Reflections of an ex-Christian at Easter

(Pic - "The Sermon on the Mount" from Ecce Homo. Elizabeth Ohlson Wallin, 1998, Photograph, 79" x 60")

My journey with Christianity has, it needs to be said, been a fairly robust one – on both sides, I suppose. I was born and raised in a fairly ordinary Christian home.  By this, I mean, that we went to a little parish Church within walking distance of our house.  We cooked a turkey at Christmas and had Christmas pudding aflame with brandy.  We had Easter Eggs at Easter and otherwise lived fairly ordinary, middle-of-the-road lives.  My parents were standard parents, with fairly standard ideas.  It was a happy home and the Church was a reasonable part of it.  We got baptised as infants and confirmed on reaching puberty.  If we got married, it was in the parish church. If you died, that is where you got buried from.  It was just the way you did things.

My siblings were much older than me and had gone their separate ways by the time my hormones started raging.  And when they did, they raged within the fairly safe confines of Church youth groups and choir practise – so generally, it was all relatively safe and sound.

I knew from an early age that I wanted to become a Priest.  I used to explain to my easily bewildered students, many years down the track, that it was primarily the gorgeous clothes the priest wore that had initially attracted me to the priesthood.  Of course, my motives all got dressed up in stuff the bishops wanted to hear, like calling and vocation and things like that – but actually, it was the glamour – the sheer outright drama of the thing, which did it.

I went to study theology at Rhodes University and Cambridge and Manchester.  I loved it all! I loved the academic rigour, the debate, the sheer, glorious liberation of being able to think things through and to discard the nonsense and hold on to what made rational sense.  I had some pretty amazing teachers – I think of the extraordinary Canon John Suggit.  I think of Bishop John Robinson, who was quite happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and still was able to maintain some kind of link with both the religion and the institution of the Church (and more amazingly, was allowed to do so!)

I worked for a while as a priest in Lesotho.  In reality, it was a convenient cover for political activity.  But it was also character-moulding in all sorts of ways.  If I close my eyes, I can still remember the day I was made Deacon in the Cathedral of St Mary and St James, Maseru.  There is a point in the service, where the Deacon is required to prostrate himself before the altar.  I remember the freezing cold of the stone floor, the smell of the incense mixed with wood smoke.  I remember the overwhelming drama of the thing and the sense of dignity and communion as the massive congregation welcomed me.

I was ordained Priest in Manchester Cathedral, after long negotiations with the ecclesiastical authorities, because of my refusal to swear any oath of allegiance to the Queen.  I remember the growl of the organ and the triumphant procession.  I remember the taste of the wine at the first Mass where I was the celebrant.

So when I call myself an ex-Christian, it is not an easy thing.  I have so much of the religion etched in my brain, in my consciousness and my unconsciousness.  The images, the sights the sounds, the smells – these are a significant part of me. And I entered into it, for a massive chunk of my life, fully and passionately.  Doubtless, I would still be there, if it were in any way possible.

When a new Archbishop of Canterbury is enthroned – something happens inside me.  It is difficult to explain – but I am still connected to it long enough to remember that I have since rejected it all.  When a Pope resigns and a new one is chosen, something in my inner being awakens and reacts.  When we approach Eastertide and my child asks me about the plagues in Egypt, I react with something much more than passing interest.

And it is not that I believe in any kind of objective God, really, it is not.  And it is not that I regret not believing in God.  It is something quite aside from that.  It is a strange and eerie connection with the rich past which has made me who I am.  It is impossible to pretend that it means nothing, or that it achieved nothing or that it is worth nothing.  And I would not want to do that.

In the end, we, as a same-sex family with two adopted children, decided to cut ties with the Church once and for all, for reasons which have nothing to do with belief.  It was simply impossible to continue in it as second-class citizens and for our children to be brought up in an environment where we were not fully and completely accepted. It became abundantly clear that it would be asking too much of an institution, riven with its own lies and contradictions, on the question of sexuality – (let alone theology!).

And so, I live my life without the Church any more.  There are some things I miss intensely and many more things I don’t.  I miss the drama and the ritual and the rumble of the organ.  I miss the hieratic language and the powerful, living poetry which accompanies it.  I don’t miss the bigotry and the anti-intellectual conservatism and the lies and the all-pervading, inescapable hypocrisy, which is allowed to grow and flourish and flower and seed, without any hinder or check.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that for all of it, my children – in their particular circumstance are better - much better - without it.  I am not sure I will be able to protect them from its worst excesses forever, but I am going to do my best to shield them, for as long as possible.  So they will have to be content with Easter eggs rather than the extraordinary story of hope rising from the darkness of the tomb.

