Formation and Sleep Ethics

One of the things I have noted in Praying the Pattern and which I will be reworking and expanding (maybe with this research!) in the forthcoming Living our prayer and praying our lives is how choosing bad sleep and rest patterns is choosing to make it more likely that we behave less graciously than we might otherwise. There is research, now, to back that up:

if you don’t get enough sleep, research suggests you are more likely to engage with unethical and deviant behaviour, such as being mean, bullying your fellow employees or falsifying receipts.  -Disrupted sleep article

So, contrary to some medieval asceticism, we should probably not normally be skimping on sleep.
It does, however, make me wonder what the purpose of sleep deprivation regimes was in those medieval regimes. I have the impression (but without researching it further) that it may have had something to do with avoiding sloth; that lying a-bed was seen as sinfully lazy. But I also wonder whether for some at least, there was a sense that we do indeed tend to worse self-censoring and self-checking when we are tired, so the point in that case may have been to push themselves more closely to their limits to make the testing of benevolence etc more real and more frequent, to give more chance to practice.
If that was the case, then I have to say that I wonder whether that is not, in fact, putting God to the test .... more thought needed.

Is God Really Omnipotent?

I think that this paragraph really articulates where I've found myself after years of wrestling with scripture, systematics and life experience (my own and others'). It comes from this dialogue:Tripp Fuller and Bo Sanders: Is God Really Omnipotent?:

Jesus died with the power of empire inscribed on his cross-dead body.  It is that body that God raised from the dead, and it is the future of the Cross-dead Christ that we as Christians share. Yet for some reason, we so easily speak about God’s power as if God was being revealed in the building of crosses and not in their bearing. God’s self-revelation in Jesus was a rejection of the coercive, determining, and controlling power that the empires of this world love so much for the power of love.  Infinite divine love, the freedom it gives, the risks it takes and the possibilities it continuously creates offer an alternative ultimate theological principle for Christian theology and one I think coheres with the story of Jesus

The helpful thing about it is that it roots the thing in Christocentric reading of scripture and reflection on that. I love, too, the first two sentences of the quote. The 'building ... not... bearing.." phrase is also helpful.

The quote leaves me thinking of expressing some of the ideas in riffs.

"Jesus crossed out by
 a mobbed popular vote; the lynch-pin
of age-change
condemnation by rote.
Sold not just for thirty argent slivers
but
for for an Empirical peace
which passed all otherstanding" 

... maybe ...

Why don't we gesture when we pray?

I few years ago, I found myself gesturing in prayer. Well, it has happened several times. The first time I found myself shrugging because I didn't know what I wanted to say, what to pray. Another time I recall extending my hands in a gesture of 'sending' -even though everyone else with skin on had their eyes closed. But these incidents (and others like them) only serve to make me ask why it is that gesturing in prayer is relatively rare compared with my normal conversational style (not that I'm a very gesturally exuberant communicator). And why is it almost unknown in prayer meetings for gestural prayer to be part of it?
I think for me it was about what is described in the referenced dialogue:

Gestures are also useful communicatively because they can give information that’s not in the spoken channel.

I'm wondering whether there is a clue in this bit of conversation between a couple of linguists about gesture as part of language.

Lauren: If we had someone speaking into a telephone versus someone – they’re hands-free. We’ll give them their hands – someone speaking into a telephone versus someone in a face-to-face conversation, who would you imagine gestures more? 

Gretchen: Probably the face-to-face conversation. 

Lauren: Yeah, because…? 

Gretchen: Because the other person can actually see the gestures, and they’re useful. 

Lauren: Yeah, we can increase the frequency. Even if we’re speaking into a telephone versus speaking into a Dictaphone that we think no one will ever listen to again, we’re even less likely, for the Dictaphone, to gesture because we don’t think our communication is going to anyone, so we probably just don’t try as a hard to communicate at all.

