Fragments of the Mind of God: Atoms in Search of a Meaning

When you read Ezekiel’s visionary experience of the “four living creatures” appearing out of the tumultuous, flashing sky and the “wheels within wheels” that rise and move with them (chapter 1, vv. 4-21), you could be forgiven for wondering what he had been smoking because that vision bears the hallmarks of an hallucinogenic experience. But some have seen it differently. They have seen in these “wheels within wheels”, with eyes in their rims, evidence of alien spacecraft – flying saucers – visiting the earth in remote antiquity. I’m not saying that I agree with this! Maybe Ezekiel was on some hallucinogenic substance, maybe he just had a very vivid imagination, or maybe he really did have a vision! Who knows? But the ‘flying saucer’ theory raises an issue that has long fascinated many people, namely, are we alone in the universe? In all its infinity of space and time, in all the countless billions of planets, stars and galaxies, is our tiny “blue dot” the only place where life has appeared, the only place where life has evolved to the point where sentient, self-conscious beings like us look up at the night sky and ask if they are alone?

When we do this it can lead to a sense of cosmic loneliness or to a longing to pass beyond Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “green borders of the peopled earth” and “launch into the trackless deeps of space”, there to search among the planets and stars of the “final frontier” and maybe encounter evidence of beings with whom we can communicate, with whom we can find fellowship and kinship, with whom we can compare our ideas of what it all means. As Anna Laetitia Barbauld asks, “is there not / A tongue in every star that talks with man, / And wooes him to be wise?”

And meaning is perhaps the object of this quest, the Holy Grail for which we search like latter-day Knights of the Round Table, itself a symbol of infinity and of our equality before it. To contemplate the unimaginable vastness of space, to realise how utterly insignificant we seem in relation to it, to be aware of how microscopically small we are in the midst of it, how brief and transitory are not only our own lives but also those of our civilization, our species, even our planet - to contemplate these things can be crushing. How can the momentary blips that are human lives mean anything in this universe of infinities upon infinities?

But maybe this is the wrong way to look at things. However insignificant our lives may seem we cannot deny the remarkable fact that they exist, that something quite extraordinary has happened on this planet, something that makes it more special than we can imagine. Not only did life appear – we don’t know how – which is remarkable and near-miraculous in itself, but life evolved into a variety of beings that even now we cannot number or understand – even as, in our folly, we seem intent on exterminating them.

And among all the species that evolved there was at least one which looked up at the night sky and wondered what it was all about. Of course, we can’t say that our species is the only one that has ever done this. There have, for example, been other human species on this planet that are now gone, leaving only their bones and a few artefacts to show that they ever existed. Did they look up at the night sky and wonder what it all meant? Probably they did. And are there other species on other worlds who look up at their night skies and wonder what it all means? Personally, I think there probably are.

However vast the odds against it may seem, there are so many billions of worlds out there that there must be some where something akin to what happened here has happened too. Of course, we may be so distant from even the nearest – in time as well as space – that they might as well not exist, but they are probably there all the same and their inhabitants may ask much the same questions as we do about existence and its meaning. Like us they may live on island-worlds amidst the apparently lifeless wastes, worlds that are blue-green oases among the sterile rocks and gaseous giants that most planets probably are, too hot or too cold for the miracle of life to happen.

But does any of this mean anything? Traditional religion found meaning, but it did so largely on the basis of outmoded and hopelessly inadequate understandings of the universe. To read theology is so often to read the thoughts of people who couldn’t see beyond this planet, whose concepts of God were as limited as their knowledge of the cosmos; who thought it credible that the fate of the universe hinged on a few events that took place on this tiny planet a few short centuries ago. The arguments and obsessions of so many theologians – past and present – pale into utter irrelevance when seen in the context of worlds and galaxies without number spread across fourteen billion years of space- time.

But does that make us all mere meaningless fragments? No, it doesn’t, because we know that our lives have meaning – meaning for us. And as mystics and poets have always known, meaning doesn’t depend on size. The universe is infinitely small as well as infinitely vast. As Mother Julian of Norwich wrote in her ‘Revelations of Divine Love’:

“And he showed me…a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it…and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.”

And similarly, William Blake wrote:

                   “To see a World in a Grain of Sand

                     And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

                     Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

                    And Eternity in an hour”

(from ‘Auguries of Innocence’) 

The scale of the universe isn’t what matters. What matters is how we treat each other in whatever time we’ve got. It matters that we are mostly caring and that we aspire to be kind. It matters that we can experience beauty, treasure it and appreciate it. It matters that we value truth and knowledge. It matters, as we are now realising, that we undo the harm we have done – and are still doing – to our environment, and so save it and ourselves from our own folly. All these things mean something here and now, and so give meaning to our existence. And they matter regardless of the second law of thermodynamics and the ultimate fate of the universe.

