Ted Witham

Rollicking journey to Eternal Life

Eternal Life cover John Shelby Spong, Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven…, Harper One 2009, Hardcover 288 pages. (Under $20 on the internet.)

Reviewed by Ted Witham

Bishop Jack Spong takes his readers on a long journey to “Eternal Life“. His vision of eternal life is broad: it includes a plan for the church’s mission in the world, a plea for mysticism, and a vision of human beings transcending the limitations of the individual for a oneness with God and with others. Overall, I like his vision.

Eternal Life is a rollicking ride of the sort we have come to expect from Bishop Spong.

Jack Spong believes that religion has prevented us from seeing the grand vision by keeping us in unhealthy dependence, waiting on a father who knows best, and who in fact often manipulates us into even more dependency.

This paternalistic dynamic played out in the news as I was reading Eternal Life. It was sad to see the wonderful and feisty Sisters of St Joseph waiting on a Papa in Rome to declare that Mary McKillop was sufficiently saintly. The Sisters already consider McKillop a saint, and it appears demeaning for them to be forced to wait while a far-off authority decides whether post mortem miracles are valid or not.

Eternal Life is in part an engaging memoir. Spong traces his journey from an evangelical home in North Carolina through his teenage years in a more “catholic” Anglican parish. At each step of the way from deacon to priest, to pastoral work in parishes and to diocesan Bishop, Spong’s intellectual curiosity deepens. He is no longer content with the church’s easy answers. He liberates himself energetically from the literalist view of the Bible he inherited. More importantly, he discards the triple-decker universe of the Bible, and along with it, the concept of the transcendent God. For Spong, God is not beyond us; God is within us.

Bishop Spong describes the church’s journey as it moves from childhood to maturity and invites others to join this journey. I sense some impatience on his part with those who haven’t travelled his particular road, or who are perhaps embarked on a different journey. In interviews he often says that his intended audience are those who have left the church unable any longer to swallow the literalism and infantilism they have experienced in the church.

He criticises priests like me who understand his journey, but in order to avoid offence, sometimes cloak our language in ambiguity. I do understand the Spong dilemma, but I am trained as a pastor and educator: I try to communicate by taking people with me.

Spong is an iconoclast. He tears down superstition and pre-modern thought and clears the way for a Christianity with intellectual integrity in the modern world. Like all iconoclasts, the Bishop skirts the edge of orthodoxy. However, if a Panel of Triers in a diocese somewhere tried him for heresy, I have no doubt that he could show that all his theology accords with scripture and can “be proved thereby” and thus satisfy the canonical claims of the Anglican Articles of Religion. Iconoclast he may be, but not apostate.

I agree with Bishop Spong that the church stands on tiptoe at the edge of great changes. We need iconoclasts like him to undo our tight grip on inadequate concepts of the past, but we also need gracious guides who will inspire us and lead us confidently into that future. Spong is the first, but not, crucially, the latter.

Bishop Spong convinces me that all scripture is poetry, but fails to read scripture with the depth and sympathy that would make it sing anew.

He is keen to remind us that God is not “up there”, and demonstrates that we should instead look within to find God. This, as he says, is Mysticism 101. But he does not account for our need to reach outwards to find God. Even if the proper direction is not up, most of us feel impelled to look outwards to our fellow humans and the wondrous creation, and to listen there for God speaking to us.

He is enthusiastic to show us that faith and science are compatible, but ignores science’s scepticism for its own methodology and conclusions. Even the brashest scientists admit that science doesn’t have all the answers. Blind belief in science will not serve faith well.

Maybe all these expect too much of Bishop Spong. We should accept that his ministry is more to tear down our conceptual idols than to build up our spiritual future. We should read Spong and clear our minds, and we should also listen to our hearts and shape our own mature vision of God and God’s future. Of that, the Bishop would approve.

The Meaning of Pain

Melanie Thernstrom, The Pain Chronicles.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
EAN:978-0865476813
$22 approx. on line

Reviewed by Ted Witham

One purpose of religious faith is to make meaning. Christians especially find it difficult to make sense of chronic pain. As Melanie Thernstrom explains in her entertaining Pain Chronicles (yes, entertaining!), acute pain is an excellent response to injury. Acute pain protects us. Chronic pain, like cancer cells that don’t know how to stop, serves no such purpose. It afflicts at least one person in ten and resists most treatments.

