Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

What Scripture says about Exercise. Surprise: It’s Strangely Silent.

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Let's Run A Race - Birbhum, West Bengal


Running as fast as we can. Not because we are being chased by a hungry lion. Not to catch a train. Not to get anywhere. Just running.
Lifting pounds of iron, again and again. Not to build something. Not to stack shelves. Lift it up, bring it down, like Sisyphus.
Yoga. The dog pose, not to scrub floors, the tree pose, not to remove dust from cupboard tops. We imitate dogs running in a dream, but never getting anywhere. Doing all this because the three components of fitness are strength, flexibility and aerobic exercise.
How obscene all this must seem to abused domestic workers, to the hard pressed poor who end each day in shattered exhaustion.
·       * *
·        
On exercise, the Bible is strangely silent. Nowhere are we commanded to exercise. Paul says there is some value in it, but the value pales before godliness. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
I have known women who would work out, but not make time for prayer, or a Bible reading. If we are one of them, perhaps we have got our priorities wrong.
There is much about running in Paul’s letters, but it is, of course, metaphorical.
  * * *
Until the last 30-40 years, we heard little about exercise as a part of Christian discipleship. Now eating healthily and working out have been added to the definition of what a good Christian should do.
The law again, in yet another guise! And it insidiously adds extraneous things to the pure and simple love and devotion to Christ, which he himself commanded.
                                                            * * *
Why are commandments or exhortations to exercise strangely missing in Scripture? Partly because it was assumed that we would get all the exercise we needed in the course of our daily lives.
Planting, harvesting, shopping, cleaning, cooking, washing….
* * *
Life in the West has removed the physical labour from the tasks of producing food, washing dishes, washing clothes, sweeping houses, getting to stores. Even cleaning; one of the first things (sensible) women do when they can afford it is get a cleaner.
·       * *
·        
I go to the gym, and wonder if doing zumba to ear-splitting music, or lifting weights with TVs on, or swimming to music makes sense, when I could be getting my exercise digging or hoeing or cleaning. But I don’t clean, for the simple reason that if I were to take it on, it would get procrastinated until the task seemed impossible. If I pay someone else to, it gets done weekly. And gardening, well, that will not build up the fitness I need—or burn as much fat as I need to burn.
·       * * *
What a ridiculous result of affluenza–that our daily lives do not provide us enough activity to keep strong, and so we need to drive to gyms, or set off walking with no destination, or lift weights with no purpose, except to keep fit
·       * *
·        
I love the Benedictine ideal of ora et labora , work and prayer, a life finely balanced between the two imperatives of work and prayer. Manual work stabilized their personalities and kept them sane through the rigours of prayer, and study (another Benedictine imperative.)
My own ideal is to get 3 hours of mild physical activity a day to balance the prayer, scripture, reading and writing, and keep me sane and grounded, level-headed and not over-intense. To keep me on the right path, without wandering off on tangents. My goal is an hour of gardening, an hour of housework (which can include decluttering and finding the right places for things) and an hour of physical exercise. I can manage all three in the spring and summer, but it’s harder in winter, when I find myself more introspective, and more of a dormouse who loves to curl up with a book or laptop. Besides, it gets dark a full six hours earlier!!
But even if I did do all three, it would not be enough to keep me really strong.
* * *
I so wish I could find a Benedictine way of living, interspersing prayer, contemplation and writing with physical fitness through activity which serves some useful purpose.
All my adult life, I have longed to find a way to be fit and strong which would also serve some practical purpose. We are trying to grow our own vegetables, and have been largely successful, but would that make me strong? Gardening keeps you stronger and more flexible, but does it significantly increase fitness, not to mention burn stored body fat. Cleaning? Well, we use the cleaner’s visit as an inciting event to put everything back in the right place, and get rid of things we can see no use for. If I cleaned, I would not have that inciting event, and if I procrastinated it, the house would never be cleaned.
And an impressive fringe benefit of exercise is that it not only keeps me physically fit, but also improves my capacity for intellectual work, and my mental stability and acuity. It sets my emotions on an even keel, and significantly improves feelings of happiness. A healthy body was essential for healthy thought, as the Greek said, but I find it also helps with sane thinking and spiritual insights and breakthroughs.
I am still trying to see if I can find a way to be fit which is also economically productive, or does some good to myself, or anyone else. Open to suggestions.

But till then I will just have to exercise.

Ambivalence on Remembrance Day: The old lie, Dulce est Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori

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If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen.

Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori. “How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country!” (the “old lie” first written by Horace).

