God the ruler of everything - continuing the review of the Apostles' Creed

((Blog editor's note:) Another in the series from one member of our group, looking at the Apostles' Creed in segments.) 

Pantocrator - The ruler of everything

[ From Latin pantocrator, from Hellenistic Ancient Greek παντοκράτωρ (pantokrátōr). ]

‘I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth’, and I’m not going to lie: that hasn’t always been easy.  With so much suffering in the world, so much wrong, so much pain and hunger, and sheer incomprehensible darkness, this doesn’t just come across as hard to swallow — it comes across as downright offensive.  I have wrestled with the triad of all-knowing, all-powerful, and all good, and am very aware that that is a circle that cannot be squared no matter how much freewill you apply.  I have clung to the mystery writ large by the Book of Job and felt my fingertips slipping.  I have denied a Creator and braced myself against the cold winds that blew through my life thereafter; and then somehow, without even realising it, I have come to see that I was wrong.

In the West, we have culturally spent so much time proving God’s existence via tried and tested arguments from the world around us, that we have lost track of where our stories about God have come from.  I could not accept a Watchmaker who set things in motion then watched and washed their hands.  I could not respect a Creator who set us up to fail, or an abusive figure who doled out arbitrary rules, which were always going to get broken, and who seemed to relish in an overkill of retribution and punishment.  That God I had to hate, or I had to believe didn’t exist.

Well: that God doesn’t exist, yet tragically the tradition that talks God up is so mixed in with our Western cultural tradition (witness the classical terms I have used in this piece) that we don’t recall that that is not the God that we experience, nor is it the God revealed in the persona of Jesus.

To answer questions, of where the world has come from and why this or that happens, we have built up logical arguments and extrapolations that seek to make the world, and to make God, more intelligible — but in so doing we have lessened them.  Our tradition is rooted in the Bible, rather than the Upanishads, the Pāli Canon or the Qu'ran.  As, over time, we have treated the Bible like a book of information, not inspiration, in so doing we have set pitfalls for our own faith.

The Bible isn’t given us to answer our questions of natural science, geography, or history.  We have other stores of experience, sources of evidence, and the wonder of the questioning mind, to deal with such things. The Bible is a store of spiritual experience, a treasury of moments and characters that have inspired countless generations.  It is a tapestry and mosaic that brings together countless people over time and space.  It is something living, something amazing; we look to it for signs and clues, not simple facts — it is inspired and inspiring. 

When God creates in the Bible we do not see God at the ex nihilo [Latin for “creation out of nothing”] moment of bringing forth from nothing. The ‘beginning’ in the Bible is a beginning point from which to tell the tale. En Arche [the ancient Greek words at the start of Genesis, and the Gospel of John, with the primary senses of “beginning", "origin" or "source of action”] bears resemblance to our fabled  ‘Once upon a time’: it tells you this is where the story starts, what has gone before doesn’t matter, you don’t need an exact date to place it, its relevance isn’t limited to a single instance.  There are multiple ‘beginnings’ in the Bible; that isn’t a problem, as they are all places to begin telling the tale, the greatest Tale, the story of God and humankind. 

The Bible doesn’t say anything about how God made the world, but it tells us again and again that God is what makes the world possible.  God is what sustains everything, everything we see in flux, no single thing constant and remaining, all things distinct yet somehow united: God is what makes the many and the one possible.  The God that we cannot see in God’s many and oneness, yet revealed in the world.  We do not know God apart from the world; we cannot talk of a time where God sat and planned, before the world came into being.  It is in and through the world around us, the world we live in, the body’s world, that we know God, the God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). 

We do not encounter the world as a question, no matter how much we may question the many things in it and that happen here.  We are accustomed to try to ask ‘who made the world?’ because we have permitted ourselves a sense that this will validate our belief in God and all that comes from that.  It won’t and it doesn’t.  Trying to separate our experience of God from our experience of the world digs a chasm we cannot cross.  When we ask about 'why the world’ we are asking about some certain part of it, something we can imagine or point to, and in every instance, we do not need ‘God’ as the answer to that question.  The question about ‘why is there something rather than nothing’ answers itself: because there is. 

