A Day I Can Believe In

N.B., Scripture [marked GNB] are taken from The Good News Bible published by The Bible Societies/Collins ã American Bible Society.

Good Friday is the grand climax (even if not the last day) of the Christian season of Lent.  I had followed the traditional idea of using this six week season as a period of reflection, and as stated elsewhere, my reading led me to the conclusion that I definitely did not believe in God in the way that Church of England priests are supposed to believe in God, i.e., a supreme being who created the universe.   I am, however, still spiritual and continue to regularly worship at St James Piccadilly (London).  It is just that my worship is not directed to a creator God, even if that is the meaning of the words that I am listening to, saying, or singing.

These reflections are based on the thoughts that came to my mind as I sat in a beautiful Good Friday service in the beautiful church of St James, Piccadilly.  Before the service began I was reflecting that Good Friday was a day that I could believe in.  When I was working as a priest in Cork I took a holiday to Venice.  While there I visited a lot of churches, and there are plenty to choose from in that city.  At the time, I was struggling to continue in having any faith in God and took to praying in front of whatever stain glass windows or statues I could find, pleading with a God who might be there to show me the way back to faith.  These prayers were not answered, but in one church I was praying in front of a depiction of Jesus on the cross.  I reflected that I could believe in that Jesus, who gave up his life for others, even if he did it empowered by a faith in God that I no longer shared.  It was Easter’s story of God raising Jesus back to life that I struggled with, indeed I struggled with the notion of God.  So Good Friday with its focus on the death of a human called Jesus is a day that I can believe in.

These reflections are based on what thoughts I was inspired with as I listened to Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Jesus, played by a string quartet, and to Gospel readings containing those words that Jesus is reputed to have spoken from the cross.   Of course, there will be those who take offence that I write that Jesus is reputed to have said these words, because it is in the Bible, so Jesus must have said it.  Fact.  End of discussion.  Well, no, actually, and Good Friday services based around these seven last words (the Bible bits, not Haydn’s composition) are a very good example of why taking the Bible literally means that we cannot take it to be recording simple historical facts.  The penultimate last word comes from John 19:30 where Jesus says, “It is finished,” [GNB] bows his head, and dies.  A good climax to a Good Friday service, except that it is not the climax, it is only the sixth of seven last words.  Up pops Luke 23:46 telling us that Jesus says, “Father!  In your hands I place my spirit!” [GNB] and dies.  Both cannot be historically correct accounts of Jesus’ final words, so to take the Bible literally, we have to take it literally, i.e., as a work of literature, or in the case of the Gospels, four works of literature.

 First Word:  “Forgive them, Father!  They don’t know what they are doing.”  Luke 23:34 [GNB]

In the light of my Lenten reading confirming that I did not believe in God, I did feel that Jesus had the advantage of me here.  In the early stage of his crucifixion he directs a call to a God in whom he believes.  That may have helped to sustain him through some of the early pain in the awful suffering that is a Roman crucifixion.  I would like to believe again in a God to whom I could turn in a crisis, but I have no such faith.  Jesus did and it must have helped him.

Second Word:  “I promise you that today you will be with me in Paradise with me.”  Luke 23:43 [GNB]

As I do not believe in God or the resurrection of Jesus, I do not believe in an after-life (at least not in the sense that Jesus believed in one).  Therefore, I cannot relate to the usual understanding that Jesus is telling the criminal with whom he is having a conversation on their crosses, that today they will both be in heaven.  That traditional understanding of these words of Jesus is difficult for traditional Christians to believe in as well.  This is because they believe that Lent has one more day to go (Saturday), before the resurrection happens at dawn on Easter Day (Sunday), so Jesus is not going to be in Paradise (heaven) on the same day as he is speaking to the criminal on the cross.  So maybe Jesus means something else.  Maybe something has been lost in translation.  Jesus spoke Aramaic, a language that I know practically nothing about, but I know a lot about Greek, the language in which the New Testament is written.  In Greek, paradise is the word for a garden.  So maybe Jesus was linking back to the Garden of Gethsemane, where he spent a night of agony wanting to be spared his predicted death.  Possibly, he was telling one or both criminals that today they would be sharing the agony that he went through in the Paradise of Gethsemane.

