The Texture of Believing

Perception and Reality

One casualty of the very public agony of the Anglican Church over the issue of homosexuality is the perception of the unbelieving world as to what religious faith is. A description might go something like this: that to be a believer in the Christian religion is to adhere to certain ideas about God, conceived somewhat as a larger-than-life and formidable being who in some way controls all our lives and knows what’s best for us; this God has laid down the rules of human behaviour and is deeply offended by some particular aspects of it, especially in the sexual field; the rules, decrees and preferences of this God have been set out in the book he has written, called the Bible; and (because he is also a God of love) he has also taken the trouble to send his Son, called Jesus, to show us the right way and help us to do better. (There’s also some rather mysterious stuff about this Jesus dying to save us from our sins, but it’s not very clear how that fits in.) In short, to be religious, specifically to be a Christian, is to buy into all this, wildly implausible though it may seem.

The argument of this essay is that we need to get ‘under the skin’, as it were, of religious believing, so as to edge towards a truer and more sustainable account of what this ‘believing in God’ actually is for the believer. What sort of an experience is it? What does it do? What difference does it make? Why does it matter? Put autobiographically, I might ask why I am a Christian.  I will not be able to answer that question authentically by limiting my answer to pointing to external articles of belief and biblical texts or by alluding to what I have been taught. I will only begin to do justice to the answer when I testify. The practice of testimony has often been unjustly confined to certain kinds of evangelical circles. In these contexts the content and style of testimony that is to be permitted is artificially circumscribed. Only certain sorts of language, phraseology and dogmatic content are permissible. This is why, in the debate about homosexuality, the personal testimony of gay evangelical Christians who are courageous enough to make it is so crucial. Such testimony challenges the pre-imposed boundaries, and demands to be listened to on its own terms.  In gracious dialogue we can all proffer our account of what our believing in God, God in Christ, God the Holy Spirit, is and does and means. And of course, we shall draw upon the richness of tradition, including the Bible, to illuminate our testimony; but external authorities shall not in the first instance define the testimony that is to be allowed, before we even begin.

I have called this ‘the texture of believing’: the feel, the stuff, the matter. Only by trying honestly to identify and to articulate this can we open up the channels of communication, especially with those of no faith, or of a different conceptuality of believing.  I repeat: these channels need to be opened up not only between, so to speak, the church and the world, but also between Christian and Christian. For ‘it is important to realize that the remoteness of God is not just a problem for unbelievers. Modern Christians are affected, too. Many drift uneasily on the fringes of unbelief, habituated to worship perhaps but unable to connect intellectually or imaginatively with the remote God presented in many pulpits and in many a stultifying liturgical backwater’. (Scott Cowdell, A God for this World, Mowbray 2000). A few years ago, American singer / songwriter Joan Osborne had a top ten hit with One of Us, a song which clearly portrays a person well familiar with the orthodox believing environment, now struggling with the conundrum of the faith as presented in it. Does God have a name, and if he did would you call it him to his face? And does God have a face, and if you had to believe, could you, if this meant ‘you had to believe in things like Jesus and the saints and all the prophets?’ As a speculative alternative she wonders:

What if God was one of us? Just a slob like one of us? Just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home, back up to heaven all alone, just like a holy rolling stone? Nobody calling on the phone- ‘cept for the Pope maybe, in Rome.
This captures well the note of ironic detachment and bemused wondering characteristic of the half-in, half-out almost believer, more or less hanging on in the church.

Testimony and Texture

To get us a little further into this business of the texture of believing, here is quite a well-known passage from the writer and journalist John Diamond, who died of throat cancer in 2001. This was his final column for The Observer. In it, he responds to his many well-meaning Christian correspondents, who wrote offering him spiritual advice about how to cope with his illness and how to make his peace with God. He remarks that they tend to assume that he knows nothing of Christianity, and that in his present condition he must be unhappy. He wants them to know that he is in fact well acquainted with the contents of the Christian faith, but that he does not believe in it; nevertheless, despite this deficiency, he experiences happiness, which he describes thus:

To add insult to cancerous injury, I neither feel the need of- nor can I discover- any comfort in religious faith, and I take refuge, legally or otherwise, in no more than the occasional dose of mind-nudging drugs. And yet most of the time, and within the usual limits, I seem to be happy, even- given my willingness to accept commissions like this one- smugly so. What, people want to know, is the trick?...And the reason in this: This is what it’s all about. It’s about reading a paper on a Sunday morning while you’re thinking about whether you can be arsed to go to the neighbours’ New Year’s Eve party tonight…It’s about the breakfast you’ve just had and the dinner you’re going to have. It’s about the random acts of kindness which still, magically, preponderate over acts of incivility or nastiness. It’s about rereading Great Expectations and about who’s going to win the 3.30 at Haydock Park. It’s about being able to watch old episodes of Frasier on satellite TV whenever we want, having the choice of three dozen breakfast cereals and seven brands of olive oil at Sainsbury’s. It’s about loving and being loved, about doing the right thing, about one day being missed when we’re gone. And that’s all it’s about. It isn’t about heaven and hell or the love of Christ or Allah or Yahveh, because even if those things do exist they don’t have to exist for us to get on with it.

This is a striking example of a piece of testimony that vividly describes the texture of happiness for one condemned man.

Before returning to this passage from John Diamond, let us add some further examples of ‘secular testimony’ in widely read recent writing, to illustrate further the preoccupation with getting under the skin of the ideas and concepts clothed by religious belief and practice. Nick Hornby’s How to be Good offers a wry and astute commentary on the inner and outer textures of the relationship between religion and goodness. The narrator, Katie Carr, is a doctor with a career stuck in a rut and a marriage running out of steam, but no ‘major’ problems: her self-image is of a ‘good person’, which she must be because she is a doctor whose whole business is doing good to the suffering (including being the sort of person who is willing to look at rectal boils). But if this is so, why is she committing adultery and why is she finding her husband David’s opiniated rants (he writes a newspaper column under the tag ‘the angriest man in Holloway’) so insufferable? When David encounters an eccentric faith healer called GoodNews and apparently experiences some kind of (unorthodox) religious conversion that transforms his mood into one of unflappable serenity, full of the milk of human kindness, she copes still less. Guided by GoodNews, David begins to take on acts of selfless, one might say, reckless, generosity. He gives away their son’s computer to a women’s refuge and donates their Christmas dinner to the homeless on Christmas Day. He invites all the neighbours round and unveils a plan for all of them to take in homeless people and accommodate them in their surplus capacity spare rooms. And she resents it all: ‘I’m a good person, I’m a doctor, and here I am championing greed over selflessness, cheering on the haves against the have-nots.’

In desperation she goes to church one Sunday. Hornby’s description of the congregation, and the service, is hilarious in itself (‘the sparsity of the congregation, and its apparent lack of interest in anything or anyone, allows us to sit towards the back and pretend that we’re nothing to do with anyone or anybody’). The mad vicar launches into a chorus of ‘Getting to know you’ from The King and I during her sermon. But Katie is grabbed by part of the message: ‘God isn’t interested in you being artificially good, because that prevents Him from discovering you’. The reading from 1 Corinthians 13 strikes home: ‘Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up’. The elusive texture of goodness starts to feel a bit plainer; less heroic and exotic, more bound up with normality. Maybe the gulf between her ‘goodness’ as a doctor and her ‘badness’ as a discontented and unfaithful wife can be bridged after all. Now of course, this isn’t one of those evangelical tales of Christian conversion leading to repentance, forgiveness and happily-ever-after contentment with one’s lot. But what does happen is that, shortly after this ‘revelation’, GoodNews, as might have been expected, is revealed in his turn to have feet of clay, failing utterly in his attempt to be reconciled, by telephone and positive psychic energy, with his own estranged sister and collapsing in a foul-mouthed outburst of frustration. GoodNews feels a failure: ‘you know, it’s love this, and love that, and I fucking hate her’. It’s the breaking of the spell. With GoodNews gone from their lives, the good news is that married life can get back to normal; nothing heroic, nothing unreal, but just possibly some scope for an ordinary goodness that sits alongside folly and failure.

Here then is an agnostic, questioning account of what religious belief might or might not deliver in its inner ‘feel’, the difference it could make, the issues it raises about goodness, truth and human motivations. Another ‘secular testimony’ is found in the popular best-seller Chocolat by Joanne Harris. The novel dramatizes the showdown in a provincial French village between the life-denying, buttoned-up religion of the local church and its repressed young priest Father Reynaud, and newly-arrived chocolatier Vianne Rocher, exotic and mysterious with a past life of restless travelling, improbable adventures and a hint of paganism and witchcraft. Reynaud touches the lives of the villagers with the hand of death and denial, producing only lovelessness and bigotry. Rocher, on the other hand, brings release, courage, warmth and passion. The abused wife finds the courage to leave her husband and discover her potential; the lonely old man with his dog escapes his shyness and begins to socialise; the mollycoddled schoolboy cuts loose of his mother’s apron strings and starts to live; and so on.