Left to ourselves the world would present itself as a fact, a reality to be got on with, in the way other animals do; but the Bible, when it tells us about Creation, presents the world as something else.  The world becomes a sign, not just a fact.  The Bible is inspired by that God revealed in the world, and the Bible inspires us to see God there.  Those first two chapters of Genesis tell a tale that will be referred back to again and again throughout the Bible: God walking in the garden with humankind, God looking for us, us hiding from God, choices and consequences, change but ever the same. 

I believe in God the Almighty, omnipotent, the source of all potential, all that might be.  God is not a wizard or an Olympic lifter; the bearded guy in the clouds is too little, the Watchmaker too mean.  I could not believe in those puppets and shadows, but I can embrace a certainty that everything comes from something, that everything is held together and somehow in all its multiplicity is one.  I can believe in God as all that might be, more than all that is and ever was but the foundation of it all the same.

I believe in God the Maker of Heaven and Earth.  I do not know the how of things but I do know that the world, as the Bible tells it, was made for God to walk in with humankind, and I know that that has never changed nor ever will, no matter how often we hide, or how often the plan seems to go wrong. 

I can find answers with my reason for all manner of things that happened in the world, choices and consequences, both foreseeable and not so.  I know that understanding why something happened doesn’t make it ok — we can learn from it but that doesn’t change it or expunge it.  But that’s consistent, because we don’t encounter in the Bible a God who makes everything ok, a God who protects all the righteous and deals out comeuppance to the wicked, quickly and easily. We do not find a God in the Bible who has a store of good things if you just ask nicely enough, if you just believe strongly enough.  We do not encounter such a God there, just as we do not encounter such a God anywhere.  If we struggle to believe in God as the Almighty and the Maker of Heaven and Earth, perhaps the question we should be asking is not ‘have we been betrayed by God’ but ‘have we betrayed ourselves and others by preaching a deity who never was’.  The God of the Bible is ever present not separate from the world.  The God of the Bible is seen in the world acting through those who answer God’s call.  God is shown looking for us, walking with us, talking to us. 

If you struggle to believe in God the Almighty, perhaps it’s time to ditch ‘God of the-ATM-in-the-sky and get-what-you-deserved-on-earth’.

I believe in God the Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

The missing man - Remembrance in Ringwood Meeting House

Some years ago our new group of Unitarians and friends started meeting in the Meeting House in Ringwood.  The Meeting House had been owned by a Unitarian congregation until the 1970s, in continuous operation as a place of worship for dissenting Protestants since 1727.  We think of ourselves as their natural successors.

Like many other churches in the country, the Meeting House congregation lost some of their number in the Great War of 1914-1918, and they commemorated their loss on this board.

A few years ago, someone investigating their family tree visited Ringwood, looking for the name of a family member on the town's War Memorial; but it wasn't there.  However, in dropping into the Family History archives held at the Meeting House, the name was found on the commemoration board.  In this way it was revealed that there was a name missing from the War Memorial.

This weekend we remember the loss of all military personnel and civilians who have placed themselves between us and danger, that our liberty might be sustained.  We remember how much we risk, when we allow our human discourse to descend into rancour and anger.  And we live with a sense of gratefulness, when we are able, that life is ours to live; life that we cannot create but only nurture or let wither.

At this time of grief, grief for and remembrance of so many things, I heed this message from Stephen Lingwood, a Unitarian minister in Cardiff:

"Unitarians must recognise that the world and human nature do not reflect perfectly the image of the divine..... it is nevertheless worth saying that we live in a world where things are imperfect: that there is a problem in human experience.  And it is not merely a technological problem that can be solved by technological thinking.  It is not simply that the world is organised in such a way that causes suffering and pain, and if we found the right way to organise it these problems would vanish.  That was the thinking of many in the past, and it could be argued that it was the thinking underlying the atrocities of the twentieth century.  Technology and technocratic thinking did not lead us to become better human beings, it simply made us more efficient at killing....Rather, the problem is theological: it is a problem inherent in what it means to be human, and it is a problem that requires a theological solution, or, in other words, salvation."

If you are saddened or troubled in these times, try the poppy meditation here:

Poppy Meditation

Perspective from an anxious 2020

[We take a break from our running series of contemplations on the Apostles' Creed, which will be taken up again in due course.  This post is by a different member of our group.]

