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I always enjoy and am inspired by doing the Serum discussions at Greenbelt. If I describe what we do it does not sound like much in terms of ‘putting on an event’ – we welcome everyone,  explain some simple ground rules, have someone give a very brief ‘thought for the day’ and ask a question which is then handed over to the small groups sitting around the tables to discuss and explore before feeding back at the end – yet I am always surprised by how such a simple formula can produce so profound an experience, “humbling and powerful” in the words of the journalist from the Guardian who attended last year.   On reflecting why this is the case I think it is a combination of tackling some of the biggest questions you can ask in an environment of respectful listening, where you are not out to win the argument but to share and learn from different perspectives and  experiences and in so doing start to find commonality as well as difference with others. This year we asked three different questions on the three occasions serum took place: how do our beliefs (whatever these happen to be) relate to and shape the way we actually behave?; do we only really search for god when we are desperate rather than comfortable?; is life all about winning and death all about losing?  In the process of discussing these questions you raise others which go deeper into the issue.

Re. life and death/winning and losing, my group asked how can we fully live in the reality of death which comes to us all, what does a ‘good life’ look like? what does a ‘good death’ look like? How can we process grief and loss?  Would the practice of wakes help us to come to terms with the reality of death by being in the presence of a dead body – how this can offer a strange comfort in that the person is no longer present, it is just the body that is left?

My experience of this discussion was that with the help of the others in my group we were able to look at something we don’t often look at together, a topic that is often avoided and can make us feel uncomfortable.  Serum provided us with some parameters in which to undertake this exploration, to take part in a considered and respectful reflection where the challenge of different perspectives and experiences can be heard in a non-defensive, non-confrontational manner.  At its best this is a process that I find converting in that it causes me to go back and question the way I see things.  It also provides a space in which I begin to find some common ground with others, that by sharing individual experience and thoughts it starts to become possible to share meanings and interpretations of that experience that translate across the divide.

For those interested in these kinds of discussions serum is happening every other Wednesday starting next week – see link for more details.

POSTED 04.09.10 BY: Vanessa | Comments (3)

Thinking again of the detail within the virtues spiritual practices and postures document, I am struck by how I and others I know struggle with the false self.  This is the projection of who we want to be, rather than who we are, which we strive to make real which results in us being very hard on ourselves and others because it is centred on our ego – on our must prove ourselves to achieve in life.  This is because of a very deep lie – that we need to achieve for God to love us – conditional love – where to the contrary God is the unconditional love that helps us to change, where we are awakened to a change that is about being more of our real self, and getting away from our false self. Our struggles of countering the construction of a false-self are very difficult – because of our our cultures obsession with consumption, competition and conditional love is all about nurturing a false-self – existing at the surface of the now (the title of my talk at Greenbelt this year).

In his book New Seeds of Contemplation page 34-5,  Thomas Merton said this:

Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory personal false-self. This is the man I want to be but cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him, and to be unknown by God, is altogether too much privacy.  My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside of God’s will and God’s love, outside of reality and outside of life, and such a self cannot help but be an illusion.  We are not very good at recognising illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves. The ones we are born with and which speeds the roots of sin.  All sin starts from the assumption that my false self – the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires – is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.  Thus I use up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences for power, honour, knowledge and love, to clothe this false-self  and construct its nothingness into something objectively real.  I wind experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself and to the world  – as if I were an invisible body that only became visible when something visible covered its surface.  But there is o substance under the things of which I am clothed.  I am hollow, and my structures of pleasures and ambitions has no foundation.  I am objectified in them, but they are all destined by their very contingency to be destroyed – and when they are gone – there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness to tell me I am my own mistake.  The secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God, for what ever is in God is really identical with God for God’s infinite simplicity admits no division and no distinction.  Therefore, I cannot hope to find myself anywhere expect in God. Ultimately the only way I can be myself is to become identified with God in whom is hidden the reason and the fulfillment of my existence.

I think Merton names here our very real struggle, and by implications, shows why it is crucial that Christianity needs to be about inner freedom of the self alongside outer freedom.  This is why we need spiritual practices, virtues and postures that help us maintain an inner freedom – because even our churches of late – neglect this need for inner discipleship.  To face the false self, we need to seek for God who speaks to us from within as much as we should be seeking for God’s presence in the world and outside of ourselves.  To finish I love this quote from John Finley:

Spiritual practices are a commitment to a daily rendezvous with God where there is no agenda but love to transform our hearts and awaken us.

