Follow The Spirit

Published

2007-01-05T22:14:51Z

I've had an article published in Newsweek's online "My Turn" column. I felt Spirit-led to write the article, in the hopes that those who read it might feel compelled to examine themselves for any hidden prejudices. The article can be found here.

Please note that the title and the tagline were not written by me. The original title was "So I Married a Creationist".

followthespirit @ 2005-12-17T14:24:00

2005-12-17T19:24:57Z

It's been well over a year since I've written an inspired poem, so I had kind of given up on them. Maybe poetry wasn't for me, I figured; maybe it's just not what I'm meant to write. So I was a bit surprised today to find myself with an inspiration while folding laundry. It came out as a sonnet, though I don't think it's a very good one. But, anyways,

"I Seek"

What is this free-time people speak of?
-- For time is never free.
In its wake lies desparation
-- Not prosperity.

I hold onto what I can,
Knowing that my grasp is weak.
Life's time is too short for a man
Who knows not what he seeks.

I seek with all my being,
I search for what can't be found.
I open my eyes without seeing,
I aim to fly with my feet on the ground.

For only God is above me,
Only by being blind will I see.

Published Sermons!

2005-08-14T16:34:41Z

Woo...

I had a pleasent surprise after work/Chapel this afternoon, to discover my sermon on Love your Enemy featuring Dr Who and the Daleks has been published in the national Unitarian 'paper "The Inquirer". Which is exciting.

However, in the same edition there was also a sermon which said that Unitarians should move to eradicate anything Christian from the movement in the name of "plurality" and "liberal acceptance". Err????? How the fuck can someone say that they ar ebeing liberal and pluralistic by wanting to remove, nay attack Jesus and the Gospel? I dont understand, but, alas! that is how our movement is going...hence me wanting out as soon as possible.

Ant x

Sailing Sermon

2005-08-08T22:39:22Z

Those of you who know me know that I have an interest in Yachting. Craig (when he was around) and a friend – Nick - used to go sailing several times a year. On our first trip, we sailed for ten days in France, visiting most of the Normandy coast enjoying ourselves, everything going swimmingly. No, everything didn’t go swimmingly as swim is the last any mariner wants to do…no, everything went sailing, except the incident involving the cup of coffee, a force 7 gale and Cherbourg harbour. Craig STILL insists it was due to the weather…however I put the onus on the coffee.

The one noticeable thing with being in a sailing vessel is how fragile it is and how very transitory the means of propulsion. One has to be skilled in the arts of reading the wind, the sea, and the sky, sails in order to make your craft sail effectively and efficiently. Oh, as well as be able to read a chart or at least make the GPS work so you know where you are going and where you are!

In order to sail a boat one cannot sail into the wind and you cannot simply set a course and attempt to go from point A to point B – one has to tack. In other words, you have to zig zag across the wind in order to keep going.

Let me explain.

When you tack you can end up facing the direction you want to, facing away from it and even end up sailing in the opposite direction or even the way you have just come. You may feel as though with all your zig zagging in front of the wind you are getting absolutely no where, and will never reach your safe haven. But, in fact, you are. With every tack, every zig or zag, you are getting closer to your destination –even if you end up sailing away from where you want to be.

I think this is a really fitting metaphor for life – if one thinks of life as a journey. The idea of life as a journey is an ancient one, as old as the concept of the “straight and narrow” path one must tread to get from point A to point B, and not deviate from it. The linear nature of our life – we cannot go back in time – lends itself well to the metaphor of a journey. But I feel that that is a very simplistic and restrictive way of looking at life. Life is far more complicated than that; one concept is that life is like a piece of music. It has a beginning and an end but it has interweaving melodies, interplaying themes with lots going on supporting and creating the whole. Life as a journey with a single narrow path I find is limiting and could be quite damaging; people are constantly worrying that they are “off track” or have got lost or could be lead astray. If that works for someone then fine, I won’t deny them that view of their life journey, but, as a Unitarian I find it restrictive and the worry and guilt about keeping to the straight and narrow path hardly useful, and a revised metaphor is needed.

