It’s time to return to what I intended to be the essence of this blog when the website was launched ten years ago – spirituality. Following my retirement as Director of Changing Attitude in 2015 I imagined I would, or ought to be, living a life freed from the deep commitment to reporting on and pursuing justice and equality for LGBTQIA+ people in the Church of England that had been a dominant focus for twenty years..
In 2015 the Shared Conversations had come to an end, and ‘good disagreement’ was held to be the desired outcome. Prophetically, I wrote that “The Conversations should have addressed the question: How do we stay together? The assumption was that there will be a fracture and when it happens, it will be small and done with profound sadness, with a measure of grace, disagreeing well. Maybe 80% of the C of E would hold together with fractures at either end of the spectrum.” I noted at the time that the Pilling group was an ill-conceived exercise in the first place, marked by a lack of coherence and competence in the Church.
Just over ten years later, “good disagreement” was being expressed at the February Synod meeting in less disagreeable terms. Even so, the conservative determination to block every move towards any change in the doctrine of the Church that validated marriage or the blessing of same-sex sexual activity has become a rock impossible for the House of Bishops to circumvent, even if 80% of Church of England members are now unfazed by such a development. What is clear is that the conservative 10% refuse to go while the progressive 10% of is a declining force because LGB people either choose to marry and forfeit any possibility of their vocation being validated, or leave for a more friendly Province, or withdraw from the Church or avoid involvement with an institution that is homophobic and abusive.
The House of Bishops has proposed to continue a process that looks increasingly futile and unhealthy – and yet I am still addicted to the pursuit of a process that seeks, ultimately, to change the most addictive, homophobic attitudes. Fortunately, my contemplative practice and my commitment to pursuing a healthy spiritual life means that I am fuelled by ideas that seek to overcome the House of Bishops’ inability to overcome the conservative roadblock.
Is it time to redraw our maps? was the headline of an article in the Guardian Saturday Review on 13 December 2025. Laura Spinney set out the reasons why new knowledge in areas from migration to ecology are making new cartographic demands. She has been provoked by President Donald Trump’s campaign to annex Canada, Trump calling the border with Canada an artificial line that had been drawn with a ruler “right across the top of the country”. He suggested that the map of North America would look more beautiful without it.
Trump, says Spinney, drew attention to the fact that the maps most of us grew up with convey a deceptively tidy view of the world – one parcelled into homogenous blocks that admit no challenge to the objectivity, omniscience or truth shown on maps.
Whatever the projection used, Mercator and others, maps represent countries with clear-cut frontiers and distorted shapes and volumes that still shape our thinking today. Some cartographers are now calling for a mapping revolution, wanting to replace the state-centric, Mercator projection mindset with one that emphasises mobility, human connections and more accurate spatial outlines. Historian William Rankin of Yale University wants cartography to embrace a new set of values. Rather than aspire to neutrality, objectivity and sharp distinctions, map-makers should embrace uncertainty, subjectivity and multiplicity with maps that challenge our dominant, inherited narrative. Although technical wizardry is constantly expanding the possibilities for visualising patterns of data and attempt to present more accurately a sphere on a flat plane, it is impossible to depict a sphere in two dimensions without introducing distortion. The perfect map of the countries of the earth will never exist. Accepting that perfection in mapping is unattainable might allow us to be more forgiving of imperfection.
Mapping God
All my life the maps I have found the “maps” used by Christians and other religions to “portray” or “define” God to be inadequate representation of the ultimate Mystery and essence of life, life in all its fullness. In earlier periods of my life the maps being used recognised the inadequacies of our attempts to interpret our traditions in the light of contemporary wisdom and knowledge. The maps being used today, by contrast, seem to be increasingly inaccurate.
I’ve written in previous blogs about being a child and adolescent who from an early age was intuitively redrawing the traditional, orthodox Christian maps presented by the Church, rooted in the Bible as interpreted by tradition, reason and experience, codified in theologies, doctrines and dogmas. Revising our map of the fundamentals of Christianity – God the Father, Jesus the Son, the Holy Spirit the Comforter – has required a constant redrawing of Christian maps, revising what we thought we knew according to new discoveries about our planet, our universe and ourselves.
The Living Love and Faith process has reached a moment of hiatus. Arguments and disagreements between progressives and conservatives will continue. The House of Bishops either cannot or are unwilling to commit themselves to a route that, if not resolving the conflicts, might allow progress to be made towards recognising that the map of faith in God we have been working with is no longer adequate to our knowledge about human identities, let alone the increasingly vulnerable, fragile state of our planet and human societies and cultures, and the unfathomable depths of the universe.
I believe those with intuitive spiritual awareness, courage and vision need to become more active in describing the parameters of faith required to evolve our contemporary “God-map”, but not many of my contemporaries seem to be engaged in this vital exploration. I’m finding the faintest glimmers, rare people with a more “accurate” awareness of such a “God-map”.
I perceive that there are key ingredients to those engaged in this task. They comprise the essences of contemplation, silence, meditation and personal presence and awareness, openness, trust in our intuition, openness to our physical bodies, emotional presence and experience. The people I meet who are developing and living a contemplative practice and pattern of life are the people living innately with a healthier, more deeply truthful “God-map”. They have a more natural essence within of goodness, love, wisdom, depth, and of what draws me more deeply into God – that which John’s Gospel names “life in all its fullness”.
I believe the Church should embody and model these essential qualities in today’s context of a Trumpian world in which autocratic, abusive leadership is sought by people who are more fragile, vulnerable, insecure, abused and abusing and addictive. The qualities and values vital to healthy, non-abusive human societies and cultures are needed as primary qualities to be developed in the life of every congregation and the ministry of every priest, preacher, teacher and leader. The flourishing I experienced in earlier decades is fundamental to human health, flourishing and well-being, whatever religion or philosophy or Christian tradition we profess. My life is rooted in the essence of life in all its fullness, a flourishing spiritual life that enhances my energy and well-being, rooted in my body awareness of goodness, love, wisdom, enriched by dwelling every day in the cosmic presence of unconditional love, wisdom, goodness and life in all its fullness. That’s my “God-map”.