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. 

Religion isn't a provisional truth for scrutiny by a group

This is, as usual for this blog, a personal view, which should not be taken to represent the views in the round of the group of people meeting under the Unitarian banner in Ringwood.

Recently I have been interested to read What Should Citizens Believe?: Exploring the issues of truth, reason & society, by Henry Tam ISBN-13: 978-1548183103 and ISBN-10: 1548183105 published in association with Citizen Network in 2018.

The aim of the book is to share a range of ideas that can help us to test the legitimacy of our beliefs. It was written in the shadow of the hashtag #fakenews and is a very helpful study by this respected academic at Birkbeck College, University of London who is also Director of the Forum of Youth Participation & Democracy, University of Cambridge.

I have also had my interest engaged by the series of programmes currently being screened by the BBC, about a group of people holding a range of different stances on faith, undertaking a pilgrimage to Istabul, along The Sultan’s Trail.

This post brings the two engagements together, and sets them both against direct personal experience.

~~~~~~~~~

Dr Henry Tam brings this to me:

“Objectivity in discourse is only possible if people follow the principle of cooperative enquiry, which demands that … an assertion [be] judged with reference to the extent to which informed participants, deliberating under conditions of thoughtful and un-coerced exchanges, would concur.  Any provisional consensus reached by one group of individuals must in turn be open to possible revisions subject to examinations carried out with input from other groups.  The ultimate strength of any truth claim rests with the likelihood of that claim surviving the critical deliberations of ever-expanding circles of enquirers.”

Many in the Unitarian movement, to which I align myself, might agree that this mode of enquiry is something to be aimed at, though we might also agree that, in practice, little of this cooperative enquiry is being undertaken in our movement at present. 

Nonetheless, the reason there is a Unitarian denomination at all is that certain people among Church congregations throughout the centuries have not accepted dogma, as presented from the pulpit or lectern, without critique and scrutiny against the dictates of conscience.  Secretly or openly, assertions have then been tested in group discourse.  Schisms and re-groupings have then followed; and periodically, successive re-groupings have occurred, in the light of subsequent new discourse and scrutiny.

Whether we consider the present state of the Unitarian movement in UK as burgeoning or diminishing, the movement continues to encompass a healthy degree of the testing of ideas, and tends to reject superstition and modes of ritual that do not in some way focus the minds and hearts of the participants.  Ambitious and optimistic UK Unitarians would hope that our way of being a movement should also aim at rejecting arbitrary hierarchies and exclusionary habits or principles; but few would claim we have attained to that way of being, yet.

So, Unitarians are people who base their lives of spirit and faith in ideas that have been tested with others.  Then the participatory events we engage in, as congregations and groups, aim to make safe spaces for personal worship or spiritual growth, founded on inclusive, common denominators, that have been felt to adhere to broadly acceptable modes.

In short (in rather old-fashioned and very broad-brush language), it might be said that the religion of Unitarians is God-given but passed through the lens of human - and humanist - filters.  It is openly recognised that it is the people who make the Unitarian mode of religion, as experienced in groups, what it is.

So I do understand, and take part in, group critique in the determination of a provisional truth.

~~~~~~~~~

Watching the television programme Pilgrimage: the road to Istanbul, I sat bolt upright when a self-declared atheist pilgrim, in talking to the adherent of a world faith, made reference to “the imaginary people you believe in,” or some wording very similar to that.

I get so bored with misrepresentations and false assumptions and narratives about religion.

I can see that, for some people, religion is defined in terms of, “Are you Christian?  Muslim?  Jewish?  Hindu?  Sikh?” but those labels for me are merely cultural backdrops.  Every age of humankind on every continent has had its wisdom teachers, seers, seemingly miraculous characters, mystics, and more recently in relative terms, its own scriptures.  Gaps in knowledge have ever, always, been backfilled in the human imagination by the good old catch all, “It must have been God / the gods.”  Yes there are distinctions to be made between these labels to do with religion and faith, but they all fall in the same category: all these faiths’ ways of looking at things are cultural stage settings.  And that is all.

If religion were football, equivalent labels would do nothing more than say which team a person plays for.  The labels “Yeovil Town FC”, “AFC Bournemouth”, “MUFC”, “my school’s first team” etc convey nothing of the essence of what it is like to play football: what it is to learn the tools and techniques in theory, to keep personally fit, to train as a group together; what it is to feel the pre-match butterflies, to walk out onto the pitch on a rainy day, the tumble of being tackled, the pain of defeat and the joys of victory.