So my question on the basis of that snippet of information is whether we tend not to gesture in prayer because we don't really frame the experience in terms of God observing our communication visually, only aurally.

This would go, plausibly, hand in hand with the usual posture for prayer in the west: eyes are closed and even covered and people definitely don't look at one another. So maybe it's about being in a situation like being on the phone when we are aware in some way that no-one is actually looking, and, in any case, we're actually talking with God not so much each other.
But it is still a bit strange that we don't seem to think that if we are talking to God that putting over the extra information conveyed by gesture is not necessary. As if God only hears the communication and doesn't see it -like the other skin-on participants.

When you think about it, gesturing could -perhaps should- be as much a part of prayer as speaking may be. Of course God 'sees' and if it helps us to express ourselves before God it can and arguably should be part of our communication in prayer. To say that God can understand us without us needing to do that (I reckon that's a possible objection) would also to be saying that speaking our prayers is not necessary and so we should remain silent. Of course that latter is a perfectly respectable position in Christian spirituality and a lot of people have a real sense of the inadequacy of words in prayer (and I sometimes find I am one of them). However for those times and those people who find words helpful and necessary, finding ways to 'cue' gestural prayer may be a good thing in bringing our whole selves before God and helping us to greater fluency.
Of course, thinking about the necessity of word-use in prayer is a topic worth taking further -but not here and not now ...

Check out: Lingthusiasm • Transcript Episode 30: Why do we gesture when we...

Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure: A review

For a long time I've been drawn to Jewish spirituality in relation to hasidic attitudes to celebration and pleasure. As a probable background to Jesus' own spirituality it has been something that has helped me to weigh up inherited European Christian attitudes to bodiliness and to appreciate the good-givenness of the material creation. And in writing those things, I partly illustrate part of the point of this book -that Christian cultural history versus Jewish cultural history- has tended to be suspicious of pleasure and this has led to a set of cultural postures -historically speaking- that have been less that celebratory about bodily pleasure and have tended to inculcate a default guilt posture about them: -'if it feels good it must be wrong' sort of thing.
It's not my upbringing but I recognise it in others -especially in many on the fringes of Christian faith. Interestingly most active Christians I know don't tend to take this view. It seems it's a perspective that lingers in cultural christianity and perhaps helps keep some at least from more active discipleship: the fear of living in constant intensified guilt. That's why it's an important thing to look at, in my view.
As for me, I have for as long as I recall knowing something about Jewish (hasidic-related) spirituality been drawn to its appreciative approach to life's positives and even some of the less 'seemly' things; having a specific blessing for going to the loo seems a good thing to me.
I have to confess I'm still working through this book -one downside is the e-book version type seems to be dark grey and unfortunately my device doesn't change it to white or paler when it is on night-time mode. As night time is when I get most of my book reading done at present, this has delayed my review -but I decided a review of part is better than none at all!
So far I have found really helpful the historical background accounts of Judaism in the first centuries of CE and of Christianity in the same period. This really helps not only see the trajectory of the thesis but provides helpful background to the NT itself and intriguing lines of enquiry in my own mind about the relationship between the two contemporary forms of religion we call Christianity and Judaism -but are arguably very close siblings -and neither are like what was Judaism until the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem. Our situation is not the same one as faced by James, Stephen, Saul/Paul.
That said, I am concerned at this point in my reading that the author is downplaying the significance of the church's struggle with gnosticism in that it forced early church theologians to recognise the 'Jewish' appreciation of matter and the goodness of creation. So it seems to me that perhaps the real question is how, despite its best insights in that respect, much Christian popular piety was captured by gnostic disparagement of 'flesh' for so long. Perhaps as I read on there will be more insights on that. It does seem that cultural capture aided by the growing antagonism between official Judaism and official Christianity (which to our shame provided a bed rock for anti-semitism) may have misled us quite seriously.
From what I know/suppose of early twentienth century western Christianity, it is at least plausible that the thesis of this book in relation to the entertainment industries has at least a germ of truth to it.

