THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL?

The love of money is the root of all evil. Paul’s First Letter to Timothy, 6 v10

Paul may be overstating the matter, but not by much. Over the last thirty years or so, we in Britain have run a dangerous experiment which has confirmed once again that Paul was right. During the experiment, we came to think that ‘resources’ meant money, when really it means people and their energy and creativity and insight, plus the bounty of the earth. It therefore became acceptable to waste people by letting them be unemployed and to waste the bounty of the earth by avoidably damaging the environment – all provided we were saving money by doing so. We came to rely on the financial services ‘industry’ for a large chunk of our national income, while we ran down manufacturing industry and outsourced services off-shore. The financial crisis of 2008 alerted us to some of the dangers of doing this: the Government – we – had to bail out banks that were ‘too big to fail’, and we are now embarked on years of austerity to repay what we borrowed in order to do so. But to say that is to state only the money side of the matter, and it was by considering only the money side of things that we got into trouble in the first place. The love of money is the root of a great deal more evil than just most of us finishing up being a bit poorer. A society that in practice extols money above all else is corrupting itself, and that corruption will have all sorts of unexpected and unwanted effects.

                The experiment involved people in the financial services ‘industry’ threatening to leave the country if we didn’t pay them vastly inflated salaries and bonuses. As a society we bowed to this blackmail, telling ourselves we must pay up because that’s how we would get what we called ‘the best people’ to run the financial services our economy increasingly depended on. There was something not only distasteful about this but also very foolish. In the first place, we learned once again that, as Kipling put it, once you have paid the Danegeld you will never get rid of the Dane: he keeps coming back for more. Employing greedy people to run financial services is about as sensible as employing paedophiles to run children’s homes: of course they will abuse their position to satisfy their lusts. Why ever would we have expected anything else?

                But the idea that the services of ‘the best people’ were to be obtained only by paying them huge sums of money was deeply corrupting. It told young people that it was money, and in the end only money, that really motivates people. This isn’t true of course, but how do you encourage a young person in a vocation to be a teacher, say, if society says that to take such a job is to admit that you are not one of ‘the best people’? And speaking of teachers, it was strange indeed that although we believed that ‘the best people’ could only be bought with huge salaries, and we said that we wanted ‘the best people’ to be teachers, we didn’t follow the logic of this by increasing teachers’ pay in line with City rewards. It wasn’t only the young who were corrupted. Older people were encouraged to regard volunteering as a mugs’ game. A society that had come to value those services that it paid obscene amounts to buy was hardly likely to encourage the voluntary efforts of Brown Owl, the special constable, and the rest of the army of truly ‘best people’ who make society work.

                Our national reliance on the financial services ‘industry’ went hand-in-hand with its growth. We wanted lots of big financial institutions in the City, and those financial institutions were paying more and more to those they self-regardingly said were ‘the best people’. Instead of there being a few City fat-cats whose relatively low level greed could be quietly ignored, we had increasing numbers of increasingly rich people parading their wealth increasingly ostentatiously. This enabled well-qualified people who could conceivably have got City jobs to argue that if non-financial businesses or the public services wanted them, they would have to pay – not as much as the City but – relatively more than those in similar jobs used to be paid. Thus the malign influence of City rewards spread over the whole employment scene. The result was that, over the same thirty years, income inequalities inexorably rose. The average pay differential between the boss of a medium size company and the company’s lowest paid employee is many times greater than it was thirty years ago. This matters partly because increasing inequality is hardly to be seen as a good thing in society. But even more importantly there is hard evidence that where income inequality is great and growing, all kinds of other social evils come along as well. We may not understand exactly why it is that teenage pregnancy and violent crime, among other undesirable things, tend to rise with income inequality, but they do, as our experience over the last thirty years bears out. And the income inequalities had another malign effect: they drove house prices out of the reach of many young people. It’s not much use tackling such symptoms of corruption if we don’t tackle what we know to be its cause.

