I suppose I owe my twitter and facebook friends an explanation for my random, generalised anti-Christian exclamations of late. I won’t go into it all too much as I’ve got to take responsibility for some things. I understand that churches usually have a large body of people who are comfortable and busy and just aren’t able to give the bare minimum of the time of day to newcomers – some of them are even so snowed under that all they can manage is a grunt when you’re introduced to them or try to strike up a conversation. I get that. I understand that people come to church with many different needs and can be pretty high maintenance to talk to: mental illness, intellectual disability, child protection issues – it makes sense that you should kind of ghettoise these people all together up the back with the new people who have arrived with young kids. That way you can ignore everyone at once. What really hurts is when people try to solve you like you’re a problem, when people try to “minister” to you, when people discuss you in a committee to try and decide what should be done about you. What really hurts is when people talk down to you and give you helpful advice on how to raise your kids and how to make friends. What really hurts is when those people then try to sign you up to the music and sunday school roster.
And they wonder why the pews seem to get a little emptier every year.
Despite being a pretty agnostic kind of guy, I’ve been brought up going to church and have continued to do so (mostly) over the years. Since coming to Sale, we’ve been hopping along to the local Anglican franchise, partly just to meet some people and partly for some kind of spiritual experience.
Churches in the west are suffering pretty badly in this day and age. It’s the baby boomers: they went to Sunday school and weren’t having a bar of it. Their parents shoved religion down their necks and they spat it out the first chance they got. My generation grew up viewing Christians as a bunch of naive kill-joys who mean well but are ultimately safely ignored. More recently we’ve come to see Christians as part of the larger destructive force in the world called “religion”: the root of all trouble and strife whether it be suicide bombers or homophobic anti abortion lobbyists.
Anglicans tend to fall into the “quirky but harmless” end of the religious spectrum: Congregations of ageing pew warmers or in the more progressive parishes, younger slightly hippie neo-pantheists or fervent evangelicals armed with acoustic guitars and chorus books. Scattered about are the social misfits: a few with mental illnesses, a few with intellectual disabilities and the working poor.
Today we changed the channel and headed up the road to the happy-clappies where you’ve got young hotties praising the Lord with soft-rock and ecstatic hand-waving followed by a guy holding a Bible who talks about how different Christians are because they have God. Everybody then gets in their four wheel drives and heads to their manicured middle class homes where they eat gourmet salad and watch reruns of 7th Heaven ... or something.
So where do we fit in? That’s what I’ve been asking myself for the last ten years. Sometimes we seem to get it right and make great friends who we connect with and who become a kind of extended family but it never seems to last. Other times, well, maybe church is not meant for critical thinkers. If only I had a heart.
My Mum gave me a book from my childhood the other day: Leading Little Ones to God. It has an inscription from my Grandmother in the front and though I don’t remember it, Mum tells me she read it to me when I was a kid.
I started reading it to Sol the other day but we didn’t get very far. Sol and I both know that my heart’s not in it and I didn’t even get past the first page “Our Hearts Search For God” before I started stumbling over assertions about the nature of God and the human spirit that I no longer identify with.
Which got me thinking: If I was going to use a book to teach Sol about morality, values and the meaning of life, what would it look like? Christianity has the advantage of being an established codified moral system that is still broadly accepted and endorsed in our society. What else is there? Sol is already a huge Star Wars fan (who would have thought eh?) which comes with a nicely packaged mythology of good, evil and Jungian templates: maybe I could bring Sol up as a jedi? I’ve also noticed some primary schools teaching philosophy as a way to help children develop a number of attributes: logic, respectful rational debate and ethical behaviour.
But then again, I don’t think books have much to do with the promulgation of values. In the early years it is all about modelling and being an example. The significant adults in Sol’s life are the ones from whom he learns how to behave: one of the most simultaneously relieving and terrifying of realisations. Relieving because it means I don’t have the burden of having to analyse and communicate my values which are a jumbled mess of contradiction and confusion. Terrifying because I have already seen some of my faults and weaknesses mirrored back at me.
Fortunately for Sol, he has a number of wise, good hearted adults in his life (including his mother) from whom I hope he’ll learn what he needs to know.
The Easter message is much more difficult than Christmas. At Christmas, it’s all about family and peace and babies. Easter is about death, suffering, betrayal and abuse of power followed by the happy ending which doesn’t quite do enough to make it all OK. Even though Jesus conquered death, he didn’t make all the bad things go away, the resolution is the promise that somehow it will all be made good but we don’t really see that apart from a bit of a light show later on. And Jesus never did come back to set everything right. We are left to squabble over our theological differences and argue about whether any of it ever really happened. Meanwhile the realities of death, suffering, betrayal and abuse of power continue with unbridled enthusiasm. Maybe we need to stop waiting for Jesus to come back to show us who’s side he’s on. I believe that Jesus never left us because the spirit of that which opposes violence and embraces compassion for others in equal measure lives amongst us. Easter is a time for us to find courage in the face of all these things knowing that we are not alone.
Thom Yorke tells me we are all just chemical reactions, hysterical and useless *. We might feel that way sometimes, more keenly when we are sick like I’ve been this week: A background virus, sleep deprivation and a couple of migraines have left me feeling a little sorry for myself. We might also ponder the meaning of our bodies when we face more serious illness like hearing of a friend’s wife receiving a terminal diagnosis, remembering an acquaintance who died from skin cancer or even finding out that a close relative is doing the cancer thing. Why is it that our wonderful minds, our selves in all their glory are housed in fragile physical systems which degrade with time, even systems as marvellous as the human body. When I get a bad migraine I feel especially out of control of my body, and I imagine I can feel it going wrong and out of balance. It alarms me how much my physical well-being can affect the way I think. Othertimes, I notice the little effects of ageing like how I don’t like having to bend down and pick things up off the floor or how I think the staircase in my house is a bit of a chore. A few years back, I wouldn’t have noticed any of those things. I worry about getting old and what it must feel like as your body degrades.
