We are on the verge of entering 2025, the year when I will celebrate my 80th birthday. I hope by the beginning of February to have left my village house, surrounded by fields, gazing at sunsets, to live in a small apartment in Bromley, South London. Actually, I don’t hope. I am becoming reconciled to this move, having been forced to sell the house to pay a divorce settlement.
This has been a peculiar Christmas, the first time for several years when I haven’t spent the day on my own, roasting a goose for myself, with ALL the trimmings, an activity taking much of the day, watching TV and listening to the radio of my choice. This year I was invited by a friend in the village to join her and her mother and a mutual friend for Christmas dinner – and very excellent it was too – as was the conversation, though after five hours I was totally exhausted. The result - I did almost nothing on Boxing Day but today I’ve woken with new energy and a determination to write more truthfully.
The Long Song
I finished reading Andrea Levy’s 2010 novel The Long Song this morning. The fictional author of the novel, July, writes on p385 of her son, Thomas Kinsman, born into slavery in Jamaica but now living in London and working as an apprentice to a printer. He reads the books available there – Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Shelly, the Bible – and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. July says:
“In an essay applauded by all, Thomas Kinsman wrote of how the philosopher John Locke, stated that there are many things we cannot know, things about which we can only have belief – yet free-thinkers must build their belief upon fact, scientific enquiry and logical principles; so how might a free thinker prove that when, say, looking upon a tree out of a window that the tree still stands outside the window when the free-thinker’s back is turned and he can no longer see it?”
Thomas Kinsman is 21; the year was perhaps 1878. He had been brought to England, adopted by James Kinsman, a Baptist minister, to whom Thomas now writes, declaring his freedom from the apprenticeship and adding as an addendum that he was now of the deistic belief. James Kinsman sends a twenty-page reply, repeatedly using throughout the words heathen, idolater, savage, ingrate and atheist. Thomas replies, saying he is not a non-believer, not an atheist, but just one who believes in natural religion and a creator God. James sends a single page in response, with one word written on it – ‘blasphemer’.
Questioning belief
Having finished the final pages of Levy’s novel I prepared to meditate, opening the Insight App on my phone to use the timing gong. A phrase to contemplate is offered each day. This morning’s phrase was: “To question what you believe is an amazing gift to yourself.” It was ascribed to Byron Katie, a name that rang no bells. After breakfast I googled her. She was born in Texas in 1942, married at 19 and started a career in real estate. In 1986, now 43 with three children and unhappily married for a second time, she was reportedly suffering from depression, agoraphobia, overeating and was self-medicating with codeine and alcohol. She was referred to a women's counselling centre and after two weeks of self-reflection, reportedly experienced an epiphany in her thinking which created a way for her to challenge and lessen the harmful effects of her long-held beliefs, echoing Thomas Kinsman.
She began holding informal meetings to discuss her philosophy and developed her own self-help theory. “I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being.” Her self-inquiry method is aimed at “freeing individuals from the suffering caused by their own thoughts and beliefs. It encourages a profound level of self-awareness and liberation from patterns of thinking that contribute to one's own suffering and unhappiness.” I thought of recommending it to the Archbishop of York.
New awareness
In my 80th year on the morning of December 27th 2024 Andrea Levy and Byron Katie opened a new awareness for me. I gained a new freedom from the tormenting insanity of being deeply involved with the campaign for LGBTQIA+ equality in the Church of England combined with a commitment to explore God’s infinite, intimate and unconditional love, the energy woven through the fabric of all creation, infused with the love of God.
I have been tormented for several weeks by the crisis in the Church of England. Members of the hierarchy have been repeatedly challenged – are you or are you not responsible in some way for the failure of the Church to adequately protect people from abuse, physical, sexual and spiritual? Some bishops have been asked whether they will demonstrate responsibility for this failure by resigning. The Archbishop of Canterbury resigned. The Archbishop of York defended his actions and declined to resign. One bishop, Helen-Ann Hartley of Newcastle, has called for their resignations. Those who comment on Thinking Anglicans and Facebook, those with strong opinions, members of the commentariat and press are divided. I find that my friends and campaign colleagues are also divided. The boat-rockers call for resignations, accountability and change, the gatekeepers want people to calm down and allow due process in the Church to take its course.
Free-thinking God
I’m with the fictional Thomas Kinsman writing his essay about John Locke. I’m a free-thinker. There are many things we cannot know, things about which we can only have belief. I believe the Christian Church is still locked into a pseudo-traditional, supposedly orthodox, fundamentalist, literalist version of Christianity, the effects of which many of us in the Church today are seeking to survive.
The Christian Church now requires a huge leap of courage and imagination, a transformative awakening, a revolution of thought and mind and heart that will open a profound level of self-awareness and liberation from patterns of thinking that are contributing to its shrunken contemporary awareness and capacities.
We members of the human race who have been born into a Christian culture or converted to a Christian faith have barely begun the process of working out the fundamentals of a God who “exists” in a global community of peoples of many faiths and no faith. Nor have we begun to work out the fundamentals of a God who people can believe in for the present era of evolution and the evolutionary eras to come. One lesson we haven’t yet learnt, despite its obvious truth, is that our inherited and our newer contemporary formulations of God will also inevitably evolve and change. We all become enculturated within and reliant on and sometimes addicted to and co-dependent on “our” formulation of what God is like but all religious and spiritual systems have to evolve in response to humankind’s ever-evolving understanding of ‘reality’, our understanding of living in an expanding universe within the confines of space/time and our scientific research into the complex fabric of matter and energy.
The challenge of AI
For better or worse, the development of AI, Artificial Intelligence, is upon us and is changing our perception of what is real and what and who to trust. This is happening in parallel with the Church of England still unable to commit itself to the full and equal inclusion of all people, whatever their gender, sexuality, race or ability; and equally unable to commit itself to a God who creates and loves equally and unconditionally. As a result, the Church of England is trapped in a fatal inability to deal with abuse in the Church, sexual, physical, emotional and spiritual, or to formulate a safeguarding system that can be trusted and will work effectively. This is not the Christian Church for me. I’m a boat rocker and I’ll be rocking the boat as hard as I can through my eighties, and I’m not going to sit down, because that won’t save the Church. People have great difficulty distinguishing between versions of God that are unhealthy and produce abusive individuals, relationships and teachings and versions of God that are healthy, creative and unconditionally loving. The Church of England in particular is having the greatest difficulty committing itself to a healthy vision of God.
Love - the essence of God
There is an essence for me in my awareness of God. Those who read my blog regularly know what it is. It is rooted in the Johannine texts “I have come that you may have life, life in all its fulness” (John 10.10) and “God is love; those who dwell in love are dwelling in God and God in them” (1 John 4.16).
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold’s poem, first published in 1867, came to mind as I reflected on Thomas Kinsman’s evolving experience in The Long Song and as I read about Byron Katie’s philosophy. I know she’s just another self-help guru and the religious shelves in bookshops are crowded with similar products today - but people crave them and are not to be despised, because:
“the Sea of Faith was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.
“Ah, love, let us be true to one another! for the world, which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new, hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; and we are here as on a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.”
One hundred and forty-three years later, the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar is more intense than ever and the Christian Church is proving itself less than ever able to bring flesh and life to our dreams, so various, so beautiful, so new.