THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS

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.

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!

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

“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?

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?

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

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: