godblog

AHAHAHA! Endorsed by Rowan Williams, no less!

(I KNOW, I KNOW. I'm really crushing on the Virgin Mary at the moment. I'll talk about it another time.)

The first thing that happened was that I was persistently distracted by an earworm. The earworm was 'I've Got A Monster' by Ivor Biggun. My subconscious is an interesting place.

And the other thing was a set of realisations about the humiliation side of the Crucifixion. The emotional abuse that was heaped on Jesus in the time leading up to his death. The thought came into my head: Jesus crowned with thorns is the king of everyone who's ever been bullied. 

Thanks to those experiences, Jesus is right there in the suffering with everyone who's shamed, flamed, abused, insulted, laughed at, yelled at, exposed to public ridicule. Everyone who's ever felt like dirt and wanted to sink through the floor. Everyone who's ever felt completely alone. He's there. He's the king of everyone who feels alone. The king of fools and nobodies. And that turns everything upside down.

And now I'm thinking epiphanies are stoopid because I've known this on some level since the day I became a Christian, I just kind of got a booster shot of it.

Related epiphany: 'take up your cross and follow me' doesn't just refer to being willing to die or embracing suffering. Making convicted criminals carry their own cross through the streets was a public humiliation thing. An opportunity for the crowd to have a good jeer. So being willing to take up your cross and follow Jesus means being willing to follow Jesus into public humiliation.

Eep eep eep eep eep.

At which point it becomes a really good thing that Jesus is right there in the humiliation with you.

And this is deeply pertinent for me because a lot of what's going on for me spiritually at the moment is, you know, embarrassing and woo woo and I don't want to talk about it in case people tell me I'm crazy. Or make genuinely concerned suggestions that this might be a mental illness thing. Or nobody says anything but I feel like I have donkey ears on my head and a cuckoo popping out of my mouth anyway. But I'm getting the distinct impression that God wants me to take up my cross and talk about the woo woo in public.

Edit: 'woo woo' is a Havi term for 'airy-fairy-mystical stuff that some people may find offputting.' Obviously, all discussion of spiritual matters is woo woo to an extent, but most people (me included) have SOME point beyond which they stop thinking 'your spiritual experience seems legitimate' and start thinking 'get me out of here!'

I've recently made the acquaintance of the wildly inspiring and hilarious Touretteshero. Tourette's syndrome is her superpower! (Warning: her site is not worksafe. If you don't want to see swearing, go here to browse in safe mode.)

As you probably know, people with Tourette's syndrome come out with involuntary sayings, or 'tics'. She's decided to use her tics to bring humour and creativity to the world. Reading through the surreal sayings she posts on her site gets me literally laughing out loud, and I've taken to using it as a mood boost.

She invites people to illustrate her tics - I've done several, two of which are God-related. The first one was pretty easy to depict:

'God's got a lovely dog made of milk.'



The second one was instantly my favourite, but it took me ages to work out how to make a picture of it:

'God loves you, despite everything.'



Get it? It's a fail whale! And God loves you even when you feel like THAT big a failure! And the fail whale's blissed-out expression is completely appropriate for this picture!

I'm really pleased with this. Making it actually helped me get my head around the concept that God loves me despite everything. Or I should say helped me get my head further around it. It's an ongoing process! But I'm surprised how much a visual image helps.

A lot of things I think about writing here don't make it here. This is mostly for two reasons:

a) because unconnected snippets of Godbabble wander into my head and I don't have a coherent post to put them in,

or b) because epiphanies are stoopid. Right now I have a stoopid epiphany that I'd love to share... and probably will when I've thought of a way to put it that doesn't invite the response, 'Are you living in la-la land and do you need the basic facts of reality pointing out to you?'

In the meantime, here's a shining example of thing type a).

I used to think of the whole 'stewards of creation' thing as God flying the plane while the humans pushed the drinks trolley and did weird mimes to show all the other species where the exits were.

On account of there not being any planes when the King James Bible was written, the word 'steward' would have conjured up a different image. The image of a very busy, responsible, and capable person who took active charge of keeping everything running smoothly. In modern terms, the butler. (There WAS a job called 'butler' at the time, but that had more to do with the drinks trolley.)

So if we, as humans, are stewards of creation, that makes us - okay, not Jeeves, because that would make God Bertie Wooster and that's just sacrilege, however cute Hugh Laurie is. Let's say that makes us Alfred, which makes God Batman, which is clearly better.

A steward is the leader of a whole team of servants (so maybe not Alfred, then. As far as I can tell, Alfred IS the entire staff of Wayne Manor. All that cleaning!) In ecological terms, this gives us the mildly tear-jerking picture of all the other species as pages and gardeners and so forth, each one part of God's household and each one serving God in a different way. But all of us here to serve God, and all of us dressed in the same livery with our master's coat of arms...

