Tag: faith

December Days 25 (26): everything, and then some

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Contextual theology: faith in what?

‘Contextual theology’ is spot on. If I’d got my act together and written this yesterday, I would have waffled at length about the Incarnation, and what it means about the importance of the present.

Context is inescapable. We cannot stop learning about our universe; things change; what we once thought was true turns out to be only a tiny part of what we now know to be true.

Faith in what? Faith in God who is infinite. Everything that I can imagine that God could be, plus everything I can’t imagine. God in whom we live and move and have our being; God who contains everything that we know – and that everything is always expanding, and that what we believed yesterday is not enough, and what we can imagine today is nowhere near the truth.

It isn’t so much that what we knew yesterday is wrong; it’s that we understand more about it. The new truth doesn’t contradict the old truth; it builds on it, reaches beyond it, adds dimensions upon dimensions to it. The more we know, the more we understand, the more we are able to appreciate the wonder of reality and of how much we can never know.

What we knew yesterday was good, but we have more of it today. One has to take all the evidence into account. Integrity demands it.

December Days 23: #ChristmasMeans

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Help us spread the real meaning of Christmas to as many people as possible by tweeting what Christmas means using images, video and text

SHAN’T.

I am stretching the definition of ‘prompt’ a little bit here, since, while the Church of England has certainly prompted people to write about what #ChristmasMeans, I think I’m meant to do this on Twitter, and, you know, take it seriously.

I started on Twitter, but it ended up spread across several increasingly irritated and unintelligible tweets about why I dislike being told to do things on Twitter.

So I thought I’d write about that on here, instead.

I have never been able to take the Church of England’s hashtags seriously since their #EverythingChanges campaign a few Easters ago; anyone who’d watched five minutes of Torchwood must have been sniggering. (Not that Torchwood was without its clunky paschal imagery, I must admit. But still. The twenty-first century is when #everythingchanges, and you gotta be ready.)

Twitter encourages triteness. The tweets currently gathering on the hashtag are no doubt very sincere, but they are mostly making me want to vomit. I am a terrible Christian (but a very British one). There is not much room for deep theological debate in 140 characters – 115, once you include the hashtag – and simplistic religious messages, however pithy, set my teeth on edge. I am the sort of Christian who smiles at, and, yea, retweets, things like ‘Actually, axial tilt is the reason for the season’. (And this is the reason that I will never be invited to tweet from @OurCofE.)

And then I think I am just hopelessly contrary. Even things that I like doing, that I would go out of my way to do, can be soured for me by a Twitter instruction to do them. Go to this! Do this! Why not…? I growl, ‘I already do this, you patronising tosser’ or, ‘Sod off’. I very rarely retweet things that tell me to retweet if I agree, even if I wholeheartedly do agree – because I don’t want to place that same burden upon my followers. This is, I think, just my stuff about being told what to do, and I don’t know where I picked it up from, but it’s a thing.

On top of that, there’s that instruction to proselytise, in the superficial ‘ask a friend to church’ way, that I have never, ever, felt comfortable doing, that has never felt authentic. I will write some other time about my profound discomfort with the idea of ‘mission’, about getting free of that, about the liberating revelation that I don’t have to try to convert everybody. #ChristmasMeans is a ghost that haunts my past self, that tells me that I am an insufficient Christian, even though the harder I try the more diminished my faith feels. I didn’t actually have this in mind yesterday, when I added “I do not pressure or guilt other people into doing things they don’t want to, dammit” to my dammit list, but in fact it’s one of the oldest hurts I have, and no better for being partly self-inflicted.

#ChristmasMeans is also setting my teeth on edge, particularly coupled as it is with that old guiltbag ‘the real meaning of Christmas’, because I can’t help feeling that the subtext is ‘and you, whatever you are doing, are failing to understand what Christmas really means. You are celebrating the wrong thing, you are too selfish, too impatient, too taken up with worldly matters.’