                Nor is it really enough to ask our society to simply stop loving money, because if money is not to be the driving force of our system, what is? Jesus observed that a choice has to be made between what he called God and Mammon. In choosing Mammon, we have self-evidently made the wrong choice, but if our notion of what ‘God’ means has been hollowed out and prevented from updating itself, we have nothing to put in its place. That’s why the mess we’re in is a spiritual mess, and, sadly, by insisting on an outdated notion of the divine, our traditional spiritual guides have offered us a choice between a notion of God that most people don’t and can’t wholeheartedly accept and a Mammon that offers us all we could wish for but, once we are hooked on it, delivers much that we don’t. Traditional religion won’t get us out of the mess we’re in, even if there are within it some of the understandings we need for our spiritual and social renewal. That doesn’t mean there’s no escape; but it does suggests that in finding that escape faith will be more helpful than religion.

EVIL

[Jesus] answered, when you pray, say, ‘… And do not bring us to the test.’ Luke 11 v4 (Some manuscripts add ‘but save us from the evil one’)

There is no more a literal devil-out-there than there is a literal god-out-there. But just as that does not mean that what the word ‘God’ points to isn’t real or doesn’t matter, so the non-existence of the devil must not tempt us to suppose that evil is not a reality. It is, and this fact and its consequences have to be faced. It is an important religious insight that all of us have within us the possibility of doing great evil, an insight that is borne out by psychological research. We should never condemn people who carry out evil deeds without taking this seriously; that way any of us could go but for …     ‘… the grace of God’ is how tradition ends that line. But what is ‘the grace of God’ here?

                A traditional church doctrine, derived from a reading of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, is that human beings are born in Original Sin, and that unless they – we – are saved by faith or the church and its rituals, we will naturally become evil-doers. This seems to blend two important and true ideas to make something that is both pessimistic and misleading. The first idea is that both as a species and as individuals we have to grow up into what we regard as mature human life; our present state is not where we started. The second is that the inclinations that can lead us to ‘sin’ are part of our original mental equipment. But so, of course, are the inclinations that can lead us to love and to have a moral sense; if we have Original Sin, we have Original Love too. Either potentiality can be developed in anyone, and what usually makes the decisive difference is the kind of upbringing they received as a small child. To say that we are meant to grow up able to love is not to say that left to our own devices we will grow up to love. But left to our own devices we won’t grow up to be ‘sin’ful either. A human individual is human not just on account of getting its genes from human parents; it is human because of growing up in human society, and the nature of that society is as crucial to the adult that results as are the genes. Left on its own, fed perhaps by animals, a child of human beings would not – in fact does not – develop language, and neither does it develop either love or the moral sense that would be necessary to say it could ‘sin’.

                The Jesus teaching attacked reliance on Law because it saw that Law did not lead people to be blessed, happy, makarios. But it did not say people needed no guidance about their behaviour. It just wanted that guidance to come from within the individual. But, again, it did not imagine that such guidance would flow out of an individual who was simply left to their own devices. It rather saw that we can be self-guided – autonomous – and yet still not be liable to want to smash up society only if we have seen other people and especially our elders being makarios and realised that they are so on account of their loving outlook and, consequently, their loving behaviour. If we grow up in any human society at all – and if we don’t, we won’t be human in any meaningful sense – we will grow up surrounded by adults whose outlook and behaviour, not least their behaviour towards us, will unavoidably incline us to explore more of the Original Love possibilities within ourselves than the Original Sin possibilities, or vice versa. That is why Jesus’s most trenchant condemnation is aimed, not at Law-breakers or Roman collaborators, but at those who give children a bad start on life’s journey: they deserve to be chucked into the sea with a millstone round their necks.

                But the job isn’t finished in childhood. As we grow up, we have to take more and more responsibility for making sure we pay more attention to our Original Love inclinations than to the temptations of Original Sin. This means first knowing ourselves, our weaknesses and our strengths, so that we can avoid situations where we can’t trust ourselves to do what our Original Love inclinations would have us do; this is why we pray, ‘Lead us not into temptation.’. It means trying not to let our sensibilities become too brutalised. It also means looking out for others too, particularly by not giving them power that they can’t handle, bearing in mind that there’s a good chance that any of us, given absolute power over someone else or the ability to act in secret, will sooner or later abuse that position.

