Thoughts from the Goose

Jesus: Teacher or Saviour, or both? Some questions, not answers, for Lent and Good Friday.

2011-03-04T11:45:00.001Z

In an article for the on-line journal the Huffington Post, an American sociologist writes about Jesus ‘Evangelicals don't exactly hate Jesus’ he writes, ‘They do love him dearly. But not because of what he tried to teach humanity. Rather, Evangelicals love Jesus for what he does for them. Through his magical grace, and by shedding his precious blood, Jesus saves Evangelicals from everlasting torture in hell’
The writer’s use of Evangelical is a little too finger waving at them not me for my liking. Nevertheless, his statement is very provocative, and for me, during this time of Lent, with its lead up to Good Friday and Easter, it’s good to have my thoughts provoked in this way. It begs some real questions for me, and perhaps for you. Firstly, how much does talk about Jesus as the Saviour come from the thinking of a generation after the thoughts and words of Jesus?
A more important question, though, is this:
To what extent does our accepting Jesus as our saviour let us off the hook of following his teaching?
For instance, when Paul writes to the Romans: “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are (put right) with God by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which came by Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as an atoning sacrifice…” he means that we are saved from punishment through accepting Jesus as the saviour, not by following the precepts of the Jewish law. Thus it is the person of faith not the perfectly moral person who is saved. Yet if we return to the teaching of Jesus towards the end of the Sermon on the mount, he says “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you workers of Lawlessness!’ This statement occurs towards the end of a sermon in which Jesus expounds his vision of the kingdom of God, and the kind of conduct that is required of people.
At the very end of the sermon he says:
“Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise person who built their house upon a rock; and the rains fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.”
So I return to the questions with which I began: In what way does the idea of Grace and God’s salvation in Jesus lead us to ignore the call of Jesus to live in an ethical way?
I wonder how easy it is to put aside the demands of Jesus when we think of him as a Saviour and not a teacher. Therefore the questions I shall ponder on are: When is salvation? Which age is the saviour for, the present age or the age to come? When I look at the cross on Good Friday, do I see a Saviour sacrificed for my sins? Or a reminder of what remains a painful reality for so many today because the teaching of the crucified one remains unheeded?

What is Theology and can one ever get it wrong?

2010-12-08T13:28:00.005Z

Richard Dawkins whether wonders Theology is a subject at all, and a friend asks whether someone doing theology can ever get it wrong.
So what is theology? The first thing to say is that Theology is not doctrine/dogma. Doctrine and it development over the centuries is one of the objects of study within the academic discipline of theology, but it is not theology.
As an under graduate I studied the core areas as well as the options around that core. The core subjects with the academic discipline of theology are doctrine and its development, the critical study the New Testament and Hebrew Scriptures, the philosophy of religion, the history of the religion of Israel and the history of Christianity. Within the latter history the first five centuries are a key area of study within the subject of theology. In all these areas the same critical rigour one finds in any other of the liberal arts subject is taught.
That is certainly how theology is taught in British Universities.
I wonder sometimes why Richard Dawkins doesn’t know this, he only need visit the faculty web pages of his own University to find out.
For me Theology is the critical study of religion, religious beliefs and practices, the development of belief and belief in contemporary society. To study theology one must learn how to be an historian and anthropologist, a philosopher and linguist but most of all one must learn to be critical of one’s own beliefs and the beliefs of others. The first essay I given as an undergraduate was titled, ‘Old Testament Study demands a combination of faith and reason. Discuss.’ The readings set for the essay were in themselves an introduction the critical thinking.
So that’s what academic theology is all about, but what of my friends question Can someone doing theology get it wrong? In the academy as with any other subject it is possible to get it wrong, any one saying Nestorius was a monophysite, has got the wrong answer.
I sense however that that is not what my friend means. You see to Athanasius, Arius was wrong because he denied the divinity of Christ whereas to Arius, Athanasius was wrong because Athanasius proclaimed Christ’s divinity. But these are just religious opinions of which we can ask; ‘What would it take to disconfirm this opinion?’ If the answer is, ‘Nothing’ they can be treated as what they are opinion and no more. Yet even here logic and reason are not redundant. Opinions even when un-falsifiable must be consistent with one another. So whilst both Nestorius and Cyril agreed with Athanasius, Nestorius got it wrong because he would not accept the logical correlate of Christ’s divinity, namely the doctrine that Mary was the theotokos, the bearer or mother of God. If Mary is not the God bearer, then who is Christ? One can’t accept one opinion without accepting the other. These are still opinions, but they form part of a logically consistent set of opinions. Can you do theology and get it wrong? Sort of.
When we do theology in the church we are reflecting upon all what has been believed in the past and reflecting also on what has changed in our understanding of the world today. From those reflections the church continues to create a meaningful narrative by which it can live its life of faith. But the theological narrative should never be a fixed narrative. It is narrative that is still in the process of formation and as such is never the final word. Whilst this narrative theology can never be wholly right, its very falsifiablility should ensure its continued place at the heart of the community of faith and doubt (the Church).
To finish then two statements on the dangers of theology, both of which have been addressed to me by religious conservatives.
‘Don’t go and study theology, theology will lead you away cross.’
‘The problem with the study of theology is that people who start it begin with a simple faith and end up with complex doubts.’
If that is true, then the friends of reason have nothing to fear and everything to applaud in the study of Theology.

Jesus advises John to look at the evidence,

2010-12-07T13:47:00.002Z

Matthew 11:2-11 NRSV
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.’ Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

The theme for the third Sunday in Advent is the forerunner of Jesus: John the Baptist.
The first thing to note is that John, now in prison, may be having doubts about his understanding of who Jesus is, for he sends a message to Jesus saying “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”
Here we see John doubting his own conviction. This should not disturb us.
To quote Joan Chittister ‎"Doubt is what leaves us open to truth, wherever it is, however difficult it may be to accept. Without doubt, life would simply be a series of packaged assumptions, none of them tested, none of them sure, and all of them belonging not to us, but to someone else whose truth we have made our own."
John, here, is asking a question. So should we. Jesus, in turn, responds by saying “Go and tell John what you hear and see.” In other words, he says look at the evidence. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk… and so on.
So, in this first paragraph, we have a paradigm, an example of how we might proceed. Doubt elicits a question, and the response to the question is to demand that we look at the evidence. Notwithstanding the nature of the evidence which some in the modern world will find difficult to receive, never the less there is a clear critical approach here. Doubt creates questions which require evidence in order to be satisfied. So much for the first paragraph.
In the second paragraph, Jesus asks the question about John:
“What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes?”
The implication is of course neither. People were not coming into the desert to look at the desert nor to find princes in their fine robes. No, they had gone to find a prophet, which is no more than somebody who speaks truth to a situation. Prophetes means ‘the one who appears on behalf of.’ and the Hebrew word ‘Nabi’ is ‘the one inspired to speak’. Both speak into contemporary situations. Prophesy is not primarily about prediction.
The message of John and Jesus is very simple: Repent. Change the way you look at the world. It seems to me that this repentance, this change, is a continuous process, because change in thinking will always follow changes in understanding. And changes in understanding will often be the result of some new piece of information, some previously unknown evidence.
What is it you hear? What is it you see? How does that change the way you understand the world?

The gold is out there, we are just not listening.

2010-11-29T10:25:00.001Z

It is Advent and my thoughts are turning towards Christmas.

How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
The blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
But in this world of sin
Where meek souls will receive him, still
The dear Christ enters in.