If we stick with the notion that life is a journey, then I think we are like sailing ships. The journey has a beginning and an end; you go from point A to point B but in order to do so one has to tack. Going back to the beginning - you can end up heading towards your destination, and at other times away from it or going back the way you came but still heading toward your final destination. For me, that is more like real life than a journey on a single track road with no deviations.

Our spiritual task is to identify our own spiritual vessels – our needs and fears –and to keep them on a level keel. But not only this, if we do think of life as being like a journey, and one on a sailing boat at that, then our task is not to get panicked or scared or guilty when we make “wrong turnings” on our journey. The concept of a purely linear metaphor for life implies that thinking in distances, straight lines, and also cul-de-sacs, crossroads and wrong turnings. Often, when we think like this, we can be pulled apart, trying to walk down several roads at the same time or being worried when we repeat ourselves or feel as though we are heading in the wrong direction. Moreover, it is very strange road that goes round in loops and circles, much as our own lives do, sometimes with the same experiences coming round again with annoying frequencies. The linear metaphor tells us we’ve moved on from those situations, but life teaches us we that haven’t, and that we can handle it the second or third time just as strongly as we did the first. The current fashion in pop psychology is to tell people to draw lines under things (oh! How we loves these straight lines), under particular experiences and to move on from them, but sometimes this is impossible and as inhuman an activity as anyone could imagine. Life is just not like that.

The sailing metaphor, however, is more useful. A sailor often ends up facing in the wrong direction, turning back on himself, apparently getting no where – but in reality we are moving along, moving toward the ultimate destination, so we shouldn’t be flustered by supposed wrong turnings, coming back on ourselves, feeling as though we aren’t getting anywhere!

For me, that is more like real life than a journey on a single track road with no deviations. Let us look at where the notion of the Straight and Narrow path comes from. It will probably not surprise any of you that it comes from a poor reading of the Bible; in Matthew’s Gospel he says life is like straight and narrow. Here we find that the word strait and straight have been wrongly translated / interpreted. Instead of saying that life is a “straight and narrow path” in fact he is saying that life is “like the straights and narrows” – in other words it is hard to find your path and even harder to navigate.

Indeed, the very means of propulsion of a sailing ship I think can be a metaphor for God. When you sail you can never sail straight into the wind, tackle wind head on, you can only ever skirt round the edges. You also cannot see the wind, only see and feel its effects on nature around you and on your vessel. God can be described like that. We can never truly see God – only fragments pictured dimly through the glory of nature, through each other: as St Paul says we see God dimly through a broken mirror. Much as a sailor can never go head to wind or see it then the believer can only see and feel the effect of God in his or her own life.

Not only that, but a sailing vessel is an inheritantly fragile object and has no propulsion, indeed, no raison d’etre without the wind. Scripture tells us that is what we and the whole of creation are like – made as vessels powered by, designed to glorify God. As a sailing ship cannot go anywhere without God (unless it has oars or an engine) I do not believe we can truly find ourselves and be whole people unless we too are powered in some form by God. Some people are Galleons – dependent entirely on the wind/God and utterly lost without Him; others are Greek Triremes – driven by the wind/God and also oars as a back up or for extra speed. If God is the wind that drives the ship then surely Faith, Trust and Hope are the oarsmen of our spiritual Triremes when we can’t find God, feel becalmed and lost. It is then that we have to draw on our auxiliary power and continue on our journey until the wind of God blows again in our sails.

Let us all hope that in times of need we can fall back on our faith, trust and hope when we feel lost and that God fills our sails to take us to his eternal haven.

Amen.

Sermon on His Dark Materials

2005-08-08T22:33:44Z

His Dark Materials

The Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman are some of the most controversial books of recent years; on the one hand Pullman is considered to be the finest children’s writer of the last 50 years with his work in the same line as Tolkein and Lewis. On the other, the Catholic Herald stated that the books should be burned and that no good Catholic should read them. But what about a Unitarian stance of reading of them?

