Being created by God……

In my last blog I declared that the first principle of all theology must be:

ALL GODS ARE THE CREATION OF HUMAN BEINGS

But I went on to claim that true theologians trust that their inadequate creations capture enough of the truth to point towards one who is beyond all worlds, who can’t be grasped by human thought.

Let me expand a little on that argument. I grew up in a Christian household and church community, through which I was given access to a tradition that included ancient stories, moral prescriptions, prayers and evangelical discourses, including the stories of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. These were transmitted to me by people who had adopted this tradition as their own and who tried to live according to its vision of life, through worship, prayer, bible study and practical goodness. Like all the generations of believers before them, they had adopted the creative imagination of the first believers, while adding their own creative interpretations of it, out of their own lived experience. They found it intellectually, aesthetically and morally satisfying to imagine God in this way, trusting that in ways beyond their understanding the goodness of the one beyond all worlds became a resource for their own living. They may or may not have believed in what are popularly called miracles, but this fundamental miracle, whereby the eternal goodness was transmitted through their human lives, without any supernatural magic, was central to their faith.

Keen eyed readers will have noticed that there is a lack of definition in my use of the word “goodness.” The Christian tradition defines goodness by identifying it with the character of God, which is revealed through a long process of development, culminating in one sentence in a letter of the first century CE, “God is love.” ( First Letter of John, chapter 4). Of course that ultimate simplicity contains many varied commands, illustrative stories and wise sayings, but all of these are to be interpreted in the light of the one simple truth of God’s love.

The fact that interpretation is required and that it involves the human experience of love, gives scope for the creative development of the tradition over time. My own conviction about the moral equality of heterosexual and homosexual relationships, which dates from long before this was the dominant view in society, was due to my own experience of love and my own understanding of homosexual love in people who were my friends. From that time I mentally excised from the tradition the ancient injunctions that told me otherwise.

But isn’t that a process of picking and choosing? Yes, it is. That’s what adults do. They don’t simply accept everything they are told, even by holy traditions they otherwise revere. But if the traditions need changing, why accept them in the first place? Because they are vast depositories of human wisdom, built up over time, that give access to a goodness which is beyond them. The very fact that they can and should be re-interpreted, as Christians say, ‘in the light of God’s spirit’ is evidence that they do give that access.

All of this means that as a believer I am an active participant in the tradition to which I have chosen to belong. I must use all my intellect, imagination, and moral conscience in understanding, interpreting, criticising and altering this tradition. I cannot avoid my moral responsibility by saying, with Martin Luther, that my conscience is in chains to the word of God, for it is through my conscience that I first of all recognise any word as a word of God. If it is not a word of love it is not a word of my God. Can I justify that fundamental principle? No, I cannot. It grasps me by its majesty and rigor, and I wholeheartedly believe it to be true, but I know that it cannot be sustained by argument. It is the wisdom that I have chosen because somehow it first of all chose me and has been creating me.

There, I have used the word which represents my understanding of my own and other religious traditions: they are collections of human wisdom, which point beyond themselves. I can understand why sensible people might dismiss the claim that they point beyond themselves, or deny that there is anything to point to, but I cannot see why any agnosticism or atheism should mean that people neglect such vast stores of human imagination, moral perception and wisdom.

Does all this leave me, as fundamentalist believers might ask, unsure of my own salvation? Well, yes, in a sense it does. If there is no God or God is not love, I will not be saved. But if there is, perhaps I shall. Somehow, all my life I have found people who were sure of their own salvation, whether Jesus – lovers or Jihadis, profoundly unattractive.

The creation of God….

Yesterday I came across a blogger whose work gained my respect as I read his stuff. He is Kenan Malik, who blogs at Pandaemonium kenanmalik@wordpress.com. covering philisophocsal, moral, political and cultural topics with an easy elegance and impressive knowledge. He calls himself an atheist and is apparently used as a devil’s advocate by a theological training college to sharpen up its students for the warfare ahead.

blake I also listened to a video in which he described his atheism as “having found no necessity to believe in God,” especially in view of the comic jumble of absoluely certain descriptions of God’s character offered by the religions of the world, and sometimes by different groups within the one religion. Obviously, for example,there is considerable distance between the God of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, wincing a little, can accept homosexual people as believers, and the God of many African bishops, for whom they are an abomination. Kenan Malik rightly observes that in spite of all the talk about unchanging truth and divine revelation, the views of Christian churches do change according to place, time and social mores. For Malik this is desirable because he sees the creativity of individuals and societies as the true driving force of humanity’s bumpy journey towards a better world.

