In Memory of Lisa Kennedy

On Thursday the 26th of April, my youngest sister Lisa passed from this physical life into the embrace of the love of God. This is my language and what Lisa would have understood a phrase like the love of God to mean is something that I don’t think I know. Always practical, my memories of Lisa are that she didn’t have a lot of use for conventional religious notions of an afterlife. Her energies were firmly focused on the life lived here and now, her children, her family, her job, and her beloved women’s hockey. I remember on a visit home some years ago Lisa turning to me and asking in all seriousness how many sports channels did I watch in England. The fact that I watched none spoke volumes about the difference between us.

Lisa was diagnosed at a relatively young age with breast cancer. The age of first onset seems to be a prime indicator of the likely reoccurrence of the disease. People marvel when I tell them that all three of my sisters have been diagnosed with breast cancer and that there seems not to be a family genetic explanation for this. I have reflected many times on how each of them, Lynette, Lisa, and finally Ali, came to terms with their cancer. Each did so in their own remarkably individual way. The way each has responded speaks to the depth of their character and dare I say the qualities of their soul.

When we human beings are thrown into a life crisis, the walls which we build to protect ourselves from the storms of life begin to crack. It is only then that the quality of soul emerges. Through the cracks in the walls we are invited to change, to grow and to renew ourselves. In my experience it is soul-quality that connects me to the reality of life being lived-out against a backdrop of something bigger than what I can immediately touch, see, or know. The quality of Lisa’s soul revealed in her a deep commitment to life sustained by her enormous reserves of courage and love.

Stubborn, willful, bloody-minded are terms that come readily to my mind when thinking of Lisa. Yet, these are simply the qualities of her determined life-force that would brook no thought of easy defeat. Over these last months as Lisa fought to delay the approach of her inevitable death, my mind has turned again and again to the Dylan Thomas poem that opens with:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Lisa bargained hard and won a space in which to prepare those she loved most for the time of her dying. For her, relationships were what mattered most. For me, the embrace of the love of God is simply a way of saying that in death the truth about what is most important in this life deepens. What is universally true is that relationships, be they good relationships or difficult relationships, are what most matter. For me, God is not a solitary being. God is a community within which the interplay of relationships bring joy and delight. God is a Trinity – a Divine Community defined by relationships that share themselves with the life of the Creation and become the model for the way we are invited to live our own lives.

I am not sure what it is I should, or even am, feeling at the passing of my little sister. The distances of time, she was only 12 when I left home, and of location, my thirty years living in the UK, in many ways separated us from each other. At the end of her life in this world I remain separated, this time by immigration processes which currently restrict my ability to travel outside of my current home in the US.

Yet, these limitations of time and space cannot seriously inhibit the exercise of love. For the distances of time and the separations of location no longer inhibit Lisa and I. Lisa’s death acts only to strengthen and deepen my sense of being in relationship with her. Despite my separation from others who mourn Lisa, I nevertheless rededicate myself to life lived motivated by the primacy of relationship. In this way I incorporate into my own life the priorities that Lisa expressed through her own living, loving, and gifting of love and friendship.

April 28, 2012 2

The Anglican Way. James C. Fenhagen

Contemporary culture always provides context, usually of the combative kind, to religious faith. Yet it provides opportunities as well. I have been struck by an observation of Walker Percy’s in his 1980 novel The Second Coming. One of the novel’s characters, Will Barrett, reflects on the religious dimension of contemporary culture:

Marion had been a conservative Episcopalian and had no use for changes in the Church. Leslie and Jason were born-again Christians and had no use for anything liturgy or sacrament, which got in the way of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. Ed and Marge Capp were Californians….Jack Kurl, the minister had no strong feelings about women priests or the interim prayer book…He attended ecumenical councils in the Middle East and Latin America …He wore jump suits. Kitty believed in astrology. Yamaluchi was a Jehovah’s Witness. He believed he was one of the 144,000 who would survive Armageddon and reign. Yamaluchi’s wife, the cook, was a theosophist who believed in reincarnation….Is this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of mass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which?

Percy’s biting commentary on the confusion which exists in religious America, as significant today as it was then, reinforces in me a conviction that is at the heart of the Episcopal Church’s understanding of the Christian faith. It does indeed make a difference how you understand the Christian faith, and it makes a difference what tradition enshrines it.

In our pluralistic world, we tend to blur denominational differences because of our understandable desire to be both charitable to our neighbors and open to expressions different from our own. I share this spirit. But I am concerned when our desire to be open to others cuts us off from what our own tradition holds to be true. I am committed to an ecumenical view of the Christian church, but not at the expense of denying aspects of my own tradition that I believe must be part of any ongoing dialogue. I believe there is an “Anglican Way” that has much to contribute to the whole church and to which we can witness with conviction. There are three elements of this tradition that I would like to affirm. I do so realizing that we share some of these elements with other churches, but that in our own tradition they take a particular shape.

