Born and bred in Australia, I was brought up in a fundamentalist home with a clergyman father who didn’t know the difference between the literal and the metaphorical in any consistent way, in his overwrought, overlong, boring, inarticulate but heartfelt sermons. With compassionate characters, my parents did a lot of charitable and social good, inspired by the bizarrely logical supernatural system they were able to create with texts out of context.
My parents avidly waited for and were preparing themselves and the world for Christ’s second coming.
Think Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the Only Fruit, and the autobiographical chapters of David Boulton’s The Trouble with God; same story, just different names and places. Growing up in that environment made one more than usually selfconscious and easily embarrassed outside ‘the sect’, and even within it.
A theology degree, plus more study at King’s College London, gave me some intellectual rigour, different perspectives and helped systematise my knowledge. Myth of God Incarnate authors as lecturers/ tutors, Don Cupitt’s Sea of Faith documentaries, JL Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God were all part of a kaleidoscope of influences on me.
A few years as a clergyman convinced me that I had few answers, was not called to be a social worker and was a thoroughgoing materialist. I told the curious that I was in theory an agnostic but an atheist in practice. The evidence for a traditional God was ambiguous at best and plain contradictory at worst.
The purpose of life was to keep busy with absorbing activities so that one was distracted from thinking about the end of all things and the futility of it all.
An LBS MBA and a job in the City helped the distraction enormously. It also added the economic model to understanding life. There is little more pleasurable than a good macro-economic article in the Financial Times or the Economist on a winter’s Saturday night!
Quietly introspective but not introverted, I am clubbable and need community. But in the late 1980s and the 1990s, that community was never churchrelated or religious. My antagonism to the church and religion, the depression and real fatigue that I felt whenever I thought of a wasted early life in a subculture of dogma, gradually disappeared. Like bereavement, one gets over it.
I’ve developed a more benign acceptance of religious belief and practice in society. I now see religion as either an evolutionary accident or survival impulse, and still of use socially and psychologically. I have no great burden to persuade churchgoers to see things my way if their faith makes them dance. I practise a religious attitude to life; it is precious and evokes awe and wonder in me. But I don’t need supernatural concepts to see ‘god’ as value, ‘god’ as life. I go to church rarely and miss it not. Many humanists in my social circles were (and are) too militantly atheistic for my comfort, but then I discovered SOF humanists. I occasionally came across references to SOF in the 1990s, but it was the book Time and Tide: Sea of Faith beyond the Millennium that led me to google ‘Sea of Faith’, join it late 2002, and start regularly attending its gatherings and events from 2003 on. The fellowship these meetings provide is a very comfortable community for me. SOF’s demographic profile is a little older than my non-SOF communities but similar educationally.
SOF’s literature has been a good friend and is an essential part of my SOF experience: prose and poetry, books, pamphlets, magazines, newsletters ‘testimony’ compilations, website, and the SOF internet forum. (There are only 60 or so members, a dozen regularly contributing, and the lurking rest of us occasionally interjecting. Where are the rest of you?). This corpus (my bible now?) affirms some ideas, informs others, challenges yet more, changes some, argues and dialogues with me, and lets me know I am not alone.
In a sense and in hindsight, this self-selecting self-help group has become my new church for the last eight years. It can be a sometimes lonely and boring journey approaching and struggling against that long good night, the close of day and the dying of the light. I’m grateful for the company.
Clem Cook is a member of the North London SOF group.