Ground and Network; Life and Death

Nearly two years ago now, Rhiannon Grant published a post on her blog Brigid, Fox and Buddha considering the question of what, if anything, Liberal Quakers think about life after death. Now, Rhiannon is far better qualified than I to say what they may or may not think, and an interesting discussion ensued in her comments section. But the question, when I revisited her blog, set me thinking.

Merlin Sheldrake, in his fascinating book Entangled Life, discusses the all way life, on this planet at least, is underpinned by fungal networks, mycorrhizal webs connecting tree to tree, plant to animal, bacterium to lichen. He remarks, of his research on fungal networks, facilitated as it is by international academic and commercial scientific networks, "It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you." (Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life (p. 240). Random House. Kindle Edition.)

Much of our unthinking outlook on things, even in the twenty-first century, is conditioned by a Cartesian, atomistic outlook inherited from the seventeenth century. This has crept into our religious and spiritual thinking too, so that we tend to understand God as a "thing" over against other things, and we ourselves as separate individual selves who continue, or don't continue, after death. Perhaps this is as wrong a way of looking at life as was the early Darwinian view of evolution as divergence, separation, of organisms (Sheldrake, op cit., pp. 80-82) rather than as interconnection, often cooperative interconnection, within ecosystems.

For a long time now, Paul Tillich's understanding of God as "Ground of Being", beyond being, not to be understood as object vis à vis any subject but preceding the subject-object disjunction (Theology of Culture, p.15) has made perfect sense to me. Tillich somewhere in Systematic Theology refers to God as Ground of Being as "Being-itself" - a concept which has always appeared to me to be pretty much equivalent to Meister Eckhart's Istigkeit, "isness"!

If God is indeed the Ground of Being, that which underlies as well as overarches all things, the ground in which, as Christ, "He is before all things, and in [whom] all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17 NIV) then his relation to "things" in creation, human and other beings included, is, at least metaphorically, much more like the relation of a network to its nodes than anything else I can think of. Our own lives, then, are "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3.3) - as Paul says, we have already died; how then can we die? (see Colossians 3.1-4!) But is this an atomistic, separate continuation, a life lived "in Heaven" rather than in Dorchester, merely? That neither seems likely nor accords with my own experience at all. Our true life is lived in God, in the Ground of Being, the isness of God. That goes on - death is consumed in life, darkness by light.

Christmas 2020

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given,
  and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called Wonderful Counsellor,
  Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
  Prince of Peace.

Of the greatness of his government and peace
  there will be no end.
He will reign on David’s throne
  and over his kingdom,
establishing and upholding it
  with justice and righteousness
  from that time on and forever.
The zeal of the LORD Almighty will accomplish this.

(Isaiah 9:6-7 NIV)

A morning of glorious stillness and light, with hardly a leaf stirring, and a winter sun gilding the trees and making translucent the leaves of the quiet ivy.

Happy Christmas!

The Fourth Sunday of Advent

Again the LORD spoke to Ahaz, "Ask the LORD your God for a sign, whether in the deepest depths or in the highest heights." But Ahaz said, "I will not ask; I will not put the LORD to the test."

Then Isaiah said, "Hear now, you house of David! Is it not enough to try the patience of humans? Will you try the patience of my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel..."

Isaiah 7:10-14 NIV

In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you."

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favour with God.  You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end."

"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail.

"I am the Lord’s servant," Mary answered. "May your word to me be fulfilled." Then the angel left her.

Luke 1:26-38 NIV

Prophecy in the Bible is a slightly difficult thing to come to terms with, however you view the historicity of the Biblical documents; the one thing, though, that comes through clearly in these passages are the attitudes of those receiving the word. Ahaz, and Zechariah too, earlier in this Gospel (Luke 1:5-25) found it hard to accept. Ahaz didn't want to "put the Lord to the test"; Zechariah couldn't believe the words of Gabriel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years." (Luke 1:18)

Mary had more to lose than anyone - her husband-to-be, her good name, perhaps her life - but she received the angel's message for what it was. Intelligent girl that she obviously was, she asked the obvious question about the mechanics of this unexpected gift, but she accepted Gabriel's explanation without cavil. She knew an archangel when she heard one, obviously, and she knew that God's word would never fail. It didn't.