Okay, now I've written that out it actually was quite a coherent post.

Yesterday I had a great time walking home in the rain, splashing in puddles and getting starry-eyed at rainbows. Realised (again) that paying attention to nature is a way of paying attention to God. Like you'd read your friend's book or go to your friend's show, because they put so much of them into it. And since God is Love, it's full of love and so it's also a way of getting love.

Easing back into this... let's talk about Totally Inconsequential Prayers! While walking home today I prayed, 'Please let me get to pat some nice bosers on the way home.' (And then didn't meet any bosers... I hope nobody's faith is rocked by this! ;)

Anyone else in the habit of making totally inconsequential prayers? Care to share? :)

So I wrote a story recently to express my revelation that Doing Things is not the point, BEING is the point. Which is one of those epiphanies that are stoopid.

I've been thinking a lot since about why rest and play are so important.

'Because they're awesome' is true, but can trigger my I Shouldn't Have This monster. ('SELFISH! You shouldn't ever rest or play when you could be Doing Things to make the world a better place!')

'Because they enable us to Do Things' is true, but not the whole truth. Viewing rest and play as just a fuel stop on the endless road of Doing Things is incredibly depressing and makes fun no fun any more.

'Because happier people make others happier' is also true (see the amazing Action for Happiness), but that still doesn't feel like the whole truth.

Then I realised. It's right there in the end of my story. Rest and play remind us that Doing Things is not the meaning of life, because they help us experience the meaning beyond doing - our intrinsic value, the fact that we exist and have a self and are unconditionally loved. And that feeling is really, really catching, so it's good for the people around us too. Play is divine magic!

Of course, you can also find that feeling in other places. I think the common thread is mindfulness. Sometimes when I'm praying, and being very wordy, silence just drops into my heart, as if God's saying, 'Shhh, pay attention.' Mindfulness leads to seeing the essential wonderfulness of everything - wow, I exist, everything exists - the joy of everything in itself. And then to the realisation that God feels like this every moment about everything - wow, it exists! - and that's love. God is that feeling, God is love.

Mindfulness in work, and finding the fun in work (often the same) can lead to that feeling as well. But you still need the rest and play to remind you that you and your value are not what you do. And also because God just loves to watch us squee! God is so full of squee. Imagine the most enthusiastic person you know talking about the thing they're most passionate about, and it doesn't even come close. And I think God loves seeing some of that in us. Made in God's image :)

It can also be weirdly easy to forget that God is a creative person! That childlike, playful, irresistible urge to MAKE STUFF is absolutely divine and fundamental to God's being - again, it's love. I can't even explain creativity without saying the word love so many times it sounds like nonsense. It's love turning love into love. Creativity isn't something you explain - it's like dogs, I explain everything else FROM it.

Speaking of explaining everything from dogs, I also need to babble about religion and the bose-nug dichotomy. It strikes me that pretty much all faiths have a nug (laws, rituals, meditative practices) that enables a bose (oneness with God, enlightenment). The nug is the structure and the bose is the energy it holds.

The nug is vital. For an example of someone who has absolutely no nug, look at the Joker. He personifies the childlike spirit of playfulness and wildness, but without even the most basic rules like 'Thou shalt not kill'. He's 'Do what thou wilt' without the 'Harm none'. Energy without structure. Terrifying.

This is why Jesus didn't come to abolish the law. Abolishing the nug would be scary. He came to fulfil it. He took the religion of the Pharisees, which had no bose and smelled terrible - law without love, structure without energy - and filled it with the energy of love.

Mr. Banks is structure without energy - he's all about rules for the sake of rules. The nug isn't supposed to exist for itself alone. Mary Poppins doesn't. She's an arch-nug who enables bosy things - love, wonder, fun, play, enlightenment, reconciliation and healing.

I have huge trouble deploying my nug in day-to-day life, so this could be useful for me. When I'm chafing at doing a nuggy thing I can ask myself, 'What bose does this nug exist for? What energy does this structure hold?' If the answer is love or wonder or fun then maybe I'll feel more like doing it - and if the answer is, 'erm, nothing, it's just a rule I've made so now I have to do it because it's a rule' then maybe I won't bother!

So for the past few weeks I’ve been praying over and over, ‘Please change me’. And it’s been working (as detailed here.) But today it started to feel untruthful. Change me? Was that really - quite - the thing?

Actually, I think it’s been brought on by this story I wrote yesterday. Or the story brought it on. Or both.

Change me? I think God’s trying to lead me towards myself, not away from it. So my new prayer is, ‘Please help me be me.’

