, 1949 Luke 12:54-57 Jesus said to the crowds: ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you immediately say, “It is going to rain”; and so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat”; and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time? ‘And why do you not judge for yourselves what is right? —o0o— Norman Maclean (1902-1990) from his notes written as a possible fore piece to Young Men and Fire. As I get considerably beyond the biblical allotment of three score years and ten, I feel with increasing intensity that I can express my gratitude for still being aroun...

In his memoir, the philosopher Norman Malcolm recalls that Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed ‘that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes (without being facetious)’ (Norman Malcolm in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p.28).

This thought, to which I will return in a moment, was very much in my mind throughout the process of creating the new website and publicity material for the Cambridge Unitarian Church because, as you can see there and here, the logo makes use of a deliberate joke in the form of a play upon the words ‘non-prophet’ and ‘non-profit’. Both the designer, Rob Kinnear from the ‘Out of House’ design agency, and we hope that the juxtaposed meanings of these homonyms, additionally juxtaposed with three very traditional words, ‘Cambridge Unitarian Church’, will make people stop and chuckle and then wonder what on earth might be might meant by this non-facetious joke; to ask, what kind of church would that be like?

Before exploring this question directly, if provisionally, it’s worth noting one of the most attractive things about juxtapositions is that they don’t brow-beat a person with the kinds of pre-determined messages usually given out by churches but are, instead, open invitations to the reader to ask themselves what the juxtaposition might mean, to what might it be pointing or suggesting, and so on.

As Raymond Geuss points out, such juxtapositions can be particularly helpful in inviting a person, ‘to pay attention to something usually overlooked or taken for granted, which seems to have a unity that upon inspection dissolves. The world can occasionally turn itself inside out or upside down’ (Geuss, A World Without Why).

So, in the joke ‘A non-prophet organisation’ juxtaposed with the traditional name ‘Cambridge Unitarian Church’, what overlooked or taken for granted thing or things are we asking people to pay attention to and think about?

Well, in the first place it’s the idea that membership of a church community requires from a person a belief in the primary way by which traditional, metaphysical religion has gone about providing the world with ‘answers’ — namely through prophets and prophecies.

The problem is, of course, that this way of providing answers, having the status of coming from some putative, authoritative God, has all too quickly and all too often, turned them into repressive and rigid dogmas which, even when our knowledge about the world has significantly changed, have successfully impinged upon our our freedom to be tomorrow what we are not today.

It’s not the case, of course, that in this local church we’re unconcerned about the need to seek appropriate, provisional, contemporary answers to life’s perennial questions but, to draw upon Rilke’s insight found in his ‘Letters to a young poet’, it’s simply that we feel it’s always important to be patient towards all that is ‘unsolved in our hearts’ and to try to ‘love the questions themselves’ by ‘living the questions now’ (p. 35). For many years we have sought to do this by engaging together in critical and creative conversations which genuinely seek to draw and build upon the knowledge and insights of the many rather than upon the pronouncements of any single, charismatic, (self)authoritative figure (whether understood as human or divine). In this community, we have come highly to value the exploratory, tentative footprints made by all kinds of people walking convivially together in creative conversation (‘pedesis’) more than we do demands that we must all follow some predetermined blueprint imposed upon us by one prophet or another. Here, our faith is rooted in the belief that it is only by working together conversationally upon life’s questions that we’ll be able to move on appropriately by continuing, again as Rilke said, ‘to live along some distant day into the answer.’

In our exploratory, attentive walking together — as scientists, historians, poets and artists — we are discovering more and more that the world in which we live is always open and being endlessly made and remade out of complex flows, folds and fields of natural matter and that indeterminacy plays a vital role in all things. This means that all the details about the future are never fixed in any absolute sense and so we cannot know for certain, in the present, what all aspects of the future will be like. This is especially true when it comes to the complex, indeterminate flows, folds and fields that make up humanity’s ever-changing and developing cultural, religious, artistic, technological, political and economic ways of being. Because of this, there can, in truth, be no such things as prophets and prophecies, by which I mean people who can, unerringly and for all time, deliver up to people the eternal truth of how the world will and must be, religiously, morally, politically, economically, financially or ecologically.

Because the future cannot be known in any absolute way (because the future is never already there before us but something always to be made in the present) it is, therefore, up to us always to be doing the best we can now, hand in hand with each other and consciously working within the natural limitations nature has gifted us in this neck of the vast cosmos.

This means that our task is not to become prophets articulating unerring prophecies about the future but people able to live well in the present—as Rilke said, by living the questions now. The best we can hope for is that this modest, experimental, non-hubristic, inquiringly conversational way of living in the present may at times prefigure in the here-and-now better ways to think about how we might live in the future. Wasn’t this, after all, exactly what Jesus did? This means we can only truly live prophetic lives by refusing to be prophets able to utter unerring, true prophecies. Such static, dogmatic prophesies will never, thank heavens, come true because life is always-already more beautiful, complex improvisational, temporary and risky than that.

Now, when you look closely at the historic development of the Unitarian movement we can see that we have always been suspicious of prophets and have instead, and on the whole, preferred exemplars. In his important work ‘De Jesu Christo servatore’ (1578) our earliest important theologian, Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), rejected the idea of that Jesus was a prophet with a fixed prophetic vision of the future kingdom of God and, instead, he saw Jesus as an exemplary figure showing what a selfless dedication to God (or we might say today ‘nature’ or ‘reality’) in the present looked like. As this idea developed and deepened within our communities over the next four centuries the world’s great religious figures such as Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha and so on, all came to be seen, at their best, as exemplars and not prophets. To us they became people who helped show us (albeit often incompletely and imperfectly) some of the positive ways humanity might choose to go on their exploratory, conversational way. But, be clear, these figures did not show us—nor ever could have shown—the only way we must go on.

The many ways we actually go on (for we are nothing if not committed to a kind of pluralist cosmopolitanism) are best thought of as lines of movement which are constantly being made and remade in the present as the complex flows, folds and fields of exemplary people (and ideas) knot, conjoin and converse in this way here, and that way there, and so on endlessly. It is this constantly intermingling and mixture which ensures that the future always remains open and is never something finally arrived at because it’s something always being woven. If one word runs through the whole of nature like the word “Clacton-on-Sea” ran through my childhood stick of rock, it is the word futurability.

Our fervent hope is that, more often than not, the future will be shaped most powerfully, not by prophets and prophecies but, instead, only by the ongoing collective actions of gentle, well-educated, genuinely free-thinking thinking men and women committed to task of living well through informed, democratic conversation and inquiry.

Let me now turn my attention to the unwritten implication in our non-facetious joke that this is also a ‘non-profit organisation’. This appears to be the less theological and religious half of the joke but I hope you will see this is not at all the case.

Being a non-profit organization is a central concern of the radical, progressive religious, political and ecological vision we’re seeking to articulate here. Here, we try never to see people, ideas or natural entities merely as ‘resources’ from which we can extract some surplus profit for our own individual, or some putative god’s, or the church institution’s, theological or financial benefit and gain but, instead, to find ways to superadd meaning and worth to every life and every thing in a way that helps us develop a deep sense of being at home together in the world, reciprocally commingled with all other sentient and non-sentient entities.

Holding this view we have become increasingly aware that the capitalist myth (especially in its neoliberal forms) which believes we can, forever and ever, continue to extract from people and the wider world increasing profits via constant production and growth, is destroying both our own well-being and that of the whole planet. As the ‘Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual’ put it ‘[t]he financial establishment colludes with the government to create rules designed to put everyone in debt; then the system extracts it from you’ (p. 1). Given this, clearly one important job at hand—religiously, politically, economically, financially and ecologically speaking—is to resist this kind of world-view by consciously not making a profit from what have been called the world’s ‘natural resources’ but, instead, to be living the kinds of lives where everything is gently and consciously folded back into the life-giving flows, folds and fields of life for the mutual, reciprocal benefit of the whole. Here, we are people who feel, as Greta Thunberg feels, that: ‘For too long the people in power have gotten away with ... stealing our future and selling it for profit. But we ... are waking up and we promise we will not let you get away with it anymore’.

But the word ‘non-profit’ also speaks about what have been called ‘spiritual resources.’ Christianity (the specific religious tradition out of which our own community was born) has in various ways through the centuries consistently tried to extract some kind of spiritual profit from people via its systematic misuse and abuse of its conception of ‘original sin.’ It’s important to see that the Christian schema of sin operates in a similar way to the loan shark. To rephrase the thought mentioned earlier from the ‘Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual’ we may say the religious establishment has colluded with the theologians to create rules designed to put everyone in religious debt; then the religious system has extracted it from us. We here are all aware that for over two-millennia we have been told we are in spiritual debt thanks to some putative original sin in which we did what any sensible, intelligent, thinking person would have done, namely, to make an attempt to pluck and eat the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Surely, seeking an understanding of in what consists good and evil is a sensible and vital, if endlessly revisable task, and we would have been mad not to try (and continue to try) to pluck, taste and share at the common table in mealtime conversations this tree’s most precious fruit?

But, having been convinced by our religious establishments and theologians that this act was a sin, we find that this has only served to put us in debt with an interest rate that was not only exorbitant but infinite. In short, the Christian story was unfolded for/by us in such a way that we came to believe this debt could only be paid off by the violent execution of a God-Man Jesus who stood in our place whose expiatory death paid off the debt for us. But we have discovered this act of violence didn’t pay the debt off at all but, instead, was only an example of selling the debt on in a fashion analogous to the infamous collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) that lay behind so many of the financial crimes of the 1980s to the 2000s and sowed the seeds of the eventual crisis of 2008. This is the spiritual profit (often tied to financial profit in the form of, for example, indulgences) that formal Christianity has so often attempted to extract from our lives. It’s a way of proceeding that makes the PPI scandal or the financial crimes leading up to 2008 look like mere storms in a teacup.

[Let’s not forget here, by the way, that Jesus actually asked in his famous prayer that we should be forgiven our debts and not our trespasses. The use of the word trespasses rather than debts was a deliberate attempt to hide from view the Church’s spiritual profit motive in which we have for centuries been (mis)sold what we might be tempted to call gilt-edged guilt].

But many people today, are now seeking a different kind of naturalist, religious myth, one that is based not upon destructive spiritual profit-extraction but, once again, upon ideas of true sustainability and endless reciprocal recycling of the common-wealth of nature.

So, all in all, I hope you can see that our joke is genuinely a non-facetious one because we truly are seeking to be a local church community that, on the one hand, refuses to make and/or take a financial or spiritual profit from the earth or from its people and, on the other hand, that we truly believe the best way to proceed is by genuinely seeking to draw and build conversationally upon the knowledge and insights of the many rather than upon the prophecies of any single, charismatic, (self)authoritative prophet.

We are, indeed, a non-prophet/profit organisation in both senses of the word and proud of it.