I am happy to accept most of what he says. The history of Christian morality in the UK in the last hundred years, indeed even within my own lifetime, is evidence of both change and creativity. The Christian culture in which I grew up, while distinguishing itself from the puritanism of some Scottish churches, was quite clear that heterosexual intercourse outside marriage was a grave sin and that homosexual behaviour was deviant and frequently degenerate. God had created us male and female so that we could get married and have children and any departure from this plan was an offence to the creator. Sixty years on, not only my views but the views of many non-fundamentalist believers like me, have changed, in that we expect our grandchildren to have a number of sexual partners before they marry; and we welcome homosexual people as worthy members of our churches.

What has happened here? Fundamentalist believers will say that we have abandoned the clear witness of holy scripture to the will of God. They will argue that God’s will has obviously not changed, but that I and people like me, have changed and not for the better, since we have lapsed from true faith and perverted the truth of God.It is easy enough to make fun of the contradictions involved in fundamentalist belief (why do they not obey the clear commandment to stone adulterers to death?) but less easy to justify our view that holy scripture is normative for our living … but…er…only the bits of it we like.

The root of the problem lies in the bad faith of religions of revelation in refusing to admit the human creativity which has produced their sacred traditions. The creation story in the book of Genesis Chapter 1 has at least one human author, who chose to represent the faith of his/her community in these words. She was aware that her story was different from the various stories told about the creation of the world in the surrounding Canaanite, Babylonian and Egyptian cultures. Although the corpus of writings which contain her story, the Torah, claims divine authority via Moshe, the author of the creation narrative simply tells her story, without attributing it to divine revelation. If we read it sympathetically, we become aware that sentence by sentence, she is inventing God. I don’t mean that she was the first person to think of God this way; clearly she was representing a tradition of belief. But those traditional beliefs themsleves are a human creation, bearing the marks of their place and time of origin. The author of the Genesis creation story is a creative artist who in all probability, was the first to synchronise the stages of creation with the days of the week, including the splendid idea of God resting from his labours on Shabbat.

This all too brief analysis reveals what ought to be the first statement of all theology:

ALL GODS ARE CREATED BY HUMAN BEINGS

All systems of theology that do not admit this are in denial. They give the game away by decribing other religions as human creations, while maintaining that their own is guaranteed by holy books whose every word is inspired or written by God. But the obvious truth is that their books bear just the same marks of human genius, human lies and human brutality as the books of their opponents.

Am I suggesting that there is no God or that God does not communicate with human beings?

No, I am suggesting that the best and most honest human users of word God are aware that they want it to point beyond their best inventions to the one who is beyond all worlds and yet accessible within all worlds to those who listen creatively. Even the grandest theologies should put the word “God” in commas, to show that is not a name or definition, but rather a pointer towards a truth that cannot be fully defined. I don’t mean that theology should be vague in its descriptions, just that it should admit that these descriptions are its own creation, just as the description by contemporary scientists of the origin of the universe is their creation, and like them, subject to criticism and development.

For example the story of Genesis chapters 1-12 is of a creator God who fashions a good world, but makes the strategic error of creating a being in his own likeness, with the power to choose, who predictably chooses not to obey God and disrupts his plans. So from the 3rd chapter onwards “God” becomes a comic figure, always being outmanoevred by his best creation, continually trying to get a grip on a deteriorating situation, who ends up almost wiping out his entire creation in a flood in a pathetic attempt to gain the upper hand. I say “attempt” because no sooner has the flood finished and the rainbow taken its place in the sky than Noah and his family are back into the old routine, drunknness, sexual scandal and lack of concern for their creator’s wishes. Finally, this “God” realises that he can’t control humanity from a distance by threats and punishments, and that he must therefore persuade (!) them to live in his way; and to that end he chooses to begin again with one family, that of Abraham. If you think I’m exaggerating, read these chapters without prejudice. No unbeliever has ever painted a less flattering picture of deity.

The Genesis writers, as subtle storytellers, are perfectly aware of what they are doing. Even within their story they offer alterntive versions, such as the two stories of the creation of humanity, because they know that they are creating God and that their creation will, at its best, only point in the direction of a truth that cannot be grasped by human beings but which may grasp them. They tell the story because they think that, inadequate as it is, it contains profound wisdom for living.

Believers should not be dismayed by the notion that they help create their God. Human inventions can be both useful and true. E= MC2 is a human invention which is both useful and true, while also being subject to criticism and development.

That’s already too much for one day. I’ll continue tomorrow. All the images are by William Blake, who invented new stories about God.