POSTED 16.08.10 BY: ianmobsby | Comments (7)

Jennie Hogan has just written a great article for the Guardian, on the subject of the new ar installation at St Paul’s Cathedral. Check out the article here.

POSTED 14.07.10 BY: ianmobsby | Comments (1)

Since Aaron’s post about how transformative he’s been finding the virtues postures and practices, and the discussion it started about anger, I’ve been doing a bit of research. I’m troubled by Old Testament wrath / New Testament mercy ‘flip-side of God’ theology. I don’t believe God changed, ‘like shifting shadows’ as James says, nor that God has moods or gets provoked and vindictive.

So I looked up some Hebrew words for ‘anger’ used in the bible last week, and found that physical imagery is inherent in many – aph depicts flaring nostrils; charah and chemah are about heated indignation. God is often described (about forty instances across the Old Testament) roused to wrath of the nostril-flaring variety. This troubles me.

But something that puts God’s wrathful moments in context for me is the as-frequent phrase ‘slow to anger’, also written as ‘long-suffering’, and to me that deliberately illustrates exactly how I’d aspire to see myself deal with anger when it flares in me, in my true, most whole or healthy self, just as with moments of gluttony, selfishness, pride or apathy. Hence ‘be still and know’, ‘wait on the Lord’, and ‘flee from anger and bitterness’.

I think Jesus was doing this when he crouched and drew in the dust, instead of reacting at once to the people ready to stone the woman they’d caught in the middle of adulterous sex. I think he was asserting space for momentary, flared-up anger to diffuse, both theirs and possibly his own.

Also, the very fact that these are physical words presents their illustrative quality to me. I am not massively into turning everything into metaphor, but I do think it’s safe to say God is not being described to us as a being with actual nostrils to flare, or blood pressure to rise. Nor, I want to suggest, is angry action innate to God’s being – God is love. God is not justice, – God holds and wields all justice. But he does not simply hold and wield love. He is love.

I happen to agree with Christopher Jamison and the Desert Fathers he cites, that anger isn’t really a good sign of anything. I don’t think getting angry is ever really just about the thing that we think, in the moment, that it’s about. I think I, and all of us to a greater or lesser degree, are sitting on a big old keg of old hurts and injustices. And when we get angry about things in a particular instant, I think that keg of anger comes into play.

A couple of mooters pointed out to me the danger here of getting into dualistic territory: ‘anger = bad’; ‘getting frustrated = bad’. I’m glad to have the community round me to navigate this territory.

And righteous energy for a cause is true and a good thing – I’m a bit of a cause-carrier sometimes – but when it’s provoked by anger, I have to take time to think and to still that, until it has aired and become something more calm and constructive.

To stay in my anger is to sit in the murkier bits of my psychology. To feel it, acknowledge it, but to be slow to it and patient with it when it comes – these I think reflect a God of love – healthy care of myself and exploration of all my feelings and their roots, but also therefore enabling my outward actions to be wholly love.

This is ‘slow to anger’ – taking the space to consider both my own reaction, and also to consider whoever has provoked me as a whole human being, with more going on than I can justifiably feel irritated with. Love is not only for some human beings, according to what they’ve done. “To know all is to forgive all”. Even love for one person, a victim, I don’t believe should ever provoke us to retribution towards another. And that pause to bring us back to a place of complete love, I think, is what Jesus was doing when he wrote in the sand for a while.

POSTED 24.06.10 BY: grace | Comments (5)

I have been re-reading one of my favourite Trinitarian Theologians, The Scottish Thomas F Torrance.  Torrance is a real inspiration because for him, his understanding of the Trinity was vital for his work as a parish minister before he became an academic. I always have a slight bias for practitioners!  So why am I so interested in Torrance?  Well for one thing – he was absolutely against the penal substitution atonement theory – because it revealed far more about pagan belief than Christian belief.  Paul. D Molnar, in his book on Torrance’s theology put it like this:

Torrance believed that a false view of Christ’s humanity lay behind the common mistake in Evangelical theologies of the atonement, wherein it is asserted that God is reconciled to the world rather than that the world is reconciled to God.  He regarded the idea that, in the atonement, God is reconciled as a sub-Christian reversion to older pagan ideas of a God who needs to be appeased and placated.  God is always the subject of reconciliation, not the object.

