Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Mark Vernon in Conversation: The Road Less Certain

Today, a podcast was recorded live at Nomad’s recent first offline Gathering, and features psychotherapist, author and teacher Mark Vernon. Mark was an Anglican priest but developed deep doubts about the faith. His subsequent journey took him through atheism, to agnosticism, through ancient Greek philosophy, to a Christian faith that sees doubt and uncertainty as integral parts (see Mark’s post, which features a mind-map drawn by one of his listeners at the April 2017 gathering)

I’ve followed Mark’s blog over the years, and on occasion he’s very kindly sent me PDF’s of some inaccessible articles he’s written, particularly in relation to Carl Jung, whom I’ve long had an interest in. A number of Mark’s books can also be found in my library, including How to be and Agnostic; The Big Questions: God; The Meaning of Friendship (Mark’s PhD focussed on this theme); and Love: All that Matters.

As I was listening to the interview I thought of my good friend Alan Jamieson and his PhD research on Church Leavers. In my mind his research and publications around this theme still feel relevant as many people question their experiences of church, faith, doubt, and spirituality. It also underlined for me the missional questions around cultural engagement (listen particularly around the 15 min mark).

This is a thoughtful, encouraging, and considered conversation, and is well worth a listen. I also recommend Mark’s books, and in particular his books on friendship and love.

Our Fragility

I’ve been listening to Bangladeshi-born Australian Doctor/Psychiatrist Tanveer Ahmed quite a bit this year. He’s a young man who’s had his fair share of controversy (plagiarism), but to me he remains a fascinating and oftentimes compelling commentator (for some he will be controversial or just plain wrong in his assessment) on what is happening in Australian culture, and as a corollary, with men. I’ve never been much inclined to gather around my self people and commentators who will affirm what I already think. I like to be stretched intellectually.

So, for me, much resonates, and I’m inclined to agree with a lot of his commentary within a New Zealand context too. I have his book Fragile Nation: Vulnerability, Resilience and Victimhood (pub. Nov. 2016 / excerpt here), but have not yet been able to make the time and space to read it.

He recently featured (along with Psychotherapist and pastor, Winsome Thomas) on Australian Broadcasting’s The Spirit of Things.

“Sting reminded us of 'how fragile we are', but is the decline of religion partly to blame?

Psychiatrist and social commentator, Tanveer Ahmed, examines the mental and social cost of the decline of meaning and boundaries normally set by religion.

Psychotherapist and pastor, Winsome Thomas was raised in the Salvation Army, but soon found the boundaries too limiting and has developed a spirituality to help fragile lives.”

Have a listen, here (53 minutes).

Making Christianity Relevant Again

Today, at the start of a New Year, a reflection from Richard Rohr. Something to think about.

“What will make a difference to the future is awakening to a faith that fully communicates God’s love—a love that transforms how we believe, what we do, and who we are in the world. —Diana Butler Bass [Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (HarperOne: 2013), p.37.]

Our religion is not working well. Another year has ended—a new year begins—in which suffering, fear, violence, injustice, greed, and meaninglessness still abound. This is not even close to the reign of God that Jesus taught. And we must be frank: in their behavior and impact upon the world, Christians are not much different than other people.

The majority of Christians are not highly transformed people, but tend to reflect their own culture more than they operate as any kind of leaven within it. I speak especially of American Christians, because I am one. But if you are from another country, look at the Christians where you live and see if the same is true there.

Let’s be honest: religion has probably never had such a bad name. Christianity is now seen as “irrelevant” by many and often as part of the problem more than any kind of solution. Some of us are almost embarrassed to say we are Christian because of the negative images that word conjures in others’ minds. Young people especially are turned off by how judgmental, exclusionary, impractical, and ineffective Christian culture seems to be. The church seems hostile toward most science (the objective outer world) and thus unable to talk about its inner dimensions with any authority. As we saw in the recent U.S. election, Christians overall showed little prophetic or compassionate presence.