And when we look up at the night sky and see those countless stars, so distant in space and time, that means something too. By the very contemplation of infinity, or of the bizarre insights of quantum physics, we not so much see meaning as give meaning. We are the givers of meaning, the makers of meaning. Without us – and those beings like us who probably exist somewhere out there – there is no meaning, only a whole lot of rocks and gas, black holes and dark matter, without a thought, idea or feeling between them. Some would have said – maybe still say – that God gives the universe meaning but that can’t be understood as it was by the theologians of the past. Rather we may say that God is the cosmic process itself, the creative force that has driven everything since the beginning, since the Big Bang. But if we do say that, then how can this universal process perceive meaning or give meaning? It can do so because we, and creatures like us, who are part of it and products of it, can perceive meaning, create meaning and give meaning. We are the universe awake and conscious of itself. We are not only the hands of God and the eyes of God, we are each of us fragments of the mind of God.

We are the potential inherent in the universe made manifest, we are incarnations of the power – the spirit – that has been there all the time, awaiting the opportunity to become flesh, to become the meaning of everything else. And that is so even if it has happened only rarely in this unimaginable universe, even if it has happened only once. When we look out into the vastnesses of space and wonder what it all means, we should remember that we who look out are what it means, that our looking out is what it means. It is what happens in our inner space that gives meaning to all that outer space.

We are not meaningless accumulations of atoms. We are accumulations of atoms which have woken up to live lives rich in meaning; lives that can embody love and compassion and all that we know as vital, good and noble - all that we call divine. And in waking up we have awakened the universe of which we are part, and that means something.  

No Thought of the Harvest

NO THOUGHT OF THE HARVEST

Rev. Cliff Reed, Minister Emeritus

Service address on Sunday 6th June 2021

I suppose worrying about the future has been one of the features of the pandemic.   Worrying about our future health, worrying about the future of the economy and how it will affect us, worrying about whether planned holidays and visits to family and friends will ever  tak e place.  We worry about the future course of the pandemic – when will it end? Will it ever end? What surprises has it got in store in the form of new variants and third, fourth or however many waves in this country and around the world. And alongside the pandemic, and not unrelated to it, there are worries about climate change, the environmental crisis and the future of human civilization and human life on this wonderful but badly abused planet. It is possible to worry a great deal about the future – but if we do, what good will it do? Does worrying about the future do us any good? Does it have any point? Does it benefit our mental, physical or spiritual health? We don’t want to be irresponsible about the future, but is it possible to be responsible about the future while at the same time not be weighed down by fretting about it? That would be quite a trick if we could manage it! Well, maybe we can. Some have certainly thought so.

Fifty-seven years ago, on an April evening at the Annual Meetings of our General Assembly in  I  be a remarkable and memorable act of worship. It constituted the Youth Meeting and was devised by the then Vice-President of the Unitarian Young People’s League (UYPL), Martin Davies, Six other UYPLers took part in leading it of whom, incidentally, three were later to become ministers who served our movement for many years. Now, I wasn’t there, nor do I have a copy of the service, but I do have a report of it that appeared in UYPL’s newsletter, ‘The Young Unitarian’ (TYU). The title of this act of worship was ‘Take No Thought of the Harvest’, a line from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Choruses from “The Rock”’. The fuller quotation goes:

All men are ready to invest their money

But most expect dividends.

I say to you: Make perfect your will,

I say: take no thought of the harvest,

But only of proper sowing.

Although I can’t tell you what was said at that service I do know that it took the form of a dialogue between a ‘Seeker’ and a ‘Sceptic’, while the other participants presented the attitudes and impressions of the young people of the time on subjects that affected and concerned them. The TYU report – written by another old UYPL friend of mine, Gordon Lowthian – mentioned what some of these were – “violence, money and human relationships.”  They were illustrated with readings and music. The readings included Wilfred Owen’s dark and powerful First World War poem, ‘Strange Meeting’, about two dead soldiers from opposing armies who meet in some dim underworld:

…some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined.

One says, Strange friend…here is no cause to mourn.

The other replies, None…save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours

Was my life also…

For them there is no future, and the poem ends with the words, Let us sleep now…

This is a poem about the futility and waste of war and violence, and perhaps of the misplaced loyalties and allegiances that drive people to kill: None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

And maybe this is why one of the pieces played in the service came from ‘West Side Story’, Leonard Bernstein’s re-telling of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the setting of 1950s New York and its rival gangs. In his report Gordon mentions what he calls the “gang theme” from ‘West Side Story’. Maybe this was ‘Rumble’, which accompanies the deadly gang fight between the Jets and the Sharks, or maybe it was ‘Jet Song’. This is about the power of the gang to provide a sense of security and belonging to disaffected youths, but which also creates the obsessive loyalty which leads to volence and death for no good reason:

When you’re a Jet,

You’re a Jet all the way

From your first cigarette

To your last dyin’ day…

You’re never disconnected!