Just reading these words from the famous Christmas carol makes me feel quite excited that Christmas is coming. But this third verse from O Little Town of Bethlehem contains a secret that easily missed at Christmas:
Silently.
Silence is very much in vogue at the moment. It began, I think, with an endurance of a film called Into Great Silence. This three hour documentary with no commentary or incidental music observes the silent lives of Carthusian monks for six months. Then there was Sarah Maitland’s Book of Silence. Recently, on BBC 2, three programmes entitled The Big Silence followed five not particularly religious people through eight silent days in a Jesuit Retreat House. They discovered in that silence something that was life-changing. Also, this year the Royal British Legion released a silent single for Remembrance.
So what is it about silence that’s so important?. It has been said that silence is not the absence of sound but the beginning of listening. John O Donohue wrote that “Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits."
I do not think that silence leads us to anything supernatural. Rather, it leads us to the deeper natural, the parts of existence to which we pay little attention because we never stop to listen for long enough. I believe there is a deep human need for that deeper-natural that we find in silence. So where has this silence gone?
Between the years 1066 and 1800 England’s population grew from about 1 million to 8 million. In the two hundred years since, the population grew to just over 49 million. So for every person alive in 1801 there are now another 5 people. That’s a lot more chatter! The great growth in population coincided with industrialisation in this country. I want to argue here that for the greater part of human existence, the world has been a much quieter place, fewer people and no mechanical noise. The loudest thing most people heard before the industrial revolution was the odd clap of thunder.
Quietness, like trees and clean seas is just another part of our environment that we have lost through the process of industrialisation. We cannot turn the clocks back, and neither should we, for industrialisation has brought great benefits too. But just like other parts of our endangered habitat, silence should perhaps be sought out and conserved. Making time for this is difficult. I have suggested in the past buying an egg timer, turning it over and spending three minutes looking at the sands and just listening. That’s one way. Perhaps, also, we need to look for the natural silences, for instance, the tiny pause at the top of each breath. The silence that can be found in the midst of a busy supermarket, surrounded by people – yes, even this can be a place of inner silence in the midst of a busy Christmas. I think we urgently need to find silence as much as we need clean air and clean water.
How silently, how silently,
The wondrous gift is given!
There is a gift to be found in silence, but this gift is one of which we cannot speak, we can but listen, look and silently behold.

Hazlenuts and Farmers

2010-11-12T12:40:00.000Z

I have in my hand a little hazelnut which I picked up on a walk between Almeley Parish Church and the Friends Meeting House. As I picked it up during the Harvest Festival Season it became the basis of my thoughts for Harvest, which we have now completed.
Human beings in their present form came into being some 200,000 years ago. If you were to compress the whole of this length of time into a 24 hour day, then the last Ice Age finished around an hour before midnight. In all the 23 hours prior to that point there was no agriculture. People lived by hunting animals and gathering berries, roots and nuts like the hazelnut I have in my hand. It is around that point we find the beginnings of Agriculture at the start of the New Stone Age.
This revolution did not reach these islands until some 6000 years before present. It was during this time that our ancestors were able to develop the skills and technology to build the Megalithic tombs such as West Kennet Long Barrow and Arthur’s Stone. It is Agriculture that made this possible. No-one who spends most of their time hunting and gathering will have the leisure to organise society in such a way that these things can begin to happen.
Of course, our technology has moved on. I am writing this on a computer; my third! Something I would not have dreamed of, even in my young adulthood. None of this, however, would be possible without the thing that made the first technology possible. Our very lives still depend on Agriculture; on farmers taking the risks with their resources, sowing their crops, not knowing what the weather will be doing during the Harvest season.
All our human activities are wonderful things. But the sustaining energy for them all is provided by agriculture. So the next time you are passing a farm, take a moment to give thanks for our farmers.

Is Accommodationism so bad?

2010-10-20T16:25:00.001+01:00

Accommodation is the new dirty word. That is strange given what the word means. It means adapt myself to others with whom I share this planet especially those I oppose and who oppose me. I suppose I must ask myself the question 'How must, and to what extent should I adapt myself in order that I may live in peace with my opponent?' And whilst what I oppose may well be a thing, (i.e. religion, political ideology, builders of roads, whatever), my opponent will nearly always be another person or set of persons.
Of course there are things that I will not adapt to, but does that ever include people?

Shouldn't accommodationism be given the benefit of the doubt?

Changing People, Changing Earth

2010-09-20T17:10:00.000+01:00

During the summer, whilst on a visit to my parents in Wiltshire, I visited West Kennet Long Barrow. It is a chambered tomb dating from round about 3600 B.C.E. At the eastern end there is a set of stone chambers which open out towards the east. At the spring and autumn equinoxes, during its time of use, the light of the rising sun would have shone directly into the back of the tomb. Elsewhere in the British Isles, such as Orkney, similar tombs face the rising sun at the beginning of February. It is possible that these were significant times of the year for our ancestors. Certainly at Stonehenge the main orientation of the monument is towards the rising of the sun at mid-winter.
One of the great gifts to us from the pre-Christian people of ancient Europe is a set of festivals which mark the turning of the seasons. There are eight of these in total: Mid-Winter and Mid Summer, the Spring and Autumn Equinoxes as well as at the beginning of February, May, August and November. Although no one particular religion celebrated all of these days, they were all marked at least somewhere in pre-Christian Europe. It was left to the universal nature of Christianity to bring all eight festivals under one religious roof, so that now you will find Christian festivals overlying all of these days, beginning with Christmas, Candlemas, Lady Day, May Day, Saint John’s Day, Lammas Day, Michaelmas and finally All Saints and All Souls.
Although these festivals were primarily used by Christians to commemorate the story of Christ in different ways, in recent years they have returned to their perhaps original use. The modern Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (OBOD) is among many contemporary pagan groups to use the “eight seasonal celebrations to help us attune to the natural cycle, and help us to structure our lives through the year, and to develop a sense of community with all living beings.”
I love the festivals of Harvest, Easter and Christmas. At these times the outside comes inside, by way of decorations garnered from the natural world. I have one very vivid small child’s memory of going out to collect holly in the forest with my father. Everywhere was washed out brown fern and grey bark, with cold almost white skies. These celebrations and others are still special to me because they remember in me that child’s joy in the natural world.
It seems to me, whether we are Christian, Pagan or of no religion at all, these eight festivals help us to pay attention to and mark the changing year.
Who knows what the builders of the tombs and stone circles thought or believed? What we can know is that they were keenly aware of the seasons and how both land and sky changed throughout the year. For them it was important enough to mark these events in stone; using the first great technology. In so doing, they have left us with a gift that we should not ignore. They were a listening people who heard a speaking earth. Perhaps like them we can use the festivals of our year to learn to listen again. Who knows what, or whom we might hear?

Wells not walls

2010-07-13T15:49:00.000+01:00

The story is told of an English farmer who went to visit a sheep farm in Australia. The farm was immense, stretching in all directions as far as the stretch of the sky.
“You must need an awful lot of barbed-wire,” the English farmer observed.
“Not at all, we don’t use any, we just dig wells, and there the sheep stay.”
We humans also gather around wells. In fact many early Christian settlements were founded near sources of water. They provided all that was needed for drinking and washing and baptisms too. One of the ironies of history is that the building of St. David’ s Cathedral completely destroyed the reason for David settling there in the first place: for in order to construct the foundations of this massive statement of ecclesiastical power, the wells and water-courses had to be drained and diverted.
Where are today’s spiritual wells, where do the thirsty come for drink and the heavy laden find rest?
The wells are still here, but are all too often enclosed, hidden by walls and fences of ambition and fear. They are walls that imprison, and fences that say, ‘this is mine’.
It is time to brake down those walls and cut through those fences.
For many are thirsty, and others still are in need of rest.