We had a two minute silence at Bible Study today as we played Radio Four and remembered 11 o’clock, on the 11th of November, 1918.
I feel very uncomfortable and ambivalent on Remembrance Day, or Veterans Day, as it’s known in the US.
The conscription after 1916 during the First World War was a tragedy, and those who lost their lives unnecessarily because of inept politicians and their inept political manoeuvring should be mourned.
The Allied involvement in the Second World War was certainly among the few unambiguously good military actions, and one can be whole-heartedly grateful to those who fought and lost their lives in the attempt to stop Hitler and Hirohito, sooner rather than later.
My father lived in England from 1944 to 1952, and was an air-raid warden in London in 1944-45. We grew up enthralled by his memories, and for years, I read everything I came across on the Second World War.
It struck me, though, that evil is self-limiting. That the Third Reich would have collapsed anyway. It was expanding too fast; was too hated in the countries it conquered; was expending too many resources in their mad quest for the genocidal “Final Solution.” But still, they did need to be stopped as soon as possible.
However, I cannot say that Britain’s involvement in the “small wars” since 1945, –the Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan among them has been unambiguously good. The Vernacular Vicar writes, “Last Sunday, among the list of those who had died in our community, I read out the considerable list of more young men and women who have died for their country during 2011.”
However, how can we say that those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan have died for their country? How has their country been served by their deaths, so sad for their family and friends? Sadly, the situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan is arguably worse that before the Anglo-American invasions. Both Britain and America would, arguably, have been better served if their young people had stayed home, and served their countries at home.
Neither Britain nor America (to mention the two countries in which I’ve listed for the last 27 years) appears to be in any present danger of invasion or attack, now or in the foreseeable future. The military is now a profession like any other. The young people sent to the middle east are not really keeping those at home safe, nor are they giving their lives for those at home, despite the rhetoric we hear. Should the military be more celebrated than those who have chosen any other profession?
* * *
What aspect of Remembrance Day do I find hardest? Well, of course, celebrating those who lost their lives in the India, or in the Commonwealth, or in the cause of the British Empire.
The British Empire, I believe, was a bad thing, not an unambiguously bad thing–but a bad thing. Its raison d’etre was the transfer of wealth from the colonized countries to the mother country. It did not exist for the good of the colonized countries, but for the good of the mother country. It has taken the colonized countries decades to recover from the British Empire, and few have done so completely.
The dramatic difference in living standards in England and the empire (India, Pakistan, Malaya, Sudan, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Jamaica etc.) makes it clear that the British Empire was a case of exploitation pure and simple. however it might have been couched as “the white man’s burden” to civilize “lesser breeds without the law.”
So for those who died fighting for the Empire, I do not mourn.
Though the Empire itself, I believe, existed for unambiguously bad reasons–exploitation–it was not itself unambiguously bad. These are some of the things which possibly came to India sooner than they would have because of the British Empire: railways, good universities, a good legal system, a parliamentary democracy, and the English language.
Ah, the English language in which I now write! For that, I could forgive the British Empire a lot, though it is not mine to forgive.
· * *
Last thought on Remembrance Day.
Has any Christian country ever tried to practice the non-violence espoused in the Sermon on the Mount? To go an extra mile with a bullying soldier. To give a cloak, if a coat is taken. To present the other cheek when slapped.
A society which practiced non-violence would not need an army, and would save billions of pounds.
Would it be instantly invaded? Or do innocence, goodness and non-violence have their own power, protection, and efficacy as fairy tales of all nations tell us, and as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Desmond Tutu in recent times have shown us?
I would love to know, and I guess I can only find out by experimenting with it in my own life.
The only reason Jesus, in good conscience, advocated gentleness and non-violence in the face of a brutal and bullying occupying power was because he knew his disciples were acting in a play written by someone else, his father who was writing the play and would control how it all turned out.
And how did it turn out? The Romans? My daughter studied some of their words for her Latin GCSE, and recited the old chestnut with feeling, Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans, and now it’s killing me.
But the words of Jesus and his disciples? I met this morning to discuss them in North Oxford with a brilliant, varied group of 14 women—a doctor, an English professor, two wives of principals of Oxford Colleges, assorted academics and wives, charity and health workers, and well, a blogger J. The words of Jesus are still as alive and as vital as when they were spoken. And as challenging.
“Non-violence when confronted with our enemies?” some of his first listeners must have said. “Vis-à-vis the Romans? Is he nuts? We need to get them out of Israel.”
And others must have said, “Well, he also talks of his father who can send twelve legions. He sounds like a man who knows what he is talking about. I think I would like to try this man Jesus’s way.”
And well, so would I.

A Way of Writing by William Stafford

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A Way of Writing

by William Stafford

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions, or–but wait!
Back in school, from the first when I began to try to write things, I felt this richness. One thing would lead to another; the world would give and give. Now, after twenty years or so of trying, I live by that certain richness, an idea hard to pin, difficult to say, and perhaps offensive to some. For there are strange implications in it.
One implication is the importance of just plain receptivity. When I write, I like to have an interval before me when I am not likely to be interrupted. For me, this means usually the early morning, before others are awake. I get pen and paper, take a glance out of the window (often it is dark out there), and wait. It is like fishing. But I do not wait very long, for there is always a nibble–and this is where receptivity comes in. To get started I will accept anything that occurs to me. Something always occurs, of course, to any of us. We can’t keep from thinking. Maybe I have to settle for an immediate impression: it’s cold, or hot, or dark, or bright, or in between! Or well, the possibilities are endless. If I put down something, that thing will help the next thing come, and I’m off. If I let the process go on, things will occur to me that were not at all in my mind when I started. These things, odd or trivial as they may be, are somehow connected. And if I let them string out, surprising things will happen.
If I let them string out…. Along with initial receptivity, then, there is another readiness: I must be willing to fail. If I am to keep on writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards. I must get into action and not let anything stop me, or even slow me much. By “standards” I do not mean “correctness” spelling, punctuation, and so on. These details become mechanical for anyone who writes for a while. I am thinking about such matters as social significance, positive values, consistency, etc…. I resolutely disregard these. Something better, greater, is happening! I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on. I am making something new, something that has not been judged before. Later others–and maybe I myself–will make judgments. Now, I am headlong to discover. Any distraction may harm the creating.

So, receptive, careless of failure, I spin out things on the page. And a wonderful freedom comes. If something occurs to me, it is all right to accept it. It has one justification: it occurs to me. No one else can guide me. I must follow my own weak, wandering, diffident impulses.

A strange bonus happens. At times, without my insisting on it, my writings become coherent; the successive elements that occur to me are clearly related. They lead by themselves to new connections. Sometimes the language, even the syllables that happen along, may start a trend. Sometimes the materials alert me to something waiting in my mind, ready for sustained attention. At such times, I allow myself to be eloquent, or intentional, or for great swoops (Treacherous! Not to be trusted!) reasonable. But I do not insist on any of that; for I know that back of my activity there will be the coherence of my self, and that indulgence of my impulses will bring recurrent patterns and meanings again.

This attitude toward the process of writing creatively suggests a problem for me, in terms of what others say. They talk about “skills” in writing. Without denying that I do have experience, wide reading, automatic orthodoxies and maneuvers of various kinds, I still must insist that I am often baffled about what “skill” has to do with the precious little area of confusion when I do not know what I am going to say and then I find out what I am going to say. That precious interval I am unable to bridge by skill.

