Coming alive to the Spirit

Here's the reflection I shared during today's lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Yesterday, in the Inspired to Follow group, we were looking at an early Florentine image of God as creator depicted as an elderly white man with a long beard, which led us into a discussion as whether God is more accurately depicted as abstract essence, rather than a person with a gender and ethnicity.

Those two strands of thought can also be found here, too, in the distinction Jesus makes between flesh and Spirit (John 3. 1-8). His description of Spirit as being like the wind makes it clear that he is making a distinction between what is tangible, visible and known – the flesh – and what is intangible, invisible and unknown – the Spirit. It is easy to hear that distinction being made and assume that Jesus is saying there is a dualistic division between flesh and Spirit and we have to choose one over the other. Many people in the history of the Church have made just that assumption.

Yet that is to forgot the way in which John’s Gospel begins; ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth’ (John 1.1, 14), Through the incarnation of Jesus, flesh and Spirit are united and made one. Jesus came into the world to unify flesh and Spirit, to show that the human and the divine can be held together and combined in one; the divine can be human and the human divine.

God was revealed in our humanity in order that we recognise divinity – the image of God - within us. That is what we see here in the distinction between our first birth from our mothers’ womb through which we begin to have experience of the tangible, the visible and the known, and a second birth through water and the Spirit by means of which we begin to acknowledge and recognise our experience of the intangible, the invisible and the unknown. Both are life experiences; the first is immediately apparent to us through our physical birth; the second is an awareness that has to be awakened in us – an awakening that comes unpredictably in line with the unpredictable movements of the Spirit, which blows where it chooses.

The distinctions made by Jesus in the Gospel of John between flesh and Spirit, below and above, darkness and light etc can help, however, in understanding what it is in us that prevents our coming alive to the Spirit. Stephen Verney, in his wonderful commentary of John’s Gospel called ‘Water into Wine,’ say that, when he makes these distinctions, Jesus is speaking about two different levels or orders to reality. What he means by this are different patterns of society, each with a different centre or ruling power. In the first, ‘the ruling principle is the dictator ME, my ego-centric ego, and the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.’ In the second, ‘the ruling principle is the Spirit of Love, and the pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognising their differences, and sharing their vulnerability.’

These two orders or patterns for society are at war with each other and we are caught up in the struggle that results. Choosing our side in this struggle is a key question for us as human beings, the question being ‘so urgent that our survival depends on finding the answer.’ Verney writes that: ‘we can see in our world order the terrible consequences of our ego-centricity. We have projected it into our institutions, where it has swollen up into a positive force of evil. We are all imprisoned together, in a system of competing nation states, on the edge of a catastrophe which could destroy all life on our planet.’ He was writing in the 1980s, but could have been describing today’s nationalism.

It is that ego-centricity and self-centredness which prevents us from coming alive to the Spirit. It is a pre-condition of coming alive to the Spirit that we look away from ourselves in order to see God and others. Beyond this, there is a degree of unpredictability in our awakening to the Spirit which means that we may only be able to tell our personal stories of coming alive to that which is invisible, intangible and beyond our comprehension.

Here is my personal story of resurrection in the form of a meditation. I wonder what features in your story?

When I stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,
I come alive.
When the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,
I come alive.
When my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,
I come alive.
When my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and passion,
I come alive.
When a friend listens with understanding and without advising,
I come alive.
When I sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,
I come alive.
When words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,
I come alive.
When I hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,
I come alive.

I come alive to endurance
when I see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.
I come alive to pain
when I hear a friend’s story of depression and unanswered pleading.
I come alive to patience
when I see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.
I come alive to injustice
when the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity lawsuits with African famine victims.
I come alive to suffering
when I see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read Endo’s Silence.
I come alive to grief
when I remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.

I come alive
when I am touched and see and hear
the beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.
The mystery or madness
of the Other in which God
meets and greets me
and calls forth the response
that is love.

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King's X - It's Love.

The contemporary magic of denial

There is significant insight into our Western denial of reality in today's Guardian. Giles Fraser is particularly apposite in a comment piece (which has some synergy with my Christmas night sermon) about our continuing belief in magic:

"What do I mean by magic? Forget Merlin. Forget Potter. I mean the belief that there is ever a short cut out of the constituent limitations of our humanity. That there is a way, instantly, with the flick of a wand or a credit card, of changing ourselves from one thing to something else entirely. Abracadabra. Magic is the escape fantasy of those who cannot cope with the fact that we are limited creatures, that we will grow old and die, that we can never have everything, that we will always be dependent on food and oxygen and the love of others, and that, because of this, we will often feel pain and loss. Magic is the belief that there is some other way of dealing with all of this other than simply by dealing with it.

Which is why I think the really dangerous magic – and I believe all magic is dangerous – is out there in the post-Christmas sales. The most insidious magic is disguised as something so ordinary we don't even notice it. In terms of magic, both Christianity and contemporary market capitalism appear under the form of their opposites ...

We buy the new suit or go on a diet to become a new person. We think becoming a pop star will plug the longing within – ignoring the evidence of those many pop stars who tragically take their own life as they realise the Simon Cowell brand of promised magic is a lie. We play the lotto. And every night on our TV screens, advertising offers us the contemporary equivalent of the philosopher's stone (turning lead into gold) and the fabled elixir of life. All of this, at root, is an attempt to escape from something that cannot be escaped from. Escape from the ordinary conditions of life. Escape from the anxiety within ourselves."

Elsewhere, in their 'Worst Ideas of 2012' feature, we read Oliver Burkeman saying (in a section entitled 'Ignoring Reality' and including comment on the Jimmy Savile scandal):


"The horror was hiding in plain sight. But acknowledging it would have meant acknowledging exactly who it was that we'd elevated to the status of national treasure – or perhaps even acknowledging, as Andrew O'Hagan put it in the London Review of Books, "that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements"."

He argues that this "refusal to see what we're looking at is surely at the heart of climate-change denial, too," as well as the implacable faith Republicans had in a Romney landslide:

"The annals of psychological research are full of examples of how accomplished we are at not seeing what's there, for many reasons. People given the opportunity to cheat in small ways on tests, for example, don't consciously acknowledge they're dishonest; they'd rather preserve their sense of not being cheats. Or perhaps you've seen that famous basketball video demonstrating the phenomenon of "change blindness": when people are asked to count the number of times the ball is passed between players, they fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk right across the frame."

Denial, in a broader sense, he notes, "has its benefits: without a dose of it, we'd be unable to overlook our own and others' lapses and faults, and relationships would become impossible. But its pitfalls are enormous, as Romney's aides and media supporters learned. Or did they learn?"


Fraser makes a similar point: "At the end of his seminal work Religion and the Decline of Magic, the historian Keith Thomas states: "If magic is defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it." That is exactly right. But in an age that prides itself on its rationality, we commonly mask this reality from ourselves." 

Fraser concludes: "The Christian tradition insists on one thing over and over again: that you and I are not gods and that we cannot defy the gravity of our basic humanity. This religion is a process of disenchantment from the persistent belief that we are the centre of the universe. What is the secular equivalent to this admonition? I don't see one. Everywhere, we are told that we can (with what Marx called "the magic of money") be transformed into mini gods – rock gods, sex gods, masters of the universe."

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Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back.