So does it really come down to the tooth fairy?

Yesterday at the lunchtime Eucharist the preacher took as his text a letter he saw published in the FT.

Apparently the letter was an attack on religious belief as nothing more than believing in a 'fairy in the sky'. I searched the FT archive but could not identify the letter.

The preacher then went on to comment on the passage from Job which was read yesterday.

The preacher invited us to reflect on Job's understanding of God as mystery, from mysterium, or more accurately, mysterium fidei, which of itself raised the possibility of the 'mystery' being revealed in a variety of forms human and otherwise, or even as a 'fairy in the sky'.

Or, as the sculpture exhibition in the Cathedral suggested, as an Angel who accompanies us on our life's journey.

Another fairy was introduced recently in correspondence with a friend, this was the tooth fairy, who had caused trouble when it was discovered that the tooth fairy in our house was apparently more generous than the tooth fairy in their house.

Whilst, as far as I know, their children didn't picket their garden gate or mount demonstrations in their garden the negotiations were, as these things can be, tough and the final settlement was a compromise between the children, the parents and the tooth fairies union.

My response to this historic episode was to observe that I ceased to believe in the tooth fairy when I became the tooth fairy.

The de-mythologising of the tooth fairy was complete when I retrieved the cast off tooth and replaced it with the fifty pence piece or pound coin under the pillow of the child with the gappy smile who had appeared earlier in the day.

Of course as my treasury of cast off and detached teeth grew so my treasury of fifty fences and pound coins decreased.

The same process of de-mythologising happened at Christmas time it is hard to believe in Father Christmas when you find yourselves at midnight on Christmas Eve pacing the landing, listening to sleeping children, placing the sacks at the end of beds and then at four or five am waking to a chorus of ooh's and aah's and being shown what Father Christmas had so mysteriously delivered whilst the children were sleeping.

So we are left with the idea of a divine and supernatural being who is being defenestrated by contemporary secularism, although the danger in this is that it may be that not only God is thrown out of the window but also the 'fairy' or the baby with the bathwater.


Secularism is giving religion a hard time, but it always has, and as Richard Holloway commented in his latest book:  'the anvil of religion has weathered many hammer blows and may yet weather the hammer blows of secularism'.

Human consciousness aspires to wrestle with the critical questions of existence, who are we? Where are we from? Where or what, will our end be?

To these questions there are both secular and religious or theological responses, these responses tend to reflect the human understanding that God as our beginning or our end (Alpha and Omega) is qualitatively different from both the tooth fairy and Santa Claus or indeed the FT's correspondent's 'Fairy'.

But the question of whether God is the product of human expectation (consciousness) or whether humanity is the product of God's action as a creator continues to challenge philosophers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

God as the summation of human consciousness can of course imply that humanity has created an idea it calls God in order to answer its own existential questions, but as with the tooth fairy and santa such an understanding wouldn't survive being demythologised, I stopped believing in the tooth fairy when I became the tooth fairy.

God can be seen throughout history, as the full realisation of reality itself, but reality itself is partial and limited. God becomes the fullest expression of human consciousness emerging in this sense as the conceptualisation of 'beings of limited reality'.

Did God create us or did we create God out of the need to answer questions of existence?

The collusion between adults and children that creates both the tooth fairy and santa is in effect a collusion that reinforces bravery or good behaviour.

When children move on from the childish belief in tooth fairies and santa's is the point when they assume new kinds of freedoms, when they move into adulthood.

So for human beings the need to move into a fuller sense of humanity demands that their understanding of God changes from a static, albeit for the Christian trinitarian 'being', into an idea of boundless self determination, (mysterium fidei) intimately involved in the unfolding universe and gifting to human beings both inner freedom and and the possibility of self giving love.

In the christian tradition the person of Jesus represents the connection between 'transcendence' and 'imminence' but such a connection becomes unnecessary when God is seen as both transcendent and imminent.

God may be a bigger he, she or it than the tooth fairy whose usefulness ends when as a parent you realise that you are the tooth fairy but the constant problem this idea of God faces is the desire of the church to comprehend, understand and contain the boundlessness as though it were a commodity when in point of fact the preacher at yesterdays service may be right in reflecting with Job that it is indeed a mystery.

A Church in Crisis?