Liberality

2010-06-18T12:15:00.002+01:00

I must confess to being an old-fashioned liberal (note small l ). What does that mean, and what connections might it have with the Christian faith?
The word liberal is often connected with a similar word liberty, which of course is about freedom. When liberals read the bible, they should be able to do so in a way that is free from dogmatic and apologetic concerns. Put in other words: There is no need to defend the Christian faith from important questions. I’ll give you an example: If we consider the different accounts of the resurrection of Jesus we find anomalies. In Mark’s gospel the women go to the tomb when the sun had risen, whilst Matthew and Luke place the visit at early dawn. John’s gospel, however, insists that it was still dark. Whilst that might possibly harmonise with Matthew and Luke, it cannot possibly be dark when the sun had risen. It seems to me that we need to be at liberty to ask the question which gospel has it right? Or do any of them?
This is the heart of what it means to be liberal when reading and interpreting the bible. For the liberal there can be no orthodoxy, no truth which is not the result of questions freely asked and freely investigated; with the proviso, of course, that any answers that we find are, in and of themselves, still provisional; they may have to change in the light of further evidence. Until the Christian Church as a whole is able to fully embrace this liberality, it remains able to speak only to itself and to those who require certainty, whether or nor that certainty is true.
Liberality has another connotation. I was a guest recently and was blessed by the liberality of my host whose generosity was remarkable.
Liberality, generosity; they mean the same thing. He might have said be free with all that is mine. Liberality, to my mind, ought to be at the heart of Christianity. When asked how many times should we forgive another, Jesus replies seventy times seven. This is a piece of rabbinic overstatement, didactic exaggeration to drive home a point. A generous, liberal attitude is requisite for those who seek to follow Jesus. For God is liberal, big-hearted as the writer of Ephesians reminds us
“but God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together in Christ. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.”
What we see here is a generous God who liberally distributes his mercy.
In the words of a former Bishop of Ludlow, John Saxbee: We serve a Christ-like God who calls us to be Christ-like so that we might win others to the likeness of Christ.
Put another way, we serve a generous God, a loving God, who calls us to be generous and loving with one another, so that through that generosity, that liberality of spirit, others are won to the way of .
Whether you believe in God or not, you can practice in liberality and grace, for in their practice perhaps the world becomes a little kinder.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

2010-05-19T10:02:00.001+01:00

I have just returned from a large international and ecumenical church event in Munich. To give you an example of the scale of it, the exhibition area, where many of the lectures and seminars, as well as exhibitions, took place, is made up of twelve huge buildings each the size of a football pitch. These were filled with people for five days.
On Friday evening, in the Odeon Platz, there was an Orthodox Vespers entitled Service of a thousand tables, where blessed bread would be shared after the service. There were indeed a thousand tables, each with around ten people on them, and more people standing where there were no tables. The service was an hour and a half long, and it was bitterly cold.
That’s over ten thousand people, patiently working their way through a very unfamiliar kind of service and breaking bread with one another. There was more than enough bread, even for those who were standing, in fact the baskets were filled with left-overs. These were people of all Christian denominations (and, I suspect, some of none) coming together to share food. I sat with people I did not know, could barely converse with, and would never see again. It’s interesting to note that the word “company” means “with bread”, and we were indeed a great company.
My accommodation for the conference was with a family who had been instructed that they only needed to provide me with breakfast. Breakfast was rolls, bacon and eggs, all kinds of wonderful foods and a lovely pot of tea made especially for me. Well beyond their call of duty, I was feasted liberally every evening with a wonderful meal and good Bavarian beer besides.
The theme of the conference was “That you may have hope”. The world’s religions offer much in the way of hope on the packaging, but perhaps fall short, as we all humanly do. But it is in the kindness of strangers that hope is really to be found, and it is something that I find all over the place, sometimes where you least expect it. Kindness, of course, means treating others as if they were kin. I have found that it is more readily available than its opposite numbers cruelty and mean-mindedness.
On a recent television programme, the Reverend Peter Owen Jones existed for two weeks on the kindness of others. He noted that “If you are reliant on the goodness in others, that’s what you will find – the goodness in others. But that means making yourself vulnerable, which is not easy.” I didn’t need to go to his extremes to find the kindness of strangers but in their hospitality, I found the real truth in the theme of the conference. For it is in that generosity of the human spirit that you may have hope.

Germany, Britain, Two wars, Rememberence and living with a shared history.

2010-04-26T14:01:00.000+01:00

What follows is the text my address to seminar looking at, Britain and Germany: Our Shared History, it will take place in Munich in May.

Firstly a little bit about myself, because in offering this reflection on Remembrance it is important to acknowledge certain things about me and what I bring to Remembrance.

I was born in February 1967 towards the end of the twenty-second year after the end of the second world war. To the boy who grew up in the 1970s that might have seemed like a long time. To the middle-aged man of 43, 22 years ago seems like yesterday. A bit more context: Both my parents were born in 1943; both of them war babies. My mother was born in Tilsit, now in the Russian Federation, then part of East Prussia. As a two-year-old she was one of the thousands of refugees fleeing the Red Army as they moved west through an eastern winter. By contrast, my father was born on a farm in rural Kent.
As a child I was a member of uniformed organisations like the Scouts and the Air Training Corps, which my German cousins would have been horrified by, I think. As a young man I served in both the Royal Air Force and the Royal Yeomanry (a regiment of part-time soldiers).So you can see that upon almost my entire life, the shadow of the second world war has lain.
In Britain Remembrance Sunday is about Remembrance and Thanksgiving. Remembering the dead and giving thanks for the freedoms their sacrifice has achieved. It is both a civic and military spectacle. Although black is very much the order of the day, this is broken up by the glimmer of medals, the colours of flags and of course the ubiquitous red of the poppies. Despite all of its sad associations it is a day that we Brits look forward to with pride.
A pride that is easy when your cause was won and your purpose was righteous. It is a pride that I have never been fully able to own. Because, you see, half the combatants in my family were on the losing and unrighteous side also, it seems.
A few years ago I was in a town in the north-east of Germany and I noticed a small memorial with words in Hebrew and German. “Zur erinnerung und mahnug” These words translated are “To remember and give warning” The memorial marked the site of the synagogue.
I have to say that I share the same ambivalence to Remembrance Sunday. We are asked to remember the glorious dead, but surely we should also ask why they are dead. Every year we sing “O valiant hearts” written by a local grandee, Sir john Arkwright, and I quote from this hymn
“Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war,
As who had heard God’s message from afar;
All you had hoped for, all you had you gave,
To save mankind yourselves you scorned to save.

These were his servants, in his steps they trod,
Following through death the martyred son of God:
Victor he rose; victorious too shall rise
They who have drunk his cup of sacrifice”.

Clearly here the sacrifice on the Somme is equated with the sacrifice on Calvary. Not only that, but it seems from this hymn, that the victorious dead have won their salvation through fighting for the right side. I have to say nothing could be further from Christian truth than this. I wouldn’t dream of saying it on Remembrance Sunday.
In the final verse of the hymn we find these lines:
“In glorious hope, their proud and sorrowing land
Commits her children to thy gracious hand.”

