When I looked around me today, all I saw was death, decay and icy endings, and I wondered what the hell God was thinking when he bothered to create something that couldn’t last.  The perfect being, self-contained and self-sustaining – why suddenly turn his hand to the needy world of temporality?  When you are a being of light and music and air [and in these things so far beyond their ideas we can only bring them as the palest comparison], why put your hand into a pit of dust?

And so I got to thinking, I suppose, about creation, and about artistry.

An artist is a creator, and a creator is someone who understands that a sandcastle is no less a work of art than a famous statue because it will not last beyond the next tide, or because there have been a million castles like it.  Is impermanence an argument against art?  Of course not!  All the works of men pass away – so too, if they are any kind of creation, will the works of God.  And similarity?  Repetitiveness?  It can be the work of the academic community to watch footnotes and pour avidly through the database and archives of their collective paranoid traditions for the slightest hint of plagiarism, of ‘intellectual theft’.  Is the artist so entirely base as to believe that dreams can be stolen?

For therein is the seed of a creator’s ideas: dreams.  Just as surely as it is the child’s dream they put into sandcastles and shapes of clay, so too it is the poet’s dream in the sonnet, or the painter’s on the canvas.  ‘Here is how the world might be’, they say: if some part of the vision exists in reality, all the better for the creator; if the dream is an impossible one, so be it; even if the dream is a nightmare, better that it is spoken aloud that left unsaid.  For this is the true genius of creation in all its myriad forms – not that it says ‘look at what I have created for its own sake’ but that it says ‘look what I have created because… look what my creation says in relation to the rest of creation.’  And it is from this knowledge that the cry but it’s not Art! springs.  Not from indignation at the form of the creation – from this comes genuine constructive criticism – but from the intent of it, from that which says ‘I am because I am’ and not ‘I am because…’  Humanity is that question to God’s creation, just as the artist’s creation is to everything around it: it need not always even be answered, but there must still always be an answer.

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

– 1st Corinthians 1:18

[[What if?]]

The great wheel of God rolls on.  It is a steamroller, trampling mercilessly all whom it catches in its path: mercy, grace, judgement and damnation, all these are handed out irrefusably and almost arbitrarily by the hideous, malfunctioning mechanics of the deity.  God has no hand on earth but those of His followers, and they are often less-than-willing glove puppets in the grand show-schemes of the heavenly powers.  Power there is, however: not only the mystic and miraculous that flows fitfully and disruptively from the hidden kingdoms but very human powers; apologetics and counter-rationalism, fanaticism and the dark and twisted psychology of heaven and hell, so fearfully angry and so bitterly afraid.  In the endless scrambling for grace and security we see the spirit of God hovering over the edge of the pit: it has the power to influence, either to pull a person back or to push them over.  It’s motives, however, are less than clear.

And in the earthly citadels of God, the earthly angels: the great unconscious psychological witch-doctors of the age.  It is a powerful irony: in this era of skepticism, smug serenity in our disbelief, we are somehow certain that we have escaped the supernatural forces that govern our lives.  We are wrong.  It is still the old gods, the priests to the old fears that haunt our thoughts in the dark, introspective hours.  From where else would come the rampant racism, homophobia, sexism?  That religious laws underpin all our own is not excuse enough: unbeknownst to most, the guilt-grace dichotomy chips away at the confidence of society, bewildering humanity with the ghost of its corrosive morality, pitting loathing against desire and self against self.  The unwitting hypocrisy of those who criticise fundamentalist Islamic states is painful to behold: at least such evil is open in its manipulation, honest in its desire to control; the creeping, insidious hold that the constant barrage of disguised theology exerts over much of western society is far, far more dangerous.  Its priests and crusaders are not only the televangelists and stadium preachers, the worship leaders and the street corner bible bashers but the right-wing politicians, the conservative media, the charitable organisations.  Old Christianity is like a gas, pervading the social atmosphere and warping out ability to see right from wrong.  For example: if a person gives to charity, they are a better person.  Why?  Is it anything more than Christian guilt-based ethical perversion to ask for two dollars, two pounds a month to ‘save a child’s life?’  What a wonderful self-affirming lie it makes!  To give two dollars a month is all very well, but let us not somehow believe it says anything about ourselves: if we give two dollars a month we do not in any way step in to save a child’s life – we step in to give away two dollars.  To imagine any one of these givers choosing the life of such a child over their own life is almost amusing.  Give to charity as you will, but don’t imagine it makes you any more heroic, or any more ‘Christian.’