Comprehensiveness

From the time of the reformation in the sixteenth century, the Anglican Communion has been committed to doctrinal comprehensiveness rather than uniformity. Comprehensiveness involves being able to hold together a number of seeming opposites within a unified whole. It allows for consistent theological debate and inquiry, but others find it hard to understand. A Roman Catholic priest once asked me, “Where can I find clearly stated what Anglicans believe?” My response was, “In the Bible, in the creeds, and in the way we worship. It is all there, but it can only be spelled out in the living of it,” and I believe that to this day.

William J. Wolf, late professor of theology at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, speaks of the Anglican tradition as a “pastorally and liturgically oriented dialogue between four partners: Catholics, evangelicals, and advocates of reason and

experience.” And the word “partners,” he notes is deliberately chosen to emphasize the need for each aspect of our tradition always to cooperate with others.

This comprehensiveness produces a certain way of understanding Christian faith. It means that we take seriously the need for intellectual integrity that is often obscured by religious fervor. There is a difference between conviction and dogmatism. The difference is faith. Jesus does not offer us absolute certainty. He offers us a relationship of incredible intimacy and power. The church offers tradition and the world offers change. Faith involves living in the tension between these three realities – a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, the tradition of the church, and the change that reflects the ongoingness of the world. We remain open to the wonder and mystery of what we do not know and alert to the movement of God in what is new. If our relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ is serious, we need not fear the hard questions which the world presents to us. We need not fear uncertainty or new ideas or even doubt, for Jesus Christ is our hope and our promise, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our church has struggled to maintain this comprehensiveness down through the centuries. It is not always easy or without pain, but I think God for what he has allowed us to be.

Personal Spirituality

Secondly, as Anglicans we see personal spirituality emerging from the inter-relationship between liturgical participation, solitude and compassion. All three are necessary and interdependent. Our tradition weaves together a concern for personal freedom with an emphasis on beauty and joyfulness and awe – a tradition made rich by such notables as Julian of Norwich, George Herbert, Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, and Evelyn Underhill.

Our greatest spiritual treasure is The Book Of Common Prayer – revised many times since its creation in 1549, and today enshrining many strands, shaped by the experience of countless millions. To be a liturgical church, however, involves more than having a book. It is a view of worship that is dialogical, where each person has a place and a part. We gather to pray not only for our own nurture, but on behalf of those who never pray or never darken the church’s door. This being an intercessory community on behalf of others is epitomized in our understanding of the eucharist where we share in Christ’s self-offering on behalf of the world. This understanding of worship does not depend on celebrities or charismatic preachers, but on the work of the people where clergy and laity each take their part and claim their ministry.

One of the phenomena of our time has been the surge of interest in Eastern religions, Christian fundamentalism, mega-churches, and the place of solitude in human life. Young people have left our churches because they did not see what they felt they badly needed. For Anglicans, the recovery of our spiritual roots – roots nourished in a liturgy but deepened and expanded in solitude. It is only in this way that we will become more compassionate and more centered people.

Thomas Merton once observed that the most pervasive form of contemporary violence is activism and overwork.

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation with violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the rot of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

These words, written by a Trappist monk (who himself was quoting a Quaker), reflect a strain that is deep in our tradition as well. It is a tradition of liturgy, solitude, and compassion that speaks to a profound hunger in our world – a hunger we see also in ourselves.

Holy Worldliness

Finally, I want to hold up that aspect of the Anglican tradition which might be called a holy worldliness. It is life affirming rather than pleasure denying. It calls people to faith not out of guilt or fear, but out of a vision of God that invokes response rather than commands it. It is a way of living shaped by words in the first book of the Bible, “And God created the world and it was good.” This is not to say that we are not serious about human sin, but rather that we emphasize what our redemption in Christ makes possible. We are a sacramental church that sees the presence of God’s love in the most mundane of things. We affirm wholeness, sexuality, and human pleasure, not as ends in themselves but as reflections of the love of God. This is why, when we distort or misuse these things God has given to us, the consequences are so serious.

