Justluckie

Is The Bible a Good Introduction to Christianity?

I'm reading a lot about Buddhism at the moment as part of a research project and, as a relative novice, it's always tempting to find that single source of all wisdom that will tell you all you need to know. Coming from a Christian background, one might think that the best place to start would be a definitive source text, a scripture that would set out all the basics. This is folly! Buddhism does not really work like that and, although many strands of Buddhism place great emphasis on knowledge of the canons of scripture and other historic writings, Buddhism does not have 'a bible' that is the one source of all doctrine. I've written before about the triple jewel - the three refuges of the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha which give a clue about the interacting aspects of the religion that must be held in constant dialogue.

But what about the Bible? Does the Bible really offer something different from this, an authoritative, comprehensive and comphrehensible source of all you need to know about Christianity? No, I don't think it does. If someone comes to me and asks, as they sometimes do, for a good place to start in getting to understand Christianity, a single text book they can read to tell them all they need to know, I struggle to know what to give them. The last thing I would do is give them a Bible to take away and read!

For a start, they might make the (very common) mistake of thinking that it all has equal weight. It does not. One's knowledge of the real nature of Christianity will not be greatly enhanced by a close reading of Leviticus and if you get too hung up on the Apocalypse or the more outre parts of Zechariah or Daniel, you might well give up before you've really begun. Even the parts that we might think to be closer to the heart of its message can be taxing if you don't know the background - you might lose the will to live in trying to figure out the more intricate parts of the rhetoric of Romans or Hebrews and even parts of the Gospels, which are the nearest thing I would offer as the key to understanding the whole lot, are not unambiguous.

They might also misunderstand the nature of the book itself. It belongs to a community who have read it and interpreted it over many centuries and if you read it outside that community, you will only pick up a part of its importance and meaning. This community has reflected on, sifted, inculturated and, most importantly, prayed with these words and if you short-circuit that process by ignoring the accumulated wisdom on how to read this text, you will not be reading the Christian Bible.

I frequently hear people writing off Christianity by finding a text that 'tells us to go and slaughter our enemies'. Well it doesn't tell me to do that. I really mean that and I'm not just playing games with language. The Bible does not tell us to do stuff. It is read as part of a process of discernment that has at its very core the commitment to love God and neighbour, to forgive and be forgiven, to be an agent of healing and peace, to live a life marked by simplicity, joy and service and, most fundamentally, to engage with the self-giving life of Jesus. If our reading of a text from the Bible contradicts that core, we must find a way of reading it differently. It should not surprise us that a text of human creation contains elements that are contradictory. Contradiction is an inevitable part of being human. What counts is to know what is the heart of the matter. The Bible might help us do that to some extent, but it will only do that if we know where to look and how to read.

So if someone asks me for a place to begin to understand Christianity, I might offer them a book like Rowan Williams' Tokens of Trust, but I am most likely to do what Jesus did and issue an invitation to 'come and see'. You will only understand Christianity if you engage with the Christian community over time. And you won't reach that understanding through thought alone. To know Christianity is, first and foremost, to pray. If you say, I will only pray once I've been convinced about the knowing, I would gently suggest that this is the wrong way round. Give it a go and see what happens. Enter the stillness and mystery of Life and see if that does not begin to do something to your knowing.

Contemplative Psalms

Christian scripture does not 'teach' about contemplative prayer in any straighforward discursive way, but there are insights and images that stand out as jewels of wisdom that lead us into silence and into the mystery that is God. One of the most sustained passages of scritpure that offers a picture of the soul's longing for God is the Song of Songs. There are also nuggets of contemplative wisdom in the Psalms and I wanted to share a few randomly today. There may be more to come at some other time. The version used is that found in the Psalter of the Scottish Episcopal Church's office book.

I still my soul and make it quiet,
like a child upon its mother's breast;
my soul is quieted within me.

