Sharing our doubts with Jesus

Here's the sermon that I preached at St Mary’s Langdon Hills and St Andrew’s Wickford this morning:

One of the things that I love most about the Bible is its honesty. In particular, the way in which it is honest about the flaws and failings in all of the great heroes of faith. The great leaders of Israel from the Old Testament and the Apostles in the New Testament, none of them are portrayed as being super-human, instead we are told about their failures as well as their obedience.

Look at John the Baptist in Matthew 11: 2-11, for example. He’d had a great ministry. He’d gone from being a nobody to having the religious leaders of his day coming and asking whether he was the next Elijah. He had not only recognised Jesus as Israel’s Messiah but had baptised him as well. And as he had baptised Jesus, he had seen the heavens open and God’s Spirit coming down on Jesus and had heard God the Father saying to Jesus, “This is my own dear Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

He had had an incredible ministry which had included some incredible experiences of God. But at the end of his life, everything came to a crashing halt as he was imprisoned by Herod, until his life was cut short by Herodius asking for his head on a platter. How was he affected by his imprisonment and this sudden end to his ministry which had had such an impact?

Well, we get a clue from our gospel reading because John sent a message to Jesus to ask if Jesus was the one that they had been expecting or whether they should look out for someone else. In other words, as he sat in his prison cell, John the Baptist doubted what he had earlier been certain of. After he had baptised Jesus, John had seen the Spirit of God come down and stay on Jesus and therefore he had confidently told others that Jesus was the Son of God. Now though he wasn’t so sure and so he sent some of his disciples to Jesus with this question.

Now isn’t that similar to our experience as Christians? Don’t we often go through times when we experience a real sense of closeness to God when we feel absolutely certain of what we believe. Times when God feels so close to us that we could almost reach out and touch him. Times when we are so convinced of the truth of what we believe that we cannot understand how other people can be so dull that they can’t see it for themselves. But then there are other times when that kind of confidence and that awareness of God’s presence seem to be far away in the past and we wonder how we could ever have been so sure about what we believed. In these times we haven’t lost our faith, although we might wonder whether that is what is happening to us, but we don’t have that sense of assurance that we once had.

Does this mean that we have lost our faith or are not following God’s plan for our lives? Does it mean that we have failed or sinned or stopped trusting? The answer to all those questions is no. Think for a moment about the way in which Jesus replies to John’s question.

First, Jesus doesn’t criticise John. He doesn’t tell him to pull up his socks or to be more trusting or to have more faith or to repent for his sins. And then he tells the crowds that there has never been a man greater than John the Baptist. Jesus knows that doubt is part of the journey of faith. Even the greatest man who ever lived experienced periods of doubt. If John the Baptist did, then we should certainly expect to, too.

Jesus also welcomes the fact that John comes to him with his doubts and sends back a message of encouragement. John was isolated in his prison cell. He obviously had some contact with his disciples, but he was not free and his disciples would only have been able to see him at certain times. In his isolation, it would have been easy for him to retreat into himself with his doubts and allow them to grow and play on his mind without being answered. But that is not what John did, instead he shares his doubts with Jesus. In the same way, we need to share our doubts and difficulties with each other and with God himself. And when others share their doubts and difficulties with us, we need to be like Jesus and give encouragement.

In the message that Jesus sends to John, he asks him, firstly, to look again at himself, at Jesus. When we do this, when we honestly look at the Jesus who is revealed to us in the gospels, we see a man who is genuinely like God. We see a man who does and says the things that only God could do and say:

“the blind can see, the lame can walk, those who suffer from dreaded skin diseases are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are brought back to life, and the Good News is preached to the poor.”

When we doubt our faith, as we all do at different times in our lives, one of the best things we can do is to remind ourselves of what Jesus is like. Could anyone do and say the things that Jesus did and said and not be God?

The message that Jesus sends to John also asks John to look at the signs of the kingdom that can be seen in Jesus’ ministry. Those things that Jesus said and did were the first signs that the rule and reign of God was coming about on earth. As John looked at these tangible signs of God’s kingdom, he could see the prophecies about God’s rule on earth coming true. Like John, we also need to look in our world for signs of God’s kingdom in changed lives and changed communities.

Sometimes as preachers we give the impression that the Christian life should be all highs and no lows. Sometimes preachers even deliberately preach that God’s plan is that we can all become champions, successful in all that we do. But that is to preach and read only a part of what the Bible says, not the whole.

God’s way for us often involves apparent failure and hardship. Look at John in this passage. Think of Paul reflecting on a ministry full of beatings, imprisonment and shipwrecks. Think ultimately of Jesus and the cross. When we experience hardship, failure and doubt in our faith and ministries we are often sharing in the suffering of Christ. A faith that survives the difficult times is longer lasting that a faith that only knows ease and comfort. It is in the testing times that our faith is stretched and grows.

Jesus understands our doubts, he encourages us to share our doubts with others and to support others in their doubts and difficulties. He points us to himself and to the signs of God’s kingdom in our lives and the lives of those around us as an encouragement to us to hold on in those difficult times and see our faith grow and develop as a result.