Charles Darwin turned 200 this week. He tells me that we are all descended from apes. But then Jonathan Marks tells me that we are not merely apes:
we are in fact quite different from apes, I mean we’re sitting here talking and Boo-boo and Bam-bam simply aren’t doing that. Not only that but we are cutting our hair, we are pulling our wisdom teeth, we’re dressed, we walk, we cry—these are all things that apes don’t do. And more importantly we threaten one another by brandishing our lawyers rather than our canine teeth. So we are in fact quite different from apes, which is not to say that we are not very closely related to apes, but to ignore the ways in which we are different I think is to ignore the fact of evolution. And if you want to say that we are just apes and not really different, it seems to me that’s the person that’s denying evolution. – Jonathan Marks, The Philosopher’s Zone 14/2/09
To deny that we are different from apes, not only denies that evolution leads to new species but stops us from imagining that we could ever be more than apes. Afterall, evolution didn’t stop back in prehistory, it continues and it continues at a very rapid pace in the human species as the selection pressures of our society shape us.
Just as saying that humans are merely apes denies us our transcendence, I wonder if thinking that we are just chemical reactions in a body made of meat denies us a transcendence as well. Even as our physical selves plunge towards their inevitable limits, instead of dwelling on the meaninglessness of death, some of us find meaning in becoming more than what our nature makes us: in reaching out to God as we understand him/her/it and as we do so, reaching out to each other. Who knows, maybe someday we really will grow wings.
UPDATE: Please forgive this blog post, I really don’t know what I’m trying to say but I’m pretty sure that the last two sentences are not it. Just imagine that I wrote a profound insight about mechanism as reductionism and science vs meaning as experience and imagination and remind me not to listen to Ok Computer and get all depressed.
I’ve been noticing more and more how some of my environmentalist friends keep doing things that remind me of the behaviour of some Christians, especially fundamentalist Christians that I’ve known. I think it all comes down to the way ideology and moral codes tend to make us act certain ways.
For example, many environmentalists feel that people who drive four wheel drives are doing something wrong and will tend to form a negative judgement of those people. Christians also tend to think like this about people who are homosexual or transgress some closely held Christian value. The common ground is that both Christian and environmentalist ideology creates a set of behaviours which arise from values and form a moral code which is in tension with the mainstream moral code. So while the majority of people live by a mainstream moral code which accepts (even celebrates) four wheel drives and is becoming more accepting of homosexuals, those who identify with a certain ideology end up subscribing to a moral code which brings them into conflict with the mainstream moral code.
I suppose I’m being obvious but here are a few other things:
The need to create an “us and them”: You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.
Withdrawal from mainstream society: Christians boycott films and products produced by “satanists”, environmentalists boycott shopping centres and products which cause environmental damage.
Narrowing of social circles: only wanting to associate with other Christians / environmentalists
Development of fashion: Christians dress neatly and conservatively, environmentalists wear organic hemp
Jargon and indoctrination: Environmentalists reduce, reuse and recycle. Christians lay it at the foot of the cross.
Preaching
Paranoia: a tendency to think that someone is pulling strings in the background to oppose you
I suppose what I’m getting at is that environmentalists need to make an effort to avoid some of these behaviours which become barriers. Are you being an environmentalist because you want to take some high moral ground and just feel good about yourself or do you actually want to see things change? I’m not saying environmentalists need to stop doing what they do, it’s about a small tweak of the consciousness and approach that makes all the difference.
I have some friends who often inspire me with their environmental choices and I find that when I hang out with them, I feel a little more motivated to try changing my own lifestyle. It’s not that they judge me and make me feel guilty, it’s not that they preach to me. It’s that I see them living a different life which they enjoy.
The hardest part of environmentalism is that society just seems to go on doing the same things forever, but we can look to a Christian parable to feel more hopeful: Jesus once told his disciples that only a little bit of salt is needed to make the meal salty, the salt spreads through the food, just a grain here and there and changes it without you even being able to see it. The path to environmental change is not in moralising, preaching and putting “eco terrorist” stickers on four wheel drives: those approaches don’t work for Christians and they won’t work for environmentalists. THe real recipe for change is in living an example and being ready to bravely discuss and gently debate your beliefs with others and listen as much as rant about the things you feel passionate about.
I’m pretty sure that when the angels appeared to the shepherds with the choir and trumpets, it was a bit of a bureaucratic stuff-up in heaven’s Department of Spectacles and Apparitions. They had planned a world-wide celebration but then God called it all off having cooked up a plan where by Jesus would be born in relative secret. The choir had been prepped already and due to internal politics, they couldn’t cancel but instead managed to divert from down-town Jerusalem to an out-of-town appearance where only some crazy shepherds would witness it. Meanwhile the star had been setup millions of years in advance and couldn’t be called off. Luckily only a couple of wacko eastern mystics noticed it so no harm done. Except the mishandling of it all just kept snowballing: crazy prophets, lepers and blind men spilling the beans, then the messiah movement got on board and started with the palm branches. The original plans had been so big that they just didn’t manage to call it all off in time.
So Christians need not lament about Jesus being forgotten amidst all the Christmas fanfare, being a subversive kind of chap, it’s just the way he would have liked it. I’m pretty sure he’ll manage to get through to the people who matter to him without our carrying on.
I think there’s something in that for all of us. Merry Christmas to all my loyal readers.