So how as Christianity asserted this hold over people?  By appealing to people, as people, for and about people.  Christianity’s greatest reversal of Hellenistic culture (instead of merely stealing from it, as per usual) was to discard the ‘prosopon’, to take away the masks that people change from day to day, situation to situation and give value to the man behind the mask, the woman behind the veil.  And when a person has value in and of themselves, when a person has worth simply by the fact of their existence, the next step is fear of being denied that value.  From here the first step of Human Rights theory quickly becomes overblown politics correctness; the first step of Equal Rights quickly becomes a cringing apologetic positive discrimination; the first step of tolerance quickly becomes acceptance of and licence for open stupidity in all parts of society.  It is one of the most brilliant, intelligent and soul-destroying gifts humanity has ever been given: the unchangeable, immutable measure of oneself; the eternal candle burning fitfully at the bottom of our darkest pit of personality.  Christianity has set the person apart from the action and – above all – set the person apart from the role.  It is a gift of great worthlessness that we have been taught to cherish so highly: we love because God first loved us, and are loved not for what we do but for what we are, and we are so afraid of losing that innate sense of self-worth that we will do anything, appease or kill anyone, to keep it.  “I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it”: why on earth would we do that?  Since when is being able to talk more important than having something worth saying?  Since when is the layman on a level with the expert, the man on the street as qualified as the university graduate?

And thus, Christian ethics keep us mired in a web of fear, appeasement and violence.  The wheel of God grinds on, keeping us cruelly reliant on it for our sense of self.  Gone is the value of a person for what they do, gone is the judgement and the hierarchy of society based on capability, gone is the ability to call someone ‘wrong’ because they are wrong, the capacity to diminish a person’s position simply because it is incorrect.  Instead it is replaced by absolute equality, inalienable: what a horrific idea.  To imagine everyone equal – whether in the eyes of God or in the eyes of humanity – is to imagine a world of stagnation, frustration, illogic and incapacity: the ideal postmodern existence.  For while people may see postmodernism as one more step taken away from the old, whitebearded God, in reality it has only shrouded Him in one more layer of philosophical disguise.  While He may be clothed in the language of universalism and freedom of choice, still at our core we fear the arbitrary judgement of that fearsome father-figure.

So here is the terrible irony of religion, accompanied by the fearsome societal hypocrisy is gives birth to: in our skewed view of the base equal identity of all we find the birthplace of racial hatred, sexual discrimination, homophobia and so much more; in our fear of losing it, we find the origin of society’s disintegration, loss of cohesion and identity, lack of strength both personal and corporate, toleration of absurdities and atrocities – it is the death of the hero and the genius and the creator, for all of these things wither and die in a society that emphasises equality over ability, limits exploitation at the ultimate price of any kind of progress.  Equality, even God’s equality, will strangle society to death.

The great wheel of God rolls on, applauded by those who refuse to see the bodies of the last great people of the age crushed beneath it.  Those who stand tallest are always the first to die: may the steamroller God of the edge have mercy on their souls.

The sun here has been incredibly beautiful lately – a rarity for Manchester! – and it’s been a joy to be able to walk home from work late in the day and still feel the sunset shimmering around the city. From the elevated trainline I entrust my life to every morning and evening, the whole city seems bathed in yellow and crimson: it’s like the end of time, or the dying worlds of C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew – stunning and sad. “Headlights racing against inescapable dark,” I think one supremely talented man put it. Mind you, I always make it home before the sun sets, so perhaps I should consider it a gift of sorts, a fleeting glimpse of the despair I am insulated against by some measure of faith and hope.

If there are any gifts given to us by God, I think they come in this form: moments that we don’t expect, people that are here and then gone, dreams and memories that you can hardly remember. Our lives are so fragile, and so tenuously balanced between a darkness we cannot survive and a light we haven’t yet learned to live with – what the divine places directly into them cannot remain. It would undo us.