This little verse from Psalm 131, which begins with a renunciation of pride, speaks to me of collected stillness, of deep trust and selfless abandon. It is an image not just of contentment, but of belonging and peace. Conetmplative prayer is the prayer of the soul's original quietness.

You speak in my heart and say 'Seek my face.'
Your face, Lord, will I seek.

Psalm 27 begins by describing God as light and salvation. It then goes on to describe the sole focus of desire as seeking the 'fair beauty of the Lord'. The search for divine beauty, of the true heart of all that is, is the sole occupation of the contemplative. This beauty is not an abstract concept but a 'face' - the contemplative's gaze is that of a lover. Of course, God's face does not have a 'form' or features but there is a pofound sense in which the Christian looks upon the compassionate face of Christ and sees there the glory of God: 'For it is the God who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness' who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.' (2 Cor 4:6) The face we seek in contemplation is the face of Christ. In that face, we meet the unseeable face of God.

As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their masters,
and the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,
so our eyes look to the Lord our God,
until he show us his mercy.

The contemplative gaze is one of humility and attentive waiting. This image from Psalm 123 is not about a fearful cowering before a capricious master, but a humble patience that seeks only mercy. Mercy for the Christian does not mean judicial acquittal but God's tender, loving presence. In Greek, it is the same word used to describe that most intimate icon of the Mother of God with Christ, and this is the state of intimacy we seek in contemplative prayer:

Those who go through a desolate valley will find it a place of springs.

This verse from a lovely pilgrim Psalm (84) speaks of the ultimate refreshment one finds in the journey into God, even when that journey seems desolate. The contemplative will find periods of barrenness and dryness, but the gift of faith is to see even these as 'places of springs', even if they do not seem such at the time.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence? (Ps 139)

In contemplation, one finds that the 'journey' is not, in fact, one that requires us to go anywhere. It is a growing sense of the divine presence within. We do not really 'seek' God in the way one looks for something that is elsewhere. The journey is one of growing awareness.

More to be desired are they than gold,
more than much fine gold,
sweeter far than honey,
than honey in the comb.

In Psalm 19, these words speak of the 'statutes' and 'judgements' of the Lord, much in the way that the long meditation of Psalm 119 does. How can one talk of such dry, legal-sounding concepts in such a warm, loving way? I think it is best to think of the 'law of the Lord' as 'God's way'. Not at all a list of directives but a path of life, an orientation. I think it is mistaken to oppose 'law' and 'gospel' because they are both terms that refer above all to the path of life. This is a path that takes us to the heart of life - the heart of God. It is a way that is no way, a path that needs no steps. All it requires is a continual turning towards the light, a constant reorienting towards the Source of all being. To engage in contemplative prayer is to set one's heart on such a journey of reorientation motivated by desire and love.

 

The Bible Tells Me So...?

I listened in yesterday to a debate in the Church of Scotland's General Assembly about the place of gay ministers in that church's life. The Assembly arrived at a compromise position that strikes me as an awkward solution that is unlikely to persist for very long. I suspect that the Church of Scotland may well move, in time, towards a fuller acceptance of the ministry of gay people as it experiences their ministry more openly in its parishes.

The thing I really wanted to say about that debate is to do with the use of the Bible in discussions of this sort. There was a general consensus among those who spoke in favour of a more traditionalist understanding that the Bible had a straightforward position on the matter, that this position was easily discernable and that the church's duty was to do what the Bible told it to do. I think that this is an unsustainable hermeneutical approach for a number of reasons.

 

The most obvious to me is that no one reads scripture in a vacuum. I said to someone recently that if he wanted to know more about Christianity, he would be ill served in this endeavour by reading the Bible from cover to cover. He would be better off discovering how the Church reads scripture, how it interprets it in the light of an ongoing life of prayer. The Bible is not separable from the community that reads it. The canon of scripture arose out of the life of the Church and its meaning is only slowly yielded as the community of faith reflects on it in the course of its life and experience of the living God. The Church does not and should not give every word of scripture equal weight. It emphasises those parts that most clearly reflect the heart of its teaching - such as the Gospels - and reads other parts in the light of that witness. This process is a constant dynamic and the careful balance between scripture, tradition and reason is maintained by constant and prayerful reflection.