Link-Love for this Review

Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure on Amazon
Robert Cherry at Brooklyn College

Tag for this book:   #JewishAndChristianViewsOnBodilyPleasure

A belief in meritocracy makes us selfish

It has seemed obvious to me for a very long time that the Bill Gates, Richard Bransons and Elon Musks of this world are not the exceptional geniuses they are sometimes painted to be but individuals who have had the luck to be in the right place and the right time for the talents and perspectives that they had to prosper. The corollary of this is that there are dozen, in fact probably thousands or even millions of people with a similar level of skill and insight and ability to all of those who 'make it' in whatever field who have simply not had the background or the opportunities (often delivered by sheer fluke) to make the money or come to the prominence that the lionised have. I seems my observation and reflection may be being borne out.

Furthermore, the idea that nurtures this belief in the exceptional deservingness of these men (as it nearly always is) is actually bad for us as societies for ...

...a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

Which suggests that we should be spreading the awareness of 'success' as a product most prominently of the vicissitudes of life, biases in the social system and favourable accumulation of good fortune. We need to help people at large to realise that there are many of us who could do just as well if we had been in the right place at the right time.

Now, that can sound a bit like 'the politics of envy' -and it could of course fuel such a thing. However, I'm not sure that some of that is not called for. But we could develop an attitude of "Well ,good for you, lucky you: but don't go around thinking you are so much better than others; be aware of your good fortune and be humble, recognise that so many others are just as deserving but without the breaks you have had and act accordingly".

It might also make us less squeamish about recognising that the monetary accumulations that come with many versions of 'success' are also products of good fortune and the tendencies for 'more to become more' as illustrated in the game of monopoly -in other words the accumulative nature of what in economics is called rent.



A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you | Aeon Ideas:

Faith-loss -a few questions and observations.

The book which publishes the research underlying this article is now on my 'to read' list. Part of my interest is from having been vicar at a church where I was told, when I was interviewed for the post, that the church had a big front door but a large back door too (ie it was good at welcoming people to the church but also had a good few leaving). Since then I've been interested in the issues that flow from that.

One of the things that the article does is give an overview of some of the 'risk factors':

 people who lose their faith tend to have certain personality traits, and underlying beliefs and values (the ingredients). These include having an above-average intelligence, and low tolerance for submitting to authority and for right-wing political ideas; valuing self-determination and being in control; and being open to experience.

As I read that I realised that I'm in the risk category on every count. So I wonder, then, what keeps me, and others like me, in Christian faith and whether there is something to be learned from that.

In fact, it leads me to ask whether there are a lot of people in this hanging on in there sort of category and what our collective experience might tell us. My suspicion is that it tells us something about Christian formation in the long-haul and the way that churches need to collaborate in long-term discipleship.
This goes to one of the other things the article mentions as a probably pathway to faithloss: "when parents or churches mistakenly equate their unique take on Christianity with the essentials of Christianity itself"
I could characterise that as 'our way or the highway' -and certainly I do come across people for whom that seems to have been the way out. The sadness is knowing that there are expressions of faith and church 'out there' that would have been able to support and hold that person but they had been demonised and that route for faith development had been closed off psychologically. That's why I'm interested in the way that we can collaborate across different expressions of church to make it possible for people to be 'blessed out' of one expression of Christian faith into another. Of course this requires a certain degree of maturity and restraint -but it has happened and does still in various parts of the church universal. Evangelicals will collaborate even while disagreeing vehemently about some things. They will put evangelism and 'by all means win some' as a higher priority and in doing so recognise that a common basis of faith is enough even if it doesn't clear up well-founded disagreements; there's a recognition of bona fides. More recent Anglican conservative Evangelical and Anglican Catholic collaborations have demonstrated something similar. So it is possible if the stakes are understood and high enough.

