102 – Advent and Utopia

Author: Dinah Livingstone. Published December 2011 in issue 102 of Sofia.

Download full issue PDF

Contents

Articles
Reviews
Poetry
Regulars and Occasionals

Editorial

Sofia is for diggers and seekers in its own native radical tradition and everywhere. 3 Sofia 102 Christmas December 2011 Sofia is grateful to Red Pepper for kind permission to reprint Mike Marqusee’s article Let’s Talk Utopia. As Marqusee points out: ‘We’ve been taught to fear utopian thinking, which is denounced as not only impractical but positively dangerous.’ But, he argues, ‘While there are dangers in utopian thinking, the much greater danger is its absence. The reality is that we don’t “talk utopia” nearly enough.’ In a struggle for social justice we not only need to say what is wrong with the present but to imagine a better future. ‘We can draw,’ he says, ‘on a rich tradition going back to the biblical prophets and found in almost every human society.’ He warns: ‘A utopia without dissent and argument is a nightmare. ’ Utopia is a good society, not a perfect one. It must be participatory and ‘more of a process, a journey’.

In the last few days (feeling too old and rheumatic to camp, besides being the world’s most useless camper) I have been visiting the protest camp in St Paul’s churchyard (see picture on the back cover). The camp’s main focus is the huge inequality in our society, and the protesters have dramatically raised the issues at stake in a way that none of us can ignore. Camping at the foot of the steps of the great West door of the cathedral, they have challenged the Church and some of the debate has been framed in Christian language. The Christian gospel and language is part of that rich utopian tradition, which belongs to all of us, whether we believe in supernatural beings or not.

Rejecting the supernatural, an important part of Sofia’s task is to translate that Christian language into secular terms, ‘holding fast to what is good’ for the sake of humanity. As I write we are coming up to the season of Advent, which not only looks forward to Christmas as a commemoration of the birth of Jesus long ago, but whose liturgy is charged both with the utopian longings of the Old Testament prophets and the gospel promise of what Jesus called ‘the kingdom of God’, that is, the coming on Earth of a kind society that is good news for the poor. In my article Advent and Utopia I explore this further.

Also in this issue, David Warden takes a critical look at Paul van Buren’s classic The Secular Meaning of the Gospel. From Australia, Peter Bore writes about the ‘troublesome priest’ Peter Kennedy, sacked by the Vatican because his church was pursuing too much ‘liberation theology’, and who has set up ‘St Mary’s Community in Exile’.

In The Strange Story of Prophet John Wroe Dominic Kirkham looks at one of the weirder and wackier stories of millenarian expectations and highlights the dangers of the claim to be the ‘chosen people’, especially when those making the claim are rich and powerful: ‘The conviction of a special destiny under God became a defining characteristic of the American psyche with its own historical narrative.’ So as with all myths, discernment is needed. Utopian yearnings and expectations must be subject to the criterion of a sane and kindly humanism.

Advent looks forward to Christmas, which celebrates the incarnation of the word, that is the story of the ‘divine word’ coming down to us, becoming fully human, embodied in humanity and active in the world. Or, we could say the story expresses the utopian desire of humankind to become kinder, less unkind. The way John puts it at the beginning of his Gospel is: ‘Ɣhe word became flesh and p pitched its tent (πΗΎ΋ΑΝΗΉΑ: eskenosen) among us.’ That word was Jesus talking about good news for the poor, and the dispossessed inheriting the Earth. Recently that word has been going out more clearly from the tents in St Paul’s churchyard than from the cathedral. The Cathedral seems to have realised this, as it has withdrawn its threat of legal action.

Sofia Editor: Dinah Livingstone, 10 St Martin’s Close London NW1 0HR editor@sofn.org.uk letters From a Different Direction May I join you? I have come from another tribe to SOF, the tribe of atheist non-believers. For all my adult life, until I ‘came home’ to the openness and questioning of Quakers, I had nothing to do with any God-centred religion.

Your Conference in Leicester renewed my faith. Yes I have a ‘faith’ – in the human rather than the Holy Spirit –which I was taught as a child. I go to a Meeting for Worship (I prefer to call it worth-ship as I see the worth of an evolved human spirit.) The word ‘evolved’ is used although I do see this spirit as being the consequence of both nature and nurture. With regard to the latter, this spirit is vulnerable.

Religions were a necessary vehicle for the human spirit. However this is being drowned under the ever increasing flood of self-interest over that of community. We all need communities – SOF is now one of mine. I saw the Conference (Brain, Belief and Behaviour) as being focussed on truth – as science healthily and sceptically sees it. This was confirmed when I met the last speaker the following weekend at our Quaker Yearly Meeting Gathering.

— Bob Booth

Bob Booth bboobboo@btinternet.com In Defence of the ‘Boring’ In the first paragraph of her letter (Sofia 101) Julia Nicoll puts on record her appreciation of this year’s Conference and in so doing performs a valuable service for the Network. In going on to report and to some extent support the flippant-seeming negative throwaway remarks of Anon ( just one delegate) I think she does us a great disservice, condemning next year’s event before it has even taken place!

Whilst I am all for freedom of speech, whoever made ‘the comment’ seems to reveal a certain lack of care for his/her fellow man which, if genuine, really does both sadden and annoy me. I too have days on which I find my job unsatisfying, and there are some aspects which I shall be glad to escape from if I am lucky enough to live until retirement . But, above all, I am profoundly grateful that I have had a life-long job, profoundly grateful for the good pension which will flow from that, and profoundly conscious of the plight of the very many who have no job, may never have a job, and certainly not the eventual cushion of a good pension.