Nonetheless, we are given moments of transcendence, I think: perhaps to help us understand what we are missing? Perhaps just to keep us interested in what goes on behind Heaven’s windows when the curtains are drawn. Either way, they are illusory, they are transitory, they happen in the strangest of places and at the oddest of times, and tend to leave you blinking and surprised.

A couple of days ago, working the late shift and with the shop nearly empty, I had what could possibly be one of those moments. How to describe it? The simple fact was that, as I stood at one end of the shop, the late-evening sun reflecting off the mountain of glass outside formed a glowing, blood-red halo around the girl sitting at a table by the window, writing dreamily in her notebook. These are the facts: they could quite easily have arranged themselves without any kind of help from on high, but nonetheless. Nonetheless, I think I have rarely seen something so perfect and so beautiful, and I doubt I could ever write a description half as meaningful as the moment itself.

At some point later it occurred to be that it probably would have made a good picture, but somehow the idea just seemed subtly wrong. I wonder sometimes if we, artists and writers, photographers, filmmakers, if we aren’t the biggest heretics of all: daring to catch rainbows in our jar, put down in permanent form what is by nature transitory and illusory. But then again, it occurs also that often the heretics are the most devout of High Priests: perhaps it takes one to know one, takes an artists to grasp the work of an artist – “Fellow creators, the creator seeks,” Nietzsche writes, “those who write new values on new tablets. Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.” God is, at some level, a personal and relational being: I can certainly attest to exactly how tailor-made, how bespoke the moment felt to me.

I’m not under the impression that this will change my life, or that I’ve been given something other people lack. But it is heartening, at the least, to be given what you need. And right then, from where I was standing, a vision of remote, untouchable, sun-washed beauty was like a gasping breath taken after a long, hard cry. “This too, shall pass,” but for now, it will suffice.

There’s a part of me that despises the idea of ‘Church.’ Not my church in particular or even any church in particular (with a few unnameable exceptions), but simply the idea of it even existing. The feeling I get is akin to the one I get for democracy: taking the worst bits out of the concept of ‘government’ and throwing the rest to the dogs. Likewise, Church always gives me this sense of chopping God into little bits and latching on to those that pander to the lowest common denominator. Modern Church Growth strategists have to deal with the danger of Church becoming a kind of godless social club, a centre of vaguely deistic activists or starving gossip-mongers, but I wonder if there isn’t a more long-term problem underlying the whole concept of communal worship. Yes, community is for the large part a positive thing, a strengthening and stabilising thing, but the nature of Christian community is unlike most others: at its most diluted it is a community with unlocked doors; at its purest it is welcoming, all-embracing and accepting of everyone.

There is, I suppose, much to be lauded in this – in theory. In practice, very few communities are truly open, and what could we find for examples of those that are? The only other group I could imagine swallowing people up so completely and with so few standards is a mob. Normal communities are drawn together through a common interest, a common goal, something that exists before entrance into the community: there are certain prerequisites, if not requirements, for entry. One does not usually join a tennis club with no intention to ever play tennis, or participate in chess club matches with no knowledge or understanding of the game of chess. But no such standards exist for becoming part of a church community. Certainly there is hope among the existing congregation that the new entrant will ‘take up their cross’ and become a fully-fledged member of the Body of Christ; certainly there is a desire to see those who walk through the door become more understanding and capable of ‘the Christian Life,’ but this does not change the fact that with Christianity, acceptance comes first, and integration comes a far and by no means inevitable second.

This is how the Christian church has interpreted the Call of Christ, it is how it has chosen to exemplify its own unique brand of brotherly love in the world, and it may be the reason churches are dying. It is a great and terrible thing to be so open that one must internalise everything, to be so accepting that one must absorb blows as if they were a joy! Because, people who seek out community not to share in its common goal, but rather for the sake of having a community, these are some of the most subtly dangerous subversives to threaten society today. Why? Because what a community or group stands for, what they strive towards means absolutely nothing to these people except as far as it keeps them included in the community. To such people, the values of the community are fluid, changeable whenever it serves their own personal needs, the need for attention, for respect, for mastery that they cannot get through legitimate means because they simply do not possess the necessary abilities or characteristics to command or inspire these responses in others. People whom society deems pathetic and unworthy will forever search for a loophole, a way to bend the rules to avoid society’s estimation of them.

