Point us to the sky

Soundless and crowdless, 

Our cityless streets are stripped of themselves.

Spires and steeples, though silent, still needle the sky, 

While confetti, breeze-beaten,

Falls from cherry trees in empty churchyards. 

Above us, and around us, only sky. 

Sun-bleached and latticed with clouds,

That sky, alone, is untainted, 

Untouched by our two-metre cells. 

Somehow, that sky is more stable,

And purer than ever before.

Purer, except for that one night when, 

Falling from that same sky, the angels spoke of Hope, 

A Hope that was one of us, 

A Hope that could live with the dying and dead. 

And yet, his storm-stilling hands stretched out to the tar-coated sky, 

That same Hope, while dying, cried out: Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

But three days of skyless death could not hold him in, 

And Hope, unburied, rose up to the sky.

My God, have you forsaken us?

Lord, amidst the shadows of these soulless streets

Point us to the sky. 

Abstract but real

I have a confession to make. Although it’s only October, I’m already listening to Christmas carol. Not because I’m already counting down the days to Christmas. Nor is it just because I am a winter person, although I undoubtedly am. 

No, I’m already listening to Christmas carols because they remind me that my faith is not something abstract.  

So often, the truths of my faith seem distant. I enjoy listening to debates on the existence of God. I find it interesting to think about God’s eternal nature, His infinite love and His capacity to do all things. 

Interesting, but abstract. Those truths seem barely relevant on a crowded, late-running bus, in the midst of political uncertainty or in a workplace reeling from a savage corporate restructure.*

But when I listen to Christmas carols, I’m reminded that the event at the heart of my faith took place at a particular time in our world. 

That’s not true of every faith. For many religions, God belongs to a separate, spiritual realm. He remains indifferent through our pain and uninterested in the tedium of our day to day lives. The Welsh poet, Gwenallt, describes this abstract God well in his poem Y Cloc (The Clock): **

Some religions have forgotten the clock.

They kill its hours, minutes and seconds.

Instead, they ascend to the Absolute in all its immensity.

There, they stare at the self-indulgent drama of its power;

A play with no prologue nor epilogue, with neither scenes nor acts,

Rehearsed on some curtainless stage far above our world.

But in Christianity, the abstract enters into our physical world. Though present everywhere, God lived in a single place and time. His eternal nature becomes bound by a body ready to die and decay. His infinite love becomes dependant on the imperfect love of His earthly parents. His capacity to know all things is crammed into a human mind. Though remaining all-powerful, He becomes constrained by the need to sleep and eat.

Through Jesus’ life, we see the abstract side by side with the physical. As He speaks with strangers, he somehow seems to know them better than they know themselves.  Waking up after falling asleep at the bottom of a boat on the Sea of Galilee, He stands up and silences the storm around Him.  And though He cries when He sees the body of His friend, He later welcomes that friend back from the dead. 

 But Christ descended into the seasons of this world,

Turning His hours, minutes and seconds

Into the revelation of God in word and deed.

Then He finished His plan for the salvation of man

At three o’clock in the afternoon.

 Man Crucified in a Dump, Tomás Sánchez  

And, as His life draw to a close, we see these abstract truths, though seemingly distant, transform the physical world around us.  The all-powerful God remains too powerful for death. When bound by time, His eternal nature ends up conquering the clock. And through His infinite love, He shares that conquest with His Church.

No longer could the all-powerful clock

Carve up time for the Saviour of men,

And so He delivered to His Church, though they were still in this world,

His conquest over the clock. 

                                  Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Salvador Dali

* Not thinking any person in particular…

** This is my own rough translation. In the original Welsh, the poem is far more beautifully written.

Notre Dame: A holy place in ruins?

Three years ago this April, I was making the most of my last few weeks in Paris. As well as slipping into art galleries and wandering through the Louvre, I paid a final visit to that old church in the centre of Paris: Notre-Dame.

Seeing front pages emblazoned with the images of that same building in flames, I feel a vague sense of disbelief. It’s strange to think that that beautiful place now exists only in memory.

