Meeting the Messiah: 4 – Where am I now?

 The foundational story of Christianity – the story of Jesus, his ministry and death, and of how he inspired his followers to take the Gospel (the 'good news') out into an ever widening world – is the central pivot on which the faith hangs. It is what differentiates it from the other Abrahamic faiths. 'God', known by one name or another – or even as the unnamable – exists in them all. Jesus exists in two of them – Christianity and Islam – but Jesus Christ, the man-god, exemplar and teacher of the 'second commandment – "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (Mark 12.31) – only exists in Christianity. The authenticity of his story and teachings are crucial to Christianity's supposed authority and allure; but therein hangs a thousand and one questions.

Through my school years I was exposed to the Jesus story both at the daily school assembly – the required "daily act of collective worship"  – and the required lessons of 'Religious Education'; and, for those unlucky enough to be sent to a boarding school, compulsory Church attendance on Sundays plus an act of "collective worship" every evening. Enough exposure to have some familiarity with at least the outlines of the Jesus story. Exposure, which if anything acted as aversion therapy: by fourteen I was a sceptic, by sixteen an iconoclast, and by eighteen a cast iron atheist.

What I had received was, we might say, was the standard version of the Jesus story – if fact, given the established status of the Church of England, the authorised version – framed within a lapsarian theology, which I had reacted to with vehement distaste. I found so much of it repugnant: it was antithetical to life, to joy, to drinking the substance of being, to celebrating each breath. I had to agree with Nietzsche, that the paviours of Christianity were life denying "afterworldsmen". Christianity fed on guilt: it induced it, and then it fed on it. Repentance and penance and falling on the mercy of an unseen and unseeable being who judges and weighs every second of your life, who might just admit you to the golden afterworld, or condemn you to eternal, unimaginable and unspeakable suffering, and who was so insecure as to require regular and repeated doses of praise and worship (I am a jealous God Exodus 20: 2-6) were the substance of the religion – and I was having non of it. You could not have put more distance between me and Christianity if you tried. 

The numinosity of life led me via the East – Buddhism, Daoism, Zen, Dzogchen – and back again to the West, where I found myself sitting in Quaker meetings and once again encountering versions of Christianity, but transformed by the journey I had been on. My eyes did not fall on it in the same way as the young man's eyes. I felt sorry for what it has so often become, but heard once again echoes of the far off teachings of that wandering Galilean rabbi. 

Researching Irene Pickard's archive forced me to reacquaint myself with the Jesus story – to meet the messiah – to update both my understanding of the story and my relationship with it. Her archive was full of reference to modern theological thinkers, ranging from her mentor, Rendel Harris, through Carl Barth, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Thomas Merton and Don Cuppit, with whom she corresponded about his television programme Who is Jesus? (1977). One thing they all had in common: their Jesus was not the one I had been introduced to and rejected. 

Carl Gustav Jung, whose works provided the lenses for Irene to see her spiritual questing through, detected in the human psyche a nodal point – an archetype – around which all our spiritual feelings, images, and ideas clustered, which he called 'the god archetype'. He suspected that it was universal, but the form it would appear in would vary depending on the cultural material available. He also thought that it was itself evolving, finding better fits for its expression, which is why religions came and went. The evolution of Christianity out of Judaism and its supplanting Paganism throughout the Roman Empire, being an example. Its emerging form being made by the transfer of pre-existing symbols from earlier religions, such as that of the god-man who undergoes a cycle of death and rebirth. He suggested that if a better fit for the archetype came along, then Christianity itself would be replaced.

So what versions of 'Jesus'  – according to Jung, the Christian manifestation of the archetype – are on offer? They seem to range from the Jesus of the evangelicals, based on assumptions of Biblical inerrancy, and the certainty of the coming judgement, and even something strange and apparently not in the Bible called the 'rapture'; through the long established Jesus of Catholic dogma, with the elevated role of his mother to that of divine interceder; on via various demystifying versions, such as those emphasising Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, to the entire thing being a fabrication, a fiction, a didactic vehicle, a myth. Take your pick. 

One thing I think can be observed. At the budding point at which new religions are born, almost invariably there is a charismatic teacher who is focussed on reforming the pre-existing religion. The reforms may be accommodated by the faith absorbing the reforms, or by the formation of a new sect within the tradition – think here of the birth of the Franciscans, or the Jesuits – or by a schism developing, and a new branch of the religion being formed – think here of Martin Luther and the Reformation resulting in the formation of the Protestant Churches, or later of the splitting off of the non-conformist churches and sects – or by the formation of entirely new religions. The rejection of the reforms, and often the death of the charismatic teacher – sometimes at the hands of defenders of the original faith – leads to their followers either having to abandon the reforms, or set off on their own, as is seen with the birth of Sikhism, the Bahá'í or the Mormons. In each case at the budding point there is an inspired teacher. It is their followers who create the new faith: it was probably thus with Christianity.

