Light in the darkness

In my research and writing at the moment I am looking at the troubling alliance between the church and what might be termed the ‘spirit of empire’, that is, the felt need to dominate and control others. While the church may convince herself that this is purely for altruistic purposes—to save the lost or ameliorate society and so forth—the basic problem is that ‘empire’ is fundamentally contrary to the way of the self-denying Christ. Christ did not manipulate, coerce, or dominate: he loved others and sacrificed his life on their behalf just as, as I write, many Ukrainians are preparing to do for the sake of their children and grandchildren. As I argue in my forthcoming book, if ‘sin’ is essentially self-centredness then empire is self-centredness amplified.

Like you, I am deeply troubled by the war in Ukraine and, in light of the above premise, some thoughts come to mind that, I hope, may help you to process your own thoughts. Continue reading “Light in the darkness”

The power of stories: Thanksgiving and Advent

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930), ‘Thanksgiving’.

Last week our American friends celebrated Thanksgiving. A couple of thoughts came to mind as I reflected on this that, I hope, are helpful.

First, that it’s good to remember our stories: as individuals and communities we are formed and find our identity in the stories we tell about ourselves. For example, if she wanted to cross the road my great grandmother would simply stride into the (horse-drawn) traffic with her umbrella held aloft on the basis that her mission trumped everyone else’s. And I am reliably informed that if she wanted to read in bed she would balance a candle on her ample bosom and enjoy some moments of refuge after a traffic-stopping day. Now from these two brief accounts you probably have a better picture of dear old Great Grandma that if I had given you a list of facts: that she lived in Kingston, was born in the 1860s (I think) and so on. Stories shine light on our lives and give meaning to our existence; even more, they define us, they shape us. Continue reading “The power of stories: Thanksgiving and Advent”

The Good News—some follow-up thoughts

In response to my last blog—Is the Gospel Good News?—I was asked a very fundamental question:

What are the consequences of our deliberate evil deeds? Can we do whatever we like and will God forgive us anyway?

I decided to post my response here hoping that it may help others.

To be honest, a book is needed to answer this question! I probably won’t write one, though, because others have done a much better job than I could ever do—especially David Bentley Hart whose book (That All Shall Be Saved) I came across after writing my last blog. I write quickly, so my thoughts are not as organised as I’d like them to be! Continue reading “The Good News—some follow-up thoughts”

Is the Gospel Good News?

An Easter meditation in the company of George MacDonald and David Bentley Hart

“Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it.”

– George MacDonald

The Easter festival celebrates that Jesus, through his incarnation, death, and resurrection, decisively defeated the powers of evil in this world. Few who call themselves Christians would argue with this central Christian claim; however, exactly how this was achieved and its implications are an ongoing matter of debate. Here, I want to focus on just one aspect of that debate and its consequences with particular thanks to my mentor George MacDonald and to David Bentley Hart as we dip into the latter’s paper, “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilho.”1 Continue reading “Is the Gospel Good News?”

Your Name – a meditation on the moral perfection of Christ

I am reflecting this morning on the name of Christ, that is, ‘the Messiah’.

Some years ago—I think it was ten years ago—I wrote a song called ‘Your Name’, a meditation on the name of Jesus. I was reflecting at the time on how biblical names often summed up the character of a person. We find, for example, that Jacob bore a name which, according to some scholars, means ‘deceiver’ or ‘supplanter’ (and was known for being a bit of a swindler). In the New Testament, perhaps the most famous example is Jesus’s affirmation of Peter’s name as ‘The Rock’. Peter, according to the NT narrative, was for much of his early life anything but a rock: somewhat unstable, he was prone to impetuous outbursts and famously (as predicted by Jesus) denied knowing Jesus three times just before the latter’s death. Continue reading “Your Name – a meditation on the moral perfection of Christ”

Peace

At the end of a Christian service, the priest often pronounces a ‘benediction’, a blessing; words like Paul’s in Philippians 4: ‘Be anxious for nothing […] and the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus’. Soothing words in an age of violence. But I am moving too fast. Is violence, war, the opposite of peace? Continue reading “Peace”

Becoming an Anglican

Like G. K. Chesterton (as I noted in my blog a few years ago), I feel a little like the intrepid explorer who, with a boat full of supplies and arms, sailed bravely into the unknown in order to discover new lands and riches for the Crown. After battling on the high seas for many a month, he espies land on the horizon. Dragging his boat onto the beach, and armed to the teeth, he intends to plant the British flag on this new territory, but soon discovers the natives already speak English. About an hour later—having realised he has landed on the south coast of England—he is sheepishly enjoying a pint of best bitter in the Ship Inn and, frankly, enjoying being back at home and having a good laugh.


