In every culture and every cultural product, some things are conspicuous by their absence, marginalised - things that make a great noise by making no noise. Within traditional Christianity, for instance, I have always felt that a healthy appreciation of sexuality, the feminine and humour were the missing or suppressed elements. One of the sub-texts of Christian groups I encountered in my teens seemed to be that sexuality was somehow wrong or unhealthy. When I turned to Eastern religious paths in the early 1970s I encountered the idea that sexuality and bodily pleasure could be vehicles for expressing spirituality, something which seemed instinctively right for me. I had always seen sexuality as something of great beauty, and for me the aesthetic and religious values were always very close.
With respect to the feminine, I was attracted to Catholicism by the prominence given to Mary - particularly in this century with the acknowledgement of the Assumption, seen by Carl Jung as a highly significant religious event. As to humour, I divide Christians into two groups: those who find Monty Python's Life of Brian offensive, and those who, like me, find it witty and full of telling insights. The final scene, in which a crucified multitude sing "Always look on the bright side of life", I see as a shrewd satirical comment on the historically dominant Pauline-Augustine emphasis on suffering and asceticism. The ability to see the funny side of oneself and one's beliefs marks mature confidence, and is an antidote to the narrow-minded, humourless attitude which is next door to the fanaticism recognisable under totalitarian regimes and in fundamentalist religion. Christianity needs to be more positive and life- and world-affirming to counterbalance this negative tendency.
Don Cupitt writes of Buddhist Christianity as opposed to the Platonic Christianity we have inherited. I would speak of Nietzschean Christianity, which would incorporate the Heraclitian/Buddhist emphasis, but in addition would be affirming and positive about this life in this world - the only life we have once we lose our illusions about a supernatural- or after-life. Given the great antipathy towards Christianity in Nietzsche's writings, this Nietzschean Christianity may seem something of a paradox, but it is prefigured in Cupitt's Sea of Faith which inspired this whole enterprise.
What is possible, and required, I believe, is to retain the positive moral ideals which Christianity brought to our culture - essentially the golden rules of harmlessness, returning good for evil, and doing one's best to care for the well-being of others as one would for one's own - and apply these to the concrete concerns of people in this, the (only) world, instead of emphasising personal salvation projected for some after-death existence. I refer to the welfare of the marginalised and rightless, the poorly- or un-fed, unsheltered, uneducated, ill-treated. In our society in particular we need to add to this list the isolated and therefore lonely and depressed, the result of the break-down of the extended family and community. It is this re-valuing and refocusing of concern on the people and world around us, a "resacralising" of this world, which I understand as the coming of the Kingdom.
Well, what about SoF? One thing which strikes me is the weight of what I would call "L-mode" thinking, sometimes called left-brain thinking: rationality, analysis, intellectualism. This is hardly surprising. It is a common characteristic of the theological and philosophic enterprise rooted in the Greek invention of philosophy. All our discussion of "theories", about the nature of the world, God, etc., have stemmed from this. In this respect SoF is still part of the Greek tradition, with its debate about abstract concerns, e.g. whether "God" is "real" or not. Such questions are of no practical relevance to the practical life of most late twentieth century Westerners. Sea of Faith magazine's contributors, like myself, are steeped in this academic, Greek form of discourse - thinking in abstracts rather than concretes, in straight lines, hard angles, chains of clear deductive argument tending to clear, rational conclusions and prescriptions. Life - my life at least - is not like that.
There are positive signs of the converse way of thinking: visual, symbolic, indefinite, suggestive, "R-mode": poetry workshops and theatre, Derek Chorley's article "God, Please Make it Snow!" in the last issue of the magazine (his beautiful, poetic childhood reminiscences reminding me of Polanyi's concept of Personal Knowledge - the difference between what we know of a pen by grasping it as opposed to having a definition of it). But still, my first thought is that the legacy of the Christian Church, like the legacy of religious realist God-talk, hangs over in this tendency to privilege "L-mode" rational discourse, which includes all the arguments "for and against". And I know that this article itself is enmeshed in just such discourse. I am preaching as much to myself as to anyone else. I would like to try to redress this a little.
In attending a Catholic Mass with an old friend several years ago, I felt what I might then have called a "presence". Enough to lead me take instruction and be received into the Church. Looking back from the perspective of non-realism, I can see that the Mass differed from other Christian services, which had not had the same effect, not because of some supernatural real "presence" but due to the cumulative effect produced by the candles, chalices, coloured silk robes, images of Christ and Mary, bells, and, especially, the incense as it is wafted around the altar in its chain-swung censer. The celebration of the "Sacred Mystery" appealed to my poetic and aesthetic sense in a way that more spartan services had not. It evoked for me a sense of the awesome and numinous, the "un-secular", the "sense of the sacred" which is one of the defining characters of religion and spirituality for me, and which I have already referred to as present for me also in sexuality. And this sense of the sacred produced in me by the Mass I translated at the time as the "presence" of something. I could still say this now, but instead of a mysterious external presence I could speak of the presence of a sacred feeling in myself, evoked by the ceremony.
I see a connection between my response to the Mass and the French Symbolist poet Mallarme, who advocated and practised non-realism in poetry in the 1890s. Mallarme's aesthetic theory was that art, rather than attempting to represent an "objective" world, should be "indefinitely suggestive". In his Paris salon, where he received and influenced a host of French, English and Irish literary and artistic figures including Whistler, Degas, Valery, Wilde and Yeats, he always smoked a cigarette, "to put some smoke," he would say, "between the world and myself".
Mallarme's attitude of vagueness, suggestion, allusion, a weaving of words was not to convey a particular meaning but to provide a starting point for the appreciative and associative processes of the reader. The Symbolist poem seems to be saying to each of us, "How does this make you feel? What does this suggest to you?" For me, this is what the Mass does. Rather than being the affirmation of a single dogma, a closed meaning (though evolving within contemporary culture, as evidenced by the current move to inclusive language), it is a subject for contemplation and meditation, perpetually open to my own thoughts and constructions. Drifting smoke, whether real or metaphorical, blunts the hardness, softens straight lines, puts everything in soft focus. And is not soft-focus photography a technique for disguising defects caught in the harsh glare of human perception, every crease and blemish, allowing us the freedom to construct our own ideal of beauty, as some well known visual illusions cause the eye to "fill in" expected detail?
So perhaps the Network should resist the "L-mode" rationalist need to be too definite, too sharp in goals and aims, the desire for "closure", neat conclusion, programmed by our culture and education. This is the lesson I have been learning in attempting to write a book recently: no statement is conclusive, no synthesis of ideas is ever complete, the "final word". Texts and their intertextuality are webs of Penelope.
When I am present at the celebration of the Mass, the "Sacred Mystery", I am struck by something, I know not what. There is a mystery there, named and acknowledged as a mystery in the ritual. It is translated into sights for the eye, sounds for the ear, the scent of incense, the taste and texture of the Host. The total synaesthetic effect communicates something to me which is not and can never be clearly and definitively expressed. That is what Mystery is. It is the same with the mystery of existence, our own life, our lives. Let us maintain some of the mystery, some of the indistinct and holistic depth of the visual, musical, sensual perceptions. Let us not be afraid to put a little smoke between the world and ourselves.
Richard Smith is a former NHS psychologist.