Another reason for my discomfort with this hermeneutical approach is that the Bible did not arise in a vacuum. It seems bizarre to have to reiterate this obvious truth after centuries of Biblical criticism. In Christian tradition, the Bible is not a miraculous text which dropped down from heaven ready-formed. I think it is profoundly heterodox to say that it did. It is the product of prayerful reflection on the things of God and, if the Church describes the Bible as inspired, it is because it has found it to be a reliable guide to the things of God. The Bible does not tell us everything about everything, but, read in the context of the community of faith, it does tell us all we need to know about God. We have an ongoing responsibility to discern how that knowledge shapes our behaviour and decisions and that is not always an easy process.

I think that this process does not work like an instruction manual: the text tells me to do something and I do it. It works more like this: our prayerful interaction with the text is the model for how we engage with the world around us. It is not the text that is primary, but our shared reading of the text. And that shared reading is done with a consciousness of how the text has been read by our spiritual forebears. This does not mean that we are bound to follow their conclusions, but we do commit ourselves in humility to hear how they read and to learn respectfully from their experience.

In this approach, God is present dynamically rather than statically. God's Word is not an artefact but a person, not a book but a body. I do not read the Bible to get an answer to my questions, but to meet God. In that encounter, I hope that I will find myself in a better place to address the questions.

Bring Back the Dragons

After singing the praises of imaginary beings yesterday, I felt a pang of sadness for the loss of dragons from our biblical translations. In particular, the old translation for one of the Psalms sung at the late night office of Compline, Psalm 91, says 'the young lion and the dragon shalt thou tread under thy feet.' More modern translations speak prosaically of 'serpents'. But these beasts are more terrible than any mere serpent. These are the tannin who appear in Genesis 1:21 and Psalm 148:7 as 'sea-monsters', as 'monsters' in Psalm 74:13 in the New Jerusalem translation. 'Monsters' of whatever sort get us closer to a sense of mythic, archetypal terror but they're still not quite as close as 'dragons'. You might hear zoologically categorised beasts referred to as 'monsters' in the more sensational brand of wildlife TV programme, but 'dragons' are something else entirely.

Borges talks about the ubiquity of dragons across world cultures and impishly observes that 'science distinguishes several kinds' from subterranean to terrestrial and celestial varieties. Of the sea dragons (such as those created on the 5th day in Genesis 1), he notes that they have the ability to boil up a mighty feast of fish with the heat of their breath and that they can whip up whirlpools, typhoons and storms. A prize if you can spot the dragon in this picture which lives down the road from me in Edinburgh:

In banishing dragons from biblical texts, we play right into the hands of the boringly literal-minded, taxonomically accurate sorts who think we ought to read scripture in the way we read a school science text book. But biblical texts offer us something much more than mere fact - they offer food for the imagination and a rich source of archetypes. Our imaginations don't simply cook up images out of nothing - they draw on deep sources of human experience, creativity and emotion to offer us images of true (sic) terror and wonder. A dragon is more terrifying than a serpent because it comes from an unseen, untameable place and it is the unseen, untameable places of our deeper consciousness that are the breeding grounds for our most ancient sense of dread where the stability of existence itself feels to be under threat. It's our appreciation of what lurks beneath the surface that gets banished when we are embarrassed by talk of dragons.

Thankfully, human culture is too robust and flexible to lie down in the face of the onslaught of the literalists. And if all else fails, we can be fairly sure that no one will dare paint over the more fanciful output of Hieronymus Bosch with stills from the latest Attenburgh series...