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Eminem ft. Justin Bieber - Even When I Doubt You.

Stride: 'The questioning hope of transcendence'

Check out my review of John F. Deane's Selected & New Poems for Stride Magazine:

'He has written of how the Roman Catholic faith he knew then, in childhood, was 'persistent as Achill rains' and associated with 'physical and spiritual endurance'. In his Artist’s Statement on the British Council website, he explains that he writes poetry and fiction to help him recover what he has 'lost, through personal experience, and through doubt and hesitations because of contemporary philosophies and events, in the area of faith' through his loss of affiliation with strict Catholicism. As a result, his work now 'is to re-locate, to re-name and to re-evaluate the Christian experience and values, not tied to any individual church or churches'. He writes 'to set the Christ-life echoing'...

With collections such as Irish Poetry of Faith and Doubt: The Cold Heaven, The Outlaw Christ and Darkness Between Stars, his own work, and his Faith and Poetry memoir Give Dust a Tongue, Deane has demonstrated the continuing relevance of a religious poetic which 'owns the power to grasp the timeless out of the temporal' and which, while insisting on the certainty of humanity’s 'insignificance in the immensity of this hostile universe, yet retains at least the questioning hope of transcendence'. His particular religious poetic is one built on the insights of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin and the Liberation Theologians.'

For more on John F. Deane click here.

My other reviews for Stride include a review of two poetry collections, one by Mario Petrucci and the other by David Miller, a review of Temporary Archive: Poems by Women of Latin America, a review of Fukushima Dreams by Andrea Moorhead, a review of Endangered Sky by Kelly Grovier and Sean Scully, and review of God's Little Angel by Sue Hubbard. To read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, here, and here. My poems published in Amethyst Review are: 'Runwell', 'Are/Are Not', 'Attend, attend' and 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages'. Read my ArtWay interview with David Miller here.

Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.

I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook.

Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.

He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).

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John F. Deane - Canticle.

Faith and doubt of John Betjeman

At a funeral this week, I spoke briefly about the 'honest doubt' in the poetry of John Betjeman:

In ‘Summoned by Bells’ Betjeman wrote of how he would “ride for miles / To far-off churches” and, of how one of them so worked on him that his life was changed so that he was inspired to cycle around Cornwall in “quest of mystical experience.” In ‘Before the Anaesthetic’, Betjeman puts us inside the mind of a man waiting for an operation while hearing the bells of St Giles Church ring. The man realizes that, although he has attended church, he has not really known God and, therefore, prays, “Now, lest this ‘I’ should cease to be, / Come, real Lord, come quick to me.”

Betjeman himself wrote: “I have no memory of a blinding light striking me at the corner of a street, or of a fit of the shudders while people knelt around me in prayer. I cannot point to a date, time and place and say, ‘That was when I was converted’. I cling to the sacraments and live for the day, have many moments of doubt when the only thing that buoys me up is the thought that I would sooner the Incarnation were true than that it were not. This, at its lowest ebb, is my faith; but frequent confession and communion have proved to me, unwilling though I sometimes am to believe, that prayer works, that Christ is God, and that He is present in the Sacraments.”

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John Betjeman - Christmas.

Sharing our doubts and supporting others in their doubts

Here's the sermon I shared at St Mary’s Runwell this morning:

One of the things that I love most about the Bible is its honesty. In particular, the way in which it is honest about the flaws and failings in all of the great heroes of faith. The great leaders of Israel from the Old Testament and the Apostles in the New Testament, none of them are portrayed as being super-human, instead we are told about their failures as well as their obedience.

Look at John the Baptist in Matthew 11: 2-11, for example. He’d had a great ministry. He’d gone from being a nobody to having the religious leaders of his day coming and asking whether he was the next Elijah. He had not only recognised Jesus as Israel’s Messiah but had baptised him as well. And as he had baptised Jesus, he had seen the heavens open and God’s Spirit coming down on Jesus and had heard God the Father saying to Jesus, “This is my own dear Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

He had had an incredible ministry which had included some incredible experiences of God. But at the end of his life, everything came to a crashing halt as he was imprisoned by Herod, until his life was cut short by Herodius asking for his head on a platter. How was he affected by his imprisonment and this sudden end to his ministry which had had such an impact?

Well, we get a clue from our gospel reading because John sent a message to Jesus to ask if Jesus was the one that they had been expecting or whether they should look out for someone else. In other words, as he sat in his prison cell, John the Baptist doubted what he had earlier been certain of. After he had baptised Jesus, John had seen the Spirit of God come down and stay on Jesus and therefore he had confidently told others that Jesus was the Son of God. Now though he wasn’t so sure and so he sent some of his disciples to Jesus with this question.