Christians need a strong theodicy to incorporate pain into their understanding of a loving God. In his 1993 memoir missionary doctor Paul Brand, famous for his work with leprosy, tried to sell the idea that pain is “the gift nobody wants.” Brand saw the lepers’ infected cuts and burns, injuries caused because they could not feel pain, and argued that we should praise God for the protective properties of pain. For Christians with chronic pain, this is not persuasive. Chronic pain serves no good purpose. As a chronic illness it challenges God’s ability to heal.

The Pain Chronicles tells two inter-twined stories: it is a memoir of Melanie Thernstrom’s own journey from her futile searching for cause and cure, to a more productive attempt to make sense of a life with ongoing pain. Formerly a staff writer with the New York Times, Thernstrom shares this journey with a robust honesty, especially her initial belief that her pain was a punishment for an ill-advised love affair.

This leads Thernstrom to meditate on the historical connections between the word “pain” and the Latin word for punishment “poena”. This excursion into history and language takes the reader through changing theologies and attitudes, and is typical of the second story of The Pain Chronicles: its pleasure in intellectual curiosity. Thernstrom follows her forensic curiosity down many byways in the history of pain and medicine, analgesia and anaesthesia. We learn both how the ancients understood pain and how contemporary researchers peer into the brain’s response to pain with real-time brain-imaging.

The Egyptian Ebers Papyrus from the 13th Century BC declares that “Magic is effective together with medicine. Medicine is effective together with magic.” “Although it would take millennia to understand why,” writes Thernstrom, “words in combination with physical treatment can alleviate pain in ways better than treatment alone.” (p. 35). She is clearly delighted to have affirmed that medications work better in a good healing relationship.

Some Christians believe that pain can lead one into the imitatio Christi. Elaine Scarry’s classic 1985 study The Body in Pain examines how the Bible understands pain, beginning with the pain of childbirth (“all those begats”) and following through the pain inflicted on God’s enemies in the Old Testament. Ultimately, claims Scarry, all this pain can only be understood through the lens of the Cross. Women’s pain, the pain of Israel’s enemies, and ultimately our pain should be viewed as a share in Christ’s Passion. After consideration, Thernstrom dismisses this idea as unhealthy: “I didn’t want to be in Pain. I didn’t want to want it. Pain is not a cross; it’s a Harrow.” (p. 76)

Ms Thernstrom cites studies that show “positive religious coping”. For some Christians, their faith does help them make sense of chronic pain by cognitive reframing the suffering or placing it in a wider context. For other Christians, however, pain leads to greater distress perhaps because they interpret their pain as punishment. (p. 206)

Hearing about the Hindu devotees who thread hooks through their flesh, Thernstrom heads to Kuala Lumpur to see whether they might have some insights into dealing with pain. Her journalist’s pen describes the festivals vividly, but they are of only marginal help on our journey. These pilgrims choose temporary pain to induce a spiritual high. This may lead to effective analgesia, but it is a practice worlds away from chronic pain: not choosing pain that never stops. No wonder the priest snorted when Thernstrom asked the god to take away the burden of her pain.

Thernstrom returns to science to make meaning of chronic pain. This malady is a disease of the brain, in fact, a disease of consciousness, that we cannot yet cure or treat effectively because brain science knows so little about consciousness.

She compares our current understanding of chronic pain to consumption in the 19th Century. Consumption was used as a metaphor for dying Romantic poets or operatic heroines. In 1882, a German physician identified mycobacterium tuberculosis. Although the cure, antibiotics, was half a century away, this scientific discovery reduced the illness from a metaphor to a disease. Chronic pain, Thernstrom concludes, currently evokes many metaphors, but until science unlocks its secrets, we will remain like pre-1882 sufferers of TB.

The Pain Chronicles cover much fascinating territory. Metaphors of pain and suffering are explored with elegance, intelligence and humanity. Melanie Thernstrom offers no theodicy of her own. She fears, I think, that to do so would belittle the experience of her fellow sufferers. What she does provide, though, is a fascinating sampling of others throughout history making meaning in chronic pain. While there may not yet be a cure for chronic pain, there is a lot of understanding here, and therefore comfort.

Intimacy

In our household
of bustling, bouncing, bumbling
boys,
we did not hug.
Like chicks and a nest, at six or eight
we were pushed
off the lap with its warmth and surrounding,
and we were told,
“Big boys don’t need cuddles.”

Returning from boarding school, I would see Dad from the train window
as the train slowed, Dad waiting to see his boy,
and he held out his hand for me to shake,
his huge farmer’s hand with warmth and surrounding,
yet
not enough.
I didn’t need to be told, “big boys don’t cuddle.”