For me it came down to two things, a Cataract which meant that I simply could not see to read the text, so I had to stand down from the Rota, for celebrating Mass at the Cathedral.

Perhaps more importantly was having to decline the Bishop's invitation to lunch on the grounds of the indoor critic's deteriorating health and the fact that the Bishop's house (He having recently downsized from a  Castle) was not accessible for a wheelchair.

In both of these events one of the Cathedral Clergy has responded pastorally and out of friendship.

But despite the seriousness of the indoor critics situation I have yet to hear from the Bishop, not much of the pastor pastorum there!

And all of this set me thinking about what I expect from the Church?

Well I guess I like to see the Mass celebrated fittingly and appropriately with due dignity, however recently I have found  myself thinking, when I have attended, that I'd prefer to do it myself than watch it being done badly or with the celebrant in a lounge suit rather than a cassock alb.

I guess I like to hear a sermon that struggles to make the lectionary readings relevant to the real world context in which I struggle to live out my faith instead of being patronised from the pulpit by a rehearsal of what we 'learned' in the recently completed Alpha Course.

I like to be welcomed as a member of the family rather than viewed with suspicion in case I am really  there to blag the vicar for a few bob after the service.

So on the whole a cup of coffee, my FT Weekend and a pleasant walk with the dog in the afternoon and supper with the indoor critic in the evening makes my Sunday pretty complete without church.

Last week I received a letter from the two Archbishop's, I read it twice, but after reading it again I really hadn't a clue what it was that I was being asked to do?

If the future of the Church is being placed in the hands of God then I imagine that asking S/he (the alleged deity above) to get on and sort out the mess we have made of it makes some kind of sense but there was, throughout the letter a sense of hopelessness, what a mess we have made and are still making as the Church we inherited sinks slowly into a crisis that is becoming a chronic, and ultimately I suspect fatal, decline.

Recently in the FT I read an article by Philip Delves Broughton which reviewed a paper called Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility.

The paper explains that as companies grow, so do complexity and bureaucracy, the effect of this is to drive the best people out of the organisation , the effect of this is that even more bureaucracy is required to manage the incompetency that remains.

Netflix's antidote to this is to hire ever more self managing, high performing people and not cramp their style.

By all means lay out a strategy, establish roles and objectives, but then get out of your employees way.

By comparison, and I have to accept that I am these days merely an eaves dropper, I seem to see and hear of more and more micro management of the Church emanating from the top, which is where my letter came from, with clergy seeming to think that survival is the best that can be hoped for and complaints coming forward that most of what was traditionally perceived as the role of the parish priest being abandoned in favour of 'management' with far to much time spent in front of the computer.

As a Parish Priest in Salford, Greater Manchester in the mid Seventies my experience was of very little interference from the hierarchy, once licensed I was allowed to get on with it with the offer of light touch support from the Rural Dean whose Parish was next door.

The collegiality of the Chapter was very real and as the congregation grew I was always aware of the very real evangelical opportunities offered by the christenings, the marriages and the funerals which it was my duty to officiate at.

As it said in the prayer at Mass, it was a 'duty and a joy'.

But the world has changed in the past forty years, now the naming ceremonies and the marriages take place in hotels or other licensed venues and, having recently attended two funerals of near neighbours, the funerals are conducted by a secular funeral celebrant who will tailor the service to your individual requirements. In fact the Co-op Funeral Director told me recently that the bulk of the requests they receive specify a secular rather than a religious celebrant.

Add to this the degree of theological speculation and reorientation, reflected in for example Richard Holloway's recent book, A Little History of Religion, where in his conclusion he observes that it is:

'the attraction and the difficulty of religion for secular-minded men and women. They may admire much of what religion has achieved, but they can no longer accept the supernatural beliefs on which it is based. They are suspicious of forms of authority that claim to be above human correction. They have noticed how slow religion is at adapting to good changes in human behaviour, as well as in accepting the consequences of new knowledge. Far from daring to know the new, religion usually prefers to cling to the old'.

So the tectonic plates that kept the Church relatively stable from the reformation until the 1970's when I was made Vicar have shifted, but the 'groaning and travailing' we can hear is  not the 'giving birth' described by Paul or a future becoming rather, it seems, they represent the agonising death throes of an organisation and institution experiencing an existential crisis for which the leadership sees no solution.