UPGRADE……

For some time I have looked at the pop up advert on my Windows 7 PC that advises me to upgrade to Windows 10. As I have been reasonably content with my present operating system, I resisted its blandishments, until today, when emboldened by my wife’s decision to use Windows 10, I clicked the button to get the upgrade, expecting that it would all happen in a flash, or at least, rapidly. As those who have already made this transition will know, that was a mistaken assumption, as the various downloads and alterations are annoyingly slow. As I have absolutely no idea exactly what processes are involved it’s entirely possible that in fact the upgrade is lightning fast, given all the tasks it has to perform.

I!m told that if you decide to clean the old system out first of all, the installation of the new one is much quicker, as it doesn’t have to cope with the idiosyncratic collection of programmes which you’ve added over time.

I want to compare this upgrade with the event that Christian believers call conversion, meaning the fundamental change brought about by trusting Jesus and his way. Christian theology has seen this a a complete turn – around of your life, which in the New Testament is the Greek word metanoia, sometimes mistranslated as repentance. It does mean a change of mind and heart.

As a teenager I became for a while enthusiastic about an evangelical form of Christianity that expected true conversion to be a rapid event. Maybe not quite overnight, but certainly not protracted. It involved a true recognition of your sins and a passionate desire to turn away from them towards the mercy of God offered in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. If you completed this process of conversion, you were “saved”, you were given “salvation” which was a sure possession even if it required to be “worked out in fear and trembling.”

Ach, dearie dear, if only it had been as simple as that!

In fact, this promised upgrade, the replacement of my malfunctioning operating system with the mind of Christ, has taken most of a lifetime already and is far from complete even now. As I write I notice that my computer is telling me that the Windows Uphrade is 9% complete. Is my Jesus upgrade any more complete? I doubt it. Looking back on past evils and follies that I have recognised I am emboldened to think that some progress has been made, but when I recollect that at the time I deceived myself into thinking they were acceptable, I’m not so sure. Perhaps, no, almost certainly, there are similar faults in my present living about which I am again deceived.

If I were to give any details about these faults, my readers would feel they were getting too much information. It’s like other peoples’ sex lives which are always either disgusting or ridiculous. Perhaps it’s enough to say that (unfortunately?) my sins have not been great, scarlet, swashbuckling sins, but small, grey and cowardly, about which I could never boast even in bad company.

On the other hand, there have been times when I’ve realised much to my surprise that I have downloaded some of Jesus’ operating system and am capable of some goodness which was beyond me in the past. Along with Simone Weil, who wrote some daft things, but also expressed some fundamental truths with unmatched clarity, I believe that our connection with the goodness that is God, that is not of this world, is what keeps us human. In its absence, we become demonic, but even a small amount of it makes all the difference.

The difficulty of conversion is that the new programme has to overwrite previous programmes, some of which, however warped, show surprising resilience. In the case of the most stubborn, there may need to be complete removal. My computer said, ” in order for the upgrade to continue the following programmes must be completely removed. Do you want to continue?” So when I refused to change a particularly cherished fault, it didn’t merely leave one thing uncorrected, it stopped the entire process of conversion. There are no 98% converted people who just happen to be racists; rather, their racism has prevented the transformation of their lives by God.

So that’s why a man in his 74th year on this planet can compare his conversion to a computer upgrade which is taking an inordinately long time. It would certainly be no surprise if God, like me, has at times been tempted to cancel the process, as I presume that like me, God keeps an eye on what’s happening and looks forward to the finished conversion, when the thing will be more effective for his/her work and less liable to foul-ups and crashes. So it wouldn’t surprise me if God were to say,”Oh for goodness sake, life’s too short for this nonsense. I’ll put that one to the tip and get a new model!”

But the gospel tells me that fortunately I live in the time of God’s patience, so this slow turning of mine can continue, if I am willing to keep learning.

“Lord, for your tender mercies sake, lay not our sin to our charge; but forgive what is past and give us grace to amend our sinful lives. To decline from sin and incline to virtue, that we may walk with a perfect heart before you now and evermore.” ( Cranmer)

Coincidentally, my computer now says, “Welcome to Windows 10!”

Did you hear the one about Jesus?

In my newspaper this morning I read the sad story of the Scot working in Kyrgyzstan who made an online joke comparing the national delicacy chuchuk ( a kind of sausage) to a horse’s penis. This so annoyed his fellow workers that there was a strike leading to his arrest on grounds of racial hatred. It is unclear what will happen to him. I can imagine what the man is feeling. He put his joke online in good will towards all, in the sure conviction that all humanity finds horse penises as funny as Scots do. Yes, I am claiming that the scatological humour of Scots thinks a horse willy is usually good for a laugh and that there’s nothing offensive about it.