I still long for Dad to hug me:
Dad who has died and can longer shake my hand.

I weep when I feel the embrace of God.

Losing Our Religion?

Tom Frame, Losing My Religion: Unbelief in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2009

337 pages, paperback.
RRP $34.95

Tom Frame is not afraid that Australia will “lose its religion”. Not really. But he is concerned that Australian Christians will pay a high price if they do not engage in a vital conversation about belief and unbelief.

Losing my Religion has won the 2010 Christian Book of the Year prize – and deservedly so. It is not only a heartfelt plea to Christians to put energy into thinking about faith and its place in a pluralist society, but it is also a comprehensive history of the interactions between religion and the Australian community.

Dr Frame is balanced in his description of the tensions surrounding religion in the convict days on the east coast and in the lead up to the framing of the Commonwealth constitution. But where the book shines, in my opinion, is when Tom Frame teases out the contemporary scene. He takes issue with anti-theists like Richard Dawkins for their lack of respect for their opponents, but he engages with the Australian unbelievers like Philip Adams. He demonstrates respect for their view but has no fear in putting forth his own.

Dr Frame is well qualified to explore belief and unbelief. As a former bishop to the Australian forces, he has ministered at an important interface between public life and the Church. Now Director of the St Mark’s National Theological Centre in Canberra, he writes lucidly on these complex issues. He draws on some of the same materials that he used in Evolution in the Antipodes (2009), but here with different intent.

Frame teases out the thread in atheism that claims it is not a belief and therefore a guarantor of reasoned tolerance. He shows this as specious reasoning both because atheism is a belief borne out of theism and also because atheism has no monopoly on reason. The presence of religious people in secular society is therefore more likely to bring tolerance and harmony than their absence, because they can take the beliefs of others into account.

Losing My Religion will make you agree and it will make you disagree. Frame knows that keeping your religion involves being confronted by a Christ who asserts his divinity; and for all of us, believers and non-believers, when we think seriously about it, that is controversial.

Spiritual help for people with chronic pain

I know what it is to live day in day with high levels of pain. My doctors tell me that, like 5 -10% of the population, my central nervous system is misfiring and produces chronic pain. For me, this pain seriously impacts my mobility. I appreciate the medical help that I receive. I also know that there are spiritual resources that I can use to live positively while still experiencing ongoing pain.

I describe many of these resources in my 56-page Living Well With Chronic Pain, a book structured around a 12-Step program. I have also written a Manual for the spouses and friends of people living with pain.

Chaplains, pain specialists and GPs approved of the ideas in the books. Over the last two years, many people living with chronic pain have found these books helpful. Read reviews here. and here.

Today the printer has dispatched the fifth reprint of Living Well With Chronic Pain. St John Books in Fremantle (WA) will sell these books, or they can be ordered directly from me for $22.95 +postage and handling.

I am also now making available a digital version of the book and the manual. These are in PDF format and cost $9.95 (the book) and $5.95 (the manual). Email me at twitham@cygnus.uwa.edu.au to order either or both, and I will email them to you. Payment can be made to my PayPal account.

(All prices quoted are in Australian dollars).

Flap over Prime Minister’s ‘atheism’

A local author protested in last week’s Busselton Dunsborough Times: an atheist Prime Minister in a Christian country, he complained. My letter was one of several published this week which disagreed with that sentiment.

The original letter follows:

This was my reply

Loss of Integrity

PSALM 12 PARAPHRASE
Help, Lord, there is nobody left with integrity.
Loyal and consistent people have vanished from Australia.

Everyone tells lies to their neighbours.
Their flattery is patently insincere. All they want is to get ahead for themselves.

If only the Lord would stop the lies and flattery,
and turn the spin into honest human talk.

They say, “We can talk our way out of everything.
No-one can stay in our way!”

Because of the abuse to Indigenous communities;
because the refugees are treated with disdain,
“I will arise,” says God, “and create safe places for Aboriginal children,
and warm refuges for those who seek asylum here.”

What God says is like tapping the bark of a healthy karri,
like the sympathetic vibration of a tuning fork.

You are sure to provide appropriate protection for us, O Lord.
You will keep us safe in this shifty world.

Though the ruthless strut on every side,
though the vilest call the shots in every State.