I understand why the people of France, and particularly Paris, would want someone to mourn the loss of something that has played a key role in a country’s history and culture for almost nine centuries. But, with the mortified crowds singing outside Ave Maria as the fire tore through Notre-Dame, it’s clear that some people were mourning more than a beautiful building that has withstood both revolutions and counter-revolutions. They were grieving the destruction of somewhere holy. Somewhere set. Somewhere where God is more likely to be. 

While I can understand the sadness of someone losing their church building in the week before Easter, I could never see the destruction of Notre-Dame as the destruction of something sacred. I would be sad if my church building suffered devastating damage a few days before Good Friday. Soon enough, though, the attention of its members would turn to finding ways of ensuring that we still held our Easter services. Because fire damage is a practical, not a spiritual, matter.  Because no church has ever been made up of four walls and a roof, but of the people within it.

The idea that the church is not a building is a bit of a cliché, I know. But the sight of devotees praying on their knees whilst the cathedral burned are a reminder that some people still think that certain places are holy.

I'm sure that Notre Dame was in one sense holy. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus tells the disciples that wherever two or three gather to pray, He would be there with them. And so when two or three, and two or three gathered in Notre Dame to worship God sincerely, Jesus was there. But that was nothing to do with Notre Dame. As a friend of mine said after the after, ‘When people pray together, the crappiest place on earth becomes holy.’

I’ve prayed in so many different churches over the course of my life, some more impressive than others. I’ve prayed in Notre Dame, in a windowless building in rural Tanzania, an ex-synagogue in South Wales and a thirteenth-century church in central London. In fact, I was lying when I said that my church could burn down. We don’t even have a building yet. We meet in a university lecture theatre that is most definitely not a sacred place for six days of the week. But wherever we and whenever we pray, we know that God is with us. No building is intrinsically holy or sacred. Those who found God in Notre Dame could have found Him anywhere else. Or rather, He could have found them anywhere else.

But there is an even deeper sense in which it’s wrong to think of Notre Dame as more sacred than anywhere else.

Some Christians call this week before Easter ‘Holy Week’. Although that usually refers to the significance of the events that we celebrate, Easter is about a radical redefinition of holiness. Because Easter is not about holiness staying in sacred, set apart places. It’s about holiness leaving holy places.

Before Jesus, God was present amongst the people of Israel, who were meant to a holy people set apart for Him. But there was always something not quite right about that presence. Not that it was imperfect. Yet God was never fully present in a way that allowed people to interact with Him. At first, one man, Moses, was the mediator between Israel and God. But even He wasn’t allowed to see God face to face. Later, God was present in one holy place within a temple. Only a handful of set apart priests were able to enter their presence. They could only do that occasionally, and only after they had obeyed strict commandments that made them temporarily holy. Eventually, God‘s presence left that temple because the people of Israel had done everything they could to make that place unholy.

Over the centuries that followed, invaders destroyed the temple that had once been made holy by God’s presence. The people of Israel mourned for that temple. But they found that God was still with them, answering their prayers and protecting them as they lived as exiles in a foreign land.

Then, in about 7BC, something unexpected happened. A child who was the Son of God was born to two human parents, both faithful to God but neither spectacularly holy. And so the holiest being left the holiest place, heaven, and lived on an unholy planet full of unholy people. Growing up, he developed a knack for finding those unholy people. He touched and healed ‘unclean’ lepers who’d been kicked out of the holy places. Lying tax collectors, ‘immoral women’, foreigners… He just couldn’t keep away from unholy people.

This was an altogether different type of holiness. A holiness that could coexist with filth yet still stay sacred. A holiness that, when dragged through the dust, made even the dust holy.

But that holiness was destroyed. It was nailed to a cross. Bleeding and gasping for breath, the world’s one holy person screamed out in agony and died. With his final, tortuous breath, the curtain in the temple dividing the holy from the less-then-holy tore in two, rendered obsolete by a revelation of holiness that defied even the grave. Three days later, too holy for death and decay, He got up and walked again through an unholy world.  

