In an article in last Saturday’s Guardian, Ben Okri describes how, faced with the state of the world and the depth of denial (about the climate crisis), he has found it necessary to develop an attitude that he refers to as existential creativity. On the edge of the biggest crisis that has ever faced humanity “we need a new philosophy for these times, for this near-terminal moment in the history of the human.”
Reading this and reflecting on the way I feel about the Church at the moment, I can identify the same reaction in my experience of the Church. I am longing for a new existential creativity and a new theology for these times when the Church faces what I believe increasingly is a near-terminal moment. Christian culture is in regression, unable to proclaim and live the gospel of Jesus because it has become systemically addicted to siding with the powerful, to those who victimise and abuse, against the victims of abuse. I believe all of us involved in the Church are in one way or another victims of this culture of abuse and collude with it.
Ben Okri proposes an existential creativity that draws attention to the dire position we are in as a species, speaking only truth, truth that must be also beauty, calling for the highest economy and having a singular purpose.
Okri is troubled by the human inability to imagine its end. I am troubled by Christianity’s inability to imagine the effect of its decadent culture. There is, says Okri, something in the human makeup resistant to terminal contemplation. How else can one explain the refusal of ordinary, good-hearted citizens to face the realities of climate breakdown? If we don’t face them, we won’t change them. And if we don’t change them, we will not put things in motion that would prevent them. I have come to feel the same way about the Church of England. I perceive it to be in terminal breakdown. I am pursued by a conviction that I should put something in motion to change this trajectory. Okri’s language is, of course, rooted in the religious and spiritual. He believes “we have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive.
Says Okri, the ability to imagine what we dread most is an evolutionary tool that nature has given us to transcend what we fear. Imagining the worst might be one of the factors that makes us prevent it from happening. That is the function of dystopias and utopias: one to make real to us a destination we must not follow, the other to imagine for us a future that is possible.
This is a time when we ought to dedicate ourselves to bringing about the greatest shift in human consciousness and in the way we live. We ought to consecrate ourselves to bringing about a conscious evolutionary leap forward. No longer can we be the human beings we have been: wasteful, thoughtless, selfish, destructive. It is now time for us to be the most creative we have ever been, the most far-sighted, the most practical, the most conscious and selfless.
I was captivated by the vision and wisdom of the Church of England in my teens and twenties. As a result, I allowed myself to go forward as a candidate for ordination. Within my ministry in Camberwell and Wandsworth I pursued a vision of how we can be transformed as individuals and within a community by teaching and embodying a vision of life rooted in Jesus the Christ, selfless, deeply conscious, visionary, pursuing justice and truth, committed to the poor in spirit, rooted and grounded in love.
Okri says we are on the verge of losing this most precious and beautiful of worlds, a miracle in all the universe, a home for the evolution of souls, a little paradise here in the richness of space, where we are meant to live and grow and be happy, but which we are day by day turning into a barren stone in space. What is called for is a special kind of love for the world, the love of those who discover the sublime value of life because they are about to lose it.
That was my vision as a priest, of a special kind of love for the world and the people around me, seeking to discover the sublime value and quality of life I find in the gospels.
Okri believes a new, brave and visionary existentialism is called for. We have to be strong dreamers. We have to ask unthinkable questions. We have to go right to the roots of what makes us such a devouring species, overly competitive, conquest-driven, hierarchical. We can’t just ask the shallow questions any more. Our whys ought to go to the core of what we are. Then we ought to set about changing us. We ought to remake ourselves.
The Archbishops of the Church of England claimed to believe a radical (brave) new Christian inclusion is called for. For this to become a reality we, too, need to be strong dreamers asking unthinkable questions going to the core of what and who we are as people of God, called to set about remaking ourselves in the image of Jesus the Christ.
Bishops and leaders equivocate and pursue strategies that continue to abuse and victimise the vulnerable and innocent.
We need to become a new people, says Okri, creative and visionary because we can only make a future from the depth of the truth we face now. I believe this. I believe this challenges the failing Christian vision that is ill-serving the future of our species, a species in crisis.