The obvious question – ‘Why would one want to undertake the Appalachian Trail hike?’
I’ll avoid the trite/clichéd answer, as the George Mallory quote goes, “because it is there!”
Instead, I will lean on my own academic of choice and quote Carl Jung, “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”
This quote comes much closer, I think, to how I experienced making the choice to walk the trail. I watched some videos. I watch a lot of videos about a lot of things, but the videos on the trail spoke to me, the idea captured me. This was about five years ago, and ever since then, the question has not been whether I will walk to Appalachian Trail, but when.
Here is a talk I gave at my church, Watershed Charlotte. The topic was on 'What is the Gospel?' As in, what do I personally understand the Gospel (the good news) to be?
The word ‘Gospel’ first conjures up for me what I consider to be the American evangelical meaning. That being, that the Gospel (the good news) is that Jesus died for you, for your sins, and that if you believe in him, you will have eternal life (which is to say you will earn your heavenly reward). It’s all about that utopia we will reach at the closing of the day - the pie in the sky when you die by and by…
I did my first degree at a conservative Bible college. In my first year I would have assented to ‘The Fundamentals’ (the set of essays written from 1910 to 1915) from which ‘Christian fundamentalists’ derive their label. In my second year I began asking awkward questions; these questions slowly drew me away from fundamentalism (or evangelicalism) down broader avenues of enquiry. A question arises in the mind, an unknowing, an opening, and our initial impulse is to find the answer…
I’m driving out along North Graham Street on the Sabbath; I pull into a parking lot in front of a non-descript building. Buildings here in Charlotte, and perhaps in America generally, are coy to reveal what human behavior transpires within; the architecture rarely offers up much of a clue. But there is a sign out front, a truly hideous and slightly pixilated sign…
Water into Wine
In this article I am going to discuss Jesus’ water into wine miracle. By way of introduction however, I’m going to discuss the following quote by C. S. Lewis: “Either this man (Jesus) was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse” (Mere Christianity, pg. 56). In this exceedingly reductive argument, Lewis gives us three options, and compels us to choose one. This argument is evidently fallacious as there are not three options, there are many many more…
I am publishing on my website this Walt Whitman centenary edition of The Bookman (May 1919) as a PDF, as I believe it is not otherwise available in the public domain. The Bookman was a literary monthly magazine based in London.
“A still quickening pulse beats in his writings, and the mystic charge he gave – “this is not book; who touches this, touches a man” – serves to point to an occult and present survival in his pages of what a Sufist might teach us to call “the liberated essence” of himself.”
On Halloween Day, October 31st 1998, my mother died. I was ten years old. There can be no doubt that this event shaped me unlike any other, in ways which are entirely evident to me, and in ways that remain unknowable. The death of a parent has a peculiar effect on a child; it creates an unresolvable question, an inability to know oneself apart from the grief suffered. Because of course, no ten-year-old knows who they are, they don’t know where life will take them, and they don’t know who they will become. All of which is to say…
Part of what I identified in my previous post was our need to discover common ground, or perhaps to put it in a better way to simply understand, or, as it were ‘put on’ the other. In this post I’m going to run with this idea and see where it takes me.
It feels like compassion closely relates to this. The desire to not just reach across the divide into the lonely lives of the other, but also to bring healing. I think this is a strong motivator for me…
Just finished watching ‘American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel’, a very interesting and inspiring documentary, which focused ostensibly on the ministries of two social action churches, namely, the Mayflower Congregational UCC Church and All Souls Unitarian Church, both in the state of Oklahoma.
Although I find the ministries of both churches to be courageous within their context, I found the liberal and inclusive approaches…
For lack of a better term, I fall into the “anti-woke” camp, an easy space to occupy if I were some reactionary conservative - that would make things so much easier - but I’m not. For good or ill, I’m a card-carrying liberal. For some time I have wanted to write something that explored “wokeism”, but given the weightiness of the subject, I have struggled to find the right words and a suitable approach, but perhaps this will suffice…
In my previous post, I referred to what I called the Judas Defence, that propensity amongst many Christian thinkers to argue Judas’ case. Why are so many compelled to make this case? What underlies this impulse? I undertake this study on Judas to further explore these questions using a Jungian approach.