Now isn’t that similar to our experience as Christians? Don’t we often go through times when we experience a real sense of closeness to God when we feel absolutely certain of what we believe. Times when God feels so close to us that we could almost reach out and touch him. Times when we are so convinced of the truth of what we believe that we cannot understand how other people can be so dull that they can’t see it for themselves. But then there are other times when that kind of confidence and that awareness of God’s presence seem to be far away in the past and we wonder how we could ever have been so sure about what we believed. In these times we haven’t lost our faith, although we might wonder whether that is what is happening to us, but we don’t have that sense of assurance that we once had.

Does this mean that we have lost our faith or are not following God’s plan for our lives? Does it mean that we have failed or sinned or stopped trusting? The answer to all those questions is no. Think for a moment about the way in which Jesus replies to John’s question.

First, Jesus doesn’t criticise John. He doesn’t tell him to pull up his socks or to be more trusting or to have more faith or to repent for his sins. And then he tells the crowds that there has never been a man greater than John the Baptist. Jesus knows that doubt is part of the journey of faith. Even the greatest man who ever lived experienced periods of doubt. If John the Baptist did, then we should certainly expect to, too.

Jesus also welcomes the fact that John comes to him with his doubts and sends back a message of encouragement. John was isolated in his prison cell. He obviously had some contact with his disciples, but he was not free and his disciples would only have been able to see him at certain times. In his isolation, it would have been easy for him to retreat into himself with his doubts and allow them to grow and play on his mind without being answered. But that is not what John did, instead he shares his doubts with Jesus. In the same way, we need to share our doubts and difficulties with each other and with God himself. And when others share their doubts and difficulties with us, we need to be like Jesus and give encouragement.

In the message that Jesus sends to John, he asks him, firstly, to look again at himself, at Jesus. When we do this, when we honestly look at the Jesus who is revealed to us in the gospels, we see a man who is genuinely like God. We see a man who does and says the things that only God could do and say:

“the blind can see, the lame can walk, those who suffer from dreaded skin diseases are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are brought back to life, and the Good News is preached to the poor.”

When we doubt our faith, as we all do at different times in our lives, one of the best things we can do is to remind ourselves of what Jesus is like. Could anyone do and say the things that Jesus did and said and not be God?

The message that Jesus sends to John also asks John to look at the signs of the kingdom that can be seen in Jesus’ ministry. Those things that Jesus said and did were the first signs that the rule and reign of God was coming about on earth. As John looked at these tangible signs of God’s kingdom, he could see the prophecies about God’s rule on earth coming true. Like John, we also need to look in our world for signs of God’s kingdom in changed lives and changed communities.

Sometimes as preachers we give the impression that the Christian life should be all highs and no lows. Sometimes preachers even deliberately preach that God’s plan is that we can all become champions, successful in all that we do. But that is to preach and read only a part of what the Bible says, not the whole.

God’s way for us often involves apparent failure and hardship. Look at John in this passage. Think of Paul reflecting on a ministry full of beatings, imprisonment and shipwrecks. Think ultimately of Jesus and the cross. When we experience hardship, failure and doubt in our faith and ministries we are often sharing in the suffering of Christ. A faith that survives the difficult times is longer lasting that a faith that only knows ease and comfort. It is in the testing times that our faith is stretched and grows.

Jesus understands our doubts, he encourages us to share our doubts with others and to support others in their doubts and difficulties. He points us to himself and to the signs of God’s kingdom in our lives and the lives of those around us as an encouragement to us to hold on in those difficult times and see our faith grow and develop as a result.

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On Jordan's bank, the Baptist's cry.

Deus Ex Musica: Four Pop Songs for Lent

My latest post for Deus Ex Musica is on four pop songs for Lent. For over 50 years, pop musicians in all genres have explored the meaning and significance of Jesus in their music. The result is a rich collection of songs that consider important spiritual questions like faith, doubt, and prayer in unique and often provocative ways.

Deus Ex Musica’s Delvyn Case and I have recently been in conversation in a short series for HeartEdge to try to mine this rich resource to share rock and pop music for Lent, Easter and Christmas. We both have a deep interest in the ways faith is expressed in and through pop music in all its many guises. So, in this series we attempted to tap our differing interests and knowledge by choosing four songs for each festival we discussed. In this post I share the four songs we chose for Lent.

My earlier pieces for Deus Ex Musica on music for the Epiphany and the New Year can be found here and here. Recordings of the HeartEdge series with Delvyn Case can be found on the HeartEdge Facebook page here.

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 Rapsody - Jesus Coming.

Lifelines: Notes on Life & Love, Faith & Doubt

Great to have the launch of Lifelines: Notes on Life & Love, Faith & Doubt by Martin Wroe and Malcolm Doney at St Martin-in-the-Fields this afternoon.

'Life is beautiful . . . and baffling. Any new day may be lit up with beauty and wonder but the next overcast with pain and sadness.

Our time on earth is shot through with questions so vast that we can’t get our minds around them. Humans have always tried to find ways to respond to those questions. It’s usually called ‘wisdom’, and before writing was thought up, it was handed down in stories.