What can I witness about it? It remains mysterious, just as all of us must feel puzzled about how we are so inventive as to be able to talk along through complexities with our friends, not needing to plan what we are going to say, but never stalled for long in our confident forward progress. Skill? If so, it is the skill we all have, something we must have learned before the age of three or four.

A writer is one who has become accustomed to trusting that grace, or luck, or–skill.

Yet another attitude I find necessary: most of what I write, like most of what I say in casual conversation, will not amount to much. Even I will realize, and even at the time, that it is not negotiable. It will be like practice. In conversation I allow myself random remarks–in fact, as I recall, that is the way I learned to talk–so in writing I launch many expendable efforts. A result of this free way of writing is that I am not writing for others, mostly; they will not see the product at all unless the activity eventuates in something that later appears to be worthy. My guide is the self, and its adventuring in the language brings about communication.

This process-rather-than-substance view of writing invites a final, dual reflection:
  1. Writers may not be special or talented in any usual sense. They are simply engaged in sustained use of a language skill we all have. Their “creations” come about through confident reliance on stray impulses that will, with trust, find occasional patterns that are satisfying.
  2. But writing itself is one of the great, free human activities. There is scope for individuality, and elation, and discovery, in writing. For the person who follows with trust and forgiveness what occurs to him, the world remains always ready and deep, an inexhaustible environment, with the combined vividness of an actuality and flexibility of a dream. Working back and forth between experience and thought, writers have more than space and time can offer. They have the whole unexplored realm of human vision. 

Two Good Voices in My Head. Two Pills: Red and Blue

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Image Credit

In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, good and bad angels speak persuasively to Faustus. He chooses the path of adventure, exploration and experience.

Two voices, saying different and opposite things. It’s a more common experience than I had realised. Billy Graham had a crisis with two voices--reason and Charles Templeton; orthodoxy and Henrietta Mears. He chose to believe in the literal inspiration of the Scriptures. He moved upwards into fame and adulation. Templeton lost his faith, and ended up bitter, because you see, he really did love Jesus, and felt he had lost something.

I have two voices in my head both two real life friends, both Christians. One voice says “Don’t question. That’s too painful.” The other says, “Think for yourself.”
Hmm.
Our family watched “The Matrix,” a couple of days ago, at the insistence of my daughter, Zoe, 17. Morpheus offers Neo two pills: take the blue pill, and continue believing in what you’ve always believed. Take the red pill, and you will see truth.
Of course, there is always the possibility that one can take the red pill, and continue believing what you’ve always believed, if what you believed was the truth.
So…blue pill or red pill? Which should I take? Continue believing what I’ve been taught?

Or pray, think, study scripture and think for myself? Encounter Scripture for myself. One is easy; one can be difficult and painful.

But, of course, if the truths of evangelical and Christian orthodoxy are the truth, they will withstand questioning. And Christ himself will withstand all questioning, of that I have no doubt!

So today, in my quiet time, one of those blessed times, in which I can actually see the face of Jesus (with the eyes of faith!) I asked Christ the question.
Should I pray, think, study and explore and encounter Scripture for myself? Blue pill or red pill?
                                                                           * * *
The interesting thing about asking Christ questions is that he does not give two people the same answer. His varied responses to different people as recorded in Scripture stagger me.
And in Christian memoir, autobiography and biography, I’ve noticed the same thing: Christ’s hugely varied responses to the same existential questions put to him by wildly different people.
So, I ask him my question, and I see him smile. And I know his answer.
I am instinctively a rebel. I have a restless mind. I cannot but think for myself.
T.S. Eliot writes in Little Gidding,
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
May it be so for me.

Human Sacrifices: The Nature of Idolatry

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Image: Tash and Aslan

When I was twenty-something, young and ambitious, I read this statement by Willa Cather, The God of Art demands human sacrifices.
“Okay, then,” I said, understanding that achieving mastery, artistry, would take a total commitment.
For these were the kind of statements which I heard in my Creative Writing masters and doctoral program: The artist’s life is the triumph of sacrifice, said the critic, Helen Vendler. The magisterial Henry James wrote, “If one would do the best he can with his pen, there is one word he must inscribe on his banner, and that word is solitude.
Mad, wasn’t it, that the ideal of writing well so consumed me, and consume me it did. I worked with a top editor from Harper and Row, Ted Solataroff, and caught the interest of a top agent, Virginia Barber in my early thirties. I completed the first draft of a manuscript through my first pregnancy, and the first year of my baby’s life. When it was turned down in 1995, I remember lying face down on the floor, and saying to myself, “I want to die.” That was only time I have ever felt like that.
However, I submitted the best chapters for an NEA award, only 30 of which were given annually then. And it won–a fat cheque of $20,000. And I got invitations to writers’ colonies, The Vermont Studio Centre, and The Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts. Where the visiting writers said I should shrink the first manuscript (about working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta down to 50-60 pages from 200+) and instead write a memoir of a Catholic childhood in India. Which I did, and then, as I’ve written here, balked again at agent/editor requests for changes, and took a break from writing.
* * *
And it took that break for that all-consuming idol of writing to die. It used to be the biggest barrier in my spiritual life: that fact that what I wanted more than anything was to write.
It’s still the case. I have a very simple bucket list of things I definitely want to do (as opposed to be) before I die. It has just one thing on it. Just one. I want to write. That’s it.
* * *
But more important than that, far more important is that I want to know Christ. I want to dwell in Christ. I want to be subsumed in Christ. I want Christ to dwell in me, every part of me, the writer part, as well as the rest of me.
The writer part of me is now subsumed in the Christ-lover and Christ-follower. It is not a little rebel part of me that stands outside apart, arms crossed, scowling at the totality of devotion Christ demands. I write because that is the vocation given to me, part of my Christian discipleship. And how long I took to arrive at this point!
In fact, I write partly through Christ’s energy and inspiration. Before, writing felt like running off and doing my own pleasurable thing, when I felt the Christian thing might have been housework, or something dreary like that.
How long it has taken me to come to this point, to rely on God’s power and inspiration to write, to feel that my writing is in the force field of God’s presence, power and blessing, and is flowing with God’s purposes for me (and my readers) rather than a guilty self-indulgence.
And now, writing is joy, instead of guilt and conflict. God has mercifully cleared the plate for me to write, as my sweet, husband, Roy, has agreed to stay home and run our home, lives, children and business, so that I can have the day clear to write. Getting back into creative work is not easy after the 4-5 year break from reading and writing that I took to establish the business, but I am gradually doing it. It is the right time. Before I felt I was grabbing time to write. Now, it is given to me.
He who loves his writing more than me is not worthy of me. He who loves his blog more than me is not worthy of me. I used to read Matthew 10:37 etc. and sadly say to myself: Well, I am not worthy. Well, I am still not, of course, but at least, I can say truthfully that, as far as I know, I no longer love my writing or anything else more than Christ.
* * *
In The Last Battle, Lewis points out the relentlessness of anything we worship except Christ. The ass who pretends to be Aslan demands more and more including the squirrels’ precious winter hoard of nuts. His demands will never be satisfied, just as the demands of anything we set up in the place of Christ will never be satisfied–a business, a career, sex, amazing children, money, fame, success…
* * *
Our spirits are eternal things. Infinite in that they will live forever. (Also infinite in that there has been no proven limit to man’s capacity to learn, to memorize, to invent or create.)
As such, only the infinite will satisfy our thirst. Only God will satisfy our thirst.
* * *
The secular writer David Forster Wallace writes brilliantly on this. Anything except God that you you worship will eat you alive, he says. He continues,
      And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it Jesus Christ or Allah, be it YHWH or the Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.
Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally kill you.
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
* * *
I truly don’t want to love anything more than Christ. And if I do, Lord, quickly set flame to it.
Because you alone can satisfy my soul as with the richest of food.
And because as C.S. Lewis says, “Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”

