This article consists of thoughts and clarifications arising from a weekend with Don Cupitt at St Katherine's Community, London, in October 1990. But first, some biographical notes.
It is over twenty years now since I had my first introduction to the other great World-Religions by Professor S.G.F. Brandon and his younger colleagues, one a convert to Zoroastrianism and one to Buddhism, in the Department of the Study of Comparative Religion in the University of Manchester. The latter subject has been taught at Manchester since 1907, and I have always felt that I am in the right place in Manchester.
I was fortunate to be a "visiting student" in Brandon's department and on his course. He was an excellent teacher. His famous book Man and his Destiny in the Great Religions, published by Manchester University Press in 1961, is well worth reading.
Brandon had been a priest in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England. His truthfulness and curiosity gradually took him to the study of, and The Chair in, the Study of Comparative Religion, created by Manchester University in the Faculty of Theology on his account. By the time I met him he had acquired an international reputation and published many books. I owe him a great debt of gratitude and friendship and illumination. Alas, he died at only 63, in 1971, much mourned by the world of scholarship as an outstanding historian of religion but little appreciated by his church and fellow-theologians.
I have been teaching World Religions on and off since 1973 at the Manchester College of Adult Education, in Brussels at the European School and, since my retirement from the College in 1987, I have carried on with The University of the Third Age.
The study of the History of Religion opens our eyes to the geographical, historical and cultural factors which contribute, very substantially, to the making of religious faith and theology and which continue to do so unabated. That nature and human life/history are in a continuous state of flux, movement and impermanence has been noted and commented upon by Taoists, Hindus and Buddhists for centuries before the Christian era. It is part of the truth of things to acknowledge this whether we Westerners, with our craving for uniqueness, like it or not.
To have this understanding of life, i.e. to accept that "Truth is a pathless land" (Krishnamurti) requires courage and faith. To find meaning in the midst of sorrow, loss, despair and horror demands an arduous commitment to the ethical teaching and values available to us all in the rich store of the world's ethical teachings. As a result of their study we realise that it is up to us, each one of us, to discover our own brand of meaning and significance. To 'make sense' of our lives, that is to find out what we are here for, involves our will, our imagination, our time and energy. Making sense of and giving meaning to our experience is a profoundly creative act performed by the human being, who shares his/her unquenchable curiosity with the animals, as they seek to understand their environment and accommodate themselves to it within the limits of their capacities.
However, unless the sense and meaning we glean from our observations, investigations and reflections acquire a distinctly human dimension and are directed towards our fellow human beings, unless they are concerned with the betterment of the society of which we are a part, unless we are committed to the safeguarding of our natural 'environ' which, with all human societies, constitute the 'reality' beyond our individual selves, we can end up in a state of disintegration, nihilism and self-destruction, a state of schizophrenia. More people than we care to know about live in that state today. They either cannot or do not want to face up to their responsibilities of living in the state of adulthood, do not want to accept the fact that the time has come for women and men to generate their own salvation in reverend mutuality with all human beings and nature.
This is what is meant by living in the Void. The Void, in Buddhism, means that human beings, as the highest form of Consciousness and born with the potential for Buddhahood (Enlightenment), are surrounded by impermanence and seeming emptiness.
Although the Void is empty it is a living Void.
Emptiness is not the same as nothingness. There is no such state/thing as nothingness. According to the Buddha, human beings give meaning to human life and history through the practice of Compassion, of the Eightfold Path which leads to Wisdom and through the overcoming of the Impurities and Suffering. In Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, the universe has been conceived as of infinite and timeless proportions. Hence Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists never experienced the rude shock we, in the West, experienced in the last century when we began to realise how empty, vast and timeless space is.
However, we who live at the end of the 20th century are already familiar with the properties of the living Void. It pulsates, vibrates with electricity and energy, with countless atoms, particles and whatnots, with light and soundwaves. It is forever creating new patterns, is never the same for one instant, but it is void and empty of divine personal being and spirit.