The theological implications of the Higgs Boson

Now, it has certainly been a while since I did theology. But theology is very slow to change, so I doubt I have missed much in the intervening years. But the recent mind-blowing identification of the Higgs Boson got me thinking about theology again.
I can remember, as if it were yesterday, the burden of faith. Essentially, the burden of having to believe what you knew to be untrue. We sang our way through our teenage years – arms raised skyward – tears staining the cheek. We believed. We believed that Jesus shot off into heaven like a rocket. We believed that Virgins conceived. We believed that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. And we believed that water could become wine and a thousand other strange and peculiar things, which reason told us not to. It was a burden. It was heavy. It was entirely unnecessary.

I remember my first year at university, when I encountered, for the first time, the standard methods of Biblical Criticism, where the Bible is analysed primarily as literature. This was a method which was then 150 years old. I suddenly felt released. I was free at last, from all the nonsense. I was liberated from the twaddle and the rubbish. At last, I could behave like a normal, thinking human being and the Bible suddenly became a goldmine for intellectual rigour and exploration.

One of my teachers, the redoubtable Bishop John Robinson, of “Honest to God” fame, once said a really interesting thing in a lecture. He said, when the aeroplane does a really dodgy landing and it lurches and shudders as it hits the ground and hurtles towards the end of the runway – one’s instinct is to pray. “It is much better”, he said, “simply to trust the pilot”.

Besides the entirely unworkable philosophical “Proofs” of the existence of God, there was, frankly very little else around. So, the believer was forced to live a life of faith on the thin gruel of the concept of “coherence”. God is “that which keeps everything together”. A kind of supernatural glue to the universe. (Needless to say, that is a belief. One could just as well believe that the colour yellow keeps the universe together.) It gives one a nice warm feeling. Within Christianity, there is the concept of a loving God, gently guiding here, nurturing there and holding everything in the anthropomorphic palm of his hand. When things go wrong, it is somehow the will of God. All we, within our limited understanding of things, need to do – is have faith, and things will get better. Because nothing can happen that is outside the plan of God. (I give you holocausts. I offer rampant, entirely unnecessary disease, disaster, famine, war. These are all apparently within the plan of God in some way. We just don’t understand them properly). And the believer will soldier on, despite these things. Despite every evidence in the other direction – that there is no plan, unless we make it ourselves. The believer will soldier on.

And then the other day, an announcement was made about the identification of a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson – a particle, which until now has been merely theoretical and whose primary function appears to be that of coherence. The discovery is key to our understanding of how matter has mass, which then combines with gravity to give an object weight. The identification of the boson has been made with an extremely high level of certainty. The chances of a false positive reading are low. The experimentation, which took place at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern in Geneva, has been amongst the most expensive and extensive that has ever been undertaken. Cern’s atom collider has cost about $10 billion and has been creating these high energy collisions in order to investigate dark matter, antimatter and the origin of the universe. As I say, the chances of it being wrong, appear to be rather remote.

No wonder, then, that the Higgs boson has been popularly dubbed the “God particle” – a term which scientists regard as somewhat histrionic. No wonder, because here at last, we have the scientific basis for the way things in the universe keeps together. We can, at last, start to understand the physical coherence of all things.

I recalled the argument of the philosopher Anthony Flew, writing at what must the same time as Higgs was positing his boson:

"Let us begin with a parable. It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revolutionary article "Gods." Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Sceptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"" Anthony Flew, Reason and Responsibility, 1968

Now, I don’t need to say it, but I will. Science has effectively pulled the carpet from the under the feet of the people who insist that only a supernatural being can fulfil this function of coherence. Because it is now fairly strongly evident that this assertion – this belief, this position of faith, is untrue. They may want to continue with the belief. They may want to say it is a matter of faith. But they can no longer say that it is a kind of cloaked “proof” of the existence of such a being – because we now have much more viable, much more believable evidence, in the opposite direction.

There is a real opportunity here, for the Church, the Mosque, the Synagogue and the Temple. The opportunity is for them to embrace the science and rejoice in this phenomenal discovery with the rest of us. Another frontier of knowledge has been breached. Another fortress of knowledge has been scaled. The inevitable march of science will continue. There will be more of the same. What will religious institutions do about these advances? My hunch is, probably nothing.
Whereas Galileo was shunned and Newton regarded with extreme suspicion, they were, very soon, proved to be right. Nothing much changed. (I lie – everything changed!) But lightning didn’t fall from the sky. The end of the world didn’t happen. It just all became part of truth. And so, undoubtedly it will be with the Higgs boson. Changes caused through our knowledge of it will be considerable. The world of our children and theirs will probably be unrecognisable to us, because of it. Surely institutions which take upon themselves the mantel of truth need to come to terms with it in some way?

But if your mind is closed and your senses dulled and your brain addled, you will probably ignore it. You will probably return to your sanctuary to worship your irrelevant and dangerous pretender to truth. Because truth is hard to come by and costs more than most religions are willing to give. It requires a certain humility and a mind that will not stop searching. Ever.