GROWING UP

‘The Prodigal Son’  Luke15  vv11-32

It’s one of the characteristics of at least the longer parables that they draw from us different responses depending on our preoccupations at any particular time. They don’t have a simple ‘meaning’, despite what the gospel writers sometimes say. The parables originally had no titles, of course, and the titles they have been given over the centuries as an easy way of referring to them often imply a particular interpretation and so tend to shut us off from the power of a parable to take on different meanings for us as we return to it from time to time. Suppose The Good Samaritan story were called instead ‘Who is my Neighbour?’, or ‘The Prodigal Son’ were known as ‘The Wise Father’ or ‘The Elder Brother’: how differently we might then think of these stories. And we could equally appropriately call The Prodigal Son story simply ‘Growing up’, and be prompted by that title to find some unfamiliar points being made in the story.

                Many traditions look at life as a series of stages, to each of which there are age-appropriate ways of thinking and behaving. Hindu tradition for example suggests that a man’s life ideally consists of four stages, as student, householder, hermit and recluse, each with its own different importance.  Maybe our culture has been too much influenced by Shakespeare’s cynical Jacques speech on the seven ages of man, and as a result has tended to mock the characteristic behaviour of each age instead of seeing it as having its proper place in a man’s development. Certainly there has been a tendency to assume that a person’s age ought not to be taken into much account in deciding how we expect them to behave. Law has had an influence here: once past the age of criminal responsibility the explicit standard of behaviour is the same for everyone. Now of course there is a great deal to be said for the principle that everyone should be equal before the law, that your age should not affect how you are dealt with. But maybe Jesus’s story ‘Growing up’ offers us not so much an alternative as a supplementary way of thinking about these matters.

                It is of crucial importance here and elsewhere to notice that Jesus often does not condemn behaviour where our traditional approach would do so; he even has a story about an unscrupulous manager that seems to be a direct rebuke to our readiness to condemn edgy behaviours. It’s not that he never condemns behaviour: he clearly does, and it’s always instructive to see which ones they are. The younger son in ‘Growing up’ is nowhere condemned for asking for his share of the inheritance and going off and spending it – ‘wasting it’ if you prefer – on travel and fun. He took a risk and it turned out badly though not catastrophically – he wasn’t dead, after all – , and he discovered that facing up to what had happened was the necessary first step in getting back on track; that’s two important lessons about life that a young person has to learn in order to become a truly mature adult. Neither is the elder son condemned for taking a more cautious approach. Some people wouldn’t say ‘cautious’ here; they’d say ‘mature’, and they’d want to praise the elder brother’s ‘maturity’ in knuckling down to helping his father in the family business. But the story makes it clear that where that more cautious, superficially mature, approach has left him is not a happy place to be; he seems to lack sympathy and human warmth. So maybe the story offers a warning about the dangers of premature ‘maturity’ – which is not to say that Jesus thought that what the elder brother had done in his youth was necessarily wrong, only that it had its own characteristic dangers that needed to be guarded against in some way.

                Even though, in context, it’s not how Jesus used it, his ‘Who is my Neighbour?’ story is often used as a challenge to people: which of the three unhurt travellers do you think you’d rather be, or ought to be? If we use the same approach with the ‘Growing up’ story, I wonder whether, given this choice between extremes, we’d rather a young person we care about were rather more like the younger or the elder brother. I personally don’t have much doubt that I’d rather they should veer towards the younger brother’s end of the spectrum, which is to say that I’d prefer them to be a bit wild and do a few things that would be foolish or daring or at least inappropriate were I or their other elders to do them; I certainly wouldn’t want to think of them as spending an adolescence that aped an unearned, fake maturity and left them a self-righteous prig like the elder brother in the story. I think this story, and indeed some of his other sayings, suggest that Jesus would have had the same preference as me.

