Theology Journal

"If anyone wants to be my diciple they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me."

Recently I have been undergoing a process of denying the certainty of many of my religious assumptions. However, this has not happened as a result of doubt or disillusion. It has happened as part of my ongoing spiritual practice. The journey to God has led me to the point where I regard concepts of God as approximations. They point to God, but they don't describe God any more that a roadsign pointing to Penzance describes that particular Cornish town.

I have accepted for some time the ancient view that God is ultimately more than any words, concepts or images can describe. But it is taking me a while to take on board what that might imply.

Here is one thought:
If God is mysterious, more than can be described rationally, then what of the universe? If the universe truly comes from such a God in some way, perhaps the universe is also mysterious, and likewise beyond the ability of reason to descibe completely.

A lot of people wont like that idea. Since the Enlightenment the assumption has taken hold that the human capacity to reason using investigation, logic and deduction would establish objective truth about the universe. The thought occured to me just today that this is taking only one way in which the mind thinks, and extrapolating it to the behaviour of the whole cosmos. But the mind also thinks in other ways. There is the erratic jump from one thing to another, peculiar associations of apparently unrelated things, breaks, imagination, intuition, feeling. In other words that whole assortment of mental clutter that Enlightenment Reason has dropped into a shoe box and shoved under the bed in its immaculatley kept bedroom as being of no importance.

Now, I can't deny that Enlightenment Reason has been very successful. It has prodded and probed, it has found interesting patterns, it has made predictions and a few have turned out to be good. Enlightenment Reason has found what it was looking for, a vast stratum of reason and rationality in the universe. And finding all this reasonableness has encouraged Enlightenment Reason in believing its assumption that reason is the key to truth.

But what if there are other strata in the universe that don't so readily correspond to logic, but to those other ways of thinking that Enlightenment Reason would like to ban? What if, when the lights are out, those things crawl out from their shoebox under the bed and doodle in crayon on the bedroom walls?

Enlightenment Reason denies that there are any such doodles. There is nothing that could possibly doodle like that, so they can't be real. But I think the doodles are there. I think I've caught glimpses of them myself, and members of my family have also seen things that look suspiciously like doodles. Other people claim to have seen them as well. Enlightenment Reason has tried to hide them with the chest of drawers and call us all liars or idiots, but it is in denial. Unfortunatly it is denial of the wrong sort. It needs to take seriously what Jesus said, quoted at the top, and learn to deny that it has all the answers.

Apparently the doodles have started appearing in the downstairs loo.

American Scientist Online - Richard Dawkins

I normally find Dawkins unbearably arrogant, but this was very interesting. I was struck by his comments on the 'tyranny of the discontinuous mind' and ethics. Much of our ethics assumes a special place for human beings, and Dawkins thinks this is related to the way that we seem so obviously different to other animals. But if our evolutionary intermediates were still kicking around then we would find it harder to so easily distinguish between human beings and other animals, because our link to them would be more obvious, and our separation more arbitrary.

I think Dawkins makes an excellent point here about our unity with all life on earth. By extension you could see the continuity between inorganic matter and organic matter, and hence the unity of all things. This unity is of course a unity grounded in evolutionary history, rather than a 'mystical' unity, but it is a good point.

Having said that, for much of history human beings have been adept at making arbitrary distinctions among human beings based on tribe, race, nationality, religion and so on, in which morality only really applies to your own group - do what you like to anybody else, they aren't like us. We are only just beginning to get a real sense of humanity as a single family. I think it will take longer for a general sense of the 'family of all life' to take root.

As an aside, I find Dawkins comments about belief in a supernatural being interesting. I passionately believe in God, but I no longer conceive of God as a supernatural being. I don't consider myself an atheist, but would others consider me as such?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Turin shroud 'older than thought'

There are some other links of of this page that are interesting. Some interesting points from these are the weave on the shroud itself which matches a weave used at Masada in Palestine from the 1st century, and the presence of a combination of pollen grains that could only come from the region around Jerusalem.

If it could be shown that the shroud is indeed 1st century then I suppose that would be a good indication that it was Jesus' shroud; why would anyone have preserved a shroud belonging to someone else? On the other hand there would still be no provable link to Jesus.

Personally I would be happy to accept the shroud as genuine, but I don't think that would give it any religious significance. That is to say, it still wouldn't prove anything about the claims of Jesus or the church or the spiritual life. It would just be an interesting physical link to the historical Jesus.