Unfortunately, in Kyrgyzstan………

Good grief what’s wrong with these people? Have they no sense of humour?

This incident is another indication of the danger of jokes, particularly in multi-racial or multi-religious contexts. Something that simply sounds funny to one group of people may sound like hate-speech to another. This is notoriously true of religious jokes. It would appear that many people are quickly outraged by jokes about what they consider to be holy. You would need to be very stupid as well as insensitive to make a joke about the Prophet Mohammed in Mecca at Hajj time. The argument put forward by the writers at Charlie Hebdo is that religious believers like all other people have to endure jokes at the expense of their profoundest beliefs.

I can see problems with this argument. What about the brutal humour of the Nazi press towards the Jews in the 1930’s? Or the sarcasm of the Red Guards’ media towards “bourgeois intellectuals” in Mao’s cultural revolution? There is clearly a tricky job for legislators in distinguishing humour from hate-speech. But as far as my own religious tradition is concerned, I hope that Christian believers can remain cheerful or at any rate patient, when faced with jokes about our what we think is holy. Sometimes we may be able to learn something useful even from an offensive joke.

For example:

“Jesus is dying on the cross. Indeed some of his followers even think he’s dead. But then he opens his eyes and gasps a word which is unrecognisable. When he receives no response, he tries again, but again no one can make out what he is saying. Finally with a supreme effort he cries out, “Peter!” Immediately Peter runs to the cross and looking up with reverence and pity, says, “Yes, Lord?” And Jesus replies, “Peter…. I … can……see your house….from up here.”

The first time I heard this I found it offensive. Yes, I recognised the contrast between the horror of the situation and Jesus’ banal observation, but I didn’t find it funny. I was offended because the joke seemed to make light not just of Jesus’ pain but of all human pain; that is, I though it a brutal and stupid joke. Later I realised that there might be a spark of genuine humour in the perception that being elevated on a cross let you see some familiar landmarks. Years later, I was reminded of this joke when I watched “The Life of Brian” by the Pythons, in which a vast gathering of people on crosses sings “Always look on the bright side of life”, causing offence to many Christian believers. I thought it shed an interesting light on some kinds of Christian piety which have turned a Roman atrocity into a routine image of salvation.

Coming back to the joke now, because, curiously, I found it the other day in an online collection of “Clean Religious Jokes”, I can see more clearly that it asks questions about the Gospel stories, all of which feature some utterance of Jesus from the cross. Believers who are familiar with the narratives have come to accept their truthfulness in spite of their inherent improbability. I doubt if most crucified people said much. In Jesus’ case, the narrative has already told us that the disciples, including Peter had deserted him. Perhaps some female disciples were present but maybe not that close. So who could hear what Jesus said, if he said anything? Perhaps the gospel writers’ piety – I exclude Mark who only records Jesus shouting in despair- the way they set up the cross as a kind of pulpit for Jesus’ last teachings, is itself offensive, especially to those whose lives have ended under similar torture and mockery. In the Gospels, the pain and degradation, the dust, the flies, the blood and piss of the crucifixion have been elided in favour of its theological significance. On the other hand, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” convinced me that a fascination with brutality and pain produced a narrative that was finally stultifying.

My own conclusion is that there is a real issue about how Christian believers tell the story of the crucifixion. We should probably avoid the hyper – realism of Mel Gibson, but we should not forget that we are dealing with an imperial execution, a “cruel and unusual punishment,” an injury to the body, mind and spirit of a man, and not simply an incident in the history of salvation.

I owe this process of thinking to an offensive joke.

PEACE..

According to the Gospels Jesus, like many other Jewish people, used “shalom” meaning peace, goodness, good day, as his greeting. It can be used simply as a conventional hello, or with more profound meaning. In John’s gospel, when Jesus says to his disciples that he gives and leaves them his peace, he notes that his gift is not to be mistaken for something worldly, as if it was mere good fortune. John places these words in the context of Jesus’ imminent suffering and death. Clearly most human beings would welcome a peace which has been tested but not destroyed by suffering.

Jesus’suffering was not simply the expectation of death. I don’t fancy death too much but I have known some splendid human beings, some of them quite irreligious who faced their dying with courage, indeed, even with humour. But Jesus was tortured and deliberately degraded. Could his kind of peace cope even with that? This year I have often mentioned David Haines, the refugee camp volunteer tortured and killed by Daesh. He managed to retain his dignity. Perhaps part of the peace shown by Jesus and by David Haines, came from knowing that the ending of their lives was in tune with their sacrificial living.

