81 – Down to Us

Author: Dinah Livingstone. Published January 2007 in issue 81 of Sofia.

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Contents

Articles
Reviews
Poetry

Editorial

When I was young, if someone wanted to tell me, ‘It’s your responsibility,’ they would say, ‘It’s up to you.’ Later I heard people saying, ‘ It’s down to you’ also meaning ‘it’s your responsibility’. At first I thought this was London demotic but now I hear it everywhere and indeed, quite by chance, I open my paper today and see an advert about climate change saying: ‘Almost half of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions which cause climate change are actually down to us.’ (Incidentally, this can act as a trailer for the next July SoF Annual Conference, at which the speakers will be ecologist Jonathan Porritt, Stephanie Dowrick from Australia and Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey, and whose title will be The Good Life?) Today, to mean responsibility, people may say either ‘it’s up to you’ or ‘it’s down to you’, which can give rise to fascinating linguistic discussions.

This resonates with the many myths of descent and re-ascent, one of which is the Christ epic. In it there is the movement down and then up of Christ, the movement of one who was ‘in the form of God’ ‘emptying himself’ down to Earth, assuming humanity even in its lowest form, even in its most painful mortality – death on a cross – and then this humanity, represented by Christ, being highly exalted.

We can read this non-supernaturally as the God whom we invented, we set in heaven, coming back down to Earth, emptying himself back down into humanity, and then this humanity aspiring back up to the ideals we set in God. There is no supernatural being up there to bail us out.

The point is that both the down to us and the up to us mean it’s our responsibility.

In the opening article of this issue Kit Widdows considers how it might ease the problems in the so-called Holy Land, if the three stories of those involved, the Jewish, the Muslim and the Christian, were acknowledged to be human creations rather than divine revelations – that is, up to us, down to us. Next, we have a new science writer, Amanda Nicholson, from University College London, writing about the brain and religious experience, a field called ‘neurotheology’.

There is just room to say I’d like once again to thank last year’s Chair, Alison McRobb, for continuing to be an assiduous proof reader of the magazine, as well as a valuable resort to discuss wider issues. Finally, as requested, we print on page 9 the tune of ‘The Larger View’ sung at last year’s Conference, by kind permission of the arranger, David Dawson.

This seemed a suitable title for our immediately post-Christmas issue. editorial INVITATION TO READERS 1. Can you compose two new verses for ‘The Larger View’ tune on page 9? Content should be singable, ‘sofish’, poetic – no pompous generalities or sanctimonious wool please! If suitable contributions come in, the Editor will propose the one she likes best to the Trustees, and if they agree, we will sing it at the next AGM. 2. In his Open Liturgy 2 (on page 21) William Imray suggests others we might want to commemorate, including George Eliot and Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar (Burma). Sofia would like to start building up a new Calendar. Please send in your nominations for inspiring people from history to go in it, with a brief biography, say 375 words. Please suggest a day on which the person could be celebrated, which could be their birthday, death day or the day on which they did some notable deed or published a notable work.

Please send your contributions to both the above to the Editor.

Dear Editor, Ref. page 16 of Sofia 80 of this month, it seems that perhaps neither Hershey Julian nor Alison McRobb knows that John Andrew Story’s hymn is No 126 in the Unitarian hymnbook, Hymns for Living. The tune is given the name STENKA RAZIN, but as I was not present I do not know whether this was the ‘Old Russian Melody’ on the Conference song-sheet.

With best wishes, Bruce Nightingale Thanks for that, Bruce. Yes that was the tune we sang at Leicester, though it seems to have a complicated history.

— Bruce Nightingale

We are really needed

Dear Sir, The ‘horror’ expressed by David Williams at the ‘vitriolic attacks’ by the editor on Israel prompted me to look once more at the offending Mayday Notes (Sofia 79), only to find no such thing. The quote, from a leading Israeli newspaper, was no more than an eminently reasonable expression of concern over the appalling military destruction wrought by a country attempting to blank out the effects of its wholly disproportionate action. In a letter which reads more like a piece of tendentious propaganda, Williams makes a factually inaccurate assertion of ‘how the war began’. It has now become clear that Olmert, on his visit to Washington, colluded with Bush to find an excuse to crush Hizbollah – regardless of anything ‘Yo boy, Blair’ might have to say. The US had already been supplying Israel with bunker-busting bombs since at least the previous October so that Bush could keep ‘all his options open’ for an attack on Iran – part of a wider, unpublished, policy of bombing states ‘back to the Stone Age’. A safe pair of hands?

Apart from this, what the letter of David Williams really shows is the need for a movement like the Sea of Faith, in particular the challenge made both by the editor and Don Cupitt to ‘come back into this world’. The events in Lebanon showed just how difficult it is to discover ‘the country of Humanity’, given the human capacity not only for paranoia and violence but also fantasy.

Our fantasies make it difficult to see reality; to see ‘Them’ as anything like ‘Us’.