We are surrounded by forces that play on our guilt and our fears, our understandable frustration and concern over much that goes on around us. There are days when, in the words of the song, we want to cry out, “Stop the world, I want to get off.” There are days when it seems that only simple answers and clearly defined enemies will satisfy the uneasiness we feel. But to give in to these feelings is to deny something fundamental in our baptism. We are people of promise who even in the midst of death can proclaim hope. We are part of a tradition that affirms that life is richest when it is given away on behalf of others. It is a tradition that refuses to live by fear or by coercion – regardless of how noble the aim – and lives instead in freedom and in loving response to what God has given us. This is holy worldliness.

Henri Nouwen tells a story that illustrates what such a view of the world might mean: There was once an old man who used to meditate early every morning under a large tree on the bank of the Ganges River in India. One morning he saw a scorpion floating helplessly in the strong current of the river. As the scorpion was pulled closer to the tree, it got caught in the long roots that branched far into the river. It struggled frantically to free itself but got more and more entangled. When the old man saw this, he stretched himself onto the extended roots and reached out to rescue the drowning scorpion. The animal jerked and stung him wildly. Instinctively, the man withdrew his hand, but then, after having regained his balance, he once again stretched out to save the agonized scorpion. Every time the old man came within reach, the scorpion stung him, so badly that his hands became swollen and bloody and his face distorted by pain. A passerby saw the old man stretched on the roots struggling with the scorpion and shouted: “Hey, stupid old man, what’s wrong with you? Only a fool risks his life for the sake of an ugly, useless creature. Don’t you know that you may kill yourself to save that ungrateful animal?” Slowly the old man turned his head and looking into the stranger’s eyes, he said “Friend, because it is in the nature of the scorpion to sting, why should I give up my own nature to save?”

Well, that’s the question: Why should we give up our nature to be compassionate, life- affirming people, even when we get stung in a stinging world? Should we give in to biblical fundamentalism and moralism because we are told this is what makes the church grow? Why should we cease to give of ourselves on behalf of others simply because the world says to protect yourself and draw back lest you be hurt?

As members of the Episcopal Church we belong to a worldwide family that shares a common heritage. In our commitment to Jesus Christ we are at one with all Christians, but in our expression of the commitment we have something unique to give: a tradition of comprehensiveness, personal holiness shaped by a common liturgy, and a life-affirming spirit. Episcopalians treasure other things as well, but these speak with grace and power to a world divided and afraid.

April 10, 2012 0

Story, The More Than Truth.

The transition from Good Friday to Easter necessitates a dramatic change of gear. I am particularly thinking about my own experience at the moment. The great cycle of our Christian faith, which for liturgical Christians unfolds through the vehicle of the Calendar is unvarying. Yet, my experience of moving through the cycle, year by year, brings out different responses depending on what is coming-up in my own internal spiritual and emotional process.

With all the hoopla stirred up by the Republican Party’s presidential nomination process these past months, this Holy Week I became particularly sensitive to the political nature of Jesus’ challenge to the political and religious status quo of 1st Century Palestine (note my last posting).

The arrival of Easter Day bursts open the tomb of my existentially-rooted spiritual reflections and my sights are raised to the Divine Action in the drama. This experience is like the sensation I have every time I travel north from Phoenix on Highway 17. Being still relatively new to Arizona I am not sure exactly where it is but there is a point where after climbing up through a rugged and hilly terrain one arrives at a point where suddenly a huge plateau expanse opens-up to view. What strikes me each time is that this expansiveness is both a horizontal and vertical expansiveness. It’s not just a sudden widening of the horizon. It’s also at the same time an opening up of the depth of sky.

I am reminded that at the human level of Jesus’ road to the Cross what has been taking place is the necessary element of human willing co-operation that brings events to the point where God is able to act. God’s expression of deep love for the world is contingent upon a human participation in the sacrifice of love. Suddenly the horizon and the sky opens in breadth and depth leading to something that is truly unimagined by us.

We human beings are story-telling creatures. In an age when a narrow scientific paradigm has substituted explanation for narrative, Faith reminds us that the need to tell stories is deeply engrained in our human DNA. The right hemisphere of the human brain is the gateway for sensory experience. The left hemisphere of our brain continually performs an editing and cataloguing function that creates narratives to articulate the multilayered depth of our experience.

Easter involves recalling the stories beginning with the Creation in the first chapter of Genesis and moving inexorably through the stories of the Exodus, the Prophets, arriving at Jesus and the Cross and Resurrection. These are the fundamental themes of the shared Divine-Human story unfolding through a repeated pattern of divine invitation and halting human response. On the whole the story shows that human beings prefer to hide in the safety of the familiar. Yet, every-so-often we become overwhelmed by the constriction of our timidity. At these points, often points of crisis in our lives, we find that we can ill afford not to open to God’s invitation to the new.

