Poorly Learnt Lessons

I try, when I remember to, to bear in mind the saying, “Everyone provides an example; some to follow and some to avoid”.  There are some people to emulate, and some people to consciously attempt not to, or more accurately, certain things about people to emulate, and certain things, often about the same people, to avoid.  I also try to remember the prayer, “Lord, may I see myself as others see me, and see others as You see them.”

It is far too easy to become judgmental and arrogant about other people, and I am well aware that this is a serious fault within myself, and despite my (often far from-) best efforts I do judge and look down upon other people.  However, I also try and draw lessons from them as well.  Unfortunately, it seems that I require the same lessons repeating on occasion.

Those of you with the signal good taste and excellent good fortune to have read my book, Three Men on a Pilgrimage (Link to the right, tens of copies sold nationwide, available online and from all good bookshops, the book already being described as ‘By Thomas Jones’) will be familiar with the chapter in which the eponymous characters encounter the shop assistant who’s constantly harassed by an old man to further reduce the price of the items he’s reducing at the end of the day, and the epiphany that the shop assistant had that the way the old man acted was exactly how he acted towards God.  I can reveal that this is based on a true story.  I was that shop assistant, during my incarceration in a supermarket, and the old man is based on a real person (or rather persons).  Having had the realisation, I attempted to act more kindly towards them.

Several years have passed, and I finished my sentence in retail and was released into a office role at an international company.  I work in the country headquarters, but we have numerous salesmen based around the country who travel about visiting customers.  One of my jobs is to send out brochures, catalogues and demonstration equipment, and as a result I am frequently contacted by the salesmen to send literature to customers, or send demonstration equipment to themselves.  Others phone because they’re on the road, and want me to check our database for a phone number or address for a customer.  They’ll frequently tell me that I’m a ‘star’ or ‘my best mate’.  On those rare occasions when they visit the head office, they will often pass through the part of the office I work in and won’t give me a glance, let alone the time of day.  Now don’t get me wrong, they’re all decent, pleasant people, and they're extremely busy, so they’re hardly to be blamed if it’s a bit ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for them.

Nonetheless, this used to annoy me, and I’ve complained to the people unfortunate enough to sit near me about the fact that I don’t seem to be their ‘best mate’ when they don’t want something.  Then, like a hammer to the brain, I realised that I’d just made exactly the same mistake as before.

“Hi God, my best mate!  Could you just...”

“Hi God, how are you?  Just a quick job for you…”

“Hi God, if it’s alright, I just need…  Thanks very much, you’re a star!”

“What?  Oh, God, it’s you.  No, I don’t need anything right now.  Why are you bothering me?”

I like to think that I’m reasonably intelligent, but that clearly doesn’t equate to being able to learn things easily.  I have resolved (if I remember to!) not to mind that they only tend to speak to me when they need something, and not to complain about it, or make sarcastic comments, either to them or my colleagues.  We’ll see how long I can keep that up for…

Everyone provides an example, some to follow, some to avoid.  Very often, the person whose example needs avoiding most is me.  I just need to be willing to learn my own lessons, as well as those of other people.

Reorganised Religion

“I’ve got no problem with religion or spirituality; it’s organised religion that I hate.”

This, or a close variation on the theme, is something I’ve heard or read frequently, and I can perfectly understand the sentiment.  After all, it’s religious institutions of various sorts and their hierarchies that have been responsible for inquisitions and persecutions, crusades, abuse scandals and cover-ups, politicking, back-biting, corruption, inefficiency, and the manipulation, exploitation and oppression of the poor, vulnerable and credulous.  It’s not a great record when viewed from that perspective.

However, it will no doubt not surprise you much to discover that although I can understand it, it is not a sentiment that I agree with.  If you are totally opposed to all religion or spirituality, then I will think that you are wrong, but I will accept that that is your position.  However, to me, saying that you’re in favour of religion, but not organised religion is the same as saying that you’re in favour of medicine, just not hospitals.  It’s like saying that you like singing but hate choirs, love music but loathe orchestras, think that children should get out more but oppose the Boy Scouts, or think that science is great but that scientists should do their science at home, in isolation from each other.  The possible analogies are almost endless.

