ENVIRONMENT We value the natural world as a source of wonder and inspiration, and accept our duty to maintain a sustainable environment for the future. [But see also our proposed fifth and sixth statements in the main text! ] Thanks to the energies of Patti Whaley, SoF established its own site on the Internet last year and growing numbers of wired-up SoFers across the world have burbled away to each other on their computers. What have they been saying? We hacked into their conversations, and now offer a taste of netspeak for the benefit of the underprivileged minority who wouldn’t know a modem from a commode...
The SoF website can be found at: www.emma.cam.ac.uk/www_server/fellows/cupitt/sea_of_faith/sofhome.html Working the Net IN THE BEGINNING THERE WERE two. On March 5 1996 Patti Whaley congratulated Stephen Mitchell on getting his new computer to work and pointed him in the direction of wacky religious websites. “There are several Quaker and Humanist sites, lots of Buddhists and zillions of fundamentalists and new agers”, plus “a bunch of college students trading bathroom humour with your occasional religious comment thrown in”. Stephen didn’t immediately reveal where his particular interest lay.
More joined the list. A heavy dialogue soon developed on the rights and wrongs of Israel and the Palestinians, one correspondent being a Jewish Quaker from Boston who had heard of SoF from the Universalist, magazine of the Quaker Universalist Group in the UK. By August there were 34 correspondents, half of them in New Zealand.
Patti proposed a contest for an SoF theme song “to counter the attack that we are too academic and dry’. Her own entry was “Cupitt wants me for a sunbeam”, and she promised a workshop at the 1997 conference on “Nonrealist Revisions of Tacky Church Songs”. (Let’s hold her to that!).
New discussion subjects made their entry: how to reform church liturgy, especially the “disaster area” of the confirmation service; atheism and SoF; what does prayer mean today?; sex and religion. Adam Thomson from Belgium picked up the themesong suggestion and offered a few lines from an old sixties songbook to the tune of Beethoven’ s Ode to Joy, beginning “Come all spirits roaming freely/Bind your will to common thrust...” Stephen Mitchell replied that he was “a bit dubious about creating songs. Certainly if you’re a church-going Sofer then it would be good to write some hymns for your church. But to write ones for SoF to sing as SoF seems highly suspect to me. I find community singing as manipulative as church services at times!” Patti found and posted a fine nonrealist prayer by Michael Leunig, which had “reconciled me to the idea of prayer again”: “We give thinks for places of simplicity and peace. Let us find such a place within ourselves.
We give thanks for places of refuge and beauty. Let us find such a place within ourselves.
We give thanks for places of nature’s truth and freedom, of joy, inspiration and renewal, places where all creatures may find acceptance and belonging. Let us search for these places: in the world, in ourselves and in others. Let us restore them. Let us strengthen them and protect them, and let us create them.
May we mend this outer world according to the truth of our inner life and may our soul be shaped and nourished by nature’s eternal wisdom”.
To an impassioned appeal for “grassroots revolution against the establishment within each faith”, one correspondent urged instead that we direct the revolution at the establishment within ourselves. “What we need, and maybe what this forum can offer in a modest way, is a developing analysis of the myriad ways in which we all oppress and hurt each other so that we can learn, pick ourselves up and do our bit to make the world a better place. With his background, how do you expect the Pope to think?
There but for the grace of God...” The Pope’s widely publicised reassertion of the perpetual virginity of Mary struck sparks. “Behind the virginity cult is a value system set up primarily for men, but it is even more exasperating that women have been such willing accomplices in their own denigration”. But there was also the subversive Mary of the Magnificat, “a rallying cry of liberation theology”. One correspondent urged the need to “re-appropriate the physical, the bodily and sexual into Christian spirituality. I have just been to see the exhibition of paintings by Lucian Freud in Kendal, these large canvasses which por- tray naked human bodies (warts, veins, wrinkles, bags, sags, spots and all) in all their materiality and contingency, but also their presence. They are not beautiful in the usual sense but they have a dignity and a grandeur which I find compelling and renewing. Freud makes us face up to our fleshiness and accept and love what the Church has taught us to fear.” Michael Robbins started a discussion on SoF and Buddhism, recommending a Buddhist review called Tricycle. Zen and the art of tricycle riding — or reading? Hugh Gilman in New Zealand wrote that “part of the testing process for me is to be confronted by zealots, as I am forced to review where I stand and formulate responses. Some day I will find courage to say to a Seventh Day Adventist on my doorstep [in answer to the question whether I have found God], ‘Why, have you lost Him again?’” Stephen Mitchell kept banging on about virgins and purity. “I don’t like singing ‘Blest are the pure in heart’ —I just don’t get any inspiration from that kind of language.