Easter burst open the tomb of my human-centered perspectives. The experience of the Cross and Resurrection confronts we with my love of the familiar. A familiar that deadens my awarenesses. I am afraid I have to be confronted by new life. It’s a surprise, because my tendency is to forget and return to making the same old choices always expecting different results. So each time the promise of new life breaks open my self-centered-ness, I am truly surprised by joy.

April 9, 2012 1

The Scarier Road

Extrapolating from my experience to a generalization about human beings it seems to be that we leap-frog from the remembrances of things past to intimations of things yet to come. What matters about this is that an engagement with the demands of the present moment is neatly sidestepped.

For those unaware of the Church Calendar its Holy Week. For liturgical Christians this is a big deal with liturgies galore culminating in the solemn Triduum cycle. Triduum refers to the Great Three Days of Easter and their marking through a dramatic liturgical enactment of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection.

Many of us were brought-up in traditions that emphasized a kind of sentimental identification with Jesus as he journeyed on the road to the Cross. Again, risking another pesky generalization – we humans find it easy to identify with the drama of Christ’s physical pain, emotional suffering, and spiritual angst. For in our own lives we know well the echo of these states.

All this encourages us towards an interior or psychologically internal identification with Jesus in the events of Holy Week and Easter. In this way we revel in the remembrance of things past, i.e. our identification with the personal suffering of the historic human Jesus. Yet, at the same time we are engrossed in the intimation of things yet to come. For are we not hoping that our emotional and spiritual fidelity with Jesus will fruit into the promise of the future, i.e. eternal life?

The journey from Galilee to Jerusalem as reported in Mark’s Gospel shows Jesus inviting the disciples on a kind of study tour. His focus time and again is on inviting them to understand the nature of the journey they have started. It is a journey through confrontation and death that ushers-in the promise of a new life. This new life is something beyond their imagining. So they fill in the gaps with fantasies of sitting at the right and left hand of Jesus in his glory. They are caught-up in intimations of things yet to come. Because this is presently unimaginable to them they imagine only what they already know.

Jesus, meanwhile is firmly focused in the present moment as moment by moment the tension between him and the Temple Authorities grows. What is going-on in the present moment is much to frightening for the disciples to really contemplate hence their flight into intimations of things yet to come. When this psychological flight fails, they are forced to physically flee, abandoning Jesus to a solitary path.

I have spent much of my life being tempted into wanting my religion to be vacuum-packed against becoming contaminated by the mess of the world. This approach makes things much less scary. A vacuum-packed approach to religion offers an interpretation of the events of Holy Week and Easter in which Jesus is seen as challenging the flawed theology of Temple Judaism. As I take a closer look it seems to me that Jesus’ tension with the Temple Authorities has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with politics. Jesus is not a theological threat. It’s the politics of his message (the in breaking of the Kingdom) that terrifies the religious authorities. It seems that religion can’t be kept separate from politics defined as the way the world works.

As I look around my world of the early 21st century I note a lot of scary things going on. Chief among these many things that scare me is the way a strident, fear-driven Christian voice is increasingly raised in defense of a vacuum-packed religious world view. This is a world view that insulates itself from the societal processes that perpetuate violence and injustice. This fear driven voice echoes the concerns of the Temple Authorities and not the message of the Prophets which culminates in the ministry of Jesus. Confronting and challenging the way power operates in society to the benefit of the few and to the disadvantage of the many is what accompanying Jesus to the foot of the Cross means.

For me, this is all very personal. Identity and identification is all very complex. I am part of systems that oppresses others by virtue of my privilege – a privilege that in my case is rooted in gender, race, and education. Yet, I am also one of those who knows the fear of the violence that can be unleashed when Christians refuse to interrogate their theologically based protection of homophobia.

I catch myself. What I catch myself doing is appearing to promote and image of Jesus as social activist along with an image of myself as potential victim. So as I catch myself I am reminded that the way of confrontation and challenge is none other than the way of love.

Macrina Wiederkehr OSB in her re-imagining of the Divine Office in sevensacredpauses 2008 Sorin Books, quotes a Sufi saying: when the power of love overcomes the love of power then there will be peace on the earth. Following in the Way of the Cross through which God confronts human politics defined as the defense of the world as it is, requires the action of love.

Love in this instance always holds within itself the potential of leading us to becoming an uncomfortable and maybe dangerous challenge to the status quo. The religion Jesus reveals to us offers us no protection from such love.