I hope our non-facetious joke makes a few people laugh; I hope our non-facetious joke makes a few people think that maybe this church isn’t necessarily what they thought it might be and that it might (just) be worth checking out; I hope our non-facetious joke encourages a few more people to begin to work conversationally together, living the questions now, gently to shape an appropriate future that knows we must never come to believe, as prophets and their prophecies have all too often claimed, that they have delivered up to all humankind the full and final answer/s.

And lastly, I hope our non-facetious joke allows some people to glimpse that life is much more complex, beautiful, open and creative than the prophets of old have told us and so are able, finally, to allow themselves, joyously and lovingly, to immerse themselves into life’s ever-moving, plural plenitude.

An Old World Procupine (Photo: Andrew Butko)

After last week’s address I had a very interesting and helpful conversation with C about what might any actual attempt to follow Jesus in showing love our neighbours look like, particularly those whom we feel to be our enemies? The conversation was had because, when all is said and done, loving one’s neighbours who are also enemies is something which continues to feel like a task that can never properly be done — it remains an impossible ideal.

This year, as we move inexorably into the season of autumn, I have stumbled across a composer new to me, the Swedish musician Lars-Erik Larsson (1908–1986) and particularly his work for string quartet which has been wonderfully recorded by the Stenhammer Quartet on the Daphne label. The whole CD is a delight but the opening Op. 20 pieces, collectively known as Senhöstblad (Late Autumn Leaves), are proving to be the perfect accompaniment to my current autumnal and melancholic written and walking meditations. I'd highly recommend checking his music out and, below the two autumn pictures I took last week near Grantchester Meadows (just click on them to enlarge), you will find a YouTube link to the final adagio to the aforementioned piece. Enjoy.

READINGS  Matthew 5:43-45 NRSV [Jesus said:] You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. From The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy , ( Harper Perennial, 2011, p. 41) The fifth commandment. In the previous law it was said: do good to your own people and do harm to the foreigner. But I say to you: love not only your own countrymen, but also the people of other nations. Let others hate you, let them attack you and insult you; but you must praise them and do good...

Jan Luyken from the Bowyer Bible. Photo: Harry Kossuth

Today is our Harvest Festival, a time when, as the author of Exodus in Tyndale’s memorable English we give thanks for reaping ‘the first fruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in the field: and the feast of ingathering, in the end of the year: when thou hast gathered in thy labours out of the field’ (23:16).

We tend to think of the traditional fruits of our labours (although it is, in truth, nearly always the fruits of other people’s back-breaking labour) in terms of tasty grains, fruit and vegetables, all of which are ubiquitously and unproblematically necessary to us, as well as unconditionally welcome, beautiful, lovely and desirable. But some aspects of harvest, at least as presented to us in the gospels, open a window on different ways to understand the festival’s possible meanings.

As you will be aware, the anonymous authors of the gospels place a number of harvest associated images into Jesus’ mouth. But, despite over two hundred years of historical-critical scholarship, it remains far from clear how many of these images and their interpretations were those Jesus gave rather than the gospel writers’ own.

In short, we’re on our own and need to do our own interpreting, something which, on balance, it seems is what Jesus always knew, if not expected, would be the case with his parables. Standing on the edge of a crowd listening curiously to him (and, as Monty Python suggests, perhaps sometimes mishearing him — “blessed are the cheesemakers” . . .) we can imagine ourselves hearing the parable we are talking about today and being forced to ask ourselves what, on earth, does the mustard shrub and the harvest of seed we gather from it tell us about what the Kingdom of God might be like?

Matthew 13:31–32 in John Dominic Crossan’s presentation in ‘The Essential Jesus’ (Castle Books 1998, p. 51)

The Kingdom of God is mustard
 a seed small enough
  to get lost among others
 a plant large enough
  to shelter birds in its shade.

Matthew 13:31-32 Authorized Version

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

Birch seeds

In Leo Tolstoy’s translation (‘The Gospel in Brief’, Harper Perennial, 2011, p. 33)

In the soul, the kingdom of heaven flourishes out of nothing, but it gives everything. Like a birch seed, the smallest of all seeds, when it grows up, it is larger than all the other trees and the birds of the heavens build their nests in it.
Today, when it comes to the parable of the mustard seed, we find it very hard avoid the traditional meaning that has become attached to it. We’re tempted to say straightaway that it’s obvious, it’s a simple and straightforward lesson about growth that we can read off the face of nature — i.e. that something which will eventually become large and expansive begins with something very small and compact. It was this kind of understanding which led Tolstoy to think he could simply and unproblematically replace the mustard seed with the very small birch seed for his Russian audience who had little or no access to, or knowledge of, mustard.

Well, perhaps. But, here we should do well to remember the fallacy of appealing to what appears to be going on ‘in nature’ in order to make a claim about what ought to be going on in our own lives. My favourite, salutary example of this fallacy at work in our own liberal religious tradition can be found in some words written by the leading nineteenth-century British Unitarian theologian, James Martineau (1805-1900). In comparison with other Christian churches we were always a very, very small religious movement and this was true even when we were at our largest and most influential during the nineteenth century when Martineau was at the height of his intellectual and spiritual powers. In an essay about an earlier, eighteenth-century Unitarian and scientist, Joseph Priestley, Martineau wrote with an astonishing mixture of the humble and the hubristic that:

‘Unitarianism, we think, must avail itself of more flexibility of appeal, must wield in turn its critical, its philosophical, its social, its poetical, its devotional powers, before it gain its destined ascendancy over the mind of Christendom’ (Essays, Reviews and Addresses, Vol. 1, London, Longman Green and Co., 1890, p. 14 — emphasis mine).

Well, look around you my friends and note well that our ‘destined ascendancy over the mind of Christendom’ has not and, in my opinion, is unlikely to occur. Our mustard seed (if that is what we were, or are) has not become ‘the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree.’

However, despite this disappointment for us (or was it, perhaps, a piece of luck?), we can see that sometimes small things do become large; mustard seeds do become large plants and, whilst calling them tree-like is a stretch for even the most imaginative of us, they do grow to a height of three or four feet. Jesus must surely have had this in mind when he told his parable. But was that all he had in mind?

To answer this question let’s first do a little bit of what the contemporary Slovenian philosopher and all-round bête-noir, Slavoj Žižek, calls ‘short-circuiting.’ Žižek notes that:

‘ . . . one of the most effective critical procedures [is] to cross wires that do not usually touch: to take a major classic (text, author, notion) and read it in a short circuiting way, through the lens of a “minor” author, text or conceptual apparatus (“minor” should be understood here in Deluze’s sense: not of “lesser quality”, but marginalized, disavowed by the hegemonic ideology, or dealing with a “lower”, less dignified topic). If the “minor” reference is well chosen, such a procedure can lead to insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions’ (‘The Monstrosity of Christ’, Slavoj Žižek and John Millbank, MIT, 2009, pp. vii-viii).

Žižek thinks that sometimes this process doesn’t simply bring to light something new in the text or tradition, but it can also serve to make us ‘aware of another — disturbing — side of something [we] knew all the time’ (ibid. p. viii).

A fine example of the art of short-circuiting in connection with the parable of the mustard seed is offered to us by the John Dominic Crossan whose translation of the parable you have already heard. The first ‘minor’ author Crossan uses as a lens through which to look at Jesus’ parable is the Roman author, naturalist, natural philosopher, naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD). Crossan reminds us that Pliny wrote:

‘Mustard ... with its pungent taste and fiery effect is extremely beneficial for the health. It grows entirely wild, though it is improved by being transplanted: but on the other hand when it has once been sown it is scarcely possible to get the place free of it, as the seed when it falls germinates at once’ (Natural History: 19.170-171).

The second ‘minor’ author, or rather authors, Crossan uses as a lens though which to look are those who redacted the early third-century AD Jewish text, the Mishnah which later on came to form part of the Talmud. In the Mishnah the authors tell us that, because of its tendency to run wild, the planting of mustard seed in a garden was forbidden in Jewish Palestine (Mishnah Kilayim 3:2). There is a very high degree of probability that Jesus would have been aware of this teaching and, given this, Crossan feels, along with the historian of first-century Palestine Douglas Oakman, that: ‘It is hard to escape the conclusion that Jesus deliberately likens the rule of God to a weed.’ Crossan, continuing to look through these lenses concludes that the point of Jesus’ parable:

‘. . . is not just that the mustard plant starts as a proverbially small seed and grows into a shrub of three or four feet, or even higher, it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control, and that it tends to attract birds within cultivated areas where they are not particularly desired. And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, but like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover qualities. Something you would want only in small and carefully controlled doses — if you could control it’ (John Dominic Crossan, ‘Jesus - A Revolutionary Biography’, Harper San Francisco 1994, pp. 64-66).

Well, well, well. As Žižek noted this surely makes us ‘aware of another — disturbing — side of something [we] knew all the time’. It’s something we can most easily see through the lens of an old gag I am, perhaps, overly fond of telling, namely, that although Jesus promised us the kingdom of God, what we actually got was the Church. It’s worth asking whether Jesus might have planted the wrong seed by mistake or, perhaps, whether he planted the right seed but poor growing conditions caused it to mutate over the years into a different species of pungent and fiery plant, namely, an institution with equally dangerous takeover qualities and which we, alas, let get wildly out of hand? This was an institution which, as it grew ever larger, began to bring with it terrible consequences as it provided branches in which too many people who desired imperial, kingly or purely personal power and oversight could settle and who were filled with an insatiable appetite for swooping down upon the land and the people to inflict upon them violence, corruption, crusades, inquisitions and so much more besides.

This is neither a pleasant historical memory nor present thought . . .

But here’s a much more hopeful, present thought. Perhaps we can say that the tiny mustard seed of the kingdom of God Jesus planted in the soil of this world was simply not able to germinate anywhere near as quickly as either he, or we, had hoped it would.

I do not know, of course, whether the short-circuited interpretation of Jesus’ parable that I am now going to offer you will turn out to be anywhere near the mark but in the possibility that it is (or at least gives us a better and more useful interpretation of an ancient parable), here goes . . .

It’s not an unreasonable to suggest that the inspiring example of Greta Thunberg may stand as a classic example of the mustard seed growing as it originally seems to have been understood by inhabitants of first-century Jewish Palestine. In August 2018 outside the Swedish Parliament she began, completely alone, a ‘School strike for climate’. An action in which, only one year later, she is now regularly being joined by several million students across the globe.

Again and again over the last years it has struck me that, perhaps, Greta Thunberg (Sweden), Ridhima Pandey and Aditya Mukarji (India), Wangari Maathai and Kaluki Paul Mutuku (Kenya), Nina Gualinga (Ecuadorian Amazon), Autumn Peltier (Anishinaabe people of Canada), Leah Namugerwa (Uganda) and the School Strike for Climate movement together make for a better candidate for being the fruit of the mustard seed than historic Christian Church ever was.

To conclude this address let’s walk through Crossan’s conclusion again with this thought in mind.