It turned out, though, that He’d been telling us that this would happen. He even talked, blasphemously in the eyes of the seemingly religious, of His body being a holy temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt. He’d promised that this would happen. Just like He’d promised that, one day, we could join him, finally holy, in his holy place.

If all that teaches one thing about holiness, it is that holiness cannot be limited to one place. 

You can mourn the loss of a building of immense cultural and historical significance, but you cannot say that Notre Dane has been desecrated. You cannot say that a holy place is now in ruins. True holiness cannot be destroyed.

That is, after all, the reason why we have Easter.

Sometimes I doubt...

This week, while sitting on a hot, crowded and delayed train, I read a book which asked why God would create a world in which suffering was possible. Cue an average Tuesday punctuated by a series of minor existential crises. Yet later that night, as I lay in bed, thought occurred to me: I still believed in God. And what’s more, it took no more effort to believe in Him than it had the day before. I believed, and that was that.

While many Christians, at some time in their lives, will go through periods of prolonged and serious doubts, I suspect that day-to-day doubts like mine are a more consistent part of the lives of most Christians.  Like an Agatha Christie in the middle of an alphabetically-arranged bookshelves, these doubts stand out not because they are commonplace, but because they are exceptional. We doubt, but then, our questions resolved or unresolved, we find ourselves returning to belief. We doubt but still find ourselves convinced.

Not that I have find myself absolutely certain that all of it is true.  Do I know whether God exists? Of course, I don’t. And neither does the Pope. Nor Richard Dawkins, for that matter. No, I find myself in a place of relative certainty. As certain I can be in the absence of definitive proof either way.

And I don’t think we do need definitive proof either way. It’s true that Christians sometimes talk about proof or evidence perhaps in response to people like Dawkins, who once described faith as the ‘belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.’ But while it’s right to emphasise that there are rational reasons for belief in God, the beliefs at the heart of our faith are fundamentally unproveable. While we can prove that Jesus lived and died, the question of whether he died and lived is not something that history can answer easily. Though we can use the unexpected and inexplicable emergence of the belief in the resurrection as a reason to believe in it, we can hardly pass it off as proof. It’s a reason to believe. I happen to think it’s a strong one. But there will always be the possibility of some unknown unknown that could explain the whole thing away. In the end, although reason can guide us part of the way to a belief in the resurrection, it will always come down to a leap of faith. Not a leap into the dark. But a leap, perhaps, into the half-lit shadows of belief.

Despite this, reason can help us deal with my doubts. While I didn’t come to my belief in God through a process of reasoning, I find myself convinced again and again by the arguments for His existence.  And so, whenever my belief in God seems less credible, or I am overly conscious of its weirdness, I remind myself of those arguments. They help me to realise that my doubts are often not usually caused by any resurgence of reason, but by my ever-changing emotions.  

Yes, while we often think of doubts as what happens when we cling on to what we feel to be true in spite of reason, just as often it is our emotions that shape what we find credible. Bizarrely, on a sunny day when I’ve had enough sleep and it feels like everything is right in the world, the existence of God feels more likely. Similarly, when I’m downing my third coffee of the morning, half-asleep at my desk yet unusually aware of all my flaws and the inadequacies of my life, my belief in God feels so much less rational.  But the arguments for believing in God haven’t in fact become more or less credible. They haven’t changed; I have. And so when I remind myself of those arguments, I’m not trying to make them seem more credible. I’m not trying to brainwash myself so that I can, in spite of reason, carry on believing what I want to be true. I’m telling myself to carry on believing, in spite of my changing emotions, what I have already reasoned to be true.

That’s not to say that I don’t have any unresolved issues. I have so many unanswered questions.  It’s been a whole three days since my mini-crisis of faith and I still haven’t sorted out the problem of evil. Just thinking about it for a few seconds is starting to make me feel a little bit stressed. Sometimes, I find even the good bits about Christianity overwhelming. I struggle to understand, let alone feel excited about, the prospect of heaven. While I can get behind the popular conception of heaven as a sort of celestial safety net that is preferable to oblivion, I just don’t connect with the idea that it could be a state of eternal fulfilment. To be honest, I find the concept of eternity vaguely terrifying. I believe, even though part of my doesn’t want it to be true.  