April 5, 2012 0

March 28, 2012 0

A very nice Conundrum

Thursday evening each week offers an opportunity for Trinity Cathedral folks to gather for Eucharist, a shared meal, and an exploration of what different aspects of daily spiritual practice looks and feels like. The evening is structured to reflect the Anglican emphasis on community worship, social fellowship, study, and reflection ending with participating in the common prayer of the Church in the form of Compline. In the study and reflection section of our evening since Christmas, we have been exploring the Rule of St Benedict. Can this ancient approach deepen our individual and collective experience of living and working in the world as we currently find it to be?

This last Thursday we turned to Benedict’s approach to work. I have already posted a number of entries on this blog exploring the experience of a Benedictine approach to the contemporary experience of work. However, last Thursday we found ourselves responding to the question which I posed to the group -“Do you feel called?’. The initial responses were predictable of our Episcopalian mind-set.

Some felt this kind of language of call to be uncomfortably evangelical in tone. What lay behind this instinctive aversion to the language of call seemed to be that people did not consider themselves important enough in the grand scheme of the things of God to warrant an individual call. Instead some group members felt that their lives had followed a kind of random pattern whereby they often found themselves in the right place and the right time to be of service to others.

One woman then said that she did not feel she had a call as such. Despite her professional life taking different turns and directions over the years, in all her varied experiences of work she tried to direct her energies towards a fulfilling of her sense of deeper purpose – which for her involved challenging the structures that perpetuated inequality and injustice for people with disabilities.

The mention of the word purpose provoked an intense discussion about defining exactly what was meant by sense of purpose? One man said that despite his continued desire to perform his work with care and attention he strongly believed that what he did had little purpose in the sense of social utility. As he spoke he communicated his deepening disillusionment at finding little purpose and value in his work.

Being a group of highly educated, left of center leaning people, the conversation turned towards challenging the structures of injustice and systemic sin that surrounded us. Individuals spoke passionately. One woman decried the luxury of our even having a conversation about purpose and calling when most of the world’s people were struggling with the bare necessities of survival.

This Thursday evening group is a typical collection of middle class Americans who feel deeply challenged in how to live out the values of the Gospel in the world in which they live. They do not dignify their struggle with an inflated language about call and high purpose. And yet, listening and watching the conversation ebb and flow I was left in no doubt of their unconscious assimilation of Benedictine Values. It was their intuitive feel for Benedict’s teaching on Humility which prevented many appropriating the language of having an individual call from God. They simply felt that they were not that important or significant in the divine scheme of things.

The members of this group of Christians struggle with a desire to deepen their living-out of the spiritual responses of gratitude, generosity and service which our Anglican Tradition, so historically shaped and formed by the spirit of Benedict emphasizes. Of course, they don’t see themselves as being Benedictine. Our exploration of the Rule, however, has begun to connect-up for them their experience of their lives with the three core values enshrined in the Rule.

They do live lives in which Stability – perseverance, courage to stick at it in the difficult situations in which they find themselves – is a hallmark of their experience. They are coming to understand that a willingness to listen carefully to one another, to sit together acknowledging differences between them, and yet still stay in relationship together is a response longed for by God as an expression of what Benedict means by Obedience. As we journey together we are all experiencing the ways being together and accompanying one another in the practice of stability and obedience is encouraging a transformation in our living and relating – which Benedict refers to as Conversion of Life.

Chiefly, however, is my observation of humility among them. Benedict talks more frequently about the need for humility than any other virtue or value. As one of their priests, I sit with a conundrum. How to guide them to an awakening of God’s dream for them? I believe God longs for them to become partners in the redemption of the world. Benedict states that it is God who calls us. How to facilitate their deeper sense of being called without disturbing their intuitive humility? It’s a nice conundrum to have.

March 20, 2012 0

Tender Competence

This Lent my internal reflections began on Ash Wednesday with issuing an invitation to the members of our Trinity Cathedral Congregation to ‘keep it simple’ in our desire to use Lent as an opportunity to deepen our sense of being in relationship with God. What I had in mind was our need to become intentionally careful and take more deliberate care with those things that already fill the contents of our days rather than adding more to our burden and feeding our general sense of distracted failure. As I then reflected on Mark’s portrayal of Jesus cast-out into the Wilderness in the readings for Lent 1 I became especially mindful of our human experience of living within limits over, which and beyond which, we have no control. My thoughts about this can be seen in my earlier post The Wilderness.

In a parallel track to my wider reflections on Lent, in our Thursday evenings adult formation process a group of around 30 of us have been exploring since January the Rule of St Benedict. For Episcopalians, who are Christians of the Anglican Tradition of Catholic Christianity, Benedict holds a special place of importance. For his Rule and its monastic practice have been the single most formative influence on the development on our communal temperament and practice. At the weekly Sunday Sung Evensong at the Cathedral, using the Thursday evening experience as a springboard, I have been developing additional thoughts stimulated by reading Norvene Vest’s book Friend of the Soul; A Benedictine Spirituality of Work, on Benedict and the current experience of work. I posted my musings in the two postings Vocare and Barriers to Vocation.

