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Text of an invited address given at the Blackpool Unitarian Church, November 4th, 2001
The first of today's readings was from the Book of Revelation, which in some Christian traditions, as you will know, is called the Apocalypse. It is the last book of the Bible, and there was once much debate about whether it should be included at all, for its imagery is violent, confused and difficult to interpret. It pounds our imagination with dramatic and chaotic pictures, and I would like to open my address with one of the best known, the breaking of the seals of the scroll by the Lamb. With the breaking of the first four seals there appeared the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. The first, on a white horse, had a bow and a crown and "rode forth, conquering", the second, on a red horse, was "given power to take peace from the earth and make men slaughter one another; and he was given a great sword". When the third seal was broken, there appeared a black horse, whose rider held in his hands a pair of scales, and a voice was heard which said, "A whole days wage for a quart of flour". When the fourth seal was broken, there came "another horse, sickly pale, and its rider's name was Death ... To him was given power over a quarter of the earth, with the right to kill by sword and by famine, by pestilence and wild beasts." Revelations was written for a Christian church suffering persecution in a world of great social upheaval. The four horsemen in a jumbled but powerful way depict state oppression, total war, famine, disease and death. And its gets worse, for with the opening of the seventh seal come "seven angels with seven plagues", lightning, thunder and earthquakes and something like a nuclear holocaust, when men were burned up by the violence of the sun. Generations of scholars have laboured to interpret the astonishing imagery of Revelations, and it has even been called the delusion of a sick mind, but in a world full of fear it gave voice to that fear and, more importantly, promised future deliverance. Hope is the theme of the first reading and the theme of my address, which can hardly be better expressed than by repeating the key images which you have already heard:
Since the events of September 11th many people feel that we are living in an apocalyptic era, and I do not think it is too fanciful to see the four horses of this new terror in the four hijacked planes which destroyed the World Trade Centre, a proud, almost arrogant, symbol of global commerce and greed, and much of the Pentagon, the military planning complex, and probably would have destroyed the Capitol, the centre of government if the terror had gone completely as planned. Death and destruction we have seen on an apocalyptic scale, and a plague of anthrax to add to BSE, new variant CJD, FMD and AIDS and, so we are warned, more to come. Like everyone, I was at first stunned and bewildered by the terrorist acts, but after a few days I felt a strange sense of relief, and I realised that it came from awareness that a new kind of hope was conceived in the wreckage. The new hope is perhaps less immediately emotional than St John's "new heaven and new earth" but is based on hard logic. It does not fade away when the emotion dies down, but brings head and heart together and offers the promise of a "can do" religion. There is light at the end of the tunnel we are now entering. It is a very great light, but it is a long tunnel. The new hope comes from two sources, the message of history and the help of the divine indwelling Spirit which we can call upon for guidance and strength. This Spirit, which the Christian scriptures call the Counsellor, the Comforter and the Advocate, is really our second self, but I will leave that marvellous theme in order to talk about the hope we may draw from history. Our knowledge of history has taken two uniquely important leaps forward in the past 150 years, first with Darwin's theory of evolution and, second, with Edwin Hubble's proof that we live in an expanding universe. The point about the first is that our ancestors were apes, and the point about the second is that the universe we know began in a point of almost infinitely dense light that we call the Big Bang. Every child knows these simple facts, but religion has yet to take them on board, and what I would like to do now is to take you with me in five thought experiments that will make sense of the words "Behold, I make all things new". I want you first to picture the state of things when our early ancestors came down from the trees and started to walk on two legs. It is hard to imagine how awkward they must have felt, and what a relief it must have been to get back into the familiar safety of the forest and do what came naturally by swinging from branch to branch. Now it is walking upright that comes naturally to us, but it took hundreds of generations before our ancestors really got used to it, and palaeontologists are seeing evidence now that one group of Homo-sapiens-to-be gave up the struggle and went back to tree-dwelling. The rest battled on and eventually developed language and for 150,000 years survived very nicely in hunting tribes, until their numbers increased to the point where there was not enough game to hunt. I want you now to imagine what an apocalypse this was for them - frustration, hunger and starvation eventually became a daily experience. It is naive to think that they were smart enough to sit down and plan to become farmers. If they had tribal meetings, they would have turned to their elders, who had been chosen as elders precisely because they were good hunters, and the advice they would have received from the experts would have been, run further, run harder. A new kind of wisdom