To me that says it all. The reason I dislike this hymn so much is not its lack of Christian truth but those final words are a sop to thousands of working class men who lost their lives; thousands more whose lives were ruined by injury, thousands of parents, wives and children whose loss all was due to a confidence trick perpetrated by the military industrial complexes of both nations.
The hymn is a way of pacifying what anger there might have been into a ritual of sorrow and pride.
Could the same be said of Remembrance Sunday itself?
In recent years the focus has begun to shift away from the two World Wars of the last century. My country has become involved in one very dubious war in Iraq, and in my opinion, a far more justifiable conflict in Afghanistan. On several occasions in most months of the year service personnel killed in action are brought back with great solemnity through the town of Wootton Bassett, and each occasion is a Remembrance Sunday. What I note about this is that we are still proud of our soldiers. We continue to wear our poppies on these occasions with pride. We give our soldiers our support. But many of us, including the most loyal, question our government about the nature and reason for those conflicts. We do so on behalf of our soldiers, sailors and Air-force personnel.
A few years ago on Remembrance Sunday I asked the question What shall I tell my children about the wars – second and first? It is question that lays right at the heart of our shared history, My response is that I shall tell them about their great-grandfathers: Franz Teubler and John Fell, both of whom fought on the Somme. They may even have fought each other. They came back and my children are their descendents. But I will also tell them of Uncle George and Uncle Werner who remained uncles with no descendents because they did not come back.
Remembrance Sunday can be about pride and thanksgiving, but we all may have something to learn from those words on the German memorial. Remembrance is also a warning.
I will finish with a better poem than “O valiant hearts”:
This is poem, written by Wilfred Owen, a man who knew only too well the reality and pity of war. It is soldier’s poem and perhaps a pastor’s too.
One ever hangs where shelled roads part.
In this war He too lost a limb,
But His disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with Him.

Near Golgotha strolls many a priest,
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ's denied

The scribes on all the people shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.

How many anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? Change!

2010-04-17T10:25:00.000+01:00

It is pollarded oaks that live the longest. For up to 1000 years, every Autumn they sew the seeds of their own successes. By contrast, their un-pollarded cousins are short-lived. What lesson here then, is there for the Church of England?

In the village of Ramsbury, near to where I grew up, there was an ancient tree, standing resplendent in the market-place. It was the symbol of the Ramsbury Building Society, and my childhood money –box from the same Society had a picture of the tree upon it. Like our own Great Oak, it was hollow. By the time I was a teenager, the tree had begun to die. Everything was done to preserve it, but eventually the decision was made to cut it down. This, of course, created a bit of an uproar. How could this symbol of the village be allowed to die? The fact was it was already dead. Its branches had gone, and all that was left was a hollowed-out trunk. In its place a sapling was planted. – one that still continues to grow to the stature of its predecessor.
I think there is a message that may be hard to listen to, but never-the-less needs to be heard. There is no point in trying to preserve something that has become a hollowed-out husk of its former self. Pruning and pollarding perhaps postpone that hollowed-out fate.
I don’t know whether the Church of England has yet reached the stage of being a hollowed-out husk, but it seems to me that it is in great danger of becoming just that. It is over 500 years old and it can no longer touch lives in the way that it formerly did.
When I was training for Ministry I was asked when had I decided to go into the church? I answered somewhat pedantically that I had been in the church since 20th August 1967, the date of my baptism. In the end old trees cannot be preserved, and they go the way of things. No amount of preservation can preserve something that is both out of time and out of place. What’s needed is the renewal of new life, and that renewal can only come when the minister, that servant within ourselves. When we receive a service from anyone, we are receiving something from that which is good.
Trees come and go. So too do institutions. Let us not weep over the demise of old trees and tired institutions. Rather, let us continue to rejoice in the life that is within us, and the service to which each life is called. These are the green shoots of May, and these are the things worth nurturing.
Nobody likes change. That’s tough. The impermanence of all things is an unchanging reality. Not even the stones live for ever. Living things change by continuing to grow. Whereas dead things change only through decay.

Spiritual but not religious

2010-04-17T10:20:00.000+01:00

“It seems that many people like to describe themselves as "spiritual," but, if pressed to define the word as it applies to them/explain what they mean by it, I imagine that they wouldn't be able to and/or wouldn't want to. That's incredibly frustrating.”
These are the words of an atheist blogger and college lecturer, Miranda Celeste Hale. She voices a typical frustration felt by many atheists at the word “spiritual” and the similar word “spirituality”.
So what do these words mean? The word “spirit” from which they both come, is usually taken to mean a non-material part of our personal existence and/or existence in general. In terms of its origin, it just means “breath”. Neither of these really helps us understand the words spiritual or spirituality. And, although these words look similar, they are speaking about different things.
I often hear people say “I’m not religious but I am spiritual.” Perhaps they mean that although they have religious feelings, and perhaps a belief in God and life after death, they don’t sign up to belonging to a particular religion or set of religious beliefs. So, saying “I am spiritual but not religious” is a less clumsy way of saying “I am religious, but I don’t believe in any particular religion”.
So, if that is “spiritual” what is “spirituality”?
If “spiritual” describes the person, then “spirituality” is a word that describes our way of being spiritual or religious. For instance, one might talk about a Cistercian spirituality, Cistercians were the monks that built the Abbeys at Tintern, Fountains and Dore. Cistercians live lives of silence, simplicity and solitude. They live their lives in silence. They spend a lot of time on their own. Their churches are very simple in design and even their clothes are made of un-dyed wool. In these three things they find their royal route to God.
Franciscans also live in simplicity and at the heart of their spirituality is a life of poverty combined with the service to others. That is their way of being Christian.
Of course spirituality is not limited to Christianity or even, some would argue, to Religion. There is even a little Atheist book of spirituality by a French philosopher.
So, spirituality is a way of being spiritual or religious or even non-religious. But I think it is also a way of living with reference to the big questions: Who are we? What are we? Why are we? and How shall we live?
You might call it applying big answers to big questions in everyday living. Lent continues during this month (Ash Wednesday was 17th February). It’s as good a time as any, to reflect on those questions, and to apply our answers to our everyday lives.

Why Wilderness?

2010-04-17T10:05:00.000+01:00

What often strikes me about the stories told in the Bible is the landscape, the wilderness in which they often take place. We are told about encounters with God in the wilderness. Moses led the children of Israel through the wilderness to the promised land. He received the Ten Commandments in the wilderness.
John appeared in the wilderness to prepare the way for Jesus.
Jesus spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. And during his ministry on earth he would spend time alone with God in the wilderness. It has been said that the God of Israel is a God of the wilderness.
In the wilderness you often find large skies and perfect silences. Such places speak of the infinity of the divine, of a God beyond description who cannot be placed into a neat and tidy dogmatic box.
We don’t need the desert to find the wilderness, any wild place is a wilderness, and any place we go to be alone can be a wilderness. It seems to me that we can find God in the wild places simply because God can be more easily found in places beyond human contrivance and preference. In the wilderness things are simply what they are, revealing something of the God who is what God is.
In the wilderness there is space, though not emptiness, this is a space like a baby’s mind, open to all the possibilities that God and or the universe have to offer.

A WAY TO GOD?

2009-12-30T12:10:00.000Z

In chapter 12 of Mark’s Gospel Jesus is asked which is the greatest of all the commandments. He answers:

‘The first is, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, The Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” The second is this, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.’[1]

Both these are quotations from the Hebrew Scriptures. The first, Deuteronomy 6, verse 4, and the second Leviticus 19, verse 18.