It’s still a little bit uncomfortable, like a pair of new shoes. But it’s truthful for where I am right now. And I can see a possible future where it won’t be any more, because I’ll just know, in silence, that I am me, and I don’t need to ask for it any more than God needs to ask to be Love.

I’m not there yet. But I’m seeing it on the horizon. My attitude’s already shifting a bit. I’m getting more of a sense that I’m allowed to be me, that I’m allowed to be here and now, thinking my thoughts and feeling my feelings. It’s making me want to be in reality more, and it’s also making reality feel more like a story. More truthful.

The concept of ‘truthfulness’ comes from P.L. Travers. The Mary Poppins stories are not true. There never was such a person. But they are truthful. They have what Tolkien calls ‘internal consistency’, and something more (as Tolkien has something more) - something a bit beyond explanation. The way things ring true to the human soul is very different from the way they ring true to the brain.

This may be what Travers meant when she said that understanding is superior to knowing. Knowing with pragmatic certainty what something means is closed and left-brained. Mr. Banks knows. But instead you can choose to stay open and full of questions, to stand under something and let meaning fall down on you like rain. I love that.

So I’ve been experimenting a bit with doing what feels right for me - going with the flow, you might say. Which is also a tiny bit Jedi. The concept of the Force doesn’t sit perfectly with Christianity because yes, our God is energy and life-force, but our God is also a person (or three) with a mind and feelings, who would decidedly object to being channelled for evil. But the concept of being ‘in’ the Force strikes me as similar to being ‘in’ God’s will. Feeling that tide flowing around and through you, feeling which way it’s pulling you, and choosing to flow with it rather than fight it. I spend so much of my energy trying to suppress and avoid that voice. I’m getting tired.

And I’ve just realised - know what this means? The dichotomy between ‘being yourself’ and ‘abandoning yourself to God’s will’? NOT SUCH A DICHOTOMY. What feels right for you. What feels truthful. That’s where you are. That’s where God is. Wow.

Obviously, there are caveats - you still need your brain, you still need rational decision-making processes, you need to be wary of deluding yourself and just feeling what you want to feel - but a list of caveats isn’t the ending I want, so let’s go back a paragraph.

Wow.

I went to St. Paul's today and was privileged to witness an amazing and challenging sermon by Canon Giles Fraser (despite having resigned, he's still there working out his notice.)

He opened by saying that thanks to the lectionary - the book that tells clergy what Bible texts to preach on each day, making it impossible to avoid the awkward ones -  he'd been stuck with Luke 6:17-31. Yes, the whole 'blessed are the poor/woe to the rich' bit. And that he really wished he could have preached on something softer after this crazy couple of weeks, but there it was.

He said that when reading Scripture we always identify with the good guys - the poor, the ones who'll be blessed. This is a problem. It's when you realise the ways in which you're like the bad guys that it gets transformative. 

He spoke about Gillian Rose's findings on how visitors to Auschwitz identify with the prisoners and not the guards, and how much more transformative it might be if we could - just for a moment - see ourselves in the guards, and come out not with sentimental tears but with the dry eyes of deep grief. 

He also talked about Easter passion plays and how they have you shouting 'Hosanna' one day and 'Crucify' the next, and how that shakes you out of the assumption that you're the good guys.

He asked us to consider the ways in which we're the rich, the bad guys. He referred to the City as 'the boiler room of global capitalism' and said 'We all own shares in the way of the world.'

He said that he thought too many people on both sides of the Occupy debate had taken simple, black-and-white moral positions without knowing all the facts (he also mentioned protesters being clearer on what they didn't want than on what they did) and characterised this as looking for 'cheap grace'.

When he mentioned his decision to resign, someone in the congregation shouted out, 'Congratulations!' I think if he'd given us one second we'd all have been on our feet with a standing ovation. Instead he came back instantly with a very firm, 'No. Absolutely not.' I could feel everyone around me reeling.

Giles Fraser does NOT want our pats on the back for being one of the 'good guys' while his colleagues are the 'bad guys'. He reiterated what he'd said on Twitter, that it had been a tremendously difficult decision for everyone involved and that they'd all acted according to their consciences, and he asked us to pray for ALL of them at this time, not just for him.

He said that moral decisions were supposed to be difficult, complex and not clear-cut, and that looking for 'cheap grace' was dangerous. What we needed to look for was 'costly grace' - epitomised by the figure of a man dying on a cross.

I've never heard a voice from the pulpit sound the way his did at the last sentence of his sermon. It wasn't a preacher voice at all, it was absolutely human, raw, and angry and left the congregation shocked. The last thing he said was: 

'It's not supposed to be EASY!'