This paraphrase was written as an exercise in the Companions in Christ program. It also happened to be the week when Kevin Rudd was deposed as Prime Minister, and the backroom operators of the Australian Labor Party were briefly visible.

Really Living After Death

One toxic idea that has seeped into Christianity is the belief that individuals survive death. This cane-toad of an idea has been introduced into the Christian faith either in its Greek form of the immortality of the soul, or in its post-Enlightenment guise of individual personalities somehow living on after death.

These ideas poison by setting our hopes too low. They arise from a careless reading of scripture and impoverished imagining of God’s cosmos. I am certain that the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead has a great deal more life than pallid ideas of “me going to heaven”.

To reduce life after death to individual survival fails to do justice to the concept. Atheists like Richard Dawkins mock Christians for believing that I should survive death in some way and their objections have traction. Given our present time-bound experience of life, we have to ask:
• What would we do after death?
• How would we endure the boredom?
• What would it mean, if anything, to meet our loved ones after death?

There must be more to it than simple survival.

Paul tells us that we are “in Christ”. According to St John being in Christ is having “life more abundant.” (John 10:10) Life in Christ is attaining “to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:13)

As individuals, we are cherished in Christ, and because Christ is eternal, then we too are eternal. But these New Testament ideas of more abundant life measuring up to the life of Christ show that we are the best that we can be not as atomised individuals but when we reach out to others and transcend our ego, our selfish nature.

Maturity in Christ means being more than just oneself. The next step in the development of human beings towards maturity is to stop being an inward-looking “I” and start becoming a functioning “we”. After death we lose our precious “self” and are caught up in the greater reality of humanity.

In Christ and Time, 20th-century Lutheran scholar Oscar Cullmann traces St Paul’s thinking on what impact Christ’s death and resurrection has on our own. He sees Paul begin with “primitive” ideas in I Thessalonians of being “caught up in the air… to meet the Lord” (v. 22) and developing into the more sophisticated “resurrection body” in I Corinthians 15.

Note what Paul actually writes: “we will be caught up”. The plural is used. “All will be made alive in Christ” (I Cor.15:22). We usually read these passages with post-Enlightenment eyes and so fail to see the significance of the plural.

To me, it indicates that our real life in Christ now is corporate: as his Body, We have glimpses of the love and unity that Jesus experiences with the Father (John 16, especially v.20). This oneness with each other and with God is the principal promise of the New Testament.

We can imagine different scenarios in which this promise will be fulfilled, all of them with far greater potential than individuals living for ever one way or another. Whatever we imagine resurrection to mean, however, it will be better than our imagination. Paul, paraphrasing Isaiah 64:4, assures us that “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived … God has prepared for those who love him.” (I Corinthians 2:9)

Sheep and Eternal Life

Like King David in the Old Testament, I grew up among sheep. The biggest difference was that where David’s sheep numbered in the dozens, our flocks were in the thousands. One of my earliest lessons about sheep was not to be concerned about individuals.

Dad forbade us to keep sheep as pets, knowing the heart-ache that came when a pet was killed for meat. I noticed too the seeming indifference to a sick sheep. If a sheep was suffering, it may have been simply killed, but in general, sick sheep were left to get better on their own – or not. The only exception to this was revealing: if a ewe was having trouble lambing, Dad would sit beside it, all night if necessary, and be midwife in every possible way.

Dad wasn’t a callous man. He was gentle and generous in character. His was the most humane way of keeping the flock healthy. The sheep’s purpose was to feed people, not to be our friends. But Dad’s emphasis on the flock was instructive.

I looked to nature. I loved watching ants go about their busy lives. I noticed that ants had wonderful powers of restoring their apparently dead companions. They would push them gently with one of their six legs, and the motionless ant would pick up its load and continue walking. But they simply walked around ants that were dead or too sick to recover.

I confess as a boy I sometimes stirred up their nests. They would rise up in anger, climbing my legs and stinging all the way. Ants from other nests would come to join their attack on the intruder. They did not care how many I slapped to death on my legs: their task was to defend the queen and her nest, and even their neighbours’ nest.

My studies at school and since have confirmed that in nature survival of a species is paramount over that of individuals. The health, comfort and life of an individual simply do not stand up against the powerful drive for the species to survive.

Nature is species-centred. Most animals seem to accept this reality. It is only humans, fired on by two important events in our history, who think differently and therefore unnaturally.