It is not just that our children start out as proverbially small and grow into creatures only a couple of feet higher than mustard plants, it is that they, too, tend take over where we stick-in-the-mud adults often don’t want them, they tend to get out of our control and their hearts and minds, like the branches of the mustard plant, tend to attract new and swift-winged, scientifically informed ideas within areas of our lives which we adults have cultivated with often problematic, destructive, out-dated and outmoded ideas and practices. Of course, we adults don’t desire this kind of thing to happen because it brings with it a serious challenge to our old ways of being-in-the-world, not least of all to our selfish and excessive consumption and waste, meat-eating, fossil fuel, car and aeroplane use which are clearly destroying the basic ecosystem upon which all life on this planet depends.

Now recall this famous teaching of Jesus’:

‘People were bringing even infants to [Jesus] that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they sternly ordered them not to do it. But Jesus called for them and said, “Let the little children come to me, and 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.”’ (Luke 18:15-17)

And now reflect that our children’s activity in these School Strikes for Climate is precisely what Jesus said the kingdom of God would be like: not like the mighty cedar of Lebanon and not quite like a common weed, but like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover qualities — dangerous, of course, only to our old ways of being which we know we must now urgently change.

Maybe, just maybe, the harvest of the mustard seed promised by Jesus is only now just beginning to become ready for an ingathering.

If this is the case then I simply say to you, just as Jesus once did:

‘The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. Go on your way’ (Matthew 9:37-38).

I trust that we, the supposed adults in the room, will heed this call and set about helping our children — our beautiful, fiery and pungent mustard seeds — bring in in a well-ordered and gently controlled fashion the harvest of a better, healthier, kinder and more intelligent world — perhaps even one that looks something like the kingdom of God Jesus once promised us.

READINGS Exodus 19:16-25, 20:1 (NRSV) The moments before God gives the Ten Commandments and other laws to the people El Greco: View of Mount Sinai  On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently. As the blast of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses would speak and God would answer him in thunder. When the Lord descended...

Darul Uloom Islamic School INTRODUCTION On Monday last week I had a very interesting and positive visit to the Darul Uloom Islamic School in Birmingham. I was invited by the school’s new headmaster, Dr Dawud Bone, who is an old colleague and friend of mine (click on this link and go to page 11 of the magazine to see the two of us together in 2009), in order to give the school assembly and then to teach three classes for eleven, fourteen and sixteen year-old student on the subject of the long, interesting and creative relationships between the early English Unitarians and Islam. [Incidentally, Dawud’s grandfather, Walter Bone (1897-1944), had been a Unitarian minister at Gloucester (1937-1944) then at the Hibbert House in Alexandra, E...

The picture of Henry Bugbee which hangs in my study   Given last week’s address in which I briefly introduced to you Heidegger’s idea of the fourfold I thought I’d bring before you another idea that has for a long time now helped me deal with the challenges life continually throws us. As with last week’s offering I simply speak about it in case it can help some of you too. It’s taken from a book called ‘The Inward Morning’ by the little known, late-twentieth century philosopher, Henry Bugbee (1915-1999), whose thinking has been described as being a kind of mix between Heidegger, Zen Buddhism and Henry David Thoreau. This is a near perfect combination in my book! Something of what this mixture looked like in person can be g...

Some of my own notes on Heidegger's 'fourfold'  INTRODUCTION This address was written after attending a meeting last Thursday between a few members of XR and various members and ministers of half a dozen local churches. The aim was to discuss and then organise a further, public, meeting where people can talk about how their Christian faith informs their environmental activism. I have to confess that this kind of meeting always fills me with dread because I think it would be dishonest of me to attend such meetings without admitting that I, personally, hold very few conventional Christian beliefs and admitting this doesn’t always go down well. I’m glad to say that this didn’t seem to be the case on this occasion. Anyway, as most of ...

In April of last year, on Palm Sunday, I took a look at what many biblical scholars think is the completely fictitious story found in all four gospels concerning Pilate’s binary question to the crowd about whether to release Christ or Barrabbas.

The least offensive version of the story is found in Mark’s gospel but, in Matthew’s telling of the story, the reader is deliberately led to believe that the Jews displayed their full guilt in the matter by shouting out, ‘Let the responsibility for his death fall on us and on our children!’ (Matthew 27:25). This verse was a key element in the creation of the most virulent forms of both Christian and secular antisemitism imaginable which, across the next two millennia, directly and indirectly, led to deaths of millions upon millions of Jews. It’s an evil that remains with us to this day and, as the biblical scholar Robert Funk noted, ‘There is no black deep enough to symbolize adequately the black mark this fiction has etched in Christian history’ (‘The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus’, Poleridge Press, San Francisco, 1998, p. 153)

I encourage you to remind yourself of that address at this link but, here, for reasons that will become clear, I would simply like to concentrate on the kind of ideology that all too often lies behind asking the kind of binary question the story contains. (Just to be clear, this current pieces re-uses unchanged a fair number of sections from my address in April.)

As I noted last April it’s been many years now since I was able to read the Christ or Barabbas story without simultaneously thinking of something deeply disturbing that the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) wrote in his ‘Political Theology’ of 1922. His thinking in that book about questions concerning sovereignty and the effective wielding of political power has been, and remains, highly influential. But his book reveals a deeply problematic way of thinking about the world because, not least of all, it’s bound up with his own reasons for his close association and juridical-political allegiance with Nazism. Indeed, he has been called by some the ‘crown jurist’ of the Third Reich.

Schmitt thought that when faced with the question of Christ or Barabbas?, ‘Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises’ could only proceed by accepting ‘a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.’ Schmitt then noted sneeringly that:

‘The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion’ (‘Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty’, Chicago University Press, 2010, p. 63)

As is clear Schmitt did not like ‘liberalisms’ commitment to the value of ongoing dialogue at all and he sought to counter it by promoting what is called a philosophy of decisionism, a philosophy with some very nasty authoritarian overtones.

In a 1960 paper about Schmitt’s concept of the political Charles E. Frye said of Schmitt’s philosophy that ‘perhaps its most characteristic aspect is the pervasive sense of the loss of orientation.’ In short, Schmitt thought that when a culture began to experience this loss one effective way of getting it back was to explore the possibilities which might emerge if you could force people to consider only either/or questions such as ‘Christ or Barabbas?’ It’s important to be aware that the underlying binary question for Schmitt was always ‘friend or enemy?’. It’s vital to realise that Schmitt believed these terms were to be taken:

‘. . . not as metaphors or symbols, not mixed and watered down by economic, moral, and other ideas; nor are they to be taken psychologically as the expression of private feelings and tendencies. . . . Here we are not concerned with fictions and normatives, but with reality as it is and the actual possibility of this distinction.’

Frye then points out that for Schmitt the ‘enemy’

‘. . . is not just any competitor or adversary in general. “Enemy is ... in the last analysis a fighting, human totality; but it is at least this. Whether it is fighting or not depends upon the actual circumstances.” And then he indicated the source of his choice of these particular terms as the specifically political concepts: “The concepts friend, enemy, and battle have a real meaning; they obtain and retain this meaning especially through their reference to the real possibility of physical killing.” Schmitt’s concept of the political ultimately derived from the specific and actual possibility of death in battle, from the most limiting of all human situations — death’ (‘Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, Charles E. Frye, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 28, No. 4, Nov., 1966, pp. 818-830).

Now, in the disturbing context in which we have found ourselves this week in the UK, my chief point today is that our own British culture (although some may say, with some justification, that it is in fact primarily English culture), has clearly lost it’s orientation and we have, shockingly, allowed into power an executive that contains people actively pursuing just such a ‘philosophy of decisionism.’

It’s a philosophy which deliberately seeks to present people with a series of ongoing, false binary questions, the answers to which actively seeks simplistically to divide the world up into various versions of the friend/enemy dichotomy. It’s a philosophy which believes we are not moving forward or doing anything meaningful or valuable unless we can be seen to be making clear binary decisions about X or Y and then acting upon them, come what may with no ‘ifs and buts’.

These binary questions are deployed by Schmittian decisionists in the belief (or, perhaps, hope) that this method will revive in ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ a belief that by answering these kinds of binary questions they are, in some meaningful and exciting way, going to be heading purposefully towards a glorious future with a restored national political, religious and personal sense of identity and confidence.

But this is a very, very dangerous route to start walking down. To see this we need only recall that ancient, fateful question “Christ or Barabbas?” and note well that it was never going to be able to deliver the ‘Last Word’ on anything we might then, or now, have considered to be good and decent and of lasting worth and that, in fact, it was ultimately only able to deliver up to us all kinds of unfulfilled (and unfulfillable) expectations that led inexorably to ever greater mistrust, hatred and, at its worst, to an almost unimaginable level of cruelty, repression, violence and, ultimately, genocide.

Well, in the figures of Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings (the special adviser to first Gove and now Johnson as PM) we, alas, seem to have allowed into our executive some very committed Schmittian decisionists. We should not forget here to add to this list the name of their extra-parliamentary alter ego, Nigel Farage.

Now, this is not just my own eccentric point of view. Nick Pearce, the Professor of Public Policy & Director at the University of Bath, former director at the Institute for Public Policy Research and Head of the No10 Policy Unit under Gordon Brown between 2008–2010, noted in a piece first published in 2014 recent that exactly this tendency was displayed by Gove and Cummings whilst they were both at the Department of Education.

Back in April last year I said that I hoped the ‘Christ or Barabbas?’ story might stand for our disorientated culture as a salutary, Holy Week warning not to make the same kind of fateful mistake in our own time and context and adopt a politics of decisionism; the last few weeks have, of course, revealed to me that this warning was not heeded although, thankfully, the executive is now facing some real, concerted, democratic and parliamentary resistance.  

Now, at this point in writing this piece I thought I would be able to conclude with something like the following paragraph:

‘Given the foregoing, it seems to me that as a community which continues to find it’s basic religious raison d’être in following and promoting a way of being in the world based on the example of the human Jesus, we must not forget that his central proclamation to love our neighbour as ourselves — a proclamation which, remember, includes even those we perceive (or are being encouraged to perceive) as enemies — has always, and will always, represent a direct challenge to leaders and/or rulers who are Schmittian decisionists. We, therefore, have a duty to challenge in all our actions such a way of attempting to govern us.’ 

Now I think something like this can confidently be said but only if you are both prepared and able to follow Jesus in an incredibly minimalistic and humanistic way by dissolving all (and I mean all) our old metaphysical theologies, theories and beliefs about God and the New Testament into a this-worldly call to justice and charity to one’s neighbour and that the doctrine of the kingdom taught by Jesus means, henceforth and forever, that God was, is and will be present ONLY in and as one’s neighbour which, remember, includes our enemies (“What comes after Christianity?” A God who gently but firmly pushes you away from himself in the direction of each other).

If you can do this then I think my paragraph (or something like it) can, perhaps, stand. But, and this is where things got for me significantly more thorny and problematic and reminded me of the well-known adage that ‘people living in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.’ You will recall that this piece began with me noting that many biblical scholars think the ‘Christ or Barabbas?’ Story is a completely fictitious one.