After all, medicine has had its murdering doctors and sex attackers; the NHS is ponderous and inefficient, and plagued by cases of bullying, abuse and corruption that couldn’t have occurred in a series of unconnected clinics and practices.   Plenty of choir masters, scout leaders, and teachers have been found guilty of neglect and outright abuse, often of the most shocking kinds.  Even such benevolent organisations as Alcoholics Anonymous has seen cases of assault and abuse from ‘sponsors’ towards their charges and the last couple of weeks have shown that organised sport is riddled with bribery and corruption that couldn’t have occurred if people just played football in the local park and left it at that.  I used to be a member of a large battle re-enactment society, and the politicking and back-biting at every level from the top all the way down dismayed and discouraged me.

I know I’m at risk of drifting into hyperbole and straw man-ism here.  Some things of course are not improved by organisation; crime for example (although the criminals may disagree) and after all, an opposition to ‘organised religion’ isn’t necessarily an opposition to what Wesley referred to as ‘social religion’.  Surely Christians can get together and do their thing in a group without being ‘organised’?  But can they really?  After all, doing a thing socially means doing it within a society, and societies can only function through a set of mutually agreed rules.  In society in the widest and most general sense, these rules and conventions have developed and solidified over time, and various natural and artificial mechanisms are in place to enforce them.  In societies in the more specific sense, these rules must be set out and agreed and then enforced, to allow the society to perform the function for which it was gathered.

Who sets out these rules?  Who enforces them?  If fifty or a hundred Christians (or any other group for that matter) wish to gather together, they will have to hire a building (or at least arrange for a large marquee).  How is it paid for, and by whom?  Who’s in charge or arranging the place and time, and letting everyone know?  Who, if anyone will start or chair the proceedings, and how will they be chosen?  Who will make the tea afterwards, and who will clear up and put the chairs away?

An individual can buy food for the homeless, but it requires an organisation to run a soup kitchen.  An individual can teach a few illiterate children, but an organisation is needed to build a school.  I can sing to myself in the shower (although my wife prefers me not to), but it takes a whole congregation to really do justice to ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer’.

“Whenever two are gathered in my name, there I will be”, but three is a crowd.  Four is a society, and society must have some level of organisation.  As the society grows, organisation becomes hierarchy, with implicit levels of authority.  With authority and hierarchy and increasing size come inflexibility, inefficiency and the potential for abuse and manipulation.  People, being people, will always fall to politicking and scheming, with ambitious individuals seeking to rise to positions of importance and see their rivals fail.  Intra-societal politics and back-biting will lead to cliques and factions, maybe even schisms and splits, hurt, hatred and recrimination.

No group or society is free of this tendency, as I have found time after time throughout my life.  The problems with organised religion are merely the problems of organised anything else, and that's not organisation per se, but human nature.  If only we could have the former unaffected by the latter, I’m sure it would be fine.  It is the great shame of the Church that it is as bad as any other large organisation, if not worse, when it is the very one that ought to be better.  The very things that ought to, and often do, make the Church such a wonderful and powerful motivating and mobilising force for good in the world are the very things that make it such a potent and virulent force for evil when they are inevitably misused.  As with the vast majority of things about religion, organised or otherwise, that its opponents rail at, the problem isn’t religion; it’s people.  As Chesterton said, “The only truly unanswerable argument against Christianity is the Christians”.

This is undeniably true, but to quote John Wesley “You must find companions or make them. The Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.”

A soloist can be good, but they are nothing like a choir.  A lone musician can be wonderful, but they are always better when they are accompanied.  Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread, and if we are sometimes far less than we ought to be, when we are together and organised we are still greater than the sum of our parts.

Cats, Compassion and Comprehension

Last week, we were staying with my parents-in-law up in Scotland, which was mostly extremely pleasant.  However, they have a new cat, a very handsome ginger kitten by the name of Rory, who, halfway through dinner one evening came through the cat flap carrying a bird.  The bird did not approve of this situation because, you see, the bird was still very much alive.  Not that it would have approved of the situation any more if it were dead of course, in fact it might have thought it even worse, but nonetheless this was not a position in which the bird wished to find itself.