I couldn’t agree more, because this thinking colludes with the thoughts that distort and projects them onto God, the God of Love and non-dualistic thinking.  This matters, because there have been a number of new books coming out recently in support of penal substitution as an atonement theory – which in a over-simplified summary understands that Jesus died on the Cross because God the Creator upstairs in heaven, was fermentingly angry, and who could only be appeased by taking this out on Jesus Christ in physical violence, (hence why Feminist theologians have called this heavenly child abuse).

As with the discussion in the previous blog entry – this form of projection and sanitisation of the thoughts that distort for me utterly undermine the principles of the New Covenant and take it right back to an Eye for an Eye of the Hebrew Covenant.  So it is really important to question this atonement theory as it has been used to justify and collude with  anger, oppression, exclusion, slavery, sexism, violence – the list is endless.  Quite why the Evangelical Alliance now insist that you have to believe this to be part of the Evangelical Alliance is beyond me.   How do you reconcile this approach with the loving God?

The truth be known – none of the theories if the atonement stack up that well – except in my opinion the work of Torrence and Alison – who both articulated the view that Christ died for our anger – not Gods – because according to them – if it were about God’s anger – we would have strayed into pagan temple worship.

POSTED 15.06.10 BY: ianmobsby | Comments (7)

I have been ruminating a little on the first discussion, a couple of weeks ago, on the virtues, practices and postures proposal, and I’d like to share some of my reflections.

Plato and Aristotle theorised about the make-up of the human person, and one of the models they came up with, which seems to have stood the test of time (not that that necessarily means anything, but let’s work with it for now) suggests that we have three main faculties: cognitive, conative and affective.

These can be understood as: cognitive – the thinking part of us; affective – our thoughts and emotions; conative – our drives, our strivings and tendencies, almost totally informed by the affective. I know I can relate to this basic outline – my active life is informed by both my thought-life and my emotional-life – and it started to connect with something else I heard recently.

One of the world’s most influential theologians, Jurgen Moltmann, recently spoke at a conference at Holy Trinity, Brompton about “being church in the power of the Holy Spirit”. Among very many other important (and no doubt relevant) things, he spoke of the great need we have for a good dose of orthopathy in current church practice. Never heard of that word? No, me neither. But he described it, basically, as ‘right feeling’.

We’ve all heard of orthodoxy (many of came to Moot to escape its tyranny), which is ‘right thinking’. Many of us with church backgrounds well know the importance often placed on this, generally to the exclusion of other things. We’ve probably all heard of orthodoxy too – many of us have been learning, and indeed prioritising, things coming under the rubric of “justice” (social action, political campaigning, protest marching, buying the Big Issue, etc, etc).

Orthodoxy relates most closely to a part of my self – my cognitive faculty. Orthopraxy relates most closely to my conative faculty. So where does orthopathy fit? Church culture and teaching, it occurs to me, have often neglected to bless and teach us with regard to our whole being. On a global scale, the church can be thought of as bipolar: one half has generally been concerned with “believing the right stuff”, and the other can crudely be described as prioritising the need to “do the right stuff”. But who’s got wisdom on “feeling the right stuff’ – orthopathy? Put simply, the monks, nuns and friars.

I’m sure you’ve heard it before but I’ll say it again: Moot is a fresh expression of church. I think that our new monastic focus, and the current discussion on virtues, practices and postures, is one of the things that really makes this true. This is because the proposal deals with the affective aspect of our being. We are a community seeking wholeness, integration. Believe it or not, the foundational idea of the proposal is that the Christian tradition actually has the resources to make this possible.

I’ve often wondered how to get my emotional life healthy, how to find healing so that I have less ridiculous outbursts, less of the bad kind of anger, less anxiety; I’ve also wanted to be more consistent in my ability to love, to do the right thing, to grow up/mature. The proposal says (although maybe not in so many words) that life is a journey of conversion of the whole person – cognitive, affective and conative.