What do I think? I know we have the texts containing the Jesus story – a legend if you will. I suspect that the Gospels are woven out of oral traditions about the sayings and doings of principally one, but may be more, charismatic itinerant Jewish teachers. The Gospels, thus created, seem to chart a progress of increasing deification, starting with Mark, where Jesus is infused with the wisdom of God manifest as love at the moment of his baptism, who then tried to live that out; through Matthew and Luke where, as well as his resurrection and ascension, the divine and miraculous origins of his birth are added; to John where, in highly literate and educated Greek, the story is reworked to emphasise the Passion – the god come to earth to suffer and redeem.

In Christianity I feel there are two distinct voices: that of Jesus the teacher, and that of Paul the evangelist. The one teaching a here and now immanence of the Kingdom that is open to all seekers (Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: Matthew 7:7); of inner revelation that will transform life; of a Jew teaching Jews to stand and live in the immanent presence of their Lord in the hope of the imminent coming of his kingdom as a result (right living leading to right ordering of the world through mass alignment with the right living); and the Greek speaking Paul, racked with guilt because of his persecution of followers of Jesus, who postpones the kingdom to an afterlife, as he is unfit to live in the immanence. His Greek speaking heritage making tenable the notion of Jesus as a god-man and the existence of an afterworld: both grafts onto the original Jewish stock.

The evangelist Paul was mission driven. First to defend Judaism against the Jesus sect, then to spread the teachings of that sect as far and wide as he could, regardless of the distinction between Jew and Gentile. It is interesting that he received his transmission of the teaching in Damascus from a community with at least three degrees of separation from Jesus, who were transmitting via an oral tradition, the intent of which was to proselytize not to preserve historical accuracy. It contained what inspired them, not what was testable as historic fact. They were fired up by the revelation of spiritual truth. Paul did travel back to Jerusalem but fell out big time with Jesus community there, and took his version of the teaching to the Romano-Greek world as a result. The Aramaic speaking Jesus community in Jerusalem's influence was largely destroyed along with the destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews, hence Paul's version came to dominate. 

For me some of the words of the legendary Jesus of the Gospels resonate deeply. Fewer of Paul's. I cannot say I ascribe to the cosmology or eschatology that, following Paul, is inbuilt into so much of Christianity. For me Jesus is one of the great wisdom teachers, one not to be ignored, but just one. His teaching of immanence corresponds well with what I have from my wanderings in the Buddhist world. His ethic of love the real heart of the diamond: om mani padme hum! (The jewel at the heart of the lotus). 

But I dare say my views are heretical and an anathema to many.  

Meeting the Messiah: 1

In researching Irene Pickard's archive it is inevitable that confronting the fundamental issue of the authenticity of Christianity was unavoidable. Hide as I might, investigating and challenging my own relationship to that vast two thousand year old tradition was not something I could duck out of. Inevitably, the very nature of the contents of the archive meant confronting my own understanding of what spirituality might be, what religions are, what role they have, and perhaps must have, in our lives, at a psychological level, if not also at a cultural and social level. 

I have for much of my life been a secular atheist, detached from involvement in any religious practice, believing myself immune to whatever appeal religions might have, protected by my intellectual training in the cannon of analytic philosophy. Religions were, ultimately, absurd, and their claims easily dismantled by the progressive application of ruthless logic. They had no useful part to play in life. They were at best delusions, at worst positively harmful. They were full of pre-scientific understandings of life, that necessarily melted away as the range and depth of our collective scientific understanding expanded. It was inevitable that they would be discarded into the dustbin of history, to borrow phrase much loved by Marxists. A lovely, clinically clean, brave new world was emerging due to intellectual advances, in which, no doubt, everything would be reducible in the end to a series of elegant mathematical formula or algorithms: intellectually satisfying in a mechanical sense, and sterile.

Only, that's not quite the truth about what happened to me. At about the age of thirty I collided with Zen Buddhism in the form of koans – intricate, logic destroying verbal Rubic cubes. Turn and turn them as you might, logical solutions are simply not possible. They twist the mind until eventually you are forced out of the comfort zone of your everyday frames of reference. Whoops! Bang! There goes the security of logical reduction used in defence of the frames of reference that you did not even know you had, but which had held your life in place until then. 

