143 – Thank You, Life!

Editorial: Thank you, Life!

As I write, at last there are signs that this winter is nearly over. The first crocuses are peeping. Soon the daffodils my grandson planted for me last autumn will flower. The March hares will be leaping. Soon my son, so long locked down in Holland, will roar through the Channel Tunnel on Eurostar and burst into St Pancras Station. He will bring his trumpet with him. Easter is on its way. Thank you, Life!

This March Sofia’s front cover shows a leaping hare. She is a female and this year may give birth to leverets. Sofia’s back cover shows the risen Christ leaping from the grave. He reminds me of a dancing figure from the sixties, when we often danced. We liked to dance to Rock my Soul and The Yellow Submarine. In January, after a belated Christmas dinner – delayed by the Covid beast – we had a little dance again to Rock my Soul. I fell over but stood up again and carried on dancing. Next time it will be The Yellow Submarine, in whose theology of ‘Love and peace, man!’ even the Blue Meanies finally join the dance. Thank you, Life!.

In our first article, Generosity and Gratitude, Dominic Kirkham takes another look at the ethics of Jesus. He says: ‘Even without the specifically theistic element, this attitude of Jesus translates easily into a sense of the “givenness” of nature/existence, of the glory of life and the need for an underlying gratitude.’ As for ethics: ‘The Law is not only oppressive and unpersuasive but was indeed dismissed by Jesus… I see the morals of Jesus as the aspiration of possibilities…reaching beyond ourselves to the unattainable goal of perfection.’

In our next article Well, that’s Human Nature! David Rhodes disputes the way this mantra ‘is used as a reason for things being bad…and also as a reason why things won’t change.’ The next piece looks at the Christ poem in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, where Christ Jesus ‘empties himself’, giving an example of massive generosity.

Then Don Murray discusses Bonhoeffer’s challenge to traditional theology and considers the insights of Carl Jung (particularly his Answer to Job), especially in relation to translating the Bonhoeffer challenge into Christian thought.

In response to the three SOF Annual Conference talks last summer on The Future of God and Organised Religion, Mark Dyer enquires into what ‘his first followers thought of the young Jewish Rabbi, who sought to teach and interpret the faith of his forefathers,… anew for his contemporaries.’

After that we have the talk Rabbi Jonathan Romain gave at the SOF Conference on Assisted Dying, about which a bill is going through Parliament.

There are the usual letters and reviews. Stephen Mitchell reviews Hope by David Gee and John Pearson’s As I Please this time is on Age.

Finally, the title of this Sofia is taken from the famous song by the Chilean songwriter Violeta Parra, Gracias a la Vida (‘Thank you, Life’ or ‘Thanks to Life’). You can hear it on YouTube sung by the great Mercedes Sosa. It is quite a long song celebrating the many things life has given her. Here is my English version of the first and last verse:

Thank you, Life, that’s given me so much,
given me two open eyes, with which
I perfectly distinguish black from white.
I look up to the starry sky above.
Among the crowd I see the man I love.

Thank you, Life, that’s given me so much,
given me laughter, given me crying, which
allow me to express the joy and pain;
they are the two components of my song
and your song too that is the same as mine,
the song of everyone I make my own.

Thank you, Life!

Dinah Livingstone

Letters to the Editor

Two Ideas

Two ideas; one from a politician, the other from a writer, Abraham Lincoln and Ralph Waldo Emerson respectively. At the height of the Civil War in his annual report to Congress, Lincoln wrote:

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.

More briefly, I drew on Emerson for: ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’ I try to bring these two thoughts close together when I try to imagine the SOF Network’s future: the suggestion that we should disenthrall ourselves and that we should tread where we will leave a trail.

So much for my starting points. I now want to convince the sceptic that this is what the SOF Network has been attempting, and its significant measure achieving, for the last 35 years. I draw your attention to just two items: our journal Sofia and Solarity. If I look at Sofia with my two thoughts in mind I see very clearly a journey predicated upon Lincoln’s opening line: The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. And the direction(s) which Sofia has taken has very clearly left a trail, as our visitor to our website might see.

I think that Dave will not object too strongly to my seeing the work on Solarity similarly: beginning from the dogmas of an earlier era being inadequate to the present; he and his associates are very clearly laying out a trail – not only in the materials themselves but, I hope, in telling the story of how it is being achieved.