My thoughts about the relationships between work and a sense of being called (vocare) leads me to reflect on Benedict’s teaching on Stewardship found in many places throughout the Rule but principally in the chapter on the qualities of the Cellarer. For I desire to take better care with those things and people entrusted to me to care for. I would like to be able to report that I have got this mastered. Instead I experience that the principle obstacle to the element of better stewardship in my life and work is not the frustrations and limitations I experience imposed by the world around me. The chief obstacle lies in my own inner resistance to trust. Can I really trust that God goes before me and is already here taking care within the situations and people in my life and my work? If I can then this means my stewardship is not about having to shoulder the caring responsibility alone – something my own life experience often tempts me to do. This is the daunting fantasy – that its all up to me, which forms the chief obstacle to my being a better steward. Benedict reminds me that God is here first. Therefore my stewardship is simply my response to God’s continual invitation to enter into that relationship Jesus promised as an extension of the relationality within the Trinity. Relationality in action marks the key quality of God’s nurturance of situations, people, and objects in my work and my life. If I can entrust myself to the reality of this invitation then the elements of my stewardship responsibilities become aspects of co-operative participation in God’s ongoing stewardship. Being a good steward becomes an experience of not being left alone with my tendency to feel I need to shoulder responsibilities to care for things, situations, and people around me in some kind of solitary manner.

I am in need of a constant reminder that in the situations I face in my work and my life being successful – whatever that term really means I am usually a very poor judge – is not the goal. I don’t have to fix, solve, or resolve. Mastery, control and expertise are not the essential qualities I need. Stewardship means taking care with an attitude of tender competence (Vest). I turn my attention to discerning how God is already present to and within any situation I face. I have to husband stabilitas – by which Benedict means the energies of commitment, perseverance, and faithfulness. However, for me an additional element of stabilitas is fearlessness in the face of obstacles to tender competence whether originating from outside me or within me. I face obstacles not as frustrations but as stepping stones to relationship with God (Basil Hume cited by Vest 1997:73).

Norvene Vest comments that: we are each day to create with and alongside God the transformation we canon yet imagine. Based on our own situation and gifts, each of us is invited to lead a life illumined by these two factors: a desire to respond to God and a willingness to see daily life as the place where that response is formed. … The Rule of St Benedict helps us to expand our understanding of how to be stewards in our own work in the attention given to everyday life. (1997:76)

This is where the need to trust comes in. I have to trust that God news my involvement through tender competence to bring about something I have yet to imagine. The fact that my life operates on a daily basis within the space of limitation makes my co-operation with god all the more crucial. I need courage in the face of my experience of those external forces that distort, disturb and destroy human well being in our culture. These are forces powerfully present in the world of work where we can come face to face with the ongoing experiences of abuse, humiliation and intimidation. I need trust to hold to the realization in the face of my internal narcissism that in the situations I face in my life and work its not all about me and its not all up to me. An attitude of tender competence enables me to stay in the tension of events and to make internal space for the presence of God’s care, concern and involvement to be experienced. This is not only Benedict’s stabilitas in action, but the path to what he termed converse morum – transformation in living.

March 10, 2012 0

Neuroscience and philosophy must work together Guardian Article

By Barry Smith

The brain is made up of a series of interlocking systems. Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki / Alamy/Alamy

Sunday 4 March 2012

Theories of consciousness are challenged by recent research into the impact of brain function on the sense of self

Human beings are part of nature. They are made of flesh and blood, brain and bone; but for much of the time they are also conscious. The puzzling thing is how the intricate sequences of nerve cells and tissue that make up a person’s brain and body can generate the special subjective feel of conscious experience.

Consciousness creates, in each of us, an inner life where we think and feel; a realm where we experience the sights, sounds, feels, tastes and smells that inform us of the world around us.

To many philosophers the central problem of consciousness is, how can the facts of conscious mental life be part of the world of facts described by the natural sciences?

The 17th-century philosopher, René Descartes, thought they couldn’t and argued that, in addition to our physical makeup, creatures like us had a non-material mind, or soul, in which thinking took place. For Descartes, only humans were subjects of experience. Animals were mere mechanisms. When they squealed with what we mistakenly took to be pain, it was just air escaping from their lungs.

Today we take other animals to be conscious; although we are not sure how far down the phylogenetic scale consciousness extends. Most problematically of all, if consciousness was immaterial, how could the immaterial soul move the physical body, or feel pain in response to physical injury?