In the Biblical text, Judas Iscariot is one of the twelve disciples, the carrier of the money bag. He is ultimately the betrayer of Jesus, whom he gives up for thirty pieces of silver…
Sat down the other night to watch the 2021 American drama Mass. I went in expecting it to be an emotionally intense experience, and it certainly was. My wife and I have a healthy film appetite; we probably get through a few a week, and although we see many good movies together, they rarely prompt in me a desire to write, to respond. But this one did.
First for the necessary provisos. I am going to be responding broadly to the film…
It is my sense that a belief in non-duality, (which is to say a fundamental belief in the oneness of all), leads naturally to pluralism. It makes perfect sense that it would, if all is one, then irrespective of your role on the world’s stage, you are never-the-less part of the whole, part of the one. Or rather, one should probably say, you are the ONE, as to say ‘part’ suggests you can in some sense be broken off…
I come to writing this essay in a melancholic mood, and as ever, I come in search of that elusive something. It is Advent 2021. Advent is the season for waiting and expectation, and I, at this moment in my life find myself waiting. Waiting somewhat against my will. Waiting for the next chapter of my life to begin.
In Christian terms, Advent is when we performatively await the birth of Christ, and eschatologically wait for his second coming…
Active Imagination is a technique that was developed by Carl Jung to access the unconscious in waking life. When we consider engaging the unconscious, most of us think exclusively of dream analysis - the process of taking our dreams and uncovering what they’re trying to teach us, ideally with the assistance of a trained analyst. Jung believed our dreams consisted of the stuff of our unconscious.
You can think of it like this. Your unconscious is like a separate autonomous person who resides within you, who is always listening and observing everything you do and say…
My thoughts return time and again to Carl Jung’s 1936 paper ‘Wotan’. This paper stands out to me as being perhaps his most controversial, given its subject matter, the rise of the Third Reich. Jung’s approach towards the Third Reich is critical, to our contemporary sensibilities however it reads as not being nearly critical enough. Much has been written on Jung’s complex relationship to the Third Reich, a relationship I will not dwell on here.
My interest relates to what the paper elucidates concerning the collective unconscious…
The path that runs behind the Publix Supermarket in South End, Charlotte, is ridiculous. For the past few weeks, I’ve been with my wife in Charlotte, North Carolina, scouting out where we plan to move to in the near future. We’re now back in England, and I have had a little time to reflect on the trip. In circumstances I assume common to most, for the past couple of years I have been living a somewhat monastic life of solitary contemplation, until this trip, which has been an explosive return to the real world, complete with actual human interaction, new senses, new tastes, and new places. A plethora of experience. My head, now thoroughly filled with all things Charlotte, has to get something down on paper. So, let’s begin with South End.
In this desperate world of spin, it does not matter what you say or do, it only matters how it is received by others. In a recent piece of journalism by the BBC (The British Broadcasting Corporation) the N-word was used. The story concerned a racially aggravated attack in Bristol. The BBC initially stated that it in effect had hemmed and hawed over the difficult decision to include the word, but had decided on balance that given their desire to accurately report the facts of the incident, as well as the BBC having the family and victim’s support, the inclusion of the word was appropriate. The story having been aired received a throng of complaints.
A few days later, given the backlash the BBC received, they decided to revise their response. They apologised for the use of the word, and stated that in the future a different approach would be taken.
Winston Churchill is our celebrated war time leader, not despite his racist views, but because of them. Churchill, like all politicians, was an opportunist, and in the 1930s he could see the decline of the British Empire playing out before him, a decline most evident in India’s growing desire for self-rule. Churchill held to a hierarchical perspective of race, he believed that white people were superior. As such he believed it was the duty of white people to rule over lesser races, such as those in Africa and India. So, for the sake of the Empire, Churchill cultivated his Victorian, reactionary, right wing ideals, ideals which brought him into direct opposition with Indian independence efforts. Ideals which shaped him into the stoic, enduring, cigar smoking, political operator who is alive today in our popular imaginations. Ideals which shaped him into the perfect war time prime minister.
