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Silent Witness - in praise of quiet subversives

Diarmaid MacCulloch has just completed his six Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh on the theme of silence in Christian history. He approached the theme with his characteristic erudition, humour and creativity, fitting singular narratives within a broader view of the trends. His approach to silence is partly focussed on the thread of the apophatic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, partly on the shameful silences of Christianity in the face of its abusive history and partly on the hidden strands of minority Christian groupings who exist undercover. The lectures will give me much to think about for some time to come and I can't wait to see the book that will come from them. Prof MacCulloch has made a strong and fascinating case for the consistent undercurrent of mystical theology that has always been there in the Christian story, though not always welcomed, and I think he is absolutely right that it is this strain of contemplative, experiential theology with its reticence about saying too much about God that needs to find its voice for contemporary Westerners who are disenchanted with religion for many good reasons. He also speaks of the 'silent ecumenism' that exists in the wordlessness that can be shared of people of all faiths and of no faith. MacCulloch has described himself as a 'critical friend' of Christianity and we all do well to listen carefully to what this friend has to say to us now from the informed perspective of Christian history.

I am greatly attracted to MacCulloch's host of minority witnesses who populate the back alleys of his history of Christian silence, from the Familists who hid themselves away within the respectability of the established churches as a mystical fifth column, to the Quakers who first made the case for the abolition of slavery, thus subverting the tyranny of textual literalism, and the gay subculture of Anglo-Catholicism. I realise that part of my attraction to this band of subversives is romantic and I have no illusions about the capacity of minorities to be tyrannical. I was, after all, raised in the Plymouth Brethren. But I also recognise the vital importance to the Christian story of those who resist the noisy hegemony of an oppressive majority prepared to use evey trick in the book (and a few more besides) to silence the voices of those who challenge their hold on power. And I refer as much to ecclesiastical hegemonies as civic ones. So I value the witness of the 'spirituals' who insist on the primacy of conscience and experience over textual or hierarchical absolutism and who recognise that faith is too important to be left in the hands of ecclesiocrats.

It seems to me that this century's main challenges to Western Christian ascendancy - struggles over human sexuality and clerical abuse - are also its opportunity to rediscover that silent voice and allow it to blossom in many new ways. In our own islands, I don't think that will happen for the Church of England for as long as it hangs on to its anachronistic privileges or for the Roman Catholic church for as long as it clings to clerical celibacy and monarchical power or for the Evangelical churches for as long as they refuse to engage seriously with biblical criticism. But I am hopeful that the quiet voices of lay people who meditate in silence, the troubled consciences of clergy who cannot swallow old formulations of doctrine, the lapsed faithful who prefer an empty church to a full one, the gay couple who stick with their faith even while their church condemns them, the mixed marriages which practice inter-faith dialogue as a daily reality, the artists who insist on the spiritual dimension of their work, the 'ordinary' congregation member who uses the sermon time to listen to God rather than to platitudes will, between them, bring about an irresistible change that will make the church look very different indeed in a generation's time.

Religious Rudeness and Religious Hospitality

Our hospital's prayer room, which is primarily used by Muslim patients and members of staff, is currently out of action because it is being redecorated. So I put up a sign saying that everyone was welcome to use the (rather blatantly Christian) chapel at any time. As a result, a couple of prayer mats are now temporarily draped over seats in the back row of the chapel. I discovered this morning that one Christian user of the chapel had placed an open bible next to these prayer mats. As I approached it, I guessed what passage might be on show there. I was right; it was John 14:6, 'I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.' This is a verse which some Christians use to justify their view that only Christians are acceptable to God. I was deeply saddened by this act of religious rudeness, a sadness only mitigated by the knowledge that our Muslim friends would not notice the insult - they would not necessarily read the text this way (I don't) and they would be too focused on praying to take the time to read the insult left there for them by one of the 'people of the book'.

Incidentally, my take on the John text is threefold: first, it's never wise to make too much of a single verse in the bible; second, the words were written as reassurance to Christians, not challenge to others; third, it seems to me that if there is only one way to God, it is a way that takes an astonishing diversity of forms!