And so what we have is a body of people to whom nothing is sacred, with no qualms about cheating their way up the social ladder despite the consequences, who masquerade as honest members to ingratiate themselves into a group they have no intention of aiding or respecting except as far as it will improve their own sorry lot in life. And who are their prime targets? The all-embracing, loving, generous, gullible Christian Church. Christians look for the work of the Devil? Nothing follows better the example of the banished Morning Star who, cast out of the society of heaven, says, “very well: I may be as repugnant as hell, but I bet it’s the good ones who’ll let me in!”

It’s no surprise that the Christian Church is failing. People say the church is full of hypocrites? It is! People say the church is inward-looking, behind the times, slow to change? It is! People say the church is full of self-interested, self-righteous, self-worshiping bigots incapable of looking past their own over-inflated egos? By all that used to be held as Holy, it is! But the one thing you will have trouble finding, the one thing the church is no longer filled with? Christians.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t any Christians in churches, or to say that they aren’t truly trying to follow Christ, or that the church is entirely and hopelessly corrupt. It is to say that, time and time again, some of the few good, selfless, caring people in this world capable of performing very human miracles of kindness are undermined, subverted and taken advantage of by people who are precisely the opposite, the people they have unwittingly invited into their churches and grafted onto their skin like leeches. And the truly sad thing? I think probably many of them are not so unwitting, that they know it is so, realise they are being abused and sapped of their prodigious strength – why do they let it happen? Because they see the churches they love failing, they see the Church they believe to be the one final hope for humanity slowly dying, and they have to believe with every fading scrap of will they have left that if they only struggled slightly harder, if they only drained one more ounce of their reserves of life they could push the Light of the Nations back to its feet.

And perhaps the saddest thing of all? They could. If the church were full of Christians, they could blaze with miracles like a bonfire, shine the unique and inexplicable light of hope like a fortress city on a hill in a land of anarchy, darkness and death. They could do anything. But will they reach out as they do, to those they do, giving what they do they will never be free. The Church has been shackled to a legion of dying parasites by its own goodwill. Ayn Rand writes that, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.” The life-blood of the Church and its Saints is draining through a thousand holes drilled through their unflinching good-nature. One way or another, it is time for Christians to shake their leech-like dependents off like dust from their sandals. Only then can these giants of faith, these giants of hope be free to save the part of the world they’ve been sent to save. Perhaps, at long last, it is time Christians went on strike: perhaps, at long last, it is time Christians realized they are only required to carry one cross, not a world full of people too lazy to carry their own.

‘the theologian‘ – the weekly column from backgroundbob
20.04.08

For generations people have striven to understand what their critics considered to be an myth, a ghost in the existential machine. But ghostly or not, God casts a very long shadow over the philosophy of yesteryear, and only a fool would let one truth get in the way of another. In the minds of every country’s population, God lurks just beyond the edge of sight and speaks in whispers just below the edge of hearing, peeking over our shoulders and mumbling incoherently in our ears. The world may have lost its respect for religion, but it struggles to forget its fear of God, and there is far more than a few thousand years of superstitious conditioning behind that: humanity is beset on all sides by the night, darkness made of ignorance, helplessness and an existence that ploughs right on through without any respect for their wishes. Reminders of the demons of age, pain, and fear are everywhere, is it any wonder that in every evil we see what we long more than anything to be there for us: salvation?

There are no philosophies that can explain God for you, even among the endless philosophers who will tell you they can. The difference between them and a theologian, a true theologian is that any good student of theology will never, ever try to tell you about God. Because this isn’t about him, folks: in the words of Frank Castle, “God’s going to sit this one out.” This is about us, about me and you and every other God-fearing or God-hating person out there who’s ever looked at the inside of their eyelids of a night and said, ‘God, I don’t know what you’re doing but I sure as hell hope you do.’ Because this is it, ladies and gentlemen: this is the inside of your churches, the inside of your heads and the inside of your souls. This is where spirituality meets banality, the nitty-gritty of human fears and dependancies. This is everything you’ve ever been afraid to ask but were too afraid to ask: this is Theology.