Algernon Blackwood was born in South-East London in 1869, and grew up in a religious household. His parents were Calvinists, which entailed an austere, narrow, and oppressive childhood. As a teenager he was even sent to an isolated Moravian Brotherhood school in the German countryside, and in a later biography he described his life there at that time - the harsh pietism which prompted his imagination to flee into the German Black Forest, where he could discern the Germanic animistic spirits at play. Animism is the religious belief that all objects, places, and creatures, are infused with some kind of spiritual essence, almost as if there is a living memory in all plants, rocks, rivers, and in the soil itself. You could even understand ‘The Collective Unconscious’, which I spoke about last week, as Carl Jung’s attempt to capture animism in psychological terms: this collective memory which bubbles out from unknown depths…
The central and most important aspect of Carl Jung’s psychology is his concept of the collective unconscious. Everything else is essentially an outworking or a consequence of that most central idea. So, what is the collective unconscious? It is the deepest-most part of our psyches. Our psyche can be divided up into three parts: first, our conscious, which is exactly that - everything we are conscious of in any given moment. So now, for instance, you are conscious of me, this space we’re in, and whatever other thoughts happen to be occupying you, perhaps what you’re having for dinner tonight. Then secondly, there’s your personal unconscious, which is everything in your head that was put there by you, by way of your own experiences, which you’re not conscious of at this very moment…
I took this morning’s New Testament reading from the lectionary. It’s an interesting passage for us to consider, because it’s a passage I have heard, many times in the past, weaponised against liberal Christians. We who have abandoned so-called ‘sound doctrine’ and followed after exactly what the passage warns against (at least that would be the charge) - teachings that satisfy our desires, our will, teachings that take us away from the “truth” towards mere myth. I’m obviously a big fan of myth, and was interested to see it used here in 2 Timothy in the pejorative sense, meaning fairy tale or fable. I looked up the Greek word, which is pronounced “mythous”, and I learned that it appears five times in the New Testament, and the word is always used in this pejorative sense, in the sense that we have (or the author has) “the truth”, whereas those ignorant people out there have been deceived by cleverly devised myths…
My summer holiday read was Carlos Castaneda’s first book, ‘The Teaching of Don Juan: a yaqui way of knowledge’. This is the topic of this morning’s service. We are entering into an imaginal realm. It is completely different to, and yet reminds me of, the imaginal realm of the 19th Century Irish poet, Æ. His world is of course that of Ireland, of her trees, of her Nature, and of her folklore. Whereas Carlos Castaneda’s world is, as we will see, that of the desert. The desert of Western Mexico and Arizona, and the Native peoples of that land, the Indians, or the Native Americans. However, the ultimate repercussions of Castaneda’s spiritual journey into the desert, is, as we will see, for a lot of reasons very controversial, and so there is the added complication this morning of having to glean that of value from Castaneda’s work, while at the same time recognising and acknowledging the harm that was done.
I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was lying on a large, very comfortable, couch. It was late, probably around midnight. I must have been eleven years old at the time. The year was 1999, and I was still living in Texas, although my remaining time in Texas was quickly drawing to an end. I had already seen the prospectus for the English boarding school I was to enter later in the year. And I wasn’t very happy about leaving Texas. The years there had been (up to that point) the happiest in my life. I had my Nintendo, my horse riding that I did at weekends, my ranch house that took me out into the country, and our suburban house, which was Texas-style-large, it has a swimming pool with a diving board, and a waterfall. It seemed very unlikely to me that whatever came next would be as good. And I was mostly right about that.