 

Windows on Old Ways of Reading

I had the pleasure of a brief visit back to the college where I used to work last weekend. Kings College in Cambridge has a chapel which is famous for its choir and annual broadcasts on Christmas Eve, but one of its chief artistic gems is less well known. The chapel boasts a complete set of early 16th century stained glass which forms a sequence beginning with the birth, presentation, marriage and annunciation of Our Lady, through the life, Passion and resurrection of Christ to the early days of the church and ending with the death, assumption and coronation of the Virgin. The windows are large scale tableaux with striking characterisations in the high renaissance style. The east window is a magnificent presentation of the key moments of the crucifixion:

But this window is not typical, as most of the others are set out in a fascinating scheme where each scene of the life of the Virgin and Christ is paired with another scene above it, usually from the Hebrew Bible, but also from ancient mythology (the offering of the golden table in the temple of the sun-god). These pairings represent 'antetypes' of the events of salvation history, prefigurings of the new events in the old to demonstrate the 'impressions' of God's plan for the world in the events of history. Some of the pairings are surprising to modern minds: Jonah being vomited by the whale is an antetype of Christ's resurrection; the story of Joseph's brothers, finding him no longer in the pit where they threw him, is an anteptype of the women finding Jesus' empty tomb; Cain killing Abel with a mighty club prefigures the betrayal in the garden; the imprisonment of Jeremiah pairs that of Christ. That story of the golden table, incidentally, was thought to prefigure the presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.

This schema seems odd to modern readers, whether of the historical-critical sort or of the more literalistic sort, but it would have been entirely commonplace to the original viewers of the windows in Kings, though given the advent of the Reformation only a few years after their completion, I wonder how long the pairings continued to make sense for those who worshipped in that place. Pre-modern readers were far more likely to turn to allegory or typology when understanding a text than to what we think of as its 'plain sense'. The Reformation had a lot to do with the preference for this 'plain sense' approach, and the modern phenomenon of biblical literalism, which draws heavily on 19th century empiricism, makes this earlier reading mode seem quite alien. If we felt inclined to make pairings of biblical stories at all (which is unlikely - we tend to read texts one by one) we might do so on the basis of direct reference of one text by another. But I think the old way has much to commend it in terms of the way our minds and imaginations actually work.

The human mind works analogically. It loves to find patterns, to discern themes and to uncover hidden meanings. It loves to play with oblique references and works more by hint than secure reference. We do a disservice to texts, biblical texts included, when we do not bring the whole range of human imagination to bear on our readings (note the plural!) of them.

 

Cuthbert's Gospel and Celtic Connections

The news today that the British Library has been able to buy the St Cuthbert Gospel, a 7th century manuscript of the Gospel of St John thought to be Europe's oldest complete book, is good news indeed. The book was originally in Cuthbert's coffin along with other symbols of his office - vestments, a pectoral cross whose form is now very familiar, a portable altar slab - but has been on a long journey since then. It has been on loan to the Library for some decades but is now secure in the possession of our national library. It is wonderful that this exquisite little book, surely once a private and devotional rather than liturgical object, is now a public object, and you can see it up close here. In this way, it can tell a story of deep memory, of turbulent history and of abiding spirituality.

This little book has many stories to tell. One is that the history of Christianity in these fringe Atlantic islands of ours is a monastic history. I spent a few days on Caldey Island just before Easter and the little medieval monastic church where I gave four retreat addresses stands on the site of a monastery dating from around Cuthbert's time.

There is still a monastic community on the island, a Cistercian abbey which took over buildings built by an eccentric Anglican pioneer of Benedictine revival, Aelred Carlyle:

The Cistercian community was founded from a Belgian mother house and the community maintains links with the Low Countries. So the story of monastic Christianity on these islands, with all its interruptions, is told clearly in these buildings as it is in Cuthbert's little book. And that story tells us something both about the character of the church for many of its centuries here - ie that it was centred on communities committed to a radical life of evangelical simplicity and spiritual exploration - and about the church's international connections. Far from representing a unique and home-grown species of Christianity, the Celtic monastic communities show distinct connections with the monastic traditions of the Egyptian and Syrian deserts. The medieval communities that succeeded them were similarly international in their character, linked now to the great monastic institutions of northern Europe. One of the journeys made by Cuthbert's gospel demonstrates this shift nicely; it found a resting place in the Norman splendour of Durham Cathedral, a Benedictine refoundation.