                It’s important not to let our understanding of the impact of upbringing on impressionable small children make us despair of those who have been led to develop their Original Sin side and neglect their Original Love side. We need not, must not, write them off. But we do need to understand that saving them is a more difficult and more costly exercise than helping them set off on the right path would have been. It always requires love of an unusually high order – a love which resists the inclination to give up when success seems unattainable, a love which is prepared to make real sacrifices to bring salvation. Paul’s teaching saw the willing sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as the decisive demonstration of the love that can save people who are almost beyond salvation. If we can no longer accept Paul’s vision of the unseen world through which this salvation is effected, we need to seek another way; it certainly will be no less costly. If you want some idea of just how costly, talk to someone who has taken young people from dysfunctional families into their own home to foster them.

                We know, sadly, that in some lives all this goes wrong and people finish up unable to hear the promptings of Original Love. The tabloid press is inclined to call them ‘evil’, but they weren’t born that way. If in desperation we use threats of ever-steeper punishment to deter them from crime and to bully them into behaving acceptably, that is an acknowledgement of society’s – our – failure. We are back with Law, and though Law may bring order it will not bring human flourishing; that is at the heart of the Jesus teaching.  So is the care we owe our children.

TO BE OPENED IN CASE ...

Remembrance Sunday

Sorrow, Gratitude and Penitence: these three emotions dominate Remembrance Sunday. Sorrow, because wars cause so much personal and communal grief and loss. Gratitude, both because wars reveal, as well as some of the worst, some of the best human characteristics, and also because our way of life is what it is because it has been defended in war. And Penitence, because we often underestimate the damage war does even to those who survive, and because we too often fail to work hard enough to find peaceful ways of settling disputes, and sometimes even welcome the opportunity to fight. It is hard, even uncomfortable, to hold these three emotions together.

                Similarly, military cemeteries are beautiful, sad places with a range of different messages for the many people who visit them. They may speak to different people of the enormity of impersonal loss, of the unbearable contrast between peace and war, of the courage and comradeship of warriors, of the price paid to protect our way of life, of the futility of war. They also of course speak of the intense grief of personal loss, and to underscore this there is in British military cemeteries a tradition of inviting bereaved families to add a brief inscription to the otherwise regimented gravestones. In the military section of Witton Cemetery in Birmingham, one family added to a Second World War gravestone this wonderfully simple and sincere inscription: ‘A tribute to a soldier who died for what he loved and believed in.’[1] I know nothing of the background of the soldier whose grave it is or of his family, but these few words seem to suggest a whole approach to life and to war. I don’t know if he left a final letter to be given to his family in case he was killed, but I wonder whether such a letter might have gone like this:

                ‘Dear Mom and Dad: 

                ‘You already know that I will not be coming back from the war. It’s hard enough for me, and it must be almost impossibly hard for you, to grasp that this letter to you is being written by someone who, by the time you read it – if you ever need to read it – is no longer alive, cannot receive any reply, and cannot even be concerned about you. I can’t believe there is a life after death; in any case, I’m not sure I would want to be aware of not having the life I’d looked forward to, and I certainly wouldn’t want to sense the pain I know my death will be causing you. People will speak of my sacrifice, but in truth the real sacrifice, the real loss, is yours; you, not I, will have to live with my death. I can only guess at what losing a child must mean to you both, and especially to you, Mom, who carried me for nine months, gave me birth, fed me and saw me through the storms of childhood.

                ‘Knowing that you have been thinking continually of me has been a great comfort, both when time has hung heavy on me and when I have been in the heat of action. Now that I am no more, you will, I know, never forget me. I hope that, in time, you may remember the wonderful times we had together more clearly than the grief of not having me around any more – though I cannot pretend to myself that that grief will ever fade completely away.

                ‘You brought me up to discover who I was and what I wanted to do. I have always been grateful to you for showing me that example of courage and confidence. It’s what made me the man I grew up to be. I want you to understand, as I’m sure you will, that taking my chances as a soldier was a choice I made deliberately, in the full knowledge of what I was risking. If I am killed – and if you are reading this, I will have been killed – it will be as the man you brought me up to be. 