Some of this was bottled in religion and became congealed into creeds and regulations. That’s all right for some, but many of us don’t want to be told what to believe, we’re shy of certainty, suspicious of authority.

We still live with the questions though. Like how the big moments – the birth of a child or the death of a friend – can leave us wondering about how to live in the small moments.

That’s what this book is about. A collection of fieldnotes on how we can live this life, and live it well.

From poets and songwriters, activists and artists, from people with faith, and people without. We’ve nicked their best ideas and added some of our own. Clues and pointers, rather than terms and conditions.'

Martin Wroe studied theology before becoming a staff writer on The Independent and the Observer. He won a Sony Gold Radio Award for the Radio 1 series The Big Holy One, and co-authored, with Malcolm Doney, The Rough Guide to a Better World. The author of several poetry books that no-one has noticed, he also produces collections of stories about people in the north London community where he lives. He is a volunteer vicar in his local parish and a contributor to Thought for the Day on Radio 4. He keeps chickens.

Malcolm Doney trained as a fine artist at what Jarvis Cocker called St Martin’s College - now Central Saint Martin’s UAL - before pursuing a writing career in journalism, advertising and broadcasting. He has written ten books, including, with his wife Meryl, Who Made Me? , a sex guide for seven-year-olds. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought, and Radio 4’s Something Understood. He lives in the village of Blythburgh, Suffolk, where he is a volunteer priest in the parish church, sometimes joined by his horse, Neville.

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Harry Baker - Paper People.

The 95: Notes on Life & Love, Faith & Doubt

The 95: Notes on Life & Love, Faith & Doubt is a book by Martin Wroe and Malcolm Doney which is to published early next year by Unbound. 

Wroe and Doney are 'calling it The 95 because 500 years ago, an obscure German monk called Martin Luther came up with his own 95 notes, which he nailed to a church door in Wittenberg. It caused pandemonium at the time but they’re looking pretty tired now. So, they figured it might be time for another 95.

They have devised these by taking the best ideas of poets and songwriters, activists and artists, from people with faith, and people without while adding some of their own. Clues and pointers, rather than terms and conditions.

Church Times currently features a sample selection of the 95 clues and pointers they’ve come up with about how we might try to live well in this beautiful but baffling world. Wroe and Doney state that:

'Our experience tells us that most people are shy of certainty, suspi­cious of authority. But they retain a longing for some deeper, richer narrative by which they might navig­­ate their days. They’re inveter­ately curious, and open to ideas. They haven’t closed the door on life’s strange mystery. How the big mo­­ments — the birth of a child, say, or the death of a friend — can leave us wondering about how to live in the small moments: how to forgive someone. If love is worth it. Why people pray.

So we figured it might be time for another 95, for these people. Our book couldn’t be called a “theses”, though — we haven’t nailed any­thing down, and an indulgence these days is more likely to be eating a cream cake in the middle of Lent. It’s rather a set of field notes for living a good life which leans on the wisdom of others: artists and activ­ists, poets and songwriters, thinkers and dreamers. Some of them are ancient, some still have acne. Some of them have faith, and others don’t.'

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Mark Heard - Is It Any Wonder?

Doubting John the Baptist

Here is my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:

John the Baptist had had a great ministry. He’d gone from being a nobody to having the religious leaders of his day coming and asking whether he was the next Elijah. He had not only recognised Jesus as Israel’s Messiah but had baptised him as well. And as he had baptised Jesus, he had seen the heavens open and God’s Spirit coming down on Jesus and had heard God the Father saying to Jesus, “This is my own dear Son, with whom I am well pleased.” At the end of his life, however, everything came to a crashing halt as he was imprisoned by Herod, until his life was cut short by Herodius asking for his head on a platter. How was he affected by this sudden end to his ministry which had had such an impact?

Well, we get a clue from our gospel reading (Matthew 11: 2-11) because John sent a message to Jesus to ask if Jesus was the one that they had been expecting or whether they should look out for someone else. In other words, as he sat in his prison cell, John the Baptist doubted what he had earlier been certain of. After he had baptised Jesus, John had seen the Spirit of God come down and stay on Jesus and had confidently told others that Jesus was the Son of God. Now though he wasn’t so sure and so he sent some of his disciples to Jesus with this question.

Isn’t that similar to our experience as Christians? Don’t we often go through times when we experience a real sense of closeness to God when we feel absolutely certain of what we believe. Times when God feels so close to us that we could almost reach out and touch him. But then there are other times when that kind of confidence and that awareness of God’s presence seem to be far away in the past and we wonder how we could ever have been so sure about what we believed. In these times we haven’t lost our faith but we don’t have the sense of assurance that we once had. Does this mean that we are not following God’s plan for our lives? Does it mean that we have failed or sinned or stopped trusting? The answer to all those questions is no. Think for a moment about the way in which Jesus replies to John’s question.

