Rowan Williams and Francis Spufford on being a Christian
By Mark Vernon on Sunday, August 19 2012, 12:40 - Journalism - Permalink
This piece on two new books, plus one not quite so new, has just gone up at the Guardian's Cif Belief...
What is it like to be a Christian? Not what do Christians believe or how many superstitions do they quietly excuse before breakfast? But what is faith as experienced?
It is an important question because, as Rowan Williams notes in his new book, The Lion's World, people might think they know what faith is about when, today, they perhaps don't, never having been there. Subtitled "A Journey Into the Heart of Narnia", the book is partly about CS Lewis. But it is also a chance for the archbishop of Canterbury to convey what Christianity means to him. This is difficult to do, not only because contemporary Britons lack Christian experience but because, as titular head of the established Church of England, Williams recognises a need to "rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity – which is almost everything".
The elusory character of Christianity is also on the mind of Francis Spufford, the historian and science writer. The subtitle for his new book, Unapologetic, is "Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense". A central worry for him is not that the rational justification for belief has been undone. Faith is not about that anyway: as Coleridge noted, the best argument for Christianity is that "it fits the human heart". Rather, it is that so many of the secular alternatives to Christianity only work because they "depend on some tacky fantasy about ourselves". They are in flight from what is truly difficult about life; what is hardest to stomach about ourselves. Take John Lennon's anthem Imagine, which had such a prominent place in the closing ceremony of the Olympics. Spufford labels the lyrics the "My Little Pony of philosophical statements", with its monstrously deluded assumption that the default state of human beings – psychological, cultural and social – is one of peace.
Instead, Spufford likens the experience of being a Christian to listening to the adagio of Mozart's clarinet concerto. This "very patient piece of music" has been described as conveying the sound of mercy because its quiet beauty does not deny the horrors of life but admits they exist and yet insists there is more too. It is as if, running through the mess, there is an infinite kindness, or gentle forbearance, or what Dante called a love that moves the sun and stars. Reason cannot decide whether that is true. The feelings that deliver closer, insider knowledge of human experience can.
Williams reflects extensively on the nature of mercy as well. He portrays it as an unsentimental though humane experience, again because it means facing up to the truth about what you have done and who you are. The theistic insight is that this truth can only be seen when you are confronted by the divine. To meet God – or Aslan, as Lewis has it in the Narnia stories – is "to meet someone who, because he has freely created you and wants for you nothing but your good, your flourishing, is free to see you as you are and to reflect that seeing back to you".
In other words, to see yourself as others see you might be discomforting but it will also always be skewed by the distorting lens of their self-interest. To be unmasked as God sees you is painful because purgative, but is also a path to true liberation. It is merciful because without it we are left in a citadel of self-deception, life's energies being sapped and wasted on bolstering self-regard.
None of this proves the existence of God in the way a science would demand because its evidence arises from the inner lives of individuals. It does, though, reflect a strand in the philosophical discussion of God, often forgotten today. Pascal drew attention to the problem God has in revealing himself to creatures he has made to be free, because if God were to offer irrefutable evidence then that would force a relationship of coercion, not love. God's solution, Pascal proposed, is to "appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and [to remain] hidden from those who shun him".
The philosopher Paul Moser calls the demand for such proof "spectator evidence" in his more academic recent book, The Evidence for God: Religious Knowledge Re-examined. And being a spectator of life will not take you into life or reveal the ground of life to you. It separates the individual from both. Rather – and as Williams and Spufford stress – what is required is a transformation of the individual, akin to the transformation that occurs when someone falls in love. It happens not because there is a hardening of the evidence but because there is an unhardening of the heart, softened in relationship. Only then might we see as we are seen.
Comments
Good point: none of the best classical music denies the horror of life.
Good point: none of the best classical music denies the horror of life.
As Lord of the beasts and thus of the natural world the Lion symbolizes perfect mastery over the human body-mind complex.
What happens when the Lion King comes to town in a Divinely Illuminated human form, even at the moment of birth, and thoroughly investigates and thus masters every minute fraction of the human body-mind complex? And thus fully describes exactly what happened in todays non-mythological reality language in The Knee of Listening, and in the liturgical prose-opera-drama The Mummery Book.
Samraj : the Divine King the master of Reality who spontaneously serves all-and-ALL by transmitting His Heart-Awakening Grace. The universal ruler. The paramount lord and sovereign.
From the book The Lion Sutra (1995): describing a remarkable experience/Realization which spontaneously occurred in 1970.
" I could feel myself in all my extremeties exactly as a Lion. I AM a Lion! And the Lion is the form that is communicating itself as my physical and vital Form. When I Realized this, my physical and vital being came to rest . It ceased to be disturbed. And its very disturbance appeared to be a result of its resistance to acquistion by the subtle Form of the Lion. Until then, the physical and vital being resisted that Form, as if out of fear of being devoured. Now there was the actual perception of this Lion in the vital and physical, and It Revealed Itself not as a hidden and exterior threat, but as the very Form and natural Master of the vital and physical iself.
Then I could feel the tremendous strength and mobility of the phsyical and vital nature. I Sat as the Lion, with Ease and Power, with massive head and limbs, virile and indpendent, with a marvellous mane that signified the dominion of the Lion in the natural order.
The results of this experience are lasting and true. There is a Clarity and Ease in the physical and vital, a sense of Mastery, Mobility, and Freedom in the natural order. There has been a purification, or firm acquisition, of the physical and vital by the Heart. And I remain with that same physical and vital sense that is the Lion, whose subtle Form is My Very Form in the living world.
There are these endless Mysteries and Marvels of manifested existence. There is such humor in manifested forms, such beauty and poetry, I do not take lightly, but there is unseriousness throughout My Life, so that I feel the Power of the Lion, and I am not disposed to cut My hair and thus deprive the Lion of his mane!
Thus, the Lion is the Form wherein I Represent the Mother by Her Grace, but the Truth whereby the Mother Shines to all is in the Lion's Heart."
Wow that was unusual. I just wrote an extremely long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn't show up. Grrrr... well I'm not writing all that over again.
Anyway, just wanted to say fantastic blog!
My apologies...