Habeas Corpus For Don Cupitt When I am dead were I admitted to heaven I would not feel at home.
How I would miss the Spring.
I sit in an April garden deep-blue-scented with hyacinths amid yellow crown imperials.
Would I want a heavy gold crown for a life achieved? I want this, which changes every day, one petal now ragged where an insect has bitten in, everything pressing, passing.
How I would miss the Summer with higgledy-piggledy picnics on the Heath, even when someone gets lost, arrives late cross and it threatens rain.
I prefer that to an angel choir where I don’t belong, habeas corpus being sine qua non of a human song.
Untidy city with your muddle of people living their lives, still falling short.
Earth with your beauty so old and so new that does not stay but slays me again and again with each different recurrence, kind and careless habitat where love can flower (or not), and every body lives and dies and the heart’s desire tantalises.
I would be homesick in heaven and hanker.
Dinah Livingstone Stephen Mitchell is a founder member and former Chair of SOF Network. He is the Rural Dean of Mildenhall in Suffolk. Fountain, Welwyn Garden City Photo © Robin Hall, licensed for reuse under Creative Commons License. r The Fountain is billed as being probably my last book. It may be seen as a purely rational religious book for the era of cultural globalisation, being pitched somewhere between Christianity, Buddhism, and the kind of modern critical secularism that began with young Hegelians like Marx and Feuerbach. For about a decade I’ve called my philosophy ‘Energetic Spinozism’, meaning a form of religious naturalism whose dominant metaphors speak not of rational necessity, substance., and eternity, but of an explosive outpouring, streaming, and scattering of energies-read-by-us-as-signs. Everything pours out and passes away, everything is broadcast, and on show, everything is constantly being re-read, reinterpreted and re-valued. In short, everything is utterly transient, including both you and me, both the stuff of the world and all our readings of it.