First, Jesus doesn’t criticise John. He doesn’t tell him to pull up his socks or to be more trusting or to have more faith or to repent for his sins. And then he tells the crowds that there has never been a man greater than John the Baptist. Jesus knows that doubt is part of the journey of faith. Even the greatest man who ever lived experienced periods of doubt. If John the Baptist did, then we should certainly expect to too. Jesus welcomes John coming to him with his doubts and sends back a message of encouragement. John was isolated in his prison cell. He had some contact with his disciples but he was not free and his disciples would only have been able to see him at certain times. In his isolation, it would have been easy for him to retreat into himself with his doubts and allow them to grow and play on his mind without being answered. But that is not what John did, instead he shares his doubts with Jesus. In the same way, we need to share our doubts and difficulties with each other and with God himself. And when others share their doubts and difficulties with us, we need to be like Jesus and give encouragement.

In the message that Jesus sends to John he asks him, firstly, to look again at himself, at Jesus. When we do this, when we honestly look at the Jesus who is revealed to us in the gospels, we see a man who is genuinely like God. We see a man who does and says the things that only God could do and say: “the blind can see, the lame can walk, those who suffer from dreaded skin diseases are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are brought back to life, and the Good News is preached to the poor.” When we doubt our faith, as we all do at different times in our lives, one of the best things we can do is to remind ourselves of what Jesus is like. Could anyone do and say the things that Jesus did and said and not be God?

The message that Jesus sends to John also asks him to look at the signs of the kingdom that can be seen in Jesus’ ministry. Those things that Jesus said and did were the first signs that the rule and reign of God was coming about on earth. As John looked at these tangible signs of God’s kingdom he could see the prophecies about God’s rule on earth coming true. Like John, we also need to look in our world for signs of God’s kingdom in changed lives and changed communities.

Sometimes as preachers we give the impression that the Christian life should be all highs and no lows. Sometimes preachers even deliberately preach that God’s plan is that we can all become champions, successful in all that we do. But that is to preach and read only a part of what the Bible says, not the whole. God’s way for us often involves apparent failure and hardship. Look at John in this passage. A faith that survives the difficult times is longer lasting that a faith that only knows ease and comfort. It is in the testing times that our faith is stretched and grows. Jesus understands our doubts, he encourages us to share our doubts with others and to support others in their doubts and difficulties. He points us to himself and to the signs of God’s kingdom in our lives and the lives of those around us as an encouragement to us to hold on in those difficult times and see our faith grow and develop as a result.

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On Jordan's Bank, The Baptist's Cry.

Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence

'Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece.

Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors.'

In his essay for Approaching Silence Martin Scorsese writes: 'Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence.'

'Adapting Silence ... has been a passion project percolating in Martin Scorsese’s mind for decades. For a while, it looked like the film would never get done. But with the release of a full cast, a first still, and a brand new essay and storyboard courtesy of The Film Stage, [Matthew Becklo says,] Scorsese’s Silence is well on its way to its scheduled 2016 release.

In an early forward for the novel, Scorsese wrote:

“How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos… [Endo] understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture… That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.”

Similarly, as David Ehrenstein writes, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, released in 1988 and adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the life of Christ, takes as its subject this same struggle between the spirit and the flesh - 'the “temptation” is simply that to be only human—to forgo divinity and martyrdom in exchange for a normal life':

'Kazantzakis’s novel had long fascinated Scorsese, who saw in it an opportunity to create a religious epic like no other, a “Passion project” if ever there was one. Written in 1951, The Last Temptation of Christ, according to its author, shows that the “part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand and love him and to pursue his passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.” And so instead of dealing with Christ as a remote icon, Scorsese’s film would explore what it meant for him to be fully human as well as divine—as the Gospels say it was Jesus’ unique condition to be.'

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Peter Gabriel - The Feeling Begins.

The poet’s eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion

Mary Karr says, "From a very early age, when I read a poem, it was as if the poet's burning taper touched some charred filament in my rib cage to set me alight."

"My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It’s morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it’s emotionally and spiritually empowering.”

Like her prose, Karr’s poetry treats events from her past. Sinners Welcome, like the memoir Lit, includes meditative poems on Karr’s recovery from alcoholism and her new found, perhaps surprising, sense of faith. Reviewing the collection for the New York Times, David Kirby found in Karr a careful, tough religious poet: “Images rather than wishful abstractions abound,” Kirby noted. “So much trickery has been got up to in religion's name that it's natural to get nervous when a writer starts talking about salvation, but Karr never tries to substitute faith for sound poetic practices. If anything, by adding prayer, she just makes the poems that much stronger.”

"Like poetry, prayer often begins in torment, until the intensity of language forges a shape worthy of both labels: “true” and “beautiful.” (Only in my deepest prayers does language evaporate, and a wide and wordless silence takes over.)"

“Fans of the smart-mouthed hell-raiser need not fear. Karr brings the same unstinting truth-telling sensibility to her spiritual concerns as she has to her earthly struggles.” — Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer on Sinners Welcome

"Theology takes on a kind of earthy insight… As Karr knows, her endeavor is ages old. It may be that all lyric poetry aspires to prayer. What gives Sinners Welcome its sharp edge is the poet’s eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion.”
— Judith Kitchen, Washington Post

"'I was not separated from people, grief and pity joined us.
We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.'