Not at the end, but in the middle:

The Universe will collapse into another big bang;

    but beforehand

Galaxies will collide;

    but beforehand

The Sun will overheat and expand, swallowing and burning up all its planets and planetary matter;

    but beforehand

The Moon’s orbit will continue to enlarge, causing it to depart the Earth, causing great changes on Earth;

    but beforehand

Tectonic plate activity will have swallowed up Earth's current land mass and will have formed new geological shapes in its crust;

    but beforehand

The supercaldera at Yellowstone Park will have exploded and thrown a dust mantle around the Earth, blocking out all sunlight;

    but beforehand

Life on Earth shall long ago have forgotten humankind and carry on in ways almost alien;

    but beforehand

Several ice ages will have come and gone;

    but beforehand

The human species will have come to an end, probably having made itself and its ecosystem of other life forms extinct;

    but beforehand

My family, and everyone I know, will die after a course lengthened by human knowledge of medicine and food production, having lived lives more or less exploitative of the Earth; our lives profligate, cruel and unthinking, or not so much

None of this can be fixed:  so what’s to worry about?

This worry is partly about whether I am doing it “right”

But there is no greater adult or adult substitute looking over my shoulder to see and judge what I am doing

So it’s tempting to think that I have to be my own judge and jury; except that there’s conscience

And where does conscience come from?

The operational rules of biophysics that confer evolutionary advantage are embodied in human conscience

But where do the operational rules of biophysics come from?

When the universe collapses into another big bang, expansion, subsequent collapse, and continuing process, the operational rules that govern that, where do they come from?

Well:

All there is      is the ground of being.

And everything.  In those terms.  Is all.  Alright.

God the Intimate - Abba, Father - rich and contemplative provisos

(This is the fourth in our continuing series examining the wording of the traditionally Christian "Apostles' Creed" in a fresh way.)

Abba, Father

[God’s title of “Abba, Father” is only found referenced in the Bible three separate times, in the passages of Romans 8:15, Mark 14:36, and Galatians 4:6, which are all in the New Testament. Only two speakers utter these words in these passages: Jesus and the apostle Paul.  The word Abba is an Aramaic word that means “Father.”  It was a common term that expressed affection and confidence and trust. Abba signifies the close, intimate relationship of a father and his child, as well as the childlike trust that a young child puts in his “daddy.”]

I am going to use the words name and title interchangeably here. Though, be ready; I really want to be talking about title, even if I slip back into ideas around name.

I want to flag that fact, right up front and central; because whilst I always mean title, a way of saying something about ‘things’, a way of expressing a relationship of ‘things within a structure’, it is more common for us to talk in terms of name.  I am not looking to veer off into specialist language or make this jarring to read, but for the sake of honesty I want to be clear that this is what I mean.  Titles are bestowed from the outside; whereas the name is not just of them but from them.

A name, in the true sense, is personal.  A name is how we address someone we know.  If we’re lucky, the name by which we address someone also happens to be the name they know themselves by.  But this isn’t universally the case.  Does your cat really think his name is “Spike”?  Isn’t he, in his own understanding, “Cunning and Stealthy Hunter of the Night”?  A name is not as simple as what someone is called by, alerted by, invited by; it is how they understand themselves and it is how they give themselves to others.  Often the name we receive at our beginnings in our community  — as if it were indeed a title — is one we grow to fill.  For most of us it may become synonymous with the name in which we give ourselves to others; it may become integral to how we see ourselves.  But equally we can adapt it, even change it.  We tell others what our name is, no matter it may not originally have been our choice, no matter who may have given it to us first.  More seriously than “Spike” the cat, and perhaps of more relevance: is the name you gave to your son at birth the name she knows herself by (and has she yet told you her true name)?

Whereas, titles are about relationships: in fact, relationships are inherent to titles.  A community can teach us titles, because titles, like other jargon, are learnt by use within those communities.  We can all use the titles of our community, they belong to all of us, but the name is something given to us each personally.  “Please call me ‘Fred’,” is reserved for particular people within the community. 