A Tale of Two Evangelists–Belief in Inerrancy Makes All the Difference in the World

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Charles Templeton, Left, Billy Graham, Right
As described in my post Inerrancy and Me, Billy Graham’s decision to believe in the divine inspiration of Scripture led him on to a joyful and fruitful ministry.

When Graham was young though, most believed that his dear friend, Charles Templeton, would go much further than Graham, and be even more renowned.
However, Templeton–and this progression is common–first lost his faith in the divine inspiration of scripture, and then, sadly, in scripture itself.
And this loss was heartbreaking, not least of all for Templeton himself. Lee Stroebel in The Case for Faith tells us his tale of two evangelists. I am quoting the chapter in full. If you are pressed for time, read the moving conclusion in which Templeton bursts into tears as he thinks of Jesus, and stammers, “I miss him.”
INTRODUCTION: THE CHALLENGE OF FAITH

Christian theism must be rejected by any person with even a shred of respect for reason.
-George H. Smith, atheist [1]

Christian faith is not an irrational leap. Examined objectively, the claims of the Bible are rational propositions well supported by reason and evidence.
-Charles Colson, Christian [2]

William Franklin Graham steadied himself by gripping both sides of the podium. He was eighty years old, fighting Parkinson’s disease, but he stared intently at the throngs inside the RCA Dome in Indianapolis and spoke in a steady, forceful voice. There was no hint of hesitation, no uncertainty or ambiguity. His sermon was essentially the same simple and direct message he had been preaching for fifty years.
He referenced the chaos and violence around the world, and he zeroed in on the anguish, pain, and confusion in the hearts of individuals. He talked about sin, about forgiveness, about redemption, and about the loneliness, despair, and depression that weigh so many people down.
“All of us want to be loved,” he said in his familiar North Carolina cadence as he approached the conclusion of his talk. “All of us want somebody to love us. Well, I want to tell you that God loves you. He loves you so much that he gave us his Son to die on the cross for our sins. And he loves you so much that he will come into your life and change the direction of your life and make you a new person, whoever you are.
“Are you sure that you know Christ? There comes a moment in which the Spirit of God convicts you, calls you, speaks to you about opening your heart and making certain of your relationship to God. And hundreds of you tonight are not sure. You’d like to be sure. You’d like to leave here tonight knowing that if you died on the way home, you would be ready to meet God.”
So he urged them to come. And they did–at first, there was a trickle of people, and then the floodgates opened, with individuals, couples, and entire families pouring into the empty space in front of the platform. Soon they were shoulder-to-shoulder, the crowd wrapping around the sides of the stage, nearly three thousand in all. Some were weeping, gripped by somber conviction; others stared downward, still stewing in shame over their past; many were smiling from ear to ear–liberated, joyous…home, finally.
One married woman was typical. “My mom died of cancer when I was young, and at the time I thought I was being punished by God,” she told a counselor. “Tonight I realized that God loves me–it is something that I’ve known but couldn’t really grasp. Tonight a peacefulness came into my heart.”[3]
What is faith? There would have been no need to define it for these people on that sultry June night. Faith was almost palpable to them. They reached out to God almost as if they were expecting to physically embrace him. Faith drained them of the guilt that had oppressed them. Faith replaced despondency with hope. Faith infused them with new direction and purpose. Faith unlocked heaven. Faith was like cool water soaking their parched soul.
But faith isn’t always that easy, even for people who desperately want it. Some people hunger for spiritual certainty, yet something hinders them from experessing it. They wish they could taste that kind of freedom, but obstacles block their paths. Objections pester them. Doubts mock them. Their hearts want to soar to God; their intellects keep them securely tied down.
They see the television coverage of the crowds who have come forward to pray with Billy Graham and they shake their heads. If it were only that simple, they sigh to themselves. If only there weren’t so many questions.
For Charles Templeton–ironically, once Billy Graham’s pulpit partner and close friend–questions about God have hardened into bitter opposition toward Christianity. Like Graham, Templeton once spoke powerfully to crowds in vast arenas and called for people to commit themselves to Jesus Christ. Some even predicted Templeton would eventually eclipse Graham as an evangelist.
But that was a long time ago. That was before the crippling questions. Today Templeton’s faith–repeatedly punctured by persistent and obstinate doubts–has leaked away. Maybe forever.
Maybe.