But it’s possible that Jesus came to doubt his life’ s commitment to God’s justice. Maybe his questioning howl on the cross expressed the feeling that it had all been for nothing.

That’s a true killer. When you are forced to ask if your main reason for living has not fallen to bits; that something you have worked for, loved, lived with, grieved over, may be null and void. My sense is that Jesus experienced this and overcame it. The writer of the book of Revelation, conscious of the persecution which might afflict his flock, used the word overcome, or conquer, to characterise the strenuous shalom that would see them through such suffering.

“Split all ends up, they shan’t crack/ and death shall have no dominion.” (Dylan Thomas)

“In the teeth of life we seem to die; but God says no. In the teeth of death we live!” ( Martin Luther)

If there is such a peace, then we should not imagine it as a feeling, not even as an inner conviction that cannot be extinguished. No, it is the capacity to endure the unendurable, annihilating nothingness, as if it were the love of God. I do not mean that God wills the suffering or excuses the evil that causes it, but rather that God’s love respects the autonomy of his creatures as long as they live on earth, and does not intervene, no, not by force or miraculous messages in the mind. But when God receives his creatures in death, then he wipes away all tears and welcomes them into a peace that is beyond their understanding.

So of course, the words spoken by Jesus in the gospels are always the words of the Risen Lord. The peace which Jesus promises comes from beyond all worlds. But I can only receive it as I walk with Him in this world, where even the greatest trust is far from certainty.

In imagine all this sounds a bit somber; far from the cheery sign off message appropriate to the last day of 2015. In fact, I’m not gloomy, I am speaking of a fighting faith. God’s peace to all my readers! Confusion to your enemies! And bugger Bognor! (The reply of George V on his death bed to someone who tried to avoid the issue by hoping that soon he might be well enough to holiday in Bognor. It is also my reply to all pious attempts to make life seem easier that it is.)

What we leave behind us……

The writer Brian Aldiss either invented or quoted from somewhere the adage that “civilisation is the distance between Man and his own shit,” which he thought mistaken and proceeded to construct a novel that illustrated a radically different possibility. I am reminded of this argument every time I see a report on my local beach at Monifieth, where the water is frequently “polluted with faecal material” in spite of the recently installed Great Outflow which is intended to take it all elsewhere, possibly Germany.

My excuse for this unsavoury opening paragraph is the increasing evidence that humanity has a maybe fatal difficulty with the waste products of all its activities, especially those which create carbon dioxide of course, but also with nuclear and chemical waste from agriculture, not to mention the plastic particles which already clog most of our oceans. A measure of how serious the difficulty is can be seen in the self-congratulatory tone of the decisions of the recent Paris Conference which agreed more stringent hopes for limiting poisonous wastes without agreeing a single binding commitment.

In spite of the romantic view that all this is due to modern civilisation which has destroyed the wisdom of our more remote forebears, I guess that from the start Homo Sapiens has been a tad careless about the natural world. The greatest destruction of the Caledonian forest we are now told, took place in prehistoric times, when it was cleared to create land for farming. There’s no doubt however, that the ruthless consumption of natural resources and deposition of waste products in earth and air and water, by private and state- owned industries in the last 100 years, is of a different order from anything that went before. Currently the most profitable and polluting industries try to persuade us that the environmental crisis is not as bad as some fear, and that as long as they can continue to pollute, they will try to provide a fix.

In truth I am not competent to write about these issues, and certainly do not have clean hands: I still drive a car powered by a pollutant (diesel) and would still consider using a plane to get to Europe.

The thing is I understand the human impulse to forget the mess we leave behind us, only too well. I can remember as a young man hiding the vast collection of glass milk bottles I had accumulated in the attic of my flat, only to be found out by a colleague who had taken over the flat and found my bottles when he tried to use the attic to hide something else. It may be the memory of such acts of shame that has turned me into a furious recycler, ever ready to remove rubbish from my house to the council tip.

More seriously I know that I have sometimes moved jobs when the problems I’d created seemed beyond me and could be safely abandoned for someone else to sort out. I know people who do the same thing with relationships. The attraction of being clean, of being able to make a new start, is very powerful when we begin to smell the mess we’ve made. Perhaps that’s why we have invented the phrases, “clean sheet, clean start.” The impulse to move on quickly may owe something to an animal fear of being tracked down by our spoor, but its human form is nearly always irresponsible. We hope something can be abandoned while knowing that nothing disappears, and that all actions have consequences.