Another of the significant stories told by this little book is that of a text. Every time I see an early biblical manuscript I am reminded that human beings have sought spiritual wisdom in these old texts for very many generations. Indeed, I was preaching on a text from John's gospel last Sunday (along with millions across the world!). Human spiritual wisdom is not, it seems to me, a matter of linear progress as scientific discovery is. Instead, it is about the progression of each human soul towards its fulfilment, a journey that is new every time it is made but which follows the deep patterns we find revealed in these sources of ancient wisdom. It is a journey inwards rather than onwards, a journey to the Source. Somewhere in that little, leather-bound book, there are words that liken that Source to a spring of living water, a spring which, when we find it, we discover was always there, simply waiting to be allowed to well up inside us.

Why Bother with the Bible?

That is the question posed by Richard Dawkins in his recent debate with Rowan Williams in Oxford. As far as Dawkins can see, there is no point in reading a text whose 'explanations' have been superseded by superior modern discoveries. You can see the whole debate here and it's well worth a look. It's a much more irenic exchange than most of those involving Prof Dawkins and is genuinely inquiring about the question of the origin of consciousness (much more interesting than the fixation Dawkins has with 'design' and he's far less clear cut in his response). I don't really understand his point about the Bible. For most of us, and for most of history, Christians have not understood the Bible as a literal source of 'scientific' knowledge but as a text through which we come to know God. You don't read Darwin to learn how to cook and you don't read the Bible to understand evolution.

But there's a more interesting mistake that Dawkins makes about how Christians use the Bible. [As an aside, please forgive me for referring to Richard Dawkins yet again. I do so because he seems to me to be an interesting barometer for how people in this part of the world at this point in history misunderstand religion. And I include many religious people in that.] In his recent survey of the 'beliefs' of people who self-define as Christian, he asked how often they read the Bible on their own, as if this was a more reliable indicator of religiosity than hearing it in church. Again, a bit of history will go a long way here. It is only in the recent past that the majority of people began to read the Bible on their own and, for many Christians, it is far more important that the Bible is read in communion and in continuity with the community within which it arose and within which it has been read and reread - the Church.

As I have suggested many times before, we always read texts like the Bible with a considerable history of interpretation behind us. We are reading the multiple interpretations as much as we are reading the text itself. let me give an example. I'm preparing a sermon for Sunday focusing on the strange and awful text of Genesis 22 which describes the 'binding of Isaac'. To make sense of this story, I have referred to modern writings about the place of Mt Moriah in the imagination of Jews and Muslims, to Kierkegaard's famous thought experiment on the story (Fear and Trembling), to the depictions on canvas of the moment of almost-sacrifice by Caravaggio and Rembrandt, to a modern reflection on these paintings, to a 20th Century Jewish commentary on the text, to the original Hebrew of the story, to a modern work on the place of mountains in human imagination and to my pastoral practice in a cancer hospital. On top of that, I have read the story alongside the Gospel narrative with which it is paired - Mark's account of the Transfiguration - and the representation of that story in Eastern iconography. Of course, not all of this will find its way into a sermon of little over 1000 words, but whether we acknowledge it or not, this history of interpretation by real communities of people struggling to make sense of life makes our reading infinitely rich and fecund.

Karen Armstrong makes the case strongly in The Case for God that we cannot think of religious texts and religious insights separately from the lived experience of communities of practice. We read these texts together within the context of worship, ritual and compassionate practice. They don't sit on our shelves like reference books. We make judgements about the relative prominence given to the texts based on that history of reflection while never being dismissive of the possibility that our judgements often need to be adjusted in the light of experience. Alongside the Bible, a wonderful example of this is the Rule of St Benedict, which still guides the life of nuns and monks across the world after 14 centuries of lived experience. It would be foolish to suppose that this little piece of Wisdom literature is read and practised in exactly the same way now as it was at the time of its writing, but it would be equally foolish to ignore the real continuities of practice and insight.