FROM FAITH TO DOUBT

The year was 1949. Thirty-year-old Billy Graham was unaware that he was on the brink of being catapulted into worldwide fame and influence. Ironically, as he readied himself for his breakthrough crusade in Los Angeles, he found himself grappling with uncertainty–not over the existence of God or the divinity of Jesus but over the fundamental issue of whether he could totally trust what his Bible was telling him.
In his autobiography, Graham said he felt as if he were being stretched on a rack. Pulling him toward God was Henrietta Mears, the bright and compassionate Christian educator who had a thorough understanding of modern scholarship and and abounding confidence in the reliability of the Scriptures. Yanking him the other way was Graham’s close companion and preaching colleague, thirty-three-year-old Charles Templeton.[4]
According to Templeton, he became a Christian fifteen years earlier when he found himself increasingly disgusted with his lifestyle on the sports staff of the Toronto Globe. Fresh from a night out at a sleazy strip joint, feeling shoddy and unclean, he went to his room and knelt by his bed in the darkness.
“Suddenly,” he would recall later, “it was as though a black blanket had been draped over me. A sense of guilt pervaded my entire mind and body. The only words that would come were, ‘Lord, come down. Come down….'” And then:

Slowly a weight began to lift, a weight as heavy as I. It passed through my thighs, my torso, my arms and shoulders, and lifted off. An ineffable warmth began to suffuse my body. It seemed that a light had turned on in my chest and that it had cleansed me….I hardly dared breathe, fearing that I might alter or end the moment. And I heard myself whispering softly over and over again, “Thank you, Lord. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Later, in bed, I lay quietly at the center of a radiant, overwhelming, all-pervasive happiness.[5]

After abandoning journalism for the ministry, Templeton met Graham in 1945 at a Youth for Christ rally. They were roommates and constant companions during an adventurous tour of Europe, alternating in the pulpit as they preached at rallies. Templeton founded a church that soon overflowed its 1,200-seat sanctuary. American Magazine said he “set a new standard for mass evangelism.”[6] His friendship with Graham grew. “He’s one of the few men I have ever loved in my life,” Graham once told a biographer.[7]
But soon doubts began gnawing at Templeton. “I had gone through a conversion experience as an incredibly green youth,” he recalled later. “I lacked the intellectual skills and the theological training needed to buttress my beliefs when–as was inevitable–questions and doubts began to plague me….My reason had begun to challenge and sometimes rebut the central beliefs of the Christian faith.”[8]

A TRIUMPH OF FAITH

Now, there was the skeptical Templeton, a counterpoint to the faith-filled Henrietta Mears, tugging his friend Billy Graham away from her repeated assurances that the Scriptures are trustworthy. “Billy, you’re fifty years out of date,” he argued. “People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do. Your faith is too simple.”
Templeton seemed to be winning the tug-of-war. “If I was not exactly doubtful,” Graham would recall, “I was certainly disturbed.” He knew that if he could not trust the Bible, he could not go on. The Los Angeles crusade–the event that would open the door to Graham’s worldwide ministry–was hanging in the balance.
Graham searched the Scriptures for answers, he prayed, he pondered. Finally, in a heavy-hearted walk in the moonlit San Bernardino Mountains, everything came to a climax. Gripping a Bible, Graham dropped to his knees and confessed hs couldn’t answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions that Templeton and others were raising.
“I was trying to be on the level with God, but something remained unspoken,” he wrote. “At last the Holy Spirit freed me to say it. ‘Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word–by faith! I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.'”
Rising from his knees, tears in his eyes, Graham said he sensed the power of God as he hadn’t felt for months. “Not all my questions were answered, but a major bridge had been crossed,” he
said. “In my heart and mind, I knew a spiritual battle in my soul had been fought and won.”[9]
For Graham, it was a pivotal moment. For Templeton, though, it was a bitterly disappointing turn of events. “He committed intellectual suicide by closing his mind,” Templeton declared. The emotion he felt most toward his friend was pity. Now on different paths, their lives began to diverge.
History knows what would happen to Graham in the succeeding years. He would become the most persuasive and effective evangelist of modern times and one of the most admired men in the world. But what would happen to Templeton? Decimated by doubts, he resigned from the ministry and moved back to Canada, where he became a commentator and novelist.
Templeton’s reasoning had chased away his faith. But are faith and intellect really incompatible? Is it possible to be a thinker and a Bible-believing Christian at the same time? Some don’t believe so.
“Reason and faith are opposites, two mutually exclusive terms: there is no reconciliation or common ground,” asserts atheist George H. Smith. “Faith is belief without, or in spite of, reason.”[10]
Christian educator W. Bingham Hunter takes the opposites view. “Faith,” he said, “is a rational response to the evidence of God’s self-revelation in nature, human history, the Scriptures and his resurrected Son.”[11]
For me, having lived much of my life as an atheist, the last thing I want is a naive faith built on a paper-thin foundation of wishful thinking or make-believe. I need a faith that’s consistent with reason, not contradictory to it; I want beliefs that are grounded in reality, not detached from it. I need to find out once and for all whether the Christian faith can stand up to scrutiny.
It was time for me to talk face to face with Charles Templeton.

