WINDOWS ON WINTER

Adam Gopnik is a true romantic. His 50th anniversary Massey Lectures, Winter: Five Windows On The Season, magnificently exhibits this quality. The title of each window begins with the letter R – Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter, Remembering Winter. The series was broadcast The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s  Radio One and published simultaneously by House of Anansi Press in November 2011. It made for good listening; and at $22.95 it’s a good buy.

The repetition in chapter titles sounds almost too cute, though alliteration is  characteristic of English romantic poetry. Each chapter is filled with ample content drawn from Gopnik’s vast knowledge of literature, music, art, religious traditions, sport and personal experience of Canadian winters he knew in his and my home town of Montreal, Canada. Twenty-two pages of the bibliography and three pages of permissions at the end of the book show how much research went into the preparation of these lectures.

The romantic attitude to winter came as one of the benefits of the Industrial Age in Britain and Northern Europe. Prior to that winter was to be endured for people not wealthy enough flee to a warmer climate. Central heating developed during Britain’s Industrial Age made greater enjoyment of the season possible. It became easier to go inside and look at winter from the windows of a more comfortable home. I remember doing that in my boyhood home near Montreal where winters were sometimes quite severe.

Vivaldi’s Winter from his opus Four Seasons and Samuel Johnson’s poem, “The Winter’s Walk,” voiced a bitterly negative view in the mid-eighteenth century. Just two decades later in 1785, William Cowper’s, “The Winter Evening,” presented a totally inverted view. Quickly followed by William Wordsworth, Hans Christian Anderson, composer Franz Schubert, poet Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, and artist Caspar David Frederic brought the romantic attitude to full flower.  After the defeat of Napoleon, not by Russian armies but the Russian winter, Pytor Vyazemsky and Alexander Pushkin had their opportunity to join the chorus that made winter “invigorating – even joyful – and always sexy.”

Reality set in when Gopnik turned to Radical Winter in his second lecture. The still elusive search for the northwest passage and the race for the north and the south poles told the truth about the extent of human endurance. Franklin’s bitter defeat by the ice and the many futile searches for his stricken expedition made for great adventure and great suffering. “They went in search of absolute winter – and got it, good and hard.”

A not always hidden imperialism clouded their vision perhaps more than the perpetual winter they discovered. In his return from apparently reaching the north pole, Robert Peary stole the right to claim success from fellow American Frederick Cook who got may have got there first. Instead of acting like a hero, Peary “did everything that made him look like a schmuck…. In one of the worst acts of cultural vandalism in the not-very-auspicious record, Peary, in 1894, carted away the three (scared) meteorites (of the Greenland Inuit) – and sold them to the Museum of Natural History in New York for forty thousand dollars.” One of the meteorites weighed one hundred tons. The Inuit had used the meteorites for centuries as their sole source of technology to eke out a survival existence by skinning walrus and whales for food, clothing and transport.

Gopnik’s third lecture/chapter on Recuperative Winter bears the sub-title of The Season in Spirit. Here he traces the origin, development and ultimate return to the roots of the annual festival of the winter solstice. Known by various names throughout history, it is best recognized in Western Christianity as Christmas. It did not start there, but was taken over from the Roman, Celtic, Norse and Jewish cultures. Many of the non-religious features of our modern celebrations come from non-Christian sources. Today our religious celebrations are hidden by commercial interest in the season that began, Gopnik claims, with Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol and Thomas Nast’s Santa Claus and ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.

Gopnik begins this chapter quoting Christina Rossetti’s famous carol of the Victorian era, In the bleak midewinter, frosty wind made moan.” In the end he finds our modern Christmas anything but recuperative. “One thing we can say for certain: the symbolism of the modern, ambivalent, anxiety-ridden, double-faced Christmas is winter symbolism. We need warmth in order to enter the cold and at Christmas we need the cold in order to assert the warmth, need the imagery of the bleak midwinter in order to invoke the star above the stable.” It’s a persuasive thesis and antithesis. So far, we have not yet found an adequate synthesis.

Sport dominates the fourth window on winter, but what Gopnik sees most is his beloved game of hockey. He feels that the most Canadian of movie or television documentaries could be made of the unique way three amateur teams in Montreal at the turn of the 20^th century created the game he loves so well. Though the game had been invented elsewhere, they were the first to play by defined rules – drawn from rugby, no less, later augmented by rules from other sports.

Competition and even conflict existed between the three dominant cultures of Montreal at the time. These were the elite English minority centred on McGill University at the foot of Mount Royal, the French in their majority status throughout the eastern part of the city, and the poor Irish Catholics from the Point St. Charles area near the St. Lawrence Rivver. Hockey gave the three a creative outlet that made the success of the new sport possible. Though hockey is not the only or the oldest winter sport, Gopnik believes that the present, professional and American-dominated National Hockey League, detracts greatly from the beauty of his favourite sport.

Winter is having a hard time getting here to southern Ontario this year. Overnight on December 30-31 we lost scarce snow cover on the ground for the third time. That’s not at all like the winters that I and Adam Gopnik remember in Montreal in our youth. In his final chapter, Gopnik writes about Remembering Winter because it is changing. We remember it in two ways: “We use it as a blank slate … where everything is scrubbed away.” And we remember it after it is over. “We set our winter clocks by the storms we’ve known.”

Those are happy memories for both Adam and me.

A WINDOW ON CHRISTMAS

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone,

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,

In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

                                                                  

To Adam Gopnik, the carol that best expresses what the festival is all about is Christina Rossetti’s poem In the bleak mid-winter. Rossetti wrote the poem in 1872 at the request of Scribner’s Monthly for a Christmas poem. It became a carol when it appeared in The English Hymnal in 1906 set to music Gustav Holst.