The difficulty of understanding such material-immaterial interactions is the reason most contemporary philosophers reject Descartes’ mind-body dualism. Surely it is the brain that is responsible for controlling the body, so it must be the brain that gives rise to consciousness and decision-making. So how does consciousness arise in the brain? Science still has no answer.

To a large extent consciousness has been dethroned from the central role it used to occupy in the study of our mental lives. Freud persuaded us that there is more going on mentally than we are consciously aware of, and that sometimes others can know more about what we are thinking and feeling than we do. Now we are also learning more and more from neuroscience and neurobiology about how much of what we do is the result of unconscious processes and mechanisms. And we are discovering that there are different levels of consciousness, different kinds of awareness, and that much of our thinking and decision-making can go on without it. So a more pressing question might be, what is consciousness for? Is it just a mere mental accompaniment to what is going to happen anyway? In that case it may be our sense of self and self-control that is most in need of revision.

It’s also worth remembering that the only convincing example of consciousness we have is our own. Are the people around me really conscious in the way I am, or could they be zombies who act like humans?

Conscious awareness is bound up with our sense of self, but our sense of self is bound up with awareness of the body. The sense of agency and ownership of our limbs is very much part of who we are and how we operate in the world. But it can also go missing after brain injury. In rare cases of brain lesion people can experience sensations in their own hand but not think the hand or the experience belongs to them.

Wittgenstein once said that no one could have an experience and wonder whose experience it was. An experience I feel has to be my experience and it is conceptually impossible to think otherwise. However, when something goes awry in the injured brain the conceptually impossible becomes possible for certain patients. So the nature of consciousness and how we experience it depends on the proper functioning of the brain. We can be aware in moving our bodies that it is our own body we are moving, and we may still have a feeling of being the agent of that movement, but it may not be our conscious decisions that initiate those movements.

The sense of ourselves as consciously deciding everything we do is surely an illusion: but a persistent one. Equally, the idea that consciousness is unified and must be that way comes under increasing pressure in contemporary neuroscience. There are levels of consciousness and perhaps splits in conscious awareness. Can we have consciousness and lack awareness of it? Do we always know what our experience is like, and is experience always as it seems? Much recent experimental evidence from neuroscience suggests that this may not be the case. So it is a fruitful time for philosophers and neuroscientists to work together, to revise previous models and provide new accounts of how we perceive things and why our experience patterns in the way it does.

There may be no single answer to what consciousness is, but we may still be able to find ways to explain what is going on in the brain. This would help resolve why our conscious experience takes the shape and form it does, and elucidate what happens to consciousness when one of the interacting systems that make possible the self-knowing mind breaks down. These phenomena provide vital clues about the neural correlates of consciousness and are a step on the road to understanding why things work as they do.

Getting at the elusive nature of our own experience and freeing ourselves from faulty interpretations is a tricky business. Many disciplines are needed if we are to make a real breakthrough.

• Professor Barry Smith will take part in a panel discussion, organised by the Guardian, on the nature of consciousness – and whether science will ever be able to explain it – at the Royal Institution in London on Wednesday at 7pm

March 5, 2012 0

Barriers to Vocation

A principal barrier to our coming to sense our vocation which is God’s call to meaning and purpose in life is that distance between our dreams of purpose and meaning and the actual world of work. If as Dorothy Sayers comments work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do – then many of us are destined to lives of frustration. The world of work is just not like that we complain, and in many ways it isn’t.

The world of work in human society is always in need of structural change. At times recently it seems that the forces that fragment us, exploit us, discriminate and entrench inequalities, oppress us to a state of perpetual fear seem to be winning. There is a need for both structural and moral change to enable people to realize through their work a sense of value. Change comes when human beings challenge the status quo. That challenge comes through a larger resistance to the forces that dehumanize our common life. Although resistance is daunting though not impossible on one’s own, fruitful resistance requires solidarity. I define solidarity as mutual reflection. Solidarity is where our own resistance, our refusal to accept things just as they are, is mirrored back to us by others as we mirror resistance for them. Maybe initially this is our calling – our vocation to resist dehumanizing forces, but to resist from a place where we have a sense of being in community – in a network of multiple relations that tie us all together as a site of resistance. This is a rather modern way of describing what Benedict did in his world. The Rule comes out of an experience of vocation – the search for meaning and purpose in a shared life of relationships in community.