FROM MINISTER TO AGNOSTIC

Some five hundred miles north of where Billy Graham was staging his Indianapolis campaign, I tracked Templeton to a modern high-rise building in a middle-class neighborhood of Toronto. Taking the elevator to the twenty-fifth floor, I went to a door marked “Penthouse” and used the brass knocker.
Under my arm I carried a copy of Templeton’s latest book, whose title leaves no ambiguity concerning his spiritual perspective. It’s called Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith. The often-acerbic tome seeks to eviscerate Christian beliefs, attacking them with a passion for being “outdated, demonstrably untrue, and often, in their various manifestations, deleterious to individuals and to society.”[12]
Templeton draws upon a variety of illustrations as he strives to undermine faith in the God of the Bible. But I was especially struck by one moving passage in which he pointed to the horrors of Alzheimer’s disease, describing in gripping detail the way it hideously strips people of their personal identity by rotting their mind and memory. How, he demanded, could a compassionate God allow such a ghastly illness to torture its victims and their loved ones?
The answer, he concluded, is simple: Alzheimer’s would not exist if there were a loving God. And because it does exist, that’s one more bit of persuasive evidence that God does not.[13] For someone like me, whose wife’s family has endured the ugly ravages of Alzheimer’s, it was an arguement that carried considerable emotional punch.
I wasn’t sure what to expect as I waited at Templeton’s doorstep. Would he be as combative as he was in his book? Would he be bitter toward Billy Graham? Would he even go through with our interview? When he had consented in a brief telephone conversation two days earlier, he had said vaguely that his health was not good.
Madeleine Templeton, fresh from tending flowers in her rooftop garden, opened the door and greeted me warmly. “I know you’ve come all the way from Chicago,” she said, “but Charles is very sick, I’m sorry to say.”
“I could come back another time,” I offered.
“Well, let’s see how he’s feeling,” she said. She led me up a red-carpeted staircase into their luxury apartment, two large and frisky poodles at her heels. “He’s been sleeping….”
At that moment, her eighty-three-year-old husband emerged from his bedroom. He was wearing a dark brown, lightweight robe over similarly colored pajamas. Black slippers were on his feet. His thinning gray hair was a bit disheveled. He was gaunt and pale, although he blue-gray eyes appeared alert and expressive. He politely extended his hand to be shaken.
“Please excuse me,” he said, clearing his throat, “but I’m not well.” Then he added matter-of-factly: “Actually, I’m dying.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
His answer almost knocked me on my heels. “Alzheimer’s disease,” he replied.
My mind raced to what he’d written about Alzheimer’s being evidence for the nonexistence of God; suddenly, I had an insight into at least some of the motivation for his book.
“I’ve had it…let’s see, has it been three years?” he said, furrowing his brow and turning to his wife for help. “That’s right, isn’t it, Madeleine?”
She nodded. “Yes, dear, three years.”
“My memory isn’t what it was,” he said. “And, as you may know, Alzheimer’s is always fatal. Always. It sounds melodramatic, but the truth is I’m doomed. Sooner or later, it will kill me. But first, it will take my mind.” He smiled faintly. “It’s already started, I’m afraid. Madeleine can attest to that.”
“Look, I’m sorry to intrude,” I said. “If you’re not feeling up to this…”

But Templeton insisted. He ushered me into the living room, brightly decorated in contemporary style and awash in afternoon sunshine, which poured through glass doors that offered a breath-taking panoramic view of the city. We sat on adjacent cushioned chairs, and in a matter of minutes Templeton seemed to have mustered fresh energy.
“I suppose you want me to explain how I went from the ministry to agnosticism,” he said. With that, he proceeded to describe the events that led to the shedding of his faith in God.
That was what I had expected. But I could never have anticipated how our conversation would end.

THE POWER OF A PICTURE

Templeton was fully engaged now. Occasionally, I could see evidence of his Alzheimer’s, such as when he was unable to recall a precise sequence of events of when he’d repeat himself. But for the most part he spoke with eloquence and enthusiasm, using an impressive vocabulary, his rich and robust voice rising and lowering for emphasis. He had an aristocratic tone that sounded nearly theatrical at times.
“Was there one thing in particular that caused you to lose your faith in God?” I asked at the outset.
He thought for a moment. “It was a photograph in Life magazine,” he said finally.
“Really?” I said. “A photograph? How so?”
He narrowed his eyes a bit and looked off to the side, as if he were viewing the photo afresh and reliving the moment. “It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa,” he explained. “They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and thought, ‘Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring Creator when all this woman needed was rain?‘”
As he emphasized the word rain, his bushy gray eyebrows show up and his arms gestured toward heaven, as if beckoning for a response.
“How could a loving God do this to that woman?” he implored as he got more animated, moving to the edge of his chair. “Who runs the rain? I don’t; you don’t. He does–or that’s what I thought. But when I saw that photograph, I immediately knew it was not possible for this to happen and for there to be a loving God. There was no way. Who else but a fiend could destroy a baby and virtually kill its mother with agony–when all that was needed was rain?“
He paused, letting the question hang heavily in the air. Then he settled back into his chair. “That was the climactic moment,” he said. “And then I began to think further about the world being the creation of God. I started considering the plagues that sweep across parts of the planet and indiscriminately kill–more often than not, painfully–all kinds of people, the ordinary, the decent, and the rotten. And it just became crystal clear to me that it is not possible for an intelligent person to believe that there is a deity who loves.”
Templeton was tapping into an issue that had vexed me for years. In my career as a newspaper reporter, I hadn’t merely seen photos of intense suffering; I was a frequent first-hand observer of the underbelly of life where tragedy and suffering festered–the rotting inner cities of the United States; the filthy slums of India; Cook County Jail and the major penitentiaries; the hospice wards for the hopeless; all sorts of disaster scenes. More than once, my mind reeled at trying to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the depravity and heartache and anguish before my eyes.
But Templeton wasn’t done. “My mind then went to the whole concept of hell. My goodness,” he said, his voice infused with astonishment, “I couldn’t hold someone’s hand to a fire for a moment. Not an instant! How could a loving God, just because you don’t obey him and do what he wants, torture you forever–not allowing you to die, but to continue in that pain for eternity? There is no criminal who would do this!”
“So these were the first doubts that you had?” I asked.
“Prior to that, I had been having more and more questions. I had preached to hundreds of thousands of people the antithetical message, and then I found to my dismay that I could no longer believe it. To believe it would be to deny the brain I had been given. It became quite clear that I had been wrong. So I made up my mind that I would leave the ministry. That’s essentially how I came to be agnostic.”
“Define what you mean by that,” I said, since various people have offered different interpretations of that term.
“The athiest says there is no God,” he replied. “The Christian and Jew say there is a God. The agnostic says, ‘I cannot know.’ Not do not know but cannot know. I never would presume to say flatly that there is no God. I don’t know everything; I’m not the embodiment of wisdom. But it is not possible for me to believe in God.”
I hesitated to ask the next question. “As you get older,” I began in a tentative tone, “and you’re facing a disease that’s always fatal, do you–“
“Worry about being wrong?” he interjected. He smiled. “No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have spent a lifetime thinking about it. If this were a simplistic conclusion reached on a whim, that would be different. But it’s impossible for me–impossible–to believe that there is any thing or person or being that could be described as a loving God who could allow what happens in our world daily.”
“Would you like to believe?” I asked.
“Of course!” he exclaimed. “If I could, I would. I’m eighty-three years old. I’ve got Alzheimer’s. I’m dying, for goodness sake! But I’ve spent my life thinking about it and I’m not going to change now. Hypothetically, if someone came up to me and said, ‘Look, old boy, the reason you’re ill is God’s punishment for your refusal to continue on the path your feet were set in’–would that make any difference to me?”
“He answered himself emphatically: “No,” he declared. “No. There cannot be, in our world, a loving God.”
His eyes locked with mine. “Cannot be.”