It was a bit like being plugged into Douglas Adam's Ultimate Perspective Vortex. You, naked and raw, are plugged in at one end and the vast complexity of the universe at the other. It is pretty clear which is going to win. Exposure to Zen induces a certain intellectual humility thereafter, and an openness to exploring what seemed intellectually off limits before. 

Having passed through the bowels of Zen, and on via Tai Chi and Qigong, where I encountered other meditative traditions, I have for the last decade been under the guidance of a Dzogchen practitioner from the Tibetan tradition: but I have also become a Quaker. I learned a little about them from my time teaching History, and I wanted to take a risk and try out going to a Meeting. What I did not expect was to fall through the silence into a place of honesty and welcome where I felt at home. It was whilst dipping my toes into the Quaker pond that I encountered Irene's archive.

As a researcher you are supposed to try to maintain some sort of objectivity in order to report on what you have found, however you are inevitably affected by exposure to your subjects' milieu of spiritual influence – you have to walk the same paths as the people you are studying – if in no more than you have to read what they read, read their comments as they digested what they were exposed to, read what they themselves wrote, and try to understand their understanding: you have to get inside their heads. It is a bit like wearing somebody-else's clothes and vicariously living aspects of their life whilst vainly trying not to be affected. You are inevitably changed by the experience.  

Historically, whether we like the fact or not, Christianity has done more to shape European culture than any other tradition, and via Europe, due to the technological and imperial explosion of the last three hundred years, the world. As a result an otherwise obscure Palestinian Jew of the first century CE has become the most influential spiritual teacher in history. Some influencer! Some obscurity! 2.382 billion followers (according to Wikipedia) beats anything on social media. It was clearly time to come to terms with the leviathan.

In the ten years since encountering Irene's archive, I have absorbed a very great deal that has deepened and widened my understanding. It has taken me places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, including having to come to some sort of terms with Christianity. Not my natural inclination. My early exposure to Christian piety had, I thought, inoculated me against having anything to do with 'faiths' – I do include them all – and led me to what I thought was a non-faith way: Buddhism. At least, that how Buddhism is often presented to the West, as being principally composed of meditative practices focussed on liberating the mind from the shackles of attachment. I now know that it is much more than that, and at bottom is just as much a faith-way.

Whatever my own views of Christianity, as a researcher I had to try to understand the Christianity of my subjects. Firstly there was Quakerism, at least that of the time of my subjects, which in itself meant delving into Quaker history. Then I had to try to understand Rendel Harris's Christianity – Irene's one time employer and mentor – and, the biggest ask of all, that of Carl Gustav Jung – the greatest intellectual influence on four of my subjects – Irene Pickard, Elined Kotschnig, P.W. and Marjory Martin – and significant in the life of the fifth, Bertram Pickard.

My subjects also met and were influenced by a number of the more prominent theologians of their time: Carl Barth, Adolf Keller, Visser 't Hooft, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, among others. I had to develop at least a nodding acquaintance with their thoughts and even those of theological thinkers such as Kierkegaard.

It has been an interesting journey. It has made me realise that my early rejection of Christianity was based on a very simplistic understanding – but that vision is, after all, what I had been fed by the compulsory religious education and attendance as required in UK schools when I was young. I now know it to be a vastly more complex spiritual path. One that has left its footprint all over European thought, even those supposedly post-Christian traditions such as Humanism or Marxism, both hugely influenced by the Christian ethic, and in some ways being simply Christianity with God sucked out.

Ah, God – that's another problem, and one I still haven't come to terms with yet: the universe seems to get along perfectly well without. According to Jung I may be stuck at the 'death of God' stage. He may be right.

Escatalogical faiths versus karmic faiths

The monotheistic faiths offer a static view of the human's position in life. The task is to avoid becoming tarnished with sin. We starts pure[ish] - original sin aside - and, only if we proceeds blamelessly throughout life will we have succeeded. We must preserve the innocence of childhood in our minds and lives. The development of all adult characteristics is a deterioration from this paradigm state. As of necessity we will become defiled by developing into adulthood we must throw ourselves upon the mercy or grace of the deity as our only hope of not suffering eternal punishment.

Buddhism and Taoism by contrast are developmental. One grows with experience. One learns the path and trains the inner and outer being, honing them to greater degrees of perfection. We are all Buddhas becoming, if not in this life, then in the next. We are seekers after enlightenment, both separately and collectively. For the Taoist it is the white haired sage who is the epitome of attainment. He has shaped and honed his being until, being totally at one with the Tao, he becomes an immortal.

