Book 3   God Lost and Found by John Pritchard  - SPCK 2011

John Humphrys the journalist “Along the way I have experienced the indoctrination of confirmation classes, the anticlimax of the eucharist, the futility of prayer, the contradiction between the promises made by an allegedly merciful, loving God and the reality of a suffering world. So I end up – so far at any rate – as a doubter.”

Henri Nouwen

“Do I like to pray? Do I want to pray? Do I spend time praying? Frankly, the answer is no to all three questions. After sixty-three years of life and thirty-eight years of priesthood my prayer seems as dead as a rock …The words “darkness” and “dryness”  seem best to describe my prayer today”. P.4

Pritchard writes

“The experience of running out of spiritual fuel and drifting helplessly on to the hard shoulder is one to take very seriously. We can’t run on empty for long. It affects most people some of the time, and some of the people most of the time. It’s hard to admit and it’s harder still to stop the slide. Going to church is meaningless except for the friendships. We find ourselves “outside” the experience rather than inside. We critically examine everything that is said or done in the service because we are unable any more to give ourselves to worship with integrity. And so the dark clouds which were “no bigger than a man’s hand” become storm clouds filling the sky and blocking out the sun. Why read the Bible when it’s so contradictory and at times downright unpleasant? Why pray when prayer bounces off the ceiling? There are better things to do than sit in a chair talking to myself. Bleak House indeed.” P. 5

Mother Theresa writes

“When I try to raise my thoughts of heaven there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul. I am told God loves me and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering so blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?”

The place of unanswered prayer is the place of transformation

“There are two primary routes to personal transformation and those are prayer and suffering. They both have the potential to take us to new places to shift mountains of debris in our path. The suffering of unanswered prayer combines the two paths.  Here then is a sacred space in which God may act in us at depth. Musicians are fond of saying that the space between the notes is as important as the notes themselves. In the dryness and the waiting we may become less arrogant and more humble, less certain and more searching, less selfish and more obedient.” P 11

He writes about a declining church

Average age of Anglican churchgoer in Britain is 61 and 48 per cent of churchgoers are over 65.

Lots of primary school children cease to have contact with secondary schools

We all need to go on asking questions

“The historian Daimaid MacCulloch wrote a piece in The Guardian addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury. It ended: You will know the saying of Thomas Aquinas which a wise old Dominican friar once quoted to me over a great deal of Irish whiskey, that God is not the answer, he is the question. As  long as your church and all other churches go on asking the question, they will never die.”

Suffering causes a lot of questions

John Humphrys writes “I was a young man, not much more than a boy, when I watched the miners of Aberfan digging for the bodies of their children after the coal tip crushed their school. A few years later when I should have been enjoying Christmas Day with my young family in New York, I was watching weeping mothers trying to free to bodies of their children from the ruins of houses wrecked by an earthquake in Nicaragua. In various African countries I have seen children, all hope gone from their blank and staring eyes, slowly starving to death. In divided countries all over the world I have seen the bodies of young men horribly mutilated by other young men for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong tribe or religion. And over and over again I was asking myself the other Big Question…where was God?”

The chattering culture has rejected religion

The writer Minette Marrin pointed out in an article in the Sunday Times

“It is a curious thing about religious people but they seem to imagine that everybody, believer or not, thinks that Christianity is basically rather nice and good and provides, as the archbishop says, “space” to think about humanity. They fail completely to understand that agnostics and atheists do not want religion – they find it intellectually incoherent and like Laplace, the French scientist, “feel no need of that hypothesis”. They cannot forget the evil that has been done in the name of organised religion and may actually disapprove of it. They fear blind, irrational faith. The suggestion of bringing religion back into politics is genuinely quite shocking to them. For some non-believers it summons up the stench of theocracy of the burning of flesh”.

“This context of functional or aggressive atheism can have a wearying and undermining effect on believers. In a lecture in 2009 Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said”
How can anyone still need religion if: to explain the universe we have science; to control the universe we have technology; to negotiate power we have politics; to achieve prosperity we have economics. If you’re ill you go to a doctor, not a priest. If you feel guilty you go to a psychotherapist not to confession. If you are depressed you take Prozac and not to the book of Psalms. And if you seek salvation you go to our new cathedrals, namely shopping centres, where you can buy happiness at extremely competitive prices.”  P.41

Richard Dawkins wrote in “Unweaving the Rainbow” that in the universe  “there is no bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, mo good, nothing but pointless indifference”