Most Christians have not been taught how to plug into the “mind of Christ;” thus they often reflect the common mind of power, greed, and war instead. The dualistic mind reads reality in simple binaries—good and bad, right and wrong—and thinks itself smart because it chooses one side. This is getting us nowhere.

Brian McLaren in Conversation

Today a recent conversation between the lads at Nomad and Brian McLaren. I’ve had the privilege of briefly meeting Brian, and have heard him many times, either in person or by way of podcast. While is not now scratching where I’m itching, he continues to articulate things that many of us experience, and indeed, that many of us long for.

I commend the conversation and think it’s worth a listen, either because it will be new, or because it will be encouraging, or it will help provide a language to describe, imagine, and dream.

‘Brian McLaren has a knack for articulating what many of us are feeling. For a decade he has been the voice of those Christians who are concerned about, for example, the Church’s overemphasis on doctrinal belief, its lack of inclusivity, and its lack of concern for the many global issues we are facing.

In his latest book – The Great Spiritual Migration (pub. Sept. 2016) – he draws together all these themes into a manifesto for a new Christian movement, one that seeks nothing less than the healing of the world.’

You’ll find the podcast here.

Barbara Brown Taylor in Conversation

“Barbara Brown Taylor is a New York Times bestselling author, professor, and Episcopal priest. She has served on the faculty of Piedmont College as the Butman Professor of Religion and Philosophy since 1998, and has released such widely praised books as Leaving Church and Learning to Walk in the Dark. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Barbara and Sounds True's Tami Simon speak about appreciating the power of divine absence as well as divine presence. They talk about the value of becoming familiar with darkness and a “lunar spirituality” inspired by walking beneath the light of the moon. Finally, Tami and Barbara discuss the modern predilection toward busyness and how a dedicated Sabbath day can help alleviate the stress of everyday life. (54 minutes)”

You’ll find the podcast here. My favourite Barbara Brown Taylor book? Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (pub. 2007). I’ve yet to read her Learning to Walk in the Dark, but have had a look through the book and warm to its themes.

Resurrection and Moral Imagination

While the book is too expensive for me to purchase, my own imagination was stirred by this nice summing up of the central theme in Bachelard’s fascinating book, Resurrection and Moral Imagination. The summing up (below) is from an online review by Phillip McCosker, published in The Tablet last June (emphasis, mine).

Contents:

• Introduction;
• Transcendence in ethics;
• Resurrection and transcendence;
• Resurrection, imagination and ethics;
• Living beyond death and judgement;
• Mortality and moral meaning;
• The practice of resurrection ethics: secularization, contemplation and the Church;
• Conclusion.

“…Bachelard’s game-changing vision is quite different from that of her fellow Anglican moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan’s earlier Resurrection and Moral Order. For O’Donovan, ethics must be founded on the Resurrection because it vindicates the created order and its morality; for Bachelard, the Resurrection gives a new world from which to act, and that world can be perceived even without explicit religious belonging…

… Crucial here is Murdoch’s conviction, which Bachelard makes central, that moral differences between us are not the result of making different moral choices within a shared world – choosing different items from the same menu – but rather because we perceive different worlds. We’re in very different eateries: the suicide bomber and the vegan live in different moral universes. Building on Wittgenstein, Bachelard emphasises how our unconscious background pictures of reality filter and unwittingly influence our every thought and action. The task of the moral life is to reveal the world as it really is and attend to it, avoiding the false consolations of attractive but illusory and facile views.

Our regular and predictable celebrations of Easter can deaden our sense of the utter strangeness of the Resurrection. Liturgical familiarity breeds not contempt exactly, but apathy or cosiness, a sense of “same old, same old”. We are now bored by the events that filled the early Christians with dumbstruck fear and awe, turning their conceptual universes inside out and upside down. Nothing was the same again, all re-constellated around the risen Jesus…

… By complete contrast, in the bizarre new world revealed by the Resurrection, we live a life after the pattern of Jesus. This is what the Spirit brings about. Not a life of prescriptions and proscriptions but a life shaped by a person, a person whose identity is constituted, not over against others, but by constant trust and dependence on the Father: an outward-looking life in which death is revealed to be a penultimate reality; a life sourced in God’s boundless generosity and grace, lived from and into the open and uncontrollable future.