We know who Rossetti and Holst are, but who is Adam Gopnik? He is an American author, born in Philadelphia, PA, educated in Montreal, Canada, the son of professors at McGill University. He now lives in New York with his wife, Martha Parker, and two children, Luke and Olivia. His essays are most frequently published in The New Yorker. Claiming to be a secular Jew, he is very knowledgeable about religious traditions and cultural history in general. His essays frequently reveal that he is also an expert on fine art.

Gopnik’s most recent publication is the simultaneously printed edition of 50^th anniversary of The Massey Lectures, broadcast over the CBC radio network in November 2011. Entitled Winter: Five Windows on the Season, the book presents a highly readable overview of the literary, religious and cultural character of what most Canadians regard as an inevitable, if not wholly enjoyable experience. Just how extensive his research was for this series of lectures is dramatically expressed in the 32-page bibliography at the end of the book.

Of greatest interest to me is his third lecture/chapter on Christmas. He gave it the composite title of Recuperative Winter:The Season in Spirit. He believes that the Christmas holiday is “a holiday that is eclectic, banged together, yet remains the central winter ritual, the central mystery, the central rite of our year end celebration.” It has always been so since the ancient Romans and later Jews began to celebrate this festival of lights in the Saturnalia and Hanukkah respectively, centuries before the Christian scriptures were written and their liturgies celebrated the birth of Jesus.

It is not happenstance that our modern Christmas, Gopnik writes, is more northern and wintry as it has evolved since Victorian times. It is here in the northern hemisphere that we experience the solstice most notably. Darkness sets in in late afternoon and snow is a much anticipated part of the season.

The material and the spiritual, the religious and the secular, became inextricably intertwined during the Industrial Age of the mid-19^th century. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Britain and Thomas Nast’s Santa Claus in the United States epitomize the transformation of Christmas into the supreme expression of materialism wrapped up in religious charity we know it as today.

Or is it really the very opposite: a mysterious religious festival wrapped in the tissue and ribbon of excessive materialism? “More abundance means more doubt,” he writes. “A festival of pagan lights becomes a festival of progress and poverty – and ends as a festival of overabundance and anxiety.”

Ambivalence has always been inherent in Christmas as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and celebrated in the liturgies of the Church since the 4^th century C.E. Check out the ambivalence in  the biblical narratives themselves. Numerous English versions are available online. Consider some of these details:

The Holy Family featured in so much Christian art had to travel on foot the torturous distance from Nazareth in Galilee to Bethlehem in Judea. Mary was in the final stages of her pregnancy. There was no room for them in the inn at Bethlehem when they finally arrived. A host of angels praised the birth of the Saviour in a stable. Their song of glory to God and peace to the world symbolized that this was a divine and spiritual event. The Magi following a star from the east – perhaps even from as far as China – to present the world’s most expensive gifts to the Christ Child. Then the Family was forced to flee to Egypt to escape the brutality of Herod’s massacre.

Gopnik is not critical of our contemporary Christmas celebrations. What he has done is give us a reality check of how we really do celebrate this season. Is it with mixed motives or hypocrisy? Could it be both?

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CELEBRATING THE NATIVITY

The original meaning of the word “Christmas” was the Mass celebrating the birth of Christ. From the church's point of view, a better word to express the meaning of the event we are now preparing to celebrate is “The Nativity.” Or perhaps even more simply, “The Birth of Jesus.”

Now greatly encumbered with creedal and cultural overlays, it is difficult to discover the historical event and its true meaning. A close study of the two narratives of the birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke show how the early Church developed those stories. They built  their stories on the Hebrew scriptures read each week in their synagogues where the first Christians worshiped. From the perspective of those early Jewish Christians, Jesus was the Messiah, the fulfilment of their scriptures.

A quick search on the Internet will reveal how contentious and confusing is the debate about the historicity of the person, Jesus of Nazareth, let alone his birth as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Even the most reputable scholars disagree on how factual each narrative is. For example, N.T. Wright, former Bishop of Durham, in the Church of England, and John Shelby Spong, retired Bishop of New Jersey, in the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. are at opposite poles on the issue.

It is noteworthy that most of the hymns and carols sung in celebrating the Nativity take a simple, literalist approach in relating the story. Among the best examples in the traditional carols Silent Night, Holy Night and The First Nowell. Indeed, many of the traditional carols are paraphrases of the birth stories.

A relatively recent outburst of hymnody in the latter half of the 20^th century has brought many new hymns to the attention of worshiping congregations. Voices United, a hymn collection published by The United Church of Canada in 1996, includes a number of late 20^th century hymns not yet thought of in the same category as traditional Christmas carols.

Some of these new hymns depart from the usual repetition of the biblical stories. Brian Wren’s Oh, How Joyfully, set to an 18^th century Sicilian melody, and Frederic Kaan’s Down to Earth, as a Dove, to a tune from the 16^th century, are two examples that express the true meaning of the nativity rather than its literal details. A third instance is Marian Collibole’s Ring a Bell for Peace, which marks the promises of our Advent liturgies – peace, joy, hope, faith – as fulfilled by the birth of Jesus.

The earliest religious song of Christmas still used today is the familiar Of the Father’s Love Begotten, sung to a 12^th century plainsong melody. Another Latin antiphon from the 9^th century O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, was translated by John Mason Neale, an Anglo-Catholic clergyman of the mid-Victorian era. Neale also translated more than sixty other hymns from the Latin and Orthodox traditions.

Today, we Christians complain that the religious celebration has been overtaken and almost obliterated by the relentless advance of secularism. Historical analysis shows that the facts should be reversed. The Christian Church captured and reversed what was originally a Roman fertility festival of renewal of life in the natural world celebrated at the winter solstice. 