Dinner was therefore briefly abandoned while were attempted to corner Rory, and persuade him to release his innocent victim, which he was greatly enjoying letting go before instantly recapturing it, batting it around and generally going about the kind of things that the CIA and MI6 get into trouble for doing abroad.  Eventually we succeeded, via the expedient of wrapping him in a towel and dangling him upside down, a situation that he appreciated even less than the bird, and he made his disapprobation known via the medium of his claws.

We then caught the bird, which was fluttering around on the floor, and released it out into the garden, where it promptly hid behind a plant.  Rory sulked, and wouldn’t talk to us for several hours for spoiling his fun.  Good deed deeded.

However, later that day, I was pondering this, and I wondered whether either animal had any idea of what we were doing or why.  After all, cats hunt birds.  If Rory were wild, or even feral, that’s how he would survive.  Birds gets hunted.  If Rory were wild, or even feral, that’s how many of them would go, not to mention sparrow hawks, other cats, peregrines etc.

Did Rory understand that we were rescuing the bird because we wanted to preserve a life that didn’t need to be taken?  Did the bird feel any sort of gratitude, or did it think that it had merely escaped from a second predator that had seized it from the first?  If the bird had no conception that it had been deliberately rescued, and I see no reason to believe that it did, then why would it feel gratitude at all?  Such a thing as compassionate altruism towards a random member of another species is totally beyond the idea of a cat or bird (or, I suspect, the vast majority of animals) to comprehend.  They might form an emotional attachment to another creature (although only really in artificial circumstances such as pethood), but to rescue a strange bird from a cat would be totally outside their experience or understanding.

So here comes the inevitable theological comparison; a lot of people seem to believe that humans are capable of understanding their universe in totum, and that we should want to.  The latter I leave to the philosophers, but I’ll try and deal with the former.  Obviously there are things that we don’t know, and we know we don’t know them, but hold out hopes of understanding them given sufficient study.  But then there are the things that we don’t know that we don’t know.  (I actually tried to think of an example of this, before realising that I was being very stupid).

Some of these we will gradually become aware of, and they will come into the category of things that we merely don’t know yet, but others are completely beyond our ability to comprehend, things for which we have no point of reference, that we are not mentally or physically capable of experiencing or processing, and, of course, the greatest of these is God.

It has often been said that it is impossible to speak of God without instantly committing heresy, because there is no way to do so without reducing God into something that humans are capable of understanding, even if we don’t actually claim to understand Him.   There was a news story recently regarding using gendered language to refer to God as He and Him, but even referring to God as a ‘being’ is to make of God something less than He is.  Indeed, the only true thing that can be said about God is what He said to Moses.  “I am that which is”.  God is incomprehensible, and a great many (if not all) questions that we ask can only be met with an honest “we don’t know”, or the “God works in mysterious ways” which so many atheists find so frustrating, because they think that we ought to be able to know.  (And, to be fair, far too often it is used as an intellectually lazy cop-out.)

It might be asked then, why we bother with theology at all, but I believe that God wishes us to understand Him as much as it is possible for us to do so, and this was surely in part what the Incarnation was about.  “He became like us, that we might become like Him”.  I said in a previous post that I would consider any theology simple enough for me to understand (without wishing to do down my own intelligence; I’ll let others do that) far too simplistic to be anywhere near the truth, and I hold to that.  I do not support wilful ignorance, and I will not stop my own pondering on the nature of God, but I will never assume that because so many things are now unclear, that therefore they are false.  To adapt an archaeological maxim, an absence of understanding does not equate to an understanding of absence.



I leave a great many avenues of thought here unblogged, not least is the fact that although I saved the bird from Rory out of compassion and a desire not to see a creature die needlessly, I quite happily eat meat that I don't technically need to in order to survive.  Thoughts for another day perhaps...