Continue reading “Becoming an Anglican”

Learning to see again

We all live in ‘villages’—places defined by their boundaries, prejudices, preconceptions, and traditions. Jesus’s ministry was characterised by a fundamental opposition to these restrictive forces. Here we consider what it means to be set free by Christ.

They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?”
He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.”
Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus sent him home, saying, “Don’t even go into the village” (Mark 8:22–26).

Sight — correct vision — is Christ’s gift to his children. Since the first words of God — ‘let there be light’ — God has been working to give his children sight. These words were spoken by Christ at the dawn of time, for John in his gospel insists that ‘through him all things were made’ and furthermore, John also says that when Jesus came into the world, he was light incarnate – ‘the true light that gives light to everyone’. In a world of darkness — especially religious darkness — John’s first-hand witness statement declares that Jesus’s primary message was ‘God is light; in him there is no darkness at all’. Welcome news in a religious world that saw God as primarily judge and law-giver. ‘This vision of God as darkness,’ John is saying, ‘is wrong. You are seeing badly: God is light.’ Human vision regularly distorts reality. God gets the blame for all sorts of things, not least the mystery of evil — especially so when so many who claim to be representatives of ‘God’ walk in such evil and darkness. It seems to me that in these dark days we need to pray for the gift of sight, and this passage of Mark is worth exploring for it holds the key to new vision — 20/20 vision of reality. When Mark edited his gospel, it seems to me that like John — who included seven acts of Christ in his account, calling them ‘signs’, Mark included this incident for the deeper truth of which it speaks. I would like to consider this.

This blind man lived in a village. We all live in villages: those places where familiarity and predictability insulate us from the true nature of the world. Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it tends to breed complacency. Villages also breed preconceptions and prejudices as we tend to absorb the values of those around us, where through osmosis we unconsciously adopt the zeitgeist of our age. They are places where we cease to truly think, where ‘that’s how things are’. The unchanging familiarity of a village gives us comfort in a fast-changing world. But Jesus wants to take us by the hand and lead us out of our villages.

The problem is that we build up a false picture of reality. If one lives in a ‘communication village’ — only speaking to, and living with, people who are the same as oneself who share the same interests, beliefs, and values — sight soon becomes distorted. Eventually, as evidenced by those who would shoot a child in the head for wanting to go to school, blindness results. Blindness comes from assuming that our view of reality is true vision — even (perhaps especially) our particularly religious view of truth. As Coleridge once sagely remarked:

He who begins by loving Christianity more than Truth, will proceed by loving his sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Like this blind man, we need to allow Jesus to take us by the hand and lead us out of the village. It is a conscious decision to allow God to lead us beyond the walls of comfort, beyond the false security of perishable props and untruths, beyond mediocrity. Without these first steps towards sight we will be forever blind.

But Jesus then does a strange thing. I find it curious that he spits on the man’s eyes and ‘puts his hands on him’ — presumably on his eyes. There is both revulsion and vulnerability here. Revulsion for obvious reasons — I wonder what the man was thinking when Jesus spat into his face — and vulnerability as no-one particularly likes having their eyes touched by someone else. To allow this, like having a cataract removed, requires significant trust. I find this hard to express, but it brings to mind the cross.

At the heart of the Christian good news is the enigma of the cross — a violation of ‘decency’. We do not like to look at the cross: as Paul rightly notes, it is offensive — and this ‘offensive’ behaviour of Jesus also begs questions. The cross is often portrayed as God’s idea, some way of ‘satisfying’ God’s need for retribution for sin. I find this caricature of the cross offensive, for was it not fundamentally a Roman idea? — a cruel invention of empire? — a means to consolidate absolute power? The cross, it seems to me, is the ultimate symbol of God’s refusal to use power to achieve ‘selfish’ ends (if indeed any of God’s acts can be technically described as ‘selfish’, but that’s another discussion): it is God allowing sin to spit in his face. Jesus’s submission to brutality — his refusal to call down those legions of angels — destroyed, emasculated sin: Jesus cut off its balls. Sin, Paul insists, now has no power over us, and sin, as is evident in today’s turbulent world, is not at all happy about this.