In the simultaneously published edition of the Massey Lectures for 2011, entitled Winter, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in November, Adam Gopnik presents pentetrating analysis of Christmas celebrations as primarily secular. Gopnik summarized his analysis with the briefest of conclusions: Our modern Christmas celebrations date from the Victorian romantic era of English and American family and economic life. Its chief features are not the Nativity of Jesus, but Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol and cartoonist Thomas Nast's Santa Claus. Christmas today he says is “a winter holiday meant for kids.”

A review of Gopnik’s study will be the subject of our next blog entry.

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IS CHRISTMAS OUTDATED?

Now, there’s an impertinent question. But realistically, with commercialism  now dominant in our cultural environment, that has to be asked of our Christian Advent and Christmas celebrations and worship.

Here’s what commercial preparations for Christmas are like this year where I live: Sears’ Wish Book catalogue arrived in July. Christmas decorations went up soon as Hallowe’en was over. Advertising and sales started at the same time. Black Friday madness spread to Canada the day after American Thanksgiving trying to keep Canadians at home for their Christmas shopping. And so on … and on … and on….

It isn’t as simple to fix as suggested by the once popular slogan, “Put Christ Back into Christmas.” Many who attend our Christmas Eve service doubt the whole story, but cannot bring themselves to admit it. Do their childhood  memories still haunt them?

Nor are the traditional “Christmas Pageants” sufficient to dispell the ghosts of Christmases past. Everyone expects the same drill telling the now familiar composite story: The Babe born in a manger in Bethlehem while angels sang overhead. Shepherds hastening from their pastures and three wise men arriving from the east carrying symbolic gifts.

Or was it that way? The narratives in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels cannot be pushed together without doing violence to both.

Of course, biblical scholars have long raised serious doubts about the whole legend of the Nativity. It is story but not history, they say. Two of the four Gospels, Mark and John, make no mention of it. In one of his letters written a decade or more before the earliest Gospel of Mark was composed, the Apostle Paul didn’t say anything except that Jesus “was born of woman” and “born under the law.” Paul knew Jesus’ brother, James, but said nothing more about his parents. He seems to have assumed that the birth was perfectly natural for any human being then or now.

Progressive views have tried to turn the Christmas story from doctrine to reality. Geza Vermes has written one of the best studies of the event in his The Nativity: History and Legend. (London, Penguin 2006). He presents the “virgin” birth as a totally human event in the life of the Mary. He suggests that she may have been a child bride who had not yet begun her menstrual cycles. So she was still a virgin in terms of Judaism of that day.

John Shelby Spong states unequivocally in his latest book, Re-Claiming The Bible In A Non-Religious World (HarperCollins and HarperOne, 2011): “While no reputable scholar today thinks of these stories as literal history, we do find some historical links in the stories that we can use for dating purposes.” He cites King Herod’s death as recorded in 4 BCE, so Jesus must have been born before that for his birth to have been historical. Contrary to his usual counsel against literalism, is that his attempt to make it history? He doesn’t mention that it was Saint Dionysius the Small who established the year 1 as Anno Domini. That wasn’t until 625 AD/CE.

For several hundred years after the Christian faith tradition began its spread from Palestine to Rome and beyond, the Church did not mark Christmas at all. It wasn’t an important feast on the Christian calendar. Now, like any other religious holiday in the present secular and multicultural age, it is becoming less and less important for most people.

The local congregation where I worship is waiting to see if the traditional three Christmas Eve service will be well attended this year. An online discussion about the beginning of Advent raised serious concerns about the discouraging downer of the scriptures read during the four Sundays of Advent before Christmas.

The question for all Christian churches is whether we change our liturgical celebrations of Advent and Christmas to match the advances of modern biblical scholarship or match the massive impact of commercialism.

And yet ….. A colleague writing the back page article in The United Church Observer for December 2011 has told us to “stop looking for theological loopholes and simply rejoice in the mind-exploding miracle of the birth of God in the very human child of Bethlehem.”

Isn’t that what Christmas is about?

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A BOOK WORTH HAVING

John Shelby Spong’s latest work Re-Claiming The Bible For A Non-Religious World, (HarperOne 2011) is an important book. It began as a series of lectures at a summer institute in South Carolina in 2006, developed into an online series of newsletters, and has now reached its published form. His intent is to give those interested in the Christian scriptures - and those dismissing it as nonsense – a clear sense of nature of the Bible as it is known to scholars who have spent their lives studying it in minute detail. In the preface, he writes, “… it will give those who engage it the sense of having completed a major university course on the Bible.”

A fellow of the Jesus Seminar, Spong adopts what can be defined as a consensus of current progressive biblical scholarship. Little of what he writes will be new to those who have maintained an active reading of current literature about how the Bible came into existence. Little will please those who cling desperately to the conservative, literal approach to scripture. He discounts the religious value of some of the less often read books of the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Some of never appear in lectionaries designed for reading and preaching in worship of congregations.

Spong holds to what is now the traditional view, already some one hundred and fifty years old, of the so-called “five books of Moses” (the Hebrew Torah).  On the other hand, he breaks with the well-known theory of a document called Q, thought by many scholars to have been the common source shared by the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The Apostle Paul, he believes, gave not only one of the first but also the most influential interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. At the same time, he does not regard the stories of Jesus’ birth or resurrection as believable in this day and age.  His alternate views on these narratives is worthy of serious consideration.

A particularly significant part of the book presents the first three gospels as set in the context of synagogue worship for a full year. Mark’s presentation of the Jesus story runs from from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, a period of about six and a half months. Matthew and Luke carry the cycle forward for the remaining five and a half months to the next Rosh Hashanah.

Possibly the most valuable part of this 400-plus page work of fifty-nine chapters in twelve parts is the religious and cultural background Spong cites for each book in the Bible. He does not believe that the Bible is in any sense the “Word of God.” He frankly states that “it is a tribal story, as this book will reveal – a pre-modern story, an ever changing and ever-growing story. It came into existence, as every other book does, out of the experience of human beings seeking to make sense out of the life they are living and the things they are experiencing.”