I do have another question about this, though. I generally take a perspective that everyone has faith: we all, as humans, seek meaning, live by values and have beliefs about how and why such things do or don't reflect reality. It's not radical -the declarations of human rights recognise that atheism is a form of belief, for example, and so cannot be used to deny someone their human rights and is protected in terms of its manifestation.

From this perspective, it's not that people lose their faith, it's that they change it. And I wonder whether that's a more fruitful way to think about the matter. In fact towards the end of the piece we almost get to that:

Marriott reports that “the vast majority of deconverts” whom he has interviewed “felt that a weight had been lifted off them and that they were now free”. They spoke of being “set free” and “liberated” — language that is usually associated with conversion stories, not their reverse.

Which story I have also heard from people shifting from, say, narrow fundamentalism to a more liberal or sacramental version of Christian faith. Or in some cases from a 'tired' or stultifying sort of church life to something with more vibrancy which felt confident about having something worthwhile to share. The difficulty is that some versions of Christian faith make it seems that their way is all-or-nothing or that it is better to drop out altogether than go over to the within-faith enemy. That's what we need to get past and perhaps help churches to recognise other churches in such a way as to bless people on the next stage of their journey with another kind of church polity or style. At different stages in our Christian development we may find in helpful to have a different approach in various ways, and to embrace that positively rather than to discourage it and risk losing some altogether might be a better way forward. In the past in this country that has happened through church splits and churn. Maybe now it's time to be more intentional. Also, it might help address this:

maybe some values and assumptions and expectations that this person holds that are a result of living in a 21st-century, modern world that aren’t necessarily indicative of just some sort of pure rationality. They are also part of a construct. . . And maybe they should ask themselves some questions about some of their underlying assumptions and some of the values that they think are very important

In other words there are elements of faith in whatever approach to life we adopt, it's the plausibility that is at issue. But if we conceive of it not so much as losing faith as changing faith, we may begin to have better conceptual tools to respond -as the article indicates that the book gives us.


What causes people to lose their faith?:

Time to ditch ‘We pray for . . .’

I really read this article because I am having a bit of a bugbear at the moment about the use of the word 'pray' and 'prayer' in worship and, in fact, prayer meetings. I'm starting to find the ubiquity of it feels like overuse: I no longer know what I'm supposed to be doing when some says 'we pray for ....'  And this seems to be part of the concern of Geoffrey Wilkinson who wrote the referenced article in the Church Times. Towards the end of the article, the author suggests,

“We pray for” is not prayer. At best, it is an invitation to the gathered assembly to pray for a particular concern" 

And I think that this may touch on part of my frustration with the phrase. It does depend, though, on what else is said. I agree that if a bare 'We pray for xyz' is used with no other qualification or elucidation, then the best we can do is bring a brief frisson of concern before God. Perhaps more than brief if the prayer leader gives pause and has signalled it. But often we will hear 'We pray for xyz and pqr and efg ...' without much gap to engage inwardly. I think this is what Mr Wilkinson is concerned about, at root.

However, I'm not sure how fully I agree with other points in the article.

By using the phrase “We pray for”, the Intercessor ceases to be a mediator between the people of God and God, and becomes instead a prayer leader. The proper meaning of “intercession” is thereby immediately lost.

I'm really not that worried about the distinction being made there, personally. And if I did, I think I might just come down on the other side of the issue. You see, I'm not really sure that the CofE means 'intercessions' in this part of the service: I think that the word was used because it has a certain gravitas but that what was really meant -and what is meant in practice- is 'petitions', 'requests', 'concerns', 'desires' and if we were honest to what a lot of people do, 'hopes' and 'wishes'. I'm not sure that 'intercession', as I understand it, is actually really suitable for regular public worship. The 'standing in the gap' stuff which involves the hard work of emotional engagement, empathy, patience, identification with others and so forth is really not something the average Sunday congregation is equipped to do corporately and most would probably find the intensity of it hard to be part of.