The story unfolds during the course of Lent: for the church, the traditional season of self-denial and abstinence, marked by Reynaud’s cold, scolding sermons and campaign for the eviction of the river gypsies who have moored their houseboats in the village. But Lent for Rocher carries its pre-Christian meaning of the overture of springtime, frost melting, leaves budding, hope re-born, symbolized in the grand, alluring and sensual Festival of Chocolate she plans to coincide with Easter. Through her attention the leader of the river gypsies, no longer despised and rejected, attains a new found social inclusion and personal esteem. In a hugely comic denouement, the priest eventually succumbs to temptation, breaks into the chocolaterie on Easter Eve, gorges himself upon chocolate and falls asleep, to awaken on Easter morning in the shop window before the astonished gaze of the parishioners. He is disgraced, fallen, but humanized- rising to his new life of sensual indulgence on Easter Day. It would be easy, and ungenerous, to criticise the story for portraying an over-simple opposition between the cold formality of conventional religion and the glamorous allure of paganism. Better to read between the lines and get at the texture, again: what is actually happening in people’s lives through their contact with the chocolaterie and its mysterious proprietor tells a story of the inner meaning of God-language in a way that the externals of village religion do not.

John Lennon once wrote (or the phrase may have been Yoko’s, who knows?): ‘God is a concept by which we measure our pain’ (God from the first solo Lennon album in 1970). We may not know what Lennon thought he meant by that, and maybe we ought not to read too much into it; but it offers another illustration of a way in to talk of God that in some circumstances might open up dialogue where official church or doctrinal language might foreclose it. John Diamond has got the measure of his pain by way of the inner feel and texture of happiness he has described. In folksy evangelical language a Christian might even call it ‘counting one’s blessings’. In a psychologically darker and more austere context, Susan Howatch in her series of novels chronicling the careers of several clerical families through the twentieth century comes back again and again to believing in God as getting the measure of our pain. There is a believing that is, as it were, all on the surface, orthodox, faithful to the church, firmly remaining in role; and there is a believing that turns the believer inside out, demanding a facing of pain and an ejection of self-deception and pretence, in order precisely to serve God with authenticity.

All Howatch’s leading characters can testify in two ways. It is not exactly that one testimony is false and the other is true; the reality is more subtle. It is that one testimony stays with the roles, the appearances; the other reveals how hard-won, and at what personal and spiritual cost, the ability to sustain those roles and appearances authentically is. In the first novel, Glittering Prizes, we encounter Jon Darrow as the brilliant spiritual director, authoritatively and insightfully taking apart, and putting back together, the spiritual biography of the young theologian Charles Ashworth in his time of crisis. Darrow exemplifies the austerity, discipline and tough compassion of the Anglo-Catholic monk, with a dash of mystery and glamour about his charismatic gifts of discernment and psychic insight. Ashworth is impressed and deeply helped by his unshockable serenity, his firmness in the presence of emotional upheaval, his unerring instinct to know what to do. But in the second novel, Glamourous Powers, it is the turn of Darrow himself to be exposed in weakness and crisis, and to confront the damage and pain of his own past, to exorcise his personal demons. We see a different side of him, even if Ashworth does not. We enter the pain of a man endowed with extraordinary gifts that make ‘ordinary life’ next to impossible for him, gifts he might rather not have had, ‘glamourous powers’ that constitute a constant source of temptation and point of vulnerability to the devil’s entry; the self-same gifts that are also the source of his striking ability to help others in crisis.

The point is that both testimonies are true. Darrow is the brilliant, disciplined, gifted spiritual director; he is not a fraud, and this is not hypocrisy. But in order to be that person, Darrow is also the tortured soul wrestling with his demons and his God, getting the measure of his pain, with the inner texture of faith bearing witness to a God to whom justice can in no way be done by remaining within the safe parameters of the orthodox language of a churchly tradition. Susan Howatch is bold enough to employ an enormous amount of explicitly theological language and profound doctrinal discussion in the course of her project to create a fictional milieu capable of communicating the relevance of religious truth to a secular environment. Many will not be ready for so rich a diet. But in the words of the contemporary classic of dance culture, ‘this is my church, this is where I heal my hurt’ (God is a DJ by Faithless): if we are able to say this of our actual church, we are communicating a vital element of the texture of believing, and a potential starting point for dialogue about what God might be.