If I may, I will go just one step further and invite you to consider Don Cupitt from the two standpoints. I see Don as if he had been present at that opening of Congress and then stepping out and applying it to the second half of the twentieth century. If evidence is called for, his Taking Leave of God could be seen as a pretty good attempt at disenthralling! I don’t need to detail the trail of thoughts and books that he has been leaving behind him!

David Lambourn, Bangor

Sofia 142

I read your excellent editorial of the latest Sofia, as well as Martin Spence’s fascinating and thought-provoking Frame of Transcendence, and I greatly enjoyed Keith Sutherland’s review of William Blake vs the World. I loved too Kathryn Stanbrook’s essay Revisiting (incidentally I was pleased that her look-down reading was Trollope; I’m in the midst of the gripping Chronicles of Barsetshire and have a job putting them down!).

But altogether I think you have created an amazing forum for discourse on spiritual and artistic questions. It is uplifting. Many congratulations.

Jane Duran, London

How refreshing to read a publication that actually does much better than ‘Johnny come lately’ to your conversation – my head must have been in the sand somewhere – but the farewell to God and traditional Christianity has been the occupation of most of my adult life. I am especially intrigued by Martin Spence’s commentary on Terry Eagleton’s talk on the Death of God. The questionable possibility of survival without a unifying mythology has occupied my mind for some time, especially since, in clarifying Eagleton, he means that human societies need some shared faith or meaning – some shared ‘source of transcendent value’ if they are to hold together.

The answer is not in a revived Christianity; Greene-Gilbert surmises that the established Church has a limited future. I must agree. It will hang on for generations, and any attempt to resuscitate any relevant institution is doomed. God has died of old age – as the all-powerful, supernatural, theistic deity, which was the pathway to transcendence for 2500 years but now has no meaning in a scientific age.

And even SOF does not have the answer. John Pearson gives SOF – the most progressive group I know of – a mere ten years. I fear he is right. SOF has met the reality of a dying God. That was the issue for our generation (I’m 88); but it is not an issue for the succeeding generations. For them it is a fait accompli and needs no further discussion. It is like my lesbian clergy daughter Deborah. She has spent much of her life facing the opposition within the church. Now she is accepted and loved and says, ‘Why discuss it, it is no longer an issue.’

However, there continues to be a profound yearning to commune with something transcendent. As Gilbert notes, ‘It is as though it is written into our very DNA.’ The challenge for those following us is pointing out an emerging unifying pathway to the transcendent.

Don Murray, Truro, Canada

This engagement now consumes much of my time and one of the things which gives me most satisfaction is the new Nature Centre that during the pandemic has really begun to flourish as people search for a reconnection with the natural world. I was quite staggered earlier this autumn when over 60 families turned up for an evening bat-walk through the park. This has been the pattern for all the modest events we have hosted; in the summer over 600 turned up to a children’s nature day.

This renewed sense among people of some sort of a desire for a spiritual attachment to the natural world, however this may be expressed, has been widely observed. What intrigues me about the success of the Nature Centre is very much a reflection of the galvanising energy of one particular lady who is also the High Priestess of the local Pagan Moot, which is also based in the park and is one of the most flourishing of its kind in the country. The Moot is very much focused on activities that allow wide scope to a form of spiritual expression of a transcendental nature along the lines of Martin’s reflection. Despite whatever you may think about pagans and witches (probably largely prejudiced given the three millennia of Judeo-Christian polemic) my experience is that one needs to think again.

Thanks for the latest edition of Sofia that has just arrived and which I am eagerly devouring. I am particularly impressed by Martin Spence’s excellent article and totally agree with his thesis that ‘the human condition generates a transcendent impulse’ that will continue to express itself in many varied ways.

Dominic Kirkham, Manchester

Making Sense

I was very sad to read the end of Digby Hartridge’s piece. It’s unfortunately not uncommon for people to judge themselves against impossible perfection.

I got as far as looking up ‘sense’ in the dictionary. The primary meaning is the use of our five senses. Sense in the expression ‘making sense’ can become a metaphor for the meaning we find in our lives, something we must each construct for ourselves in accordance with our experiences. The danger comes when we use our ‘jackal mind’ to use the views of others as our yardstick.

To cite a personal example, we were once in college comparing our life achievements. I had followed a fairly undistinguished path in industry, but had brought up (or not totally frustrated) five children, all successful in their caring professions and all nice people to know. This was found to be a good and useful life. As Digby says, we never know what goes on in other minds.

Michael Helf, Birmingham