I am an evolving person. We are all evolving people. And we live in an evolving universe. We members of the human race, the only yet-known life form that has developed the capacity for awareness and self-reflection in the universe. Our human capacity for self-reflection is a relatively recent evolutionary development in the 13.7 billion year evolutionary span of the cosmos. Even more recent is the development of our awareness of evolution. We learnt less than two hundred years ago that we are the products of an evolutionary process. In the course of the last two hundred years human knowledge has expanded exponentially. This has given rise to a number of global systemic problems that, at the time of writing, we are unable to respond to effectively: a global climate crisis; a potential crisis for democracy in the USA and elsewhere; prejudices about race, gender and sexuality; economic and social inequality between nations and within society.
There is another problem that we are as yet unable to solve; the inability of religious thought to process the implications of evolution. For example (and of specific relevance to my vocation as a priest, an activist, a campaigner for equality for LGBTQIA+ people, and a contemplative) is that the Church of England (and the Christian Church in general) has yet to recognise that the Bible was written and Jesus lived and taught in the period prior to our discovery of the process of evolution and with it, the age of the universe.
The debates taking place in the Church of England about human sexuality and gender are taking place in a theological environment that fails to factor in the reality of evolution. It is being conducted by proponents (including me) who are arguing against opponents at a primitive level of understanding. I blame the opponents – of course! Their religious mindset operates as if evolution isn’t effective within the realm of religious ideas. For them, the whole of the Bible can be used as a resource indiscriminately as if any apparently relevant idea, quotation, verse or passage can be quoted to support ideas that in our contemporary, evolutionary world are understood to be wrong.
Christianity - and all the major world religions - have a lot of catching up to do. So do I. Every morning I read for an hour and meditate for thirty minutes. My ideas evolve. I read books that alter and expand my awareness. This happens through a mixture of chance and revelation (what some people would understand as divine revelation).
Spirituality seeking theology
At the moment I am reading a book by Roger Haight, S.J.: Spirituality Seeking Theology. It had been put on one side for me by the assistant in Church House Bookshop. Published in 2014, it had been remaindered, reduced from £26 to £4.99. It is proving to be invaluable. The blurb on the back says “Roger Haight suggests ways in which spirituality – the cultivation of a relationship with the transcendent – can lead spiritual seekers to open-ended questions of theology. I highly recommend the book.
Haight has written the book I spent fifteen years trying to write. I wish I had come across his book thirteen years ago! I had thought that the evolutionary movement in theology that so inspired me in the 1960s had effectively declined and almost vanished over the last three decades. I’m learning today that it still evolves, but in people and places that no longer attract attention.
The word ‘God’
Let me try and describe the thoughts and ideas that have been coming to me this week. In my time of contemplation I am developing the teachings learnt thirty years ago when I trained as a psychotherapist. I am trying to integrate awareness of my body and body energies with the practice of breathing and consciousness of my/our bodies as our personal resource for the experience of ‘God’. ‘God’ has become a difficult word, too often used anthropomorphically. God is taken to be the name another being in our cosmos, albeit one with divine power, mystical presence and no physical body or location. We can come to know something of God, says conservative, traditional Christianity, by coming to know Jesus. We do this by reading the Bible, and in particular, the Gospels. But, as Haight explores, Jesus of the Gospels is a complex figure, woven together in the decades after his death from the memories of and stories told by his followers. But just as there is no single idea of what marriage means in the Bible, neither is there in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, a single, universal idea of God. Ideas about God evolve through the Bible narrative.
Our thinking about God
How do I, do we, do you, do other people, think about God (and Jesus)? I know I think differently about God from other people. We all have our own conceptual version of God. Churches, bishops, theologians, mystics, men, women, gay activists, homophobes, misogynists, etc., each have their own version of ‘God’. Some claim their version to be the unique, unquestionable, authorised, ‘true God’’. ‘He’ isn’t. It’s their version of a truth. We think we ‘know’ God, but we don’t. We know God in the same way we know ourselves and other people – partially, incompletely, and elusively.
Haight says that:
“Because God is God, the infinite transcendent mystery, human beings have no ability whatsoever to know God directly or to comprehend God in concepts and language. Human beings more accurately may be said to have a sense of God, experience intimations of God, feel God’s presence, project language about God that tries to bring God’s reality to expression, intuit God, encounter God beneath or above all words, within the marvels of creation.”
[We have] “the paradoxical situation in which God can be known in a mediated way in the created world around us and within us. But one cannot positively read off the surface of events an understanding of God’s absolute transcendent mystery.” (p49)
The content of the word ‘God’ and meaning we give to the word is a contemporary problem.
Thinking about Jesus
‘Jesus shows us what God is like’ is the Christian answer to the question ‘show us God’. But the same question raised about God then arises – which Jesus? The Jesus we think we know from the Gospels is a creation of his first followers using their memories and the stories they told about Jesus combined with the many new ideas about the nature and essence of Jesus that evolved during the centuries following his death.
Each of us thinks about Jesus in relation to ourselves and our own experience, influenced by the culture of our particular church and congregation, our social culture, and contemporary Christian culture. We think about Jesus’ humanity in relation to our humanity, and his divinity in relation to – what? If we think about his spirituality and prayer life, we are likely to do so in relation to our spiritual awareness and pattern of prayer. If we think about Jesus’ pattern of life, his friendships, teaching and practice, we are likely to do so in an idealised way – he is the Son of God, after all, not like us.
Grounding Jesus
But we are like Jesus. We are embodied like Jesus. We have the same body organs as Jesus, the same physiognomy, the same brain, the same consciousness, the same emotions, the same breathing and digesting and evacuating. We share the same social dynamics of family and friends. Do we share the same dreams, visions and convictions? Isn’t that what Christians are assumed to do? One thing we do not share with Jesus is the same world view, the same conception of the planet on which we live, let alone the same historical, evolutionary world view. Jesus did not have an understanding of evolution in the same way as us.
I think about our human identity in a way that is different both from Jesus’ thinking and probably from the thinking of most of you reading this.
Each of us is a unique physical presence, a living, breathing, chemical and electrical energy field. Our bodies are an embodied reality, complex, subtle energy fields. In this respect, we are exactly the same as Jesus. However, our particular consciousness, wisdom and experience, unique to us, may be impoverished, not quite the same as Jesus – nor anyone else. Our entire physical, psychological and genetic make-up is never quite the same as anyone else. I believe there are elements we all share, even if we don’t quite believe them. We share a common spiritual essence, experiential convictions about the qualities of love, truth, kindness, goodness, beauty and wisdom. Our hearts melt when we encounter visions and images that we interpret as beautiful and that melt our ‘soul’. This we share with Jesus. They also give us what we interpret as ‘intimations of God’.
I want to describe my own contemplative experience and the thoughts, visions and ideas that come to me when I read and meditate each morning – but they will have to wait for a future blog.