Third Word:  “He is your son.  She is your mother.”  John 19:26-27 [GNB]

Jesus is directing these words to his mother, Mary, and the person whom the Gospel refers to as the disciple Jesus loved, but traditionally called John.  This reflection is one that I prepared earlier, in that it is the only one that derives from on-going reflections about the crucifixion scene.  John is at the cross with the women, while the other three Gospels depict the male disciples as hiding from the authorities.  This leads me to reflect that John’s place was seen to be with the women, not with the men.  Maybe John did not fit in with an otherwise macho culture among the male disciples.  Maybe he was gender variant or very camp, or just not seen as terribly male by the other disciples, and not seen as a threat by the authorities.  Or maybe tradition is wrong to named the disciple Jesus loved as John, maybe this disciple was one of the women.  If John was the disciple Jesus loved and if he was not very macho, maybe he had been thrown out by a macho father and Jesus was suggesting that he link up with Mary, and we are told that Mary moved in with John from that day onwards.  Why Mary needed to move in we do not know.  She had sons other than Jesus, one of who (James) would later become leader of the Christians in Jerusalem.

Fourth Word:  “My God, my God, why did you abandon me?”  Mark 15:34 or Matthew 27:46 [GNB]

Is this the point at which Jesus joins me in no longer believing in God?  His faith in God was easier to maintain when he was first placed on the cross, but now as the pain increases, maybe his faith has decreased to nothing.   That would mean that he now has to face his pain alone without the comfort of God.  That is the great irony of believing in a God who helps in time of trouble.  It is much easier to maintain that faith as a pious hope in untroubled times, but much harder to keep the faith in the midst of the deepest troubles when you most need that help.

Fifth Word:  “I am thirsty.”  John 19:28 [GNB]

Jesus is by now deprived of the comfort of his belief in God.  God has abandoned him and so he is more exposed to his physical pain and he cries out in human need.  In the process, he places himself at the mercy of his fellow humans, who respond by giving him some wine on a sponge.   One of the advantages of losing faith in God is that it means that you must be more attentive to the support that you can receive from your fellow humans.

Sixth Word:  “It is finished!”

The service that I was at was the traditional three hours of observation from noon to 3pm.  This led me to reflect that by the time Jesus was declaring the end and finally dying, he might have been agonising about why the agony lasted so long.  Maybe his thoughts ran along the lines of “I agreed to die, but not to this manner of dying.  In the Garden of Gethsemane I asked my friends to watch with me for one hour, but why have they had to watch me dying for three hours?”

More prosaically, was Jesus simply saying that there was no wine left in the sponge and asking, Oliver Twist style, “Can I have some more, please?”

Seventh Word:  “Father!  In your hands I place my spirit!”  Luke 23:46 [GNB]

My muse had been good to me up until this point, but she was now silent.  Maybe this was because if I was to follow my theme of Jesus having lost his faith in God, this final cry would be his return to faith.  I cannot relate to this as a final word of Jesus, as I myself cannot return to such a faith.  Of course, there is also the problem noted earlier that Jesus is already dead by this time, according to the sixth reading.  I prefer the theatre of the desolation in John’s words, and Luke is just far too pious for my liking.  You have to pay your money and make your choice, as Jesus cannot have said both the sixth and the seventh words.

Concluding Words

These probably come across as rather odd Good Friday reflections, but that should not be too surprising for someone who cannot believe in the triumph and celebration of Easter Day (but I joined in the celebrations to be with friends).  Good Friday was, however, one day in my regular attendance at St James Piccadilly when I could say, “This is a day I can believe in.”

By George

On the day that John Lennon was shot dead (8th December 1980) I stayed up all night listening to Radio One play constant Beatles and Lennon music.  I was hooked and became a major Beatles fan nearly ten years after they split up and on the day that the first of the Fab Four died.  My favourite Beatle was George Harrison, probably because I felt sympathy for the quiet one and I wanted (in vain) to be a guitarist.  My favourite album was Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967 – it came out when I was 8 months old) and my favourite song on that album was the only one by George:  Within You and Without You.

