A manifesto
It has taken me a long time to compose this blog. Elements of these ideas have been with me and within me since my childhood. I’ve written pages of notes trying find my way to the core, the essence of what has been bugging me for years. Sufficient clarity and confidence arrived towards the end of several days when I was feeling acutely sick – my body telling me it’s had enough and needs a break. I’ve had enough, indeed – enough of trying to communicate within a Christian culture to Christians within a Church of England that exemplifies for me anything, absolutely ANYTHING BUT a spiritually and emotionally and theologically healthy Christian culture proclaiming life in all its fulness.
Let me dive straight in.
God
God is not an object in creation that we worship, not an entity, a being, not even a presence to be found somewhere. God isn’t any ‘thing’. God is essence, “isness”, everything. God is unconditional, infinite, intimate love, a trinitarian formulation akin to Father, Son and Holy Spirit. These are not entities but interpretations of human experience that the religious institution, the Church, developed into theological constructs that our ancestors inevitably turned into images – and images easily became idols.
This is my core article of faith – Jesus lived that we may discover for ourselves as he discovered for himself how to live life in all its fulness. God (and the Gods and gods of other faiths) is in essence unconditional, infinite, intimate love – and goodness, beauty, wisdom, truth, and all the other profoundly human and humane Christian values. These core values are the elements of life in all its fulness. John’s Gospel identifies this as the essence of Jesus’ wisdom, teaching and practice.
Jesus
Jesus had the most deeply conscious human awareness of this experience of the God of the Hebrews, the Father God of unconditional love, deeply personal, deeply present, infinitely present, energy woven through all creation, the essence of life and of every fragile, beautiful human being. All you need to do is look and see, said Jesus. Open your eyes, your bodies, your emotions, your heart and soul, look at the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Just stand and look, gaze, absorb, breathe, feel. Life in all its fulness is within you and you are immersed within it, whoever you are and wherever you are. All that is required is for you to look – and see – and absorb – and be absorbed.
The essence of the teachings of Jesus and about Jesus in the Gospels and the other books of the New Testament are found in his parables, the mystical healings and events of the stories about him, in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, in John’s mystical Gospel and the last discourse of Jesus, in Paul’s meditation on love in 1 Corinthians 13, in the descriptions of mystical encounters with Jesus after his death and the transformative energy on his followers and of his followers as they became conscious of deepest truth, experience and presence.
Reform of tribalism
The Church needs reform today – truism - the Church always needs to be reformed. It’s a permanent evolutionary necessity. We don’t yet fully understand how serious is the need for radical reform today. My eleven year old self knew it, filled with desire for and attraction towards another boy in my class at school. I knew same-sex desire was taboo, I knew my parents would disapprove, I knew homosexuality was taboo in the Church, and I knew God was said to disapprove. And I knew that if it was a question of “choose life”, choose to follow my desire for this boy and other boys for the rest of my life or choose the God who disapproved and was disgusted by my desires, then my only option was to honour my desires and choose life. This moment of desire and choice opened a door for me that I have chosen never to close. The door had been opened. I only had to wait another seven years for Honest to God to be published to know the doors were being not just opened but blown off. We need reform today because the Church magisterium, under intense conservative pressure, devotes huge time and energy trying to close the doors on that radical new awareness and vision and keep them closed.
As I survey elements of the Christian Church today, a focus on the vision of God’s infinite, intimate, unconditional love seems to be almost entirely absent. Tribalism dominates the Church of England, from the loose tribalism of progressive, inclusive movements to the defensive tribalism of Conservative Evangelicals within the Church of England Evangelical Council and the same within Anglo Catholics in the Society of St Wilfred and St Hilda. One tribe is homophobic and transphobic, the other is misogynistic. The latter tribe already occupies a legally protected space within the Church, the aspirant tribe wishes to be granted the same legal protection. Both seek to defend themselves from what they perceive to be people who will contaminate their purity of faith.
The Church of England Evangelical Council has issued a declaration setting out why they are compelled to resist any attempt to create a Church fully open to God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love. They will declare that any such action represents a departure from the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness. They will resist all attempts to introduce any of these changes. Their Christian identity depends on there being a Church free from the contamination of partnered and married same-sex couples. They want a Church defined by and characterised by prejudice and the abuse that inevitably follows their prejudice.
