|
ADDRESS SUNDAY, 2 MARCH, 2003 Address given by Barrie Allom Barrie Allom is the author of Beyond Belief, Fraser Books (Chamberlain Road, RD8, Masterton, N.Z.), ISBN 0958233225, 266 pp., 2003 While leopards seek to change their spots, snakes cast off their skins … It may seem a whimsical title, but it arose as I thought of responses to serious questions suggested by Dick as being of interest to this congregation. Questions about where my experience has brought me in terms of my view of the world, my faith, and my understanding of the place of religious institutions in this age. But, before I plunge into the subject of snakes and leopards, first I greet you; good morning, and I say thankyou for the invitation to be here – it is my first experience of the Unitarian Church. My eyes and ears are wide open, taking it all in. Whimsical though the title of this address may seem, it is descriptive of ground that I want to cover with you this morning. At the outset I will talk about my experience, as a necessary prelude to understanding my world-view, my faith, and my thoughts on religious institutions. My journey has been chronicled in a recently published autobiography, Beyond Belief. I guess it is that which has led to the invitation to be with you people today. I will speak initially to the experiences running through that book, but since its publication late last year, one of the recurring queries readers have voiced has been to do with what has happened since the event that marked the closure of its story – the cancellation of my licence to function as a priest of the Anglican Church. I hasten to add – the cancellation was at my request. Some readers have felt that the book ended too abruptly – they have asked, where am I now? What do I believe in? Do I still go to church? In fact, they are similar to the questions that Dick raised at the time we discussed today’s address. So, what I propose to do is to tell you what has happened since the ending of the story in the book, which means telling you of some of the things that came to light as the process of writing the book went on. They have led to where I am now. The main theme of the book was originally to do with political confrontation and theological dispute within the Church – in this case the Anglican Church. I was at the core of more than one such event, but it was particularly the final one, the one that led to the termination of my ministry as a priest, that fascinated me most – now here was a story. I wanted to take it apart and look at its dynamics – theological issues of fundamentalism and evangelicalism versus liberalism and radicalism; political methods employed in out-manoeuvring each other;; the role of the ‘orthodox’ in all this. But as I used the discipline of writing to tease it out, and as the fires of anger and polemic died down, I began to see that the issues over which I had fallen apart all too readily, are not the bottom-line issues. It was my writing mentor, Lauris Edmond, claiming no particular religious faith, nor membership of any religious institution, who bluntly asked the question, ‘If this is how your priesthood ended, then how did it begin? Why the hell did you become a priest in the first place?’ It was no longer a question of whether I’d got it right or not, it had become a question of how I’d got it at all. Was religion like a disease – a contagion I’d caught? And, if so, what were the predisposing conditions for catching it? The search began, backwards, into the pre-ordination days, into the pre-church days, into boyhood and childhood days, and I made some momentous discoveries. I couldn’t believe how thick I had been in my lack of self-understanding; so much so that for many years I had been living a kind of lie. But it was not a deliberate or conscious lie. When I was about to cast myself into the trash-can of self pity over all those supposedly wasted years, there also came the realisation that the years were not entirely wasted; many creative and beautiful things had also happened. I was not back at square one, sitting in sack-cloth and ashes, but was actually standing at about square 60 plus, standing metaphorically naked, experiencing for the first time, in all its strength, the primal wind of the universe. Everything that had gone before, positive and negative, was part of that ‘standing’ – it had brought me to where I was. I’m not going into the detail of this – it’s in the book, and I wouldn’t spoil your reading of it. But what I had discovered, with growing chagrin, as the book-writing process went on, was that I had adopted the beliefs and practices of religion for at least two seemingly unworthy reasons – the deep-goading need for personal security and the equally strong driving desire for status. Arising from a childhood and young manhood that positioned me that way, I was prepared to take on, like a mantle, a whole system of belief and practice, largely based on trust and the recommendation of others. It warmed and protected and projected me through the next thirty or forty years. I suppose it’s no more than the story of an idealist, who having fondly imagined himself to have pure altruism and sacrificial motivation, discovered that he’s actually a very human human being – his bottom-line is ‘what’s in it for me?’ Despite its avowed intent to the contrary, the Church’s faith and practice appeals deeply to people of self-interest, like me. So, in a sense, the real issues for me, and I expect for many others, have not been theological, but personal. Theology became an accessory to a private agenda that I had with the Church as I worked out my personal issues. I was angry that I had made myself dependent upon the Church. I also recognised that the Church had made itself dependent upon me – we had become co-dependent. The Church, at its worst, feeds on the weak and needy – it too fosters co-dependency by exercising control over its members’ lives. Now, that is a very damning and judgemental view of the Church; it ignores the positives. Yet, in my case, the realisation of my own ambiguous motivation, plus the paper-thin veracity of the Church’s motivation, culminated in a moral imperative to get out. As part of this process I took up my growing interest in theological radicalism and used it, not to enlighten the Church so much as to punch a hole in what I saw as an enveloping membrane. I didn’t need a security blanket or a status provider any longer. I must stand on my own two feet. Call it arrogance, if you like, but it didn’t feel like that, and still doesn’t. Snakes cast off their skins. Where am I now? As I’ve already said, some readers have expressed frustration about Beyond Belief ending as it does, abruptly, at the point where I leave the ordained ministry of the Church. I’m unrepentant. I wriggle uncomfortably when asked where am I now? I look suspiciously through my snake’s eyes at those who ask the question and expect that they would like to get