That song’s lyrics  end by promising personal enlightenment when we see that we are all one and that life flows both within and without us.  That is a good summary of how I see spirituality now that I am content to give up the quest to re-believe in a creator God.  My spirituality is not focused on following the rules set by anyone else, certainly not by a transcendent God in whose existence I can place no faith.  When I meditate it is to allow myself to experience something beyond the mundane within myself.  Yet I do not want to stop there, for I also want to experience a feeling of connectedness with all other existence that is beyond me.

I follow no teachers, but I have my influences.  My ideas of spirituality are influenced by Zen Buddhist spirituality, even though I would not embrace much of Zen’s philosophical stances.  One aspect of Zen philosophy that I do adopt is that of no-self (anatman) although my primary influence in that direction came from Western postmodern philosophy.  Yet while postmodern thought deconstructs the self in theory, Zen has spirituality as its primary focus.  I do not follow Zen, but its concept of no-self inspires me to see spirituality as re-connecting with all other beings, human or not, in our shared universe.

And, By George, I have a long way to go along this spiritual path.

Do You Want to Believe in God?

I was waiting to catch a bus home from Tottenham Hale Retail Park when a young man approached me in a way that suggested he was going to ask me something.  I was quite relieved when all he wanted to know was if I wanted one of his magazines.  I have no idea what the magazine was, but I suspected that it was some religious propaganda so I said “No.”  He then asked, “Do you believe in God?”  I thought it a bit rude to just ask that question without any build-up and I did not like being asked such personal questions while balancing five storage boxes a new coat and three new tops on a bus shelter seat.  I suppose I could have given a detailed theological response to his query, or simple told him to mind his own business, but again I replied “No.”  He was a persistent young man (or maybe working to a script) and followed up with “Do you want to believe in God?”  I resisted the very strong temptation to respond with “Not if she is anything to do with you, darling,” and, as it was already a tried and tested response in this unwanted conversation, I said “No.”

Often in the last two and a half years I have been asked the “Do you believe in God” question and answered “No.”  This is despite the fact that I still worship (if that is the appropriate term for a non-believer) at St James Piccadilly every Sunday.  Normally, I explained my continued presence in church on the basis of answering “Yes” to the second question:  “Do you want to believe in God?”  I identified as agnostic (or sometimes atheist), but I was never content in that position as being a believer in God would make my life simpler as a priest, even as one without permission to officiate.

One morning in St James my mind was wandering and wondering again and the thought came to me that my non-belief in God was something that had been present since moving to Manchester in September 2008, with a few trial runs at atheism in my troubled last post as a priest in 2006-2008.  So was I not believing in God because I simply had not re-examined the evidence?  Even when I led a discussion at St James’ Awakening to God group on Christian atheism, I was still citing my rejection of a creator God during a physiology lecture about October 2008.  As a theologian I should keep my research a bit more up to date than that, so I decided that I would spend Lent 2011 doing some reading to see if I could study my way back to believing in the sort of God that Church of England priests are generally believed to believe in.

So as Lent approached I took myself off to Waterstones one Sunday, which is just a few doors down from the church, and bought Andrew Pessin’s The God Question:  What Famous Thinkers From Plato to Dawkins Have Said About the Divine [2009].  For once I did not procrastinate on my Lenten reading and actually finished the book well before Mothering Sunday, so I needed to return to Waterstones, and this time bought Alister McGrath’s Darwinism and the Divine:  Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology [2011].

Andrew’s book left me wondering why all these thinkers were bothering to spend all this time debating the existence of God, when the idea of God was reduced to a formula of the creator God who must (or, for a few of the writers, could not) exist.  I realised that these debates, which as a theology lecturer I found fascinating, were now meaningless to me.  I had been much more interested in my reading for the previous Advent:  Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth:  The Evidence for Evolution [2009].  My atheism or agnosticism derived from a lecture in human biology convincing me that the human body suggested that it was the result of evolution, not the first or last act of creation (depending on which creation story in Genesis you follow).  Richard’s book convinced me of the truth of evolution, but unlike many of his other books, he did not use evolution to argue for atheism.  The philosophical writers summarised by Andrew were not answering the scientific questions I was asking, while Richard was not addressing the theological issue in his book.  So I began reading Alister’s book and, at the time of writing this blog entry, I am still reading it.