That’s why I pray and poetize: to be able to see my brothers and sisters despite my own (often petty) agonies, to partake of the majesty that’s every Judas’s birthright."

See: Descending Theology: Christ Human, Descending Theology: The Garden and Descending Theology: The Resurrection.

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Rosanne Cash - Sister O Sister.

Business is a religion ... secularism is a religion ...

Tim Lott makes some helpful comments about the nature of belief and faith (acknowledging that each of us, whether religious or not, are in reality 'believers') in his latest piece for The Guardian. Interestingly, he needs to refer to the New Testament and use language drawn from the Christian tradition in order to do so:

'We live in a world of unprecedented change and complexity, and this makes us more desperate than ever to cling to what we think we know. We need to believe that our purposes, those goals in which we invest meaning, are valid. On this definition, business is a religion, career is a religion, family is a religion, nation is a religion, secularism is a religion, and religion is a religion. There is no getting away from it. However, our values cannot be independently verified – other than by the reassuring support of the like-minded ...

The alternative to belief (“lief”, incidentally, comes from the root meaning “to wish”) is faith. Not religious faith, but faith that does not become brittle with its own projections of hatred against “the other”, which includes the apostates in our midst who do not share our view. Faith that we are all human souls struggling to keep our heads above water in floods of confusion. Faith in reason, faith in the idea of truth, however elusive the actuality. And faith, as any reading of the New Testament makes plain, is always hedged by doubt.

Doubt is nothing to fear – the doubt that all our ideas and precious beliefs are straws in the wind. There is meaning in meaninglessness, in the “cloud of unknowing” that we all live inside. There are real facts – there is love, there is our own consciousness, there is this day, this moment, the feeling of human connection.'

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George Michael - Faith.

Review - Barbara Kruger

I have a review of Barbara Kruger's exhibition at Modern Art Oxford  published today in the Church Times.

In the review I explore how Kruger's work leads naturally into reflections on the nature of belief. The words BELIEVERS, DOUBTERS, AIRHEADS are at the very centre of her main installation while an earlier Kruger installation contained the equation BELIEF + DOUBT = SANITY. Kruger’s work refuses cheap solutions to that balance and the question of our own identity. 

I also refer to work by Rose Finn-Kelcey and Caroline Richardson which can be viewed here and here.

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Woven Hand -  Obdurate Obscura.

Modern Art Oxford: Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger at Modern Art Oxford until 31 August 2014

'Through ironic appropriation of specific slogans and imagery, Kruger deploys the visual strategies of mass communication in order to challenge the often manipulative logic at work in the language of advertising, television and other media and the role of Western consumerist culture.'

'Kruger’s investigation of rhetoric is further intensified by the work’s loud graphic style of which the artist says “I attempt to investigate the complex inter-relationships between power and society, but as for the visual presentation itself, I try to avoid a high degree of difficulty. I would like for people to be drawn directly in the work.”'

'While the exhibition addresses ideas of value and consumerism, this work also presents a more philosophical trajectory, confronting the viewer with questions and declarations such as, “IS THERE LIFE WITHOUT PAIN?” “IS THAT ALL THERE IS?” and “THE BRUTAL RELENTLESS FEARFUL END OF IT ALL.” The repeated motif of an emoticon – a hallmark of smartphone and social media communication – references the explosion of digital culture across online and mobile platforms and the influence of these technologies on our lives.'

'Kruger’s work is primarily concerned with the machinations of power in contemporary life. Through ironic appropriation of specific slogans and imagery, she deploys the visual strategies of mass media in order to subvert the often manipulative logic at work in the language of advertising, television and other media. Kruger’s use of both declarative statements and the imperative, what she terms ‘direct address’, is a consistent tactic throughout her work. This mode of address is utilised not only to grab the viewer’s attention but also to implicate us in the work’s content, forcing us to confront and question familiar social and cultural orthodoxies.'

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Barbara Kruger at Modern Art Oxford.

Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches Lent Service

Tonight at 8.00pm at Seven Kings United Free Church the Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches will be celebrating and giving thanks for the learning we have done together as part of this year's Lent Course - 'Build on the Rock: Faith, doubt and Jesus'. Our Lent Service will include feedback from each of the three groups that studied the Course.

We have had an excellent Lent Course this year as can be judged by some of the feedback from those who took part:

• "We had some very deep discussions. Our discussion about death was particularly interesting, thoughtful and deep."
• "I appreciated thinking about Jesus as 'friend' and 'brother'. This was a new way of thinking. I had to stop and think about what we are really saying when we call Jesus our 'brother'."
• "Asking why God leads us to pray was thought-provoking and important for me."
• "You think you're not that good as a Christian but to then hear that we all struggle with doubt, it makes you realise that you're not odd." 