                ‘I want you to know that had I survived the war I would have been proud of, or at least content with, what I have been and done as a soldier. I hope that you will be able to experience that pride or contentment on my behalf, and that it will in some small way compensate you for losing me and the hopes you invested in me. I have fought for a cause I believe in, and I hope that the world that emerges from this conflict will not be as bad a place as I feared it might become when I joined up; in that sense, my life, if I lose it, will not have been wasted. I have, I think, been a faithful comrade, and seeing men die beside me whom I have loved as brothers has given me an inkling of what my death must mean to you. And I have discovered it to be frighteningly easy to do what I thought would be the hardest thing in my life: I have killed other men.

                ‘The memory of those deaths would, I fear, have haunted me through the many years of peace that I hope you will see; certainly the son who would have come back to you would have been very different from the one who went to war. As I write this I hope to return from the war to live in peace, but what I most fear is not being killed so much as coming back to you a broken man – broken physically, broken mentally, broken morally. I realise that there is some selfishness as well as a kind of cowardice in that fear, because you would want me back in any condition, if only so that you could tell me and show me how much you love me. You now know that this fear of mine will not be realised, and I hope that that too will be of some little comfort to you.

                ‘I am sorry that all you will have of me will be your memories. I hope they will be a comfort in the years ahead. Thank you, both, for everything.

                ‘Your very loving, and beloved, son …’

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[1] The grave is that of Gunner R E Wilkins of the Royal Artillery, who was killed in 1945 aged 25.

OTHER RELIGIONS

The man [Adam] lay with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. … Then Cain lay with his wife; and she conceived and bore Enoch. Genesis 4 vv 1 and 17

According to Genesis, when the sons of the first people, Adam and Eve, grew up, they found women to have children with. But we aren’t told where these women came from; they just appear. This is troubling only if you believe that the Genesis stories are to be understood as a literal account of the creation of humanity. It does however suggest an important question: given that we are interested in the development of our own religious tradition, what do we have to say about other religious traditions whose origins are parallel to those of our own but were not known to its founders?

                Early Old Testament religion accepted that there were many gods but believed that one of them had taken the Hebrew people under his wing. When the Hebrews fought with other peoples, it was seen as a contest between ‘The God of Israel’ and the gods of those other peoples. This God of Israel was not the only god there was, but he was the only god for the Hebrews and their descendants, the one they should exclusively worship and who in return would fight for them. This approach to religion is unashamedly tribal, but it’s a fair tribalism: other peoples have their own, real, gods. Over time, this approach developed into monotheism, culminating with the writer of the second part of Isaiah, where the God of Israel has transmogrified into the God of all there is. The so-called gods of other peoples are now mere idols, the work of men’s hands, not real gods at all. In one sense, this monotheism is a glorious achievement and an important step in the development of human thought, since it unifies all that is under one overarching explanatory system – rather like proposing a single explanatory system for electromagnetic, gravitational and nuclear energy. But it leaves a real problem. The one God apparently has an interest only in one particular people, the Jews, the descendants of the Hebrews, and is manipulating history with them particularly in mind; the Assyrians and other peoples are being used by him merely as pawns in his dealings with his specially Chosen People. He is not interested in these other peoples for their own sake; he does not love them. There is something in this still relatively young religion that is reminiscent of how a growing child thinks of himself as the focus of the universe. As a religious position, it is essentially racist in the strictest and least pejorative sense of the term. Like other racist positions, it occasionally allowed non-Jews to become ‘honorary’ Jews, but it certainly did not seek non-Jewish converts.