However, even the titles we learn in our communities can become names — but they can only become names through a living relationship.  Then the name, unlike the title, is something we cannot share with others because it is not the sound of the word or the shape of the writing that creates the relationship, it is that living relationship that transforms that title into a name.  As an example: we call God by the title ‘Father’ in the Lord’s Prayer but it is the ‘Our Father’ of praying as a community.  For it to become ‘My Father’ — well, that is not something that can be taught or even tested from the outside: that is a matter of the lived relationship and personal experience in prayer.

There is possibly no better cipher or symbol for this than the traditional Christian ‘Holy Trinity’.  God is three and one, said to be truly one and also truly not only one.  If we are personally able to use this frame of reference, immediately we are faced with the real inability of even our most basic concepts — “one” and “many” — to be applied in an exhaustive or limiting way to that which we call God.  Moreover, we are not only faced by this reality: if this is our language, we face this reality without withdrawing from being able to speak about God at all.  We embrace being able to say something, while also embracing that there is always so much more than what we have said. 

But there’s more: in the Holy Trinity we also encounter God as relatedness (for more on this, explore the writings of Gregory of Nyssa), in which the titles ‘Father’, ‘Son’, and ‘Holy Spirit’ all refer back to each other, and are understood in view of each other.  This framework suggests that the ways of relating to God are many, not because they can be but because they have to be.  Each and every one does not stand alone but implies the others too.

This is not the place to develop a theology of the Holy Trinity, though there is a rich and beautiful tradition to draw on, which many Unitarians have neglected, that delivers a treasure trove of insights about relating to God, in the light of God’s self-relatedness.   Similarly, in the Hindu tradition, inherent to the universe is the relationship of Brahman the unmanifest potential of all that can be, sometimes known in the west as the Godhead, and Atman the manifest, the created, the ensouled God.  And in respect of this all-pervading relatedness, there is a wonderful Hindu saying: 

'You think that you understand TWO because you understand ONE, and ONE AND ONE MAKE TWO; but first you have to understand AND.'

For now I just want to make the point that in the same way ‘God’ as a no-name holds the place for that experience of the insistence on more , ‘Trinity’ holds the mind back from reductionist descriptions of the Divine and from mistaking any of God’s names as being exhaustive. 

The Apostolic Creed is in many ways an expansion of the idea of the Holy Trinity, not just in form (though there it is most clear), but also in reflecting on the meanings of each of the names of God given in that formulation.

How often do we get caught up in having to outline what we mean, and what we don’t mean, when we talk about or to God, in community?  We reach around, looking for shared experiences to draw on, and often find that for every good feeling invoked by a name there are profoundly negative experiences linked to it too.  We can find ourselves trying to use novel names or lengthy work-arounds which provoke responses we don’t intend — or which simply leave people cold.  Understood correctly, the moniker of Holy Trinity gets in there right from the start with the provisos, and moves our communitarian speaking of and to the Divine out of the realm of our many and varied personal associations with names; moves our speaking of and to the Divine into a place of a shared understanding of titles, and how they relate to each other and not just to us personally.

For some people, the experiences of their life may mean they never experience God in their lives as the ‘Abba, my Father’ of Jesus praying alone, but that doesn’t prevent them from honestly reciting the words ‘Our Father’ with the community.  Nor does it mean that they can’t experience the private intimacy in prayer that the words ‘Abba, my Father’ reveals. 

We fear that the way we talk to and of God in our communities will exclude and marginalise.  That concern is born of love, and of the awareness of how differently people can experience the world. Yet the truth that no name, taken alone, exhausts the Divine — and that how we learn in community to talk of and to God is the starting point not the end of our own lived relationship — can set us free from the knots we tie ourselves in.  To say ‘God is Father’ is to say something but not everything; it is to affirm something but not to exclude everything else; it is to indicate something but also to draw attention to there being more.  The Holy Trinity helps us keep our minds as open as we want our hearts to be, so that we can share in community not by ignoring diversity of experience but by embracing a shared context and a profound respect for God in the lives of each and every one of us. I believe in the Holy Trinity.

That word 'God'

In God

Do not be afraid.  

This is not the name used to coerce compliance to a set of rules, or used to open wallets for personal profit.  It is not the name behind which people doing bad things have hidden, or the name in which truly awful things have been done.  Some people have always tried to coerce compliance, to prey on the finances of others.  Some people have always sought to get away with doing bad things.  And history is full of people being truly awful.  There will always be people using anything that works to do these things; and we must not be blind to it no matter where or when it happens. ‘God’ didn’t make them do it, no matter how much our cultures and societies may have enabled it.  Those people need to answer for their crimes, and alongside that, other people need to recognise the abuses of systems and to change the systems.