But doesn’t the Christian Gospel, with its offer of forgiveness through Jesus, encourage just this mindset, that we can leave the mess behind us and be saved? Well, yes, sometimes it may have been misunderstood to mean just that; but in fact the forgiveness that Jesus offered released people from social condemnation and self- loathing to deal with what they had been, while reaching towards what they could be. The story of the corrupt collaborator and tax collector Zacchaeus, is of a man who is freed by Jesus’ advance of trust (forgiveness) to restore the money he has extorted from his victims. (Luke 19). In fact Jesus was always dealing with the mess that others had left behind. The diseased outcasts, for example who had been judged as suffering for their sins by the rigidly righteous; or the prostitutes, whom men had used and forgotten.

I like the gospel word “redemption” which originally referred to the buying back of captives or of slaves. It is used as a metaphor for the liberation Jesus brings. It is not a matter of “at one bound he was free”; there is a price to be paid. People who are in a mess have to be empowered to tidy it up or make reparation to others. Often they have been unable to do so, but somehow Jesus helps them do so by transferring some of his credit to them. Jesus loses some of his public honour in order to give honour to Zacchaeus, who in turn deals with the mess he’s made.

Indeed we could say, that in Jesus, God takes responsibilty for the mess he’s made by inventing human beings and permitting their evils. In Jesus, God shows that he will avoid no suffering to clean things up, that he tolerates no pollution at all, but fights it to his last breath, and invites human beings to share his passion.

So, yes, the ending of a year brings time for urgent reflection on the messes I make, so that I can help to clean them up. And , oh yes, which Council department do I contact about the state of my local sea water?

When the angels were gone….

It’s a phrase from the Christmas story in Luke chapter 2, which tells of the coming of the Angel to the shepherds, and the chorus of angels singing glory to God. Then it says that when the Angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds decided to obey instructions and go to Bethlehem to see the child. There is a vision, then the everyday world returns, in which there are no angels, and still these remarkable shepherds decide to stick with the vision.

When the angels have gone away into heaven, is when Christmas lives or dies. For if it is a brief moment of pretence, the families who rarely come to church these days, all present and smiling for our Christmas Eve services, and the old stories generating a glow of magic and goodwill that lasts till they get home, but not much longer, then not much has happened.

if I, after becoming utterly absorbed in the worship and the worshiping people, return to face my own accusing memories of countless follies in the past with no confidence that my future will be different; if I am no more equipped to cope with the terrible suffering of one of my family than I was before; if the fact of the plain stupidity of human beings including myself suggests just as messy future for the planet and its creatures as it did last week; yes, if the Angels have gone away into heaven, leaving no addresses, what benefit can there be in this festival?

Luke, the storyteller would not be impressed with this ineptitude. He knew that when the Angels went away, everything depended on the shepherds’ readiness to meet the new reality, just as it had all depended on Mary when the Angel went away, that there would be any new reality for them to meet. Of course Luke is writing magical realism rather than history, but every single detail is important. This one suggests that I have to get off my ass, and find the reality in which God is with us.

Did I say, “in which”? Of course, it should be “in whom.” That is, it will be present in human beings and in the creatures of the earth. If the word, the wisdom of God was indeed made flesh through all the processes of evolution, then I should be able to trust that it has not gone back into heaven but continues to be flesh here and now. This presence of God however is not some mystic thing that that exists in and under everything, it is goodness: the goodness God saw in his creation; the goodness of Jesus Christ in every person who shares his ministry to other human beings and his sufferings at their hands; the goodness of the Holy Spirit, who shows me that I am not on my own, but that I inter- exist with all other existences, including God’s.

Ths link to goodness is all that matters, as it tells me that hurt, oppression, violence, selfishness, greed, addiction, lust and self- righteousness, as well as all disease and suffering, are damaging and wrong and must in God’s name be opposed, healed, perhaps transformed.

I can sit on my butt complaining that angels have never had to deal with sheep tics, or I can make my way to Bethlehem and find a family treasuring their newborn, as families do. Treasuring the good God has given me, is where I must start again, and where I can learn again to treasure all the good God gives, when the Angels are gone away into heaven.

World class..

The other morning I had a phone call from an old friend Dennis Nicol, whose name will probably be unknown to most of my readers. He was on his way back to his home in Aberdeen from vital development work in Africa, where he had been offering his very practical entrepreneurial skills as a volunteer. I first met him when as along with others I formed a voluntary agency called Instant Neighbour, designed to use the skills of unemployed people in Aberdeen to assist its most vulnerable citizens. Dennis was employed as the manger and development officer of this project, which is still at work today, largely due to his genius for invention, hard work, and total respect for people in need.

He is only one of a vast army of people I know in Scotland who have spent significant parts of their lives working for charitable agencies, not to mention the very many people, especially in retirement, who work as volunteers for the same agencies.

