A Great and Mighty Wonder

Few would dispute that an extraordinary mystery lies at the heart of our reality. But that enigma is interpreted in a multitude of different ways.

Many will not be familiar with the words of St. Germanus or the music of Praetorius. To God on high be glory and peace on earth to men, he proclaimed, lauding the virgin birth of the infant Jesus by Mary, a first century Jewish woman from Nazareth.

To Christians, that birth is the great and mighty wonder. At the centre of their universe.

Other cultures view our world through a different lens and interpret the riddle in another way.

All such traditions are, as the Buddhists might say, fingers pointing to the moon. Attempts to capture that central reality, not the mystery itself.

Science too is one such “finger” and the Buddhists in particular have been keen to allow their views and beliefs to be informed by this method of investigating reality.

For many years I have been intrigued by science. At its very core, reality is empty of all but energy we are told. Not even science can tell us what that energy is or how it got there.

Whether that energy has purpose or consciousness is an intriguing question. What it “means” if anything is another.

As a non scientist I have nonetheless been intrigued by what science is revealing and how it seems that all material reality can be bent to our will. And yet there is a hollowness in pure reductionism, which scientists seem unable or unwilling to fill. In addition I am of an age where even the rapid pace of scientific discovery is too slow. I am unlikely to see a theory of everything in my lifetime.

And a reductionist “theory of everything” would be a sad and empty thing, unendowed as it would doubtless be with any existential content.

And so back to faith, or faiths. My only faith is the belief in something rather than nothing and the firm conviction that consciousness plays a central role in reality. And further that our animal consciousness can and may evolve into something “godlike”, should we take the trouble to examine ourselves and choose our goal wisely.

God was made in man’s image.

Our faith, our religion has always sought explanation and a better way of living. An existence beyond the bestial, where all is calm, all is bright.

And to that extent I am and always have been deeply “religious”. A mystic who seeks a reality beyond the mundane and thoughtless brutality of animal existence. A believer in a great and mighty wonder.

I believe that we can and should rise to godhood. It is our choice and hopefully our destiny to put aside greed, violence and every other venal aspect of animal existence and, aided by science, create a very different world.

A world such as faith has always imagined.

For thousands of years religious terrorists have used and abused the beauty, the central mystery of reality for their own purposes and I will have no part in it.

Christian and most other faiths have amassed great wealth and committed appalling atrocity in the name of their “god”. They have forcibly converted the heathen, they have committed genocide. They have insisted on their rightness, and the wrongness of everyone else who has the effrontery to think or believe differently.

None of that destroys the truth of a great and mighty wonder. It merely shows how humanity can and does twist and corrupt the best of ideas in search of power and possessions.

But yes, I am a Christian. A “cultural” Christian whose entire life has been enriched and enhanced by the magic of the better bits of the New Testament. And indeed the Old. Whose very language and pattern of thought have been deeply influenced by the idiom of Christianity. Whose life has been enhanced and made richer by the music, language, art and architecture of 2000 years of this admirable but ultimately flawed effort to explain the unexplainable.

To those who might say I am not a Christian I would say fie. At heart, Christianity is but one attempt to explain the central mystery and I value what it has to say. As myth, as parable, as a finger pointing to the moon.

I am a Christian because I believe in a better world. Because I believe in a central mystery so beautifully described by so many different faiths. I am a Christian because I can see that it is meet and right to invent a good god and to seek to become that beneficence.

I am a Buddhist. A Muslim, a Jew, a Taoist, a Hindu and a Shintoist. I am every faith that seeks a better world and evolution towards the divine.

And to those who would reject me, I understand. I do not seek to convert you, I am not right nor you wrong.

Of any whose faith sees a great and good mystery at the heart of reality and who seeks to emulate it, to move towards it, I claim kinship. And towards those of no faith who nonetheless renounce the way our world has so often been, and who seek something better, I claim kinship also.

Life is a struggle, of that there is no doubt. It is an uphill battle to smile every day in the face of adversity. To be pleasant to those around you. To be good tempered and well behaved. To resist greed and base materialism.

We must seek reality, whatever and wherever it is. We must move on if we can, upwards and away from our past.

We must seek the central mystery.

I need my faiths, all of them.

Illustration: William Blake – an illustration for Milton’s poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”