A Guy Like You in a Place Like This....

It has been a while since I have blogged!  We have moved to Cambridge UK in August 2011 to do a Post-Doc in the Faculty of Divinity's Psychology and Religion Research Group.  It has been an amazing journey so far and I am finally getting sorted enough to get back to my sporadic blogging.

I am headed down to London tomorrow to go to the School of Life www.schooloflife.com.  I have wanted to visit this little place ever since hearing about it from my friend Barry Taylor.  Alain de Botton will be preaching about his new book Religion for Atheists.  Atheists like de Botton are taking a spiritual turn towards religion and actually engaging with religion in ways that are textured and critical.  There is an approach in the 2.0 version of atheism of the need to understand and learn from the dynamics of religion.  Within this engagement is the acknowledgment that individuals and society are facing problems and religion can be a helpful dialogue partner.  Alternatively folks like Jack Caputo, Richard Kearney and Pete Rollins are introducing western constructs of religion to continental philosophy's notion of the absence of God, the concealment of God and the unnameability of God.  This is the religious turn towards atheism and doubt as central to the christian faith.  I think there is much to be gained in holding these two dialogues in tension.

Here is de Botton at TED - my guess is that his talk on Sunday will be cut from the same cloth.  It is well worth the 20 min:

Caught Between Our Past and Who Knows What

Barry Taylor is an artist, poet, theologian, cultural muser and has become a dear friend the past year or so.  He sits uncomfortably as the associate rector at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills California. I say uncomfortably because Barry occupies thought and presence at the outer edges of Christianity, caring little for polishing the relics of orthodoxy while somehow en-living its very intent. He dwells in the hyphenated reality (christian-agnostic-eastern-western-poet-artist-mystic-materialist...)more comfortably than anyone I know. This poem came from a homily where he was reflecting on John 1:29-49.

"There he stood, pointing, pointing

day after day after day

and only sinners came

unwashed to be washed clean

then one day he pointed, hand trembling

gaze fixed on one he saw

pushing us away in his direction

he bid us go, go

and there we stood, wondering, wondering and glancing back and forth and back again we began to walk hesitant, hopeful, eager, afraid we picked up the pace with one last look we saw john turn his back and we were gone, gone

the one before us stopped, stopped

and watched, and watched us approach

caught between our past

and who knows what

then he asked “why?”

we looked at him like children

both of us said “you”

and he said “come, come”

- Mike Mercer

The spiritual path is caught between our past and who knows what's next.  That space of uncertainty, the lack of confidence, our disorientation, the 'not-knowing' is the space where we learn to be human.  Yet our hands grasp for certainty and assurances, the two things that life will not offer and so we are apt to fashion these with our own hands.  Lesser gods that become the gravitational pull of our life. Yet still a Solicitation occurs that will not be extinguished, "go to the limits of your longings...flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in, let everything happen to you.."(Rilke) There is something irreducible that continues to call us into the depth of our own humanity, longing and life.