This was expressed with admirable clarity by the distinguished Israeli novelist, Amos Oz: ‘When the Arabs look at us they see... a new offshoot of Europe, with its colonialism, technical sophistication and exploitation, that has cleverly returned to the Middle East – in Zionist guise this time – to exploit, evict and oppress all over again. Whereas when we look at them we do not see fellow victims either, brothers in adversity, but somehow we see pogrom-making Cossacks, bloodthirsty anti-Semites, Nazis in disguise, as though our European persecutors have reappeared here in the Land of Israel...’ What we see in the Middle East are two ‘victims’ locked in an asymmetric grievance, fuelled by the most outrageous religious fantasies and fanaticism: the devout Jew stands by his tank reading his Torah whilst shelling villagers of whom he knows nothing but contempt and the dedicated Muslim emblazons his rockets with Koranic texts to shell settlers for whom he has only hatred. Religious allegiance reinforces the denial of common humanity and ensures its practitioners live in parallel worlds. Jews from Brooklyn and Barnet go to Israel to live out their fantasies whilst monomaniacal Muslims from Birmingham and Finsbury follow in an eschatological jihad to Tel Aviv (so much for the myth of multiculturalism); what begins as the ‘legal fiction’ of an eruv in a London suburb (pace Anthony Rudolf’s letter) ends with a twenty foot high concrete wall in the West Bank with Palestinians just wanting their homes and olive groves back.

What the War in Lebanon clearly showed was that in the face of religious conviction and political ruthlessness, the concept of humanity is utterly hollow.

Over millennia we have changed not one iota. What we witnessed in Lebanon was the same primeval savagery that prompted Alexander to sack Tyre and Agamemnon to burn Troy. The same killer primate still stalks the land. Nothing has changed except the technological sophistication of the savagery. After Lebanon we see convincingly how belief and moral discourse simply serve to excuse the inexcusable. Yet the fiction of faith lives on. And so does reality – against theological niceties the one remaining truth: ‘homo homini lupus.’ Now think again about that challenge to ‘learn to love life and live well.’ Dominic Kirkham 94 Clarendon Road, Manchester M34 5SE

— Dominic Kirkham, Manchester

I’d be interested to reprint the article you translated by Ernesto Cardenal (from the November edition of your magazine) in our newsletter. Is that okay with you, and should I seek also the permission of the author?

Best wishes, Greg Spearritt (Sea of Faith in Australia) sof@a1.com.au We said yes, of course and the article has now been reprinted in the Australian SoFiA December Bulletin. with an acknowledgement to its previous publication in our Sofia. Letters Editor.

— Greg Spearritt, Australia

Dear Editor No doubt Ernesto Cardenal intended his message to PEN (‘Bush is the new Hitler’, Sofia 80) to bolster up those of us who oppose Bush’s policies. Unfortunately, overstating your case often has the opposite effect, and ends up discrediting the very position you wanted to support. I’ve seen those lists of how many times the US has invaded other countries, or how many countries they have invaded; they pump up the numbers by counting military patrols in US territories that were not yet states, removal of US citizens during local civil wars, provision of food aid, joint international peacekeeping, and even the Berlin airlift.

They are so obviously tendentious that they do more harm than good.

Similarly, putting Bush on a par with Stalin’s Gulags or the Nazi Gestapo shows either ignorance of, or disregard for the nature and scale of the crimes committed under those two regimes. There is ample cause for warning Americans that Bush has started down the road that Hitler travelled; to suggest that he has already travelled as far as Hitler is simply hysterical.

When Bush came up with his ‘axis of evil’ phrase, we scoffed at him for resorting to demonisation and cutting off rational argument. It doesn’t help for Cardenal to do the same. There has to be a way for us to express our outrage against Bush without stooping to Bush’s rhetorical level. Sofia is meant to be about seeking wisdom; unfortunately, this piece is more rhetoric than reason.

— Patti Whaley and Rob Wheeler, Faversham, Kent

Silent in Church

Dear Editor I could not agree more with Paul Overend’s concern for silent space in Church. Even as someone perhaps ever in Simone Weil’s limbo of ‘hesitation,’ I have found participating for an hour every week, after Vespers, in a totally silent group meditating in a semicircle upon the iconic puzzle of the Blessed Sacrament an entirely invigorating experience.

Perhaps a perpendicular Gothic Rosary Chapel is ideal for such an experience except to say the growing sense of group power and liberation that builds from, and within the group over an hour always feels unique. Perhaps the C of E could institute a similar silent meditation ritual, for me ever a ‘learning experience.’ One contemplates the self, en route. Is one good enough?

Yours sincerely Christopher Truman 39 Marsden St London NW53HE TRUMAN433@aol.com

— Christopher Truman, London

The Christian label just doesn’t mean anything to that age group if they don’t believe in Original Sin and the Redemption through Jesus Christ.

There are many more positive religious movements for spiritually inclined young people.

They range from full blown Evangelical Christianity through Buddhism and Hinduism to the Natureworshipping pantheism of neo-Pagan movements like Asatru, Druid orders and Wicca. Those who need a guru will prefer the warm mysticism of Sai Baba or other Hindu sages to the cerebral Don Cupitt, but neo-Pagans trust only their own direct emotional experiences of the divine immanent in so many facets of life.

Frederic Lamond, Moosweg 3, A9241 Wernberg, Austria This is vintage Cupitt. All the familiar themes are here from his earlier classic books: the Truth is not ‘out there’; we create and redeem our own world; human life is ‘outsideless’. And right at the centre are the two great ultimates: God and death. Never mind the death OF God, now we are to treat death AS God.

— Frederic Lamond, Wernberg, Austria