I am not a political or social analyst. I am a catholic priest of the Anglican Tradition. This tradition, so powerfully shaped by the Benedictine experience understands the presence of the Kingdom of God in the values of gratitude, generosity and commitment to service. These values are acted upon and placed center stage within networks of mutual relationships. Our human relationships model the life of God not only within the Trinitarian nature of God’s self but also in the relational nature of a God who is deeply, relationally present in the world.

For me spirituality is deeply shaped by an understanding of human individual and group psychology. The principal barrier to vocation – being called – is fear. While the structures of human society are always in urgent need of challenge. So too are the structures of our own inner worlds. These are the forces of greed as in a need to acquire material protections, aggression as in the need to compete, insecurity as in the need to win approval often at another’s expense, narcissism as in the need to control our own destiny through mastery over tasks, events and relationships as if we are the only person who matters, fear as in the urge to fight as well as fear as in the urge to flee. God’s call to us confronts our internal worlds as much as it is a call to challenge the societal state quo where so much of our work generates so little sense of being of value for us. Our internal fears dominate us and become the prism that distorts our true nature and identity. Unchecked, and unworked upon these dynamics powerfully present in our internal worlds, or as Jesus would have said in our hearts. These become the aspects of human nature that we uncritically mirror to one another in relationships marked by greed, competition, exploitation and fearfulness of the other.

The world of work is changing. Social commentators like Richard Florida in his recent book The Great Reset: How the Post Crash economy Will change the way we live and work point to a future where making a profit and maximizing production efficiency will need to depend on the quality of the workers experience. The quality of the final product will depend to some extent on the quality of the production experience for the workers. Here he contrasts companies like Walmart who exploit low paid and non-benefited workers and Best Buy where workers are encouraged to develop knowledge and use knowledge based skills in quality circles to enhance the quality and efficiency of the service provided. Improvement feeds promotion and quality of benefits. But the chief benefit from a Benedictine angle in the Best Buy model of retailing is the quality of the workers sense of value and meaning the enhancement of a sense of call.

Does a closer look at Benedictine spirituality offer the real possibility that we can make work a friend of the soul? The Rule ensures that we control our cynicism in the face of frustration. It counsels working at becoming mindful of the need to balance starting with stopping in order to become ready for what is next. In short to develop an attitude to daily life of listening, responding and becoming transformed within a network of mutual relationships that support resistance to the forces that dehumanize, both external and internally driven.

March 5, 2012 0

Vocare -to be called

Life raises the question for many: can work be a holy task? For work to become a holy task in the sense that St Benedict intends we require purpose in our work. Purpose begs a further question: do we feel called in our lives? In Friend of the Soul: A Benedictine Spirituality of Work Norvene Vest notes that work has the potential to become a holy task when each of us takes to heart a desire to respond to God and a willingness to see life as the place where that response is formed and acted upon. Is it possible we can experience ourselves not as being limited by lack of control but as able to interact with things beyond our control in a manner that enhances our deeper sense of being called into relationship with purpose and value in our lives?

One of the themes for me this Lent is the notion of wilderness (see my earlier blog on) as a place where we come to terms with the space in which our lives are actually lived. I call this space a wilderness not in the sense that it is empty or barren, although at times it certainly can feel like this, but because it is boundaried by an experience of limitation beyond which we have little if any control over things. So much of the fantasy in life is to equate purpose, meaning, safety, fulfillment in life with having control over life. I am suggesting that its not being in control so much as being able to interact with things that are essentially beyond our control that matters to us. We do this from the space of wilderness where like in the Sonoran Desert that surrounds our life here in Phoenix, life flourishes in astonishing abundance and variety through skillful adaptation to environmental limitation. Its within this space, this wilderness where we experience our vocation- our call to purpose and meaning.

So much of my own drive in life has been to achieve mastery over tasks and events. No matter how successful I become at this I am always afraid that the next turn of events will finally be the other shoe that drops and life will disintegrate around me. The problem here is that my life is all about me. I fill the whole frame that boundaries the picture of my life. There is no room for a necessary sense of being called, because I am the one always doing the calling. In short there is no room for a sense of being called by that greater than myself. Benedict understood that it is God who does the calling. God’s call is not only to the special, those singled out for purpose, but to all human beings. We experience that call in the context of the space where our lives are actually lived. Because this is the space where God is already waiting for us with an invitation to live life. That invitation awaits only our acceptance of being called. Vest quotes Frederick Beuchner’s description of vocation as where our deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet. I would reframe that to vocation is also the place where our deep gladness and our own hunger meet. We need to experience the dynamic tension between gladness and hunger, gratitude and frustration. In this tension like the life of the desert we adapt skillfully to life’s joys and demands. Principally those demands come to us as the need to learn how to more skillfully interact with those things that are beyond our control.

March 4, 2012 0