To put it simply, the gospel writers — or, more accurately, the earliest sources upon which the gospel writers drew to create their texts — made it up. They did this, I suggest, because they too were lured by a kind of Schmittian decisionism, let’s call it a Pilatian decisionism.

The truth is that formal Christianity — from its earliest to its most recent times — in its attempt to build some pure kingdom or Christendom, has all often deliberately placed before people many false either/or binary questions. It has a terrible record of wanting to separate cleanly and clearly insider from outsider, the faithful from the heretics, the saved from the damned, the sheep from the goats, the chaff from the wheat and so on. Throughout the New Testament and on into nearly all the structures of formal Christianity I find again and again many, many of examples of Schmittian or Pilatian decisionism.

When I began writing this piece I thought I might be able to say in conclusion that the way our current executive has chosen to try and govern over the past couple of weeks is profoundly ‘un-Christian.’ But that’s an unsustainable claim. What we have seen attempted by the current executive is painfully close to the way formal Christianity has often chosen to govern its empires, states and churches. This fact — and continuing tendency — must never be forgotten.

But what I am prepared to say is that promoting this kind of Schmittian or Pilatian decisionism is a way of governing that really does deem to run completely counter to the minimalist understanding of what and how Jesus seemed to teach people to behave outlined above and, therefore, it is, at the very least, one more good reason to reject the divisive and destructive politics of Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michael Gove, Dominic Cummings, Nigel Farage, et. al..  

READINGS: Matthew 15:1-10

From ‘The Gospel and Culture’ (1971) by Eric Voegelin (‘The Eric Voegelin Reader’, ed. Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes, University of Missouri Press, 2017, pp. 247-248)


Th[is] passage [from the Dutch Catechism], though wanting in polish, is philosophically very much to the point. Its well-intentioned clumsiness sheds a flood of light on the difficulties in which the churches find themselves today. Note above all the difficulty the church has with its own believers who want to be Christians at the price of their humanity. Justin [the Martyr (d. ca. 165)] started as an inquiring mind and let his search, after it had tried the philosophical schools of the time, come to rest in the truth of the gospel. Today the situation is reversed. The believers are at rest in an inquiring state of faith; their intellectual metabolism must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a questioner, that a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a “good Christian” but is a questionable man. And we may supplement the reminder by gently recalling that neither Jesus nor his fellowmen to whom he spoke his word did yet know that they were Christians—the gospel held out its promise, not to Christians, but to the poor in spirit, that is, to minds inquiring, even though on a culturally less sophisticated level than Justin’s. Behind the passage there lurks the conflict, not between gospel and philosophy, but rather between the gospel and its uninquiring possession as doctrine. The authors of the Catechism do not take this conflict lightly; they anticipate resistance to their attempt at finding the common humanity of men in their being the questioners about the meaning of existence; and they protect themselves against all too ready misunderstandings by assuring the reader they do not mean “to take up a non-Christian attitude.” Assuming them to have weighed carefully every sentence they wrote, this defensive clause reveals an environment where it is not customary to ask questions, where the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as “a non-Christian attitude.” If that, however, is the situation, the authors have good reason to be worried indeed. For the gospel as a doctrine which you can take and be saved, or leave and be condemned, is a dead letter; it will encounter indifference, if not contempt, among inquiring minds outside the church, as well as the restlessness of the believer inside who is un-Christian enough to be man the questioner.  

From ‘Letters to a young poet’ by Rainer Maria Rilke (pp. 34-35)

. . . I want to beg you, as much as I can dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions them­selves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Per­haps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it—but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your inmost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985)

For Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) ‘question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search’ (‘The Gospel and Culture’ in ‘The Eric Voegelin Reader’, ed. Charles R. Embry and Glenn Hughes, University of Missouri Press, 2017, p. 249). The search for an answer to ‘the enigma of existence’ was central to his life as it is to the lives of most of us here. Naturally, any search requires us to ask questions and this is why, for Voegelin ‘man . . . is a questioner.’ However, despite this, Voegelin is clear that ‘man . . .

‘. . . can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible. The gospel, to be heard, requires ears that can hear; philosophy is not the life of reason if the questioner’s reason is depraved (Romans 1:28). The answer will not help the man who has lost the question; and the predicament of the present age is characterised by the loss of the question rather than of the answer, as the authors of the Catechism have seen rightly’ (ibid p. 249).

Given this predicament one of Voegelin’s aims was to recover the lost question because without the question to which the gospel was perceived to be the answer we simply have no chance of knowing what the gospel might actually have been and, perhaps, still is, or can be, for us today.

As we proceed it is vitally important to fully to appreciate the point I made a moment ago that, in Voegelin’s mind, the question and the answer are not things that can be pulled apart as if one could exist independently of the other. For him neither an answer which put a final end to questioning, nor a questioning which couldn’t at least hold out the reasonable promise of delivering up some kind of practical answer to the enigma of existence’ could ever be seen as satisfactory or sufficient for us.

Now, every search requires the existence of some kind of ‘pull’. To keep to the language of the gospels, two everyday examples of this pull are the valuable lost coin you know you mislaid in the house or the single sheep lost from your flock (Luke 15:1-10). Their loss are events which insist we ask all kinds of questions and which, in turn, we hope will help us successfully to search out and find the coin, the sheep or whatever. In the case of coins and sheep there is, of course, always the possibility that the questions will lead to disappointment because they fail to help us find these very specific known and knowable things or, if the questions do help us find these things then, in general and all things being being equal, the pressing need for further questions about the matter quickly begin to fade.

But with ‘the enigma of existence’ this is not the case. There is by now many hundreds of thousands of years of evidence which strongly suggests that we’ll never find a final answer to this enigma and so there will always be the need for us to ask questions about it. But, and it’s a vital but, Voegelin thought that despite this we could still find appropriate ways of living with the endless questions about the enigma that, in a special, existential way, do come to constitute a certain kind of practical and satisfactory enough ‘answer.’ In other words the tension experienced in the event of the search becomes itself the very place where an answer to the enigma of life is gifted to us. The existential answer about which I’m talking is found in the movement — the tensional push and pull — that takes place in between the question and answer; it is there that ‘we live, move, and are’ (Acts 17:28).

For me, no one has put this thought more beautifully and succinctly than the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) in one of his famous letters (written 1902-1908, pub. 1929) to the young poet Franz Xaver Kappus (1883–1966). You will recall that Rilke encouraged Kappus to ’love the questions them­selves’ and to proceed, not so much by seeking final answers right here and right now (which we couldn’t yet understand anyway) but, instead, by learning how to ‘live the questions now.’ For Rilke the hope was that by doing this he might ‘gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.’

Now, one of the many great tragedies about Christianity as it developed into a formal Imperial, and then State, religion was that instead of always-already being prepared to enourage people to ask genuine questions about ‘the enigma of our existence’ and then enabling them freely to work towards some provisional answers which were, in turn, ever open to further questions and inquiry, it became, instead, a religion which insisted people rested wholly content in, ’an uninquiring state of faith’. I hope it is clear that this was to create a religion which believed it could eliminate the need for questions and, therefore, eliminate any need for ‘man the questioner.’ Indeed, all too often, as the writers of the ‘Dutch Catechism’ realised (for us, astonishingly and depressingly) it has become the case that to ask questions is believed by many Christians ‘to take up a non-Christian attitude.’

Speaking personally, this is one of the major reasons I simply had to leave behind any form of traditional Christianity. From individual conversations with you I know that this is the case for many of you too.

In short, traditional Christianity tried to make the pole of ‘the answer’ supreme and to separate it from the question and the movement of the search. It attempted to do this by making the answer — its ‘gospel’ — via various theological doctrines elucidating God’s attributes and actions etc., into something knowable, fixed and final. In turn, this meant that once a person came to know the doctrines and possessed their eternal truth then the need for them to ask any further questions ceases. That person believes they have found the answer to ‘the enigma of existence’ in this known thing called the ‘gospel’ just as they might find their lost coin or sheep. Job done, questions over, all tension resolved, all movement stopped.

In passing today, but importantly nonetheless, it’s worth being aware that what is true in such Christian circles is as true in other doctrinal, ideological settings such as those found in certain kinds of political circles.

Anyway, it is no surprise that, basing itself on the supremacy of ‘man . . . the questioner’ (especially in his or her role as scientist or philosopher), as our modern, Renaissance and Enlightenment, humanist inspired culture has developed it came ever more to reject such a ‘gospel’ because it was clearly so often being used to shut down the need for any further questions.

This was an intolerable situation and so there was much that was right and proper about this humanist move. But Voegelin recognised there was a real danger here because it tempted us into thinking that because the answer couldn’t be found in a dogmatic and fixed gospel the ‘Church’ it now had to be found wholly in a known and knowable humanity and, of course, in the natural world of which we are so integral a part.

Much more needs to be said about all this but, for now, let me just sum-up by saying that Christianity came to believe the answer to the enigma of existence was to be found only in a dogmatic gospel about a known and knowable God, whilst the secular, humanist world came to believe the answer to the enigma of existence was to be found only in a known and knowable humanity and natural world.

Voegelin’s great insight was to see how wrong-headed this is. This is because what it is for us to exist as the kinds of being we are is always-already to feel ourselves in what Plato called metaxy — the In-Between; it is always-already to be inextricably situated, pushed and pulled, in-between the poles of question and answer, in between what for us is a never fully known and knowable humanity and natural world on the one hand, and what we feel to be an unknown and unknowable transcendent (or divine) reality on the other.

The mistake we often commit is to make the human and divine poles the only really-real or truly-true things and to forget that the only thing that we can assuredly say is real or true for us is the movement, the push and pull, that is set up between those felt poles. Our whole existence always-already takes place completely inside the movement of the event of the search and the only answer to the enigma of existence which will ever satisfy us (and have half a chance of being as true as anything can be) is one that remains consciously in the metaxy — the In-Between.

As Voegelin writes:

‘The search itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning, man’s experience of his tension (tasis) toward the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer. Question and answer are intimately related toward the other; the search moves in metaxy, . . . in the In-Between of poverty and wealth, of human and divine, the question is knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of a question that may reach the true answer or miss it. This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and asking the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is the life of reason’ (pp. 248-249).

With these words I’m now able to bring this address to a tentative and provisional close because I think we’re now in a position see reasonably well the lost question Voegelin thought he had recovered to which the gospel was perceived to be the answer.

It is the life of reason understood as the learning how  to how to live, well and fruitfully, in the always ultimately unresolvable tension of the metaxy, in the searching movement of the In-Between; in-between the push and pull of questions and answers which must always be held together without one of them ever winning over the other. This is surely something akin Rilke’s advice to the young poet.

For Voegelin, the only religions and philosophies that are truly worth their salt are those which offer people practical ways to live well and fruitfully in the metaxy, the In-Between and not to seek fixed and final answers from either the gods or humanity/nature alone. The moment a religion or philosophy believes it has found the answer to the enigma of existence by absolutising either the divine on the one hand or the human/natural on the other they have become religions and philosophies which have lost sight of what it is to be human and threaten to introduce tyranny into our lives.