And there are enough expectations placed upon people at this time of year as it is. I say this as a comfortably-off middle class person with no children who isn’t going to have to do any cooking until the 29th. I feel bowed down with the expectations that people – good, faithful, Christian people, in many cases – are putting on me, and it is exhausting to hand those expectations back to them graciously.

Insisting that we focus on the Real Meaning of Christmas just adds another expectation, unless we are also given permission to not take part in the Unreal Meaning. It has been a real struggle for me this year to write Christmas cards. I don’t know why; I know they ought to be simple for an administrative genius like me, and God knows I feel like a pathetic excuse for a human being for not even being able to write a simple Christmas card, but there it is.

I know that I can choose not to write Christmas cards. I know that some of the consequences of this will be: that some people will not hear of my new address; that I will go on some people’s Stinge Lists; that some people will not even notice; that some people will notice and wonder if we are still friends; that some people will notice and wonder if I’m all right. And so, because the thought of all that is daunting, I have written the damn things, and sent them.
I would like to know that #ChristmasMeans that I am not, actually, a pathetic excuse for a human being even if I do fail to write a single Christmas card. Somewhere, deep down, I do know that. But it doesn’t fit into 140 characters.

Do not get me wrong. For me, the Incarnation is the most important thing in the history of this planet. (Yes, for me, even more so than the Resurrection.) And yet #ChristmasMeans feels at once like an invitation to troll and like a burden that I cannot bear.

#ChristmasMeans turkey and mince pies

#ChristmasMeans new Doctor Who

#ChristmasMeans the most beautiful music ever written

#ChristmasMeans the most awful music ever written

#ChristmasMeans hard work

#ChristmasMeans I am, as ever, a social failure

#ChristmasMeans feeling horrible for rolling my eyes at the hashtag

#ChristmasMeans I am, yet again, failing to be a good Christian

#ChristmasMeans pretending I’m coping

I will tweet one single, serious response. It will not convey everything I am trying to convey. But it is the best I can do, and it will say this:

#ChristmasMeans you are OK exactly as you are.

Advent

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Today is the first day of Advent, and, for me, the first day of the new year. I observe both this new year and the one where the calendar flips over to 2015, and spend the intervening month reflecting on the year past, and looking forward to the next one.

My Advent practice for 2014 includes the following:

– The Meaning is in the Waiting (Paula Gooder) – a section a day
– A Feast for Advent (Delia Smith, yes, that Delia Smith) – a section a day
– Advent candle (starts, irritatingly, at 1; I have burned the tip of it today, for 30)
– responding to Reverb prompts
– making an O Antiphons calendar (at the moment this consists of 21 purple-painted cardboard circles)
– as much rest as possible
– limiting personal purchases and instead making a daily donation to The Children’s Society
– bringing out one Christmas decoration every day

December is, inevitably, busy, and I’m still not entirely well, so some of these may fall by the wayside as I go through this. That’s normal. I hope, however, to be here almost every day, and deliberately, consciously, with myself every day, too.

Mary, Marriage and Misogynist Typecasting

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I see that yet another wannabe Dan Brown has dug up an obscure but by no means lost ‘gospel’ that ‘proves’ that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. I have still not forgiven Rev Arun Arora for ‘we are all broken’ (subtext: ‘but some are more broken than others’) but I have to admit that this smackdown-cum-summary is rather pleasing. I note with some amusement that this particular WDB has plumbed new depths of desperation by going for a text that has nothing to do with Jesus at all, but this isn’t really my point.

I would like to say first that I understand that the insistence on Jesus’ presumed celibacy has done a huge amount of damage. I blame Paul’s short-term thinking, and Augustine. Mostly Augustine, really. I can understand the attraction of a married Jesus for that reason alone. If we’d had a married Jesus, perhaps the Church would have grown up a little more sex-positive and a little less misogynistic. But perhaps it would have been even more difficult for a woman who did not feel herself called to marriage to carve out her own path. I don’t know.