God is not a name.

God is a no-name.

And I believe in God.

I believe in God the way I believe in Justice, in Truth, in Beauty, in Good.  When I say I believe in all these things I am not opening up a debate about their existence, as if I can point at them — or as if anyone would settle anything by pointing to a place where they were not.  I am not using the phrase to ward off responsibility for my words and actions, and I am not using it to give me an authority or power over others, though that can be done with any of those other things I believe in too.  When I say I believe in God I am sharing my experience of the world, and of something important to me about how I live in that world.  

When I say I believe in God I am witnessing to God’s insistence, not God’s existence (John Caputo, The Weakness of God).

Personally or in my community, I have never experienced God as a rare creature found only in particularly unusual habitats, of which tall tales are told and dubious sightings are shared in hushed tones.  My belief in God isn’t a scientific fact to be verified or falsified; it’s my witness to a lived experience of more.  The experience of an insistence that I try to be a better person, that I try to understand the world around me and my place in it better.  An insistence not limited to the will and wants of the people around me, not limited to my ease or preference, not limited to current success or bound by past failures.  An unlimited insistence that is neither without me nor within me (John Henry Newman, A Proof of God).  The experience of an insistence that there is something else just over the horizon, just behind that cloud, or around that bend.  The insistence that things go on, wherever I look.  This experience is subjective, in the sense I can’t ever separate myself from it; but it is objective in the sense that I do not choose it, it does not stem from me alone, and — more yet — it is at the core of everything I do or say. 

That which we call God is always more (Anselm of Canterbury, Monologion). Every time we alight on something and would call it God we are disappointed because it falls short (Plato, Phaedrus).  God is more: we experience God in the difference between how things are and how we feel they ought to be; between what we know and what we feel there is to know. 

God is more, which means for every title we give, for every description we use — however true, however just, however beautiful — there is always more, which it does not convey, than it conveys.  For every new insight that comparison reveals to us about God, it turns out that God is always more NOT like that, than God IS like that.  God is always more NOT as we imagine or intuit, than anything we fixate on God being. 

Not this.

Not this.

Not even this.

That very urge that makes you feel uncomfortable with the word ‘God’, that makes you want to shy away from using it, is your own witness to knowing that God is more than what ‘God’ is said to be.  I, too, do not assert an old man with a long beard on a cloud; I, too, do not assert an angry, joyless dictator.  I, too, can all too often see the human behind the curtain when ‘God the great and powerful’ is proclaimed, and am angry, and sad, at the abuse and the greed and the power-mad, wanton cruelty.  None of this will I call God.

God is the insistence that I cannot deny that these things are wrong, that we can do better, that things can be better, that there is always more.  God is not ‘this being the case because I want it to be’: God is more, and I believe in God.

In the beginning was the experience of Truth — How to say “We believe….” as recognition of community

We Believe

Often we read or hear something and our first thought is “I wouldn’t say that” or “I’m not comfortable with that language”.  We pore over the words of hymns or dissect the latest sermon or blog, and all the while we draw lines and dig trenches.  Creedal Tests have been used for centuries to do the same — as if Truth were a sword to separate the Sheep from the Goats, or the wheat from the chaff. 

Pause. 

Breathe. 

Don’t ask yourself if you agree with me; just take a moment to see if you can hear what I’m saying.  No one requires you to do anything or take any stance for the moment; and when that time comes you can, and you will.  But this isn’t that time, not yet.

I believe Truth isn’t a sword: it’s that in which “we live and move and have our being” (Act 17:28, Cretica by Epimenides).  It’s not something to use to divide and hold apart; rather, it is the very thing that makes us one.  It isn’t something to use to conquer others; it is the very foundation that allows us to be free. 

EPIMENIDES OF CNOSSOS a semi-mythical 7th or 6th century BC
 Greek seer and philosopher-poet.