Despite the fact that neither Lent nor my Lenten reading are over yet, I can already say that I would now always answer the young man’s question as “No” not my previous “Yes.”  I have lost the desire to try to find my way back to believing in a creator God, despite the fact that this makes what belief I have so different to most other people in a Christian church.  Yet there is a qualification that I need to make.  I answer unhesitatingly “No” to what I am sure was the question that the young man meant:  “Do you want to believe in a God out there, who created the universe?”

I would have answered differently, if I thought that his question meant “Do you want to believe in someone or something at the heart of human spirituality that might be called God, even though it may in reality be a part of human psychology with no outside existence?”  I would have said, “Well I want to change my answer to your second question, I do believe in that God.”  Or, at least, I would have wanted to say that if I did not know that his immediate response would be, “So to return to my first question, do want one of my magazines?”

Of course, the sort of people who want to push magazines and God-believing at bus shelters generally are not the sort who are happy for others to believe in a God who might not exist outside human spiritual experience.  So I will stick to my original answers to the young man, “No, No, and No.”

Nothing Out of Creation

I dreamt about being lost in a set of corridors that I thought of as Kings College London and in the dream I was there researching a theology based on a notion that God had nothing to do with creation.  Then when I awoke I thought of turning around the tradition Christian doctrine of Creation Out of Nothing into Nothing Out of Creation. I briefly expanded that into God is Nothing Out of Creation, but rejected that as I thought that it was presuming too much to name my non-creation musings as God.

Creation Out of Nothing [SCM, 1990] is coincidentally the title of the first theology book that I read after my undergraduate studies in theology (1985-88).  I had bought the book because I was planning a PhD on the topic of creation from a viewpoint inspired by the Neo-Orthodox theologian, Emil Brunner (1889-1966).  This book by Don Cupitt (born 1934) was not about a traditional doctrine of a God who created the universe, but was about the creation of human meaning through language, including language about a God who does not exist.  I was much more conservative in my theology at the time that I read this, and rejected Don’s atheism.  Nevertheless, I was fascinated by his exploration of a postmodern theory of the priority of language, which had resonances with the philosophy of religion that I had studied under John Heywood Thomas at Nottingham University.  This inspired me to drop that idea of doing a PhD on the doctrine of creation and instead I undertook one on the postmodern hermeneutical theology of David Tracy, supervised by another devotee of the priority of hermeneutics, Werner Jeanrond. Interestingly, on a return visit to Nottingham I called in on John, who informed me that Werner had written to him when I applied for the PhD.  John had recommended me highly and suggested some areas of research linked to work that I had done at Nottingham.  I often wondered what recommendations he made, but I doubt that they would have borne any relation to the type of theology that interested me by that stage.

This was in 1990 and 18 years later I returned to undergraduate study, this time as a student nurse at Manchester University.  At the time, I had become practically atheist as a result of my negative experience of being constructively dismissed from my post as a priest in the Church of Ireland, although I interpreted that atheism as a very long dark night of the soul, which had begun in Lent 2007, while I was still working as curate of the Douglas Union of Parishes in Cork.  In Manchester, I worshipped at the Metropolitan Community Church, but I never felt comfortable in that quite conservative theological setting.  Yet I thought that if I continued in my spirituality that my faith in God would eventually return.  An important part of faith for me as my theology became less conservative was the notion of a creator God.  Indeed this became more important than Jesus as it was an aspect of faith derived from philosophy, not the Bible.  So I looked forward to my physiology lecture on the nature of the human body, expecting to be so awed by the complexity of life, that I would be brought back to a belief  in a creator God.  Instead, I sat in the lecture thinking that the human body was so complex and dependant on a symbiosis with dangerous micro-organisms that I could not believe that the human body could arise from anything other than the gradual development of evolution.