A near contemporary of Jesus, Hillel, a Rabbi who lived c.110BCE-10CE [2], said:

‘Do not do to another person what is unwelcome to you: this is the entire Law, and the rest (of Scripture) is interpretation.’[3]

In the same way, I would argue that the real message of Christianity, the real point of it, are those words of Jesus. The rest of scripture, indeed, the rest of Theology, is a comment on those words… So let me comment:

It is often said that religion is about morality. Christianity has been called an ethical monotheism, that is, a belief in one God who requires our good behaviour. I do not think this is true at all. You might ask “Why?”

All living things, including plants, have some sort of consciousness. For instance, at night time, daisies will be closed. They respond to daylight by opening up. However primitive and simple, that is a form of consciousness. The higher primates, like Orangutans, do have something that approaches self-consciousness, but only human beings, so far as we know, are fully self-conscious. You and I are aware that we exist as separate beings; not only separate, but finite. We know we have a beginning and we are also aware that our existence as self-conscious beings will come to an end. We have sought to alleviate the anxiety this obviously produces by creating for ourselves a being outside of, nature, who will guarantee our existence after death. I think this makes us look in the wrong place for comfort and a source of ethical living.

Nearly every religion in the world has a theology of atonement (at-one-ment). Despite the benefits self-consciousness gives us, we are nevertheless left with a sense of disconnection from everything else, including other people. Your cats and dogs live in the moment, so do newborn babies. The whole of reality is a unity to them, of which, of course, they are unaware.

It seems to me that the true message of religion, and certainly of Christianity, is not to be found in following a ‘God’ given rule book, nor either in putting our hopes in a supernatural guarantor of life beyond life. God and the good, are not to be sought in the non-real or the un-natural. Rather, God, and therefore goodness, is found at the very heart of what is real and natural. Jesus calls us to love the totality of being, that is God; one another and ourselves. I would rather see that totality as a unified whole, rather than a collection of separate beings.

As Einstein said,

‘A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his 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’.[4]

It is in this totality of being that we find God. It is in loving that totality of being, that we find goodness. To misquote John Donne:

‘No being is an island, entire of itself;

every thing is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

Any thing’s demise diminishes me,

because I am part of everything;’[5]

For me Christianity is not about believing in and obeying a supernatural being who will reward us in the afterlife. Christianity should be about loving, now. In loving we can find union, now, and through that union we acknowledge that what hurts another hurts me.

In loving we find that we are loved. So;

Beloved,

Let us love one another;

For there is no fear in love, since perfect love casts out fear.

If we love one another, love dwells in us and love is perfected in us.

Love is,

and whoever lives in love is truly alive, for love lives in them…[6]

So, Happy New Year everyone, and may it be a loving one too.

[1] Mark 12.29-31 RSV

[2] It’s commonplace now, in Religious studies, to use BCE (Before the Current Era) and CE (Current Era), which are identical to BC and AD. Given that Hillel was a Jew it seems appropriate to use these abbreviations.

[3] Carpenter, Humphrey, Jesus, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) 51.

[4] Wikiquote, Pantheism, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pantheism

[5] John Donne, Meditation XVII see Oakley, Mark, ed. John Donne, Verse and Prose, (London: S.P.C.K., 2004) 79.

[6] Based on 1 John 4, 7 ff

Lecture notes

2009-11-25T21:06:00.000Z

These are notes from a lecture by Warren Brown a neuropsychologist working at Fuller Theological seminary.

Warren Brown
How many essential parts am I composed of?
Am I a body?
A body and a soul?
A body and a mind?
A body, a mind and a soul?
A body, mind, soul and spirit?
Am I a unitary being or am I a being controlled by some sort of committee?
The “traditional” view is that humans are physical beings with a non-physical soul.
It is the soul which exhibits free will, is spiritual and allows us to experience and relate to God.
This view is called body/soul dualism, that is that we are in two parts. Its origins are in philosophy, particularly the philosophy of Plato. It became a solidified philosophical system in the writings of Rene Decartes. It pervades the Christian view of the human being as well as that of secular spirituality.
However..,
It is increasingly difficult to find an area of human cognition, affective, social, moral or religious functioning that has not already been shown to have correlates in identifiable patterns of brain functioning.
Take the case of Phineas Gage.
In an accident the frontal lobe of Gage’s brain was damaged
He never lost consciousness, however the consequences of the accident were remarkable. Before the accident Gage was:
Intelligent
A Capable and efficient worker
An Excellent manager
A Responsible family man
An Upstanding citizen
After the accident he
Maintained his general intelligence, but became
Unreliable/capricious
Socially inappropriate
Amoral (i.e. not immoral, but one without any moral compass)
Consequently he lost his job and family.
“Phineas Gage was no longer Phineas Gage”
The areas of the brain damaged were the areas that deal with empathy and moral decision making.

People experiencing a temporal lobe seizure have reported experiences like those of religious visionaries. Very deep and powerful religious experiences can come about by malfunction of certain parts of the temporal lobe.
A similar result can be induced in a person who is not experiencing temporal lobe seizure, by a process known as TMS Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. TMS to the right temporal lobe can create a sense of “presence” of God or of an angel. This demonstrates a close relationship between temporal lobe activity and religious experiences, or experiences we might interpret as religious.
These are just a few examples for the purpose of illustrating this problem that neuroscience raises for the “traditional” view of human nature.
The Knotty problem
“When the life of the soul is conditioned in every detail by bodily organs and processes, how can it be detached from the body and survive it?”
Wolfhart Pannenberg, theologian.

I find it difficult to see how it can be the case that we have a soul as well as a body when just about everything about us, including our religious experiences, seem to be happening physically within our brains and our bodies.

So what is the solution to this problem?
One possible solution is that of Scientism (note not Science in and of itself)
Everything is ultimately determined by and therefore entirely explained by the laws of the material world.
Humans are neurobiological beings whose mind (thinking, deciding, religious experiences, etc.) can, in theory, be completely and exhaustively explained by neurochemistry and physics.

This is called formally
Eliminative Materialism in that it
Eliminates, in principle, the idea that persons can be causes of their own behaviour.
This is ethically problematic.

“Nothing Buttery”
“According to this view…the whole thing can be explained away as ‘nothing but’ the mindless motion of molecules.” Donald M. Mackay neuroscientist.

It seems then that We need a third view that is both resonant with science and robustly Christian.
The Emergent Alternative
It is not necessary to postulate a second non-physical entity (a soul or mind) to account for human capacities and distinctiveness. Mental and soulish capacities are physiologically embodied.
But
Human behaviour cannot be completely or exhaustively explained by neurobiology.
But
The highest levels of human mental capacities emerge from our complex brains as new causes in the physical world.
We are persons whose thinking and deciding is not an illusion., but as whole persons we are causes of our own behaviour, capable of being truly responsible, truly moral and having truly relational experiences with one another and a meaningful religious life.
Nest-building is not reducible to the characteristics of single ants but is emergent in colonies of ants.
The Emergent Alternative: We are physical beings who operate physiologically, however, all of the important things about humans are real properties of us as whole persons that emerge from the interactive complexity of our nervous system.
Implications of the Emergent Alternative:
We need a Physicalist Theology of Human Nature:
A holistic view of humankind as embodied physical creatures of God’s creation.
At the same time we need a Neuroscience of Emergence:
A view of neuroscience that accepts the emergence of new causes in the form of human mental capacities.
We ARE bodies. We do not HAVE bodies. Or We ARE souls we do not HAVE souls.
What is meant by the idea of human uniqueness? i.e. that humans are made in the image of God, above all other animals.
Neuroscience would say we are distinctive but not unique. For instance a chimpanzee has many of the characteristics we have, but less developed.
Our distinctiveness comes from our Relationality:
“…humans are more social – mote deeply social- than any other species on earth, our closest primate relatives not excepted.” “…by deep I am referring to a special degree of cognitive and mental penetration between individuals.” Andrew Whiten
Thus, a major part of what it means to be made in the image of God relates to the possession of a deep social mind. This deep relationality is both a distinctive characteristic of humankind and a calling on the lives of humans – a vocation, if you will.
But are we unique in any way?
I would say that humans are unique not just distinctive because we have been called by God to participate in a unique form of relationship with Him. Our uniqueness is not about us, per se, but about God’s calling on us . Thus I would say in the end that human distinctiveness is something that science has much to say about. But human uniqueness is a question that can only be answered by theology.
You might like to think about the following questions:

Natural Druid

2009-10-24T16:15:00.000+01:00

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?”