When I say “I believe”, I am not telling you what you ought to think, or requiring you to confirm my view.  I am sharing with you something about how I experience the world, offering a glimpse into why I say and do the things I do.  I am speaking my Truth.  That is to say, I am voicing that Truth open to all, shared by all, lived in by all but as experienced by me in all my limitations, with all my back-story, and in the language I have learned throughout my life.  

Expanding that idea, it is a beautiful thing to be able to say: “We believe…”.  It is an acknowledgement of a shared experience, a shared language, and shared hopes.  It is never the fruit of a simple debate over concepts and words: it is, at heart, a recognition of community rather than a tool for forging it.  The words of a Creed can inspire the conversation, the prayer, and the actions that bring about the “We believe …” moment, but they themselves neither create it nor constitute it. 

The Apostolic Creed, one of the most widely used and oldest of the creedal statements in Christianity, has to be understood in the context of a shared community, a shared set of stories and rituals, a shared experience of life.  It was spoken believer to believer, and is deeply embedded in the ritual of Baptism — where the dialogue isn’t one of Gatekeeper to Supplicant but, rather, the excited back and forth between friends or new partners.  The “Do you..” and “I do ..” is not one of uncertainty but of already knowing the answer and delighting in hearing it out loud.  Think of the wedding ceremony where each partner is asked if they take the other: there is no uncertainty at this point, and yet the saying of it out loud is still so much more than formality: it is a joyful expression of their relationship to each other and the community around them. 

The excitement of retrieving the football - which will
 become a shared story, a shared experience of life

The Apostolic Creed is not the Creedal Test that has rightfully been recognised in terms of power dynamics and control.  It is not accompanied by the cudgel of “say this, think that, or else”.  It is the joyful celebration of a shared experience of the divine, in a community of shared stories, shared rituals, shared prayer, and shared hopes.  This Creed is a shape not arrived at by carving into, or by cutting away, according to a precise, planned view of the end result, but rather a shape grown organically according to the nature of the living material and the conditions over time it finds itself in.  It is a shape that shows its history in every twist and knot, but is always growing, never knowing what the future will bring for it — yet unafraid because growth is not deviation from a plan, it is not failure, it is the success of ongoing life and vitality.

knotted, gnarled, organic growth - this is an apple tree
 but it may as well be a creed from the 4th century CE

“We believe …” can be beautiful, it can be joyful, and I think — if we are honest with ourselves — it is something we all long for.  Though we may all fall into the pride of wanting to push our views and our expressions on others, and though we have all seen too clearly how easily Creedal Tests have been used to exert influence and put pressure on individuals and groups, our longing is not for the set of words.  The shared experience of the Divine, the communal life of shared stories and prayer, the excited back and forth of connecting with others at the profoundest level: that is what we thirst for.

We long to be one, not by giving up our personhood, not by rejecting the quality of individuality, not by capitulating to the will of others, but by embracing the community, by shared living in Truth.  I haven’t lost hope for that “We believe…” moment, that Creed ‘in spirit and in truth’ (John 4:23) and I believe the surest start towards it is acknowledging the culture and the stories that have shaped me and which I already share with others.  Despite the name that the tale is more commonly known by, there were two sons in the tale of the Forgiving Father (Luke 15: 11-32): together we can write an ending where no one is left sat outside.

In the beginning was the doing and the doing became the Word - how to say "I believe" as part of conversation

“I believe…”

      I’m going to ask you to bear with me.  There are going to be times you want to jump in and point out things that are problematic, things you don’t agree with, things that need rounding off or balancing out.  Don’t do it.  I won’t take your silence for agreement and I ask you to not take any of mine for deliberate avoidance or ‘tacit denial’.  I’m going to advance a position today that suggests that what we say takes its meaning from the conversation we are having, and that that conversation is framed within the community, culture, and ‘way of life’ we find ourselves in.  This isn’t my idea, so I am not going to build it up from the foundations.  If you fancy checking it out in detail give Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations a look. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930

The meaning I am looking for today is what we mean when we talk about our beliefs, how we understand what is said when we say “I believe…” or, I guess more often today, when we say “I don’t believe…”.

These kinds of statements, even when made in private, always have an audience, either actually there or imagined.  First off, we are saying them in a language that we have learned from others and use within a community.  