And, in fact, I'm not really sure I want to conceive of my role when I lead 'intercessions' at communion -or would want others taking that role- as mediating "between the people of God and God". I think I'm trying for "expressing requests and concerns" as a kind of spokesperson-in-congregation. I actually think that the kind of role described at that point feels uncomfortably close to usurping the role of Christ. I think that intercession is more like standing between God and the situation/people concerned -and we do that as a response to a vocation and as part of our ministry (lay or ordained) and, crucially, it's something we do in Christ -we take a share of the mission of God in the ministry of Christ. This is not what those Sunday morning prayers are largely attempting. Though I think that there is room for a conversation about how we situate our corporate petitions in the mission of God and our apprehension of it.

I'm also not fully with the assumption behind one of the remedies offered in the final paragraph:

THERE are two main ways of extracting ourselves from the “We pray for” mire in which we now find ourselves. The most obvious is to address God throughout the prayers, without faltering.

My main quibble with this is the assumption that it is not what is being done. I agree that the literal grammar of the phrasing suggests that we are, in a sense, describing what we are doing. However, I do actually think that most people who say this actually conceive of the phrase performatively, that is in saying 'we pray...' they are actually doing what they describe and bringing the matter to God, they do not conceive of themselves as merely inviting others to 'think their own thoughts prayerfully'. I guess that I am taking issue with that first quote I repeated: for a number of people it actually *is* prayer and the words are performative in intention. Now you might, as I do, wonder whether we can't do better, but I don't think quibbling about grammar is the right way to go to address that.

So, I guess the question then devolves to what I think could be done, going forward.

The article I'm reacting to is found here: Time to ditch ‘We pray for . . . It is possible that it may be behind subscription /limited sign up barrier.

I'm thinking that we actually need to encourage people to think more about what could be meant we the/we say 'we pray...'. One way to get a sense of that would be to ban using the phrases 'we pray...' or the word 'prayer' in our corporate petitions. This would make clear that what is often going on is a truncation of petitionary activity; we are coming to think that the word 'pray' is sufficient to say something. But what something?

So, take a phrase like "We pray for our government." Now, sometimes that may be followed up with some concerns which would be actual prayers in Wilkinson's terms: things like 'that they might have wisdom in their deliberations" for example. And if we followed up the ban on 'pray' we might just come up with an alternative like, "We ask for our government to have wisdom ..." or "We request you to send your Holy Spirit to work through the deliberations ..." The use of words like 'request' or 'ask' more strongly require a transitive construction than 'pray' now seems so. I suspect that once upon a time, when 'pray' was only just taking over from 'bede' or 'bid', it would have been nigh on impossible to say 'we pray for the queen.' Full stop. Without feeling it necessary to complete the sentence which was so obviously felt to be unfinished.

To refuse to use 'pray' might also encourage or even force us to consider what we are doing in terms of specifically asking for something or mainly giving expression to our concern. Those are not opposed matters; the latter can run into the former. Our concerns should be expressed before God: 'We are worried about ...'; "We fear for ...."; "We hold N in high regard"; "We hope ....". With those latter examples, we start to shade into naming our requests.

But there is one other component needed in leading public petitioning of God. That is the 'according to your will' or 'in the name of Jesus' dimension. This involves making requests that we truly believe are part of what God desires and is working for by the Spirit. This is no light or mean thing. In many, perhaps most cases, therefore, we will want to be restrained and perhaps a little imprecise. Perhaps we will want only to name our concern and encourage ourselves to hold it before God with a degree of unknowing about what the right thing to ask for us, seeking God's further wisdom and enlightenment. Perhaps sometimes that is what we need to say in public rather than being quite so bold before we understand better what we might be asking and best to ask.

Perhaps we should give up 'praying' for Lent! -Instead let's be 'asking', 'requesting', 'petitioning', even 'imploring' or just 'bringing our concern'. In taking up the challenge to 'say what we mean', we might just also discover that we say less and enquire more: that we learn more fully to 'wait on the Lord'.