What happened next was lovely. As I celebrated Mass with three Christian patients, three Muslim members of staff came in, one by one, to perform their midday prayer. They did so quietly, discretely and un-fussily. The third member of staff was still praying as we finished so I apologised to her for the disruption as she left the chapel. She was not perturbed in the slightest by this inconvenience but was very grateful indeed that she was welcome to use the chapel to pray in. The contrast between this simple gratitude and the earlier attempt at a Christian insult was profoundly humbling. For a brief moment today, as Christians and Muslims respectfully prayed in a shared space, I glimpsed something of the divine.

In Wisdom you have made them all...

Natural theology doesn't seem to have an easy time of it these days. In many contexts, the fundamental notion that we can discern God in the world around us through our minds, our senses, our intuitions seems to take second place (at best) to theologies based on revelation and tradition. I apologise for that large generalisation, but I think there is a certain truth in the observation that, for religious and secular people alike, there is a default notion that human reason and experience and religious faith occupy different territories. This is a great problem when it comes to dialogue between religious and non-religious people; if we do not have any shared language about the stuff that matters to us, how can we begin a meaningful conversation?

It was not always like this. As recently as 1980s and 90s, a remarkable Christian monk called Bede Griffiths was developing a Christian mystical theology based on dialogue between the science of human consciousness, the 'new physics', Hindu thought and Christian mystical theology and practice. There is a wonderful summary of his approach here, and I would recommend his work to anyone who is as frustrated as I am with a crass binary opposition between and faith and human knowledge.

It seems to me that we need to recover the very strong 'wisdom' tradition in Christianity that honours human knowledge and endeavour. This tradition is well represented by significant figures throughout Christian history, from Benedict to Teilhard. The features of this tradition that most appeal to me in the contemporary context are the exploration of human consciousness and the practice of contemplation. Of course, most faith traditions underline the limits of human knowledge, especially in relation to what we can know of God, but this epistemological humility is by no means absent from other branches of human knowledge. More than that, the practice of a contemplative disposition towards the world - by which I mean a commitment to attentive seeing/hearing leading to a silent, awe-filled wonder - seems to me to be a way of being that is as natural to scientists and ecologists as it is to religious mystics. Additionally, Griffiths' work points to fruitful possibilities for a new assessment of the interaction of matter and mind that belongs as much to the religious world as to scientific and artistic enterprises.

I strongly feel that religious and non-religious people need to talk to each other a lot more than they do at present. And I think this realm of 'contemplative consciousness' is the best place to start. How we see the world and how we understand the one doing the seeing are the questions we are all seeking to address, so let's stand together on this common ground and get talking!

Prescribing Meditation?

The best books about prayer are not about prayer at all. One of the 20th century's classic works, Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplatuion, contains very little by way of 'how to' advice on prayer. Instead, it explores such things as faith, fear, integrity, union, detachment, aridity and social justice. Similarly, William Johnston's The Inner Eye of Love is a rounded and profound exploration of mystical theology, and even his work, Being in Love, which is subtitled 'The practice of Christian prayer', is wary of focusing on technique.

For religious people, the practice of prayer, which we may also call contemplation or meditation, is not primarily about what you do or say in the time you set aside for a specific activity. It is primarily about who we are, how we see the world, what we mean when  we talk of the divine and how we undertake the life-long (at least life-long) journey towards the fullness of life for which we are created. For sure, there is a specific way of being in the world which manifests itself in a number of ways, including the disciplined practice of prayer, and it is right that mystical theology concerns itself to some degree with the experiential aspects of that practice. What is clear to me, however, is that prayer cannot be seen in isolation. It is not a thing in itself but an orientation, a disposition, a way of being, of seeing, of listening.

With all this in mind, I was curious when I learned that our hospital had engaged someone to lead meditation classes who did not come from any specific religious tradition. He is clearly someone who thinks deeply, reads widely and practices a form of meditation, but he was astonished when I talked with him about the long Christian experience of mystical theology and contemplative prayer. His assumption had been that Christianity was about a set of 'beliefs' (ie intellectual propositions), practices and ethical pronouncements.