I suggest that allowing Jesus to ‘spit’ in your face is not a bad deal, for he now has power over sin, the slave master. His submission to the ultimate offence means he has the power to destroy all evil embedded in human nature. But sin, the evil embedded in us, finds this offensive. Why? Because Jesus’s acts, whether on the cross or here is this short narrative, result in sin’s destruction. To rephrase this from a different perspective: allowing Jesus to lead us by the hand out of the village, to allow him to spit in our eyes (to attack the cause of blindness), and to allow him to touch our eyes, all speak of allowing ourselves to be vulnerable — to be submissive to Christ, to be re-centred on him. And this submission is the opposite of the myopic preoccupation with self that is the essence of sin — self-centredness. The choice to be submissive and vulnerable to the touch of Christ is the beginning of vision.

Sure enough, the man’s vision is restored, but it is a curious two-stage process. At first he sees falsely, ‘men like trees walking’. Sight does not necessarily result in vision: all humanity is living in the this world of light that God created, but clearly not everybody is seeing truly. As John says:

‘He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognise him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.

To understand the reason for this we have to look no further than the village. Villages are, as I have said, places of convention and familiarity. The curious thing is that we as human beings see much less than we think: the human brain is continually producing a composite image from fragmented information that it receives from the eyes. It calls this ‘reality’. Without getting too complex here, I simply want to note that what we call ‘reality’ may in fact be made up of a series of stills — images of village life—that we think form a true picture of reality.

Perhaps this blind man is the ultimate example of this: having no sight at all, his only reference point is imaginative images constructed from other sensory input. He has constructed an idea of what a man should look like. So when Jesus asks him ‘What do you see?’ his answer reveals that his visual vocabulary is still village-based: he is interpreting the visual cues using bad reference images. This is the main problem of village life: we can be deluded into thinking that our own little village, with its conventions and beliefs that we hold so dear, represent reality. I wonder often whether some of the things I think I see so clearly are really ‘men like trees walking’. So Jesus touches his eyes a second time. Jesus, it seems to me, is giving him true reference images. I do not think this was a question of optics, but of cognition — that, having never seen a man before he had no clue what a man looked like. Now he has vision, not just sight.

But this is not the end of the story. When I first read it, I though that the village was the man’s home, but Jesus’s final admonition is revealing. He ‘sent him home’ and then says specifically: ‘Don’t even go into the village’. In short, village and home are not the same place, or, to put it another way: your home is not in the village — you belong somewhere else.

The place where you and I belong, I suggest, is in the heart of God. What I mean by this rather clichéd expression is that ultimately human being finds fulfilment and identity by being united with its creator, but more profoundly, that sight — vision — does not inhere in seeing the ‘right’ things (which, as I hope my discussion has revealed, is more about what we believe is right than anything to do with vision) but in knowing the right person — Christ. This is why I wrote the song ‘Without Walls’ which is a prayer to move beyond convention — mere human wall-encompassed safety in religious (or other) dogma — to the place where ‘I will love you without walls’. The place where heart meets heart. I would argue strongly that it is only from this relational reference point that the idea of true vision — ‘truth’ — makes any sense at all.

We live at a strategic time in human history when there is a desperate need to connect truly with the God of light. So much of what we call ‘belief’ is simply second-hand. So many of us (myself included) believe things are true on the basis that other people have told us they are true, but in reality it is just the repetition of ‘village’ dogma: some idea (perhaps even an old wives’ tale) that someone at some time bothered to think through, and is now — although perhaps once a living truth — buried in a grave of convention.