As with our 2010 conference on Social Justice (another rather under-attended gathering for reasons which I fear, judging by Julia’s letter, that I understand only too well... ‘boring’ perhaps ?) the Trustees decided some time ago that work, in its many forms, was a worthy area for some serious reflection.

Doubtless most of us are more at ease with ‘sexy’, crowd-pulling topics such as ‘Brain, Belief and Behaviour’, whetting and satisfying the appetites of the navel-gazers amongst us, (and I confess to rather enjoying such discussions myself when they come along ). But I strongly agree with and support those who feel that the Network must also be seen to address the pressing issues of the day. Only through this last approach, I suggest, can we hope to be taken seriously by a wider audience, not least the young, facing as they do some of the very concerns which we hope to explore. As far as we can tell at this distance Work and Worth goes ahead in 2012, because we think it should, albeit with a different title if anyone out there can suggest a more inviting- seeming one. I strongly urge readers to come along please, when the time comes, and to bring a friend or two!

John Pearson Chair of Trustees Newcastle-upon-Tyne PS. Incidentally, we intend to make a personal approach to all non-members who attended Conference, as we have in the past, inviting them to join and play a part in the Network Being Commissioned to Write a Poem Look at this Oscar, I’ve been invited to write a poem on ‘space.’ I’m lucky, I’ve already written two on that subject. Stop that, I’ve told you it’s rude.

— John Pearson, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Please put the date in your diary and notify your interest immediately to helen@hbellamy.me.uk or by phoning Helen on 01226-711745. The conference will be held close to Notting Hill Gate tube station. Full details will be distributed before long, always supposing there is a good response. 21 Sofia 102 Christmas December 2011 Unhelpful Words In 1955 during Confirmation lessons I was in principle happy to accept authority. But I couldn’t ‘get’ the Creed, didn’t understand a single phrase. Then I took social anthropology at College. And then, as I lived in (as it was) Rhodesia, events alerted me, alas, to the way people refuse to look facts in the face and justify terrible deeds to themselves and cling angrily and alltoo-expediently to undeserved privilege – and I wondered if religious belief, also, was self-delusion.

So far so standard SOF. But soon I began to have trouble with words. One of them, contrarily, occurs in the name of the Network I now belong to. What did ‘Faith’ mean? I consulted the dictionary. None the wiser, I tried empirically to work out what people meant when they used the word. Was it a set of aspirations or vague hopes or a resolution to some philosophical debate I hadn’t been party to? Was it a sort of ungrounded certainty about the Meaning of Life? Discussing Faith with People of Faith, to reciprocal incomprehension, it became obvious it called for a turn of mind you either had or didn’t have, as with a sense of humour. ‘Faith’ (either the personal feeling or a particular organisation), I decided, was an Unhelpful Word. (Incidentally, to champion plural ‘Faiths’, à la Prince Charles, or a singular portmanteau ‘Faith’, as in Tony Blair’s set-up, is illogical.) At best ‘Faith’ was shorthand for a convenient body of ready-made opinions. ‘Belief’ was less confusing, but still an Unhelpful Word. If you try with all the means at your disposal to unravel a mystery, as you do, without clear result, you don’t pretend to any belief, you put the whole thing on the back burner. Equally, you don’t find the need to say, for instance: ‘I believe in the sea.’ (Which incidentally deals with the second half of the name of the Network.) Soon other redundant words cropped up, such as ‘Spirituality’ and ‘Mysticism’ (apparently heightened states of perception). It were better such words hadn’t been invented. ‘Revelation’ was more promising (a sudden realignment of unresolved conflicts). ‘Religions’ were clearly social institutions of great diversity, with disparate customs and codes of behaviour, some weird. ‘Religious’, however, denoting a kind of sensation, was a woefully imprecise qualifier.

Like an autistic person puzzled by empathy, I continued to study the deployment of these words and discovered they were sclerotically overburdened with countless individual past interpretations, dating from when animists tried to move on and barked up the wrong tree. Ruminations in isolation. More usefully, over the years in Australia and Britain, I made some headway tackling Compassion, Love, Self-Awareness, Sacrifice, Moral Frameworks, even Humility (arguably).

Come 1990, John McDonald Smith recommended a book by Don Cupitt. And all the while I thrilled to the sunset over the veldt, bush or wold.

Lots of true Dawkinsesque sensibility here. Indeed, in my old age, with leisure to reflect, I’m becoming enraptured by rigour and incline towards atheism. Why categorise by ‘belief’ or ‘disbelief’ in ‘God’ (another nebulous concept)? Why isn’t a theist called, let’s say, an a-humanist? Though, as a pessimist and ex-originalsinner, perhaps I’m one of those? Which dithering reminds me, if there were a God, then ‘believing’ in him would be a heresy, wouldn’t it, proclaiming with arrogant absence of any doubt his Existence? An Archbishop put me on to that: be undecided. Mind you, starting from scratch, there’s no reason to invent the word ‘God’. Has anyone said different?

Funnily enough, I still ‘worship’ (formally celebrate life) and ‘pray’ (map my daily progress) – alone or in small groups only, please, to avoid hysteria – although of course I’ve been conditioned to do so. There lingers within me a cosy affection for the good old C of E (when census-filling) and the Sea of Faith. Please don’t tell me I’m out of place in the latter, for I assure you I’m sensitive, even non-cost-beneficially contemplative. Contrary to first impressions, I can think metaphorically and laterally, which I attribute to short circuits in the brain.

Now I’m wondering (rather belatedly): what’s the practical application, in a world wilfully wounded, probably dying, of all this speculation?

— Anonymous, Bristol