Without falling into the trap of supercessionism, Spong’s approach to the New Testament locates many of the stories and interpretations therein as the fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures.  He ends his final chapter reassuring his readers that, despite what some will see as his extreme views, he still believes that God was in Jesus and therefore remains for him, Christ.

The publisher, HarperCollins (HarperOne, in Canada) anticipates a wide readership, particularly in small study groups found in many progressive churches. It is priced accordingly. Anyone looking for a suitable Christmas or Hanukkah gift for a spiritually searching friend or family member could find nothing better than this.

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SACRED MEMORIES

In Canada and throughout the Commonwealth, Remembrance Day falls on November 11th each year. It marks the end of hostilities in the First and Second World Wars (1914-18 and 1939-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953). In the USA on the same date, Veterans Day is also celebrated with appropriate ceremonies. It is day of sacred memories for the dwindling few service men and women remaining from the Great Wars of the 20^th century.

“Sacred?” Is that the right term for terrible conflicts in which so many died. Not just those who served in armies, navies and air forces, but even millions more civilians too.

A book review in the Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine cites the memories of an American veteran of the Viet Nam War as having given him “the profound belief that combat is a potentially sacred experience.” That experience incorporates four components of a mystical event: premature awareness of one’s own mortality, total focus on the present moment, valuing the lives of others more than one’s own, and feeling part of a larger community.

By no means did every veteran have such an experience. Nor is the experience limited to veterans alone. Families and descendants also shared something similar. As early as ten years of age I was aware that my paternal grandmother and my father’s sisters felt that way about Remembrance Day. When the Vimy Ridge Memorial was dedicated in 1936, my aunts travelled to France to attend the ceremony. One of my father’s elder brother’s had died in the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915. His name is forever sculpted on the Vimy Ridge memorial along with the names of thousands who has no known grave.

Another brother had been taken prisoner in the same battle at Ypres. Though he lived into his seventies, his three and a half years in a German prison camp ruined the rest of his life. Eligible for military service, my father was exempted because he was the only remaining male able to support his parents in their old age. So too was my future father-in-law.

I was too young to serve in the military in World War II. My older brother was wounded in the Normandy campaign in 1944. Several of my classmates did serve, however, and the chap who sat behind me in class died in the Battle of the Bulge in France while serving in the US Army. Since then I have marked Remembrance Day in the churches where I was pastor. Those services were usually held on the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day. On November 11^th there is a community ceremony at the cenotaphs in each community as well as at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

My wife frequently reminds me that civilians too also served in our nation’s war effort on the home front. During high school, she spent three summer vacations working in various roles. For two summers she was a civil servant, the third she worked as a farm labourer in the Ontario Farm Service program. Those same summers I too was a farm labourer.

While I may quibble with these being “sacred memories,” I do feel that our work was as essential to the war effort as on the battle front.

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"KARMA IS NOT AN EQUATION"

That title has been plagiarized from the October 8^th edition of the Toronto Star. It headed a column on ethics written by a friend and colleague of mine, Ken Gallinger. Most likely, the headline had been written by someone else, as is the normal practice in the newspaper business.

Be that as it may, my friend’s advice was not to equate good behaviour with

blessings while also believing that bad behavior is inevitably punished. “It’s

obviously not true,” he wrote, “that people who do good always get good. But it

is true that people who are generous, kind, faithful in their relationships –

people who love, keep promises, work hard – tend to be happier, more peaceful

and more hopeful.

“They have friendships that last. They deal with adversity with more equanimity.

 They laugh in the daylight and sleep soundly at night. They do, overall, have more
 fulfilling lives ... even when the math doesn’t work out as precisely as we might
 wish.”

Was my friend being overly optimistic? Certainly more so than I would have been. Or was he contradicting himself?
His comments reminded of another article by a well-known Canadian humourist,

Scott Feschuk, in a recent issue of Maclean’s Magazine. He made the sly comment
that “these are prosperous times for pessimists.” Feschuk was writing about the
current global economic malaise and the threat of a double dip recession. For most
people this isn’t funny at all.

By sheer coincidence on this same day, the Nobel prize for economics was awarded to two Americans, Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims. Working separately in the 1970s and 1980s, they developed methods for answering questions such as how economic growth and inflation are affected by a temporary mandated increase in the interest rate or a tax cut. By even greater coincidence, all this happened on our Canadian Thanksgiving Day.

Was it coincidence, or what our scriptures keep reminding us: a touch of God’s

almighty hand in the history of our times?

That is a metaphorical expression, a poetic and theological way of saying what the Bible takes for granted. God's almighty hand - aka Providence - is in all human affairs. Theologians struggle to find new ways of describing the same religious experience in terms of an expanded view of human consciousness without a literalist approach to biblical metaphors of that Transcendent Reality we call God. 

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Theophanies – Then and Now.

One of Cuyler Black’s biblical cartoons, (www.inheritthemarth.com) shows Moses coming down the mountain carrying the Ten Commandment stones and grumbling to himself. “Kill joy! Out of the cloud overhead comes the Voice, “I heard that!” That’s a delightful turn of phrase about the meaning of a theophany.

 Part of the title of this note could be reversed to now and then. That’s how some even very religious people think of theophanies. It is not just occasional, but rare and bestowed on very few individuals as a special gift. That is not what the dictionary definition states. A theophany is defined as the appearance of a god to a human. Note the singular. Usually a theophany is an individual religious experience a manifestation of that spiritual reality we call “God.”