You’re home with your own

When company’s expected

You're well protected

…

When you’re a Jet

You stay  

A  Jet.

This is what gang culture offers – what amounts to a pointless present and an ultimately hopeless future, or no future at all.

Another piece of music in the service was ‘Money’ by the Beatles. Released in November 1963, it is an ironic commentary on a life and a society obsessed with material and financial gain, where the acquisition of money for its own sake pushes everything else aside, an obsession that is destructive of human values and productive of a false and ultimately pointless view of the future. To illustrate points made about human relationships there were readings from Stan Barstow’s novel ‘A Kind of Loving’ (1960), with its bleak portrayal of a man trapped in an ill-considered marriage.

There were original songs in the service, written and sung by Rosemary Goring, but I don’t know what they were or what they said. Perhaps, though, they echoed some of the sentiments being expressed at that time by a young singer-songwriter, who turned 80 recently, named Bob Dylan. In that same year of 1964 he released his seminal album, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’’, with its title track that protests against the status quo, against the world that the older generation have bequeathed to the young, and looks to the creation of a new and better world. The 1960s were to be a hopeful and optimistic decade for many ung people and maybe ‘Take No Thought of the Harvest’ was part of this. It took issue with  “”values, ambitions and mindsets that were seen as stale and regressive, and instead called for something new, something more humane as well as more human, something more spontaneous to replace the ruts into which people were all too often thrust for the rest of their lives.     

 It was new, it was fresh, it was exciting – but it also had deep roots. It was by no means the first time that people had thought such thoughts, had sought to break restrictive moulds and free the spirit. And nor should it be the last, because we are always in need of being reminded that false and destructive structures – be they physical, political, mental or religious – are always around and always need to be challenged. That is why the ‘Black Lives Matter’ phenomenon has arisen today, even though it is hardly the first time that these issues have arisen in one way or another. Things don’t stay the same. Things do change, albeit slowly and haltingly; sometimes for the better, but by no means always. There are steps back as well as steps forward, and we can’t always tell the difference at the time. The old evils, the old negativities, are always lurking in the dark recesses of the human psyche, ready to crawl out anew, so requiring a new generation of humanity to call them out, to expose them, resist them and show that there is a better and more loving way to go.

And this better way is not about trying to fix or determine the future, trying to control or dictate to future generations what they must do. Rather it is about how we live now, because ‘now’ is the only place we can live. We are called to live lovingly and creatively, we are called to be good stewards of the earth, we are called to treasure the wonders of this incredible planet, we are called to do justly and to walk humbly – and we are called to do these things now. Hopefully, and hope, if it is not obsessive and misdirected, is a part of our spiritual resource – hopefully, by living wisely and well now we will bequeath a better world to those who come after us – but it is the living well now that is our business. That is all we can do.

The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that the fate of any plans we make is ultimately beyond our control, “since you do not know what disasters are in store for the world” (Eccles. 11:2). We must still conduct our own lives as best we can but we cannot count on the future, “for you do not know whether this or that sowing will be successful, or whether both alike will do as well” (Eccles. 11:6).

For the author of Ecclesiastes this life is full of uncertainties, the only certainty being “the days of darkness” (Eccles. 11:8) at its end, but that is no reason not to live a full life in the present, unclouded by a future which is not ours anyway: “The light of day is sweet, and pleasant to the eye is the sight of the sun, However many years a person may live, he should rejoice in all of them” (Eccles. 11:7-8),

Jesus too rejects an obsession with the future and tells us to live in the now, “Can anxious thought add a single day to your life?” he asks. “Do not ask anxiously ‘What are we to eat? What are we to drink? What shall we wear?”’ Rather we should focus on living in the present with our minds set “on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else” (Matthew 6:33), meaning the rule of love that is “God’s kingdom and his justice.” If we live lovingly, as citizens of God’s kingdom, says Jesus, “all the rest will come to you as well.” His radical conclusion challenges the way in which we so often think, clouding the present with our fear. Jesus says, “So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own” (Matthew 6:34).

And this, I think, is the message of those lines by T.S. Eliot. “Most expect dividends” when they invest but this is to lock yourself into an uncertain and maybe futile enterprise. “I say to you: Make perfect your will” – which is another way of saying “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice.” 

“I say: take no thought of the harvest,

But only of proper sowing.”    