We need to find both the testimony, and the language, to convey what faith in God does, and how and why it matters; and often this language will lie outside the parameters of the officially authorised. The work of rock band U2 is well known for its religious content: take for example this piece of theology from the band’s most recent album, All that you can’t leave behind: ‘Grace - She takes the blame - She covers the shame - Removes the stain…Grace- it’s a name for a girl - It’s also a thought that changed the world - When she walks on the street you can hear the strings - Grace finds goodness in everything…Grace finds beauty in ugly things.’ Is this a description of what is going on in the life of the church on the corner? If not, why not?

Personal Faith and God-Talk

And so, telling the personal story is indispensable to getting the true measure of faith’s reality. To put it another way, the Gospel cannot be proclaimed by means of an objectified and decontextualized declaration of supposed truths that are simply given and non-negotiable. It is simply not good news if the church is heard to be saying ‘this is what to believe, take it or leave it’. There is a proper reticence about God-talk because it is all too easy to claim too much too glibly. To quote Scott Cowdell again:

there is an element of hiddenness to God which is part of this experience [of living in the world]. God is a conclusion from the evidence rather than a piece of the evidence; God is a way of viewing the world rather than something we encounter among the things of the world. The action of God is not a part of our experience, in the same way that other agents are experienced...we would not expect to find objective evidence of God that requires no interpretation and is open to no dispute.

The texture of believing is always of a living from the inside; God is not available for inspection as an external artefact or an accoutrement adorning the outside of the household of faith, so that it might be possible to step outside and point to God. There is, in philosophical language, no ostensive definition available. What is available, to accompany the personal testimony, is what the late Monica Furlong in her autobiography called ‘the myth’: ‘The interaction of the myth with our life is our experience of God…When living faith, and powerful interaction with the myth, dies in us, then propriety is apt to creep in in its place like a deadly parasite’. (Monica Furlong, Bird of Paradise, Mowbray 1995). Notice the wisdom of that statement: our experience of God is the interaction of the myth with our life. This identity statement is central to the theme of this essay. The mythos, the Christian narrative and all its ramifications through time, tradition and church history, its doctrines, liturgies and spiritual disciplines, its ethical demands and social embodiments, can all be pointed to as among the evidence for what we mean by God-talk. But it can all be so much ‘propriety’, like the house swept clean and garnished, without the harder task of articulating the testimony of its impacting on our murky life of the flesh. May God deliver us from the projection to the world of an image of religion as propriety!

Brian Taylor is an American Episcopalian priest who emerged from a period of spiritual dryness into a new phase of the life of faith in which he too recognized the need to give expression to the inner texture of the experience of believing as part of the rediscovery of faith’s vitality. He wrote about it in his book Setting the Gospel free:

Describing our experiences of God, we [are] describing the nature of God…[when] we become more reverent and relaxed. We become lighter and more playful. We lose more of our fear and useless, busy striving. We are more loving. This is a description of our own spiritual awareness. But because it is an experience of God, it is also a description of God: God is reverence, peace, light, playfulness, openness, renewal, freedom, happiness, truth, courage and love.’ (Brian Taylor, Setting the Gospel Free, SCM Press 1997)

The testimony here is much more light and airy than the struggles of Howatch’s clerics! But the point is, again, that Taylor is attempting, rather like John Diamond, to describe a quality of living, a quality in his case attributed to religious faith and therefore identified as God. There is no alternative route to the pin-pointing of God as someone or something, then to be somehow appropriated or believed in; there is only the experience of a texture of believing.

‘The question of God’, writes James Byrne, ‘is not a matter of a dispute about evidence, which can be resolved by rational argument and evaluation of the balance of probabilities. It is rather a question concerning each person’s response to the whole of their existence’ (James Byrne, God, Continuum 2002). Immanuel Kant showed that since ‘existence is not a predicate’ (i.e. not a quality or perfection like ‘goodness’ or ‘greatness’), it is fruitless to argue about whether God enjoys the attribute of ‘actually existing’. I suppose that if belief in God were a logical conundrum of this kind, two people might come down on opposite sides of the argument without it making a shred of difference to the actual life of either of them. In fact many people today, at a more popular level, would prefer it to be like this: ‘you believe, I don’t believe, it’s just a matter of opinion, let’s not get too excited about it!’ God is not, in this sense, an Object to be argued over. But where people meet in faith, and by faith, and with faith, God may be said to be the Subject of the energy that flows between persons, the transcendent reality that springs up unmistakeably and gives the assurance that what is happening is valid and true and good.