Personally, I find it very useful indeed that there is not much about Jesus’ personal life in the Gospels. In the not-knowingness I find room for my late-twenties-married self, and for my late-teen-seriously-considering-celibacy self. I find room for my trying-to-be-out-bisexual self and for my boringly-conventional-het-married self. I find room for the self who doesn’t have children and for the self who might have children one day. There are hints in the Gospels of Jesus who knew about family life, and Jesus who occasionally had to get away from it all. And, if it comes to that, Jesus who created his own family from the waifs and strays he found along the way.

Anyway, I don’t want to talk about Jesus so much as I want to talk about Mary Magdalene. Why, if we are going to write ‘Jesus’ wife’ into the script, do we have to cast Mary Magdalene in the part? The Gospel of Thomas? The Gospel of Thomas would not be my first stop for sex-positivity or feminism. The Gnostics were a misogynistic bunch who thought that the physical world in general and the body in particular were irredeemably sinful. Marrying Jesus off to Mary Magdalene does not make the Gospel of Thomas any better than Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, look:

Simon Peter said to them: Let Mary go forth from among us, for women are not worthy of the life. Jesus said: Behold, I shall lead her, that I may make her male, in order that she also may become a living spirit like you males. For every woman who makes herself male shall enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Thomas-114)

To be fair, I could see Peter saying that. I could also see Jesus hitting him very hard with the cluebat. The Jesus we see in the Gospels doesn’t need Mary to be a man. Equally, he doesn’t need her to be his wife. He accepts her exactly the way she is.

The wonderful thing about the relationship between Mary and Jesus as we see it in the four generally accepted Gospels is that it has very little to do with the fact that they are of different sexes. Other people try to make it about that but Jesus, in flagrant disregard of the conventions of the culture, sees her as fully human. Her place isn’t in the kitchen. I’m not trying to say that Jesus just sees her as ‘one of the lads’. One of the disciples, yes – but the point is that ‘disciple’ isn’t a ‘man’s job’. In Mary we see that everyone can be a disciple.

Mary shares the good news, she doesn’t cut cucumber sandwiches. She’s defined by her relationship to Jesus, yes, but in the same way that Peter is, or John or James. She greets Jesus as ‘Teacher’. She loves him deeply, but how constricting, to assume that it must be romantic love, that this is all women are capable of! (And then we have John, probably ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ – how very quick we are to assume that ‘love’ means something different here.)

If you accept the traditional identification of Mary with the woman taken in adultery (I don’t, personally) it becomes even more striking. If you accept that, then we see Jesus as perhaps the first person in her life (and, it sometimes seems, the last in recorded history) who isn’t interested in who she’s slept with.

I find the thoughtless attempt to force her into this extra-canonical role as ‘Jesus’ wife’ offensive beyond belief. We have in Mary a woman who exists in her own right, and whose existence in her own right Jesus recognises. We have a woman who loves and suffers deeply and visibly, who is brave, who is steadfast. We have a woman who defies convention. Why must we shoehorn her into one?

People have been obsessed with Mary Magdalene’s sex life for centuries. I don’t find this new take on the story any more feminist than the old one. A married Jesus? Fine by me. But as for Mary Magdalene, leave her alone. As Jesus said of another Mary, she has chosen the better part.

Faith, belief, doubt, and pedantry

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I think, for me, there are two main elements to this: the way faith works for me in the context of my history of depression, and my religious background.

First, thought, it’s worth mentioning that I draw a distinction between faith and belief, and that I am acutely aware of the difference between knowledge and knowledge (why doesn’t English translate savoir and connaître properly?) – knowing intellectually, in the head, if you like, and knowing in the heart – the difference between knowing facts and knowing people.

Faith, for me, is not the same as belief. (This, I know, is not something that all Christians would agree on, but I am only talking, here and throughout, about one Christian.) I can remember a real lightbulb moment a few years ago, at one of my parish’s Lent Courses Where One Is Not Told The Answer, where somebody linked faith to trust rather than to belief, and I suddenly stopped feeling guilty about not believing hard enough. These days I think I would describe it as ‘relationship with the Divine’ and leave it at that.