At Christmastime I am deluged with appeals from charities that want my support. I am a habitual supporter of Medicins Sans Frontieres, Shelter, Amnesty, and Christian Aid. But I also give gladly to the local charities whose people engage me in the street and in supermarkets. Just this week I met for the first time representatives of a small Dundee charity that provides spectacular holidays for terminally ill children. Some may ask if that is really a priority, but I am simply impressed by the humanity and energy that gets something like that off the ground. There’s also something gallus and politically incorrect about it, that seems to me distinctively Scottish.

Scotland has a spectacular number of charitable agencies for a small nation and its citizens give a bigger proportion of their incomes to charity than any other part of the U.K., except maybe Northern Ireland. Who can say what influence this kind of wealth has on the quality of life in Scotland, and on the social ethics of its people? I’m sure that a little of the kindness, bloody minded determination and social vision of these agencies rubs off on the consciences of many citizens.

I am a socialist who believes in the welfare state, but who knows that the quantity and quality of state provision must be supplemented by many different kinds of charitable work that is not owned by the state. There has been and still is here a continual, critical, relationship between the state and the charitable sectors.

I think people should be more aware than perhaps they are of the extraordinary richness of charitable provision in and through my nation. We may not have a world class football team these days but our charities are world class! You don’t think so? Who d’ye think you’re talking about, pal? Want tae argue? Anyway if you are unfortunate enough to come from somewhere else and think you do it better – tell me about it, and I’ll celebrate your achievements as well.

In a world where the worst are always wanting something for nothing, the best are giving their something for nothing or for very small rewards.

That’s why a report this week on the very large salaries being paid to the CEO’s of some charities, even in Scotland, is a warning. The greed of sinful human beings and the sense of entitlement inculcated by capitalist society endanger even the best of people and institutions. Highlighting the true wealth of charitable agencies is one way of guarding them against corruption.

A proddy looks at Mary

For the benefit of readers who know nothing of Scottish culture let me explain that a proddy is a Protestant brought up to view anything connected with the Virgin Mary as Roman Catholic and therefore probably damnable. My own upbringing was more reasonable, softened by elements from the English Cathedral Christmas, but it stopped short of anything that might be called mariolatry.

Over time I have come to see the Catholic tradition about Mary as an answer to the male bias of mainstream Christianity, but as the wrong answer. Yes, Mary has become a kind of female incarnation of God, with her motherhood emphasised and her sexuality rejected. She is the apotheosis of the female eunuch, serving the male power of Christ and The Father and conceiving Jesus through the male power of the Spirit. She has been distorted by a deviant preference for virginity over sexual experience, and has in turn helped to bring the Catholic tradition on sexuality into its current antiseptic irrelevance to healthy people although it does, however, influence the aberrant sexuality of its male priesthood. She is a male dream of holy womanhood.

The biblical Mary is quite different. Luke makes her a feisty young woman, part of a family whose women,especially, dream of the Messiah to come, and are ready to play their parts in his birth and ministry. She responds to Jesus’ adult ministry with dismay and is rebuked along with the rest of his family for not giving priority to God’s will. She is also mother to Jesus’ brothers and sisters. She follows Jesus to the cross, and becomes the mother of the Christian community as part of the household of John the disciple. Her son James becomes the leader of the community of believers in Jerusalem. The biblical account gives absolutely no indication that she remained virginal for the rest of her life or that she was assumed bodily into heaven.

Still, even a Prod has to admit that she must have been a splendid person; indeed a Prod like me who doesn’t believe that Jesus had a son of God implant which made him different from other children, is probably the ideal person to appreciate Mary’s qualities as a woman and mother. She along with her husband Joseph must take credit for Jesus character and wisdom. The reasonable deduction, that Jesus’ parents contributed to his adult nature, undermines a magical view of Jesus as son of God, and allows us to begin a reflection on the God who works through an evolutionary process which culminates in Mary and her first-born child.

Yes, that’s a real brain teaser!

Meanwhile I leave my readers with a fresco by Giotto, which more than any other work gives us the human Mary and Jesus, and the bond between them. Mary reaches for her child from the midwife and her eyes look into his, and his into hers. This is the word made flesh.

Strike action

Jesus: Santa Claus! This is a nice surprise, but aren’t you a bit early? It’s santa1 only 15th December, but if you want to give me an early Christmas, that’s cool with me….

SC: Well, no sorry Jesus it’s a bit more serious than that, and I’m not on my own today…….

Jesus: Well, yes, hello Rudolph, and, eh, good morning elves, and yes, peace to you, Christmas Snowman, and …and…

SC: This is Theresa McConnachie, one of my most faithful mums….