THE ILLUSION OF FAITH

Templeton ran his fingers through his hair. He had been talking in adamant tones, and I could tell he was beginning to tire. I wanted to be sensitive to his condition, but I had a few other questions I wanted to pursue. With his permission, I continued.
“As we’re talking, Billy Graham is in the midst of a series of rallies in Indiana,” I told Templeton. “What would you say to the people who’ve stepped forward to put their faith in Christ?”
Templeton’s eyes got wide. “Why, I wouldn’t interfere in their lives at all,” he replied. “If a person has faith and it makes them a better individual, then I’m all for that–even if I think they’re nuts. Having been a Christian, I know how important it is to people’s lives–how it alters their decisions, how it helps them deal with difficult problems. For most people, it’s a boon beyond description. But is it because there is a God? No, it’s not.”
Templeton’s voice carried no condescension, and yet the implications of what he was saying were thoroughly patronizing. Is that what faith is all about–fooling yourself into becoming a better person? Convincing yourself there’s a God so that you’ll become motivated to ratchet up your morality a notch or two? Embracing a fairy tale so you’ll sleep better at night? No, thank you, I thought to myself. If that’s faith, I wasn’t interested.
“What about Billy Graham himself?” I asked. “You said in your book that you feel sorry for him.”
“Oh, no, no,” he insisted, contrary to his writings. “Who am I to feel sorry for what another man believes? I may regret it on his behalf, if I may put it that way, because he has closed his mind to reality. But would I wish him ill? Not for anything at all!”
Templeton glanced over to an adjacent glass coffee table where Billy Graham’s autobiography was sitting.
“Billy is pure gold,” he remarked fondly. “There’s no feigning or fakery in him. He’s a first-rate human being. Billy is profoundly Christian–he’s the genuine goods, as they say. He sincerely believes–unquestionably. He is as wholesome and faithful as anyone can be.”
And what about Jesus? I wanted to know what Templeton thought of the cornerstone of Christianity. “Do you believe Jesus ever lived?” I asked.
“No question,” came the quick reply.
“Did he think he was God?”
He shook his head. “That would have been the last thought that would have entered his mind.”
“And his teaching–did you admire what he taught?”
“Well, he wasn’t a very good preacher. What he said was too simple. He hadn’t thought about it. He hadn’t agonized over the biggest question there is to ask.”
“Which is…”
“Is there a God? How could anyone believe in a God who does, or allows, what goes on in the world?”
“And so how do you assess this Jesus?” It seemed like the next logical question–but I wasn’t ready for the response it would evoke.

THE ALLURE OF JESUS

Templeton’s body language softened. It was as if he suddenly felt relaxed and comfortable in talking about an old and dear friend. His voice, which at times had displayed such a sharp and insistent edge, now took on a melancholy and reflective tone. His guard seemingly down, he spoke in an unhurried pace, almost nostalgically, carefully choosing his words as he talked about Jesus.
“He was,” Templeton began, “the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I’ve ever encountered in my life or in my readings. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world. What could one say about him except that this was a form of greatness?”
I was taken aback. “You sound like you really care about him,” I said.
“Well, yes, he’s the most important thing in my life,” came his reply. “I…I…I,” he stuttered, searching for the right word, “I know it may sound strange, but I have to say… I adore him!”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. “You say that with some emotion,” I said.
“Well, yes. Everything good I know, everything decent I know, everything pure I know, I learned from Jesus. Yes…yes. And tough! Just look at Jesus. He castigated people. He was angry. People don’t think of him that way, but they don’t read the Bible. He had a righteous anger. He cared for the oppressed and exploited. There’s no question that he had the highest moral standard, the least duplicity, the greatest compassion, of any human being in history. There have been many other wonderful people, but Jesus is Jesus.”
“And so the world would do well to emulate him?”
“Oh, my goodness, yes! I have tried–and try is as far as I can go–to act as I have believed he would act. That doesn’t mean I could read his mind, because one of the most fascinating things about him was that he often did the opposite thing you’d expect–“
Abruptly, Templeton cut short his thoughts. There was a brief pause, almost as if he was uncertain whether he should continue.
“Uh…but…no,” he said slowly, “he’s the most…” He stopped, then started again. “In my view,” he declared,” he is the most important human being who has ever existed.”
That’s when Templeton uttered the words I never expected to hear from him. “And if I may put it this way,” he said as his voice began to crack, “I…miss…him!“
With that, tears flooded his eyes. He turned his head and looked downward, raising his left hand to shield his face from me. His shoulders bobbed as he wept.
What was going on? Was this an unguarded glimpse into his soul? I felt drawn to him and wanted to comfort him; at the same time, the journalist in me wanted to dig to the core of what was prompting this reaction. Missed him why? Missed him how?
In a gentle voice, I asked, “In what way?”
Templeton fought to compose himself. I could tell it wasn’t like him to lose control in front of a stranger. He sighed deeply and wiped away a tear. After a few more awkward moments, he waved his hand dismissively. Finally, quietly but adamantly, he insisted: “Enough of that.”
He leaned forward to pick up his coffee. He took a sip, holding the cup tightly in both hands as if drawing warmth from it. It was obvious that he wanted to pretend this unvarnished look into his soul had never happened.
But I couldn’t let it go. Nor could I gloss over Templeton’s pointed but heartfelt objections about God. Clearly, they demanded a response.
For him, as well as for me

Blogging Will Bring You A Bigger Audience Than Writing

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 My blog is relatively small but rapidly growing. 12105 page views last month according to blogger stats, about 400 a day.

