Blog 1

So I’ve decided to keep a blog, and here I am, somewhat self-consciously beginning by admitting that I’m one of those people who likes the thud of his own keyboard and has the arrogance to believe that other people should have the benefit of my ‘wisdom’ and/or stupidity. I find myself at the dark age of 44, increasingly confused about life and its meaning, yet increasingly convinced that the Good Book is extremely relevant to all this working, playing, struggling, imagining and fearing that makes up the pieces of our reckless fragmented lives.

What I do wanna say about the faith is this. For too many years I believed a whole load of stupid things about the faith, the Good Book and the meaning of life. I mean totally stupid, it seems we can easily become extremely polarised about religious things.

Various viewpoints seem to prevail, here’s just a few highlights:
That all religion is bad, and anyone with faith in someone greater than ourselves is sadly deluded.
That one particular train of belief is the one and only way and anyone with other faith, or lack of it, is sadly deluded. (This kind of thinking leads to the attitude that I have the truth and must dump it all over you – which isn’t a million miles away from what’s going on with this blog.)
That hidden somewhere on the planet there is irrefutable evidence that Jesus was really a terrorist/evil genius/benign Superman/alien predator with a foolproof agenda for overthrowing everything everywhere, and if only we could lay our hands on it the world would be very different and we’d discover that all religion is bad and anyone with faith is sadly deluded. (N.B., worth noting here that the beloved DaVinci Code is somewhat irrelevant anyway as Jesus had at least four brothers and two sisters, so therefore there’s bound to be his great, great, great to the power of x, nephews and nieces walking about today who apparently haven’t managed to solve the world’s problems.) Sorry Dan.
That all religions are really the same, despite the fact that the founders of said religions worked blooming hard to emphasise the differences.
Worst case scenario – that Jesus was a nice guy, who wanted to heal the world with a bag of miracles and a smile. And if we were all just better people and more ‘Christian’ everything would be fine.

But I’ve had enough of talking about that. For me the faith is about being human, engaging with the world, engaging with other people, and spotting signs of the kingdom as we stumble across them in the cinema and the hospital, high street and bus shelter. Not that I believe people are God, but it seems to me that, for some reason, God has chosen to be invisible and invited us into the job of making him visible. Which can seem bloomin’ annoying, but that’s the way it is. So I have to get over it. And if God is God – why shouldn’t he do things that way?

Arguing for the existence or non existence of some kind of deity seems a fairly pointless exercise to me. All I’ll say on that is either we came from something bigger than us (e.g. a Creator) or something smaller (e.g. a jellyfish). The fact that we possess knowledge and ability and laughter, along with a sense of justice and humour, suggests to me that we came from something greater than ourselves, and the fact that so much of what we have can easily become twisted and damaged suggests that we often require the assistance of something greater, not smaller.
(On a bad day though all I would say is this – I have nowhere else to go – looking, up, out, around for God is my default option.)

For better or worse I love the Bible – not the shallow stilted book so often discussed in public – but the book that’s jammed with people wrestling with faith, despair, temptation, purpose and doubt. I am only beginning to glimpse the context of much of what is going on in the Good Book, but I’m with a guy called Rob Bell, who asks this kind of question: is the Bible effective because it happened in the past, or because it happens today? Again arguments about what did or did not take place may miss the point. Every day I’m offered the kind of Eden fruit that may sow destruction in my life, every day I face the Job-like threat of losing everything precious to me, every day I may encounter a transfiguring moment of enlightenment, standing on the most unlikely metaphorical mountain, every day I may get confused and abandon my faith, and run like the rocky Peter.

One final thing. Clearly Jesus understood ordinary people and, unlike much religious hokum these days, spoke the language of the people, in the places of the people. I’m a coward, and a poor example of doing that, so I’ll hide behind this blog and make vain attempts to spit out little gobs of hope from a distance.