Voegelin felt that the ‘gospel’ — which centrally involves the idea of a life of seeking which involves giving up one’s life to gain it — did, in fact, offer just such a practical answer to this question.

But today what, in detail, Voegelin the atheist thought consisted in the gospel is something I might endeavour to explore some other time. All I wish to do today is place before you the question to which Voegelin thought the ‘gospel’ was one possible ‘answer’: How do we live well in the metaxy — the In-Between? In-between the question and answer; in-between the gods and humanity?

My uncle's signature on the flyleaf

The last three years of the whole Brexit affair, Boris Johnson’s proroguing of Parliament yesterday and a heated family argument about it and its meaning have all caused me to reflect this evening upon something that has continued to hung very darkly over me since my very early teens.

My uncle Ed was in so many ways a wonderful man. By all accounts (I have heard or read) he was fine chiropodist who truly cared for his elderly patients. He was also a great supporter and promoter of amateur athletics. Additionally, he was passionate about the natural world and on occasional walks on the North Norfolk coast he taught me many wonderful things about the local flora, fauna and geology, things for which I will remain eternally grateful.

But during the late 1970s and 1980s, especially at Christmas, I began to see and understand that his presence at family events brought into our circle a dark and evil spirit. At some point during the festivities he would start to spout various bits of racist nonsense, the most ludicrous and offensive example of which was his theory (got from God knows what insane source) that ‘we’ white people were descended from dolphins whereas ‘those’ backward, black people were descended from apes. ‘Our’ descent from dolphins ‘proved’, or so he thought, that ‘we’ were the superior, master race. His views were shocking to me then and they remain deeply shocking to me today.

Anyway, by the time I was fourteen or fifteen (1979/1980), whenever he started down this track I felt uncontrollably compelled to challenge him, an action which, inevitably, descended into a very heated exchange. I was distressed enough by his words but what was equally distressing to me personally was that it was always me who was ticked-off, clipped round the ear and sometimes sent out of the room in disgrace for having ‘ruined the family Christmas’ whilst he was left unchallenged. Well, ‘fuck ruining the family Christmas’ was always my response because it was clear to me that here was a man set upon attempting to ruin everything that seemed to me be decent about the way I believed ‘we’ were now in a modern United Kingdom, a nation which, after all, had successfully fought fascism and brought an end to the dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini. Why was I not being supported in challenging my uncle and his blackshirt inspired ways? Why, why, o why was not having a family argument more important than challenging his racism and fascism? I just didn’t understand.

By my early twenties I had pretty much rationalised the situation by persuading myself that my wider family had, in fact, (more wisely than me) somehow recognised that my uncle represented a strand within British culture that was definitely dying out and would, very soon, be consigned to the history books. In short, I told myself my family’s actions were really a form of saying, ‘just let it go, for his is a view that will soon be gone for ever.’ And perhaps that was, and is, how they truly saw things.

Then, one day in the 1980s (I forget the exact date), he was gone. Shortly after he died — for what reasons I know not — I was given five things from his estate: his Book of Common Prayer, his King James Bible, a presentation walking-cane from the Norfolk and Norwich hospital, his captain’s chair and, to my horror, his copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ by Adolph Hitler, on the flyleaf of which he had written his own name (see photos in this post — click on them to enlarge).

I still remember the profound chill of seeing his name — it seemed to me proudly — placed so close to that of Hitler’s. Holding the book that day it was almost as if, from beyond the grave, he was still goading me. So what to do? Well, I chose to confront this darkest of ‘gifts’ head on and to read it. Consequently, I came to know, first hand, what a pernicious and evil book it is and that my uncle knew this too yet still chose to value and promote the message it contained.

I took the decision to keep the book always to remind me that I was, indeed, right to have challenged him every time he spouted his racist hate. Of course, it’s a volume that has always been tucked away out of sight on my bookshelves but, I told myself, there it could function as a reminder of something evil within British culture that was, thankfully, past, gone, dead.

Many years later, between 1997 and 2000 whilst I was training for the Unitarian ministry and studying theology at Harris Manchester College, Oxford, I had the pleasure and privilege of getting to know the historian Alan Bullock who was, himself, a Unitarian. Lord Bullock wrote a book which I first read when I was about sixteen or seventeen called ‘Hitler: A Study in Tyranny.’ It had an incredibly powerful influence upon me and was one of the major reasons I felt empowered both to continue to challenge my uncle and also to become more and more involved in avowedly anti-fascist politics.

One Sunday after service in the college chapel over a cup of coffee I asked Lord Bullock the question, ‘What, after all your years of academic study of Hitler and Nazism, is it the single thing you'd like to pass on to someone like me?’ He replied immediately by saying something along the lines of ‘Whenever you hear someone spreading fascism, even if it is in the queue in the Post Office, challenge it.’ In other words, he was saying to me, draw a line, don’t let it spread, never let it become quietly normalized. I was, unsurprisingly, profoundly grateful that, at least with regard to my uncle, I had challenged it in the family situation.

But, as I have already admitted, I thought that the dark and evil spirit that inhabited my uncle — that was my uncle — was dead to us, but the last three years have made me realise that it seems I was sadly, badly, and perhaps culpably, wrong; it was not dead but only dormant. It is clear to me that the events of the last three years have only served to give it the opportunity to begin to flicker and flit back into life within certain though, thankfully, still very limited sections of our culture.

Now, I want to be clear, absolutely clear, that most people who voted for Brexit and who continue to support it via the undemocratic means currently being employed by Johnson, Cummings et. al are NOT racists or fascists. Their reasons for voting the way they did and continuing to support Brexit in the way they are, are very, very complex and often rooted in many real economic, political and social injustices and inequalities. But the nasty and polarising way the whole situation is unfolding (and sometimes being encouraged to unfold) is, to my mind, serving to revivify the same dark and evil spirit that I saw burning in my uncle all those years ago. To be frank with you, seeing it makes me both very angry and very frightened.

It is very clear to me that Lord Bullock’s warning needs to be heeded by us as it has never been heeded before:

‘Whenever you hear someone spreading fascism, even if it is in the queue in the Post Office, challenge it.’

And not only that, under no circumstances must we allow our liberal democratic parliamentary structures to be so weakened that this dark and evil spirit could ever gain even the slightest foothold within them.

Anyone with ears to hear should listen and understand . . .

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985)

In response to my last post, Of course there is no God. But we must believe in Him, an always insightful and helpful correspondant of mine, DK, asked a pertinent question: 

That was very interesting. Something really bugs me about it though. If Voegelin stands up for his civil theology in the face of the “truth”, what is the hope underlying that stance? I mean, it seems that in proposing a more “moral” alternative to the “truth”, even if it’s a fiction, he trusts, or at least hopes, that it can lead to something real.

Does that make sense?

In the (admittedly, unlikely) event that it will prove useful/interesting to anyone else, here’s my immediate response.

It does make sense.

It seems to me—which does not mean this is the case!—that, because Voegelin doesn’t believe (see n.7 in Poirier’s essay) we are able to transcend our subject consciousness in our quest to know the real and the true we cannot, therefore, make contact ‘in some sense with what is real, i.e., with what is as it exists independently of their subject consciousness’ (see n.7 in Poirier’s essay).

In short, Voegelin doesn’t believe that we can talk about anything ‘underlying’ anything. He is clear that for him there is no independently existing real Ground. As Poirier says,

‘It (the Ground) existed only as an expression of the existential consciousness of that experiencing subject. It had existence only as a subjectivity for Voegelin, a shared one perhaps—shared with all other human beings—but still only a subjectivity.’

The following passage from Poirier’s essay seems vitally important here:

‘So important was this that he himself chose knowingly to live by a standard that he knew to be no standard at all, that is, he chose to live his life by placing all of the emphasis and focus on his experience of a Ground that, for him, did not exist independently of his experiencing consciousness.’

Voegelin’s hope is not, therefore, of a metaphysical kind but of an existential, wagering kind. And his wager is simply that whenever we live by the truth that ‘there is no God’ the repercussions for us ‘were just too horrendous . . . for any of us who are decent, to contemplate.’ As Poirier notes, ‘he had the Twentieth Century to prove it’ and that, therefore,

‘Man must acknowledge God, not because there is a God, but because our consciousness, and the concomitant experiential life that arises therefrom, is structured that way, and also because if we were not to acknowledge this Subjectivity, this Ground, and instead live by the truth, we would become savages of the worst sort, of which there are a large number of examples in modern times.’

Consequently, it seems to me that his hope (or lack of) is all on the surface in our existential situation and not in any kind of underlying metaphysics. One way of putting this might be to paraphrase the example concerning friendship and love I sent to you a while ago from Michel Onfray’s book ‘A Hedonist Manifesto’ and say that, for Voegelin there is no such thing as ‘truth’, but only existential proofs of ‘truth’: no ‘underlying hope’, but only existential proofs of ‘underlying hope’.

When you say that Voegelin has hopes that it ‘can lead to something real’ I think you’re onto what is going on. Voegelin is simply wagering that in the practical business of going on together we do this best—most civilly—by living frankly by an untruth. To borrow from Wallace Stevens in order to put this more palatably, we might say we go on together best of all when we have available some kind of shared, ‘supreme fiction.’

All of this reminds me of a passage from Nietzsche’s ‘The Gay Science’:

‘We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live — by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error’ (§.121, trans Walter Kaufmann).

The conditions of life—human life anyway—do seem to me (and I think to Voegelin), inevitably and irrevocably, to contain error and untruth and we simply have to learn to live with this massive limitation—and learn to live with it in civil ways. This recognition (the ‘terrain on which I cannot comfortably travel’) is why I have recently been concerned to re-examine and explore some of the implications of John Keat’s ’negative capability’. Keats, remember, did not use the word ‘negative’ in a pejorative sense but, instead, to help us see that our potential as human beings is far from being completely defined by what we possess (eg ‘truth’) because we are clearly defined as much by what we do not—and perhaps never can—possess. Keats saw that, despite our strong determination to work everything out we continue to need to develop and nurture a very specific kind of active passivity that is a willingness to allow whatever is mysterious or doubtful to us to remain just that. Of course, one can and should at times and in the appropriate contexts probe these things—some of which will, in time, yield to our probing—but the likelihood is that there will always remain things which continue stubbornly to resist rational understanding and with which we will always need to live, humbly and patiently.

But, to repeat, this is all to engage in an existential wager in a ‘supreme fiction’ and it is not to act based on firm belief (hope) that what we do is, somehow, underlain by any actually existing (metaphysical) Ground.

Voegelin’s essay open in the Manse’s shady back-yard

Today, my last Sunday off before I rejoin the fray after my summer leave, I decided to reread a 1971 lecture called “The Gospel and Culture” by Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) as well as a 2009 paper by Maben Walter Poirier called “Eric Voegelin’s Immanentism: A Man At Odds With The Transcendent?”.