We bother with the Bible because others have done so before us, because others do so with us and because this collective bothering has yeilded hard-won insights into the mysteries of human life.

I'd like to offer a reflection from another Richard, Ricjhard Rohr, the radical American Franciscan. I think he says all of this much better than I can:

How can we look at the Biblical text in a manner that will convert us or change us? I am going to define the Bible in a new way for some of you.The Bible is an honest conversation with humanity about where power really is. All spiritual texts, including the Bible, are books whose primary focus lies outside of themselves, in the Holy Mystery. The Bible is to illuminate your human experience through struggling with it. It is not a substitute for human experience. It is an invitation into the struggle itself—you are supposed to be bothered by some of the texts. Human beings come to consciousness by struggle, and most especially struggle with God and sacred texts. We largely remain unconscious if we avoid all conflicts, dilemmas, paradoxes, inconsistencies, or contradictions.

The Bible is a book filled with conflicts and paradoxes and historical inaccuracies. It is filled with contradictions and it is precisely in learning to struggle with these seeming paradoxes that we grow up—not by avoiding them with a glib one-sentence answer that a 16-year-old can memorize. If I had settled for the mostly one-line answers to everything from my Fr. McGuire’s Baltimore Catechism, my spiritual journey would have been over in the third grade. And for many people, otherwise educated in other fields, that is exactly what happened. We created people with quick answers instead of humble searchers for God and truth, which never just falls into your lap, but is only given as a gift to those who really want it and desire it.

 

Was Jesus an 'activist'?

Fellow motorists might have wondered whether I was entirely sane this morning at about 7.52am as I argued out loud with the voice on my radio. The voice was that of Anne Atkikns on Thought for the Day who was talking about the difficulty of conscripting Jesus to any of our particular causes, and I have some sympathy with that view. But the phrase that made me splutter was her assertion that the one thing of which she could be sure was that Jesus was not an activist. It is, without doubt, unhelpful to try to attach modern categories to the ancient world, but I wonder what on earth she meant by saying so confidently that Jesus could not fit into this particular category. What else would you call someone who raises public issues in public places, who unambiguously sides with the poor and dispossessed, who undertakes symbolic actions to make his position dramatically clear, who appoints leaders to further his cause, who saves his sharpest words for the centre of religio-political power, who so riles the powerful elites that they execute him as a threat to public order? I imagine that the opposite of an activist is one who chooses not to raise difficult issues in public, who devotes himself to armchair pursuits, who nails his colours to the dead-centre of the fence and who insists that religion is very much not something to talk about in polite society.

Now, I do have a bit of a cold, so it's possible that I misheard Anne Atkins, but if not, I feel that this is not the time for Christians to be seeking to withdraw from taking sides on difficult public issues. Interestingly, Atkins used Jesus' parable of the rich man who accumulated much wealth (Lk 12:13-21) to support her view. What she did not say was that when God says that the rich man's life will be demanded of him, he also asked 'And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'. There is a straightforward answer to that question - they will belong to the beneficiaries of his estate. Wealth does not simply evaporate in this world of ours and you have to 'follow the money' to see the true nature of the ethics of our financial systems. Neither did Atkins point out that Jesus' own take on this parable was to 'be on one's guard against all kinds of greed.' Neither did she refer to Jesus' warning a few verses later about the existential dangers of wealth - 'you buried your heart where you hid your treasure' (J.D. Crossan's paraphrase).

Was Jesus an activist? Yes, and he called ordinary people to do likewise.