                The attempts of Christianity and, later, Islam to break out of this racist religious position were only half-successful. Both continued to think that the one God was supportive only of a section of humanity, but added that anyone could join that section of humanity by converting. It turned out that there was a trade-off between arrogant racism and an equally arrogant proselytism. To choose not to convert was to turn your back on the one God, preferring to worship idols, non-gods, thus foolishly rebelling against an all-powerful king and condemning yourself to his punishment. Conversion often felt very like conquest, and militant – note the word’s derivation from the Latin word for ‘a soldier’ – Christianity felt comfortable seeing itself as enforcing the will of the Lord God of Sabaoth, of the Armies. It was a kind of anyone-can-should-and-(perhaps)-must-join-our-race racism, and it is the stage at which mainstream Christian theology has been stuck.

                Underlying it is the conviction that Christianity has been given to us by God as a package; our proper response is simply to accept the package, not tinker with its contents, and share it, unaltered, with other people. But what if Christianity is our essentially Judeo-European response to how what we think of as divinity reveals itself, a package put together, not unalterably by God, but in a culturally-determined way by us? Other cultures might then be seen as responding to the divine revelation just as legitimately as we do, but in their own distinctive ways; we could allow ourselves to ask whether some parts of their response might not be more appropriate than bits of ours. We could meet them as equals, not try to beat them, metaphorically or literally, into submission. We could acknowledge that they no less than we are children of God, and as such loved by him just as much as we are – and are loved by him just as they are, for who they are. Yes, we would want to share with them the insights of our tradition, but we could also learn from them, as children of the same father share with and learn from each other.

                We don’t really have much choice about this, for several reasons. First, it’s impossibly hard to imagine Jesus the prophet of Nazareth beating anyone into assenting to any religious formulation; his way is rather to ask his listeners to observe and respond appropriately to whatever around them brings them closer to blessedness. Second, if our idea of God is anything like right, we must believe that he loves all people quite as much as he loves us, and that he reveals himself quite as much to them as he does to us. Third, more practically, our interconnected world cannot afford for religions to be at each other’s throats; sectarian violence is bad enough writ small, but writ large it would be catastrophic. But as if those three reasons were not enough, the clincher, it seems to me, is that no particular religion will have very much to say that is genuinely helpful to our world so long as it continues to denigrate, in theory if not now always in practice, other approaches to life. The world needs a more-or-less shared view of what flourishing human life might be like in the world as it really is, a system of values that recognises that view, and techniques for helping us all to live that life; it is the role of religions and cognate systems to foster those things, and they cannot do that while they fight between themselves, or at the very least impugn each other’s legitimacy. Adam and Eve’s daughters-in-law did not come from nowhere: they too must have been the creation of God himself.

KNOWING YOUR PLACE

But when you are invited, go and sit in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher’. Luke 14 v10

No one after lighting a lamp covers it with a vessel … but puts it on a stand that those who enter may see the light. Lk 8 v16

Proverbs are irritating things. For every proverb that says one thing, there always seems to be another that says the opposite. ‘Look before you leap’ by all means, but remember that ‘He who hesitates is lost’. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again’ – but ‘don’t bang your head against a stone wall’. Maddening. But maddening only if you hear such advice as a rule that applies to every situation in which decisions or perseverance are at issue. Perhaps the usefulness of such pairs of proverbs is that they prompt us to ask which of the two applies in the situation in which we find ourselves, that they raise questions rather than give answers. I have chosen two sayings of Jesus as our texts today because they are very much like these superficially irritating pairs of proverbs.

                We are so used to hearing Jesus through a religious fog that we often don’t catch quite ordinary bits of sensible advice. Here, he points out that being presumptuous at a feast can lead to social disaster; better, less embarrassing, to wait to be invited to go to one of the more prestigious seats. Quite true: pushy people at a social occasion are irritating and deserve their comeuppance. But what does this have to do with ‘religion’? Not a lot, I think. Again, society is an unforgiving place on the whole; while it quite frequently finds a way to put down those who are unbearably presumptuous, it less often tries to advance those who simply wait to be asked to ‘come up higher’. Even the most able can wait a very long time with their light under a bushel before someone suggests that they bring it out so that it can shine usefully. So we should not wait. This too has little to do with religion and everything to do with fulfilling ourselves and contributing to the life of society. That these bits of advice are about society rather than religion does not make them relatively trivial. It is a major plank of Jesus’ platform that it is religious preoccupation that is relatively trivial; being a good neighbour is, in his view, of far greater importance than getting your ceremonies and sacrifices right, and in this of course he is taking forward the long prophetic tradition in Israel as well as heralding what we might like to think of as our modern approach to religious observance.

