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.
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.
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