But of course the younger son’s hard-won but genuine maturation is made possible by his father; it was he who funded what we might think of as a kind of wild gap year and welcomed his older and wiser son home when it went pear-shaped. Since you’re reading this, it’s probably more likely that you’re in the position of the father in the story than in that of one of his sons. If so, you won’t need me to spell out what seems to be the clear implication of the story for you, nor will you need me to say much about the courage and faith that the wise father needed to behave as he did. It is horribly difficult to watch someone you care about go off on a path that seems fraught with every kind of risk, against your advice, against what you see as common sense, against social conventions. But then, it can also be pretty horrible – not least for the adult the child becomes – to discover that a lively, adventurous, promising child has allowed advice, common sense and social convention to turn him or her into a version of the prodigal son’s elder brother.

WHO TO BECOME

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Philippians 4 v8

We choose who we shall become. I don’t say that unavoidable outside influences don’t have any effect on who we become – of course they do. I say merely that many outside influences are not unavoidable: we place ourselves in the way of them. The sometimes uncomfortable truth is that to a considerable extent we are who we have chosen to become, even if we weren’t always conscious of what we were choosing. And more comfortingly but also more challengingly we still have choices about who we shall be in the future.  So: who do we want to be like? Which of the people you know have a disposition that you find admirable? This is part of the challenge of Jesus’s Beatitudes: notice, he says, how blessed, how makarios, are people of various dispositions. It’s not a question of imitating their behaviour; that would be to try to find a short cut to being makarios, and there is no such short cut. It is rather a matter of asking ourselves what influences and experiences we might expose ourselves to that might help to develop in us the kind of disposition we find admirable – and just as importantly, of avoiding those influences and experiences that would tend to make acquiring the disposition we desire less likely.

The greatest sin – the sin against Holy Spirit (your spirit, which is holy because it is the most precious thing you possess) – is to allow yourself to become someone you can’t respect, someone you don’t want to be, by exposing yourself to damaging or misleading influences and experiences, or, having found you can’t respect the self you have become, to fail to take the necessary steps to change your dispositions. This latter is what repentance is really about; it’s not (just) a matter of stopping doing some bad things: it is to take steps to change who you are becoming. So the matter of which friends we choose, what leisure activities we take part in, what entertainment we watch, what organisations we join, what work we undertake, what intimate relationships we enjoy, what books we read, which thinkers we allow to influence our approach to life – all these are questions of the utmost importance to us: to a large extent, they decide who we are going to become. This is necessarily an exercise in autonomy. Similar experiences do not affect everyone in the same way; it depends on who they have already become. Consequently as an adult you have to judge for yourself what influences and experiences you need at any particular time in your life. You might take advice, but in the end you must make your own decisions, because it’s your soul we’re talking about. These decisions won’t always meet with the approval of others; as Jesus observes, you may sometimes have to turn your back on home and family – as indeed he did.

This is not a plea for a caution that amounts to being so afraid of possibly damaging or misleading experiences and influences that one tries simply to avoid them completely. That is too negative an approach, and in any case some possibly damaging experiences are unavoidable and probably necessary in life because, like the prodigal son, we grow through them. Moreover, growing up necessarily involves encountering and dealing with experiences that a few years or even just a few months earlier might really have been potentially damaging; it’s no use being afraid of growing up – however old we are. No: like St Paul’s advice in our text, it’s a plea rather to make sure that there are sufficient countervailing helpful influences to shape us as we want to be shaped. And if the influences that we have already taken to heart have largely settled who we are becoming and have been positive, then we shall be the more able to expose ourselves without fear of damage to situations which might in other circumstances have drawn us in a less helpful direction.

Propagandists and advertisers understand all this very well of course; their task is to make sure that the influences that we are likely to come across most easily are ones that will shape us as they want us to be shaped. They are thieves of our autonomy and therefore of our souls. Sometimes propagandists appear to have benign intentions: they may seek to protect us from unhelpful influences. There is no doubt a place for that when bringing up a child, though it’s probably not as important as setting before that child examples of admirable lives. But we need to be very cautious about using that approach with adults, which is one reason why we are rightly suspicious of censorship.