An Aberdonian Jesus

My first encounter with paintings that captured my imagination was as a teenager in Aberdeen's city Art Gallery. And one of the painters who is best represented in that excellent collection is the local artist William Dyce, whose work also adorns walls in the Houses of Parliament and All Saints, Margaret Street in London. Dyce was not what you might think of as a typical Aberdonian - anglo-catholic, respected art historian, devotee of the painters of the Italian Renaissance - but it's worth remembering that this apparently far-flung northern city also has Britain's fifth oldest university and longstanding trade links across northern Europe and beyond. But for all his cosmopolitanism, Dyce remained thoroughly rooted in the land and history of Scotland's North East corner. His painting of Dante's Beatrice was one that caught my attention many years ago and speaks most unambiguously of Dyce's historical and international perspective:

By contrast, or so it would appear, his moving little picture of Jesus as the man of sorrows is clearly set in the Scottish hills. This picture hangs in the National Gallery in Edinburgh:

However, all is not as it may seem. Although Dyce was clearly intending to 'incarnate' his religious images in the landscape he knew best, this was no parochial move. In giving such unmistakably local colour to his biblical paintings, Dyce was firmly in the company of the Italian artists he loved. And in a curious way, it seems to me that choosing to locate the scene in a particular place is a way of saying that it can belong to any place. The Galilean wilderness becomes the barren moorland of the Scottish hills as easily as the olive groves of Tuscany.  In this image, the contemplative, even melancholic stillness of Jesus is intensified by the deserted landscape. The identifiable location does not render the image inaccessible to those who do not know the land, but makes it more surely a universal human image because we all exist in some place.

I have loved this picture for many years, so was delighted when a patient picked it out of a book of Scottish art that I lent her as the image that gave her the most comfort through a difficult patch. She found that it spoke to her desire to find a place of solitude and stillness where she could draw strength for her difficult journey.

Rich Gleanings, Thin Pickings

Yesterday, I spent a little time preparing an introduction to the book of Ruth in the Hebrew Bible for a study group. It is a short story about Ruth, a widow, who leaves her homeland of Moab to accompany her mother-in-law Naomi, also a widow, back to her land of Judah. Eventually, the younger woman marries again and has a son by her new husband Boaz, keeping her family lands in the family and securing a place in society again for Naomi. The story has many fascinating strands, including the means by which Ruth gets her man, and sheds light on some interesting customs relating to inheritance. It is a story of poverty and exile, of harvest and kinship, and, above all, of loyalty and community. This drawing by Rembrandt shows Boaz giving Ruth six measures of grain after her daring approach to him by night. He then ushers her off before there is enough daylight for anyone to find out that he has spent the night with her!

As a part of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, it is also a shared story and a paradigmatic one. Despite its brevity, it bears repeated retelling, not least because it is a well-crafted tale which takes in some of humanity's enduring concerns. As a part of a shared religious culture, I wonder how often this story has been invoked to remind people of the demands of kinship loyalty, of the welcome due to strangers, of the subtleties of sexual attraction and perhaps even of some of the niceties of inheritance law. The story is not overtly theological, but God does appear in the narrative although more in the background than as a key actor. This is another example of where the modern preoccupation with religion as a set of metaphysical propositions breaks down. Religion provides a set of shared human stories that provide a common narrative resource with which to explore life's more complex issues.

It seems clear to me that this stock of shared stories declines when religion becomes less of a significant feature in many people's lives. Culture does not seem to provide the same set of stories, except in more limited ways - how likely is it that a cross section of our society would have any story to call on as an example of how people have coped with some of life's major issues? One small part may be able to refer to Eastenders and an even smaller part might be able to recall something of Macbeth, but it is not likely that there would be any set of enduring stories held in common. This effect seems likely to be compounded by the availability of such a wide range of narratives through electronic media. Perhaps the closest we come to a source of shared narratives with some kind of moral dimension is in the detailed knowledge of court cases like that of Amanda Knox, but these stories will not last long in the public imagination and do not address the more normal human transactions you find in a text like Ruth.

I think that something has been lost to our wider societies and cultures with the loss of these shared stories, but I think the opportunity is still there for the communities who do cherish them to draw on their wisdom and to ensure that they continue to be told for the common good.