I once thought science could give the answer to every question. As I learned more, I found that, for every question answered, two more were generated; so the likelihood of everything being knowable shrank. Later, I recognised that the strength of the scientific method is that it never claims to know absolute truth, but “our current best model”. Scientists are sometimes derided for changing their minds, but that’s how we learn. Clinging stubbornly to opinions that are contradicted by facts isn’t faith, but foolishness. Fay Rowland
Last week I asked you to think about the way a wedding is constructed and drew comparisons with our weekly services; how they are carefully constructed to contain the elements we need to … well, to what, exactly?
We considered the elements of a wedding in preparation; its dressing up and anticipation, its jouney and, on arrival, our re-alignment within a community network, and then the transition over the threshold into a different way of being, another form of truthfulness…
and I wondered if that transition is really very important to us … I think it is.
We need to experience the transition because what we attend to when we attend to the sacred can be so important it can even be overwhelming and therefore we must approach it carefully.
We must approach it with reverence.
We heard the great Abraham Heshel description (in The Vocation of the Cantor) of the synagogue as the place where we can learn the way of silence, of reverence, where we can affirm the validity of these components of a good life which our contemporary culture wants to deny, components like contrition: the capacity to admit that we are not perfect, and to ask for forgivness, to discover that we are acceptable in the words of the great Paul Tillich.
I say often that this is a space to practice the skills of the heart, and isnt this one of the most difficult; to cast ourselves on the mercy of something greater than we are; to trust that we are acceptable – even as flawed as we know ourselves to be?
One of the greatest lies within which we live is the lie of self-hate; we are surrounded on every side by images of idealised bodies, idealised selves, ideal aspirations in a kind of internalised war which we are expected to fight. And it takes immense strength to reject these images, to reject these lies, to say “get thee behind me…”
Have you ever realised that it is only humans who become self conscious, that it is only us who can objectify ourselves? Only we who can see ourselves as objects. Only we who project an external self to turn the gaze back on ourselves and assume the power of judgement … only we who become ‘self conscious’… but this is to digress, I’ll pick up on the power and the shadow of self consciousness when we consider the Biblical Fall in a few weeks, but the point that I’d rather make right now is to conclude the thought that I began last week – if it is true that we are here for something other than the narratives of the mainstream – and I think it is, then I think we should ask what then are we here to listen to – to wait on…
St Augustine asked “What is it that I say I love when I say that I love God?” Augustine: Confessions
But we should be prepared to wait in ambbiguity, to wait within the question…
We are consumed in a narrative that wants above all clarity. Consider Fay Rowland’s testimony as a mathematician and scientist; the dawning revelation that the pragmatic physicalist method produces more uncertainty not less. But the same model demands, insists on certainty and the continuous affirmation of the duality of true and its opposite false.
And in the search for an unambiguous clarity the most important test it fails, is the necessary goal of being able to hold two truths at once.
When Jesus was asked in bad faith by spies trying to catch him out, to trick him into an act of treason within the Roman state where Caesar was a God and where Jews were beholden to the law that you shall have no other God but Jahweh, when Jesus was asked ‘Shall we pay our taxes to the Romans?’ and Jesus answered ‘Give to Ceasar what is Caesar’s and give to God what is God’s.’ His reply is perhaps the first time this dichotomy is described – that there can be more than one claim of reality which can be seen to be true. There are indeed things which are of this world as there are things which are not.
The psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist writes in his books about the structure of the human brain and its hidden capacity to work in a dual way; possesed of a bicameral brain we seek truth with a fact insisting mind that seeks to grasp ‘hard facts’, but we also know with a view less focussed on apprehending than it is on wondering, maintaining sense softly in ways that reach beyond surface facts.
When I ‘ve spoken of our careful process of constructing a context in which we might promote a sense of the numinous it isn’t because I want to be holier than thou or create a humourless and self-important temple which has more in common with a tomb than a celebration, it’s because I think this work is important and requires and deserves our best shot.
The practice of the heart is to find equilibrium, to balance and counter balance, to find for example the gift of self-consiousness, which grants us the power to assess our selves critically within our context, with freedom from egotism which allows us to dwell easily within the love of God
Gustav Mahler said that ‘tradition is not the preservation of Ashes but the celebration of fire’ and I think that our tradition is uniquely placed to celebrate within the context of contemporary culture the art and way of the uncertain, the undecided, the humility of understanding that more than one thing can be true at a time, that truth may sometimes be beyond our grasp yes, but within our heart nonetheless.
Blessing:
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Now may this blessing be with you through all the returning seasons
May faith sustain you and hope surround you and love step gently with you as you walk onward today and always…
A Space of possibility 