Recovery
The Church of England has over the past three decades lost and is not going to recover a healthy Christian vision and spiritual energy until it re-orders its primary convictions about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, restoring a healthy vision that accords with contemporary science and physics, global consciousness, evolutionary awareness, cosmology, the climate crisis, damage to our planet and species, and damage to human emotional, spiritual and physical health and well-being.
There should be no accommodation within the Christian Church to prejudice towards and the abuse of any element of creation or any natural, innate human characteristics; no misogynism, no room for the protection of misogynist beliefs, no room for homophobia or transphobia, no safe exclusive spaces for those hostile to equal marriage and full equality for LGBTQIA+ people.
I know such an agenda is thought to be almost impossible in today’s Church. Such an expectation places an impossible burden on Archbishop Justin. He faces conflicting demands and expectations that are impossible to resolve and that consume huge amounts of time and energy, draining the Church. Archbishop Justin knows this all too well.
Infected Church
We are all affected by and infected by, to a greater of lesser degree, these seemingly impossible-to-resolve conflicts located within the very unhealthy twenty-first century constructs of Christianity. Today’s Church is a breeding ground for anxieties, uncertainties and insecurities and they affect pro-equality, pro-inclusion progressives as much as conservatives. None of us has begun to come to terms with the implications of God’s unconditionality.
Time to tell a different story
We, those of us who see and feel and intuit differently, we have to tell the story of a different vision, a compromised Gospel. We have to uphold and articulate our spiritual, contemplative convictions.
The Dream of God
Unless we are developing confident convictions about the dream of God as unconditional love, a conviction experienced in the core of our being, in our bodies, heart and soul, guts and mind, transformation will not happen. In her 1991 book The Dream of God Verna J. Dozier noted that “the Christian Church has distorted the call of God, narrowing it from a call to transform the world to a call to save the souls of individuals who hear and heed a specific message, narrowing it from a present possibility to a future fulfilment.” Religion, she says, is always “about” God: intellectual formulations, institutional orderings, liturgical expressions. This is the God of CEEC and the Society. All, over time, run the danger of solidifying into “God.” Instead, Jesus came as the Way, a new possibility for encountering God ever anew in the fluid, changing experience of life. The Church of England is already well on the way to losing the dream that flourished half a century ago.
Living in our bodies
Eckhart Tolle’s 1999 book The Power of Now enhanced my spiritual practice, reinforcing the importance of living in our bodies, in the present moment, in the presence of universal divine energy, simply by learning to breathe again. The health and well-being of our bodies is an essential element of the spiritual life. The corporate life of the Church will not achieve better health unless and until our corporate bodies, churches, congregations, synods, social networks, schools, businesses, political and financial institutions, are all populated with a leavening of people committed to a healthy spiritual vision and practice.
Unless spiritually and mentally and conceptually we are drawn towards and become immersed in an open-minded, open-souled, open-hearted, unconditionally loving presence, the dream of God will not come to be. People will reject Christianity and walk away from the Church. They will find healing and truth wherever men and women recklessly, generously pour ointment on feet, where tears and love flow and the broken hearted are healed.
Until we recognise the birth narratives as the most powerfully rich and transformative myths and the resurrection narratives as the experience of people undergoing the deepest emotional and spiritual transformation, a transformation that is possible for every single human being, the contemporary unhealthy construct of Christianity will continue – and Christianity will continue to decline.
God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love and divine essence is everywhere, seamlessly present in the fabric of the universe. The divine is immersed in creation and we are immersed in the divine. If we are open to being transformed and are allowing ourselves to see the sacred in anything and everything, then our potential to be the purveyors of life in all its fulness and a healthier quality of divine energy and presence will be steadily enhanced.
I’ll end with further quotations from Verna Dozier:
“The important question to ask is not, “What do you believe?” but “What difference does it make that you believe?” Does the world come nearer to the dream of God because of what you believe?” “I believe that the genius of Christianity is not creed or institution, but the vision of a new possibility for human life rooted in an ancient understanding of God, and articulated and lived out by a Nazarene carpenter from that tradition.”
“We the people are responsible for what the institution has done. We have allowed God’s gracious gift to us of order, continuity and memory to become monster of control, irrelevance, and idolatry.”
“The call to ministry is the call to be a citizen of the kingdom of God in a new way, the daring, free, accepting, compassionate way Jesus modelled. It means being bound by no yesterday, drawing no lines between friend and foe, the acceptable ones and the outcasts. Ministry is commitment to the dream of God.”