My point is that what drives us can also be transformed – we know about the need to “think the right stuff”, or “do the right stuff”, but without addressing our thoughts and emotions, without finding healing and wholeness as people, we aren’t ever really going to change. The approach to spiritual growth we are advocating is holistic, which means that it is candid about the need to find inner freedom, as well as practice justice and have good theology.

Of course, psychotherapy has had to pick up the baton in the modern period because the church forgot the wisdom of the desert fathers and mothers. I believe it’s time we began to reclaim our heritage, and release some real life and liberation into the heart of our community. It will also save us vast amounts of money on therapy.

P.S. Brian McLaren’s new tome, A New Kind of Christianity is great. I could say loads about it – because I do think you should go and buy it at The Centre Bookshop on Lombard Street – but maybe in another post. If you have it, turn to pages 38-39.

POSTED 12.06.10 BY: Aaron Kennedy | Comments (10)

Finding Happiness is Abbot Jamison’s follow up to Finding Sanctuary. In this book he contrasts happiness as defined by society, with how it is understood by the monastic. In so doing Abbot Jamison examines the limiting ‘8 Thoughts’ identified by the desert fathers and the necessary virtues we are called to practice in their place. These being: Spiritual Carelessness – Spiritual Awareness; Gluttony – Sufficiency; Lust – Chaste Love; Greed – Generosity, Anger -Patience; Sadness – Hope; Vanity – Magnanimity; Pride – Humility.

As with Finding Sanctuary, the Abbot challenges his reader with a wise, non-judgemental insight into the human condition, and provides powerful tools for the pursuit of interior freedom and peace.

Currently in Moot we are in the process of developing postures and practices based on the virtues Abbot Jamison has outlined. Ian has therefore purchased several copies of Finding Happiness which are presently doing the rounds in the community. I therefore recommend that you either contact info@moot.uk.net to track one of these down, or buy your own copy (following this link generates 10% income for Moot) click here for UK and here for US

POSTED 26.05.10 BY: ianmobsby | Comments (9)

Matthew 8:23-27, Mark 4:35-41, Luke 8:22-25

“Where is your faith?” – as the boat the disciples had embarked on was about to sink, so they thought, Jesus woke up from his siesta and asked them this simple question: “where is your faith?”.

For those of us with anxiety disorders, learning to restructure thought patterns and realising that we are fully capable to cope with life on a daily basis is key to liberating ourselves from these “demons”. But, as could be argued, there is no actual need for faith in this process – a combination of medication and determination is in most cases sufficient.

In this story of the Bible however, Jesus challenged his disciples to face a real threat, death, not just something they perceived to be a threat. He did not only ask them to believe that “things would be ok”. He actually called on them to contemplate the fact they could die at this very second. No determination (and no sea sickness medication) in the world would have helped them in this situation. Faith, when faced with imminent death, is the conviction we shall overcome this very threat although the odds would be against it. God wants us to go through.

We thankfully do not realise this on a daily basis but we constantly face death. Yes God protects us, but we really do not know our day and hour. We can learn to overcome anxiety on our own. But in the case of real threats, God is ultimately in control, and only faith can overcome fear, and eventually death.

POSTED 25.05.10 BY: Nicolas | Comments (2)

Encountered this sign on the train from Waterloo to Clapham Junction, grafitting the space usually taken up by an advert. Given all the uncertainty following the election, ecological, economic and other concerns, I think we are seeing an increased search for meaning in the UK. People are increasingly finding a culture defined by the market and a life style dependent on consumptive gratification as unrewarding. I hope this questing will open up the spiritual landscape.  Given all the uncertainty, this is an opportunity for the church to start talking about a more virtuous society and that would called hope.

This Sunday is Pentecost, the third great celebration of the Christian Year – where we remember the work of the person of the Holy Spirit. What would Britain look like if there was a movement of the Spirit now?  That would be interesting…

POSTED 21.05.10 BY: ianmobsby | Comments (4)

Just in case you missed Jonathan and Samuel Bartley on the news this week, it is this Jonathan Bartley that is coming to talk to Moot at St Mary Woolnoth at 7.30pm to talk about the subject ‘post-Christendom and the election’. For more information, please see the events section of this site.

POSTED 01.05.10 BY: ianmobsby | Comments (1)