We don’t get to decide what a word means or how a language works, no matter how much we can push the boundaries of it. The more we nudge words outside their usual use the less likely our audience will understand what we mean, and the harder time we will have being sure we know what we mean ourselves.  Sound extreme?  Ask yourself how clear you are on something when you can’t share it with anyone else.  If you find yourself unable to describe it, explain it, or even show it, then you are going to have some doubts about it. 

      I spoke about nudging ‘words outside their usual use’.  We don’t learn language by understanding what one word means using a series of others.  We would never be able to begin, if that was how language worked.  We don’t learn language by clearly setting out and agreeing on terms up front; we need to already have language to be able to do that.  Rather, we learn language by doing things.  We learn to sit in chairs, to pass the sugar, to find the bathroom; and the more we do things with others the more our language grows, and the more complicated the things we do as a group, the more complicated our language becomes.  This starts right from our first words and carries on throughout our lives.  We’ve all started a new job and felt a bit lost till we were in on the buzzwords and shortenings; we’ve all taken up a hobby and at first felt bewildered by the array of new terms and phrases.  Those of us who have lived abroad and learnt a new language will recall how we moved from translating every foreign word back into a word from our mother tongue, and finally came to a place we could say and think and even feel things in the new language that we were unable to quite express in our first one. 

This fascinating book says a lot more
about how languages don't exactly match.

I’ve dwelt on this longer than I intended, but it is important because when we say “I believe...” we are saying it not just in our mother tongue, we are saying it in a certain ‘work’ or ‘hobby’ environment too.  We are saying it in the context of doing something together, simple or very complex: we are saying it in the context of doing something.  If what I am doing and what you are doing are not the same, if I am talking in terms of one environment and you in terms of another, then we may as well be talking two different languages.

      When we say “I believe…” we are conversing within a community and we are trying to do something specific within that conversation.  When we fail to acknowledge that community and to accept what is being aimed at we cut ourselves off from conversation and can only enter into conflict.  At the heart of that conflict is the need to impose on the other what we understand by the words they are using, and that need is driven by the deep desire to understand ourselves.  Socrates, in Plato’s dialogue Alcibiades I, speaks of how we see ourselves in the mirror that is the eyes of others.  Well: imposing what we want words to mean is rather like painting over that mirror with the portrait we’d like to see.  When we succeed in doing it, we harm the other and lose sight of ourselves as well.

"The Portrait of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

      If we are going to have fruitful conversations around what we believe — and even more so if we are going to build fruitful communities around what we believe — we need to learn to look into the eyes of others.  We need to realise that belief is something that isn’t about the sound of words or how we try to draw out the concepts; it’s about how we live.

In the Bible, ‘truth’ is something that is done not just said; knowing is about relationships, not just being right and being able to explain why.  I bring up the Bible here, not to rely on its authority, but because it relays thousands of years of human religious experience and because it is central to the community and culture in which many of us, myself most certainly, talk about our beliefs.  Whether we say “I believe …” or “I don’t believe …” we, here in the West, are talking in the shadow of that dominant narrative.  Our communities have splintered into smaller communities each with their own divergent stance to that narrative, but it is there for the Atheist Humanist, the Pagan Revivalist, and the Cultural Agnostic, as much as for the Roman Catholic, Protestant, or Non-Conformist.

       Acknowledging the role of language, and its reliance on communities and what we are trying to do at any given time, might sound like it is making saying “I believe...” difficult, like it’s making the conversation around that nigh-on impossible, but it isn’t.  All our language is rooted in the experiences we share, the things we can and can’t do, the world we live in as ourselves, the things we can’t change that set the stage for the things we can.  Language works, for all its nuance and contextuality, because language is how we live in a world we share.  We can say “I believe…” because of that shared world, that shared experience, that shared interplay of what we can and can’t change. 

If we put in the work to understand the conversation that is being had when we say “I believe …”, if we can hold back with pushing what we think ‘should’ be meant with the words, if we can actually engage with what is trying to be done in that moment, then we can begin to grow together and in looking into another’s eyes we can begin to see ourselves better too. 

      Belief is never purely intellectual: it is about how we live our lives, why we make our choices.  I hope we can explore that together, I hope we can share that together, and I know that if we do together, we’ll find that our language will bring us eventually more together, however much it may hold us apart for now.