 Just how theophanies take place is quite unknown. The Bible is full of them. In particular prophets have them and so become spokespersons for God. Because of the male bias of the authors of the writings we have collected in what we call our Scriptures, we have come to think of particular men like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jesus and Paul as having such experiences. That is a pity, because there is no reason why women and other men may also have theophanies. Deborah (Joshua 5), Mary, the mother of Jesus, (Luke 1:26-56); Anna (Luke 2:36-38), Lydia (Acts 16:14), Priscilla (Acts 18:1, 26) are women of the Bible known to have had similar experiences.

 Are we then to presume that every person who claims to have had a spiritual experiences of this kind have had a theophany. That would be foolish. It is not the experience per se that is evidence of a theophany, but the spiritual fruits that results from it that determines its validity.

 I recall attending an evangelistic revival in a large stadium that was normally used for football games. The preacher held forth for nearly an hour, then called for people who felt so moved to come forward in an altar call. I am not sure that that either the preacher or any of those who went forward for a special blessing and prayers would claim that any had a theophany. Yet there are plenty of examples of evangelists who desperately tried to create the circumstances for a theophany to occur - but failed.

 The truth is that we cannot manipulate God to appear or to communicate with us at will. Yet we do need to maintain our relationship with God in public worship an in private devotions.

 An article in the current issue of The United Church Observer asks, “Does God need to be thanked?” The author proceeds to give what he calls “four good reasons to argue that there is no need to offer thanks to God.” He concludes by saying, nevertheless, that if we believe in the God Jesus revealed we need to remind ourselves that we have a relationship with the God who loves us and the whole universe. We have a place in God’s whole scheme of things. “God needs our thanks to know that we care.” He quotes from the First Letter to the Thessalonians 5:18 where Paul wrote, “In everything give thank: for this is the will of God in Jesus Christ concerning you.”

 It is to people who practice their faith on a regular basis that a theophany may occur, if God so wills.

 
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CIVIC RELIGION

CIVIC RELIGION.

The late Mordecai Richler was one of Canada’s leading 20^th century novelists. From the Jewish community in Montreal, Richler fiercely opposed to the narrow French nationalism of Quebec. He was equally dismissive of what he called “sentimental, milquetoast” nationalism of English Canada. A lecture delivered on the Big Ideas program on TVO, Ontario’s educational television network, featured Charles Foran, author of a recent biography of Richler. Yet Foran had difficulty describing the kind of nationalism exhibited in Richler’s numerous novels, magazine and newspaper articles, and television commentaries.

Foran believes that Richler rejected all sense of tribalism, whatever its source. Instead he belonged to a brand of moral individuals springing from Judaism “whose duty is to question and confront” every position that does not meet the highest standards of justice. Without saying so, Foran described a man who was a prophet of his time in the midst of Canada’s struggle to remain a united country.

Canada has a long history of nationalism, particularly in relation to the United States of America. Our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald (1815-1891), was perhaps the greatest of those who could be said to be Canadian nationalists. He was determined to do everything possible to maintain the whole of Canada’s vast geography from east to west coasts as “British North America.” It was his driving motive for striking the political deals that brought about Confederation in 1867. Later he negotiated the entry of Manitoba and British Columbia in the west and Prince Edward Island in the east, as the next provinces to become part of the new “Dominion of Canada” as part of the British Empire.

Today Canada is a vast country stretching from sea to sea to sea, with a very limited population of only 33 million. Our constitutional monarchy expresses a value system that recognizes our place in the world as a nation that seeks to help others protect democracy or achieve freedom and independence. In global geopolitics we have served many times as peacekeepers or peacemakers for the United Nations.

Most everyone may be proud of their own country’s particular brand of nationalism. Some may criticize or condemn it as an extreme form of patriotism. I prefer to call it our civic religion. Each brand of civic religion has its own liturgy, beginning with a national anthem and a constitution that declares the nation’s basic values and system of government. In this country our national holidays and memorials are essential to our civic observances. Our Canada Day celebrations on July 1^st and Remembrance Day parades to the national and local cenotaphs on November 11^th also evoke the liturgies of our civic religion.

One of the more powerful instances of civic religion came  little more than a week ago in the marking of the 10^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. We in Canada marked the anniversary too by recalling how we had helped the many airline passengers who had been forced to land at airports far from home. We welcomed several thousand passengers from those aircraft into our homes for up to a week while they waited to be cleared to fly on to their destinations in the USA. All this was done without any cost to the passengers. We feel proud of doing more than might have been expected of us. Those simple acts of kindness were a supreme expression of our civic religion.

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REV ELATION - Part 2.

The role of the church in determining whether or not a particular experience of revelation is valid also has to be raised. Through the centuries Christian church authorities have been somewhat rigid in allowing solo voices to depart from the creeds established by church councils. Creeds have been used as a means of controlling what is a true and what is a false revelation. The church has often denied that particular individuals have received a prophetic revelation.

For instance, since the 4th century CE the Christian church has insisted that God is to be understood as a Trinity of three personae but one divine being. Anyone who disagreed with this doctrine has been pushed to the fringes, expelled from the church as heretics, or at times cruelly executed. On a number of occasions in church history these people have created new movements that became sects or denominations that prospered as competing rivals. Unfortunately, this divisive process is still going on.

Not all revelation occurs in a religious context. The discovery that energy is the basis of all life is a scientific revelation. So is the discovery that all animal species have remarkably common genomes. For instance, fruit flies and humans share 60% of the same genes. Another revelation states that all living things have a common descent stretching back over the 3.5 billion years that there has been life on the planet Earth. The religious person interprets such discoveries as experiences of God’s unfolding purposes.

A children’s book I read to my children many years ago had these words: “God speaks to me in my mind and says, ‘Be good; be kind.’” Those words and the influence of people of faith in their lives helped to shape their character and their faith. Many other parents have had similar experiences. This is both a mental, moral and religious process. Physiological and neurological research is beginning to discover the means by which this takes place within our neurological system.