This living void has become, increasingly, the background of our lives. We are moving into, flying around in it, investigating and probing and landing, so far only on the Moon, and establish space stations in it. The void forms the backcloth to our human existence in the biosphere of our planet earth which is turning on its axis in the void, ceaselessly. We can learn to feel at home in it and with it and bring about a sense of unity between our inner and its outer space : an interpenetration of inner and outer space.
In the process of creating my own faith-language or faith-story in my meditation times, I find the notion of the Nooesphere, encircling our planet earth, helpful. It is vibrating and pulsating with the spiritual energy of the faithful departed from every faith-community and none throughout the earth ; with praises and thanksgivings for all human life and endeavour, for all sentient beings ; with intercessions and supplications for our fellow human beings in their various needs and for due reverence in our dealings with the phenomenal world ; with the holy dreams and visions of countless women and men in every faith-community and none throughout the earth, in every place, of a more humane world-society, one which is caring for the biosphere "... as over each continent and island the dawn leads on another day voices of prayer are never silent, nor dies the strain of praise away ...". Prayer is the concentration of the human mind, in reverend attention to whatever need, problem and injustice has come to its notice.
Not to believe in God does not rob us of spiritual responsibility, energy and creativity. To the contrary, our self-generated spiritual energy, nourished by the teaching of the religious geniuses of the species, contributes to our human strength and self-reliance, to our determination to achieve universal compassion and wisdom.
It was Professor Wladimir Wernadski, living at the beginning of the century in Moscow, who invented/created the notion of the Nooesphere. He and Pavlev Florovski, who was a member of the Russian emigre community in Paris in the Twenties, corresponded about it. They conceived of it as being a sphere or crystallisation of human spiritual energy, emanating ceaselessly from the earth and, simultaneously, sending spiritual emanations back to earth as holy power, presence and energy. Teilhard de Chardin must have picked up the notion from the Russians in Paris and used it in his own thinking and writing.
How do I know this ? From Raisa Orlowa Kopolev's book : Die Türen öffnen sich langsam (The Doors slowly open). It is the account of her painful transition of having to leave Russia and her family with her husband Lev, who was expelled in the same manner as Solzhenitsyn. They settled in Germany with the help of Heinrich Boll, the German writer, and she had to learn and understand a foreign language and culture which she achieved and crowned with her book written in German. In this book she writes about Wernadski and his Nooesphere. Alas, she died of cancer four years ago. Her husband still lives in Cologne.
How does Jesus, the Christ, fit into this new vision of faith ? He was a prophet of the Old Testament Jewish mould and a religious genius whose message and example of living continues to be felt by his followers, by those who believe in a personal God at the centre of the universe and history who was once and for all time incarnated in Jesus Christ. The person, life and teaching of Jesus has inspired Western men and women with splendid, tender, and holy stories, pictures, ideas, dogmas and a systematic theology.
Their meaning need not be lost, if the will to change their presentation, radically, can assert itself in the church and among theologians.
It is meaning we are after not "Truth". Truth like "God" is a word that has lost its former meaning.
Both had meaning in the past, great and 'ultimate' meaning for me, once, also. Today each of us must choose their own metaphor, concept, symbol and create their own story, learning to share them with others in state of "frank and honourable exchange".
This is the true way forward into discovering, in the words of a fellow-story-teller, a "thousand, thousand, thousand and one different currents/stories each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity ... and because the stories held there, in the ocean of the streams of stories, are in fluid form, they retain the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves and so become yet other stories ...." (Salman Rushdie in Haroun and The Sea of Stories, published in 1990.) We Westerners, and that includes Jews, are so frightened of giving up the triumphalist truth-claims of our Judeo-Christian story and its uniqueness. This attitude of exclusivity has not only dominated our religion and culture but our nationalisms also. Overall, it has done as much harm as good in our world-region Europa, in the Near East and worldwide. In what sense would the world really be better off with a belief in God and the teaching of Christology ?
Christians and Jews have to address themselves to answering these questions in the light of the teaching of the other great Faiths, some of them more ancient than they are, and in the light of the research into modern sub-atomic physics and the structure and chemistry of the human brain.
ROSEMARIE WEDELL is a retired college lecturer in World Religions and lives in Manchester.