Christianity must take a large part of the responsibility for this misunderstanding but there is also a more deep-seated assumption in our corner of the world that meditation is a practice which exists in isolation from the context of any wider world view. In offering meditation classes, for example, our hospital is simply offering something like a relaxation technique for people with slightly exotic tastes. I wonder if underlying all of this is either some kind of assumption that everyone shares a materialistic worldview, or simply no concern at all for how we look at our understanding of the world and our place in it. In any event, the result in relation to this matter is the same - meditation is simply one of the techniques people have for dealing with the bad stuff that comes at them.

In a way, there is a parallel with the way the NHS prefers the practical techniques of CBT over longer term psychotherapy which demands a deeper exploration of root causes. Put crudely, everything is symptom. I would be a little surprised if this thinking pervaded every part of healthcare: would we accept a physician who knew no biology, a surgeon who knew no anatomy, a pharmacist who did not study chemistry? People's inner lives are far too important to be treated symptomatically. Perhaps it's time that those who work in this area got together to make the case for a deeper understanding of the matters of the spirit.

On being an atheist diagnosed with MS | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

This is a very interesting article which gives me hope that there is a point of real encounter between atheists and religious people. Thompson's understanding of his situation seems to me to be a profoundly spiritual one which resonates with the teaching of the world's great mystical traditions. When he talks of his sense being someone 'who doesn't mind that there is no point to any of this, that it just is', he is very close to the via negativa of Christian spirituality and to the Eastern understanding of nothingness. Where I think most religious people would diverge is in his assessment of the impulse to make meaning of it all. The mystical way is one in which the effort to make meaning will eventually give way to a new kind of silence, but we only usually get to that when the search for meaning gives way - there probably isn't a shortcut! There are many ways in which this search is conducted, religious and non-religious, but I think there is a common end, which is a fulfilled life.

I am moved by the humility of his 'why not me' understanding of his diagnosis and I hope that people of faith would be able to say the same thing.

This is a rather hurried and very immediate reaction to this article, but I really think there is a meeting place here between religious people and atheists. If you like, it's a kind of inter-faith dialogue based on an understanding that we are actually talking about the same stuff. All thoughts are most welcome.

What will be left of us? - artifacts and digital ephemera

My new favourite website is called Europeana, a Europe-wide collaboration between cultural institutions which makes cultural artifacts available digitally. It's basically a huge online museum. One of their current projects is a roadshow travelling the continent to encourage people to drop in with their family artifacts from the Great War which are digitised on the spot and eventually made available through the web portal. People are bringing postcards, photographs, trench art, diaries, official military documentation and letters. One of the most moving things for me about this project is that it allows us to see this history from a very human perspective, but also from an international perspective. Most of our static museums show a partial, national view of this history. As an example of this, there is a very moving little film on the website showing a young German woman's search for material relating to her ancestor Otto Arndt, a German soldier who, along with a British soldier, rescued other British soldiers from a burning building. The two soldiers became and remained friends and Otto made a matchbox cover for his friend out of an old shell case. The matchbox is one of the items digitised and available to view on the site.

Many of the artifacts are written ones - letters, postcards and diaries - and this got me wondering about what our current generation produces in a tangible form that might offer a physical connection to our time to future generations. Given the extent to which our lives are transacted digitally, is it possible that we are robbing the future of its past? Where once a journal was written, now an ephemeral blog takes its place; emails and texts take the place of postcards; flickr and facebook replace photo albums. And it is not clear whether these new artifacts will have a future. If they do, we will be leaving behind more than our forebears did, but if they don't, we will leave considerably less. In any case, the physicality of the artifacts will be lost and this saddens me. The handwriting of an ancestor in a battered diary is surely a more wonderful and personal thing than a Times New Roman email.

So maybe we should all write a little more down, make artifacts to be handled and handed on, create a story for the future.

Rediscovering old friends on my bookshelves

I am engaged in a very slow and very enjoyable process of selecting books from my shelves and boxes at home to populate my shelves at work. This is a fascinating exercise for two reasons: one is that I have think about what will be most useful to me at work, the other is that I rediscover old friends. I imagine that the resulting collection on my work shelves says a lot about me, and probably locates me pretty squarely in time, revealing just when my formative years of study were! But the curious thing about this is that in some areas, notably novels and biblical studies, my work bookshelf has plenty of new material but in others, notably prayer and spirituality, the books are either medieval (alas, not first editions!) or from the period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s.

