David Partridge 83 Hamilton Road Oxford OX2 7QA Do please keep sending your thoughts - and comments to Postbag. a Sof 56 November 2002 My heartbeat had been regularised by Sunday morning - less than 24 hours after an unexpected admission to hospital. I’d try to use this precious time reading Don Cupitt’s new book, Emptiness and Brightness, potentially a description of the change in me from yesterday to today.
The woman two beds away had kept us awake at night talking to herself, including some religious phraseology. We didn’t know what was wrong with her and she didn’t talk with us. Under stress, she lived in a world of her own. At 10 a.m. that Sunday a male visitor arrived. He read her the bible passage about Jesus walking on the water. "If you have enough faith in Jesus you too can walk on the water," the Church elder concluded with irritating self-assurance. As he left, the nurse arrived with the next injection.
The sultry day wore on. For me, in contrast to the would-be walkers on water, Cupitt was justifying religious humanism. ‘Talk about believing in God and about the nature of God could be entirely replaced by talk about a religious response to life and about what sort of things turn it on’. Yes - we in SoF are good at talking, and we love it. But what actually turns us on apart from intellectualised dissent and discursive inquiry? SoF’s agreed aim is to explore and promote religious faith, but how much of our time is actually spent on such exploration? The temptation is merely to discuss religion; this is what the Western mind is trained to do. We write off walking on the water as a mere metaphor, but those two in hospital wanted to believe this as a genuine response to life as they found it. They wanted to transcend everyday life because they didn’t find it good enough. In contrast Cupitt asserts that ‘Empty radical humanism fills me with indestructible joy’. ‘Emptiness is bliss’. The old vocabulary required faith in a realist God (or is it Jesus?) who will fix everything; the Cupitt vocabulary involves faith as ‘an easy Yes to life’. Both involve some form of abandonment of the self. Like him, I have (or I think I have) got rid of ‘the natural/ supernatural distinction and all its correlates’.
However, I am less sure that for me faith is merely ‘the knack of letting go and surrendering control’. Does life deliver the goods without cash on delivery? Do religious humanists have no need to strive? Are they sure they have the right emotional toolkit, for when life gets tough? Like Cupitt I’m not engaged in a metaphysical, even sentimental quest for ‘an objective anchorage or foundation’ for my life, but I need to nurture faith, to exteriorise, to aspire, to find motivation, to renew commitment, to live out values. Perhaps my liberal, non-conformist origins leave me uncomfortable with just allowing things to happen. My faith is not a ‘letting-be’ -that’s too theoretical and too chancy; it needs active and deliberate cultivation.
It may be difficult for loyal ‘Church members in SoF’ to understand the problem. They can live dual lives - one through SoF and the other through the traditional, communal faith activities within their Churches. The former provides intellectual respectability; the latter provides familiar types of emotional and motivational support, always there on tap. For those who do not come from, or have moved out from the great religious traditions, life is tougher. The need is for ‘spirituality’ (albeit a word needing definition), and the company and support of fellow travellers.
They have to create a satisfying personal religion as they go along.
Week by week. DIY religion is hard work - making decisions as to what a modern form of religion really means in practice. There’s no pre-set agenda. How can others assist in this quest and how can one help them? Some form of group activity is needed, with all that implies in terms of the need for organisation and viability.
Plunged that weekend into the antiseptic world of physical medicine I kept asking myself what was really meant by talk of walking on water. Human need was writ large in these contrasting approaches to healing. What could a SoF-type chaplain have offered in this situation? To what extent does post-modern religion sof 56 November 2002 Expressions Miles Howarth ponders a future for the Sea of Faith provide a faith to live by? We need to ask ourselves such urgent questions if SoF is to progress from being just a talking shop. As an organisation SoF is not expanding.
Perhaps it is too much of an intellectual featherbed and not enough of a launch pad for life. We urgently need some rethinking about the basics, and the potential. Does SoF go beyond a liberal syllabus for ‘A’ Level Religious Studies (heretical module)? Does such a cerebral approach to religion have any relevance to life once you've got your certificate? Why bother any more?
Through Sea of Faith’s outreach activities, and at SoF events, our original function must continue - offering mutual support.
This ministering role will remain. Some will then pass through to secular humanism, hoping to find enough motivational and emotional activities there to meet their needs. Some will linger, hopeful of salvaging something from the collapse of their traditional religious world. Beyond them, we need to be sure that SoF has something to offer the vast number of people ‘out there’ who have long ago rejected traditional religion and do not intend to retrace their exit path. Some have become vaguely conscious that there might be something of value there after all — perhaps psychological insights or some accumulated wisdom not to be found elsewhere. They will not wish to call themselves Christians for fear of the baggage now attached to the label. Some will join new religious movements. SoF’s Object rightly talks of religion, not just Christianity. For all these people SoF can, and needs to, help them to practise forms of religion, which are intellectually coherent. The most valuable part of SoF gatherings may well be the experimentation with new forms of worship, new manifestations of human community, new expressions of meaning and spirituality. The agenda must concentrate on the emction as well as the logic. This is where the springs of human behaviour are to be found.
And now for a wider view, coupled with a prophetic warning.
Consider the last few pages of Lloyd Geering’s The World to Come where he indicates some parameters of a new global religion, which is required for a globalised society. He offers some broad outlines of the attitudes and values which will constitute being religious. And ‘unless we humans are strongly motivated to become a global society, we are likely in the imminent future to suffer tremendous catastrophes which will be of our making’. My own observations are that there are liberals or radicals in other religions who are beginning to move away from religious realism, using parallel paths of metaphor and symbol. ‘The vision, goals and values to be found in any global religion must possess their own inherent power to win conviction; they must appear to be self-evidently true to all humans irrespective of their cultural past’.
Indeed, and SoF is in a stronger position than most to make a useful contribution. We need to work at this, but in a practical way. To break with the past, perhaps we shouldn't see it as religion.
In sum, for the sake of our own faith, for the future of SoF as a valued (possibly unique) organisation, and even for the sake of global cohesion, the prime task is now to find ways of celebrating and giving value to human life. We can’t just rely on support structures from a Christian past, merely because they happen still to be there. The intellectual battle is won. The need is now to develop faith practices which have meaning for vast numbers of people — new, good quality, hard-wearing tools. We must look for new expressions of common, shared aspiration - depth in simplicity, but more than just silence. Perhaps in the second decade of SoF the need is for self-confidence and courage - to think big. We could start with a SoF ginger group.
Keeping an active retirement, Miles Howarth is a trustee of the SoF Trust, a Vice-Chair on his local Parish Council and a trustee of a local educational charity and several Unitarian bodies.