He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!

2009-10-14T18:49:00.000+01:00

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 St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians he writes about the Jewish law: “Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified through faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian.” [3]

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.

[1]Monty Python - The Life of Brian

[2] Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters and Papers from Prison 129f

[3] Galatians 3.23-25

Prayer

2009-09-10T16:06:00.000+01:00

Prayer

is not an appeal

nor an attempt to change or interfere

Quite simply

it is solidarity

a nameing of someone

something

in mind and heart

when nothing else is possible

The book of books

2009-07-13T15:54:00.000+01:00

Here is the text of a lesson I gave to some 11 to 12 year old on the Bible.

The word Bible comes from a Greek word biblion meaning book or scroll, and, as you can see, the Bible is a book. However, it is more accurate to say that the Bible is a collection of books.

I have a little collection of books here, my old Ladybird books:

First,

Little Red Riding Hood;

Cinderella;

A book of Prayers;

The story of Baby Jesus;

The story of Nelson;

A Robin Hood adventure.

We might add to that little collection of books:

The Summa Theologiae,

A hymn book;

A book of philosophy

Bede’s History.

So what kind, what type of books are these?

Little Red Riding Hood; a story with a moral

Cinderella; a story

A book of Prayers;

The story of Baby Jesus; a biography,

telling us about someone’s life

The story of Nelson a biography

The Robin Hood adventure. a myth/legend perhaps history

Summa Theologiae, ; a theology book

A hymn book; a collection of hymns

Discourse on Method a book of philosophy

Bede’s History. a history book

Different kinds of books, exactly the you will find same kinds of books in the Bible – because the bible is a collection of books.

For instance,

The Gospels biography –life of Jesus

The letters of St. Paul A letter - and theology

Ecclesiastes philosophy

The book of Ruth story

The book of Kings history

The Psalms hymns and prayers

Genesis a collection of legends and

creation stories

So that’s the bible.

Returning to Little Red Riding Hood: We all know the story, but we also know that wolves don’t talk, people cannot be eaten whole by wolves, and you’d never mistake a wolf for your grandmother – would you? So we can say that the facts of the story are nothing of the kind – there are no facts in this story – nothing happened as the story said – it’s just a story. However, does that mean there is no truth in the story – no truth to be found within its words?

So, for instance, one of the truths might be Don’t talk to strangers – that seems a good idea – especially if you’re young – listen to what your mother tells you, and so on.

There you are, we know that the story of Little Red Riding Hood is not true but there is truth to be found in it.

In the bible, many of the stories and even the histories that tell us about real events are written in such a way so that we can find a moral, a truth in them that’s not just about the facts of the story.

Let’s look at the first two stories in the bible:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

And God said, "Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind." And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

Notice that it is God who is creating here. The word God is Elohim in the Hebrew text. This is the first account of creation that we find in the bible.

Now look at the beginning of this Babylonian Creation story:

When on high heaven was not named,

And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,

And the primeval Apsû, who begat them,

And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both,

Their waters were mingled together,

And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;

When of the gods none had been called into being.

You might think they’re quite similar – and that’s because they are. Around about 605 years before the birth of Jesus there was a war between Babylon and Israel. Babylon is in what is now Iraq. The Babylonians won and took many people from Israel to live in Babylon. Whilst they were there they would have heard the Babylonian story of creation. They took that story and made it their own, changing it to give it their own meaning.

Now let’s look at the second account of Creation that we find in the bible:

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created.
When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens-and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no human to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground- the LORD God formed the human (Hebrew adam) from the dust of the ground (Hebrew for ground is adamah). and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living being.

Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the human he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The LORD God took the human and put it in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the human, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

The LORD God said, "It is not good for the human to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for it."

Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the human to see what it would name them; and whatever the human called each living being, that was its name. So the human gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
But for the human no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the human to fall into a deep sleep; and while it was sleeping, he took one of the human's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the human, and he brought her to the human.

The human said,
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman’ (Hebrew ishah)
for she was taken out of man (Hebrew ish)."

Notice some of the differences between the two stories of Creation.

In the second, Humanity is created first, before all the other animals. Secondly, again in the second account, we are given the name of the god who creates – You might notice the word ‘ Lord’ is written in capitals; LORD. This is a tradition. It actually translates a word that looks like this: YHWH which is God’s name. and thought to be too holy to even speak, which is why we use the word LORD written like this whenever the Hebrew bible uses YHWH. Notice that the first creation story doesn’t use this at all. This is one of the reasons why we know that the two stories were not written by the same people. In fact they come from completely different times.

The second creation story probably originates from an earlier period of Israel’s history, between 1000 years and 900 years before the birth of Jesus. It comes from the time of Israel’s great king Solomon. It is a story that has a moral. It reminds human beings, however powerful, however glorious they think they are, they are in fact made of the dust. It’s a good thing to tell a powerful king that he’s just dust.

The first story has an order to it: the first day this happened, then this happened, then this happened….and God saw that it was good…It is about the triumph of Order over Chaos. Remember the Israelites had been defeated, their lives were in turmoil and chaos. They needed a story that told them that Order and harmony would prevail, and that God would be victorious over the turmoil and chaos.

The purpose of the two creation stories is to say something to particular human beings in two particular situations. The writers of the bible are using two different creation stories to two different sets of people. ‘You are getting too big for their boots, you are only dust.’ (the second story) or ‘Even though things seem bad now, everything is chaos and turmoil; harmony and order is how the universe has been put together, and harmony and order will win out in the end.’ The first story.

So, let’s return to your question of last week: Were we made by God or descended from monkeys? Behind that question I think, perhaps there is another one: Does the Bible conflict with Science?

Think back to the types of book we listed at the beginning. One type of book you won’t notice in the Bible is a Science book. That’s partly because Science as we know it now didn’t really begin until around 1300 years after the birth of Jesus.

Returning to the Creation stories in Genesis, notice again that there are two stories not one. As we saw, they don’t agree with one another. But that doesn’t matter, because they’re not telling us facts, rather they are trying to tell two different ‘truths’ to two different sets of people. People who wanted or perhaps needed to hear different things. What both accounts agree on of course, is that God is the Creator. They differ only on how God created. But creation is perhaps not the point at all, the stories have different purposes, purposes that have only been rediscovered over the past two hundred years.

What are days for?

2009-07-10T14:04:00.000+01:00

The older I get the quicker the years go. Ten years ago seems like yesterday, and yet twenty years ago does now seem rather distant. It’s a strange thing, time, how it plays tricks on us.