The sowing is how we live now, which is within our power. The harvest is beyond our sight and beyond our power. If we sow properly today that is as much as we can do. If we sow well there is a chance of reaping a good harvest, but we cannot count on it, we cannot control all that might affect it or even blight it, so for now take no thought of it. The future is not built by us worrying about it, the future will be the creation of others living in their own time. We can only live in our own time, and how we do that will affect our successors, but we cannot see how. So let’s see to our proper sowing in the here and now, and take no thought of the harvest.

Celebrating Wisdom, May Day and Beltane

CELEBRATING WISDOM, MAY DAY AND BELTANE

Rev. Cliff Reed

Ipswich Unitarian Meeting, 2nd May 2021 

Text: The Song of Songs, chapter 2, verses 10 to 13.

Those lines from the ancient Hebrew love poem that is the Song of Songs contain one of the most beautiful and memorable evocations of spring ever written. They are very appropriate for today, at the beginning of May, when spring reaches the height of its beauty and ebullience.

It is not surprising that May Day has long had a great significance for human beings, although it managed to avoid having a major Christian festival associated with it. It is the feast day of a few saints, notably Joseph, the natural father of Jesus, and two of the Twelve Apostles, James the Less and Philip, but this doesn’t really register in the popular consciousness and probably never did to any great degree. In fact, May Day is, at root, an ancient pagan festival. To the Celts it was Beltane. This marked the time when the flocks and herds of sheep and cattle were put out on to the freshly-grown summer pastures, there to remain until the autumn and the festival of Samain. Beltane was celebrated with the lighting of bonfires and with dancing and feasting. It was the time of transition from spring to summer’s beginning, full of the promise of warmth, long sunny days and the richness of field and pasture on which human life depended – and still depends.

It was a time for the lifting of the human spirit, called to celebration by blue skies, blossom and birdsong, by the return to our skies and our countryside of swifts and swallows, cuckoos and turtle-doves – whose gentle purring is mentioned in the Song of Songs but which is all too rarely heard in our woods and hedgerows today.

We know from the Hebrew scriptures – from the Song of Songs, the Psalms, the book of Ecclesiasticus and so on – that the natural world and its seasons were crucial to the faith of the people who wrote, read, heard or sung them. And we know that the Celts and other ancient peoples celebrated the natural cycle too, and when these traditions met with Christianity the results could be mixed! Ordinary Christians still wanted to celebrate the natural world and its cycles and seasons. They did so either by amalgamating ancient pagan festivals with the newer Christian ones or, as with Beltane, May Day, just carrying on regardless with what they had always done, maybe minus some aspects of the pagan celebrations.

No doubt though there were always churchmen of a more severe type who lamented and disapproved of the pagan survivals, but that did not stop these continuing throughout the Middle Ages, when times of celebration were a welcome relief from lives of toil and, for many, of hardship. The reason why the ancient festivals were closely associated with the seasons was because the production of food was the most important activity that anyone was engaged in. The festivals, which always had their religious or spiritual aspect, not only celebrated nature’s bounty but were seen as central to ensuring its continuance. Failed harvests and animal murrains meant hunger and famine and were signs of divine disfavour or the result of the malicious activities of evil beings, both human and otherwise. Placating the gods and showing due reverence and obedience to them was part and parcel of these festivals as well as celebrating nature’s bounty and beauty with due thanksgiving.

In the 17th century, though, Puritanism became the dominant religious force in some places, of which this country was one. The Puritans set out to purge the Church and society generally of the old pagan survivals and the ancient festivals and their traditions were suppressed. No doubt there were still people who celebrated May Day but this became a more marginal activity, no longer really ‘respectable’ and usually associated with those regarded as the ‘lower orders’ of society, with the ignorant, the superstitious and those inclined to drunkenness and debauchery whenever an excuse presented itself. But May Day was to make a comeback!

In the 19th century there arose a nostalgia for ‘merrie England’, for a somewhat sanitised past, and May Day re-emerged. Ancient practices – real or imagined – made May Day a time of celebration once again, complete with May Queens, Maypoles and children dancing round them, innocently unaware of their phallic origins. The popular Victorian novelist, Harrison Ainsworth, gives us an example of how people in the 19th century imagined the May Days of earlier times to have been in his book ‘The Lancashire Witches’ (Book 1, chapter 1, ‘The May Queen’).

This charming picture may well owe more to Victorian sentimentality than to history, but it is the picture that has moulded our image of May Day ever since. What religious significance it may have retained in the Middle Ages from the paganism of the more remote past was largely lost, at least until more recent, somewhat contrived, attempts to revive it.

But something else happened to May Day in the 19th and 20th centuries, and this was its association with working class identity, with what was called ‘the common man’, with labour, with socialism and communism, with trades unionism and with left-wing causes generally. This was a direct development from the traditional May Day, seen as a time for labouring people to celebrate the work they did and the communities they formed.