Pagan Roots/Routes

The routes that weave in and out of my roots, through wood and down dene, know of hop and beating the wassail – a man leading a wild procession with antlers on his head, all set to sing to the apple trees, to conjure forth fruit for the cider strong enough to bend the legs of the hardest man. A green man smiles forth from the ceiling of the church where sheela-na-gig exposes herself for all to see and Christ hangs on a fruiting bough, full in green leaf and growing yet. 

Doubt not the pagan depths from which all this is sprung. 

It is no accident that the Jesse Tree is close by at the mouth of the Gavenny, or that yew and thorn are to be found in every church yard. Each spring is formed into a well that bears the name of some saint or other, but was holy long before the first saint trod the earth, it healing spirit known and loved. The very word holy itself sprung from the words for a well, the hole from which the waters flow.

“Ah”, says the priest, “we baptise you with water”. “We always have”, the pagan says. 

“He died upon the tree” the priest says. “Just as he always did” the pagan says “to give us fertility, see”. 

“He rose again” the priest says. “Just as he always has”, the pagan replies “in fruit and ear of corn”. 

“He is our one true God” the priest says. “As you will” the pagan says, “but we will leave an offering at her feet none-the-less. And turn the coin in our our pocket on the full moon, and touch wood for luck when we need”. 

“Our pews are empty and the church doors locked” says the priest. “But we still cast a coin in a well for luck” says the pagan “and leave flowers by the wayside for the fallen”.

Theist v Atheist

If you take the apparent question of whether “god” exists or not as an existential question or as an ontological question then then I suspect that you will be caught in the never-ending, polarised and irresolvable debate between theist and atheist. Here I am at one with the Buddhist teaching that there are unanswerable questions.

It is not a question. It is not provable or disprovable. It cannot be resolved by any experiment or by any formal method of proof. It is beyond knowing. It is not a thing of the mind nor can it be captured by any web of words. It is deeper and is visceral in its intelligence. It is in how we feel and respond at the very deepest levels of being. It is when we are stripped totally bare and have no shield, no defence, no words, no wisdom, nothing more than the very breath we hang onto - there, that is the point where we touch the divine.

I have no wish to characterise the divine or to label it.

Such things we can experience, but the more we try to tangle them in webs of explanations, the more we enfold them in doctrine and belief, the more we wrap them in words like “god”, the more we try to condition and canalise them to fit in with our systems of belief and faith then the more we betray them.

Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, scientific rationalism, realism - whatever and whichever - these are just the vehicles in which we may travel for a while on our journey. We should not mistake the vehicle we are travelling in with the journey that we are making.

That is the most astonishing journey of all: the journey from our birth to our death.

And that journey is but a thread in a cloth woven since the beginnings of time.

Houses of words

We build houses out of the words we believe so that we made hide inside them safe from the unknown, safe from the uncomfortable, safe from the threatening, safe from the questioning, safe from exposing our utter nakedness and want of coherence in the presence of a universe so vast that we cannot encompass it or comprehend it. “God” you utter and yet another brick is forced into place shielding you from all that you would keep outside. You offer me this brick and I have no idea what to do with it.

Just maybe you might feel the same too?

Why I am a unitarian*:

Because of the connectedness that underlies all things.

Because of the inseparability of the material and the divine.

Because seeking and not knowing is the path.

Because all paths are as one path.

Because of the partiality of any understanding.

Because of the inexpressibility of the truth.

Because of the life-light that burns through all people.

Because of the understanding that goes beyond words.

Because of the peace that passes all understanding.

Because of the temporarily of the self.

Because of the temporarily of humanity.

"We are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically" Carl Sagan

http://bit.ly/cDZhrY

 * unitarian with a small capital, not Unitarian with large one, because the word denotes a way of seeing our place in the universe and not the membership of a particular faith group - as admirable, or otherwise, as their beliefs may be.

Messiahs, canons, penal substitution & the formation of orthodoxies.

Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of the Gospels, may have lived and died sometime during the period 10 BCE to 20 or 30 CE. It was not until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, three centuries later, that an agreed creed confirming the triune interpretation was established, and not until the Synod of Hippo in 393 CE that the biblical cannon of the New Testament was agreed - some three and a half centuries after the events that they purport to record. (Not exactly contemporaneous recording!) During the intervening period many differing interpretations and versions of “the life of Jesus” and its significance competed with each other, ranging from those that identified Jesus as fully divine to those that identified him as fully human, from those who saw the teachings in the light of lapsarian and eschatological thought and those who took them to be more immanentist or gnostic.

It should also be born in mind that the loosing sides in the many disagreements and debates during this formative age would run the risk of being declared 'heretical' and would be in considerable danger. A fact which may have lead to the destruction of many alternative gospels and other writings. In these theological battles of the early church the winner took all and and all evidence of the loser's thought was expurgated.