I still try to deal with my unanswered questions. But I know that any other worldview I adopted would come with its own unresolved issues. Take the problem of evil, for example. I find it hard to comprehend why God would allow a world in which evil was possible. Yet I also struggle to see how an atheistic worldview could explain why I find that evil repulsive. Perhaps a basic conscience could emerge as humans who cooperated with each other managed to survive for longer. But how could that explain why we think rape is wrong? In a morality governed by the survival of the fittest, why on earth would sexual consent matter? Rape would be a good, perhaps even praiseworthy thing. And if we could explain every aspect of our conscience using natural selection, why would that evolved morality have any intrinsic value?

There are unresolved issues in any worldview. It just so happens that I find Christianity both leaves fewer questions unanswered and gives better answers to the rest. In the end, I find I still believe in spite of my changing emotions because, while there are moments when I’m not convinced by Christianity, I’ve certainly never been convinced by anything else.

The Familiar Road

They say that repeated use strengthens the neural pathways governing our thoughts, words and movements.  It must be the same with well-travelled roads.

One journey has been constant throughout my life. Every school holiday, every Christmas and Easter, we have driven, often in the dark, down the lonesome country lanes that lead to my grandmother’s farm in West Wales.

The farm has changed over that time. Though she rents the farmland out now, I can just about remember feeding newborn lambs and playing with Charlie the sheepdog.  As for the journey itself, however, that never seemed to change. It’s true I’ve ditched my walkman But we have always travelled the same roads, passing though the same, unaging villages until we reached the emblem of the wolf that has guarded the farm for decades.

Even when we moved to Swansea and I gained a new home, a new church, a new school and new friends, we ended up at the same destination, passing the same landmarks, albeit by a shorter route.

Except for one Sunday when the destination did change. I was still in bed when we had the phone call. My mother pried open the door and told me that her mother had had another stroke. At the time, I thought that meant another mini-stroke, a so-called warning shot, not a full-blown, life-changing stroke.

After the service that morning, my father and I made that same journey once again. We talked about his father and his illness as we travelled westward. I have just one memory of my grandfather. We were going somewhere. I think it might have been a hospital appointment. My grandmother was shouting at him, telling him to ‘put his boots on’. For some reason, the fact that she said ‘boots’ instead of ‘shoes’ sticks in my mind.  Not that it was her choice of words left him confused and unable to answer. For years, I assumed he was deaf. When I was older, I realised that dementia had made him deaf not to words, but to meaning itself.  

And so we found ourselves in a stroke ward. It’s difficult to forget the inhuman sound of a human struggling to speak. One patient who tried every now and then to shout and scream sounded as if he was being strangled. My grandmother, too, tried to force out some words when we saw her. She seemed to choke, and then I think she cried. When it was time to leave, I told that I was sorry to see her like this and that I would pray for her. She raised her right hand, the one side of her body she could still control, and waved us goodbye. That voiceless gesture, somehow full of her personality, reminded me that her body undeniably belonged to her.

I am still here.

Later, after we had left, she was given a paper and pen. This is the end, she wrote.

She was wrong, of course.

Over the months that followed, we made that old journey again and again, this time, though, with a different destination. They say that our brains can find new ways of navigating damaged neural networks. With time, my grandmother learned to bypass her body’s stroke-broken nerves. Unslurred speech replaced the silence. Eventually, we could drive past the hospital, pulling up instead at the farm.

But there was something different about the route. I realised that we no longer drove through the villages that had once been fixed markers along the journey. It had been months since I had been through Roberston Wathen, Llanddewi Velfrey and Slebech. During my grandmother’s time in hospital, they had built a new road bypassing that quaint mishmash of Anglo-Celtic and Viking names.

And so the journey was, like the destination itself, slightly different to before.