May Day is thus a number of things – all of them worth celebrating in their own way. It is a celebration of spring’s climax, of nature’s beauty, bounty and triumphant rebirth after the long weeks of winter. It is a time of great agricultural significance, of new growth in the fields and when summer grazing promises meat and milk and all manner of important animal products. It is a nostalgic enjoyment of our country’s real or imagined past and the traditions we link with it – such as morris-dancing, Maypoles and the re-enactment of old myths and legends. And it is a celebration of ordinary people, their lives and the work they do. As the author of Ecclesiasticus put it over two thousand years ago, describing manual workers and craftsmen of all kinds, “All these rely on their hands, and each is skilful at his own craft…They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. But they maintain the fabric of this world, and their prayers are about their daily work.” (Ecclesiasticus 38: 31, 33b-34)

__________________________

‘THE LANCASHIRE WITCHES’ by William Harrison Ainsworth

Extract from Book 1, chapter 1, ‘THE MAY QUEEN’

“After this came the Maypole, not the tall pole so called , and which was already planted in the green, but a stout staff elevated some six feet above the head of the bearer, with a coronel of flowers atop, and four long garlands hanging down, each held by a morris-dancer.

          Then came the May Queen’s gentleman usher, a fantastic personage in habiliments of blue guarded with white, and holding a long willow wand in his hand. After the usher came the main troop of morris-dancers, the men attired in a graceful costume, which set off their light active figures to advantage…

          Ribands were everywhere in their dresses, ribands and tinsel adorned their caps…In either hand they held a long white handkerchief knotted with ribands.

          The female morris-dancers were habited in white, decorated like the dresses of the men; they had ribands and wreaths of flowers round their heads, bows in their hair, and in their hands long white knotted kerchiefs.

This gay troop having come to a halt before the cottage, the gentleman usher entered it and tapping against the inner door with his wand, took off his cap as soon as it was opened, and bowing deferentially to the ground, said he was come to invite the Queen of May to join the pageant…”

'The Last Shall Be First: The Women and the Resurrection' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

One of the most notable aspects of the Easter accounts in the four canonical gospels is the presence of women at the crucial moments. And one woman in particular is named as being present at virtually all of them, namely Mary of Magdala or Mary Magdalen. Matthew places her at the Crucifixion as do Mark and John, and although Luke only mentions “the women who had accompanied him from Galilee”, we may safely include Mary Magdalen in that group. Only John’s gospel mentions the mother of Jesus as being present at the crucifixion, along with her unnamed sister and Mary of Clopas. And only John’s gospel places a male disciple, John, at the crucifixion.  In Matthew and Mark we have a different set of names at this point in the story Both name another Mary, identified as the mother of James and Joses (or Joseph), while Matthew mentions the unnamed “mother of the sons of Zebedee” and a mysterious “other Mary”. Mark names Salome. 

The next crucial event is the burial of Jesus, and Mary Magdalen is named as being there by Matthew and Mark. Luke sticks with his “women who accompanied him from Galilee” formula. Who else was there? Matthew adds his otherwise unidentified “the other Mary” while Mark mentions Mary, the mother of Joses. John has no women present at the burial, only Joseph of Arimathaea and Nicodemus.    

And then come the events of Easter morning. All four gospels have Mary Magdalen as first to arrive at the empty tomb, and in John she goes alone. The others differ slightly in saying who accompanied her. Matthew adds “the other Mary”. Mark names “Mary the mother of James, and Salome”, while Luke mentions “Joanna and Mary the mother of James”, and he adds “the other women” without naming them.

What is significant about all this is that it shows the importance of women in the community of disciples that surrounded Jesus. The way some people talk you would think that there were only twelve disciples, all of them men, but this was clearly not the case. Even though the later church ignored,  fetishised or otherwise diminished the women around Jesus, in the early church women had a far more central and honoured place as the successors of Mary Magdalen and her sisters. One of the most important aspects of the first Christian communities was their reversal of the old order of things and the affirmation that those who were last shall be first (Matthew 19: 30), and that certainly included women. Only in John’s gospel does a male disciple stand by Jesus on the cross, otherwise they are scattered and in hiding while the women are there at his death and burial. They are also the first witnesses of the Resurrection, with Mary Magdalen foremost among them.