Augustine asked “What is time? Who can explain this easily and briefly? Who can comprehend this even in thought so as to articulate the answer in words. Yet what do we speak of in our familiar everyday conversation, more than of time? We surely know what we mean when we speak of it. We also know what is meant when we hear someone else talking about it. What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an enquirer I do not know.”[1]

Einstein showed us that time and space are in fact part of the same thing. When the universe started, time started. So in answer to the question ‘What happened before the universe?’ the answer is ‘Nothing’, there is no before, because before is part of time, and time is part of the universe. (Now if this is making your head ache, it’s making my head ache too!)

Perhaps we should come back down to Earth in trying to understand these things. Philip Larkin wrote “What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us time and time over. They are happy to be in: where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields.”[2]

We need neither the priest nor the doctor to come running over the fields. Surely the answer lies in the fact that we are in time and space, it is where we live, breathe and have all our being.

I started off with a question. Another year has gone. It has been filled with happiness and sadness; profit and loss; love and hate; health and illness; life and death. “The days of our life are three score years and ten, or if our strength endures, even four score; they soon pass away and we are gone. So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.”[3]

It seems to me that wisdom is the practical application of our understanding. I understand that my time and yours are limited. Time is short. So whatever time in the end is, this I know: It is a gift that I will not discard with yesterday's paper

Time for a cup of tea.

[1] Saint Augustine: The Confessions, book 11, chapter 17 tr. Henry Chadwick. Oxford 1991

[2] Days, The Whitsun wedding Philip Larkin: Faber & Faber. London 1964

[3] Psalm 90, verses 10 and 12.

Collective Worship in a Church of England (C.E.) Voluntary Controlled (V.C.) Primary School. Is it theologically possible and morally desirable?

2009-07-07T21:17:00.000+01:00

What follows is the text of a seminar I led for an MA module.

I have always enjoyed leading collective worship in schools. I like singing and story telling. The children, by and large, have enthusiastically participated in both story telling and song singing. As a curate in Birmingham, with many children from non Christian backgrounds attending assemblies, I was taught to be careful, always reminding the children when appropriate, that this is what Christians believe, and was not necessarily what they had to believe.

After Birmingham came schools in rural Shropshire and Herefordshire. With the same philosophy in mind I led Collective Worship, never assuming the Christianity of the children present, until challenged by an inspector about the way I led Collective Worship. Whilst acknowledging the fact that the children were obviously enjoying Collective Worship and gladly participating in it, he nevertheless questioned whether this was worship. ‘Could it be better described as the imparting of information with some entertainment and singing?’

This of course begs questions, ‘What is worship?’ and ‘Are those without choice able to offer it? And ‘Should they be required to do so?’ Hence my questions:

Before moving on I would like to say just a few words about context. When I submitted my proposal, one of the questions that arose from the email conversation with my tutors was.

‘The context of assembles being in a faith school means that parents have chosen to place their children in a faith school and we wonder if this is important?’

May I respond in two ways.

Firstly, in my thinking I had not considered the school to be a faith school in the current usage of this term. This is because parents in our village do not choose the school because it is a 'faith school', they choose it because it is the school in the village. Neither does the school select on the basis of denomination or any religious affiliation. The head recently told me.

‘We are a community school, we put our arms around everyone.’ This from a school that just last week achieved an Outstanding from its statutory church inspection.

It is the community school that historically was provided by the church, as a service to the community.

Let's call it a church provided community school.

Secondly, I am not sure how the answers would be changed by context, faith school or non faith school.

If the love offered to my spouse, in my arranged marriage, is not freely offered and therefore turns out not to be love. No amount of my parents choosing my spouse for me would make my ‘going through the motions’ love.

So if worship that is not freely offered turns out not to be worship, then no other external considerations, i.e. parental choice or faith school context will make it worship.

Similarly if an action in and of it self turns out to be morally undesirable, then nothing, not the law, parental choice, faith school context, nothing can make it morally desirable. So if compulsory worship turns out to be a violation of a child’s Freedom of Conscience, and that is held by society and church to be wrong, then nothing not the law, parental choice, faith school context, nothing can make it morally desirable.

So what does the law say?

...each pupil in attendance at a community, foundation or voluntary school shall on each school day take part in an act of collective worship.

The whole act is interpreted by a much longer document Circular 1/94.

It states that the aims of Collective Worship are:

…to provide the opportunity for pupils to worship God, to consider spiritual and moral issues and to explore their own beliefs; to encourage participation and response, whether through active involvement in the presentation of worship or through listening to and joining in the worship offered; and to develop community spirit, promote a common ethos and shared values, and reinforce positive values.

It goes onto state that worship:

…must in some sense reflect something special or separate from ordinary school activities and it should be concerned with reverence or veneration paid to a divine being or power. However, worship in schools will necessarily be of a different character from worship amongst a group with beliefs in common. The legislation reflects this difference in referring to 'collective worship' rather than 'corporate worship'.

It says further that:

In the light of the Christian traditions of Great Britain collective worship organised by a county or equivalent grant-maintained school is to be 'wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character'. The Act then further defines collective worship of a 'broadly Christian character' as being worship which reflects the broad traditions of Christian belief.

The Churches represented in the Churches’ Joint Education Policy Committee take the following position:

“We strongly support the continuation of Collective Worship in all schools, recognising the major contribution it makes to the spiritual and moral development of pupils, which is a prime goal of education. It is believed by other faith groups to be of benefit even though its emphasis is mainly Christian. We look for Government support for an improvement in the quality of acts of collective worship and for ensuring that all pupils are able, with their parents’ consent, to attend meaningful acts of worship at school.”

The churches argue that Collective Worship has both Educational and Spiritual benefits.

It provides a means of developing an appreciation that goes beyond the material world, fostering a concern for others and providing a forum for exploring shared values.

Our society has other voices, The National Secular Society unsurprisingly takes a different view. Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, has said:

“The churches are putting incredible pressure on the Government and on Ofsted to enforce this iniquitous law. Large-scale surveys show that 60 per cent of school children define themselves as atheist or agnostic, so why are they being forced against their conscience to worship a God they don’t believe in? It is an abuse of their human rights – they are not permitted to exercise their freedom of conscience.

This is straightforward indoctrination. The churches can’t get children into their services so they bring the church to school, and force the children, a captive audience, to observe by law. We encourage parents to consider whether they want their children to undergo this manipulation. They have the right to withdraw their children from it, and many are exercising that right”

The British Humanist Association:

"Would like to see changes in legislation to give schools much more flexibility about how they conduct assemblies, the immediate withdrawal of Circular 1/94 (which insists on a narrow interpretation of the legal requirement for "broadly Christian" worship) in favour of new guidance from the DCSF recommending inclusive assemblies, suitable for all. This should be followed by repeal of the legislation requiring acts of worship in schools. Schools should, however, provide time and space for optional worship for those who want it."

Earlier we looked at the words of Keith Porteous Wood from the NSS

‘Why are they (the children) being forced against their conscience to worship a God they don’t believe in? It is an abuse of their human rights – they are not permitted to exercise their freedom of conscience.’

It seems to me that the whole question turns not on faith school stroke non faith school, but on the issue of Freedom of Conscience.

What does Freedom of Conscience mean? How should it be applied to the individual. To what extent do children have the right to exercise Freedom Conscience?

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads:

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Furthermore Article 18 declares.

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

The UNHCR Declaration of the Rights of the Child principle 3 declares.

The child shall enjoy special protection, and shall be given opportunities and facilities, by law and by other means, to enable him to develop physically, mentally, morally, spiritually and socially in a healthy and normal manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity. In the enactment of laws for this purpose, the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.