Am I self-righteous?

“Jesus said to them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."”

Mark 2:17

A few years ago, I was approached by a woman handing out food. She was wearing a ‘Muslims love Jesus’ t-shirt. A thought went through my head: you don’t know who Jesus is, and I do. I said no, thank you and walked on. Was I being self-righteous? Yes. I was sure that I was right and she was wrong. More than that, I thought that made be better than her. But there is nothing in my faith that gives me the right to feel like superior to anyone else. In that moment, I was being self-righteous in spite of my faith, not because of it.  

Sometimes, we are justified in our belief that some Christians are acting self-righteously.  At other times, though, a Christian may come across as self-righteous because the way she approaches faith differently to someone who doesn’t share her beliefs.

We live in a culture of self-improvement. Whether it’s your personal best or your curriculum, it seems like most of us are trying to improve ourselves in one way or another. And so ‘spirituality’ becomes just another aspect of self-improvement. Through anything from mindfulness to the power of reason alone, we can become spiritually or morally enlightened. It is something each of us achieves in our own way and through our own effort. In this mindset, the plethora of spiritual and religious practices around us are merely alternative ways of seeking the same God.

Sometimes, the parable of the blind men and the elephant is used to explain how this works. You’ve probably heard it before. Three blind men touch different parts of an elephant to try and find out what it is. The first man feels the trunk and decides that it must be a snake. The second touches the side of the elephant and is certain that it is a wall. The last man, after putting his hand on the trunk, assumes that he is holding a spear. The idea, of course, is that we each perceive God in different but equally valid ways.

From that perspective, the Christian who claims to be right about God seems to be saying that he is wiser and more spiritually enlightened than anybody else. But Christians don’t believe that you can come to a greater knowledge of God through human effort. In Christianity, we can only know God because He has revealed Himself to us. (Surprisingly, God doesn’t necessarily reveal himself to the most ‘spiritual’ people. In fact, it’s often the opposite.)

In that way, the God of Christianity is vastly different to the God of that parable. It’s no coincidence that the story uses an animal to represent God. The God of the parable is an unknown, even unknowable that cannot speak to the people he has created. Another parable, one where the blind men touch the hands, feet and chest of another human being, would have a very different ending. No one with an ounce of compassion would let the blind men come to such flawed conclusions about the object that are touching. Yet that is the God of the parable. And what kind of a God is that?

While the claim that only Christians can know God may seem exclusive, the God of the parable is even more exclusive because everyone is excluded from fully knowing that God.

When the Apostle Paul, one of the earliest Christian missionaries, came across a group of people who believed in such a God, he didn’t claim to be superior to them. Instead, he told them that he himself knew the God they were trying so hard to find:

“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: . So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you…God made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place,that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find him, (Acts 7:22-27)

According to Paul, the unknown God was not unknowable. In fact, that unknown God wants us to know Him. While Paul might sound self-righteous when he claims to know God when they do not, he was not claiming to have gained an understanding of God through his own effort.

Paul was never an ideal candidate for spiritual enlightenment. Though he had led a deeply ‘religious’ life, all his spiritual practices hadn’t led him anywhere near a state of moral perfection. In fact, when God was first revealed to him, Paul was his way to Damascus, where he hoped to find and kill Christians. As he was travelling, a light came down from heaven and Paul heard a voice saying; “Why do you persecute me?” Moments later, the person speaking revealed His identity: Jesus.

None of this gave Paul any reason to be self-righteous. He had considered Jesus a heretic, yet Jesus was revealed Himself to him. Far from claiming to be spiritually superior, Paul would later describe himself ‘the worst of sinners’ (1 Timothy 1:15). Elsewhere in the Bible, he wrote that “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)

When I thought I was better than that Muslim woman, I was being unchristian. Far from being superior to anyone else, I am just a ‘weak thing of this world’. Yet the God who created me has revealed Himself to me. And He revealed Himself to all of us when, unlike the unknowable God of the parable, He entered our world so that we could know Him. He died and rose from the dead so that man’s broken relationship with God could be restored. And since the offer of a personal relationship with God is open to everyone, weak, unenlightened and morally-imperfect Christians like me really have nothing to be self-righteous about.