I’m very Anglican. I am both catholic and protestant, and neither Catholic nor Protestant. My non-conformist streak is Quaker, and Quakers don’t conform with anything, particularly non-conformists. And I say all this because the thing about the very Protestant Churches that I was most glad to leave behind was their insistence on belief, the idea that one has to believe the right thing to be saved. It always felt all wrong to me.

I am finding increasingly as I get older (she says, from the ripe old age of 28) that what I believe is becoming less and less important. I don’t worry at all about whether other people are believing the right thing, whatever that is. My own belief has become less certain, and less defensive. I don’t know what I believe about all sorts of things, and that no longer seems to be a problem, except to other people. At the same time, my faith has become much surer. I can’t really describe it, except by saying that it’s a sense of being loved, in a very calm, sustaining kind of way.

Which is all very well, when my brain is working. Quite often it isn’t. I’ve had depression on and off for the past twelve years, I would guess. There are two things about this that are particularly relevant to this post. Firstly: when I am depressed I cannot remember how it feels to not be depressed. (Conversely, when I’m not depressed, I find it difficult to remember how awful being depressed is, but, because my brain is working better all round, I can – if I choose, which I usually don’t – describe it via imagination.) Secondly: when I am depressed I cannot feel love, either giving it or receiving it. I can have my best friend hugging me and feel about as much emotional response as a dustpan.

This is where savoir and connaître come into it. In my head I know that my family love me, that my husband loves me, that my friends love me. Sometimes they tell me this using actual words. They mean those words. And in my head I know all that, and it means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t get any further. When my brain is working, on the other hand, it’s fine. It all gets through and I feel it deeply. I can quite often be in love with the entire universe for whole seconds at a time. (An interesting side-effect of this is that I now cry at pretty much anything. Tinny call-centre Vivaldi, for example. Also discovering that I have more and better friends than I thought I had, which has happened quite a lot over the past few months because of my brain not being so broken as usual.)

What I am driving at here is probably obvious: that a faith that manifests itself predominantly in a sense of love cannot make itself felt all the time, particularly when I can’t feel love all the time anyway. And I suppose the spaces between might well be called doubt. The thing is, though, that I know that the ones who love me don’t stop loving me just because I don’t have the capacity to experience it, any more than the sun stops burning when it’s behind a cloud. The same feels true of the Divine. Apart from anything else, that’s always the first thing to come back.

So: that’s me, and faith, and doubt. I hope… I don’t know what I hope. But there it is. Be gentle.

Manifest

kathleenjowitt8 Comments

Well, you know what it’s like,
having a mother with Causes –
Or, I don’t know, maybe you don’t,
maybe you never gave up your Sundays,
stood out in the rain with a banner,
cried out in the streets for your rights –
or someone else’s –
Anyway, mine had plenty:
She was always out there,
smashing the patriarchy, putting down
the mighty from their seat,
that sort of thing. ‘Jesus,’ she said,
‘a woman’s body’s her own, her soul’s her creator’s.
Don’t you forget it.’ Or, ‘What this
country needs is revolution.
Lift up the humble.’ She thought big.
So I was surprised when, at the wedding,
she said to me, ‘They’re out of wine.
What are you going to do about it?’
‘Mother,’ I said, ‘this isn’t the time.’
Meaning, of course, that I had bigger fish to fry.
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘there’s one thing
you haven’t yet learned about changing the world.
You begin where you are
and you use what you’ve got.’
So I did. That’s where it started.

I start here: Advent

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I have been looking forward to Advent. This feels vaguely heretical, given that Advent itself is meant to be about looking forward. Looking forward to looking forward. Oh well, why not?

Advent starts tomorrow – tidily, this year, on the first of December, so everyone’s Advent calendar is right, for once. I find this pleasing, because this Advent is a particularly important one. For me, at least.