Notice the words I have italicized and underlined. ‘in conditions of freedom and dignity’

So here are two well known secular declarations on Human rights that seem to be saying that the freedom of conscience even of the child is something to be upheld by law.

So what does the Christian Tradition have to say about Freedom of Conscience.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that;

God created man a rational being, conferring on him the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions. "God willed that man should be 'left in the hand of his own counsel,' so that he might of his own accord seek his Creator and freely attain his full and blessed perfection by cleaving to him."

“Man is rational and therefore like God; he is created with free will and is master over his acts.”

“Every human person, created in the image of God, has the natural right to be recognized as a free and responsible being. All owe to each other this duty of respect. the right to the exercise of freedom, especially in moral and religious matters, is an inalienable requirement of the dignity of the human person.”

Martin Luther is reported to have said.

"Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen."

Now compare this with this question from early Christian history. Why were Christians persecuted by the Roman Empire, an empire which is well known for its religious toleration?

‘The Christians “atheism” was the basic cause of their maltreatment. Some intellectual pagans decried the forms of contemporary cult, but almost all concurred with them when necessary; the Christians refused to concur and their lack of respect was intolerable….

Nobody minded too much what the Christians did or did not believe. As a governor told Bishop Dionysius, there would be no objection if the bishop would only worship the pagan gods as well as his own.’ 1

Christians were brought to the attention of the Roman authorities because they refused to offer sacrifices to the imperial Cults. The Romans were, in the main completely perplexed by this conscientious objection to sacrifice. The fact of Christian martyrdom at this time and throughout Christian History demonstrates in my view the importance that Christianity has always given to Freedom of Conscience.

I would like now to turn my attention to the nature of worship. When it comes to worship, I feel a bit like Augustine trying to describe time. When I use the word I know what I mean. When someone asks me to define it, that is when I am in difficulty.

‘Worship is a religious phenomenon , a reaching out through the fear that always accompanies the sacred to the mysterium conceived as tremendum but also as fascinans, because behind it and in it there is an intuition of the Transcendent.’ 2

Put another way ‘Worship is a religious phenomenon, a reaching out through the fearful and fascinating mystery of the sacred, because behind it and in it there is an intuition of the Transcendent.’

Worship then, might be described as a human response to that which is wholly other. The question that arises for me is whether such a response is voluntary of involuntary.

One particular saying of Jesus springs to mind.

“A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” 3

I have a subsequent question for myself. Is there a difference between compulsion and coercion?

The difference perhaps is that a compulsion to act can arise from within a person, whereas coercion is something that can only originate outside a person.

I might say that am compelled from within to respond to God in worship.

Another word often associated with worship is devotion, which I equate to an active love. Again I can be compelled from within to respond to God with loving devotion.

Loving devotion is not possible where coercion is involved. For if the love is real, why the coercion?

So let me offer some tentative conclusions.

I do believe that the question of God and therefore the question of worship do have a place within the educational context. Accompanying those questions is that of ‘Freedom of Conscience’. Only when that question is properly addressed can the possibility of true worship be entertained.

To quote Jesus again;

In terms of practice, I would begin by exploring with the children the issue of Freedom of Conscience. If children are to develop a ‘Good Conscience’ they need to be given some freedom to develop and use it. It seems me to that ‘Collective Worship’ provides an opportunity for this to happen.

The BHA expressly argues that ‘Schools should, however, provide time and space for optional worship for those who want it.’

The question of God, and whether and how we should worship God can and perhaps should be part RE. It might turn out that in a particular class that a minority of children do not believe in God. This question could be asked of the majority;

‘Should those who do not believe have to attend worship?’

Similarly if the believers happen to be in the minority, the majority could be asked;

‘Should the believers be given the option to worship? What are you the non believers going to do instead.?’

One final question might be asked

‘How do we come together as a school to think about and affirm our shared values?’

I began with questions, and I have ended not with answers, but further questions.

1 Lane-Fox, R., Pagans and Christians p.425.

2Jones, C., et al eds The Study of Liturgy, p.7.

3 NIV John 4. 23f

4 NIV John 4. 23f

Believe it or not

2009-07-04T21:28:00.002+01:00

I must confess that that I have always found belief in God quite difficult. There is something of the sceptic in me which has to seriously, the lack of positive evidence for the existence of God. Sometimes belief seems to evaporate altogether. Oh dear. But then perhaps we think of belief in the wrong way. I realise that I have come to think of belief as a something or a feeling that I either have or I don't. Here belief is a noun. But is that right? Does belief have a being all of its own. Is it something given by God, the god's or by life to those mortals that are favoured? Does that account for why some people believe in God and others do not? If that were true then God or the god would be capricious in the extreme. It seems especially unjust when one considers the fact that for many Christians, belief is a prerequisite of their entry into heaven. You don't believe, well you don't get in.

I do not think that belief is like that at all. It does not begin life as a noun but as a verb. Belief is not something that we have, it is something that we do. Belief is the child of believing.

It is like the story of the man who found he had no love for his wife anymore.

'Go and love her.' said his friend, 'Love is a verb not a noun.'

You may ask whether I believe in God, and I will say that I do.

'What are you reasons? Where is your evidence?'

Ah well, there is the rub, I have plenty of reasons, but not much evidence.

When the planes went in to the twin towers on 9/11 they were piloted be men who believed that God would reward them for this action. It was a belief they had no evidence for at all. Believing without evidence can be very dangerous.

There is an ethic that says, 'Do what thou wilt, and harm none.'

Believing is fine.
Believe if thou wilt, but in that believing, harm none.

Atonement

2009-07-04T13:19:00.000+01:00

Atonement: A word that provides the title to a recent film. But what does the word mean? We can speak about making an atonement for our sins, usually by saying “sorry” or offering some sacrifice of service to the offended party. The word atonement was invented by William Tyndale when he translated the Bible into English during the time of Henry VIII. It is really a phrase made of two words: at, one. He was trying to translate a word that did not have an English equivalent. It described the sacrifices made to God to put people right with God. To be reconciled with somebody or something is in one sense to be at one with that person or thing. Traditionally, Christians have seen the death of Jesus as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Jesus pays the price for the things that you and I have done wrong. But I would like to think of atonement in a slightly different way. Athanasius says of Jesus, in his work on the incarnation, that Jesus “indeed, assumed humanity that we might become God.” So we might say that, in Jesus, God is at one with us. He is at one with our birth, he is at one with our living, our crying and laughing, finally he is at one with our dying.

A few months ago I was driving down from Bollingham. It was a bright December day, and in that brilliant late-morning sunshine the valley was a white river of mist, the hills either banks or islands. As I looked upon this beautiful sight I yearned to connect, to be at one, with it.

It has been said that Christians are somewhat obsessed with sin. But then sin is misunderstood, it is not what we do, it is a state that we can be in. When we feel disconnected, being apart from, rather than at one with everything, we sundered from the rest. In sin. It was Einstein who said “We experience our self, our thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of our consciousness. 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.”

The separation from others might result in a failure to myself in someone else’s shoes. ‘How might they be effected by my actions.’ And yet we do display a need to be at one with others. Our yearning to connect arises perhaps out of a recognition that we are also at one with the rest of creation and not truly separate from it. The monks on Mount Athos say “We have died and we are in love with everything.”

Must we wait for death? Maybe not. As Richard Jefferies put it.

“Eternity is here and now. I am within it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air…The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this burial mound was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment.”

Put another way. At one ment is now, because in the now every moment is one moment.