People liked the quotes in the course booklet ("I was surprised that some of those quoted had a Christian faith") and the range of perspectives from those interviewed on the course CD. We also liked working together with people from other churches and hearing different perspectives when discussing topics.

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Bruce Cockburn - The Rose Above The Sky.

Why there's no faith without doubt

The Lent Course organised by the Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches is featured in the current edition of the Ilford Recorder.

Our Lent Course this year is entitled Build on the Rock: Faith, doubt - and Jesus! Based around Matthew 7.24 (Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock), the course starts by looking at faith and doubt. Is it wrong – or is it normal and healthy – for a Christian to have doubts? Is there any evidence for a God who loves us? We will hear from many witnesses. At the heart of a Christian answer stands Jesus himself. We consider his ‘strange and beautiful story’ and reflect upon his teaching, his death, his resurrection and his continuing significance.

The Course has five sessions: (1) Believing and doubting; (2) Jesus - our teacher; (3) Jesus - our saviour; (4) Jesus - conqueror of death; and (5) Jesus - Lord and brother. Produced by York Courses, the course comes with a good choice of wide-ranging questions designed to involve all members in lively discussion and also brings the thoughts of prominent Christian leaders into our own discussion group.

The Course Booklet has been written by best-selling author, Canon John Young. The Course CD contains five 14-minute radio-style starters for group discussion, with former BBC broadcaster Canon Simon Stanley putting questions to the participants: Bishop Richard Chartres (Bishop of London), Dr Paula Gooder and Revd Joel Edwards. Each session closes with a Reflection by Methodist minister David Gamble. Former Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, introduces the course.

Why do a York Course? Tens of thousands of people study a York Course each year:

"I like the format. Listening to the speakers on the CD helped to clarify my own thoughts as well as inspiring me with new ideas… The questions were challenging and well thought out. Altogether a very enjoyable course."

"York Courses are by far and away the best thought-out house-group material that I have come across. Excellent notes, a really useful range of questions, and stimulating audio contributions."

"Along with thousands of other Christians I have benefited greatly from participation in York Courses over the past few years, mainly as a group leader."

The Lent courses are organised by the Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches (SKFC) and will run at:

· 2.00pm on Tuesday’s at St John’s Seven Kings (11 March, 18 March, 25, March. 1 April, 8 April)
· 11.15am on Wednesday’s at St Peter’s Aldborough Hatch (12 March, 19 March, 26 March, 2 April, 9 April)
· 8.00pm on Wednesday at St John’s Seven Kings (12 March, 19 March, 26 March, 2 April, 9 April)

Our SKFC Lent Service will be at 8.00pm on Monday 14th April at Seven Kings United Free Church.

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The Call - I Still Believe.

Tadeusz Dabrowski: the caring non-presence of God

Black Square by Tadeusz Dabrowski is reviewed in the current edition of the Times Literary Supplement.
Adam Zagajewski has written that 'Tadeusz Dąbrowski is writing his self-portrait of the artist as a young man. Love, faith and doubt fill its pages.'

Dabrowski has published five volumes of poetry in his native Poland, which have won him numerous awards. His work has appeared in translation in thirteen European languages. English translations of his poems by Antonia Lloyd-Jones have been published in several leading literary journals, including Agni, American Poetry Review, and Tin House. Black Square is his first collection to be published in English.
In his introduction Tomasz Różycki writes: 'It is hard to define Dąbrowski’s poetry with utter certainty, to say whether its subject has or has not reconciled himself with God—whose authority is never put in question—or what his moral choices are. This is a poetry that complicates matters, that refuses to provide answers, that constructs small treatises in completely unpredictable places—an existence en brut, always becoming, always variable and resistant to definition. This is a poetry that smelts its inheritance into something new, modern, and original, something dynamic, paradoxical, constantly in motion, a poetry that is engaged with today’s world in so many of its manifestations, leaping from theme to theme—art, travel, sex, love (presented in all its succulence, no doubt, and with complete candor, as if this most fragile of human affairs was the only constant in life), computers, camera lenses, Europe, America, quotations from philosophers, and rock lyrics—in its ambitious gambit to comprehend a world that remains elusive and undescribed.'

The TLS review notes that some 'of his most compelling poems are meditations on the absence of God or what he prefers to call "His / caring non-presence."'

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Henryk Górecki - Songs Are Sung.

Mysteries and miracles

'The value of religion is that it points beyond anything that can be known by the methods of science, showing us that a mystery would remain even if everything could be finally explained. The heart of religion isn't belief, but something more like what Keats described as negative capability: "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".'

John Gray, 'Alain de Botton's atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one' - The Guardian

A miracle (what else can you call it):
the sun rose today at three fourteen
a.m.
and will set tonight at one past eight

A miracle that's lost on us:
the hand actually has fewer than six
fingers
but still it's got more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the inescapable earth.

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.
Wisława Szymborska, quoted in her obituary for The Guardian

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The Call - Everywhere I Go.