The address is on Thomas Aikenhead, a twenty-year-old Unitarian martyr. But before I get to him, let's talk about the weather - namely, how much colder Britain used to be. In 1845, the Reverend Richard Cobbold published his book on Margaret Catchpole, the famous Ipswich horse thief, prison breaker, and adventurer, but before she was any of those things, she worked for the Cobbolds as a cook and carer for their children, including the Reverend Richard Cobbold himself when he was a boy. I bring this book up for one simple reason: it recounts an ordinary 18th Century winter’s day in Ipswich, in which Margaret Catchpole takes the Cobbold children to Christchurch park wrapped up in their “cloaks and muffs” to go and see the ice skaters. It reads… “Many in the busy town of Ipswich left their labours and their cares for a few hours’ recreation; fair ladies ventured to lean upon a brother’s or a lover’s arm and try the slippery ice.”
The two brothers, Cain and Abel, are the first two sons of Adam and Eve. It’s an episode which appears very early on in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. In Genesis chapter 1 we have the first creation account, in chapter 2 the second creation account, in chapter 3 the whole ‘eating of the forbidden fruit’ incident, the first sin, and the couple’s subsequent expulsion from the garden of Eden. And then in chapter 4 is the story of Cain and Abel. The story goes like this: Once Adam and Eve had been expelled and were living outside of the garden of Eden, Eve bore Cain, and then she bore Abel. As far as the mythological account is concerned, Cain and Abel are therefore the first two people to be born of natural means. We’re told that Abel grew up to become a keeper of sheep, and Cain grew up to become a tiller of the ground. But for reasons we’ll get into, their relationship went sour. They became adversarial, and ultimately Cain murdered Abel.
Although I have referenced ‘Christ Consciousness’ several times from this pulpit I have never fully articulated what I understand it to be. It’s a way of recognising that in Jesus, there is something intrinsically more important than the mere words he spoke, more important than his teachings. Because teachings alone are problematic. A teaching, or a rule, or law, or precept, is by default a surface level thing, and Jesus wasn’t very concerned with surface level things. Whether we understand an individual to be adhering to a teaching or rule is, however, entirely dependent upon our observation of that person, on the external appearance of things. One might appear to be observant, following as they do the letter of the law, but in fact, be entirely disregarding the spirit of the law. To think about this in more depth, we can turn to some of the Mosaic Laws laid down in the Old Testament. Namely, the most well known, The Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shall not kill’, and ‘Thou shall not commit adultery’ to take two. In examining these two you will see just how wide the gulf can be between what we might instinctively feel these commandments are driving at, and how they were actually implemented.
So, to take the first ‘Thou shall not kill’ - pretty clear right? ‘Do not kill.’ Well, it is certainly not that straightforward…
I went walking in Rendlesham Forest, to escape into woodlands, to escape into Nature. I went along one of the popular trails that skirted the Woodbridge Airfield, a place with its own interesting Cold War mythology. For portions of the trail there were others in sight, families out for a walk, and at other times I found myself to be alone. At one such time, probably about a mile east of the airbase, I was struck by the quality of the silence, and so I left the dirt path and strolled into the forest a little way until I found the ideal spot. It is surprisingly difficult to find a spot such as this in Suffolk, to find yourself in thick woodland, and for the only sound to be that of the wind in the trees. A spot devoid of the traffic’s hum. I was standing amongst the tall conifers and silver birches, light reaching down to the detritus-strewn woodland floor, pines, leaves, and clusters of bracken growing, the sound of the birds singing, as I took a deep breath, and breathed in the smell of pine resin, and the wild air. That’s the spot where I simply waited. This morning, let us wait together in the wood.
Spirit of Love and Light,
Light that reaches between the swaying branches,
Bringing its vitality to all it touches,
Even to this place,
Wherein your secrets are hidden,
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Published in 1959, it was the seminal work of Kevin Lynch, an MIT professor in the school of Architecture and Planning. His book is about the way cities look, or rather the mental picture that we all form in our heads of cities. His book looks at three American cities: Boston, Jersey City (Part of the New York metropolitan area), and Los Angeles. So, we are surveying the city much like an artist might survey a piece of art, it brings to mind the Goethe quote that architecture is like “frozen music”. It differs however, in that unlike the semi-quaver on the page, or paint on the canvas, cities lack such controlled parameters; they vary, being affected by time, weather, and the interactions of those who populate them…