Disdain for Christianity

A A Gill was interviewed by Lynn Barber for the observer

Lynn Barber said “A Christian, as in believing in God, the God, that God?” Oh dear. Yes, that God. “You’re not, you can’t possibly be.” Now remember that she’d found out that I’d been a drug dealer, spent adult years wetting beds, smoking cigarettes out of the gutter, sleeping in dog baskets, drinking Benylin and vodka through a straw for breakfast and seeing spiders the size of Vanessa Feltz’s head, all of which had elicited no more than an encouraging ho-hum. This, after all, was only the tired, repetitive litany of contemporary celebrity revelation, but being a Christian, and working in the media in the 21^st century – being someone who’s been to the Groucho, eats at the Ivy, is known to public relations VIP lists – how could you possibly be anything as embarrassingly naff and hick and unbelieveable as a believer? Well, there it is. I’m outed, proud to be godly”. P. 43

2008-9 The emergence of dillusionment at materialism

Jonathan Sacks commented “Oscar Wilde was right when he defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. The richer Britain became, the more cynical it grew. It put its faith in a financial house of cards. It looked at house prices and thought itself rich. It created the religion of shopping whose “original sin” was not having this year’s “must-haves” and whose salvation lay in spending money you don’t have, to buy things you don’t need, for the sake of a happiness that doesn’t last.”

Howard Jacobson pointed out “So many men of religious conviction are men of doubt and so many doubters are men of utter certainty…The great failure of secularity as a guiding principle is that it does the opposite of what is says on the packet – it doesn’t liberate or enlarge us, it confines us to certainty” p. 52

ENTERING THE WORLD OF DOUBT IS A GOOD THING

“To have entered the zone of dark doubt is to have had to face the demons, the negative arguments, the wondering “if this was all folly”, and to have found an accommodation, a way of staying in there.”

The philosopher Unamuno “Those who believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, not in God himself.”

Dostoevsky “It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt”

KEEP PRAYING EVEN IN THE DARKNESS

“Prayer is harder to stop than belief – and my encouragement would not to try, Praying into the darkness may seem futile at one level, but it keeps open the possibility that normal service will be resumed. Or rather, that a “new normal” service may be resumed, because it is unlikely that anything will be the same after a significant crisis of faith. Prayer is such a multi-layered gift it’s hard to believe there isn’t some expression of it that won’t be possible for everyone with some inkling of the spiritual” p 59

Jesus more a lunar teacher than a solar one

Richard Rohr “The lunar light is much more subtle, filtered and indirect, and sometimes, in that sense, more clarifying and less threatening. The solar light can sometimes be too bright, and so clear that it actually obscures or blinds you…Jesus is much more of a “lunar” teacher, patient with darkness and growth. Jesus says himself “The seed is sprouting and growing but we do not know how (Mark 4.27)” He seems to be willing to live with such not-knowing, surely representing the cosmic patience and sure control of God. When you know you are finally in charge you do not have to nail everything down along the way.”

Desert tradition includes fifth century Dionysius the Areopagite, the fourteenth century author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and the sixteenth century John of the Cross. The latter’s teaching on “the dark night of the soul” have particularly resonated with Christians who have lost contact with God and waiting in darkness for long years.  His explanation is that when we are very close to God the eye of the soul has to dilate to cope with the fierce light, with the result that all appears dark.” P 83

 Mother Theresa shared the value of suffering in a letter to a spiritual companion

“I cant express in words the gratitude I owe you for your kindness to me. For the first time in years I have come to love the darkness for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth. You have taught me to accept it as a spiritual side of my work…Today I felt a deep joy that Jesus cant go any more through the agony, but that he wants to go through it in me.” P 83

SLOWING DOWN TO FIND GOD

John Pritchard comes up with lots of suggestions of how to meet with God – going for books, slowing down, meditating – looking at nature

St Augustine “Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book, the very nature of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your eyes the things that He hath made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven and earth shout to you, “God made me!”” p.94

GOD  IS AT THE CENTRE OF LIFE

“The American Fransican Richard Rohr is fond of saying that God comes to us disguised as life. In other words, God is not to be encountered in the margins of our experience but in the centre, and especially wherever we encounter richness of life. The mistaken relegation of God to places where strange things happen on the edges of normality has displaced him from the heart of human experience, with considerable collateral damage to people’s awareness of God as the source and centre of every aspect of life lived fully and well.” P 95

“The category of religion may have become too burdensome, but the category of “life” might be more rewarding” p.95

“It follows that what matters to God is not some optional activity we call religion, but life itself, all of it –science and art and politics and prison reform and peace movements, and why we keep destroying the planet and why we spend so much on what we ironically call “defence” and why England teams are so fragile and why contemporary films are so full of theological questions and so on. God’s specialist subject is Life” p 99

“Choosing life means something like choosing quality, not consumerism; choosing humility, not hubris, choosing courage, not the siren song of the crowd; choosing faith, not the convenient agnosticism of the age, and so on. It’s about going the long road with lasting values, and relishing the journey. Above all, it’s about love as a way of life.”  P.99