was needed, but if some old woman or child had asked why don't we plant carrots and fence a few sheep, they would have been ignored. What a mad idea! Who wants to spend their life watching cabbages grow, when you can have the excitement of the chase and of discovering a new blackberry patch? Hunting is a very satisfying way of life, so satisfying that it can only be indulged in today at great expense. It will probably cost you two or three thousand pounds for the thrill of stalking and killing deer in the Scottish highlands. The hunting instinct is also deeply wired into our psyche. Prince Charles inducted his sons into the hunting tribe by "blooding" them in the traditional way, wiping their faces with the blood of a freshly killed fox, a rite which is doubtless much older than baptism with water. For our ancestors to give up the hunter-gatherer life and become farmers was in effect to redefine what being human meant, a critical step towards a more challenging way of life, living in cities, without which civilization could never have happened. Only a citizen, said Aristotle, is a full human being, and the Sanskrit word "purusha" means both city dweller and human, as "pagan" or country-dweller later became the opposite of Christian. With the creation of the city, said the psychohistorian Julian Jaynes, we humans had for the first time to learn how to live with others whom we did not know instead of fighting them. We had to learn how to create a civic family. Now we have the same challenge writ large, how to create a global family. Those with no knowledge of history will say it cannot be done, but these first two thought experiments should convince us that human nature does change, and that it happens at times of crisis when we must choose to become a different kind of human being and strike off into an unknown and "unnatural" future. We are now at just such an evolutionary crossroads. If there is going to be a future, we shall have to change our idea of what it means to be human, change our mode of life, and move forward into the unfamiliar and the untested. Two more thought experiments will show us which road to take and the scale of the challenge. The first uses scientific imagination, the second exercises our empathy. Since the universe was born in the Big Bang, it has been expanding, until now it consists of billions of galaxies. Imagine now, in a third thought experiment, that you are watching a film of that expansion played backwards at high speed. The universe will shrink and heat up until we arrive, after fourteen billion years, at the point of almost infinite energy where it all started. Where did it come from? Can we wind the film even further back? Cosmologists are still trying to figure that one out, but there is no denying that the first point of light was a creating energy, and the late Fred Hoyle, who started off as a religious unbeliever, eventually came to see that the universe is a work of creative design or, in his words, "a put up job." What he didn't see is that science had lit the fuse for a religious revolution, for if follows logically that everything in our universe is a form of that energy, including us. We were not made out of nothing. We are made out of the primal energy as literally as this lectern is made out of wood. Science shows us that we are made of stardust, which is literally true, but the logic of cosmic evolution goes beyond that to assure us that we are made of God-stuff. You don't need to be religious today to believe that an eternal and infinite creating power exists, for science gives us all the evidence we need. So religion's task is now stark, to explore the question, "Can we communicate with this power, and how?" Once we become aware of the fact that we cannot be made of anything except divine substance, the consequences are unnerving. We are faced with a choice that is the equivalent of staying in the trees or coming down and learning how to be a new kind of human being by applying the new knowledge, which mystics of all ages have known intuitively. Meister Eckhart said, with complete humility, "Where I am, God is," and that is scientific, as well as gospel truth. It is mind-bending in its implications, for it puts God in our power. The divine spirit had only one chance to be manifested as Jesus, and has only one chance to be manifested in each of us. God-as-Mary-Smith or God-as-Abdul-Karim or God-as-Lee-Wan- Ho - put your own name in the blank. It is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and we must not blow it, for God's sake and our own. Evolutionary science has totally transformed religion, and if they were really serious about spiritual development, every church, mosque, temple and synagogue would have a notice outside advertising the new good news. Just as a baker's shop invites us in with the sign, "Fresh bread, price 80 pence", a church should tell those outside, "Experience God inside - price on application". The ministers, rabbis, priests and mullahs should be able to guide you into the experience and assure you, hand on heart, "Happiness and fulfilment guaranteed" - though it is not going to be the kind of happiness that might be expected and it must be paid for. Cheap happiness is cheap happiness. I will return to the question of payment, but before that I would like to read a passage from a book by the anthropologist Jared Diamond, entitled Guns, Germs and Steel. He is writing about an experience with the Fayu, an isolated nomadic group in New Guinea whose relationship with other such groups was one of suspicion and hostility. Inter-tribal murderer was commonplace, and they came together only to exchange brides. Diamond relates what happened on one such occasion when a murderer found himself face to face with his victim's relatives.
