A photograph taken during the early 1970’s pictures my father, my younger sister and me aged about three. It is a picture glowing with the late sun of a winter afternoon. Beech leaves, bronze brown, lie snow deep amid dark smoothed barked trees. What the picture cannot show you is the wind that sang through the trees. Its song moved me. Still does. My parents remember me leaping up out of the pushchair throwing my arms up into the air, shouting, “The trees are singing!”
When I related this story to Philip Shallcrass, he smiled and said, “Natural Druid.”
So what am I, an Anglican Priest at the rational end of liberal, to make of such a thought?
I grew up in Wiltshire, in the shadow of Savernake Forest, beneath the Marlborough Downs. For my friends and I this land was a playground, our games storied it. In turn every tree, stream and hillside shaped my story, created the boy that made the man.
“Natural Druid.”
At the heart of contemporary Druidry is a spirituality that celebrates the world in which we live. It is a religion that responds to and is moulded by the natural world. In so far as I was fashioned by forest and down, I am a ‘natural druid’. But I am a Christian. What have chalk springs and woodland clearings to do with God?
Before my encounter with Druidry my theology was transcendental. Divinity lay beyond sense ability, unknown and wholly other. My prayer might have been that of John Oxenham,
“Lift me O God above myself, above my highest spheres, above the crawling things of sense to higher atmospheres…”
God could not be perceived in a world emptied of Divinity, so I would have to wait, my faith focused on the unknown beyond.
Postponed Divinity could lead one to defer joy, transfer hope, post mortem. It is a common accusation levelled by both Humanists and contemporary Pagans that Christianity is anti-life, and world despising. It is charge that often sticks for the reason I have stated.
Druidry challenged me to take seriously Christianity’s central doctrine, the incarnation, Emmanuel, God is with us. The God of scripture is never absent.
“Whither shall I go then from thy Spirit: or whither shall I go then from thy presence? If I climb up into heaven, thou art there: if I go down to the grave, thou art there also.” Even the use of the familiar ‘thou’ shows an intimacy with the Divine;
“God is not an absent or distant god,” wrote William Law “but is more present in and to our souls than our own bodies;”
At this point some might protest. There is a great deal of distance between the doctrine of the incarnation and the pantheism, polytheism and animism found in contemporary Druidry. Yet divine immanence is a point of contact. St John’s “Word made flesh” is not a world away from Thomas Traherne:
“…the world is that body which the Deity hath assumed to manifest his beauty!”
Or Marcus Aurelius:
“In the thought that I am part of the whole, I will be content with all that comes to pass.”
I have long ceased to believe in the ‘God of the gaps.’ Deity is not a substitute for that which we cannot yet explain. For this ‘Natural Druid’ the divine is that which wells up from the depths of my being and responding reaches back to connect me to the whole.
“There is something which is above the created being of the soul and which is untouched by any createdness, by any nothingness. It is a strange land, a wilderness, being more nameless than with name, more unknown than known. If you could do away with yourself for a moment, then you would posses all that this possesses in itself. But as long as you have regard for yourself in any way or for anything, then you will not know what God is.” Jesus taught his disciples to die to self. Is it in that dying to self that we can truly find our selves in love with everything?
However, lurking behind a love of the natural world can be the danger of misanthropy. I must confess to once visiting West Kennett Long Barrow and feeling a second’s annoyance because there were other people already there. My quiet communion was going to be ruined! Of course there is nothing wrong with wanting a place of solitude. I suspect though, that our ancient monuments were envisaged with anything but solitude in mind.
As a teenager I would often watch the summer sunset over the Downs. I would watch the final red segment resting upon the furthest ridges before disappearing. Yet there was something missing, someone with whom to celebrate and share that moment.
A few years ago I sat with my wife watching the sunset from the Rollright Stones. It was Midsummer’s Eve and we shared that time with many others who had journeyed there to celebrate.
It should always be remembered that humanity is an element of creation. Each one of us “a part of a whole, a part limited in time and space. We experience our self, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of out consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
“Natural Druid?”
It seems almost natural to be religious, a part of our human response to being alive. Richard Dawkins quotes Einstein. “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.” Dawkins continues, “In this sense I too am religious with the reservation that ‘cannot grasp’ does not have to mean ‘forever ungraspable’.
Druidry perhaps represents a shoot of natural religion, a spirituality which naturally celebrates nature.
We are all part of a great web of nature which is in some part conscious of its own existence because we as conscious beings are part of it. Perhaps my yearning for the transcendent arises from a need to connect with it, to leap up out of my pushchair to join my voice to the song of the trees.
“Natural Druid?”
Saturday 24 October 2009
Wednesday 14 October 2009
He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!
Brian: “Please, please, please listen, I’ve got one or two things to say.”
Crowd: “Tell us, tell us, both of them.”
“Look, you’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals.”
“Yes, we’re all individuals.”
“You’re all different.”
“Yes, we are all different.”
“I’m not!”
“Shh”
“You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves.”
“Yes, we’ve got to work it out for ourselves.” “Exactly.”
“Tell us more.”
“No, that’s the point. Don’t let anyone tell you what to do.”[1]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a clergyman in Nazi Germany. He was executed by the Nazis in April 1945 for his “crimes” against the Third Reich. In his ‘Letters and Papers From Prison’ he wrote “We cannot be honest unless we recognise that we have to live in the world even as if there were no God…Before God and with God we live without God.” [2]
In
I think what Paul is getting at here is the tendency for human beings to delegate the ordering of their moral and spiritual lives to a set of rules enforced by a cosmic law giver with a big stick who will punish disobedience and reward compliance. He goes on to argue that Christians no longer need such a disciplinarian, because, by faith/trust in Christ, we find it within ourselves to work out how we should live our lives.
Bonhoeffer takes it one stage further and says that in world come of age, secular humanity can and must grow up and take responsibility for the ordering of their own moral and spiritual lives, which is exactly what Brian was saying in his speech from “Life of Brian”.
“You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves.”
It seems to me that the Church has done its best to avoid the implications of this teaching. It has told people what to do and punished them when they’ve got it wrong. Far from helping people to work it out for themselves it has always been in danger of infantilising them, keeping them as spiritual babes and moral infants, doing what a cosmic “Law-Giver” tells them. It could have been so different, and still can be. The Church is, after all, a community and communities, be they churches, schools, families or social network sites provide the contexts in which we are formed as moral and thinking individuals. Life together forces us to think about how our actions affect the lives of others. But community demands more, it ask us to take the risk of making relationships built on trust. Of course it’s not perfect, but that imperfection enables us to learn lessons we won’t discover if we surrender to a set of rules, boxes to be ticked without a thought. As large brained animals we are capable of so much more. We are all individuals. We can hurt and be hurt, bless and be blessed.
Life together forces us to face and reflect on the consequences of our actions. Our actions can harm or heal, break or to build. It’s our choice and together we can learn how to make the right choice.
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