On the night of Jan 10th 2005 I was lying in bed awake as I often do. It is normal for me to wake up a lot during the night, and sometimes I am then awake for several hours. On this occasion I suddenly heard this sound in my left ear; I don't mean that the sound was to my left, but the sound was experienced as being localized in my left ear. The sound was like that of a radio tuner looking for a station, loud static rising and falling in pitch. This continued for less than a minute and then the static stopped and was replaced with a male voice speaking. However, though there was no static, the voice was buzzing as though it was a bad line on a phone, and I couldn't make out anything that was being said. The speech was not a continuous stream of words, but consisted of several short sentences, punctuated by pauses. After about a minute of this the voice went and was replaced by the static again. After a few seconds of this the static disappeared again and there was silence once more.

I make no judgements about what was going on, I simply report this as an unusual experience.

My Christmas musings, while sitting in contemplation.

My experience of God has become truly trinitarian, so that the trinity is not an obscure and difficult to understand doctrine, but a way of being. It is indeed the experience of Jesus that brings this to pass. For in Jesus the Word of God, the image of God, is incarnated in Mary by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit incarnates the image of God in each of us as we submit to it, as Mary submitted when she said "May it be to me according to your will", until we give birth to Christ. Mary is thus our mother, and is each of us. Indeed, Mary is the world, clothed with the sun, with the moon at her feet, and crowned with twelve stars: the Holy Spirit incarnates the image of God in all things until the whole world gives birth to Christ, the fulfillment of the promise of God. Then the world will be truly the image of God - not just human beings, but all things, so that 'the Word happened as flesh' is true for the whole world, all things brought together under one head who is Christ.

I have read several accounts in which one of the things that gurus do is give energy to others. This energy has various effects, but they all seem to be connected with awakening the spiritual senses. It is this aspect of guruhood that made me think of Jesus, rather than the aspect of a teacher of enlightenment.

Jesus Christ is heralded in the gospels as the one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit. After Jesus' death, resurrection and ascension the Holy Spirit comes upon the disciples of Jesus. Since then the Holy Spirit has been the gift of Jesus to those who follow him.

It is as though Jesus death and resurrection transformed Jesus into someone who is able to give the Holy Spirit to anyone at any time or place. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that unless he goes away, the Spirit will not come.

Of course, Jesus as a guru in this sense does not exhaust the identity or role of Jesus.

I do not often set aside 'prayer time'. I tend to pray on the hoof, while walking from A to B. I find this unsatisfactory on the whole, it is much better to be able to devote time to prayer for then I can be focused and I feel that I am in God's presence.

This lunchtime I found a quite place with the intention of spending a few minutes in prayer. There were no chairs so I had to kneel on the floor. I normally begin with the Lord's Prayer, up to 'deliver us from evil'. I find that this simple but profound prayer focuses my mind on God, and it is often enough to allow me to feel God's presence. I then brought up a few family names that need God's power, and the rest of my family followed in my mind until I had this sense of my family and it's links by marriage, all united. Without words I pictured wholeness and healing in my family, some parts of which are also in need of reconciliation. I felt a powerful connection with them all, as though my prayer for them had created a unity or created awareness of a unity.

What I then felt was something new. I felt great pulses in my heart, as though my own heart had grown larger. Each pulse was several seconds apart, and with each pulse it felt as though something was going out from me to those who I had prayed for. As I write about it now I think of Jesus' experience when the woman who was haemoraging touched him; he felt power go from him. Of course, whether my prayer has changed anything remains to be seen; though as I got up I felt profoundly confident.

The heart-beat was something new for me, but recently I have had the sense several times of a connection with other people through prayer. During the eucharist service several weeks ago I first had this feeling during the intercessions. I felt as though there was a bond between myself and those being mentioned, despite not knowing the people concerned. Last year I remember writing in this journal about an experience I had one night of feeling myself as part of the body of Christ, with the Holy Spirit flowing through us as if it were blood.

I have mostly ignored intercession the last few years, I had pretty much lost faith in it. I am now beginning to feel once again that there is something in it. My recent experience makes me wonder whether intercession creates a link that unites intercessor, intercessee and God, or opens up a link that already exists. Divine power flows along these links. Of course, my talk of links is a metaphor. The feeling I have is one of unity, so perhaps a better description is that in the unity of intercessor and intercessee with God, God's power is active.

I could be completely mistaken of course.