As a sceptic with a naturally religious mind I continue to find both the lecture and the essay interesting because, as Poirier notes:

In a memoir entitled “The Professor and the Profession”, recently published by the University of Missouri Press, Professor Heilman reported that Voegelin, on one memorable occasion, said to him: “Of course there is no God. But we must believe in Him” (p.8).

Despite this statement a majority of Voegelin’s supporters still seem to hold that he was a Christian. As Poirier says it is interesting also to note that

His atheist opponents also think this to have been the case, despite the fact that Voegelin is much more in accord with them than they realise. The fact is that he differs from his “atheist opponents” only to the extent that he wishes to draw on his immanentised understanding of Christianity—read solely as a civil theology—to mitigate what he sees as the disastrous effects of the civil theology that is modern millenarianism. In short, he is more prudential than they, but he is not less an atheist (n. 8, p. 6)

A year after first reading it I find myself responding positively to Poirier’s point that “the motive behind Voegelin's advocacy of an immanentised Christianity [was to have] ‘his’ Christianity act as the basis on which to erect a new civil theology, a civil theology that would be less millenarian than were the civil theologies that issued out of the Enlightenment” (n. 12, p. 7). This motive seems not unconnected to the concerns I expressed in the piece I posted earlier this morning called Being an Umpire and not a Player. 

Here are a three more relevant paragraphs from Poirier’s essay which, to quote Poirer from elsewhere, leads Voegelin, Poirier, and me too, “onto a terrain on which I cannot comfortably travel”:

Parenthetically, one of the implications of Voegelin’s prudential approach to this most important of issues is that it forces us to conclude that Voegelin was primarily not a philosopher, if, by “philosopher,” we mean someone who devotes himself to speaking candidly about as much of the truth as is available to him regarding the human condition, and damn the consequences. Voegelin never damned the consequences. 

Voegelin was a social and political thinker who deeply wanted his fellow human beings to experience civility in their relations with one another (a far from unworthy goal in these modern and violent times) more than he wanted them to know the truth, and unfortunately this civility, in Voegelin’s estimation, could only be purchased by their knowingly pretending to credit what he, and they, conceived to be an untruth. This is the cost of civility, for Voegelin, and we have no choice but to pay the price if we mean to be decent and moral. Simply put, the origin of civility is in the lie that we knowingly tell ourselves about this most important matter, namely, “there is no God, but we must believe in him” even if there is no God, for the alternative is too terrible to live through. 

And so, in a subtle way, Voegelin was a specifically modern variant of Aristotle’s “continent man” (spoudaios) more than he was a philosopher. He was someone who believed that under current conditions, which may be the norm at all times, it is not appropriate to dwell solely on speaking the truth. In fact, it may be reckless for us to do so, which is something that one ought never to be. It would almost seem as if Voegelin’s sense of morality demanded that the horrendous consequences of speaking the truth be brought to the attention of those who may be inclined to be irresponsible and improvident enough to want to speak it, and this alone should suffice to induce them to be prudent where speaking the truth is concerned. Evidently, Voegelin saw a conflict between being moral and being truthful, which is something that no classicist or scholastic would acknowledge (p. 10).

This is clearly terrain upon which it is not comfortable to travel but, given the current state of affairs I find all around me (both locally, nationally and globally), I have no choice but to continue to traverse it.

Time for an afternoon gin and tonic I think . . .

I publish the following piece with an important caveat which borrows some words of Herbert Fingarette (1921-2018) found in his ‘The Self in Transformation’ (Basic Books, New York 1963, p.1). I want to make it clear that this piece is an outcome rather than a realised objective and, as such, it simply forms an intellectual footprint and not a blueprint. If it helps you personally to find your place on the intellectual map and the existential position in which you point, all well and good. If not, so be it, I wish you well in your own place and in following your own direction of travel.


This occasional piece finds its genesis in a chance encounter with a fellow, free-thinking, minister of religion who, on hearing Susanna and I were caring for Susanna’s terminally ill daughter, offered us in a gentle but, in terms of his personal belief anyway, a ‘hot’ message of hope involving belief in the survival of personality beyond the grave and the existence of, what seemed to me, to be an almost Kantian kind of ‘kingdom’ or ‘realm’ of ends in which an all-good God (or principle) eventually brings all people to some kind of salvation and so, along the way, gifts our transient life (and, therefore, death) with some kind of ultimate and eternal ‘meaning.’

Neither Susanna nor I share my colleague’s beliefs but we did not take his proffered gospel of hope unkindly for this person has always seemed to us to be a genuinely good and kindly soul. Nevertheless, something about the encounter unsettled me but I couldn’t immediately quite put my finger on what it was. It was only a few days later when I began to read through the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s 1962 book ‘Rationalism in politics and other essays’ that I began to see with a small measure of clarity what it was that had disturbed me.

To be able properly to reveal to you what this was I’ll begin by noting that the encounter high-lit a profound tension between my colleague’s and my own understanding of in what consists the primary role of a minister of religion.

The traditional role of every minister of religion (of whatever persuasion) remains to teach and preach to a particular, voluntarily gathered community (and, oftentimes, also to the wider world) some kind of positive religious/philosophical doctrine for which they are personally prepared to go out to bat. In short, an important defining characteristic of this kind of minister is to be a ‘player.’ In offering Susanna and me his particular, Kantian-flavoured gospel my colleague was simply and uncontroversially engaging in a traditional kind of religious ministry.

But, for all kinds of reasons, many of which I have related in this blog, I have found myself less and less able to do likewise. It’s not that I’m not prepared to continue to make some personal, albeit very minimal religious/philosophical wagers about how the world is and my place in it—of course I do. But, in my twenty-year long public role as a minister (which has always run alongside a continuing series of private philosophical and theological studies and reflections) I have become ever more acutely aware that when it comes to my own religious and philosophical wagers—and political wagers for that matter—I’ve often been certain, but wrong, and that, in the future, even when I am once again very, very certain, on too many occasions the conditions will be such that it will be unlikely I’d ever be able to realize how wrong I am.

Consequently, in my public role as a minister, all I am able (and prepared) to do these days is tentatively to bring my own very minimal and provisionally held wagers about how the world is and my place in it into an ongoing and radically open-ended conversation in which ‘the participants’, as Oakeshott says,

‘. . . are not engaged in an inquiry or debate; there is no “truth” to be discovered, no proposition to be proved, no conclusion sought. They are not concerned to inform, to persuade, or to refute one another, and therefore the cogency of their utterances does not depend upon their all speaking in the same idiom; they may differ without disagreeing. Of course, a conversation may have passages of argument and a speaker is not forbidden to be demonstrative; but reasoning is neither sovereign nor alone, and the conversation itself does not compose an argument. . . . In conversation, “facts” appear only to be resolved once more into the possibilities from which they were made; “certainties” are shown to be combustible, not by being brought in contact with other “certainties” or with doubt, but by being kindled by the presence of ideas of another order; approximations are revealed between notions normally remote from one another. Thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions. Nobody asks where they have come from or on what authority they are present; nobody cares what will become of them when they have played their part. There is no symposiarch or arbiter; not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials. Every entrant is taken at its face-value and everything is permitted which can get itself accepted into the flow of speculation. And voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy. Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering. Properly speaking, it is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another (‘Rationalism in Politics’, Liberty Fund, Carmel, 1991, pp. 489-490).

The defining characteristic of a person engaging in the the kind of ministry which seeks to promote such a conversation is NOT to be a ‘player’ like my colleague—taking the field to bat passionately for his/her own religious/philosophical wagers—but to be an ‘umpire’ carefully attending to the arrangements, rules and by-laws which both enable and govern this conversation.

I began to see that Oakeshott’s understanding of in what consisted the best way to govern the (British) nation state was, quite unexpectedly, analogous to the way I have (always very imperfectly) tried to be a minister by putting just such a conversation at the heart of things and, in the next four paragraphs, you will hear Oakeshott (‘Rationalism in Politics’, Liberty Fund, Carmel, 1991, pp. 433-434) gently paraphrased, and sometimes directly quoted, again and again.

On taking up my first ministerial position in 2000 I quickly learnt that one of my key public-facing roles—especially in the increasingly fraught post-9/11 context—was not to inflame religious passion and give it new objects to feed upon but, instead, to inject into the activities of already too passionate men and women an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down. I saw how important it was to make it clear that, although I did not believe myself to be an agent of a supernatural God or some other benign providence, a custodian of a moral law, or an emblem of a divine order, I was still able to alert people (both inside and outside any local congregation) to the existence of something shared which they could easily recognize as valuable; something that, to some extent, they were already experiencing in the ordinary course of their own religious and, for that matter, political, lives.

I also came to recognise that I needed to find ways to ensure that in any local, liberal religious congregation the aforementioned restraint upon passionate religious belief was imposed upon its members, not by my own inappropriate suggestion or cajolery, or by any other means than by, if not legally binding laws (as is the case in the nation state), them at least by the congregation’s own shared and collectively agreed upon local by-laws and patterns of (broadly speaking) liberal/free-Christian and Enlightenment inspired behaviour (rather than belief). I saw that into the heat of our engagements, into the passionate clash of our personal beliefs, into our individual or shared enthusiasm for saving the souls of our neighbours or of all humankind, week by week, it was important constantly to bring into play the scepticism which most people neither have the time nor the inclination to do for themselves. In more poetic terms, I have come to see that my job as a minister is, therefore, primarily to provide people with something like the cool touch of the mountain that one feels in the plain even on the hottest summer day. Or, to leave that metaphor behind, to be like the ‘governor’ which, by controlling the speed at which its parts move, keeps an engine from racketing itself to pieces.

Lastly, I also realized my role included finding ways to strengthen already existing, but occasionally forgotten—and, alas, sometimes deliberately obscured—congregational structures which ensure that no single person is ever given (or is allowed to take) too much power or opportunity for advancing their own favourite religious or political projects. For me, as a minister, what has come to count above all else is, not my own religious/philosophical wagers, but the meaningful continuity of the four-and-a-half century old, free-thinking religious tradition to which I belong and which includes, remember, a genuine defence of the freedom to become tomorrow what we are not today.

In short, I have come more and more to see the value of a creating a free-religious congregation whose (lowercase ‘c’) conservatism imposes upon us all an orderliness without unduly directing the enterprise of any individual member’s own free-thinking and seeking and which, at the same time, concentrates all our duties to our tradition’s rules/by-laws in such a fashion that in our conversations together there is still plenty of room left for genuine delight and discovery. The hope was, and remains, that everyone who becomes a member of such a community is prepared to accept such a liberal/free-Christian and Enlightenment derived ecclesiastical order (polity), not because they believe it to represent some unassailable religious truth, but merely because it helps restrain any indecent competition from breaking out between our different substantive religious wagers and which, as Hume said, also moderated ‘the plague of a too diligent clergy.’

