Sponged, again

Yesterday evening I was in a packed church - and St John's, Princes Street is quite a size to pack - to hear Bishop Jack Spong talk about the difficult subject of eternal life. Difficult? From my early teens I've realised how difficult, when my father used to quizz me: what kind of eternal life did I envisage? Would I fancy it as a spotty adolescent, or would it be more like an eternity of arthritis? He knew, and even then I knew, that these were facetious questions masking an uncomfortable reality - Richard Dawkins would have felt quite at home chez nous in the early sixties. And of course, it's the simplistic notions that the Dawkinites, and plenty of people who actually simply know very little about religion, keep insisting are the bread and butter of the Christian faith and any other you might care to mention. No wonder they dismiss us as daft. And no wonder we get fed up.

But Jack Spong had this crowd feeling anything but fed up, if the applause was anything to go by. He's just brought out another book: Eternal Life: A New Vision, and reading it would give you a better idea of his drift than reading this post. But a few bits stick: the God-filled man that was Jesus showing that the Kingdom of God was within him, and telling us that it is also within us; the living of a life of loving that aligns us with God who is timeless; the self-conscious humanity that is at once our original sin and our saving grace. And a joyous recognition of the impossibility of sharing our experience of God in words, in this question: Can a horse tell another horse what it means to be human?

The laughter showed the relief of those who had realised that the high and crazy and the low and lazy were not for them, and that sharing their own experience didn't fill pews. That's not our job, said the bishop in his wonderfully American way. We're not here to do that. The faith we hold is not to bring peace, but to help us to grasp reality and have the courage to go on facing it. It takes, he said, a lot of courage to be human and realise that we are finite - the whole nature of humanity is to be anxious.

In the end, I can't even redeliver this talk, any more than I can redeliver religious experience without resorting to art. But the realisation that there are so many of us - including people we met whom we know in more conservatively Christian circles - was thrilling. Our churches may be falling down around our ears, they may be populated by people of my age and older - but maybe that's as it should be, at this time. And for sure I came away with the conviction that if the church is diminishing, it should probably not moan about the failings of society.

It's time to take a long, hard look at our own failings. And then? I don't know. But it should be good ...

As Richard Holloway, winding up the evening, put it: we'd been well and truly Sponged. I recommend the treatment!

Re-engaging the brain

Feeling slightly recovered from the malaise of the past four days, I felt up to opening my new book. ( I must just add, however, that it is dispiriting to note that the 4lbs shed during the aforementioned four days seem to have come off such unhelpful parts of the anatomy as the fingers and the face. Perhaps this is why I needed to engage my brain again).

But a nos moutons. Spong's prologue and opening chapter have left me asking the same question as he does:

"Is faith so weak and life so afraid that those who dare to pose questions must expect to be attacked for faithlessness by the religiously insecure?"

Immediately before that question, he asks his readers if they have felt the tension between their inability to believe literally the supernatural things said about Jesus in the Bible and reiterated in Christian history and their being drawn "deeply and expectantly" into the Jesus experience. As one of these readers, I know that there are areas of my religious thought that I simply don't share - unless, perhaps, with an interested non-believer. Safer that way, don't you know.

There is little chance that someone like me will receive death-threats over this - unlike Spong. And my job doesn't depend on my toeing the party line. But surely all these highly-educated clergy of my acquaintance must know all this stuff? So what happens? Does every priest have to stick to the curriculum regardless of what they know? Is there a rule about this? (These aren't rhetorical questions: feel free to enlighten me)

I wasn't really brought up to believe much. I was taught the basics and allowed to go my own way, and it was experience of something which happened in an Anglican framework which caught me, so perhaps it was always going to be easy for me to question and to feel it was ok to use the brains I'd been given rather than give them a Sabbath rest. And yes, I'm a Christian, one who doesn't want to live in a mediaeval cosmology. Just let me keep the music ....

Left holding the baby

One of the good things I did over my long weekend away was to attend a lecture in Edinburgh by Jack Spong, radical American bishop and theologian. I was delighted to realise as I passed the Unitarian church where it was delivered that the event was a sell-out long before it started - not just because I was able to sell my spare ticket (at the purchase price) but because this seemed a hopeful sign. For much of the time I feel that religion in our society is so much a minority sport (I'm talking ethnic Brits here) that I wouldn't have been surprised at a half-empty hall, but no, it was packed. The audience was interesting - I felt young by comparison with 90% of those attending - and resembled a cull of many piskie congregations, which was probably just about right.

Spong was speaking about the subject of his latest book, Jesus for the non-religious. To attempt to summarise the 90 or so minutes of his talk would be to diminish it, and I don't intend to try. But it was heartening to hear someone of his undoubted scholarship reinforce ideas which I feel I've instinctively held for years, and to realise that this was another of these inspiring Christians who could blow new life into the flame of faith and show how possible it all is. I'll share one of my insights which he touched on.

When setting Interpretation passages for senior pupils, we often used to put a question about the nature of the text used. Was it fact or fiction, and how could you tell? And one of the possible pointers to fiction would lie in the close reproduction of the most private or intimate moments of conversation. Like the one between Pilate and Jesus, for example. Now, go too far down that road and you could end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But explain the Jewish background and a bit of history and suddenly - hey! You grab the baby and embrace it. The superfluous bits are seen for what they were. It's what is that counts.

Ok. I told you it was simple. I bought the book (link on the Wikipedia site already linked to) and will be on surer ground when I've read it. But at the end, when he stood like an old-fashioned Baptist preacher and demanded of the church: "Give me back my Jesus!" the hall erupted. It was exciting and exhilarating, and all these aged persons were full of it. No doubt there were those who had come to mutter, but they must've slunk off.

And me? I had a bad attack of the whirring brain and wasn't asleep till after 3am. Isn't religion exciting?

Succinctly put

I have to thank blogger Mad Priest for publishing
this letter from John Spong on the subject of the current strains in the Anglican Communion. One sentence in particular struck a chord: I, for one, insist that truth always be placed above unity and I do not care to be a member of a Christian body that is mired in an unchallenged sickness called homophobia. Now, the church in Scotland is not currently so "mired" that it cannot extract its feet from the mud, and there is room for hope that we shall - to continue the metaphor - be able to march on our way unhindered. But right now there is work to be done. As Spong says, There are two kinds of ignorance in this world. One is the ignorance of not knowing. That kind of ignorance can always be remedied by simply getting the facts. The other kind of ignorance, however, is the ignorance of not knowing that you do not know. It is the job of those who know to teach those who do not, and we cannot afford to leave it to someone else.