If we receive our real identities from the risen Jesus who is always ahead of us as he calls us, this fundamentally alters our relations with each other. We cannot control our identities: we receive them as gifts. Likewise we do not possess goodness: we participate in it as it transcends us. For Bachelard, a moral life sourced in the Resurrection reveals the true depth of reality; it is always vulnerable because it lives from the unknown future and under God’s judgement alone, and it is therefore always compassionate, producing a moral discourse which doesn’t trade in easy certainties or wishy-washy niceness but is messy, unsystematic and painful…”

The Churchless

The Barna Group recently published an article summarizing some of their most US research on the “Churchless”. It coincides with the publication of a new book (excerpt here) with the same title. Here are excerpts from the article.

“…4. There Are Different Expectations of Church Involvement

Another intriguing shift among the churchless has to do with their expectations of church involvement. In the early 1990s, our research showed that nearly seven out of 10 adults, if they were to visit a church, would be most interested in attending the Sunday service. Today, weekend worship services remain the most common entry experience, but only slightly; now, only 57% of churchless adults say they would be interested in Sunday worship as their starting point. Today's unchurched are more likely to say they are simply not sure, reflecting their disinterest in churches generally, or are more likely to say they would prefer attending some activity other than the Sunday service.

A similar shift is afoot in terms of the number of churches they would attend. The churchless were asked in both 1993 and in 2011 if they would prefer to be involved in one church or multiple churches in their area. Two decades ago, even the unchurched expressed some sense of church loyalty (albeit hypothetical): 85% said they would expect to attend just one congregation. The recent study reflects a slight loosening of this potential loyalty, but the more notable shifts are among those who don't have a preference and who aren't sure. Together, these percentages doubled from 8% to 16%, reflecting growing cultural indifference to church involvement.

5. There Is Skepticism about Churches' Contributions to Society

Although many of the churchless hold positive views of churches, a substantial number also have no idea what Christians have accomplished in the nation, either for the better or for the worse. When the unchurched were asked to describe what they believe are the positive and negative contributions of Christianity in America, almost half (49%) could not identify a single favorable impact of the Christian community, while nearly two-fifths (37%) were unable to identify a negative impact. Of those who could identify one way Christians contribute to the common good, the unchurched appreciate their influence when it comes to serving the poor and disadvantaged (22%), bolstering morals and values (10%) and helping people believe in God (8%). Among those who had a complaint about Christians in society, the unchurched were least favorably disposed toward violence in the name of Christ (18%), the church's stand against gay marriage (15%), sexual abuse scandals (13%) and involvement in politics (10%)…”

You can read the complete article here. Thanks again to Gabe for bringing, from afar,  the article / Barna book to my attention. For a more Kiwi flavour I highly recommend Alan Jamieson’s research, his first publication being A Churchless Faith: Faith Journey’s Beyond the Churches. 

Joan Chittister: Monastery of the Heart

I really appreciated listening to an interview with Catholic Nun and prolific author Sister Joan Chittister on Radio National (Australia) programe, The Spirit of Things. Here’s the promo for the show: 

“America's most outspoken Catholic nun, Sr Joan Chittister, breaks down the high walls of the monastery in her extended poem, The Monastery of the Heart.

She invites us to 'stop the noise within' and consider a relationship to God which opens to the self and is a bridge to the world. Based on the Rule of Benedict, Chittister's testament is full of wise counsel and spiritual direction that speaks to people of all traditions and none.