At the centre of faith is listening, always. To be still enough in ourselves to hear, quiet enough to receive the gift within the silence; to wait in unknowing, as long as it takes, for the Lord's mercy - to be open enough for grace - is to rest at the still point of the turning world.*

*TS Eliot, The Four Quartets: Burnt Norton (1935)

The Third Sunday of Advent

“And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Highest; For you will go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways, To give knowledge of salvation to His people By the remission of their sins, Through the tender mercy of our God, With which the Dayspring from on high has visited us; To give light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death, To guide our feet into the way of peace.”

(Luke 1:76-79 NKJV)

The universe is filled with light, threads and vast floods of light, streaming through apparent emptiness, illuminating all that is made, bringing life to all that is alive. And the darkness has not overcome it.

Another Kind of Desert

I have written before here about my growing sense not only of a increasing personal call to some kind of hiddenness, but also of the way in which the (at least in the UK) repeated lockdowns and "tiered" partial easings of lockdowns have contributed to the growth of what Steve Aisthorpe calls The Invisible Church:

There is a growing realisation that church is what occurs when people are touched by the living Christ and share the journey of faith with others. Whether that occurs in an historic building or online or . . . wherever, is unimportant.

The history of religion is littered with examples of the way that the luminous insights of prophets and poets and contemplatives (in my usage, Jesus would be all three) become clouded and encoded by institutions, and by their uneasy relationships with power and wealth. Obvious examples would be the Roman church in the years following the Emperor Constantine's conversion, and the chaos of the English Reformation and the ensuing Civil Wars, but within other religions there are many parallels such as the  troubled history of the Islamic Caliphates and the role of Buddhism during the politically volatile late Heian to early Kamakura period in Japan.

Time and again contemplatives have broken away from the apparent corruption of state churches on the one hand and religion-inspired revolutionaries on the other, sometimes forming loose communities, and retreated from formal organisation almost altogether. Examples are as diverse as the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt and Syria around the 4th century AD, the Pure Land (Shin) schools of Buddhism founded by Honen and Shinran in 12th and 13th century Japan, and the Quakers in 17th century England.

These contemplative movements, often based around simplicity of practice and openness to the Spirit, seem to arise when not only are the religious establishments in a compromised and sometimes corrupt condition, but the state is in flux, sometimes violent flux. Trump's America and Brexit Britain, scoured by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, would seem to provide fertile ground for contemplative change in this way.

Needless to say I have no answers, but the question underlies, it seems to me, much of the interest in "Churchless Christianity" that has flared up even more strongly during the present crisis. There will be voices raised, of course, both on the side of secular humanism and on the side of organised religion, accusing "hermits" of retreating from their responsibilities to the world, just as parallel voices have been raised at the hinges of faith and practice throughout history. To them I would offer these words from Caryll Houselander (quoted in Richard Rohr's The Universal Christ)

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.

The Second Sunday of Advent

 It can be tempting to think of Advent as a cosy time, drawn close around the fire while we warm up the engines of Christmas. But for me at any rate this year it seems to be something far less romantic: a time of stripping back, clearing the tangled thorns around the heart - brambles of memory, the climbing briars of faithlessness. But we cannot reach, and the thorns tear the skin of our reaching hands.

Advent is a time of stillness, of waiting, they say. But for what? For what we cannot do for ourselves - Eustace the dragon, helpless within his scales.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

(Romans 8:26-27 NRSV)

Our waiting is for God's grace alone. There is nothing we can do except wait, and pray that silence may itself bring us only to some kind of holy longing, to the psalmist's words at the end of his hymn to the Word:

I have strayed like a lost sheep. Seek your servant, for I have not forgotten your commands.

(Psalm 119:176 NIV)