I don’t intend to get into one of those “what really happened?” discussions. All we can say is that something really happened and that women were at the heart of it. The Resurrection ushered in a new order and a new humanity in which the fixed and oppressive relationships of old were dissolved. In the new community, the new Body of Christ, the distinctions of gender, class, nationality and ethnicity were replaced by oneness, equality and love of neighbour – whoever she or he might be. When we look at the events of Easter as described in the New Testament we see women moving centre-stage, and none more so than Mary Magdalen. She was clearly the leading woman disciple and arguably the primary apostle, for it is she who first experiences and announces the Resurrection. She is the apostle to the doubting, sceptical male apostles. Luke writes that when Mary and “the other women” tell the men what they have witnessed “the story appeared to them to be nonsense and they would not believe them” (Luke 24: 11). This attitude has too often characterised ecclesiastical attitudes to women and their experience in subsequent centuries.

Perhaps the most powerful, the most moving and the most lyrical of all the Resurrection stories is that of Mary Magdalen meeting the risen Christ in the garden on Easter morning. It makes clear the very special bond that existed between Jesus and Mary, and which she still felt even after his death. Mary went on to have a leading roll in the early church, although you will find no evidence for this in the New Testament outside the gospels. What happened?  Perhaps, as the church itself sought acceptance in the male-dominated world around it, it lost its initial radicalism with regard to women. They were relegated to a subordinate role with an exclusively male hierarchy ruling the roost for two millennia, as it still does in much of the Church and in the minds of all too many Christians. The quite unjustified relegation of Mary Magdalen from leading apostle to guilt-ridden, half-witted prostitute has been part of this, and it would surely make Jesus weep.

It was not always so. It may be significant that the wonderful scene in the garden on Easter morning appears in John’s gospel. Although beloved of conservative, orthodox Christians today, this gospel was once viewed with suspicion because of its Gnostic overtones. In particular, Mary Magdalen, although effectively written out of Christianity except as a dubious marginal bit-part player, was of immense and central importance in forms of the faith that once flourished but which were then suppressed as heretical. Documents such as the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip reflect a situation in which she is the close confidante of Jesus and is recognised as an authority by the other disciples. We may not know exactly what went on but we do know that Mary Magdalen was a key figure in Gnostic Christianity, a situation which probably had its roots in the place that Mary occupied in the original Jesus community. And her displacement from a truly honoured place in Christianity is witness to the way that a growing “orthodoxy” sought to eradicate its rivals. Forms of Christianity that honoured women, which practised a radical equality that eliminated the distinctions of gender, were downgraded, even when they had the support of the teachings of Paul. And branches of the faith which recognised women as celebrants, priests and bishops, as true successors of Mary Magdalen, were persecuted and exterminated. Thus one of the achievements of the Resurrection – the overturning of the old unjust order as regards gender – was greatly weakened, something not without its continuing malign consequences today.

We sometimes get obsessed with arguing about whether the Resurrection is “true” or not, whether we should try to explain it or explain it away, whether we should see it as physical or spiritual, or whether we should dismiss it out of hand. But rather we should see it as a radical revision of what it means to be human, what it means to live in a community moulded by a fundamental respect for each other, and by a truly reverent love. What matters is not whether a dead man came to life again two thousand years ago. What matters is that the love preached by Jesus and both given and received by Mary Magdalen should suffuse our own lives and, through us, make this troubled world a happier and more equal place for women and men of all kinds. This is the promised land and although it may be forever out of reach in its perfection, in the attempt to achieve it we can make things a whole lot better and our fellow human beings a whole lot happier. This is what we do as a community of the Resurrection, both a physical and a spiritual reality, offering life where the human spirit all too often lies in the darkness of the tomb.

(CMR260321)

***

'Famous Last Words' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

The last words of Jesus on the cross will be much read and much reflected upon today, but what were they? In fact the gospel accounts differ on this, and the most agonising and the most challenging version of those last words appears in only two of the gospels, Mark and Matthew. It has been suggested that Luke and John omitted them because a despairing and desolate Jesus did not really fit with the triumphant Christ that the early Church was preaching.

So what were those words? As translated from the Aramaic into Greek and from Greek into the 16th-century English of William Tyndale they are, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And these were, in turn, ‘borrowed’ by the committee which produced the Authorised, or King James, Version of the Bible in 1611. And it is those words which continue to puzzle and perplex us today. Did Jesus really say them? If he did, what did he mean by them? If they are authentic, what do they tell us about him?

Given the situation in which Jesus found himself: in terminal agony on the cross, deserted by his closest disciples – the male ones, at least – with his hopes dashed and apparently abandoned to his fate, I would say that those words sound perfectly plausible. It must indeed have seemed that God had forsaken him. It can be argued that their very desolation not only testifies to their truth, but also to the truth of the crucifixion itself. If, in the early days of Christianity in the Roman Empire, you were trying to prove that Jesus was the Son of God, a figure of supernatural power and status, the Saviour of the world, you would hardly make up a story in which he is executed in disgrace for sedition and rebellion against Rome and dies as broken in spirit as he was in body. Which is why, perhaps, Luke and John soften things up a bit and omit the words of desolation, substituting others that seemed to them more suitable for the Anointed One of God.

