Self destruction incoming.

The post that keeps not getting finished.

This post is the one that I was really trying to create in my mind as I hacked away at the workshop floor. I had several goes at writing it : each attempt having a different start and a different emphasis on the things that I was thinking about. In a way this post is part of the thread of posts that give us both the sweaty physicality of the background work, some of what was going on in the world and the impact of those things on me.

The central questions that I was trying to formulate my own answers to while I was working at the same time as trying to think about difficult things were : 1) what does it mean for me and 2) is the Church of England/Anglicans on a path of self destruction ?, It isn’t immediately obvious why the questions are related and also why my mind was in fizz mode – basically wandering all over the place.

In blog time/blog space, the second builders skip has been heaved out, the actual builder has given my work so far his nod of approval and iv’e started to fill some of the deeper pits with the same waste stone as I dug out. In real time it’s also raining steadily which is great because : 1) we’re in the middle of a long dry spell and really need the rain and 2) it’s as good excuse as any to sit and write.

And so….alongside my own positive reactions to the new Pope mixed in with the thought that anything I think or say is largely irrelevant because I have no skin in the game – as I put it. I once took the RCIA course but i’m not a baptized or catechized Catholic as I may be a fellow traveller but still an RC reject if canon law is still the same as it was then. During the RCIA course, when asked by an already Catholic (and egregiously nosy) course member what my spiritual/religious background was I had to explain that I come from that part of the country that gave us the hardore Puritans (Cromwell’s place is a few miles up the road) and that, to the best of my knowledge, the small market town may have had an example of every Protestant demonination except a Catholic one. I was brought up, for a while, being taken to the local Baptist hall which to my memory was as blank and sterile a ‘church’ building as you can get.

Now, I have no intention of expending lots of time and too many words on my personal history of religiosity except to say that I stopped attending the Baptist hall as soon as I was given the choice, did have a flirtation with the happy clappy end of Christianity during my nurse training but as quickly abandoned that in favor of a deeply atheistic skepticism. Two of my best friends during my student nurse years was a pair of lovely local girls – both Catholics and neither of which I succeeded in getting off with !

I was going to add that iv’e never darkened the door of an Anglican/Church of England church except in a very four weddings and a funeral kind of way. My partner was brought up in the C of E, was married there and both her late father and his sister (Jackie’s aunt) are buried side by side in the graveyard of as cute and calm country Parish church as you could possibly imagine.

Thus, with no skin in the game with either the Anglican or Roman Catholic churches I find myself being in the position of what CS Lewis described as spiritually homeless. I still have a lot of affection and respect for the local RC parish priest for sticking with canon law when it came to what I thought might be the deal breaker : that of me having a long term partner whilst remaining unmarried. In a way i’m glad that I fell before the first fence as I would, in all honesty, had to present a greater problem in that I have a big problem with the central RC belief of transubstantiation and i’m really sorry but however hard I try I see it as representing a symbolic act. I never say just before symbolic because somehow iv’e also picked up on the power and importance of symbols and symbolism via Jonathan Pageau’s lectures on the subject.

That’s the meat and bones of it really – not Catholic because they won’t have me and mostly not Anglican because I won’t have them due to the path they seem to be on – the path of self destruction, which is, after all, the title of this post.

After my fail with the local RC’s I contacted my local Anglican parish to sound out the local vicar on quite a wide range of things – none of which being relevant to this post. I never received a reply which is one of the main reasons I never went to check them out on the ground, another reason being that the local Angican parish website started to throw up some red flags for me and that’s what I want to talk about in the second half of this post.

A whole heap of Red Flags.

Iv’e had several tries at summing up everything that I think is going wrong in our own Church of England and it’s various offshoots. My problem is that the list gets longer by the day but when it comes to giving actual examples I need to start naming names and calling out the individuals concerned. I happen to think that that is very poor internet behavior so I generally avoid doing so.

Ok then : i’ll break my own self imposed internet rules and start with an actual example.