I close with a final thought. I suspect that after some time the man did go back to the village, if only to thank his friends. One problem that the image of ‘leaving the village’ evokes is the danger of disengagement from the real world. A ‘relational theology’ such as I am advocating may, if naively applied, result in two dangers. The first is simply the tendency to go and find another village to live in. Enough said. The second is the danger of a kind of Platonic dualism: of seeing the material world in which we live as somehow inferior to the relational, mystical ‘spiritual’ realm. Well, as I say, I think the man — after he had become more confident, perhaps, in his gift of sight — went back to the village and with his new-found vision I am sure he saw village life in a new light and maybe even helped to bring about change. Materiality is not the issue, but the way we see it. It is the village that is illusory, not the real world in which we ‘live and move and have our being’. It is my hope that as I — we — allow Jesus to lead us out of our villages, touch our eyes, and give us new vision, that we will be able to make a real difference in this beautiful, but damaged, world of light.

Light in the darkness

An advent meditation on art

“Look, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
and he will prepare your way.
He is a voice shouting in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord’s coming! (Mk. 1.2-3.)

Last Sunday we lit the second advent candle at our church, a symbol of the light of the coming Christ, and Saša spoke about John the Baptist—the voice crying in the wilderness, heralding the coming King.

I believe such a voice had not been heard in Israel for some 400 years; the prophets had been silent. For 400 years the faithful had waited for the fulfilment of the words of Micah and Isaiah which Mark quotes here. This really is good news! The narrative begins, ‘This is the Good News about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.’ The silence is broken.

Mark records that the first voice to cry our after this long tacit is that of The Baptist, fulfilling those predictions of Micah and Isaiah; a voice calling in the desert, crying out the need for repentance—for turning back towards God.

John, an ascetic in the Essene tradition, is a liminal character inhabiting two points of transition. He lives both on the edge of society, the place where inhabitation ends and desert begins, and he lives on the borders of the land of the spirit. He is a bridge, reminding us that all may not be as it seems.

On Sunday, our speaker, Saša Flek, mentioned that art is also a voice crying in the wilderness, and this got me thinking. We normally associate the word ‘prophecy’ with foretelling the future, but the word really means ‘to speak forth the mind’, and in the religious context this means speaking out the things of God — revealing God’s ways (past, present or future). It is easy, perhaps, to fall into the error that Paul warned us about in his letter to the Thessalonians (5:20) — that of despising prophecy. In my past experience of charismatic Christianity I have come across many who have claimed to be God’s mouthpiece. Unfortunately their proclamations were often more to do with the desire to manipulate, or to be visible, or, frankly, just human nonsense. I have become a little more wary of the ‘prophetic’ voice having experience those who are quick to speak in God’s name, but slow to live a godly life.

We must be careful, however, not to judge the priesthood by the priest, for here we have a true prophet. The Baptist was a man of integrity, turning his back on the comforts of the society he judged, speaking out against political evil, and longing that the Christ would have more visibility than himself. It was a message that involved not just words, but his whole being. It was a message that cost him his life. His was a life and a message not to be despised.

The artist is also necessarily a prophet, for to be an artist is also to be a revealer of hidden things. The creation of true art, like prophecy, demands vulnerability: it involves taking risk, not only in revealing deep personal convictions (always risky), but in questioning the status quo. The artist is also a liminal voice, crying on the edge of society, calling for new perspectives, asking us to consider change. It is perhaps this synonymy which has resulted in the recent paucity of art in the Christian world, for if Christianity is in itself a prophetic voice which challenges society, is it any wonder that there are those who would want to silence this voice? To make us mute?

As psychologist Iain McGilchrist has persuasively argued, this is perhaps one of the unfortunate consequences of the Reformation, that in their quest to quell the abuse of art, the Reformers destroyed art itself instead of focusing on the abuse. In their zeal they destroyed the very means to bring renewal — they silenced the prophetic voice. Whether or not you concur with this somewhat bleak analysis, the fact remains that modern post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment society, both within and without the church, is deeply suspicious of the artist for the artist is dangerous, cannot be controlled, and often challenges the way things are.

The highest calling of the artist is to be a prophetic voice. Like the Baptist, the present-day artist finds him- or herself in a desert: a world where music is controlled and recorded by computers, where visual imagery is untruthful, where The Word has been reduced to mere words, and where worship has become cliché. If this is you, this advent season, make a choice to speak the truth. But it must be said that, as an artist, as a believer, you only have the right to speak the truth if you are prepared, like the Baptist, to live truthfully.

Most of all, I pray that during this wonderful season of Advent the light of Jesus will shine on you and those you love.

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