Jesus: You’re very welcome Theresa, come in and have a seat. Cups of tea all round?

SC: No thanks, I think we need to get down to business….

Jesus: The floor is yours, big man…

SC: Well the fact is, we’re going on strike!

Jesus: You mean, no special parcels, no reindeer, no Santa visits, no snowmen!?

SC: That’s it in a nutshell.

Jesus: So what’s brought about this decision?

Elves: We used to cope alright with the demand. Kids would ask for one item or maybe two from Santa. But now the kids have got so greedy that we get lists twelve or even twenty items long,best of stuff too, that it’s simply impossible to get it all together…

Rudolph: And even if they could get it together, my team just can’t cope with the delivery schedule. I mean, I try to keep the lads fit, on the road and in the gym, with special skill training on the roof tops and that, know what I mean? And these are good willing boys, they’ll try to get a result, but the fact is they’re not coping. I’ve got a terrible injury list already and there’s no way we’ll manage Christmas Eve..

Snowman: My problem’s more fundamental. Not only are most kids not interested in snowmen any more, but also the snow’s not there. Dreaming of a white Christmas, my sweet ass! It’s years since we’d a real fall of snow at Christmas, so nobody even thinks now of keeping that special carrot for my nose. It’s global warming of course, but nobody really wants to know. But if you’re built like me, well, there’s a nasty dripping noise when I walk… sanata2

SC: Most of all, there’s the sense of entitlement. Just last week I was I a big store and this porky kid was demanding a new x-box thingy and I tried suggesting something less expensive, and he just kicked me, and said,’Just do what you’re told, fatso!’ so I kicked him back when nobody was looking, and he was so astonished he went all quiet, but someone had filmed it on a phone and so I was asked to leave under health and safety rules…

Jesus: Dear, dear, what a catalogue of troubles! But you’ve said nothing, Theresa?

Theresa: I’m on my own with two kids, so it’s always been hard at Christmas. I buy things early when I see them cheap, and try to teach my kids to be reasonable, but this year I just know it won’t work. They won’t get what they want to keep up with their pals and I’ll have borrowed money from the loan shark at terrible interest…so if I had my way, I’d cancel Christmas! It’s become a monster!

Jesus: I hear all your troubles and I sympathise especially with Theresa…..but I’ve one question: why have you come to me?

SC: Well you’re the big boss of Christmas, it’s your show like, so if we’ve got an employer it must be you. I mean if we go on strike you’ll be the most affected…

Rudolph: I said it was only fair to tell you so that perhaps you could change things for us….

Jesus: I see. The first thing you have to learn is that I’m not your employer. If you want to see your real employer I can call him for you.

Snowman: Yes, go on, why not?

Jesus: MAMMON COME HERE!

( A giant appears dripping with all manner of consumer goods, riding in a Rolls Royce, wrapped in tinsel and fairy lights, playing White Christmas, and giving away signed photos of Donald Trump)

Mammon: Ho, Ho, Ho, what’s all this about then?

SC: We’re completely fed up with your Christmas and we’re going on strike until we get improvements.

Theresa: Yeah, no more exploitation for us!

Mammon: You are truly pathetic, you little people! Grow up. Christmas like everything else is for money. Of course most of that comes to me and my fellow entrepreneurs, because we deserve it. Don’t imagine you can change the system, you get what you deserve. I have true worshippers all over the world, in every board room of every enterprise, and in every government. So don’t think a strike will cut the mustard. I’ll just sack you and make sure you never get a job again, anywhere. Now, get back to work!

SC: When you put it like that I don’t suppose we have much choice….

Elves: I guess he’s got us beat, boss….

Theresa: But you can’t bully me, I’m not working, I owe you nothing….

Mammon: I think you’ll find that I can stop your credit altogether. Then where’ ll you kids get presents? Think of it. The only kids in the school that got no pressies. How do you think they’ll feel?

Jesus: As far as Christmas is concerned you still need me. My name makes the whole thing OK. Without me, it won’t be any different from New Year. Without me, everyone will see it as just one big rip-off. So I say the strike should go on, and I’ll join it. And I’ll tell all my churches that Christmas is nothing to do with me….

Mammon: You wouldn’t dare! How would they survive without Christmas? Even as it is they’re going down the tubes, do you think they’ll throw away their best brand?

Jesus: We’re going to find out Mister! From today, I’m asking my churches to announce that I’m on strike with my friends here and that none of us will ever work for Christmas again. And for those who want to celebrate my real birthday, I might tell them the real date, one of these days…..