I’ll assume that most readers will know that the USA has a (relatively) new president and during part of the process he (Donald Trump) attended a multi faith prayer service alongside his VP and members of both families. At that service he was, in my own words, essentially lectured/harangued by a lesbian activist in the guise of an episcopalian ‘Bishop’ and frankly I found it embarrassing and cringeworthy. For sure president Trump maybe did need a few words to remind him of the Christian responsibility that he bears but what he got was a lecture about the concerns and alleged fears of the LGBTQ community almost solely – almost as if nobody else exists except that community.

Iv’e been thinking about this example, and similar ones, that read one way in my mind but also say quite a bit about my own, rather conservative, mindset : it probably says as much about me as it does about that particular bishop.

I think that what disturbed me is that her address wasn’t a homily, a prayer or a well thought about and timely address based on scripture so much as being political grandstanding based on a narrow range of activism which the Protestant/Anglican churches seem to be promoting. I don’t like and won’t use the term woke although other commentators did,

Forgive me, and correct me if i’m totally wrong, but i don’t recall even one new initiative coming from the Trump presidency that directly or indirectly threatens the lives and freedoms of the LGBT community but if you listened to that address and took it seriously what would come to mind is threats of violence leading to persecution and prison camps. To my mind no such thing exists although it does seem a regular progressive trope to label anything remotely conservative immediately as fascistic and Nazi without ever thinking it through.

I use the example, perhaps improperly, to highlight what i’m saying about the whole progressive tilt of the English Protestant church and I know it’s at least slightly wrong because I see plenty of evidence of hard working and committed C of E vicars serving their parishes. As I did when I was recounting my own reactions to the new pope as compared with the previous incumbent I was frequently swayed by the opinions and views of actual practicing Catholics, now i’m having tom do the same thing with practicing or recently recusant Anglican ministers .

Not so fast Bucko…..

Enter player one – who is of course Dr Jordan Peterson – the psychology professor whom, when asked, ‘Do you believe in God’ ? responded with ‘What do you mean by God ? and what do you mean by belief’ ?

I remember being distinctly pissed off when I first heard Dr Peterson say that and it’s taken me several years to finally catch up with his meaning. At the time I thought he was being pretentiously obtuse and willfully evasive but nowadays I (mostly) get it. Dr Peterson gets a bit squirrelly about all this and generally gets a bit annoyed with certain brands of Christian that persist in asking him the same thing over and over. My own version of the whole thing started at the same time as I sat through the RCIA course and I tried to work out, at least for myself, what I meant by God and how I defined belief. If I say today that i’m not sure about either it’s because I have thought about and the nearest I can get with ‘God’ is a slightly better idea of what God isn’t.

Very crude I know but at least I can say, with some certainty, that ‘God’ isn’t some kind of supreme being – that’s about as far as I can go – at least here and today.

This post is mostly about belief so, picking up on the things that Dr Peterson says, is belief just the thing we might say or is it the thing we act out in the world ?. My more direct and personal question – really getting down to the weeds now – is what does that actions of our lives say about our spoken belief : are our actions and words consistent ? I suspect that if you were to have been watching the things that I do, the things I demonstrate by my actions as being important to me, wouldn’t so much mark me out as having a strong spiritual belief (of any kind) anything like as much as it would show that i’m a pretty self centered kind of person whom is largely doing what he is doing because of its benefits to myself.

Afterword/postscript edit.

This post has been essentially the outcome of a lot of semi random thinking done day after day while I hacked and dug out the floor, there’s a load more detail that I either didn’t add or edited out and i’m conscious that the post called for some kind of resolution that I haven’t given and probably can’t. Thus, this post is the end of the series of random oddities that only continue with me rebuilding the workshop.

A slightly less than random thought is the thing that Jordan Peterson said about writing and that is that helps in organizing and making concrete ones thinking, My conclusion and resolution in this post is that I should be more naturally an Anglican in one sense (the transubstantiation problem and a few others) and yet not in others : it’s a lesser issue but I still admire the symbolism usually present in Catholic churches – it feels more complete somehow than the blankly whitewashed preaching halls of some of the Protestant demoninations.

I think it best to leave it there and go do the weeding that our garden so desperately needs – I have a few days off from being a builder as my hardcore doesn’t get delivered until next week (in blog time). By the time this blog goes live i’ll be spending hours a day moving barrow loads of heavy hardcore and most likely occupying my mind with something else entirely.

Best wishes Y’ awl.