My ideas based on maps and mapping described in my previous blog, Time to redraw our God-map, didn’t work for some Thinking Anglicans and Facebook readers. Having just re-read the blog, I’m feeling inclined to invite everyone to read it again! It sets out very clearly what I’m still thinking and still wanting to say:
“All my life I have found the “maps” used by Christians and other religions to “portray” or “define” God to be inadequate representations of the ultimate Mystery and essence of life, life in all its fullness. In earlier periods of my life the maps I was presented with recognised the inadequacies of our attempts to interpret our traditions in the light of contemporary wisdom and knowledge. The maps being used today, in contrast, seem to be increasingly inaccurate.”
One respondent who emailed me thought maybe I’d got it all wrong. He said the analogy of maps doesn’t work – it mystifies.
Another person wrote that maps for them:
“… are nearly always tools for travelling, showing paths and roads to proceed along the terrain to avoid and difficulties to encounter and then to be prepared for. All these are physical things, and maps show them in physical ways by shape and colour, but your God-map requires a route to “… more natural essence [..] of goodness, love, wisdom, depth …“ I suppose the God-map will show how to avoid problems that are “… more fragile, vulnerable, insecure, abused and abusing and additive.” All these things are emotional, so how you’ll display them physically beats me. How’s your map to be drawn? What will it look like? I know it won’t be literally drawn but it’s too difficult for me to visualize.”
One response to this comment would be that maps are indeed not literal representations of the world but use symbols to communicate what the landscape looks like. If you learn to interpret the symbols effectively, over time you will develop an intuitive sense of what to expect the landscape to be like. Familiarity with a map’s symbols helps us navigate our journeys better and refine our visualisation of the actual landscape.
The problem for some of those who responded to my blog is that they seem to take both my analogy of mapping and Christian ideas about God too literally. I understand that the Christian Church commonly works with images of buildings and foundations and spires pointing to Heaven and ideas such as Absolute Truth and the problem of Evil. But I work intuitively, visually, emotionally. I’m a Myers-Briggs INFP. I understand that other people don’t share my way of perceiving God and life but my starting point is love, unconditional, infinite, intimate love; and “life in all its fulness”.
I’ve been prevaricating for two weeks, not knowing where to go next with my ideas about “mapping God”. Last weekend, rescue came in the form of an article in The Observer by Kenan Malik. It was headlined:
When everything is taken literally, meaning itself can swiftly start to unravel
Malik’s article begins with religion:
“Literalism was once the province of the religious. Fundamentalist believers regarded the Bible or the Qur’an as the inerrant word of God, to be read literally rather than allegorically. Today, literalism is increasingly embedded in the secular world.”
“Even the most fervent believers rarely take every word in the Bible or Qur’an literally. What religious literalism does in ensure that human thinking is evacuated from the process of understanding. Meaning becomes that which is given by authority.”
Literalism and fundamentalism or free-thinking intuition?
Maps of our world can be designed to do different things. A road atlas is suitable for planning a long car journey. We’ve become increasingly used to relying on SatNavs and Google maps instead of a road atlas, but SatNavs and Google maps don’t provide us with context, an awareness of the area we driving through, let alone a “map” or “impression” of the landscape. One of the great things Ordnance Survey maps is that they come in a variety of scales, smaller scales for covering long distances and larger scales for walking, hiking and exploring footpaths and new terrain. Larger scale OS maps provide detailed information that helps me locate where I am in a way that SatNav and Google maps totally fail to do. A good map can create an impression of the landscape that can help us orientate where we are and even form an impression of what to expect. They can be a resource for my intuition and imagination, developing a sense of where I’d like to visit.
There is a parallel here for me in working with a metaphorical, intuitive map of my Christian faith. My map has been resourced by involvement with the Church of England from the age of four – resources from the Bible, worship, liturgy, ritual, hymns and songs, sermons and teachings and all the traditions and doctrines of the Church, directly and indirectly. But MY FAITH has mostly been lived intuitively, formed by the people in the congregations where I’ve worshipped and the significant individuals with whom I’ve connected and been affected by.
My map of God developed in the context of my sexuality, my strongly intuitive, contemplative, introvert personality, by Southwark Diocese, south London, by the revolution of the liturgical movement embedded in language, worship patterns and transformative use of space, by theological developments, globalisation, political and economic transformations, by London theatre, my architectural training, Westcott House, psychotherapy both as a client and as a trained practitioner, and by the gift of trusting my intuition when it was creating a different map from the Church’s map of God and Jesus and history.
A dissenting life
One result of all these influences is that I have lived a dissenting life, a person at odds one way or another with the direction of travel of the institutional Church that, despite this, selected me for training and ordained me as a priest but hasn’t known what to do with me for the past twenty years. I’m at odds with the primary direction of travel of today’s C of E. I knew I was at odds with God at the age of 11. I still am. I still believe God to be at odds with many widely held ideas about God and God’s story. The Christian Church goes through periods of understanding and to some degree tolerating those of us with an innate, intuitive, mystical awareness of the divine, holy, sacred, incarnational presence of the Mystery. I needed the mystical space created by the remapping of God in the last century for my gay man’s God-given sexuality with the desires, loves and intimacies that go with the gifts of our sexualities to be able to flourish.
This awareness of my difference is very specifically MY problem; AND the House of Bishops’ problem and General Synod’s problem and Living in Love and Faith’s problem and Together for the Church of England’s problem and that sibling of GACON, the Global Anglican Council’s problem.
I live by and am inspired by and am committed to a very different map of the Christian God from those claiming fundamental adherence to a very literal faith and version of the Christian Gospel that is working with a map of God, the Bible and Christian faith that is sadly and often shockingly inadequate and inaccurate as a guide for faith today, resulting in misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic prejudice and abuse.