Now, in order to bring this piece to a satisfactory enough—though very provisional—close, I need to return to the distinction I pointed to at the beginning and note that Oakeshott also said:

‘An “umpire” who at the same time is one of the players is no umpire; “rules” about which we are not disposed to be conservative are not rules but incitements to disorder; the conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny’ (‘Rationalism in Politics’, Liberty Fund, Carmel, 1991, pp. 433-434)

I now realise that my chance meeting with my colleague so unsettled me because it unexpectedly brought back into mind my strong intuition that when and wherever a person in a formal representative or leadership position (such as a minister of religion) is a player in whom dreaming and ruling are conjoined there will always exists the very real danger of generating tyranny, and this is so even when the person concerned is kind and gentle in so many ways, as is my colleague.

If my intuition is correct (although in the conversational spirit outlined here I recognize I might be mistaken), I hope you can see why, as a minister, I cannot be a ‘player’ but only an ‘umpire’: i.e., a person whose primary concern is not for my own religious/philosophical dreams and wagers but, instead, for the well-being and maintenance of the arrangements, rules and by-laws governing the kind of conversation outlined above in which ‘thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions.’



I add here the Object and Constitution of the General Assembly of the Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (on whose roll I am a minister) because it seems very germane to my reflections above.

READINGS: 1 John 3:18-22 (David Bentley Hart) Little children, let our love be not in talk or on the tongue, but in action and truth. By this we shall know that we belong to the truth, and assure our heart before him: That, if our heart should offer condemnation, God is greater than our heart, and knows all things. Beloved ones, if our heart offer no condemnation, we have confidence toward God, because we receive from him whatever we might ask, because we keep his commandments and do the things that are pleasing in his sight. An brief introduction to George de Benneville (1703-1793) George de Benneville (1703-1793), born in London in 1703 to aristocratic Huguenot French parents in the court of Queen Anne, was a Christian Universalist phy...

It was a very hot day here in Cambridge reaching 32 degrees celsius. Apparently, on Thursday, it may reach 35 degrees celsius. Hmm . . . it's a reminder of why both I, personally, and the congregation collectively is supporting the Extinction Rebellion movement by making the building available to them for free.

Anyway, today, the coolest place in my neck of the woods was that same church which is immediately next door to the manse where Susanna and I live. So, during the hottest part of the afternoon, I decided to take my camera and, in the spirit of my photographic hero Edwin Smith, to try and capture something of the modest beauty of the church I am privileged to serve as minister. I post nearly all the photos I took (in the order in which they were taken) so that somewhere online there is available a reasonably good overview of the place. If you'd like to know more about the building then please click on the link below which will take you to a pdf of the book written in 1914 by the building's architect, Ronald P. Jones, called Nonconformist Church Architecture. The building which he there imagines and describeds in Chapter 5, p. 43ff was finally built in Cambridge in 1927.

READINGS

From “A History of Unitarianism; Socinianism and its Antecedents”, Vol. 2 by Earl Morse Wilbur (Boston, Beacon Press, 1945/47, p. 5)

It is intended here, therefore, to present not so much the history of a particular sect or form of Christian doctrine, as to consider broadly the development of a movement fundamentally characterized instead by its steadfast and increasing devotion to these three leading principles: first, complete mental freedom in religion rather than bondage to creeds or confessions; second, the unrestricted use of reason in religion, rather than reliance upon external authority or past tradition; third, generous tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity.

From “A Letter Concerning Toleration” by John Locke (first edition, London, Awnsham Churchill, 1689, p. 5)

The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light. I will not here tax the pride and ambition of some, the passion and uncharitable zeal of others. These are faults from which human affairs can perhaps scarce ever be perfectly freed; but yet such as nobody will bear the plain imputation of, without covering them with some specious colour; and so pretend to commendation, whilst they are carried away by their own irregular passions. But, however, that some may not colour their spirit of persecution and unchristian cruelty with a pretence of care of the public weal and observation of the laws; and that others, under pretence of religion, may not seek impunity for their libertinism and licentiousness; in a word, that none may impose either upon himself or others, by the pretences of loyalty and obedience to the prince, or of tenderness and sincerity in the worship of God; I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other. If this be not done, there can be no end put to the controversies that will be always arising between those that have, or at least pretend to have, on the one side, a concernment for the interest of men's souls, and, on the other side, a care of the commonwealth.

From “What is wrong with tolerance: The ideal of religious tolerance has crippling flaws. It’s time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity” by Simon Rabinovitch

The purpose of religious tolerance has always been, and remains, to maintain the power and purity of the dominant religion in a given state. Most dominant religions in most states today profess tolerance, but they also seem to feel especially threatened. Religious nationalist movements in the United States, Europe, India, Turkey and Israel all want to strengthen the relationship between state identity and the dominant religion. In each case, democratic elections have reinforced the significance of the majority’s religion to the meaning of state and nation, elevating the power of that religion. We can see a rising chauvinism in the mix of Catholicism and politics in eastern Europe today that portrays liberals and communists (often a code for ‘Jews’) as enemies. We can see a similar dynamic in the Turkish celebration of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. And we can also see it in the reemerging influence of Evangelicals in the US, as defenders of ‘religious liberty’ in their associations and businesses, and against ‘Sharia’ – as they imagine it – in the public sphere.


In 1945 Earl Morse Wilbur offered up what he thought were the three defining principles of our, by then four centuries old, free-thinking, liberal religious tradition which are still often cited by us as being characteristic of our particular way of doing religion. As you heard in our readings they are freedom, reason and tolerance.

But, as with all such things, things change and time takes its toll and in the context of our own age and situation they are beginning to look very worn. Indeed, it seems to me that although, as an ideal, the first of them, “complete mental freedom in religion” remains reasonably serviceable (although I strongly resist the idea that any of us is actually capable of complete mental freedom because we are all so deeply and unconsciously shaped by many inherited misapprehensions and prejudices), the second and third principles, reason and tolerance, are in very much poorer states of repair and right now they are in need of some serious and significant reassessment.

Some of you will know that in recent months I’ve spent a fair bit of time reassessing the idea of “unrestricted use of reason in religion” so, today, I won’t explore this characteristic in any detail and will confine myself simply to noting the headline point I’ve been making.

Whilst the use of reason in religion remains absolutely vital it is a fundamental mistake to forget that reason has significant limitations. This is why I have returned on a number of recent occasions to Keats famous idea of “negative capability”. Keats, remember, did not use the word “negative” in a pejorative sense but, instead, to help us see that our potential as human beings is far from being completely defined by what we possess because we are clearly defined as much by what we do not — and perhaps never can — possess. Keats saw that, despite our strong determination to work everything out we continue to need to develop and nurture a very specific kind of active passivity that is a willingness to allow whatever is mysterious or doubtful to us to remain just that. Of course, one can and should at times and in the appropriate contexts probe these things — some of which will, in time, yield to our probing — but the likelihood is that there will always remain things which continue stubbornly to resist rational understanding and with which we will always need to live, humbly and patiently.

Today, however, what primarily concerns me is the third principle pointed to by Wilbur, namely, the “generous tolerance of differing religious views and usages rather than insistence upon uniformity in doctrine, worship or polity.”

To see the problem here it is important to remember that for us the origins of religious toleration lie in the religious conflicts which came out of the sixteenth-century Reformation and continued until the mid-seventeenth century during which the stamping out of heresy became to many people a positive indicator of true religious devotion. Eventually, as much thanks to sheer exhaustion as any deep display wisdom, it became clear to everyone that this state of affairs simply could not continue. However, and this is key, it was always and only the majority religion that was ever going to have the power and wherewithal legally to impose upon the minority religions the then new and life-saving idea of religious toleration.

I do not want to belittle or underplay the role the idea legally defined religious toleration played in the creation of our modern British society, not least of all because, considered retrospectively, to us it seems to have been a necessary condition for the ending of large-scale religious violence in our neck of the woods. The enactment of legislation legally to force upon a whole nation religious toleration has undoubtedly saved millions of lives including many within of our own minority Socinian and Unitarian communities and it allowed us to worship in freedom and without fear of our lives. This should not be forgotten. But this undoubted benefit came with a high cost in the form of the strengthening of the majority state religion firstly via the Corporation Act of 1661, and then the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678. Together they insisted that only those who were taking communion in the established Church of England were deemed to be eligible to serve in any public office. In a nutshell toleration excluded us from having any role in the day to day running of our own, wider, civic communities.

I hope this helps you see that from its very beginnings our idea of religious toleration was conceived primarily as a one-way relationship between the tolerating and the tolerated, a relationship which explicitly attempted to keep tolerated minority groups outside of full membership of the dominant, majority group.

It is also very important to note — although in passing today — that this model of religious toleration was then exported to many places around the globe thanks to the expansion of the British Empire into north America, India, Australia and huge parts of Africa and the Middle East between the early seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries.

But notice I said a moment ago that an attempt was made promote religious toleration by using this legal and, quite literally, divisive model. I say “attempted” because we now know that on the ground the legal division created between the majority and the excluded minorities, though very real, was never as watertight as many people (sometimes on both sides of the divide) hoped it would be. Instead, it was always a leaky affair and this allowed, albeit very slowly, a process of creative religious, social, political and cultural exchange to occur between the majority group and the minority groups which, over time, radically changed everyone in some fashion or another. As time unfolded the exchanges became ever more widespread and increasingly dynamic and this, in turn, meant that the division became ever more leaky, so much so that when the Test Acts were finally repealed in 1828 and 1829 very little public comment or protest was made. This was because, by then, the division — or at least massive sections of it — had simply dissolved away to almost nothing.  

Now, in what might at first seem to be an outrageous non-sequitur, many of you know that I am very interested in ghosts, not because I believe in them but because when they are explored as cultural constructs they help reveal to us what is haunting and, therefore, unhealthily and, even apparently spookily, still shaping any given culture or time.

I mention this because it seems to me that although the legal division set up by the Corporation Act, the two Test Acts and the Toleration Act of 1688/1689 has dissolved or died, its ghost, still bearing the name and ghostly memories of seventeenth-century “Toleration”, continues unhealthily to haunt us.

By this I mean, often without realising it, we are still tending to frame our contemporary relationships with other religious minorities primarily, not in terms of reciprocal interchange, but in terms of one-way relationships between the tolerating and the tolerated which, by default remember, attempts in some fashion to keep tolerated groups outside full membership of the dominant, majority group.

As a minority, liberal religious tradition the major difference for us between the seventeenth-century and now is that, today, we consider ourselves to belong to (or are at least completely integrated within) the majority group. This means that we, along with many others in the majority, can now all too often and too easily, fall prey to seeing ourselves as the insiders who are in need of protecting ourselves from dangerous outsiders. In today’s increasingly unpleasant and febrile national populist context, these dangerous religious outsiders are, for the most part, not the kind of minority Christian groups such as was our own, but minority groups from other religions with Jews and Muslims being singled out as particularly problematic.