The first event was when human beings became self-conscious. Because we know we are alive as individuals, we can choose to protect our own life at the expense of others. It is notable, however, that in dangerous situations, people don’t always choose their own life over that of others. We hear often of people who choose to sacrifice their own safety to protect others, particularly women and children, who are the future of the species. They act naturally.

The second event was the European Enlightenment which encouraged us to think very highly of individuals. The Enlightenment accorded to individuals human rights. The Enlightenment encouraged individuals to greater self-expression.

Could it not be that the Enlightenment project is against nature?

It is natural to think not of the individual but of the species. It is natural for people to be stirred up about the damaging effects of climate change: our species is at risk. The plight of low-lying island nations like Kirabiti and the Maldives stirs deep emotions. We don’t want human habitat to be wiped out.

To think that God’s imagination can provide nothing better than the survival of individuals after death is to think poorly of God. God’s mind is on the main game, which is played by species not their individual members.

This is why I find the usual ideas about life after death lame in comparison with the glorious visions of future humanity put forward by say, Teilhard de Chardin and Ilia Delio. As individuals we are secure in Christ. But as a species, how much more secure is our life.

Teilhard’s vision was that homo sapiens continues to evolve. We have come to self-consciousness and are moving towards a complete humanity in Christ. Jesus, the true human is coming to his Omega Point, where humanity converges with God. We will be raised up into the One who has made us.

Ilia’s focus, it seems to me, is on a slightly closer time. What is the next step of this evolutionary journey? How close will humanity come to its machines? Will brains be uploaded into computers? Will human beings extend their thinking power through new digital media? Is our destiny – short-term – to be cyborgs?

In the broader vision, I suspect the speculations of Ilia and others will be swept aside by an even grander picture of what homo sapiens will become, and will have more to do with what happens as the individual is transcended and we each become part of a greater whole. Again, the technological revolution gives us the clue, as the Web becomes more and more an extension of individual minds into the minds of others.

It is true that there are dangers. Monsters may be born. But the teaching of evolution is that that which is best suited to its environment will flourish, and homo sapiens will become more a creature of the cosmos rather than less.

These are extraordinary and beautiful visions of our future life. Bring it on!

Suffering unto death?

The comment was only half in jest, and it caught me by surprise. “You sound disappointed that you weren’t diagnosed with bone cancer or blood cancer.” My answer was the sanctioned one: “I am disappointed that they haven’t found something that they can treat. I don’t really care what its name is.”

The truth is, there is a little part of me that felt disappointed when the scans and blood tests returned negative. Of course, that’s partly explained not as a death wish, but as frustration with my symptoms, which have been powerful enough on some days for me to think that death would be easier to bear than the pain.

But my friend made me wonder. During those days of waiting for results I did rehearse my reactions to the possible diagnosis of a fatal illness. The prospect that I would not have more years with Rae filled me with pain. The thought that, though I might live to see Clare’s wedding, I might not see the children she will have with James and watch them as babies, toddlers, children, adolescents and growing to adulthood, seared my heart. The idea that I would not be around long enough to see Brendan settled and happy troubled me deeply.

No, I am not disappointed. I want the chance of more life. But I hope I am also strong enough to face my mortality, and to wonder what that now means to me as a Christian. These last weeks have reaffirmed for me the stark fact that I will die, if not soon, then in the coming decade or two. And whatever I believe, I cannot escape the reality of nature: death is the end. We live, we die. Anything that might be beyond our life span would be a sheer miraculous gift of the Most High. Resurrection is by definition surprise.

It is many years since I believed (if ever I really did) in my continuing existence after death as an individual. I hope I have not given false comfort to people over the years that they will somehow be reunited beyond the ashes or the grave with their loved ones in some happy valley. This false but widespread belief is both arrogant and petty: Arrogant to believe that human beings are so important in the scheme of the Cosmos, and petty to think so poorly of God’s imagination.

By definition, “eternal” cannot be after anything. The word itself tells us that the grace of God operates not after our death, but beyond our life – out of time. As far as we can know now, eternal life is about the intensity with which we live in this too short space between birth and death. Eternal life is about our gratitude now. Eternal life is about intentionally taking time to be simply in the Presence of all that is.

Looking forward to some second-rate paradise after death will in fact take away from the joy and brilliance of living in the now.

Instead, we should be journeying within to discover the broad and marvel-filled country of our souls. Instead of yearning for a union with those whom we love in the past, we could be yearning for a greater quality of loving those we are given to love now.

I am not afraid of the darkness to come. The problem is that sometimes I am afraid of the brightness of the light here and now.