So even if there were not some independent evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus by the Roman authorities, the last known words of Jesus in Mark and Matthew would seem to support it. But what are we to make of them: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Do we take them as the very understandable cry of someone dying in the most appalling circumstances – both physical and spiritual? They are certainly credible when seen in that light, and maybe we should be content with this most obvious explanation.

However, there is another way of understanding that cry. Those exact words open Psalm 22 and it has been suggested that Jesus was quite deliberately quoting them, intending his Jewish hearers to find his meaning in the Psalm as a whole. The Psalmist writes as one who is indeed in the depths of misery, humiliation and even self-loathing – “I am a worm and no man” (v. 6).  He is at the mercy of his enemies and his words seem to be a prophecy of what happened to Jesus: “They pierced my hands and my feet” (v. 17); “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (v. 18) They have been used by Christians, along with other Old Testament sources, to ‘prove’, as they see it, that the life of Jesus was the fulfilment of prophecy. Others, more sceptically, have argued that the whole story of Jesus was concocted by the gospel-writers out of a hotch-potch of Old Testament verses and prophecies.

But there is a third possibility. That when they contemplated the story of Jesus and came to write it down, they found in it echoes of Old Testament passages, like Psalm 22, and moulded their accounts accordingly. Those words of desolation may indeed have been spoken by Jesus on the cross, as remembered by the faithful women disciples mentioned later, but it was the gospel-writers Mark and Matthew who used them to reference the whole of Psalm 22. Why? Because after describing the despair and suffering of the Psalm’s unidentified subject it closes with an affirmation of faith in God’s deliverance. The psalmist’s life is restored and his powers of preaching and prophecy are renewed: “I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I praise thee” (v. 22). Interpreted in this light, those words on the cross become more positive and, for some, a promise of the Resurrection.

Without this, though, the words of desolation pose a problem for those wanting to present Jesus as God and as a supernatural divine being. For God to lament his desertion by God; for an omnipotent divine being not to know about his own Resurrection – these seem nonsensical. For the crucifixion to have any relevance for us it must involve the death of a real human being as weak and as subject to pain and despair as any other. The hope lies in his humanity, in his courage, in his integrity, in his witness for what he believed was saving truth for the human spirit. By putting his own self aside, by accepting death rather than deny the Way that he taught and lived, he revealed divine truth in a way that no magic or miracle ever could. It is in humanity in all its weakness and fallibility that the Divine Mystery is to be found. Without these there is no courage, no resilience, no faith, no love.

This is something that Jesus exemplified but we have seen it too in the response to the current pandemic at its best. Waiting around for divine intervention does no good, nor does denial, brittle bravado or a belief that one is too holy to catch the virus. It is frail, fallible human beings working selflessly with whatever gifts they have who have carried us through, and who continue to do so. Those despairing words of Jesus must have been on many lips this past year, and for some – as for him – they will have been their last words. But for many a deeper and unsought determination has been kindled – determination to serve, to nurse, to heal and to restore; determination to understand the deadly virus, to counter it and to protect us from it. And, not to be forgotten, there has been the simple determination to be a good neighbour. Yes, these are all human qualities but they are also what we really mean by divine. It is in humanity’s strength in weakness that we find God. Maybe this is what that Roman centurion meant when, at the very moment of Jesus’ death, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15: 39).

(CMR240321)

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'Interesting Times' by Rvd. Cliff Reed

In the prayer we just had, Dwight Brown quotes the “ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’” Well, I suppose you could say that we live in “interesting times.” When we say that times are or were   “interesting”, we generally mean that they are “interesting” to look back on from a safe distance. True, some times are both interesting and good to look back on – I can think of some – but more often than not, what makes times “interesting” to look back on was not at all pleasant to live through, hence the Chinese curse. 

Although social historians try to convince us that people’s everyday lives in the past are the most “interesting” aspects of it, in the main those lives appear to us have been as uneventful and unremarkable as ours mostly are. Sadly, therefore they are often neglected and overlooked. But what usually makes history “interesting” – even exciting, fascinating and compelling – are the times when humdrum, everyday life was interrupted by social upheaval, natural disaster, war, revolution, plague and pestilence.  

Of course, it takes time for such things to become “interesting” – often many years, even decades and centuries. While they are happening they are frequently nothing less than disastrous, with great suffering, great misery, even great evil and cruelty. But as all personal involvement with such times fades away then we come to see them as “interesting” – the fit subject for scholarly studies, historical novels, films, plays, “historical” re-enactments and television documentaries – even comedy. Try these things when the human suffering is still fresh, though, and the cry goes up that it’s “too soon.”   