                Traditional societies have a fixed social order; everyone ‘knows their place’, and not just at feast tables. The life of Jesus suggests that he would have had little patience with such rigidity; as a man of humble, provincial origins, he had no business going around preaching. And we know that rigid social stratification keeps some very able people in quite ordinary roles in life even as it brings some incompetents to positions of power and influence. But our so-called meritocracy is distressingly often nothing of the kind: it too often mistakes ambition for merit, and confidence for competence. Perhaps for us today part of the point of this bit of Jesus’s advice is to suggest that we should be aware of this danger and prepare ourselves to tell the truth to and about people who have talked their way to positions that are beyond their competence. It is a responsibility that we should not shirk; judgments of these kinds do have to be made, and made ‘prayerfully’, that is, with our whole selves engaged – our intellects, our intuitions, our imagination, our care for others. You may think it’s rather unlikely that such people will in fact begin with shame to take the lowest seat, but it’s worth a try.

                Because put-downs come more naturally to most of us than invitations, we need always to be on the look-out for people who may need our encouragement if they are to fulfil their potential, whether in society, at work, in voluntary organisations, in creative endeavour, or in private life. Love comes into this, because love is present when we think about someone we know as the unique individual they are, and so come to appreciate aspects of their character that are not getting the use they deserve and, for that person’s fulfilment, need. So look around your circle of acquaintances: is there anyone who you think is ‘hiding their light under a bushel’? What might you do to invite them to ‘go up higher’? A word of praise for something they have done, perhaps? Or a suggestion of some life-shaping change they might not have dared to contemplate? Or maybe a request to do something they may wrongly feel is beyond them?

                It’s important that we each keep an eye open for others who need to be put down a few places or to be encouraged to display their light. But we also need to be aware of our own behaviour, and in particular we need to remember that Jesus, in common with every dictionary of proverbs, gives what appears to be contrary advice. This is not because he’s confused; it’s because he knows that different people and different situations require different responses. We have to ask ourselves which of this pair of contrasting bits of advice is applicable in any particular situation we face. For people brought up with a dumbed down version of humility that means not being fully aware of your own abilities and desires, and always deferring to other people, it’s very easy to wait – and if necessary to wait for ever – to be asked to ‘come up higher’ and put your lamp on a stand where it can give light to the whole house. Better perhaps to err on the side of presumptuousness than on the side of such false humility; at least the world has a ready remedy for presumptuousness. Better still, though, to love ourselves enough to recognise our own abilities and aptitudes, humble enough to accept that they demand to be made good use of, and wise enough to understand that that will sometimes involve us in competition with other people – competition that can be managed within the framework of reciprocity and forgiveness that Jesus’s teaching encourages.

SPIRITUAL EDUCATION

Education Sunday

The schools and universities of Europe owe their origin to the medieval Christian church, yet it’s not obvious what link that church saw between education and the approach to life suggested by Jesus of Nazareth, the promotion of which you might imagine to have been its core purpose. Degrees in canon and civil laws and in medicine were vocationally useful to both the institutional church and secular society, but only theology even gestured towards the spiritual. Yet spirituality, the concern with what really makes life worth living, has to be at the centre of any truly successful approach to bringing up children and inducting young people into adulthood. If how we teach today in schools and universities lacks this perspective, it will only do half the job required of education: it will give children and young people the skills and knowledge they need to get a job, manage their lives and understand their environment, but it will fail to help them develop any clear sense of why they might want to bother.