His Dark Materials offers an epic fantasy that borrows from Scandinavian mythology and Christian religious tradition to explore the possibility of parallel universes, the complexities of good and evil, and the “temptation and the fall of humankind”

The books have two main stories. One is that of Lyra Belacqua – a child told of in a great prophecy, either to be the Churches’ and Mankind’s greatest enemy or saviour. The second story covers that of Lord Asriel (who transpires to be Lyra’s father) in his quest to kill “The Authority” (God) and to create the Republic of Heaven. Despite Pullman being an atheist, he is certainly interested in religion as well as mysticism, with a great sense of there being much more than the here and now.

Lyra, to cut three books down to a few sentences, is the new Eve and therefore considered by the Church to be their greatest threat – but to those opposed to the Church and on its fringes as their great saviour. She is seen as the bringer of new sin into the world – as Eve did in the Garden of Eden. In the story of her life that unfolds in the books she displays many similarities with Jesus – she proclaims freedom to captives and does indeed free the children taken prisoner by the Church; she descends to the world of the dead and defeats death and then returns to the real world.

To Church in the world of Philip Pullman – and perhaps even to the Church in the real world - anything worldly or sensual is a source of sin, and that the world and the things of it are inheritently sinful and take us away from God; to the Witches and the liberals in the Church the world is seen as something to rejoiced in with relish as it is part of the Authorities’ great creation and helps us commune with him. As Unitarians we surely fall into the latter camp – to us the world is a reflection of the glory of God and something to be enjoyed as fully as possible, not rejected.

In Lyra’s world, the soul is not internalised as an abstraction but is manifested in a physical way as a visible daemon. This daemon reflects a person’s character and moods and changes shape with those moods, but by puberty its shape becomes fixed, as does that persons character as they reach adulthood and by its shape and nature reflects entirely that person. Not only are people’s daemons considered to be their soul but they add extra senses and are responsible for greater and heightened feelings; the notion of “soul mate” or “kindred spirit” is manifested quite visibly when two daemons meet. Because of the sensual nature of Daemons and the fact that they heighten the senses, the Church in it’s excess orders a Mrs Coulter to develop a way of preventing children from falling into sin via their senses, ultimately sexual, and she comes up with a means of cutting off a child’s daemon. Philip Pullman is unashamedly condemnatory of the barbaric practice of child genital mutilation and indeed says that the process of “cutting” a child from his or her daemon is an attack on male and female genital mutilation; indeed he says that such mutilation (and I agree) is a breach of fundamental human rights and one that cannot be condoned even for “religious” or “traditional” reasons, and are more to do with social control and trying to prevent sex than anything else. We should embrace our bodies and our world with all of our senses and any one or thing that proposes to curb our understanding and enjoyment of ourselves and the world we must look at with distrust. In the world of Lyra the removal of the daemon and therefore all the senses associated with it is viewed as positive by the Church but with utter disgust and rejection by the people. Surely that is the stance we should take against similar activity in our own world? If we see something that is wrong in our world - even if sponsored by “religion” - should we not stand up to it and stamp it out?