Nor do I get much from talk about rights and wrongs. Most actions — bombing a country’s military communications system, selecting one person for a job, medical decisions, bringing up children — have downsides to them. I fancy there are a lot of people who just don’t get involved with these sorts of decision or are inhibited because they see them as a mixture of rights and wrongs, goods and evils. So it means they can’t be pure in the world of political (little ‘p’)) decision-making. I guess they can try to construct a life where they can remain a moral virgin — a moral monastery — but how many of us want to live in one? I prefer to talk about what we'd like to do. There'll still be downsides to that but I can cope with talking about desires and wants, joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains... My definition of a nonrealist is someone who doesn’t find much use for the word ‘real’. To test whether youre a nonrealist spend a week not using the word ‘real’. Now I think I'll add to the wordlist ‘right’. What use are these words? Why should I use them? Oh well, Onward Virgin Soldiers...” Bill LeFurgy reported a new software programme in Germany which allows users to confess to their com- puters instead of priests. The programme lists 200 sins and may be customised according to the sinfulness of the user. The computer calculates the seriousness of the sin and prescribes a suitable penance.
But apparently the German hierarchy has banned its use, insisting that “you cannot have sins forgiven by the push of a button”.
Patti, again, picked up a reference to someone’s friend who visited an Indian ashram though he “didn’t believe in God as such”.
What, she mused, was the difference between “He doesn’t believe in God as such” and “He doesn’t believe in God”?
Someone else threw in “Talk about God is a wastebucket of failed suggestions”.
Or was God simply “as He is in Jesus”?
No, replied Anthony Freeman. “Jesus is a very flexible friend — as flexible as God and he can be moulded into almost any shape which Christians wish. He is invoked in support of socialism and capitalism, pacifism and militarism, catholicism and protestantism, quietist mysticism and muscular Christianity. That is not to deny that the character of Jesus can be a great challenge to our settled ways and an inspiration to do great things. It is simply to reflect that to say that ‘God is as He is in Jesus’ is not to put any specific content into the term God.” Adam Thomson thought we went on about God too much. “The question of God has been dealt with — she is mystery, that’s the end of it.” SoF should attend more to saving the world. To which Patti responded “Give me a break! Saving the world’s what I get paid for!” (she works for Amnesty).
A dialogue between the Revs Mitchell and Freeman, with the same breathless readability you find in one of those footnotes in Das Kapital which take up more room than the chapters, had one or two e-mailers dropping off the list because the exchanges were getting “too erudite”. Others stayed but remained readers rather than writers. Stephen tried to tempt them in: “How, I wonder, do they watch? With bemused cynicism, frustrated bewilderment, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy?” Tim Gouldstone responded by recommending Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self on Meaning, Manipulation and Promise, by A. Thistleton. How many more left?
Erudition apart, Gouldstone introduced a new note, critical of the Network. “I believe that the SoF movement is moving towards becoming a platform for the fundamentalism of the dogmatic liberal/radical personality who despises all points of view except his/her own.” Adam Thomson wrested the site back from the theologians, making his own contribution to the proper marginalisation of erudition with the following church noticeboard announcements gleaned from the Guardian: “Don’t let worry kill you. Let the Church help” “Mrs Jones will sing ‘Put me in my little bed’ accompanied by the Pastor” “The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind and they may be seen in the church basement on Friday” “A Bean Supper will be held on Tuesday in the Church Hall. Music will follow”....and many more of the same ilk.
John Maindonald restored respectability by asking how Sof related to earlier radical religious traditions: the 17th century radical movements, republican Quakerism, humanist Unitarians, “A great idea!” responded Patti. “It would be great to find (or, if that’s impossible, to write) a single book that analysed and pulled together the radical fringes of Christianity. It might give us a clearer idea of where we stand.
Does anyone know of such a study?” Maindonald suggested The Radical Reformation by G.H. Williams - “a huge 1500-word tome” published by Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Kirksville, Missouri, and_ R.H.
Bainton’s The Travail of Religious Liberty, Westminster Press.
Hugh Gilman contributed the following, allegedly from a New Zealand exam paper: “Moses led the Hebrews to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. The Egyptians were all drowned in the dessert.
Afterwards Moses went up Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Amendments”.