Sensing this, we have tried two ways of supplementing the teaching of necessary skills and knowledge: compulsory worship and religious education, both of which are still requirements in English state schools. Useful assemblies are held in many schools in which teachers attempt to develop something like a spiritually informed approach to life within the constraint of having to shoe-horn their efforts into a ‘basically Christian’ framework. Yet compulsory worship is seriously compromised both by the variety of religious traditions in England today, and by the fact that the sort of beliefs that underpin any kind of genuinely religious worship are not shared by many school pupils or their teachers. And Religious Education as a school subject is now generally a combination of factual knowledge about the unfamiliar beliefs and practices of various religious communities with some discussion of ethical issues – both no doubt useful in themselves but not-at-all the same thing as spiritual education. The most spiritual of religious teachers down the centuries have often warned about how easy it is for the elaboration of religious ritual and the study of religion to supplant the spiritual insights they were meant to express and communicate. They were right: a spiritually informed approach to life is not something that can be separated off from life itself. Consequently, the place where the spiritual approach is to be developed in school cannot principally be in religious assemblies or in RE classes; it has to be across the curriculum.

In science students learn both how insignificant within the universe we are and how wonderful is the power of our brain; to learn either without picking up a sense of awe is to reduce science to fact collecting and job training. Science teachers may not use the words of the Old Testament writers, but they are teaching that we are only ‘a little lower than the angels’, despite being like ‘dust on the weighing scale’. A key element in maths is probability, the study of how things happen in a patterned yet still random way; we can’t foretell what will happen in any particular case, because that, using theist language, would be to see into the mind of God, but we can be sure that what happens is not out of ‘God’s’ control. Probably one reason art classes feel less demanding than maths is that they are essentially about how students as individuals see the world and express their individuality; that sense of self is necessary before we can have much sense of other people as individuals. Part of the spiritual point of studying literature is to deepen our appreciation of the differences between people and the patterns of their lives, both the characters of fiction and the authors of poetry; without such an appreciation we cannot begin to love other people. Jesus talks a lot about forgiveness, the necessary corollary of people trying to live free and fulfilled lives; one of the important things learnt on the sports field is that we will occasionally hurt and be hurt in the course of the game, and that those regretted hurts need to be met with forgiveness. These are of course only a few examples of how every part of the curriculum as well as the ordinary life of the school has its contribution to make to spiritual education; I’m sure you will be able to think of many more.

I’m also sure that many teachers would resist any attempt to require them to make explicit the contribution their subject has to make to their students’ spiritual development. And they may well be right. It’s an odd thing to say in a sermon, but always trying to put things into words is not the best way of communicating awe, love, forgiveness and the rest. At best words can only draw attention to, and remind us of, real experience; at worst they can divert us from real experience. As adults, never mind as teachers, it is our responsibility and privilege to pass on through our own approach to whatever issues we are tackling with children and young people a sense of the factor that illuminates life and makes it worth living, despite and through its ups and downs. Of course, if this factor is embedded in our own approach to life, communicating it won’t be difficult – in fact, we won’t be able to help communicating it. That said, it would certainly do no harm for teachers to be alert to their responsibilities as spiritual educators, even if they rarely say much about this part of their work in class.

There remain some elements of a spiritually informed approach to life need something different. Space. Stillness. The opportunity to be aware of inhabiting our own bodies. To reflect. To sense our connection with people around us. Our society hasn’t been very good at this, and religious institutions haven’t really helped: shared stillness doesn’t have much of a place in our liturgies. Yet the sense it fosters of being a person whose life with our human brothers and sisters is worth living is a great deal more important to us as people than the simple pursuit of facts and skills, exams and jobs, status and wealth. Most of us come to know this as we look back on our lives, and we may well regret that there seemed to be little opportunity or encouragement for us to develop a sense of it earlier. Education has improved hugely over the last century; it’s time we began to improve it further by being conscious of, and occasionally explicit about, its role in spiritual development.