I don't think this is a problem in any way, because the things of the spirit are ageless and the insights of the past are no less important now than they were when they were committed to writing. So I am happy to have Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing, Thomas Merton, Anthony de Mello, John Main, Bede Griffiths and William Johnston back on my desk to guide me in how I live and in what I might have to offer to my role as a hospital chaplain. I can think of no better guides.

But that also raises a question for me. Given that I find no shortage of inspiration from contemporary writers in many other realms, am I missing out on the wisdom of contemporary writers in the Christian mystical tradition? Apart from books by Richard Rohr and Christopher Jamison, I have nothing written in the last decade. Or could it be that fewer books are being written in this area than was the case 30 or 40 years ago?  So please either tell me of the newer books on Christian spirituality that have caught your eye or confirm my fear that this is a neglected area!

When did it all go wrong? Empire and Christian Exceptionalism

At church yesterday, I had a fascinating chat with the excellent Lay Reader who was preaching. He said that he had conducted an admittedly unscientific survey to find out the views of ordinary Christians about other faiths. The question he posed to a large and diverse group of Christians was whether, in their opinion, a Muslim who had lived a good life and kept to his faith would be able to 'enjoy eternity in the company of the Almighty'. He said that the vast majority said 'yes' with the very few dissenters coming from a well-known conservative evangelical strain of Anglicanism. He said that the small number of clergy he had asked we less immediate in their affirmative reply, but had gone away and come back with good theological reasons for saying 'yes'. The only exception in this latter group was a Roman Catholic priest who had no hesitation in replying positively.

This very much backs up my own experience of 'ordinary' Christians whose instincts are considerably more generous towards people of other faiths than the anti-religious lobby might have you believe. For me, the experiences and thinking of the late William Johnston and Bede Griffiths provide theologically sophisticated accounts of this generosity for anyone who wants to develop their instincts further. However, it is impossible to deny that a significant number of Christians (with a loud collective voice) take a very different view and leads me to wonder why and when this other view started to gain currency. One part of an answer to that may lie, for British Christians at any rate, with the developing history of first-hand encounters with people of other faiths.

In preparation for a trip to Delhi, I have been rereading William Dalrymple's fascinating book about the city, City of Djinns. Dalrymple describes the change that happens in the approach taken by representatives of the British East India Company towards Indian people, a change he explores further in his equally fascinating White Mughals. As an example, he shows how his wife's ancestor William Fraser, the British Resident in Delhi, adopted a much more open attitude towards Indian cultures and faiths than most of those who came after him. Many of these earlier British proto-colonialists adopted Indian lifestyles, married Indian partners and sought to work closely with the local power structures. Fraser also developed in his religious thinking to the point where his Christian faith bore many of the characteristics of Hindu thinking. He was, however, still buried in the churchyard of St James' Anglican church:

As the British presence in India became more aggressive, particularly after the brutal suppression of the Uprising of 1857, religious attitudes also became hardened and cultural separation became the norm. The damage done to Fraser's Indian-European style house in 1857 is a powerful icon of the moment when attitudes began to shift most decisively:

This was at the same time as more exclusivist, evangelistic and positivistic approaches to Christian faith developed, not least in reaction to changes in scientific world-views. The assertion of British might over local discontent, and the developing sense that the spread of enlightened British values was making the world a better place must have had some 'carry-over' to the religious dimension of these profoundly unequal relationships. And given that we British have done little to come to terms with the dark aspects of our colonial legacy, I wonder the extent to which the views of some Christians towards those of other faiths continue to be shaped by that legacy.

I don't want to romanticise a past golden age of religious toleration, but I do want to say that the phenomenon of Christian exceptionalism is not the norm for every time and place.