Which is not a lot compared to the top bloggers in my category. But it is perhaps a whole lot more daily readers than writers who stick to print have.
Laura Miller mourns the decline of reading in her Salon article. It is not true, however, that people are reading less. They are reading more. However what they are reading has changed. They read on their laptops, and largely read things produced for people who read in that medium–blogs, online newspapers and journals, Facebook, Twitter.
Here are some excerpts from Laura’s piece on NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month:
NaNoWriMo is an event geared entirely toward writers, which means it’s largely unnecessary. It was yet another depressing sign that the cultural spaces once dedicated to the selfless art of reading are being taken over by the narcissistic commerce of writing.
I say “commerce” because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. “People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.’”
Yet while there’s no shortage of good novels out there, there is a shortage of readers for these books. Even authors who achieve what probably seems like Nirvana to the average NaNoWriMo participant — publication by a major house — will, for the most part, soon learn this dispiriting truth: Hardly anyone will read their books and next to no one will buy them.


So I’m not worried about all the books that won’t get written if a hundred thousand people with a nagging but unfulfilled ambition to Be a Writer lack the necessary motivation to get the job done. I see no reason to cheer them on. t’s the readers who are fragile, a truly endangered species. They don’t make a big stink about how underappreciated they are; like Tinkerbell or any other disbelieved-in fairy, they just fade away.
Rather than squandering our applause on writers — who, let’s face it, will keep on pounding the keyboards whether we support them or not — why not direct more attention, more pep talks, more nonprofit booster groups, more benefit galas and more huzzahs to readers? Why not celebrate them more heartily? They are the bedrock on which any literary culture must be built. After all, there’s not much glory in finally writing that novel if it turns out there’s no one left to read it.
Consider turning away from the self-aggrandizing frenzy of NaNoWriMo and embracing the quieter triumph of Kalen Landow and Melissa Klug’s “10/10/10″ challenge: These two women read 10 books in 10 categories between Jan. 1 and Oct. 10, focusing on genres outside their habitual favorites. In her victory-lap blog post, Klug writes of discovering new favorite authors she might otherwise never have encountered, and of her sadness on being reminded that “most Americans don’t read ANY books in a given year, or just one or two.” Instead of locking herself up in a room to crank out 50,000 words of crap, she learned new things and “expanded my reading world.” So let me be the first to say it: Melissa and Kalen, you are the heroes.
* * *
Many bloggers have a holy grail–publishing a book.
However, online is where our readers are, and online is where we are likely to find our biggest readership and influence.

The Differences Between Religion and Spirituality

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Stuart asked me, “Do religion and spirituality mean the same thing?” Here’s my response:
To me, spirituality is our sense of God, of infinity and immensity. Every society we know of has been spiritual in some way. There are no entirely atheistic societies that I know of. Faced with the vastness, beauty and brilliance of creation, and our own smallness, most people instinctively sense a God behind it all.
When I consider the heavens the works of your hand,
The moon and the stars which you have made (Psalm 8)
this sense of wonder is not confined to religious people. The created world tells us much about God, since what may be known about God is plain , because God has made it plain. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, (Romans 1:20).
Wordsworth expresses this pantheistic  areligious spirituality,
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;      
A motion and a spirit, that
rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; 
Spirituality is a kind of DIY religion. Spiritual people can meditate, though the objects of their meditation can vary immensely. They may (or may not) believe in God, but this God is generally fashioned in the image of what their day and age believes a good human being should be.
I once met Iris Murdoch at a garden party at Somerville, when I was a student there. She said she meditated, but did not believe in God. A perfect example of a person being interested in things of the spirit, and even spiritual practices, without any religion at all.
All these can be part of non-religious spiritual experience: prayer, meditation, visions, dreams, revelations, ecstasy. And they can also be part of religious experience, in which case they add depth, joy and sweetness to it.
Religion, (in contrast to spirituality, which can vary in beliefs and experience so much so that one man’s spirituality can be unrecognisable to another) is a revealed set of beliefs, and most religions insist that their set of beliefs is right, and everyone else’s wrong. Mary McCarthy in her memoir, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood writes, “Religion is only good for good people.” The sense of being in on ultimate truth can bring out people’s pride, dogmatism and intolerance, and in that sense religion is far more dangerous than spirituality.
However, while most religions are based on revealed and written truths, spirituality can be a sort of jigsaw, patchwork, guesswork religion, each spiritual person piecing together a pastiche of what he or she believes.
I much prefer religion, well to be honest, the religion I believe in, Christianity. Essentially, because of the beautiful, breathtaking, brilliant figure of Christ.
And to a lesser extent, because of its beautiful, noble theological system, which makes sense to me, and satisfies my moral and aesthetic sense, and as my irritable cravings for logic and for the ineffable to make sense. I love reading the theology expressed in Paul’s writings. Just reading them expands my mind and spirit.
So while spirituality is an apprehension of the sublime and the divine, religion is a detailed description of the grounds of worship.
One can be spiritual without being religious. And people, sadly, have managed to be religious without being spiritual. They have understood the grammar without the poetry of the spiritual life, the letter without the spirit. These can make people arrogant, narrow-minded, dogmatic and judgmental. These people have been a menace to their churches and the societies in which they live, and as far as possible, I intend to steer clear of them!