Spiritual Wealth
It's not often that I make time for a TV sitcom, but the current BBC2 drama, ‘Rev.’, has become something of a weekly must-see, and a welcome antidote the ‘Vicar of Dibley’, which we have been known to take on holidays with us as a box set.
Set in inner city London, the drama stars the diminutive Tom Hollander as the newly appointed priest in charge of a
beautiful, crumbling Anglo Catholic church, whose last incumbent, in the jargon, ‘went over to Rome’.
The Reverend Adam Smallbone, as the surname perhaps suggests, is a good man, in a rather unequal fight. His congregation is poor, small and eccentric, and when it does suddenly expand in the first episode, it’s only because the local C of E school has become suddenly popular due to a dynamic new Head and a glowing Ofsted report. So when a priceless stained glass window is broken, and there is no money to replace it, he suddenly finds himself in a position of power, where people are willing not only to fill his pews, but also to pay money in return for school places, if only he can turn a blind eye to their real motivation, and acquiesce to some of the other kinds of demands that people, used to having their own way, tend to make.
Now, though Smallbone may conform to a certain kind of stereotype in being unworldly and hamstrung by niceness , he counts among his strengths the friendship of a loving spouse, and a very active, not to say conversational prayer life, with God. (Who else?) And in these two relationships, one could say, lies his true wealth. For who better than a Friend who knows you, and God, who knows you even better, to remind you who you really are?
But in Smallbone’s case, it also requires a test. Given the twin temptations of cash and numbers, both of them the outward signs of a successful ministry, he seems to be fighting a losing battle against his own conscience. That is, until one particularly obnoxious potential donor tries to insist on the removal of one of the most difficult, but oddly faithful members of his flock. At last Smallbone realises what he can’t and won’t do. And that’s the moment when everything else falls into place, because the choice reminds him, that if he is to be who he really is, nothing else matters.
Compared to this wealth, what is money; and what is success?
Julian Armitstead |
 Quantum Theology
Trinity 1, 2010
‘In the beginning, the energy of silence rested over an infinite horizon of pure nothingness. The silence lasted for billions of years, stretching across aeons the human mind cannot even remotely comprehend. Out of the silence arose the first ripples of sound vibrations… The stillness became restless and tiny bubbles emanated from… the featureless ferment of quantum possibility.
‘And a mighty sound ruptured the tranquil stillness as a single point of raw potential: bearing all matter, all dimension, all energy, and all time; exploding like a massive fireball… The time, according to human reckoning, was somewhere between twelve and fifteen billion years ago. From that time on, the silence begets the dance, and the dance explodes into story.’
That’s a quotation from a book called Quantum Theology by Diarmuid O’Murchu, which explores Christian doctrine through the language of quantum physics. I thought about it this week, because at this time of year it’s impossible not to be astonished by creation. That anything should exist at all… and then that the sky should be so blue, and leaves so green, and birdsong so brilliant. If it weren’t our own world, we’d hardly believe it.
And if creation is amazing, the way it goes on and on is even more so. John Stewart Collis talks about it memorably in his book The Worm Forgives the Plough. During the Second World War, Collis was a conscientious objector and became a farm labourer. What sets him thinking about creation is pruning blackcurrant bushes:
‘I made huge piles of the discarded branches, leaving behind the renewed bushes, which would bear fruit next year. I find such well-known physical facts to be more extraordinary than the extraordinary… It is surely a mistake to be moved to wonder by the exception instead of the rule. The rule beats the exception at its own game. It is not the rabbit out of the hat, but the rabbit out of the rabbit that is so surprising... It still stirs me at intervals, this most conspicuous of all phenomena, the recurrent increase, the everlasting something out of nothing… Except that it’s not something out of nothing: I’m surrounded by plums, apples, currants, hard and concrete substances miraculously appearing, but they are made out of earth, they are made out of air… The circle is continued eternally… with no bankruptcy, no waste. The mind informed by political economy, expects otherwise. I still feel nervous when I throw away a piece of bread. But in Nature nothing can be lost, nothing wasted, nothing thrown away, there is no such thing as rubbish…’
And it’s not just the rabbit out of the rabbit that is so amazing, but the rabbit out of the primeval ooze. If anything is more remarkable than reproduction, it must be evolution: the way there always seems to be room in creation for something new, more complex, more ingenious, better adapted to the world around it.
And the Trinity season is a good time to think about all this - not only because it’s summer, but because part of what makes the idea of the Trinity so powerful, is that it captures and interprets that universal human wonder at existence, and its constant evolution and self-renewal.
It is one of our basic intuitions as religious people that the world is as it is, and we are as we are, because we are formed out of the Power that shapes everything, and that we share essential qualities of that Power. One quality is that we are creative: forward-looking and hopeful. Another is that we are both one and many - all very different but all connected, And another is that even when our differences produce competition, conflict, suffering, death - still the Power that shapes all things, brings all things ultimately back to harmony.
That complex, creative, harmonizing power, is what we call God, ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’, and our aboriginal bond with it is what we call love.
‘In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved on the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light: and there was light.”’
Our stories begin with God the Creator. And with him, God the Spirit, who breathes God’s own life into creation so it can live and create new life in its own right. And God the Word, who, in Christ, becomes part of creation, to help it breathe the Spirit more deeply, and live more fully. ‘I came,’ says Jesus in St. John’s gospel ‘that they might have life, and have it more abundantly.’
So in this Trinity season, we embrace life. We put our faith in a divine creation, in which there is no waste. Where even death is not only an ending, but also part of a process which will always see new life arising somewhere, somehow.
And that’s true not only when we die, but in our lifetimes too. The gospels remind us that we are God’s children, filled with God’s Spirit, and full of potential to enrich and develop our world. If we accept that, then there’s no part of our lives - nothing we’ve done or that has happened to us - that can’t be made use of: recycled and redeemed. The endless evolution of God’s creativity brings every part of our nature and experience to new life. ‘Behold,’ says Christ in the Book of Revelation, ‘I make all things new.’
I think that affirmation is what is behind today’s gospel reading about the resurrection of the widow’s son. Most of us nowadays don’t expect to see the dead rise in our city streets. And nor did people in the ancient world. And what lies behind this story in the life of Jesus we don’t know. But what it says to us is that in the presence of Christ, death is never the end of the story. The end of the story is life - life renewed, life redeemed, life perfected.
If we put our trust in Christ and embrace this life, we never know where it may take us. Perhaps we’ll learn to breathe the Spirit more deeply and become more the people God created us to be. Perhaps we’ll be inspired to try to help the rest of the world fulfil its own diverse and miraculous being. Whatever happens, to live in Christ is to live more and more, every day. ‘I came,’ says Jesus in St. John’s gospel ‘that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.’ Amen
Teresa Morgan |