The time of pandemic that we are living through will one day be counted among those “interesting times.” The pandemic is indeed a “curse” and few would use the word “interesting” to describe it now. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, dead is not “interesting”, it is catastrophic – not to mention all the personal suffering it has caused and is causing over and above the stark statistics of the death toll alone. Our response to this may be shock and horror, depression and despair, grief and sorrow, compassion and resilience, courage and resolve, or any number of exceptional responses to exceptional circumstances – but “interest”? Few would rate that as an adequate term to describe their feelings. Today the interest lies in finding ways to halt the pandemic, to alleviate the suffering it brings, and to defeat – or, at least, suppress – the virus that is causing it. 

Much is rightly said about the pandemic’s effects on physical and mental health, but what about our spiritual health? Our sense of purpose, our confidence in who and what we are, our rootedness in something that underpins our lives in all their fragility and vulnerability? By throwing our lives into varying degrees of confusion, by blighting our plans and hopes for the future, by undermining our confidence in the structures on which we thought our lives rested: our society and we, as individuals within it, have been challenged existentially. 

We are not, after all, safe and secure in a bubble of comfortable self-confidence. Our bubble is fragile, perhaps increasingly so, and for all too many people it has burst altogether – or will. And it doesn’t take too much thought to realise how easily this could be true for all of us, even if we haven’t really suffered too much ourselves so far. We have been fortunate that vaccines were developed so fast – imagine what things would be like if they hadn’t been. But can we be sure that future viruses, or even further mutations of the Covid 19 virus, will be so easily contained – not that “easily” is the right word, of course! Even the present virus, in its various versions, is still far from ending its depredations. And this is especially so in poorer countries without the best modern medical facilities and ready access to adequate supplies of vaccine. 

Another disturbing factor is the link being made between the pandemic and the wider – indeed, greater – environmental crisis that we face on many fronts. Our upsetting of nature’s balanced systems, our tearing apart of its web of life, our reckless confusion of things best kept distinct – all this and more will bring manifold new threats to human health and wellbeing, to our ways of life around this one world. 

Of course, humanity has a way of surviving and surmounting challenges, of finding resources – including spiritual resources – with which to survive those “interesting times”, but the combination of threats we now face is unprecedented. There is certainly no guarantee that we can somehow emerge from them unscathed, even emerge from them at all in any state that could be called satisfactory. 

In the far future, historically-minded folk may find these times of ours “interesting”, but the prospect for all too many of those doomed to live through them is anything but. Which is why it is up to the present generation of earthlings to see that our “interesting times” don’t get any more “interesting”, and instead become mercifully uninteresting and humdrum: a normal succession of life and death, of everyday dramas of no great consequence, of events which make for happiness and content but which won’t detain future historians overmuch. We want stability, a future we can have some sense of certainty about, a world of peace and order, sustainability, health and simple pleasures.  Not heaven on earth, perhaps, but at least an earth beautiful, vibrant and pleasant to live on. Is that too much to ask? Not really, but achieving this modest aim requires us all in these “interesting times” to adapt our ways and lifestyles, to change our priorities and technologies, our economic systems and methods of doing business, and so make more secure the basis of our increasingly unstable existence. But, of course there can be no guarantees. 

Lent is a good time to reflect on such things. When Jesus was “driven” into the wilderness after his baptism he was forced to re-assess his life and its purpose – an existential shift portrayed mythologically as his triumph over the temptations of the devil. It was this that set him out on his ministry, and ultimately on the road to Jerusalem and the great crisis that awaited him there. It was that ministry, that crisis and what followed, that set out a new spiritual path for humankind. That path still offers us a world at peace with itself, with nature and with God, the eternal basis of our existence.  

Reject that path, take the ways of greed and destruction, and life gets rather too “interesting”. Follow it and something more important than mere “interest” comes into play.  It is the world where, as the prophet Micah says, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4: 3-4) Not very “interesting” to historians but no bad way to live out our human existence. 

In the wilderness Jesus confronted himself and found a new path to follow for the good of humanity. As the model for Lent, that wilderness experience, that time of fasting, bids us to put aside our usual assumptions, to renounce our petty ambitions, and instead seek a deeper understanding of our life’s purpose, rooted in loving kindness and the will to be a saving and healing presence in this wounded world.

I suppose this past year of pandemic has seen us all driven into the wilderness in one way or another, and we are not out of it yet. Some have confronted their interior demons as well as external tribulations, and come through – battered but unbowed. Some, sadly, have not done so well. Others, of course, have not survived at all. We give thanks to those who have borne the brunt of this particular wilderness and its trials and temptations for the sake of us all. And let us resolve to learn from the wilderness ourselves, finding there a deeper assurance, a clearer path and a better way to be human in these troubled and all too “interesting times.”