Diamond's point is that this was normal behaviour in a band of about four hundred primitive hunter-gatherers, who live today much as Stone Age man once lived in Europe, but as one goes up the evolutionary scale to clan, tribe, nation and the modern state, the same sort of hostility and primitive behaviour still continues. Conflict resolution today is not much more advanced than restraining the combatants by superior force. We do not make any systematic attempt to change the emotional patterns and responses in ourselves or in others. Such feelings and aggressive behaviour are "natural" and, as we all know "human nature never changes". What the events of September 11th have brought home to us, however, is that unless it does change, we face the same threat of extinction as did our hunting forebears when the game ran out, but now on a global and apocalyptic scale. It is no good turning to our political and religious leaders, who are the equivalent of tribal elders, for they will at best say the equivalent of run harder and further. By that I mean they will tell us to try to be better human beings, normal but nicer. But it is precisely this definition of "normally human" that has brought us to this crisis, and I think the oppressive fear and confusion that has settled over our society is due to the fact that we sense that we can never escape from this global nightmare without escaping from ordinary humanity into something else. But what else, and how to escape? The first question is relatively simple, and I would like to answer it with the fourth thought experiment. Imagine you are in a waiting room and opposite you are sitting a caveman and Jesus, both in suits and ties and both speaking English. After some conversation you realise that one of them does not measure up to your idea of being normally human, he is subhuman or pre-human, and then it dawns on you that the other is a higher kind of human, he is "transhuman", that you are not in his league. It was intuitive realisation of this latter that inspired the early Christians to come together as a community in order to imitate Jesus and unlock the potential to become fully human that he had revealed. But, to echo Wordsworth's question, "Where is it now, the vision and the dream?" For lack of understanding, Christianity became the worship of Jesus and in some places the worship of his mother too, and decayed even into worship of the church and the Bible. The essential vision of Christianity is what knocked St Paul to the ground and blinded him, the sudden realisation that Jesus is, in Paul's words, "the new man" and "the first born of a new family". It was an evolutionary vision, but it is only since Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859 that we have known we belong to an evolving species, and thus are able to see Jesus as a higher human type and a blueprint for those who want to unlock their hidden potential and, in so doing, take the evolutionary process further. There are, of course, other individuals who can serve as patterns in various way, but the great spiritual leaders in all traditions are the same in one vital respect: they identified their true self with the power that created them. Jesus put it this way, "The Father and I are one", and cosmology now explains how this can be historically true, for our consciousness is formed from the same energy that gave birth to the universe. The message of September 11th in this context is, stop worshipping Jesus, and start imitating him. Start developing his sense of oneness with the divine and his love for all humanity and our suffering planet, for it is only that which will take the evolutionary story forward. If we do not rise to the challenge, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse will be with us forever. If we do rise to it, we shall find a deep and unshakeable happiness under all the trials and turmoil of life. God through us and we through God will make all things new, as the author of Revelations promised. Great stuff! However, the happiness must be paid for by giving up a lower kind of satisfaction and old familiar ways that we shall be very unwilling to give up, and when it comes to "sign the cheque time", we shall find a strange reluctance to reach into our pocket or handbag for a pen. We shall be tempted to duck the evolutionary challenge and betray our species as surely as those humanoid apes who climbed back into the trees four million years ago. The hidden nature of the challenge can be found in the gospel story of the man crippled for thirty eight years, whom Jesus met at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:2) and whom he asked, "Do you want to be healed?" Our first reaction may be, "What a daft question?", but if we consider the price that the cripple would have to pay for healing, after living on alms and pity for so long, the question does not seem so daft. Get into his mind as a fifth thought experiment. If he accepted healing, he would have to learn a whole new way of life, earn his own living, stop blaming life for everything, start giving to other people, maybe even think of making them happy and healing them for a change. His whole world would have to be re-visioned from a new centre, and rebuilt. This is at the heart of the Christian message, and what happened on September 11th brings it home. Unless our species is to be forever emotionally crippled, with each tribe blaming every other tribe for the impending apocalypse, we shall have to remodel the species on those who are more highly evolved, the trail blazers. We cannot go around telling others to do it, we have to start with ourselves. The healing will come, we may be sure, if we ask for it, slowly and in unexpected ways and with lots of setbacks. Those who want to make a start must come together to help each other, from whatever background. The way into the future is a new Rainbow Coalition made up of all those who want to change by identifying their true and deepest self with the divine Spirit. I would like to end not with a formal prayer but with a few lines from the late Bishop John V. Taylor's inspiring book, The Go-Between God, which is about the role of the Spirit in changing us into a different kind of creature. I always want to say "Amen" when I read these words, and I hope you will feel the same, for that will make them into a corporate prayer, which has a special power to bind and change:
Frank Parkinson |