D.F. Corbally 81 Miller Brow Miller Bluelcheon Lancs Do please keep sending your thoughts / and comments to Postbag, sof 55 September 2002 cima Sea Of Faith Fifteenth Annual Conference 23-25 July 2002 "Faith and Fantasy A report by first time conference attender, Barbara Burfoot, a humanist newcomer to the Network The organisers had sought to bring new people to this year’s conference, and judging by the number of participants with green dots on their badges, denoting first conference attendance, they had succeeded. I was among the "first years”.
The conference began on Tuesday afternoon with a welcome from Patti Whaley who chaired almost all of the plenary sessions and graced the fancy dress cocktail party as the wicked witch of the West, complete with ruby slippers.
Don Cupitt introduced the Celebration of Faith and Fantasy with his address ‘Fairy Tales, Religion and Life’. I had never heard him speak before except on television. I appreciated his exploration of the continuing importance of stories in spite of all the pejorative associations of storytelling and romancing.
Stories give shape to our lives and a means of learning how to live. We should accept that life involves loss as well as gain and abandon the culture of complaint. We should rejoice in life and “live like the sun”. Stories about talking animals and humans with supernatural powers are a way of smuggling otherwise unacceptable material past "the censor". A religious belief system is a big fairytale for adults to live by. In the subsequent discussion Don was challenged by Aileen La Tourette who felt that some people particularly women still had ample grounds for complaint.
I was looking forward to hearing Philip Pullman talking about “Writing Fantasy Realistically” and I was not disappointed. Philip Pullman is the first writer to win the Whitbread Prize for a children’s book The Amber Spyglass, the third part of his trilogy His Dark Materials. Philip's work addresses “the theme of the Fall, the fall away from grace and towards wisdom, the fall into embarrassment and selfconsciousness: the theme of growing up”. He had been embarrassed to find himself writing fantasy and feeling liberated by it. Embarrassment is like the Fall happening repeatedly throughout our lives. It can be overcome by learning and growing. He had discovered that it is possible to write fantasy stories that explore moral ambiguity and involve psychologically complex characters. If you are writing for an audience that includes children you must keep the story going. Children will always stop what they are doing for a story. So great is the story’s power that when Lyra visits the world of the dead, the children clamour for a story and even the harpies stop to listen.
Philip only comments on C S Lewis’ Narnia Books if he’s.asked and he was. He replied if you had no knowledge of Christianity, you could read all seven without realising that the greatest of Christian virtues is charity. In discussion he pointed out that if he had written His Dark Materials for adults it would never have left the fantasy shelves. As it was, children had persuaded their parents to read it. Philip Pullman is also the first speaker I can remember hearing who thanked his audience for their questions. sof 55 September 2002 On the last day David Boulton spoke on ‘Stories, Lies and Videotape: Broadcasting Faith and Fantasy’. When David first became a journalist he was told that good stories sold newspapers and bad stories didn’t. His preferred view is that "News is what someone somewhere doesn’t want you to print”.
As a journalist he had been kicked out of more countries than an asylum seeker, had been able to ask Richard Nixon if he was still a Quaker and had sought Harold Wilson’s real opinion of the unions while standing next to him in the Gents. He stressed the need for media literacy: audiences must understand when they are being got at.
Religious culture is "mighty mass of stories". Without theological literacy, reading these stories critically and sifting out what "speaks to our condition" religion can become a killer disease. With it we can all play our part as free citizens in building the Republic of Heaven. He urged the SOF to study current issues "to go private" to prepare for "going public" with agreed positions or at least better informed members. We should be embarrassed that the Archbishop of Canterbury elect will speak out on Iraq while the SOF cannot. I remember almost identical discussions in the British Humanist Association some years ago.
David Boulton certainly "spoke to my condition". Before his address I had found the Conference very enjoyable and interesting but I still felt like a visitor. Once David had spoken I knew that the SOF could be my home.
I was sorry that I could only attend three workshops. It was encouraging to find people from very different religious backgrounds arriving at similar conclusions by a wide variety of routes. The creeds written in the "What I believe" workshop and artwork from "Painting music" were displayed in the main hall. A selection of the creeds is being printed as a booklet by popular demand and will be available soon.
At the AGM the discussion of the resolution to initiate a study on the allowability of doctrinal diversity within Christianity" (see below) almost compensated for missing the film "The Gingerbread Revolution" shown at the same time. I was interested in Don Cupitt’s point that only Christianity had a mechanism for identifying and dealing with heresy and in the suggestion that other groups in the Anglican Church might be at more risk from heresy investigations than SOF members If | had got up early enough I could have attended a Hindu Puja, or a Druid ceremony, or taken part in Quaker quiet time.
If I’d had enough energy at the end of the day I could have done some circle dancing or participated in Indian story-telling and theological discussion. I was glad that I found time to follow the Pilgrim’s Progress prepared by Rob Wheeler from Leurig’s cartoons. It was both amusing and, at times, almost unbearably moving particularly to someone recently bereaved.
My very dear husband died suddenly on 8 October last year.
The panel for the final Plenary Questions chaired by Aileen La Tourette included Don Cupitt, David Boulton, the novelist, Wendy Perriam, in place of Philip Pullman who had been obliged to leave early, and Nilesh Shukva, a Brahmin from Loughborough. It was particularly interesting to hear Nilesh’s comments on the conservatism of Asian communities in Britain compared with their counterparts in the home countries who had moved on. He pointed out that there had been an ancient critical tradition in Hinduism that had produced the Vedanta commentary on the Vedas and that Hindus had to experience something before they believed it. As a very minor politician I will cherish Don’s comment that "There is no spinless world" The accommodation was clean and comfortable; the food was good, the films entertaining, the speakers stimulating and the company varied and friendly. If you didn’t get to the 15th Conference you really should try to make the 16th . It is already planned to consider building the Republic of Heaven.
A footnote from the AGM A resolution to initiate "a study on the allowability of doctrinal diversity within Christianity" was passed at the AGM. This seeks to enable the Network to make an informed response to the tightening of controls on the clergy. This has led recently to the pressure on Andrew Furlong to resign his appointment and to a proposal for the establishment of tribunals, by the Church of England, to discipline the clergy for "preaches of doctrine, ritual and ceremonial". (Reported in "Bishops revive heresy trials for atheist clergy", Daily Telegraph, 20th July 2002 and discussed with Peter Bruinvels on "Sunday" BBC Radio 4, 21 July 2002). The result of the study has not been predetermined. It may be that a church as a members’ club can define its beliefs and boundaries or it may be that a church, particularly an established church, has a responsibility to include all those of the sovereign’s subjects that identify with the religion that the sovereign constitutionally defends. It was noted as a point of principle that this study should help the Sea of Faith to come to an informed consensus on such matters.