I moved to Surrey in the late autumn of 2007. The first service I ever attended at Holy Trinity, Guildford, was the Advent Carol Service: the beginning of six years growing in love, faith, confidence and vocal skill. This was the church, and Church, I needed, and I found it on Advent Sunday because I’d lost my sense of direction and couldn’t work out how to get to the cathedral. In fact, I count my time in Guildford from that Advent Sunday; I can’t remember now what the date was that I actually moved, but Advent Sunday is where it began.

My last 101 in 1001 list (now abandoned, but helpful in various ways beyond the scope of the project) began on Advent Sunday 2010. To be fair, this was deliberate, but I think it’s interesting that even back then I was already thinking in terms of Advent being a beginning.

On Monday I begin a new job in a new office. This is a huge step: after nearly four years finding my confidence, my motivation, my feet, I’m moving on, and – well, I’ll almost certainly address this at some point over the next few weeks, but I seem to have a career now. And so, by pure chance, the first working day of Advent sees me starting a whole new adventure.

An entirely frivolous reason to like Advent: purple is my favourite colour (except for when I prefer red). Also, I’m an alto, and for an alto things don’t get much better than This is the Record of John.

And so I’ve come to the conclusion that my year runs Advent to – well, the Saturday after Stir Up Sunday, or Christ the King, or whatever you like to call this. I have decided to go with this. New Year’s Eve is always a write-off in my family, because of our devotion to the cult of historical public transport meaning that we all go to bed early. New Year’s Day is spent riding around Winchester on a succession of incredibly chilly buses. Advent Sunday, by contrast, is candles and purple and Gibbons and Mendelssohn and expecting. Advent means more to me than changing the year on the calendar ever has.

This does not really make any difference to anything outside my own head. I’m not going to start wishing people a Happy New Year tomorrow, or anything like that, but I want to say this, now: my new year starts tomorrow.

I’m not ready for it to be the new year. I have three things that terrify me: the Record solo, the new job, and turning right off the AA roundabout when I cycle back from the station on Monday night. I’m not sure I’m ready for any of this.

That is rather the point. I am never ready for anything until I start doing it. Starting my year in December (or, next year, November) gives me a whole extra month to get ready.

My first month of the year is also the last month of the year and I am going to use it as a time of very gentle transition.

In previous years (mostly last year, but to a certain extent before that) I have devoted the week between Christmas and New Year to fairly serious introspection, reflecting on the year gone, and looking forward to the year ahead. Last year I also took part in the Reverb project through most of December. This has worked very well. This year has been unnumbered blessings and I have made enormous progress in all sorts of things. Some of this is no doubt due to other factors, but having set the compass eleven months ago, being able to look back at what I wrote last year, has been very helpful.

This year I’m going to do it again, but I’m going to move the timescale a bit. I will devote the first four weeks of December (in other words, Advent) to this reflection. Reverb 13 prompts have already started appearing. I’m not going to beat myself up if I start slipping: I know already that this is going to be a peculiarly hectic Advent, because: new job, longer commute, long-distance relationship, three works Christmas parties (two of mine, one of his) and all sorts.

On the other hand, this does leave the week after Christmas completely free. At the moment I’m not sure what to do with it. I might use it to catch up with things I fall behind on. I might not. I don’t know. At the moment, that’s as it should be.

Other things for Advent: Haphazard by Starlight. Advent candle. As of yesterday, chocolate Advent calendar from one of my lovely colleagues. The O Antiphons (one of my plans for an unspecified date in the future, When I Have Time, is to make a sort of wall-hanging that will have the O Antiphons unfold over the week before Christmas to gradually spell out ERO CRAS). Freedom for this all to crash and burn and for me not to do any of it if it doesn’t seem right.

But at the moment, I am looking forward to all of it. Alleluia.

 

Angels with Umbrellas

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‘You meet angels, of course,’ someone said. Was it Marie-Noëlle at the Emaús house in Burgos? If so, we had met one only that day.

Even if not, we knew what she meant. We had met angels; ours carried umbrellas.

At Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, two days into the pilgrimage, and with the forbidding snowy bulk of the Pyrenees looming ahead of us, the hospitalero came out, umbrella in hand, into the drizzle to point us the right way to cross them – away from the Route Napoleon, towards the gentler, safer way.

At Roncesvalles, a lifetime later and somehow still the same day, with night sweeping in along with the snow, we were frozen, soaked, lonely, exhausted; we had abandoned the waymarked Camino on the grounds that the road was a lot easier to follow – and as we struggled down the last few metres into the village, a monk emerged from the restaurant, his habit brushing the fallen snow and his umbrella raised aloft against what was still coming down. ‘Peregrinos? Vamos!‘ he said, and swept us into the monastery, to shelter, warmth, and a bed for the night.

At Logroño, leaving before daybreak, and already uncomfortably conscious of our propensity to get lost in cities, we missed our way. Grey sky, grey pavements gleaming under the street lights, and rain, and a man with an umbrella to point us back in the right direction.

At Burgos, a glorious, sun-soaked Easter Day, and another city to get lost in. And another angel with an umbrella to put us back on the right path, or, rather, since we had already planned on stopping, and knew where we wanted to spend the night, an angel to read our guidebook, ask the directions for which we were too tired to think up the Spanish, and walk with us until we were in the right quarter.

We met angels.

This is what I have learned about angels, and about their habit of carrying umbrellas:

They are, as is generally rumoured, messengers and guardians (sometimes this is the same thing, if the message is what keeps you safe).

They are quite obviously distinct from you, and your needs are different from theirs. (Even in everyday life I find using an umbrella irritating beyond belief, and it would be an impossible encumbrance for a walking pilgrim; but an angel might well use one, and so might any other normal person on the street.)

They provide you with what you need (and it is not something that they lose by sharing it with you).

They do not neglect their own needs in caring for others (and this, more than anything, is where I am still learning from them).

#justaboutclingingon

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The hashtag is cribbed from @davewalker. My reaction to that was, ‘oh, thank goodness, it’s not just me!’

It’s been a long Lent. A cold Lent, a hard Lent, a Lent that didn’t stop for Sundays, that ground me down, that wore on and on.

The first two weeks were OK and I had good intentions. Things like doing a lectio divina – not every day, because I am realistic, but twice a week at least, let’s say, and not buying things in supermarkets, and not buying things I didn’t need at all, and I was doing reasonably well…

Then there were all the people: two weeks where I had to see people every day, to be interesting and polite and to talk, and then have to do it all over again in the evening, because it was a PCC meeting, or my mother was staying the night, or there was something else that meant I had to talk to people, and I never had an evening, let alone a day, to just crash; and then my brain broke and I cried at work and I know I shouldn’t have gone in in the first place.

Then I caught a cold, which put me in bed for two days (not consecutive) and has put me on limited spoons (to the extent that my reasoning goes like this: “I would like to go out for a cycle. But my front tyre needs pumping up. But pumping my tyre up will be so much effort that by the time I’ve done it I will be too tired to go out cycling. Also I have evensong tonight oh God oh God there is so much stuff to do I just can’t…”)

And they put the clocks forward an hour and I’m not sure I’m ready for Easter. Because it’s already here and I’m still tired and cold and grumpy and coughing like a blocked drain, and not feeling spiritual in the least. #everythingchanges, says the Church of England, and I am here going, really?

But new life doesn’t always come with a boom as the stone crashes down. Mostly it creeps out in tender little green shoots, or tiny sticky leaves. It is not spectacular, but it is hope, of a sort.

I went to church this morning. The last hymn was Thine be the glory and our organist played little twiddly bits between the verses, because it’s Easter. The one between the second and last verses was particularly reminiscent of another famous Handel piece. Hallelujah! it went. Hallelujah!. Then, diddly diddly diddly pom pom pom NO MORE WE DOUBT THEE…

It would not have had me on my feet (had I not been already, I mean…) But I did feel a tear prickling at the corner of an eye, and thought, oh.

I am alive, after all. Hallelujah.