“The mind is the locus of revelation,” wrote Bruce Chilton in his latest book, The Way of Jesus to Repair and Renew the World. (Abingdon, 2010.) “What if whole communities, formed by people inclined to Mindful discipline, treated prophecy as a human gift, conveyed by the Spirit, rather than an unusual and random occurrence? St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Pursue love, be zealous for spiritual things, and above all that you prophesy.” (1 Corinthians 14:1). To him it seemed obvious that an awareness of God active among us should bring prophecy to the leading role in the guidance of communities. What is obvious to see, of course, is not always easy to do. To move from possibility to action will be the achievement of Mindful practice.” (Capital letters for Mindful were Chilton’s.)

In 2010 the Tony Blair Faith Foundation launched the Religion and Globalization initiative at the Centre of Research on Religion (CREOR) at the Faculty of Religious Studies of McGill University, Montreal, Canada. This year a series of leectures on "Religion and the Brain." These lectures will likely be published at a later date. I wait with anticipation to read them.

I am convinced that further research will bring to light how God uses the basic elements of our bodies and minds to reveal to us the nature of faith. Whatever the technical details may be, it is not likely to take us beyond the biblical revelation that the true nature of God is love, a love that embraces all humanity and wills that all humanity embrace each other.

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REVELATION - Part 1

The story of the call of Moses to lead the Israelites from slavery in Egypt to freedom and a home in Canaan is a story about revelation. It reveals in that it makes something known. It discloses a kind of knowledge that the Israelites interpreted as re-establishing their God-given promise of a homeland and their mission in a world of much hostility. According to the biblical record that promise and mission were first given to Abraham (Genesis 17:2-9).

These days we are flooded with information, with new knowledge about ourselves, the world and the universe we live in. Conflicting religious traditions and cultures tend to blur or blot out entirely our understanding of what revelation is. In theological terms, revelation is transcendental. It exists apart from, beyond, and not subject to the limitations of the physical universe. The late Prof. Wilfrid Cantwell Smith, a prominent Christian scholar of comparative religious history, used the word Transcendent to refer to our human experience of the divine in all religious traditions.

In the biblical sense revelation is not about us or our material universe at all, but about God. The God who is Spirit beyond our sight and other senses, but whose presence can yet be experienced by ordinary human beings. That is why the familiar story of Moses and the burning bush is so important to the Christian and Jewish traditions alike.

There are several kinds of divine revelation in this narrative. There is mediated revelation. There is direct revelation. There is spiritual revelation interpreted by faith. There is revelation of God’s own nature. There is revelation of divine purpose and mission. There is revelation in a historical context. Above all, there is revelation of the real presence of God in human life and history.

Throughout the Bible these several kinds of revelation can be found again and again. This is particularly true in the experience of Israel’s prophets of whom Moses was the first and perhaps the greatest. The prophets of Israel appeared to have a special sense of what God was about. This was often couched in words that came directly from God to the prophets who the declared, “Thus says the Lord ….”

We must not infer this to mean that the actual words of scripture are in and of themselves the literal revelation. Some people do believe that; I do not. Instead it means that God uses the words of scripture to show people of faith what God is like, what God is doing, and how that matters to us in our historical context. Revelation through the words of scripture is a religious experience. That is true even in this atheistic age when reason is so emotionally espoused as the only acceptable alternative.

To Christians the supreme revelation of God is a person, Jesus of Nazareth. He has been revealed to us the Messiah/Christ, Son of God, since the first writings of the New Testament were composed in the 1st century CE. In Jesus the essence of all that is divine and all that humans may become has now been disclosed. This revelation brings people of faith into a personal relationship with God and with each other.

The danger of this revelation is that we can turn it around to believe in God as anthropomorphic – very much like humans, made in our image. Psychologists and psychiatrists following Sigmund Freud and others have consistently made that claim. But does this really affect our understanding of revelation?

It is true that many passages in the Bible also give this same impression. Numerous texts cite God speaking, as in the story of Moses receiving his call to lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Through the ages, numerous people of faith have heard God speaking. Have they all been deceived?

The history of our Christian tradition tells us that they have not. Rather, they perceived a revelation, experienced and interpreted through faith, and formed a personal relationship with God and with Jesus Christ. God had become a real presence in their lives and consequently they have acted accordingly. We call this the work of the Spirit of God within them. They have been given prophetic powers that shape their lives in unique ways and help us discern the will and purposes of God in the context of everyday life. These prophetic gifts are not exclusive to a few but available to all people of faith.

(More of this note on Revelation will follow in Part 2.)

MINDS IN A CROWD - WHY RIOTS OCCUR.

The following quotation is from the abstract of Dr. Elizabeth Zoffmann’s presentation, Minds In A Crowd, at the 32^nd International Congress of Law and Mental Health held in Berlin, July 17-23, 2011.

“People ‘en masse’ often behave in ways that the individuals alone would not. Literature review reveals little empirical study of mass behaviour though individual interviews with protest/riot participants indicates that frontal lobe functions are limited or absent in the context of excited crowd activity. Recent advances in policing methods have used principles from this theory to manage group behaviour by addressing the principle that critical mass, physical proximity, a physical or psychological focus and a driving ‘beat’ are required to form a ‘mass brain’ or syncitium that is less than the sum of its parts.”

The unusual word in this excerpt – syncitium – comes from biology. It describes individual cells that act as one. In this context, however, syncitium means that people in a crowd lose their individual sense of critical judgment and personal discipline. They then behave as a mob, acting in such a way as to cause a riot.

Dr. Zoffmann, a practicing behavioural psychiatrist and an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, first worked on her theory with a former Vancouver police inspector, Dave Jones.  Her psychiatric practice and teaching are based on evolutionary biology. Her ideas were featured in an interview published in the Vancouver weekly newspaper Georgia Straight. The interview referred extensively to the riots following the loss of the Vancouver Canucks in the Stanley Cup playoffs of the National Hockey League in May 2011. 