The writers and subsequent editors and translators of the competing gospels and other writings went to some lengths to tie in the stories they were telling with the Jewish belief in a messiah. There was a need in marrying the two halves of the evolving bible, the Jewish written Old Testament and the new writings of the New Testament – to make the new mesh in with the old. The messiah was the bridge that allowed that linkage to be made.

With regard to the doctrine of penal substitution, it might be interesting and informative to consider the influence of both Zoroastrian and of Pagan belief on its development; Zoroastrian belief being millennial and dualistic and Pagan being sacrificial and resurrectional (the enactment of death to create re-birth and regeneration, often the death and subsequent resurrection of a god or demi-god, or of their human incarnations or substitutes).

Judaism may well be the father of Christianity, but Paganism is the mother and Zoroastrianism its great uncle.

The challenge of polarity

Polarity has always been a theological challenge to monotheism. In attempting to make the deity universal, that is to be all encompassing, the deity becomes just as strongly identified with all that is harmful, destructive, negative, "evil", or repulsive as with all that is constructive, positive, healing, "good" or attractive. An omnipotent and omnipresent god is equally good and bad, equally loving and hating, equally constructive and destructive. If not, then they are not omnipotent and omnipresent.

Watching the apologists for monotheism attempting to salvage a “loving” god from that paradox is interesting. 

The Zoroastrians did so by having two opposed deities and life as a battle ground between the two. It is likely that the Jews incorporated this into their theology during their exile in Babylon, only in a lop sided way, with their “God” on the side of goodness and, as a result of the fall, “Satan” leading the opposing team. In time the resultant lapsarian theology has become much more pronounced in many forms of Christianity than in Judaism or Islam, but is implicit in them all.

That is the problem with calling things “God” - they inflate into monsters who run eternal concentration camps called “hell”.

But why go down the route of using a noun? Why not a verb? Why not “godness” rather than “god”? Why not a quality that things can possess, a bit like a static electric charge, but which can not exist independent? That is the approach taken by Shinto. Kami are a quality possessed by things, not something that exists independently. They are not universal, nor are claims made about their being omnipotent nor omnipresent, but we all know the tangibleness of special places that fill us with senses of wonder, or of peace, or of calm, places that move us. They do indeed seem charged with something indefinable.

The Impenetrable Wall

The unanswerables due to ineffability:

1. Whether god exists or not
2. Whether god is one or many
3. Whether god is permanent, impermanent or intermittent
4. Whether god is universal or local
5. Whether god is male or female, or neither, or both
6. Whether god is concious or unconscious, sentient or insentient, cognisant or uncognisant
7. Whether god is anthropomorphic or alien
8. Whether god has any intentions or what those intentions are
9. What god may or may not think or believe, want or wish
10. Whether you can or cannot communicate with god
11. Whether your beliefs about god are true or untrue

Ineffability implies incomprehensibility: that is the impenetrable wall.

There are experiences that we can have when confronting that wall, and, yes, I feel it is important to confront that wall.Those experiences can sometimes be given names like “god”, like “the peace that passes all understanding”, like “touching the divine”, like “being in the presence”, like “being touched by god”, like “seeing the light” …; these experiences are very real and can be important to our spiritual growth, but they can lead to many delusions.

Interestingly, people tend to interpret such experiences in terms of their culture, Christians in a Christian way, Muslims in an Islamic way, Hindu in a Hindu way, Buddhists in a Buddhist way, and so on. Such experiences are taken as a confirmation of the ontology of their respective weltanschauung. Thus in monotheistic cultures they are often taken as confirmation of the existence of a deity.

"Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God." 

The Cloud of Unknowing

And I would suggest that even the word “god” can be one such stumbling block, one such attempt to explain experiences in terms of a familiar culture. 

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability

Something almost tangible

Priestie, well, that is the nickname we have given him, he is an x-catholic priest, now married, divorced, and, who knows, maybe in a relationship again, but all of that is not the point. The point was a conversation we had. He pops in now and again, just for a chat. On this particular occasion the subject turned to death, which as a catholic priest he had to witness quite a number of times - part of the duties of the job, administering the last rites and similar stuff. He did say there was a strange beauty in the moments of death. First the light going out of the eyes, then something slipping downward across the face and on, as if some force was leaving the body, something almost tangible, almost a thing in itself that was shedding the body. He said it gave him hope.

Thought I would share that with you.

Creating monsters

Listening to the truth within,
Observing the wonder without.
Unbinding from the shackles of words:
Name it God and you create a monster,
Name it not and you close your heart.