When in the scriptures we find Commandments like those practiced by the Church in Lyras world, it is important to realise that the paradox of these so called laws is that yes their purpose is to prevent our over enjoyment of this life and as a test for the one next to come, but they are deep insights into the human psyche and to what constitutes general well being. To me they are telling me that we need to be whole people and not to be hung up and overly occupied with self aggrandisement, but the escapement from our own insatiable appetites for material accumulation, quick fixes and excesses of every kind. Jesus said he was the bread of God – to me that means he is the staple food, the long term sustainers not a snack to be had between meals or a quick chocolate fix, nor the pick and mix buffet. We need to move away from our quick fix to sustainers – to a spiritual walk with God.
Pullman is openly anti clerical, but not anti religion; he condemns the excesses of the Church and of the fanatics that it creates. He criticises and attacks the constraints of dogmatism and the use of religion to oppress, not Christianity itself. The figures of The President of the Consistorial Court and Brother Jasper are both examples of a cleric whose power has gone to his head, who runs the Church for his own ends, puts the Institution before its people and commands fanatical devotion or exclusion. Brother Jasper is a fanatic who cannot see beyond his own narrow interpretation and who has never been allowed to think. He cannot see beyond his own “divine” task of killing Lyra, but when faced with doubt and questions cannot go any further. Figures like these do not merely exist in novels – they exist here in our own institutions and religions. It is people like these that pervert religion, hijack it for personal or political reasons and isolated or unclear texts are twisted to suit the personal agenda. By attacking Clerics Pullman is warning us here and now about the figures like these in our own religions, and forces us to wake up to the reality that these figures exist in all religions and we have to be prepared to recognise and deal with them.
It is very hard to think of books that celebrate the numinous and the inexplicable and mysterious so vividly; the books and play are symbols for the important things in life and above all the sense that all people have an unquenchable thirst for meaning and spirituality and also that our approximations to the spiritual life are inadequate. They have become calcified and hardened, dreary and untruthful. Deformed. That is what Lyra was prophesied to destroy in the Dark Materials trilogy and what Jesus Christ managed two thousand years ago. The Church in Lyra’s world act like the Jewish leaders and Pharisees of Jesus’ time – and indeed of our own time? They condemned as a heretic, a danger to the very fabric of society, but importantly, the Church, the man sent by God to change it. As H. G. Wells no less once said "Jesus was like some terrible mortal huntsman digging mankind out of the snug burrows in which they had lived hitherto. In the white blaze of his kingdom, there was to be no property, no privilege, no pride, no precedence; no motive indeed, and no reward but love". And isn’t Jesus still doing that? Shouldn’t we be doing that? If not, why? We should be searching ourselves, our souls, finding our complacency and being challenged every day – being challenged not only by ourselves but by God.
We are called in the Gospels to lead new, spiritual lives. But Religion and spiritual living are not always close companions and more often than not are diametrically opposed to each other. Religion is the means by which we can collectively express a set of beliefs, a process by which spiritual insights are made respectable by being brought into line with majority opinion, which is generally why religions support the status quo. But we, like Lyra, are called to be different, to lead a Spiritual life – a new kind of living embodied and manifested ultimately in the life of Jesus – which is often at odds with convention and requires a complete re-orientation of ourselves, our values. We are called away from prudence and into foolishness, refuse to live by the norms and standards of the world – but as St Paul says, “…the foolishness of God is wiser than men”.

The notion of “sin” and its prevention is one that runs deep through Pullman’s stories. He claims, as do Unitarians, that people are born into the world as innocents; that we are not born sinners and nor do we have an innate capacity for sin. In his books he describes how sin came into the world from “the fall of Adam” and that sin is something that builds up in a person as we grow and become more aware of ourselves and the world. The German, Heinrich von Kleist in an essay written in 1812 has similar ideas and the conclusion they both come to is that the further we go from the human – into the semi consciousness of an animal or the entire unconsciousness of a puppet – the more clearly grace emerges. It is self consciousness that kills it off. We live in a dark valley, says Pullman, on a spectrum between the unconscious grace of the puppet and the full consciousness of God. The only way out of this impasse is not back towards a childhood state of innocence and innocent grace – as the Church would have us do by denying ourselves and the world – but by going forward, through the travails and difficulties of life, embarrassment and doubt, and above all hope, that as we grow older and learn more we may approach the paradise again from the back door, as it were, and enter that grace which lies at the same and opposite end of the spectrum.