me by the tail and put me back in a box, complete with a label. And that is where I’m not willing to go. Labels, boxes, dogma, unchangeable beliefs and rules – they are the tools of order, yes, but more significantly they are the tools of control. Get a label on someone and you’ve got a handle on him/her: s/he can be managed, even filed away. My world-view does not include the sort of approach where everything is ordered and controlled, categorised and arranged in ‘tick-the-box’ answers. The guiding force behind my current spirituality is the Question, not the answer. Find an answer and it is always the beginning of the next question. The Question, given free rein, always leads into the mystical world of unknowing. I no longer subscribe to belief in a world or a universe controlled by some pre-existent being, external to the process; or by his agents within the process – no, not even when they are attributed with the very highest of human qualities. God is a three-letter human word for a purely human conjecture – nothing more. The world itself is self-regulating. Humans will make of it what we will – and when we’re done, the world will shrug us off; the Humanic period it may be called, just like the Jurassic, or whatever. ‘When we’re done’ – that’s the crunch question. When will that be? Humans are invested with a deep desire for immortality. We expect to go on forever, ‘world without end’, as a species, if not as individuals. We don’t reckon on being done. But the likelihood of our continuation as a species lies very much in our own hands – how we treat each other, how we treat the world’s creatures, and the fabric of the world itself. It is also becoming a question of how we treat the solar system and the universe out there. Hence I have a strong conviction that ethics and values are very important. I don’t think they are delivered from above. Societies work them out as they go along, but we are deeply indebted to the wisdom and experience of the past. Much of this wisdom and experience lies enshrined within the religious institutions, of which the Christian Church is one. Alas, if humanity keeps walking away from the Church in droves, as it has done, does it lose those values? Do they remain enshrined in a dying Church? Do those who’ve walked away, the snakes, have to start all over again and invent a new set of values? To do so they must first find common ground and some means of recognised association where the values for the future will be hammered out. Here’s the irony – am I talking about starting another church? – a new common ground and place of association (dare I say, another institution)? Which leads me to the last part of this address. A new religious institution starting? What about the old one; the ones the snakes have cast off. Is it really dying? Remember the leopards – yes, I want to talk about the leopards who, as the saying goes, cannot change their spots. That’s often used in a pejorative sense. But I don’t want to talk about the leopards disapprovingly – I have many friends among their number. I admire them. Maybe I wish I had the guts to be a leopard. They hang in with the Church, the old one, and try to change the spots. They’re well aware that the spots identify them all too clearly, as an anachronism in a habitat that has changed entirely from the one for which the spots were originally designed. To be relevant to the world they must get rid of the spots – appear in another guise to invite renewed confidence in their old institution. But I don’t share their hope that the spots can be changed. I believe that the way for a new spiritual association of people to form is the anarchic way. The Church must die before there can be new life. Nevertheless I admire those in the Church still – people like Lloyd Geering and Jim Veitch are very public members who stay with the ship and give many members a lot of hope. They are certainly in contrast to the snakes that change their skins. Given that humans will always have religious institutions, be they old or new, what kind of church is needed in New Zealand at this time? More to the point, is a church needed at all? Speaking personally, I have been cruising along for the past six or seven years without one, and much to my surprise, I haven’t missed it. I’m a spiritual solitary at the moment, and maybe that’s a necessary state to be in at some point in one’s life. But ‘cruising along’ suggests movement – who knows what’s around the next bend, what eventuality might require another shift in my thinking and attitudes? The door is never closed. I suspect that religious institutions in the future are inevitable – because we are only human, and humans must meet, and associate, and do together the things that express faith, engender hope, and stimulate love. Given that there is a church, naturally what I would want it to be arises out of my experience of the one I’ve left: • A church that thinks, and allows others to think, and respects their thinking. A place of adventure rather than a haven of security. • A church that truly meets – where people are valued and cared about, rather than assessed and cared for by a distancing mechanism euphemistically called ‘reaching out.’ An organism rather than an organization. • A church which offers words of vision, challenge and encouragement to live life to the full, rather than words of comfort offering a supposedly better life after this one. • A church that ‘prays’, if that word must be used, by contemplation of the universe – placing God, if it must, within the context of the universe, rather than addressing, in all too human language, to a being outside of or above the universe. • A church that develops liturgical forms to acknowledge and marvel at life and to celebrate the processes and the stories that have enabled life to develop. And now I must bring this account to a close. I will do so with a reading from the last pages of Beyond Belief – something I wrote in my journal several years ago: Quote from page 265 of Beyond Belief. I must go on, along the lone path, in faith. Faith is a kind of nakedness, a vulnerability. It isn’t a safe certainty. I no longer need a belief in an external heaven, or an endless personal after-life. This life, lived in fullness, is sufficient. I learn to trust the evolving process of this Universe. The Church gave the answers of a bygone age and I learned them and taught them, loved them and treasured them. But those answers no longer fit my experience, no matter how security-seductive they seem to be. The journey in faith is a series of questions, not answers. It cannot be bound by unchanging dogma about an unchanging God. My questions are no longer about God: they are about myself – ‘Who am I?’ To explore the question I must go Beyond Belief in ‘God’. The ultimate question is existential, rather than metaphysical or theological. While leopards seek to change their spots, snakes cast off their skins. Barrie Allom |