STUCK IN A RUT

[Jesus said:] You have learned that our forefathers were told … But what I tell you is this … Matthew 5 vv21-22

When I was at school, back in the 1950s and ‘60s, my numeracy lessons had features that today’s young people would find unfamiliar, not to say astonishing. We were still using the ancient, pre-metric measuring system, with distance measured by12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard, 1760 yards to the mile and so on, and weight by 16 ounces to the pound and 14 pounds to the stone – not to mention a currency which divided the pound into 240 pence by way of 20 shillings. Huge effort was put into teaching and learning this hopelessly outdated system as we sat in class and chanted these arbitrary relationships. No-one dared tell us that there existed a metric system that radically simplified this nonsense. And then: imagine trying to compute how much 4 pounds 12 ounces would cost if one ounce cost three shillings and fourpence; especially imagine trying to compute it without a calculator. Not having calculators meant that even when we came to do maths as distinct from arithmetic, a large part of our time was devoted not so much to understanding the principles and applications of maths as to improving our accuracy in doing the necessary calculations unaided; yet when calculators became affordable and common, there was still great resistance to allowing children to use them in class, let alone in exams. Of course, the old systems could be, and were, made to work, even though society’s need for measuring systems had long ago far outstripped their ability to deliver them efficiently; and calculators were, demonstrably, not strictly necessary to doing calculations.

                We could speculate endlessly about why British society hung onto outdated measuring systems and resisted the use of calculators in schools. Let’s for a moment just be astonished by this behaviour and remember that it happened in our own society, and well within living memory. And then let’s see how this can help us to understand aspects of religion. Jesus’s teaching, in effect, told his Jewish society that it could abandon its religious equivalent of feet and inches, pounds and ounces. It wasn’t that the old ways were necessarily wrong in themselves, or that they didn’t work at all. Sacrifice and temple ritual and all that went along with them may have been a useful innovation once, and they could obviously carry on being practised indefinitely. But they didn’t need to go on being practised; there were other, newer ways of achieving the ends that the ancient practices had been developed to attain. What’s more, focusing on the old methods and the effort expended in maintaining them took attention away from what was actually more important. I don’t know whether Jesus expected that this obviously good news to be universally welcomed, or whether he was amazed as well as disappointed when those in charge rejected it. Still, at least large numbers of ordinary people who didn’t have a stake in maintaining the old ways did embrace his teaching, even if some of them were later persuaded that this kind of modernisation was a danger to their way-of-life, rather as some people even today can be persuaded that metrication is the final nail in the coffin of Britishness.

                It’s important I think for us to realise that what Jesus was not combating some odd, ancient aberration that was specifically religious and Jewish. It seems to be a human pattern for us to sometimes get so committed to one way of doing things that even when some better method comes along we can’t let ourselves abandon the old ways, a pattern that is especially noticeable when the old ways are bound up with our sense of community, whether as a religious group or as a nation. This is not about simply abandoning the old ways because they are old; it is about abandoning them when their time has passed, which requires both keeping the old ways under review and having the boldness to let them go when they are no longer effective because times have changed. And that is why the work of Jesus is never done: the times never stop changing.

                When in the 1970s and 80s the mathematical modernisers got the bit between their teeth, there was a tendency to feel that maybe maths wasn’t really all that necessary to successful living; you could after all get along pretty well with a modicum of arithmetic ability, aided by a calculator. Appreciating the beauty and power of trigonometry and algebra was not exactly a survival skill; they could surely be dropped from the syllabus without much loss. And who needs to know anything about calculus except those really rather odd people who devote their time to things that don’t have much use in everyday life? What began as the entirely laudable aim of making what mattered in maths as easily accessible as possible came to be a tendency to think that nothing mathematical really mattered at all, except to professionals. You will guess that my point is that we can do much the same with religion: we can abandon the mumbo-jumbo and in doing so discover that we can no longer remember what was the point of it all, except perhaps to the vicar. While Jesus thought that old religious observances needed to be replaced, he certainly did not think that what they had gestured towards did not matter at all, or that you could get on perfectly well in life, not only without religious observance, but without the Awe and Love and Truth that it pointed to. You might survive without them, but you could hardly be said to live, and you certainly could not flourish.

                So we face two challenges: first to examine our ways of doing things to see how and when they need to change, and second to think about how, as we make the necessary changes, we can avoid throwing out the baby of faith with the bathwater of religion. If traditional religion is less and less effective in helping develop real faith, what methods is society going to use instead? Or are we going to have a go at seeing whether faith will simply develop in people without organised help? Would you try that with maths?