Football is not everyone’s game and not everyone will have developed the wealth of connotations behind the word ”football” that spring instantly to mind for others.  And that’s ok.

Well: religion is not everyone’s game and not everyone will have developed the wealth of connotations behind the word “religion” that spring instantly to mind for others.  And that’s ok too.

But when I heard what I heard on the television programme, what I first noticed was this: whilst it would not normally be considered good manners to casually say to a footballer, “the pointless exercises of competence you take part in, against other teams, every weekend,” the atheist did not instinctively feel it to be bad manners to say “the imaginary people you believe in”.

Dwelling on this for a moment, I then noticed that the words used said even more about the bad-mannered atheist.  The turn of phrase used revealed that the word “religion” had not been unpacked by the atheist, despite the fact that they were due to take part in a programme, a staged commitment, that was deliberately constructed, and planned well in advance, to explore what faith and belief, of all kinds, might be.  I was struck by how disengaged, ill-prepared, or perhaps lazy, the atheist was showing themself to be.

The atheist thought they understood the word “religion” because they already had in mind an idea of what it is, and what the doctrines of some of the world faiths are.  The atheist was treating “religion” as those ideas that Dr Tam was talking about.  I surmised that it was as if the atheist — with a certain amount of justification, I would agree — were speaking from the platform that no ever-expanding circle of enquirers in the 21st century world would be likely, in un-coerced exchanges, to concur that human persons rise from the dead or take night-time journeys in the heavens (whatever they may be) to become special categories of person with the power to intercede or intervene.  That no ever-expanding circle of enquirers would be likely, in un-coerced exchanges, to concur that there are special rituals which guarantee a secure and safe or even happy life.  That no ever-expanding circle of enquirers would be likely, in un-coerced exchanges, to concur that one group of people have got a privileged way of doing things that will stand the test of all time and be borne out in the end (whatever that might be) to have uniquely worked out how life should be lived.

I am putting words into a person’s mouth, of course.  But I do — I get so bored with misrepresentations and false assumptions and narratives that seem to be common currency, about religion.

Religion isn’t about “what it seems logical or plausible or satisfying to believe or support”; nor is it about group concurrence on provisional truth.

Religion is not a matter of reasoning; and it most emphatically is not a matter of choice.

The semantics of the word give it away: it has its roots in Latin, meaning “that which binds”  (cf “ligature”).

Religion is the stuff that ties you.  That ties you together within yourself.  That ties you to your place in the multiverse.

It’s the stuff you can’t evade.

It’s what you find in yourself when something hard, painful or uncomfortable looks you right in the eye without flinching or drawing back, and in a voice that cannot be unheard, demands of you, “Are you telling the truth?”

It’s what you find in yourself when you are hurting, are nearly broken, can’t find the way back and don’t even know how to try; when you are burning up with shame; or when you are shivering and stone cold in loneliness; and something looks you right in the eye without flinching or drawing back, and in a voice of infinite gentleness that cannot be shied away from, says, “You are seen and known; and you are loved.” 

It’s not always seen in such sudden epiphanies; binding and tying can be gentle, subtle, sneaking-up-on-you processes; but the effect is the same: religion is what cannot be evaded and it is not a choice. 

Religion is not about “imaginary friends.”  It’s about what is experienced: what ties, what challenges.  What wrecks complacency and what re-orders confusions.  What steps in as an unimagined, unexpected disruption that cannot be grasped or comprehended, and transforms, despite all frantic attempts to remain in control.

Religion is not about “making life better” or “making more sense of life” or “making me feel a better person”.  It’s about what won’t be denied.  Religion is a demand.  I recognise that it’s a demand that only a minority of people feel; but that’s alright.  Religion isn't about group concurrence on provisional truth.

The human world would not be what it is without religion.  That doesn’t mean everyone has to experience it.  The human world would not be what it is without science, technology, fine art, music, sport, poetry, even the intricacies of civil administration; and no one says that everyone has to experience, or want to be involved with, any or all of those things, either.   Nonetheless, a writer cannot help but write.  A musician cannot help but make music.  A dancer must dance. Those who are struck by religion must obey the call.

If you don’t experience religion, don’t expect to stand on common ground with those who do:  because, for those who experience religion, no proof is necessary; for those who do not experience religion, no proof is possible.