These verses contain some powerful imagery. I think maybe we the Church have good reason not to be too literal about our interpretation of scripture. The tragedy of institutional religion is that it is very good at stumbling blocks. Within a few hundred years of its birth the church became politically and socially powerful – and couldn't resist wielding authority and control, manifesting itself as the placing of a plethora of stumbling blocks before the people – blocks to what they could and could not believe, or do. We are still in the throes – what I would hope are the death throes of that historical legacy. There we have it – the whole of church history in four or five lines! I had conversations to this effect at each of the three 'gigs' I had in the last three days..... my gig, a funeral for a large Edinburgh family yesterday who don't have a live church connection, and Suzanne and David's lovely wedding yesterday. This is a live issue.
The website of the writer Jeanette Winterson (www.jeanettewinterson.com) is perhaps not the obvious place to go for spiritual inspiration, but I know people who do. Ms Winterson may now be a sceptic about religion, but her gifts as a former child preacher shine through. She captures a sense of the transcendent, the holy. For her, this is found in art, which encourages life at the highest level. Her appeals to engage with life fully, to open the heart and mind when it is easier to close them, and to keep on praying strike a chord with readers disillusioned by the Church. I came across the site when searching for information about an old acquaintence, the Scots poet Harry Smart. We worked together some years back on a project for the BBC. Here is the poem that Jeanette Winterson listed amongst her favourites.
PRAISE
Harry Smart
From the collection Fool's Pardon
1995
Praise
be to God who pities wankers
and has mercy on miserable
bastards.
Praise be to God who pours his blessing
on
reactionary warheads and racists.
For he knows what he is doing; the healthy
have no need of a
doctor, the sinless
have no need of forgiveness. But, you
say,
They do not deserve it. That is the point;
That is the point. When you try to wade
across the estuary at
low tide, but misjudge
the distance, the currents, the soft
ground
and are caught by the flood in deep schtuck,.
then perhaps you will realise that God
is to be praised for
delivering dickheads
from troubles they have made for
themselves.
Praise be to God, who forgives sinners.
Let him who is without sin throw the first
headline.
Let him who is without sin
build the gallows, prepare the
noose,
say farewell to the convict with a kiss.
Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the "spirituality" section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God. It is for people who somehow want to be religious, who want to know what it means to know the divine, but for good reasons are not and do not. If the religious have come to own religious discourse it is because they alone have had places where religious language could be spoken and understood. Now there is a forum for the supposedly non-religious to think and talk about what religion is, is not and might be.
One current article is about country singer Johnny Cash who died last week:
Cash sang plenty of songs about white trash and long-legged women and traveling the country from Amarillo to Pocatello. But such country record staples were merely rest stops along the long musical road Cash traveled, beginning at the small town of his personal shortcomings and finally arriving in the metropolis of self-determination. Looking back, Cash always sang about prisons and jails and the things we do to get sent there. And being from the South, he always drew on gospel allusions to punctuate his point. Hell, this reformed drug addict knew more straight-up gospel songs than most small town church ladies. The records he made at the end of his life are far more cathartic and indeed more religious than an entire choir singing “Amazing Grace” on Easter morning.
If Jesus was indeed challenging his disciples for their failure to accept the contributions of those outside their immediate fold but who nonetheless espoused the values of God's realm, then we need to recognise that his criticism is about as stinging as his words are anywhere in the gospels. What might be different about our Christianity that might counter this instinct for putting barriers in the way of everyday faith?
I was impressed by an article I read last week by the Dean/Chaplain of New College, Oxford and I would conclude by quoting it to you.
For
those people, the Church, obsessed with its internal politics, seems
not to offer a gateway to the divine. This summer, as debate about
sexuality have reached fever pitch, faithful Christians have
come to me with heavy hearts because they see the Church as excluding
rather than welcoming them, and they don't know how to walk back in
its doors. One now plays tennis on a Sunday morning; another has
started Buddhist meditation; others are holding on, but losing hope.
What the Churches fail to present publicly is a sense of the mystery
and, ultimately, unknowability of God, and the humility that goes
with that. There is a tradition within Christianity that suggests
that God is so beyond our human
understanding that we cannot ever know him, and it is only by
acknowledging this that we can approach a glimpse of him.
This
via negativa, or negative
way, has thrived on the margins of the Church in the mystics, from
Dionysius the Areopagite to the author of The Cloud of
Unknowing and St John of the
Cross. They teach us that acknowledging the mystery of God takes us
beyond our narrow, inadequate, all-too-human frames of reference for
the divine. But the Churches have too often tended to domesticate
God, laying claim to a certain knowledge of who God is, who God likes
and what God wants. This leaves out the mystery — the transcendent
God witnessed by a few disciples in the great moment of the
transfiguration; that sense of the divine we glimpse in the
paintings, music and writings of great artists. It also leads to
exclusion and condemnation rather than welcome and humility, when
encountering different human beings. I recently passed a church
noticeboard with the old line: "CH—CH. What's missing from
this? UR." This may be true, but we shouldn't assume
that it means people don't want or haven't a spiritual life.