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Romans 5:8

Have I been brainwashed?

'What a child should never be taught is that you are a Catholic or Muslim child, therefore that is what you believe. That's child abuse.'

Richard Dawkins

According to Richard Dawkins, I have been brainwashed. While perhaps not everyone would go as far as he does, I don’t think it’s uncommon to assume that children will just believe whatever religious truths their parents tell them. Even other Christians I know sometimes assume I accepted my parents’ faith unquestioningly. But those of us from Christian backgrounds don’t all pop out of the womb reciting the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit..."

Like many of my friends from Christian families, I only fully accepted my parents’ faith as a teenager.

I wonder if Richard Dawkins has forgotten what it is like to be a child. Of course, children are more likely to hold irrational beliefs. Most children believe in Father Christmas just because their parents tell them it is true. But even young children eventually question that belief. And if a child questions what their parents tell them about Santa, why wouldn’t they question was their parents tell them about God?

As it happens, I questioned the existence of God a few years before I stopped believing in Santa Claus. I remember coming home from church one Sunday and wondering whether God existed. I was perhaps three or four, maybe even young. I decided at that moment that God did exist. While I seem to remember having a vague idea that God must be the explanation for everything around me, I doubt I had any clear reason for coming to that conclusion.  I’m not sure anyone at that age would have been able to make a rational decision about the existence of God. But the fact that I even thought about it shows that I was able to accept or reject what my parents told me about God. I chose to believe in God. Though that choice may have been influenced by the beliefs of my parents, it was nevertheless a choice.

As a child, I always knew that most people didn’t share my belief in God. After all, it’s not like I grew up in a monastery. I grew up in a working-class community with just two small churches. There were perhaps 50 or 60 Christians out of the 3000 people living in Maerdy.

At school, I couldn’t avoid being challenged about my belief in God, particularly not when everyone knew that my father was a ‘priest’ or ‘vicar’ (though technically he was neither). My classmates loved to tell me that what I believed was a load of rubbish. And, like any child, I was more than happy to tell them that they were wrong. Even in infants’ school, I was asked questions like ‘Where did God come from?’ and ‘Doesn’t science explain everything?’. I hear the same objections from adults today. If anything, the kids on the school bus were more sceptical than most atheists I know. Those children questioned whether Jesus had even existed.

Although I have believed in God since I was three or four, it wasn’t until the age of thirteen or fourteen that I became a Christian. It’s not that I didn’t believe in the core truths of Christianity. I didn’t doubt that Jesus was the Son of God who had died on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven. I was sure that He had risen from the dead, meaning that those who believed in Him could go to Heaven. I thought of them as facts, but nothing more than that. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus seemed irrelevant to me. It had less of an impact of my life than my beloved Doctor Who.

When I became a Christian as a teenager, I finally understood that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection restored the broken relationship between man and God. I realised that I could have a personal relationship with God if I accepted that Jesus had died for me on the cross. I had always been told that I needed to respond personally to Jesus’ death on the cross. When I finally I did respond, it was again my own choice to do so.

Not all Christians from church-going backgrounds will have a similar story to mine. I know plenty of ‘cradle Christians’ who can’t remember a time when they didn’t believe. That doesn’t make them gullible. In fact, many of the brightest Christians I know can’t remember a time when they didn’t believe in Christianity. Ultimately, they have made a decision to carry on practicing their faith into adulthood. Others have not.

As a child, I knew that I believed in God without knowing why. Twenty years later, I know exactly why I continue to believe in God. And while I never really questioned the core beliefs of Christianity in my childhood, I know now why I continue to believe them.

I haven’t been brainwashed. When I came to a belief in God, I knew perfectly well that not everyone shared that belief. When I became a Christian, I did so not because my parents forced me to, but because I had decided that I needed to follow God. Ten years later, it’s a decision I make, with the help of God, every day.