Yet Sr Joan's role as a leading figure in the Roman Catholic Church's women religious in America, has also put her in the line of fire, which she addresses in this extended interview and reading from her home in Erie Country, Pennsylvania.” 

You can listen and/or download the interview here. 

What to Say to Suffering and Death.

The Spirit of Things (ABC Radio National) recently featured a show under the title: What to Say to Suffering and Death.

The following is from the first part of the show. It’s an excerpt on reading scripture, and the interviewee is Deborah Masel who was a Jewish spiritual teacher in Melbourne whose gifted interpretation of the Torah gained many accolades. She wrote In the Cleft of the Rock and Soul to Soul while dying of a brain tumour. 

Here’s an excerpt on reading Scripture:

“…She'd [Debbie Masel] just published In the Cleft of the Rock, prose poems on the Five Books of Moses, and here she explained how they grew out of a mystical way of reading scripture: 

Deborah Masel: Well, the mystics say there are really four ways of reading the Torah, which is called by the mystics Pardes, a Hebrew word that means 'orchard'. It is understood to be the mystic orchard, for ways of entering the Torah. The first Pardes is an acronym for the Hebrew word Peshat, which means a narrative reading of the text, just understanding the ritual meaning of what's happening in the text. The next is Remez, which means 'hint', that there's something in the text that is hinting towards something deeper. 

The next level is the level that we call Derash, which is a homily and is often very frequently the level that the rabbi will access when he is giving...and I say 'he', but of course in the conservative and reformed congregations it could equally be she...is giving a sermon in the synagogue to give some kind of educational point, spiritual point that can guide people. But then there is this fourth level which is this level called Sod, which means 'secret' or 'mystery' and that's certainly the level that the mystics who coined this phrase, Pardes, were trying to activate…”

And the following is a quote from the second part of the interview. It featured Jesuit Priest Richard Leonard whose sister was left a quadriplegic after a terrible accident. Leonard remembers that the words of 'consolation' by the faithful were far from comforting. As a Catholic priest and a movie critic, Leonard plumbs the theological and movie archive to find truly meaningful responses to suffering and death that strengthen rather than diminish faith. This part of the show deeply moved me.

“…Richard Leonard: Christianity can't settle on pious statements and throwaway lines and quick getaways because people are in real pain. I've discovered lots of people have walked away from faith, all sorts of faith, because their respective religious collective did not have an adequate…”

You’ll find the podcast (downloadable) here. 

Doubt is Nothing New, But it is Important

James K A. Smith recently offered a short little reflection under the title: “(Liberal) Skepticism vs. (Orthodox) Doubt”. Here’s an extract: 

“…There are certain streams of "emerging" Christianity, which seem to think that doubt is some revolutionary new stance that has finally had permission to emerge now that we are "new kinds of Christians." 

… It seems that those who think permission to doubt is some radically new possibility for Christians are the same people who think that a concern for justice is some "secret message" of Jesus heretofore hidden from Christianity--when, in fact, it just means that it was hidden from them in the pietistic enclaves of their early formation. In a similar way, doubt is as old as faith. As Kierkegaard suggested in one of his journals, "doubt comes into the world through faith." As I've suggested elsewhere, some of our greatest saints have been our greatest doubters, too. Some of our exemplary believers have also been masters of suspicion. The new kind of doubters have nothing on the likes of Graham Greene or Mother Teresa or Bernanos' country priest or Endo's Jesuit missionaries…”

You can read the full post here. Note to self: I must re-read my copy of The Diary of a Country Priest, a novel by Georges Bernanos. 

Doubt and the questions which doubt gives voice to have been important parts of my journey; a journey characterized less by certainty than a willingness to live – to some degree – with mystery and with darkness. But its more than that; its also about being willing to have courageous conversations, to being willing to live on the edge rather than at the centre, to being willing to take responsibility for resourcing ones own journey; to being willing and able to be deeply self reflective and critical, and its about what a recent correspondent and fellow wayfarer described as “remaining consistently enquiring over the years.”