Further to this, in the third book of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass, in which Lord Asriel wages war on God himself we find that God, or as he is referred to in the books, “The Authority” has been cocooned in a crystal casket, and is trapped in a form and prison made for him by the Church. “God,” says the 12th century German mystic Eckhart “is nothing” – no thing. Not another being that exists separately from everything else, but instead is the very source of being and consciousness itself, which cannot be contained within the narrow parameters of human description. To the Sufi’s God gave mankind an imagination so that they could imagine God and that in all they do they must imagine God therein. Therefore, God is imagined and part of a collective imagination. Eckhart asks to be rid of God – meaning to be freed from the anthropomorphic projection of our imaginations which is actually impeding his ability to connect with the source of his, and our, existence, a source which we can only encounter with open hearts and minds, a source which we can only encounter on our own and within ourselves not in a fancied external entity. Pullman has taken this one step further by showing how God has become trapped in his anthropomorphic straight jacket which is actually killing him. Lyra, with her subtle knife, releases him from his torment, and in so doing “kills” the anthropomorphic God.

Pullman says: “It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches – and it comes not only from the Christian Church but also from the Taliban.
Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don’t accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on

The God who dies is the God of the burners of heretics, the hangers of witches, the persecutors of Jews, the officials who recently flogged that poor girl in Nigeria who had the misfortune to become pregnant after having been forced to have sex – all these people claim to know with absolute certainty that their God wants them to do these things. Well, I take them at their word, and I say in response that that God deserves to die”

It is this anthropomorphic, impassive God that Lord Asriel wants to kill. To him, God by existing and not taking a hand in affairs, in letting evil happen has condemned himself, for failing to become the promised protector of his people. Asriel in rejecting this form of God argues for the building of a Republic of Heaven on his world; not just waiting for Heaven in the afterlife, but heaven in the here and now. Such a cry is an ancient one, and can be found in most of the major religions. St Thomas said that the “Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the Earth” and we Unitarians have at points in our history alternated from demanding physical revolution – like that proposed by Lord Asriel (but would we kill God to achieve our aim?) – to one of a gradualist approach: chipping away at tyranny wherever we find it. Our Hymns are our war cry and declare our aims and purpose, helping to build that “Golden City”, striving “onwards and upwards”.

Our spiritual task is not to discover truths about the nature of God in order to understand, to satisfy and subdue intellectual curiosity because not only is it impossible but also inevitably and ultimately divisive. Our pressing concern is to discover or rediscover our sense of identity and connection with all that is – the ultimate unity of all things and the unity of all things with God.

followthespirit @ 2005-08-01T00:46:00

2005-08-01T04:46:36Z

My English teacher senior year in his final lecture to the class said something along the lines of "You are the only one to blame for your unhappyness."

If your heart. You may get hurt but the most important thing is following your passion. You are you and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

"So, whatever you do, don't be bored. This is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive, and things are just starting."
-the dreamer in Waking Life

My posts seem to be on a similar note, but this was inspired by a conversation I had today. I hope it moves you.

hi hi

2005-07-29T22:53:24Z

Just thought Id introduce myself. I'm Ant but some of you probably know me via the Quaker LJ...for those who dont...hello! Im a liberal Christian with no denomination at the moment...I am technically a Unitarian (Im a lay preacher) but Im falling out with them a bit....I also used to be Methodist and URC.....

So thats me! hello!

Ant xx

Dream...

2005-07-29T19:11:11Z

I had a dream several nights ago that has stayed with me. In the dream, there was a family living in the United States (as I do) that had been reduced to what they and other Americans consider poverty. Their home had been stripped of all non-essentials; the furniture was old and tattered. In the midst of this, a voice came to me and said:

"It is a sad day when so much is seen as so little."

That's not an exact quote (I really should have written it down on that day), but it resonated truth to me, and for a couple of moments, I felt I truly understood what simplicity is...

(x-posted to quakers)

followthespirit @ 2005-07-27T00:10:00

2005-07-27T04:10:46Z

In death, your life is defined.

In order to have a well defined life. live it.
for a life not lived is undefined death.

In the end, don't fail to see the beauty in life, or in death. For it is all sublime.