This developing situation, frankly, scares me witless not least of all because we know where this kind of thing can lead and, alas, does seem to be leading once again.

As a minority religious group ourselves which still has in certain congregations and individuals a long institutional memory it seems to me that it is incumbent upon us to speak out as best we can and say that the seventeenth-century conception of toleration didn’t work — at least not as its devisors thought it would — because the central pillar upon which it rested — namely a putatively clear division in the civic world between the majority insiders and the minority outsiders — never could work. This is because there is nothing in reality — whether conceived in scientific of cultural terms — that is not, ultimately, porous and leaky. It is because of this leakiness that despite attempts to stop it occurring there is only and always occurring religious, social, political and cultural exchange in the civic sphere. One can never hold this tide back — as wise old King Cnut knew. Given this isn’t it about time we as a community laid to rest the ghost of seventeenth-century toleration and began to encourage amongst us the development of a new conception of toleration that is, from the outset, an explicitly porous and leaky concept?

As Simon Rabinovitch, an assistant professor of history at Boston University who has written on this subject notes, it needs a new name because the ideal of religious tolerance has been shown to have crippling flaws. For him this is an indication that we are entering a “time to embrace a civic philosophy of reciprocity”.

The need for this kind of exchange is particularly pressing at the moment because we find ourselves in a rapidly developing situation where “one set of ideals (for diversity, pluralism and exchange) is being challenged by another (for intolerance or, at best, a return to a highly contingent tolerance)” and this, in turn means that “a space has opened for a new civic philosophy” — that of reciprocity.

Rabinovitch feels that for this concept to develop further we need to begin “to teach it, study it and write about it” and this address is simply my own first, tentative and exceedingly modest contribution to the project. But, most of all, he thinks we should all be talking about it in a way that helps shift us “away from a binary vocabulary that counters intolerance with calls for tolerance, and toward a discussion of shared histories and mutual obligations.”

Rabinovitch begins to draw his own essay to a close by pointing out that in *The Constitution of the French Second Republic* which was “enacted during the wave of democratic revolutions known as the *Springtime of the Peoples*, which swept through Europe in 1848” we find “one simple article that grants no right or power to either the state or the people. Article VI states only: ‘Reciprocal duties bind the citizens to the Republic and the Republic to the citizens.’”

Rabinovitch then concludes by stateing his feeling that

Reciprocity makes this claim but goes further: the more we acknowledge what reciprocally binds each group to the society, and the society to each group, the better off we will all be.

I can’t help but feel he is right. It is, surely, time to lay the ghost of seventeenth-century religious toleration to rest and begin, instead, to conceive and bring to birth new and creative way of being together in our differences, namely, a civic philosophy of reciprocity.

READINGS  The “Overview” taken from the chapter on religion in the new British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey Rise of the ‘nones’ Most of the shift in the religious profile of the nation has been towards non-affiliation, with 52% of the public now saying they do not regard themselves as belonging to any religion. Of these, most were simply not brought up with a religion, with a smaller minority having lost a childhood faith. Those who do not regard themselves as belonging to a religion are increasingly secular, that is, likely to say they are “very” or “extremely” unreligious. The number of people with no religion, who were not brought up in one, has increased from 11% in 1998 to 23% in 2018. Consolidation of attendance T...

An view of the moon that stopped me in my tracks READINGS: SELF PORTRAIT by David Whyte from Fire in the Earth  ©1992 Many Rivers Press It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the go...

It's been a pleasure and honour to have been able to welcome so many of you to the many XR events that have been held in the Cambridge Unitarian Church over the past few months. Thank you, too, for inviting me to say a few words here today.

I have no doubt that all of us gathered here today are people completely committed to playing a real part in the necessary restoration of our planet and its associated ecosystems. Even without the mountain of scientific evidence which clearly shows that our current growth-obsessed, industrialised and financialised cultures are destroying the world at an unprecedented rate it is now possible for everyone to see that humanity simply has to start living in very different ways from those we are currently pursuing. As events such as these, and the inspiring school climate strike movement, are showing, there is now ever more widely in play a new ethical demand to protest against and to begin actively to disrupt our old ways of living.

However, as we do this we must never forget that as a movement we are not only concerned to protest against something and to disrupt it but also — through the creation of intelligent, scientifically informed, plural, inclusive and democratic Citizen’s Assemblies — we hope to articulate and then to bring into law, radically new public policies designed to protect the world from any further rapacious exploitation and wilful destruction and, secondly, to introduce policies which will help all of us play a part in the slow, careful, loving process of restoration.

In connection with this necessary process of restoration today I want simply to add a single, brief thought to our collective conversation which I learnt from the environmental film maker Steve Dunsky.

He realised that any true and lasting restoration of the world needed to be intimately accompanied by the need to “re-story” our world and he memorably insisted that “[b]efore we make new policies, we need new metaphors.”

Dunsky could see that our metaphors, in the form of the stories we tell each other, continually shape us; indeed, it is no exaggeration to say WE ARE the stories we tell each other and ourselves.

What is now clear to us all is that the old, growth-obsessed, industrial and financial stories that have prevailed in our world for too long must now urgently be abandoned. As loving, thoughtful gardeners of the earth we need lovingly to dig into the rich and fertile soil of global human literature, music, art and philosophy and religion to encourage the appearance, growth blossoming and fruiting of new stories, new metaphors suitable for our own times.

Our present political, financial and industrial leaders refuse to do engage in this work of re-story-ation and endlessly say to us TINA — There Is No Alternative — to their way of doing things.

But, if we take seriously the need to re-story ourselves, we will find not the TINA beloved by our current political and industrial leaders but the far more wonderful TATIANA — That, Astonishingly, There Is AN Alternative.

Today, we are gathering as a people who know, deep in our bones that, astonishingly, there is an alternative.

But these alternative ways of being in the world — prefigured for a summer afternoon here in Cambridge — will not take root, blossom and fruit unless we all take time to re-story ourselves. For it is only out of our own individual and collective re-story-ations that there can come the right kind of new policies which are truly able to protect and nurture this our most beautiful, but often bruised and hurting world.

So let’s raise a glass and a cheer to TATIANA — that, astonishingly, there is an alternative and we, through our new stories, will be ourselves TATIANA embodied.


I took a few photos at the junction of Emmanuel Street and St Andrew's Street where I spent the day with a lovely bunch of people. I post a few of them below for your pleasure — just click on them to enlarge. We talked and sang and thoroughly enjoyed the blessed lack of traffic . . .

We were even joined by a bride on her wedding day!

This morning I read through Lorraine Daston’s masterful and “pithy work of philosophical anthropology that explores why humans find moral orders in natural orders.”  Speaking personally, I’d highly recommend getting hold of a copy and, to help you make up your mind, I paste below the publisher’s summary of the book.

Her insightful and helpful questions and thoughts helped shape my own philosophical reflections all afternoon, not least of all whilst I walked around the peaceful and beautiful Cambridge University Botanic Garden with my camera in hand.

As always, I hope you enjoy the photographs (just click on them to enlarge) all of which were taken with a Fuji Film X100F and are just as they came out of the camera (with only some occasional, minor cropping).

Against Nature by Lorraine Daston

Summary
Why have human beings, in many different cultures and epochs, looked to nature as a source of norms for human behavior? From ancient India and ancient Greece, medieval France and Enlightenment America, up to the latest controversies over gay marriage and cloning, natural orders have been enlisted to illustrate and buttress moral orders. Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike have appealed to nature to shore up their causes. No amount of philosophical argument or political critique deters the persistent and pervasive temptation to conflate the “is” of natural orders with the “ought” of moral orders.

In this short, pithy work of philosophical anthropology, Lorraine Daston asks why we continually seek moral orders in natural orders, despite so much good counsel to the contrary. She outlines three specific forms of natural order in the Western philosophical tradition—specific natures, local natures, and universal natural laws—and describes how each of these three natural orders has been used to define and oppose a distinctive form of the unnatural. She argues that each of these forms of the unnatural triggers equally distinctive emotions: horror, terror, and wonder.

Daston proposes that human reason practiced in human bodies should command the attention of philosophers, who have traditionally yearned for a transcendent reason, valid for all species, all epochs, even all planets.

Hop Hornbeam

Hop Hornbeam

Hop Hornbeam

Hop Hornbeam

At the beginning of the week I wandered over to St Mary the Virgin church in Fen Ditton (the photo to the right is of one of the splendid eighteenth-century gravestones in the churchyard  — click on it to enlarge ) to eat an apple, drink a flask of tea and re-real a little of my favourite text from the English Revolution, the (still to me astonishing) The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650) by Jacob Bauthumley. Here's a taste of it taken from the text’s opening section: O God, what shall I say thou art, when thou canst not be named? What shall I speak of thee, when in speaking of thee, I speak nothing but contradiction? For if I say I see thee, it is nothing but thy seeing of thy self; for there is nothing in me capable of seeing...

A Boeing 777 READINGS:  WORKING TOGETHER David Whyte from The House of Belonging ©1996 Many Rivers Press We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous. I am thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we, in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great intangibles about us. Written for the presentation of The Collier Trophy to The Boeing Company marking the introduction of the new 777 passenger jet. EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU David Whyte from Everything is Waitin...

Sculptor Fathi Muhammad with his bust of Al-Ma'aari READINGS: Traditions come from the past, of high import if they be True; Ay, but weak is the chain of those who warrant their truth. Consult thy reason and let perdition take others all: Of all the conference Reason best will counsel and guide. — Al-Ma'arri (trans. Nicholson, poem 209) Ye have gotten a long, long shrift, O kings and tyrants, And still ye work injustice hour by hour. What ails you that ye tread no path of glory? A man may take the field, tho’ he love the bower. But some hope an Imám with prophetic voice Will rise amid the silent ranks gaze. An idle thought! There’s no Imám but reason, To point the morning and the evening ways. — Al-Ma'arri (trans. Nicholson, po...

READINGS: Poem No. XXII in “A Shropshire Lad” by A. E. Housman      From far, from eve and morning         And yon twelve-winded sky,      The stuff of life to knit me         Blew hither: here am I.      Now—for a breath I tarry         Nor yet disperse apart—      Take my hand quick and tell me,         What have you in your heart.      Speak now, and I will a nswer;         How shall I help you, say;      Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters         I take my endless way. NB: The creating wind in Housman’s poem is not “the Spirit of God” that “moved upon the face of the waters” as recounted in Genesis but, instead, a Lucretian breeze of folding, flowing and fielding matter wh...

The weather-world, Cambridge, Ascension Sunday morning . . . READINGS The Ascension of Jesus (Acts 1:6-10) So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, ...

Dunes at Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk READINGS: What you have here in the readings is a juxtaposition of pictures concerning our idea of foundations and the foundation of our ideas. Today, for this address to have its greatest impact I'd like you to be aware, not so much of the different pictures themselves but rather upon the act of juxtaposition itself . So, on the one hand, Jesus said: Matthew 7:24-27 Jesus said: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be li...