When I quit my nursing degree and moved to London in June 2009, I began worshipping at the Anglican parish of St James Piccadilly.  There I continued in doubting the existence of God, but in a much more comfortable setting of a church where I was not the only member of the congregation to do so and where a Gloria was often used that expressed a belief in evolution.  My theological views at this time were definitely atheist and I connected to the Christianity proclaimed in the worship via a strong belief in Jesus that finished with his death on the cross, but could not move on to the resurrection or a belief that Jesus was divine.  At first I inwardly cringed when a priest preached about faith in God, but gradually settled down to seeing that language as a part of the poetry of worship.

Later on, I even began to come back to a sort of belief in God, but not in the God that Christians tend to believe in, i.e., not in a creator God.  This partial retreat from atheism was inspired by two ideas from my theological education, one postgraduate and one undergraduate.  In my early days in the Trinity College Dublin Graduate Seminar in Theology, we studied On Religion:  Speeches to its Cultured Despisers by Frederich Schleiermacher (1768-1834).  That formative text of modern theology contains the notion of intuiting the universe and the memory of that phrase made me reflect that maybe I could move away from a creator God without being atheist. That move was inspired by my undergraduate study of Sikhism under Douglas Davies.  In that religion, there is a very different concept of God to that found in Christianity, with the world being seen as co-eternal with God.

In my context at St James Piccadilly, and in general English culture, this might not be much of a departure from atheism.  For the Christian notion of God is so tied up with the doctrine of divine creation that believing in a co-eternal universe will appear to most to be much the same as not believing in God.  As a consequence, I tend to describe myself as an atheist as it is much simpler that saying that I might believe in God, but not in the usual way that people in the West believe.  Whether or not that qualifies as atheism is a very moot point, but what is definite is that in my belief I take nothing out of (the doctrine of) creation.

Mercia Musing on Pink News

I am photographed and (mis)quoted on Pink News I said that a “small minority of Christians were homophobic” not a “small majority.”  They only appear to be a majority because they shout louder.

What is Progressive Faith?

This blog contains Mercia’s Musings on Progressive Faith, so what is this progressive faith all about?  First off it needs to be pointed out that these are my musings and this definition of progressive faith is not attempting to set any hard and fast rule, just what I mean when I muse on progressive faith.  I am using the term progressive faith to describe an approach to faith where any question is allowable, including the question as to whether God exists.  While my musings are underpinned by a postmodern philosophical outlook, I do not limit progressive faith to any one philosophical outlook.  This blog will primarily come from my Christian perspective, but again progressive faith will not be limited to one religious tradition.

Another way to view progressive faith is more than just a questioning attitude, but it also involves a particular ethical stance.  This the viewpoint of the Progressive Christianity Network, whose eighth of their Eight Points states “[We are Christians who] Recognise that being followers of Jesus is costly, and entails selfless love, conscientious resistance to evil, and renunciation of privilege.”  To me that is pre-determining the conclusions of the questioning process, and so my view of progressive faith will be more open than that.

So to sum up my position – progressive faith is faith that is open not only to any question, but also to any answer.

Old Blog, New Direction

I have once more changed the direction of this blog, which began life as my only blog, including reflections on transgender matters.  I then switched the trans concerns to a separate site Trans Scribe and this became a seldom used personal site.   I considered making this blog one for purely personal reflections, but I have never felt that a blog about what diet I am on, etc., is going to be of any interest to the general blogosphere.  Instead, I have decided to use this blog for my theological reflections.  I have in the last year re-engaged with my Anglican preisthood and also with my background as an academic theologian, through doing some research in the British Library.  That research plus my ongoing involvement in St James, Piccadilly, places me very much in the progressive camp of the theological and faith world, and the blog title of Mercia’s Musings lends itself well to relaunching this blog as Mercia’s Musings on Progressive Faith.  As I have sat in the British Library or St James Church many different ideas have come that could over the years become books, but in the era of the blogosphere there is no need to wait to persuade a publisher that people would actually be willing to part with hard cash for a printed version of my musings.  So I decided that these meandering musings should find a home on this blog, which I hope to update more regularly than in its previous incarnations.