From van Gogh to Maggie's - Therapeutic Inner Spaces

I was having a conversation yesterday with someone about the wonderful work of the Maggie's Centres, an innovative approach to providing supportive therapeutic centres to people living with cancer. The genius of the organisation is in giving close attention to the design of their buildings and this is hardly surprising, given the movement's origins in the experiences of Charles and Maggie Jencks. I have some experience of the centre at Charing Cross hospital in London and can attest to its stunning design, its focus around the hearth and kitchen table, it's provision of complimentary therapies and its provision of a homely interior space.

And its the creation of a sense of 'safe interiority' that impresses me most. Hospitals, on the whole, focus on surface things and little attention is given to the inner turmoil that usually accompanies serious illness. So it is refreshing that Maggie's seek to provide a peaceful space that nurtures inner wellbeing. For example, the Charing Cross centre has small internal courtyards that look like Japanese Zen gardens and give a lovely vision of simple, enclosed beauty.

There is ancient wisdom in this use of space. I can't help thinking of the image of a walled garden that appears in so much spiritual literature and religious design, from metaphors for the Virgin Mary to Islamic gardens. As one example, the use of the cloister, often with a garden, in Christian monastic architecture is very much an image of the tending of the interior world. One of the loveliest examples I have seen is the former monastery near Saint-Remy de Provence which became the sanatorium where van Gogh recuperated for a year in 1889/90.

He painted 143 works while he was there, including some famous images of the monastery's olive groves.

It looks to me like the inner calm of that place allowed him to portray the outside world with creative attention. I wish that all hospitals would give more attention to their inner spaces and, indeed, to the inner worlds of those they treat. I understand the need to focus resources on the most pressing matters, but we all know that it's not only medicine that makes us well.

Automatons, Strange Engines and Things Hidden

Peter Carey's new novel, The Chemistry of Tears is a wonderful and strange account of two lives separated by a century and a half but united by an object - an automaton in the form of a swan - and by the pain of separated love. For Catherine, the contemporary conservator given the task of reconstructing the swan, the separated love is for her secret lover, a colleague who has just died at the outset of the story. She is given the restoration project as a kind of therapy while she mourns this hidden love. Henry is the Victorian gentleman who commissioned the swan - though he really wanted a duck - as a gift to delight his sick son in the hope that this delight would effect a cure. He travels to the Black Forest where he finds a terrifying genius of a clockmaker, Herr Sumper, who takes on the commission. His household also includes a mysterious Huguenot sliversmith-cum-fairytale collector and a young boy with a spark of genius. This young boy becomes the way Henry explores his love for his son back home.

One of the many strands running through this story is the search for hidden things and the question of whether, indeed, there is anything hidden at all. For example, Catherine's obsessive assistant, who is placed with her in order to keep an eye on her, is convinced that the automaton has a hidden secret and takes extreme measures to find it. Catherine insists that the swan has only surface, nothing hidden, just a comprehensible collection of intricate moving parts. For Henry, there is the question of what lies hidden in Herr Sumper's workshop, what sophistication there could possibly be in such undeveloped rural surroundings. And what truths, if any, like behind his boasting of the Genius he worked for in London and his strange calculating engine? The novel doesn't answer these quesions directly but it does finish with a return to hidden things - the hidden loves of the two main protagonists. The objects of their loves are never seen in the course of the story but the nature of that love is explored as a constant thread.

I have recently been rediscovering the work of William Johnston, an Irish Jesuit who worked most of his life in Japan and had signifcant encounters with the Zen tradition. He wrote extensively and lucidly on Christian mysticism and his language about the 'hidden things' of the mystical way came to mind as I reflected on Carey's novel. He mentions the foundational writings of Pseudo-Dionysius which were translated into English by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing as 'Denis Hid Divinity'. This makes good sense as 'mystical' carries the sense in Greek of initiation to the knowledge of 'hidden things'. I like Johnston's approach because he insists on the accessibility of the mystical way to all people, not just a select band of initiates. And his talk of 'hidden things' is a way of describing the truth that not all knowledge is 'surface'. The way of knowing that lies at the heart of the mystical way is a lover's knowing. Peter Carey's novel suggests to me that there are indeed hidden things in this world, but they are not the hidden things of abstract esoterica. They are the hidden things of love, whose truthful knowing is not subject to calculation and measurement.