The riots in the United Kingdom during the past week have given rich new data for the research Dr. Zoffmann hopes will result in further tests of her theory. It would appear at this date that the massive police force that swarmed onto London’s streets after four days of rioting, arson and looting have indeed proved adequate to quell the violence permanently.

One should note, however, that placing the blame on the frontal cortex of our highly evolved human brain is only one theory of why such widespread destructive behaviour occurred in London and other British cities last week. Other explanations cited such political decisions by the Conservative government to reduce expenditures for education and training of the large phalanx of unemployed youth. These political decisions had economic causes in the massive debt incurred after extended budgetary deficits at all levels of government.

Some of the louder voices blamed the widening gap between rich and poor in Britain’s traditional class structured society. Others called this a race riot pointing to the large number of rioters who were black and south Asian youth. Such descriptive terms themselves were racially intended as people looked at photographs of youths throwing molitov cocktails to start massive fires or running out of stores with stolen merchandise. Black youth workers responded that budgetary cutbacks on social assistance and unemployment had made it virtually impossible for many youths to avoid involvement in criminal gangs.

From those inclined to moral and religious interpretation of events came angry cries that parents were neglecting their responsibilities to teach their children moral discipline. When the riots had subsided a few parents did turn their children in to the police to be charged. Angry right wing religious groups placed the blame on Islamic fundamentalists. Religious leaders responded defensively, falling back on the fact that Christianity and Islam alike embrace family moral values.

The history of riots cites incidents as far back as 44 BCE when a mob seized firebrands from Julius Caesar’s funeral pyre in the Forum and ran through the streets of Rome to attack the houses of Cassius and Brutus. British and American history includes plenty of similar examples of mob violence. The original Boston Tea Party in 1773 led directly to the American Revolution. Belgium emerged as an independent country after riots that began with what is called “the Opera Riot.” Street violence was joined by theatregoers emerging from an opera on August 25, 1830. Violence continued through the southern provinces of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands for nearly a year, ending with the declaration of the independent Kingdom of Belgium on August 12, 1831.

During the parliamentary debate that followed the suppression of the riots, Prime Minister David Cameron told the nation that there had been too few police deployed available to quell the violence. His admission that the police had got the riots wrong was immediately countered by a retort from Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers. He acknowledged that police had faced "an unprecedented situation, unique circumstances" — but added that it was police themselves, rather than "political interference," that got the situation under control.

It is popular to express the traditional philosophical position established by John Locke (1632-1704) that God made humans in God’s own image so that even in our natural state we are not jungle beasts because we possess the God-given gifts of reason and conscience. It would seem that both reason and conscience are in very short supply of late. If Dr. Zoffmann is right in her analysis there is likely to be many more riots in future.

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EVERYONE NEEDS FUNDAMENTALS

Fundamentals. We use the word quite often, but do we actually know what it means. A dictionary definition may help. A fundamental used as a noun is "a basic principle, rule, law, or the like, that serves as the groundwork of a system; essential part: to master the fundamentals of a trade." (Random House Dictionary.) More often it is used as a noun. In the study of any intellectual discipline, whether a student or a scholar, one beings with some fundamentals that are the guidelines or, as we see above, "the groundwork of our system."

In all disciplines, there are fundamentals that form the basis of study, research and implementaion. Biblical studies are no different. A little more than a century ago a new movement burst on the scene disrupting scholarly pursuits in biblical interpretation that had been pursued since Christians and Jews first composed what became their respective Holy Scriptures. From the beginning of the Enlightenment Age in the 17th century scholars had been applying modern historical and literary methodologies to those scriptures. The impact of these methodologies and in particular the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species with its fundamental challenge to the Creation passages in the Book of Genesis caused many sincere scholars and preachers to react with surprising negativity.

This new movement was given the name of Fundamentalism. In many respects, the conflict it caused resulted in irreparable divisions within some Protestant denominations and numerous congregations. Like all intellectual systems, Fundamentalism has its basic principles, five in number: biblical infallability and inerrancy, the virgin birth and deity of Jesus, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement for sin, the resurrection and ascension of Jesus to heaven, and the authenticity of the miracles of Jesus and his miraculous return at the end of history.

There is nothing wrong with those fundamentals, but it is certainly not those I would select as necessary for appropraite study of the Christian Bible or the Holy Scriptures of any other religious tradition. The tragedy of our time is that every tradition has its own "fundamentalists" who attempt to force their will on others of their own or other traditions. I was trained in the historical critical approach to the Bible. That was more than sixty years ago. The discipline has changed in the interim. On the other hand, it is almost impossible to keep up with the changes unless one has access to a major library collecting every available imprint in the field.

Recently I have been reading selectively in progressive biblical studies like those written by members of the Jesus Seminar and Evolutionary Christianity. My main question to those authors is a simple one: "By what fundamentals are you deciding that your approach is an advance over what has gone before?" Another serious question that could also be asked is the proverbial one: "Are you throwing out the baby with the bath water?" To be specific, a significant issue needs to be  raised: Does setting aide the traditional doctrine of the Trinity or reviving the century old search for the historical Jesus in the Gospel narratives create more faithful followers of Jesus in a global society?

Those authors who seek to move the Christian faith beyond its traditional base of theism embodied in human life need to make clear just what other fundamentals they would put in its place.

FAITH AND DOUBT

In its November/December 2010, the Biblical Archaeology Review published an interview with Professor Sean Frayne, Director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies and Emeritus Professor of Theology at Trinity College, Dublin. Prof. Frayne is a renowned scholar whose studies focus on the integration of literary and archaeological sources of Galilean culture in the Hellenistic and Roman times. Possibly his most controversial statement was that the real Jesus is a historical and theological construct.

