Welcome
Autobiography
God
in All Things
- Preface
- Chapter
1
Oh God,
Why?
- Preface
- Chapter
1 - 6
God In All Things
Preface
IN
1985 I WROTE God of Surprises, a guidebook for the inner journey in which
we are all engaged, whatever our religious beliefs or lack of them. I
wrote that book for bewildered, confused or disillusioned Christians,
who have a love-hate relationship with the Church to which they belong,
or once belonged. God in All Things develops and enlarges upon some of
the themes of God of Surprises, and draws on my experience of working
in the field of ecumenical spirituality in a number of countries over
the past eighteen years.
During this period I have been working particularly with those who are
actively engaged in the fields of justice, peace and reconciliation, and
I have become increasingly convinced that Christianity today has reached
the most critical moment in its history. It is more critical than the
eleventh century, when Eastern and Western Christianity divided, and far
more critical than the Protestant/Catholic split of the sixteenth-century
Reformation. The institutions, forms and structures that served us well
in earlier centuries no longer answer the needs of our day. Our nervous
systems, gradually evolving through the millennia to deal with the gentle
pace of natural and human development, are now subjected to abrupt and
massive change. The population of the world has doubled in the last thirty
years – Church and State are shaken and confused, their cohesive
forces ruptured. Reactions vary: some people are crushed by all these
experiences and despair; others refuse to face the fact of change and
insist on carrying on as before. There are some who relish change and
remain full of hope for the future. The outbreak of fundamentalism in
society and in all the religions of the world is an inevitable reaction
to such rapid change. Such a reaction is very understandable: fundamentalism
represents a desperate attempt to find some point of anchor as our familiar
securities are swept away. But the fundamentalist reaction is about as
helpful as King Canute’s order that the advancing tide should ebb!
Where are we to find security today? Where are we to find God? For Christians,
God is always in the facts. It therefore follows that in today’s
confusion we are being invited to grow. We can become too attached to
our securities, including our forms of religious worship; too attached
to the way in which we formulate our beliefs and understand God and God’s
creation. Today, those securities are being shaken, not in order to destroy
our faith in God, but as a means of helping us to rediscover our real
security, which nothing can destroy, not even death itself. True security
enables us to live at peace in insecurity, offers us certainty in uncertainty,
comfort in confusion; it helps us to spot creativity in chaos, and to
smile even in the tears of things.
God is very near, is at hand. ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among
us.’ But in spite of God’s continuous efforts to make this
known to us, we have nevertheless managed to make God remote, and we take
remarkable care to keep God at a distance! The first three chapters of
this book enlarge on the ways in which we do this. This split in our spirituality
impoverishes us, preventing us from recognising God at work within us
and around us. We are divided from God, from other people, and from ourselves.
As a result we become frightened creatures, so intent on our own security
that we try to make ourselves invulnerable both individually and collectively.
We are wedded to violence, which always devours its lovers in the end;
in the name of freedom, we oppress, exploit, or get rid of those who thwart
us. As long as our spirituality is split in this way, we cannot know our
inner wealth and ultimate identity. That ultimate identity is to ‘become
God’.
One of the joys of working ecumenically is the discovery that the Holy
Spirit does not appear to be a respecter of Christian denominations, but
seems to be happily at work across them all, and in people of differing
religious faiths and of none. Chapter 4 offers some methods of prayer
that have proved helpful across the cultures and across the Christian
denominations, as well as to those of differing faiths and of no formal
belief. The common factor within each method is that it allows our everyday
experience to become the substance of our prayer.
Where do you start when working with people of differing religious traditions
and those of no formal belief? Is there anything we have in common? Desire
is common to all human beings. It is the source of our actions and reactions
and is fundamental to all decision-making. Our desires are many and varied
and most of them are mutually incompatible. They are the source of our
strength and creativity, but also of our pain and destructiveness. How,
then, does God’s will relate to our desires?
Desire lies at the root of all feeling and emotion, and Chapter 5 explores
the nature of desire. Chapter 6 develops this by showing that the search
for our deepest desire enables us to distinguish the creative movements
within us from the destructive ones. It also explores ways in which we
can change the potentially destructive into something creative.
How do we discover the roots of peace and of violence and the relationship
between inner and outer peace? And how do we find peace within our warring
selves? This is our greatest challenge and a constant question among those
active in the promotion of peace. It is the theme of Chapter 7.
Pilgrimage has been described as ‘the poor person’s substitute
for mysticism’, and it is far from coincidental that the practice
of going on pilgrimage has become so popular in recent years. When we
find ourselves confused, bewildered and directionless it can be very helpful
to decide on a destination and to walk there, if at all possible. Pilgrimage
is a way of externalising our inner confusion, countering that confusion
by setting ourselves a destination, and then learning the lessons about
life that the journey can teach us. This is the subject of Chapter 8.
The Christian Church has been described as the ‘pilgrim people of
God’. Chapter 9 explores the Church in light of this description:
the call of the Church to unity, not only between Christians, but with
all peoples in every circumstance of their lives. It is in discovering
our unity with all peoples and with all creation that we can come to discover
ourselves within the God of unity and compassion.
A common reason given for the abandonment of Christian belief is the impossibility
of believing in a ‘loving’ God who allows the innocent to
suffer and evil to triumph. Chapter 10 looks at pain, suffering and death
in the light of a Christian belief, which can help us to appreciate and
value every minute of life now, and enable us to face the future with
hope.
The final chapter draws together the various themes of the book. How can
we allow God to be the God of love and compassion in our own lives, in
the life of the Church, and in the lives of all peoples? How can we let
God out of our religious cupboards, in such a way that we can come to
know the God of freedom, who loves all creation and loves each one of
us in every aspect of our being.
God in All Things has been written in order to help readers to discover
– or rediscover – for themselves the treasure that each one
possesses. This treasure has been freely given. It is not something we
create, or earn by our good behaviour: it is God’s gift of Godself.
Consequently, we can be confident that God is within our present crises,
both the crisis of Christianity and its future, and the crisis of human
survival on our planet, which is so deeply threatened by our greed, violence
and timidity. We are being invited into a deeper understanding of the
meaning of Christian faith, an understanding that brings heaven closer
to earth and helps us to walk the earth, not ‘mourning and weeping
in this vale of tears’, as the ancient prayer describes it, but
walking with God the foolish lover who, knowing the essential goodness
within us, accepts us as we are in all our stupidity, meanness, narrowness
and brutality; God, the divine alchemist, who transforms base material
into the very life of God.
If you find sections of this book difficult to understand, I suggest that
you skip over them and come back to them later. The most valuable part
of the book lies in the exercises at the end of the chapters. There is
no need to try them all, but you are likely to find it helpful if you
return more than once to any exercises that you have found useful. In
Appendix 1 I have provided brief practical suggestions for using the book
in groups.
If you enjoy this book, pray for me. If it annoys and irritates you, pray
for me even more! And I shall remember you.