My latest blog dwells of John narrative of the crucifixion. It is John alone who adds the detail of the seamless tunic (or undergarment) woven in one piece to his narrative. It is the symbol of what God is revealing and doing. Jesus, in John’s understanding, is saying, “In the new order there shall be no schism, but you shall be one and you shall love one another and be woven together from above.
There is a strong “Neanderthal” dimension to the beliefs, values and truths that constitute Christian faith today. I am part of the movement seeking to create a post-Neanderthal faith. The divine, sacred presence that began to dawn in Neanderthal and Homo sapiens consciousness 40,000 years ago is a seamless reality, a continuously evolving awareness. Our awareness continues to evolve and we can, when we awaken to this truth, open to and give ourselves to the evolving process of consciousness. Meanwhile, General Synod will be presented with LLF proposals intended to prioritise unity by ignoring and suppressing human consciousness.
If the Church of England is unable to recognise God as manifested in the life of Jesus to be the presence of unconditional, infinite, intimate love in creation and evolution, a presence that all human beings are able to experience through the presence woven into creation of what Christianity identifies as the Holy Spirit, then the Church needs to reflect on what, from the Biblical witness to the life and teaching of Jesus in a twenty-first century understanding of reality, God might look like and where the Church has got God wrong.
My daily faith experience is woven around the always elusive presence in which silence, attention, presence, self-giving, experience, quality, emotions, the unconditional, uncertainty, goodness are ingredients and essences, everywhere. Trusting deeply in what I can’t prove but know is my core, my essence, deep within, touched by, feeling it. The Church faces me with many images of God – homophobic, misogynistic, white bearded, authoritarian, judging, cruel, partisan, rejecting. The disconnect the Church maintains, between an imaginable God for the twenty-first century, and the God of co-dependency, abuse, depression, anxiety, and neurosis, is unsustainable.
This week I’ve been particularly interested in the authority of bishops. I realised that the status of the authority of bishops has changed significantly in my lifetime, in a way that I had been intuiting but hadn’t quite identified. I haven’t found it easy to find the right words to describe this, but I believe the bishops of the church, the teachers and leaders and theologians, senior staff at Church House and Lambeth Palace, the members of the Archbishops’ Council, no longer, ontologically, embody the kind of wisdom authority to the same degree that many church leaders embodied in my youth and my years in parish ministry.