Welcoming doubt

One of the things that I love most about the Bible is its honesty. In particular, the way in which it is honest about the flaws and failings in all of the great heroes of faith. The great leaders of Israel from the Old Testament and the Apostles in the New Testament, none of them are portrayed as being super-human, instead we are told about their failures as well as their obedience.

Look at John the Baptist in Matthew 11: 2-11, for example. He’d had a great ministry. He’d gone from being a nobody to having the religious leaders of his day coming and asking whether he was the next Elijah. He had not only recognised Jesus as Israel’s Messiah but had baptised him as well. And as he had baptised Jesus, he had seen the heavens open and God’s Spirit coming down on Jesus and had heard God the Father saying to Jesus, “This is my own dear Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

He had had an incredible ministry which had included some incredible experiences of God. But at the end of his life, everything came to a crashing halt as he was imprisoned by Herod, until his life was cut short by Herodius asking for his head on a platter. How was he affected by his imprisonment and this sudden end to his ministry which had had such an impact?

Well, we get a clue from our gospel reading because John sent a message to Jesus to ask if Jesus was the one that they had been expecting or whether they should look out for someone else. In other words, as he sat in his prison cell, John the Baptist doubted what he had earlier been certain of. After he had baptised Jesus, John had seen the Spirit of God come down and stay on Jesus and therefore he had confidently told others that Jesus was the Son of God. Now though he wasn’t so sure and so he sent some of his disciples to Jesus with this question.

Now isn’t that similar to our experience as Christians? Don’t we often go through times when we experience a real sense of closeness to God when we feel absolutely certain of what we believe. Times when God feels so close to us that we could almost reach out and touch him. Times when we are so convinced of the truth of what we believe that we cannot understand how other people can be so dull that they can’t see it for themselves. But then there are other times when that kind of confidence and that awareness of God’s presence seem to be far away in the past and we wonder how we could ever have been so sure about what we believed. In these times we haven’t lost our faith, although we might wonder whether that is what is happening to us, but we don’t have that sense of assurance that we once had.

Does this mean that we have lost our faith or are not following God’s plan for our lives? Does it mean that we have failed or sinned or stopped trusting? The answer to all those questions is no. Think for a moment about the way in which Jesus replies to John’s question.

First, Jesus doesn’t criticise John. He doesn’t tell him to pull up his socks or to be more trusting or to have more faith or to repent for his sins. And then he tells the crowds that there has never been a man greater than John the Baptist. Jesus knows that doubt is part of the journey of faith. Even the greatest man who ever lived experienced periods of doubt. If John the Baptist did, then we should certainly expect to too.

Jesus also welcomes the fact that John comes to him with his doubts and sends back a message of encouragement. John was isolated in his prison cell. He obviously had some contact with his disciples but he was not free and his disciples would only have been able to see him at certain times. In his isolation, it would have been easy for him to retreat into himself with his doubts and allow them to grow and play on his mind without being answered. But that is not what John did, instead he shares his doubts with Jesus. In the same way, we need to share our doubts and difficulties with each other and with God himself. And when others share their doubts and difficulties with us, we need to be like Jesus and give encouragement.

In the message that Jesus sends to John he asks him, firstly, to look again at himself, at Jesus. When we do this, when we honestly look at the Jesus who is revealed to us in the gospels, we see a man who is genuinely like God. We see a man who does and says the things that only God could do and say:  

“the blind can see, the lame can walk, those who suffer from dreaded skin diseases are made clean, the deaf hear, the dead are brought back to life, and the Good News is preached to the poor.”

When we doubt our faith, as we all do at different times in our lives, one of the best things we can do is to remind ourselves of what Jesus is like. Could anyone do and say the things that Jesus did and said and not be God?

The message that Jesus sends to John also asks John to look at the signs of the kingdom that can be seen in Jesus’ ministry. Those things that Jesus said and did were the first signs that the rule and reign of God was coming about on earth. As John looked at these tangible signs of God’s kingdom he could see the prophecies about God’s rule on earth coming true. Like John, we also need to look in our world for signs of God’s kingdom in changed lives and changed communities.

Sometimes as preachers we give the impression that the Christian life should be all highs and no lows. Sometimes preachers even deliberately preach that God’s plan is that we can all become champions, successful in all that we do. But that is to preach and read only a part of what the Bible says, not the whole.

God’s way for us often involves apparent failure and hardship. Look at John in this passage. Think of Paul reflecting on a ministry full of beatings, imprisonment and shipwrecks. Think ultimately of Jesus and the cross. When we experience hardship, failure and doubt in our faith and ministries we are often sharing in the suffering of Christ. A faith that survives the difficult times is longer lasting that a faith that only knows ease and comfort. It is in the testing times that our faith is stretched and grows.

Jesus understands our doubts, he encourages us to share our doubts with others and to support others in their doubts and difficulties. He points us to himself and to the signs of God’s kingdom in our lives and the lives of those around us as an encouragement to us to hold on in those difficult times and see our faith grow and develop as a result.  

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Paul Mealor - Locus Iste.