This service was given on June 28th 2020 during lockdown restrictions for Covid19:

Today we heard a track from I’m New Here by Gil Scott Heron – “…this the closest thing I have to a voice of reason…”
Gil Scott Heron was one of the heroes of my youth, a genuine cross-over artist who introduced punks to jazz and white boys like me to the black power movement and the ideas of resistance that were evident in his great album Moving Target. Social change, he told us, could not be domesticated and tamed. But he was, above all, a great musician and poet, his music is told and his passionate lyrics of commitment are also tender and compassionate. He influenced punk and new wave in the seventies and eighties and then rare groove in the 90s. In one interview I saw Gil Scott Heron give he said that in music stores he could never find his albums; they were not filed in Jazz or blues or Soul but in ‘Miscellaneous and Other’, and he’d decided he liked that designation better, ‘miscellaneous and other’ suited him fine. Ever since hearing that interview I’ve tried to appropriate that sentiment, I’ve appropriated ‘Miscellaneous and Other’ as a religious category – it suits me ok too.

Scott Heron was pursued by demons from his childhood and he was arrested for possession of Crack cocaine but unlike any of his white peers – any white celebrity would have been bailed or fined – but unlike them, Heron was repeatedly imprisoned. After his release in 2007 he didn’t live long. He produced one album ‘I’m New Here’ before he died iin 2011, and I love that refrain from the title song:
‘No matter how far wrong you ve gone, you can always turn around. Turn around turn around turn around – and you will come full circle, and be new here again.’

Some weeks ago I said that there was a different process to both the normative religious ways of being. Usually we see either the prophetic voice that wants to promote revolutionary reform or the priestly voice that tries to develop the advances made by the prophetic change (encouraging devotion through praise and sorrow). The Maieutic, is another way, found in Greek philosophy it is ‘the way of the midwife’, which draws out the truth from the seeker of wisdom – instead of dispensing knowledge from the teacher, the assumed holder of knowledge. The Maieutic way informs person centred therapy as well as philosophy – therapists understand that they don’t, can’t instruct the patient on how to resolve their problems – but instead understands that the patient carries the source of their own self-healing within them; then the therapist’s job is maieutic, they help the patient discover their own inner wisdom. The philosopher Socrates also understood this and his way of teaching [described by Plato as a convivium – ‘with liveliness’] was to acknowledge that the student carries within them the answer to their own question, the job of the teacher is then to help the student discover their own answer.

In the Christian scritures the account of St. Luke draws together sources to make special claims about its protagonist Jesus: it draws in the evidence of (at least) two sources to add to the evidence provided by Mark that Jesus was a special kind of person, among these sources are the prophetic religious style of Isaiah and the priestly style of the Psalmist and these sources are blended in Luke: the prophetic Jesus, who confronts the religious order of the day, and the priestley Jesus who worships God and consoles God’s people. But Luke also introduces a further characteristic to the narrative which is less remarkable but nevertheless completely obvious; it’s hidden in plain sight: Jesus style of ministry: of course it is often noted that he teaches in parables; complex tales with ambiguous meanings, but He also walks. Completely pedestrian, He is a saunterer, a rambler.

Some religious scholars have said that this is to accomplish a political action: to unite the two halves of a divided Holy land, Judea and Israel, but I think there is another reason, in walking the land, the scriptural metaphor that begins in Moses’ meeting with God and leading of the people of Israel into the wilderness is modelled again. Again the animating force of God is shown to be humanly evident on foot; in contact with nature and interdependence with it, God is constantly in motion, unfolding at walking pace, evolving, emerging: “I am that which I am becoming” says God in answer to Moses request for God’s real name.

In the gospel of Mark we are introduced to the ministry of Jesus through John the Baptist who, we are told, preached repentance: turning your life around. The word repentance is translated from the Greek word Metanoia, a transliteration of the Greek μετάνοια, which means ‘beyond-thought’ : it is taken to mean ‘to change your mind’, and it is usually translated as repent for reasons which I think are theologogical; it suited interpreters to follow this meaning of a turning away from sin, but what if we stay for a second with the concept ‘beyond thought’ – because I think its important, (also for theological reasons although I’m going to try to remain open and transparent about mine…)

From everything that I can see of the current debates in philosphy and theology there could be a problem with believing that only one way of knowing — ‘knowing that‘, or ‘propositional knowing’ — is superior to others, rather than interdependent with other ways of knowing.
If it is right to suggest that our current crisis is a meta-physical crisis, a crisis beyond the physical, perhaps the solution to such a crisis is ‘beyond thought’. Rationalising or hyper-rationalising is really good at producing positions (and oppositions), but these positions are usually unsatisfactory at best and sadly counterproductive at worst.

The Maiuetic response to our metaphysical problem is to recognise that we already have the answer to the deepest problem before us – we only have to find the way to real-ise, to bring out, the answer.

I’m wondering if it could be that the seed of the answer to the problem, the seed which we carry within us, the seed which in Isaac Pennington’s great prayer ‘God plants in us, and owns and knows and loves…’ is the catalyst that sets us in motion on a journey to discover the truth. In other words I wonder if the answer and not the problem comes first in the order of knowing. Well this would be to turn things around for sure, would be beyond thought, no doubt.

The classic story narrative is the story of the quest. The hero’s journey is the journey of discovery. It begins with a question (hence quest); and is completed with the answer. OK but what if the answer is what comes first, if the answer deep within us is the seed of the unrest, the discomfort which sets the person out of their comfort zone on a journey to give birth to what is within them.

Nora Bateson has argued, that data changes as it moves across different contexts, and trying to analyse it outside of its context takes the life out of it. Acknowledging this possibility forces us to be humble. We don’t know everything perhaps…

If we want to reckon with, understand and allow society to be transformed by what’s happening during the present pandemic crisis in a way that moves us to another stage of development rather than to all out war, we need metanoia – to move beyond thought.

What does this actually look like? None of us know yet– and so we’ll have to move, to journey, to walk.

The labyrinth that we began to utilise at Mill Hill is based on a design called in Welsh Caer d’roya ‘the city of turns’, a labyrinth is a map of the world in that it allows the answer to draw the questioner into the heart of itself before finding stillness in the great question and turning again, re turning, back into the world of wonder and woe, returning to discover our truest selves.