For the next three issues BAR published angry letters to the editor. Some threatened to cancel their subscriptions – and a few actually did so - because the article had challenged their concept of faith as true believers. Others offered support of Frayne’s critical views of the historical character of biblical narratives. One of the more trenchant supportive letters said in part, “Within the very concept of faith is the possibility of doubt, lest it would cease to be faith.”

Passages in the New Testament itself would appear to support Frayne’s position. A case in point is the Gospel lesson in last week’s lectionary (Matthew 14:22-33).  The disciples became terrified when they saw Jesus was walking toward them on the sea. Doubting that the approaching figure was Jesus, Peter challenged Jesus to let him walk on the waves too. Jesus bid him come. Out of the boat Peter’s courage failed him and he began to sink. Jesus saved him saying “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

For a second instance see Acts 9:10-19 where Ananias, a Christian in Damascus, had a vision that God had told him that Saul of Tarsus was staying in a house on a certain street praying. Knowing why Saul was in Damascus, Ananias immediately doubted that God had spoken to him. But God insisted and Ananias obeyed. In the ensuing encounter with Saul, the great apostle to the Gentiles was baptized and for a short time longer in Damascus became a persuasive preacher that Jesus is the Messiah.

Taken literally, these miracles stories require an unusual faith that Matthew and Luke had access to any records of these events. Was that possible in an oral culture 50 or 60 years after the events occurred? Or is it credulity?  Another unlikely possibility is that the Holy Spirit inspired the verbal composition of these narratives. Critical scholarship looks at both stories as instances where faith met doubt in challenging situations and triumphed. To believe otherwise is to question the creativity of the authors with a sound theological message to convey: that Jesus is the Christ, Son of God.

No interpreters of scripture use a totally literalist reading of the text. To do so would be to deny that the world revolves around the sun. (Psalm 104:19; Judges 5:51; Joshua 10:13; etc.) It may still appear to be so and our more poetic language still uses it as a metaphor. Yet Galileo proved that to be a totally mistaken observation as long ago as 1610.

Out of such discoveries critical scholarship has developed alternative systems for interpreting the mysteries and apparent paradoxes of the Bible. Neither history nor archaeology can fully satisfy human reason and the seeming paradoxes of faith, Prof. Frayne argued. But faith is just that - “paradox is all but the very definition of faith.” Therefore, in true faith, doubt can never be escaped.

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Christian Faith and the Oslo Massacre.

This is being composed a few days after the massacre of eight people in a bombing in downtown Oslo, Norway, and sixty-eight young people at a youth camp on an island not far from that city. The destructive bomb was made of fertilizer packed in a car near a government centre in the city. The explosion is thought to have been directed at the prime minister and also a cover for the more horrifying tragedy at the camp. The young people at the camp were attending a political training experience sponsored by the prime minister's Labour Party. He expected to give an address there the following day and was at home preparing his speech when the bomb exploded near his office.

 As far as is yet known, just one lone man, a 32 year old Norwegian, Anders Breivik, carried out both acts of extreme terrorism. In a long diatribe running to some 1500 pages online, the self-confessed perpetrator made the ostentatious claim that it was his Christian duty to do this. His intent was to shock his own country and all of Europe into the dangers of Islamist immigration. He wanted to initiate a revolution to purge Europe of an Islamic invasion. His rambling message defined himself as a 21^st century Crusader determined to form a new battalion of the Knights Templar to free Christian Europe from Islam.

When Breivik appeared in court six days after the massacre, he sought to have all the media broadcast his message. The court denied him the privilege. Later the presiding judge briefed the public on what had occurred at the hearing. He said that the accused had admitted committing the crimes, but pleaded not guilty. Breivik  believed his acts had been justified. He had to do it to save Norway and all of Europe from Islam. He regarded what he had done as an act of war.

Not since the invasion of the German Nazis during World War II has Norway been victimized by such horrendous events. Breivik’s lawyer has reported that his client is a “very cold person,” used drugs and is probably insane. It is not yet clear whether he will plead insanity when the trial begins.

Is this an expression of genuine faith or is it a form of excessive ideological fundamentalism only peripherally associated with the Christian tradition?

It is true that some intense forms of religious ecstasy can reach the borders of insanity. It is also true that a political or economic ideology can have the intensity of a religious conviction sanctioned by God. Many Christian fundamentalists in Europe, Australia and North America have expressed attitudes against Islamic immigrants closely related to those of Breivik. Multiculturalism and racism too can be as extreme and as religiously sanctioned as any Christian belief.

As the Norwegian Prime Minister said, it is not a crime to think or to have such destructive beliefs as Breivik. It is criminal to act on them.

Even Jesus was charged with being possessed by an evil spirit. Mark 3:21 reports that his family came looking for him because people were saying that he was out of his mind. In biblical terms, Breivik appears to be possessed of a demon. He perpetrated this tragedy by letting his demon drive him to mass murder.

In the Bible Joshua 8:1-29 cites an instance of mass murder that was also part of Israel’s ancient tradition. Was this really done at God’s bidding as related in the biblical record? (8:1, 18) The poet who composed the bitter verses of Psalm 137 certainly thought that it was God’s will for Israel to destroy its enemies Edom and Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. These are difficult passages to interpret from a progressive point of view.

The God I believe in is compassionate and caring for all people, not vicious and immoral. It is wrong for anyone - Christian, Moslem or Jew - to turn from belief the bloodshed.

The people of Norway are in mourning. They have flooded the square in front of the national cathedral in Oslo with all sorts of memorials for the dead. The prime minister has avowed that this vicious act of madness will not deter his country from being an open, intercultural, interreligious democracy that welcomes people of all races and religious convictions. It is to be hoped – however faint that be that hope – that no other nation will suffer a similar act of terrorism.

Thanks be to God.