                There is of course an infinite number of very different potential selves that we have not turned out to be because of the choices made long ago by ourselves or others, consciously or unconsciously. It is sometimes tempting to wonder who we might have become, if … whatever.  But the range of missed possibilities is in truth too vast for such wonderings to have much meaning. Even as we recognise that there is still a considerable range of possibilities for our future, we have to accept that we are, now, who we are, now; like any journey, where you go in the future has to start from where you are, not from somewhere else. The wonderful thing is that, whatever has happened in the past, there are always still choices to be made about who you want to be tomorrow and the days after. They may be tightly constrained, there may not be much time left; but there are choices. This understanding that the future is not mapped out, not absolutely dictated by the past, is an important part of what we mean by hope. We do not need to be hope-less. But being hope-full is not a matter of just passively hoping for the best; being truly hope-full involves action, yes, but more essentially it involves putting ourselves in the way of those experiences and influences that will make us who we still want to become.

IDOLATRY TODAY

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths but do not speak, eyes, but do not see. They have ears but do not hear, noses, but do not smell. They have hands but do not feel, feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat.  Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them. Ps 115 vv4-7

How stupid those ancient people must have been! To imagine that little figurines of wood and metal should regarded as powerful entities in their own right, and should therefore be worshipped and have human sacrifices made to them – how could they not see that this was crazy? Whatever you may say about other aspects of ancient Jewish religion, at least the Psalmist was right to pour scorn on the idols of neighbouring peoples. For they were worshipping – and the root of that word is ‘attributing worth to’ – things that did not have the kind of worth or value that was attributed to them. True, they might have artistic value, or value as precious materials, or value as a symbol of tribal identity, or value as concrete representations of important but intangible aspects of life; but value in themselves, as gods? The Psalmist was right about that: the idea is nonsensical. For most idolaters, though they could not see it, idolatry was merely a surrender to a foolish illusion, and maybe additionally for a few priests or kings a useful tool for bolstering their social position. What was surely needed was a bit more hard-headed realism that recognised real value where it was really to be found instead of mis-attributing it to artefacts. 

                This, obviously, is a mistake we’d like to avoid. Consequently it’s comforting to think of idolatry as a phase of human social behaviour that has largely been left behind. Here in the west, the Abrahamic religions have been careful to avoid idolatry, sometimes taking the destruction of ‘idols’ to extraordinary lengths; one thinks most recently of the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban, but down the centuries Christians too have destroyed as idols some wonderful artworks. Such iconoclasm may be taking things a bit far, but at least it’s surely a sign that we have got over the illusions that underlie idolatry.  Or perhaps it isn’t. There is at least a case for saying that just as we have modernised genuine spirituality in ways that can obscure its connection with ancient religion so we have modernised idolatry in ways that make it easy for us to think that we’ve really abandoned ancient idolatry. I tend to think that spirituality and idolatry are both pretty permanent potentials in the human psyche, and if that’s right we can’t be complacent; we need to look actively for the idols that have replaced those ancient figurines. And among them I suspect that money will be near the top of the list.

Idols and money have their uses and even their value, but idols are not gods, and money is not a resource. And just as idols can distract worshippers from what is of real value, so money can, and does, distract modern society from seeing that the only genuine resources we have are human resources and natural resources. In a global sense therefore, money cannot really be ‘wasted’; only human resources and natural resources can be wasted. Of course money is useful as ‘a means of exchange and a store of value’, but as money-idolaters we go much further than this. For instance, as a society, we find it hard to quite grasp that things that can’t be given a monetary value have any value at all; we say we understand this but judging by how we behave I’m not sure we do. Or notice how we find it difficult as a society to put resources into schemes that we’re quite certain will in the long term be of benefit and make better use of resources, because our money-based methods of accounting can’t identify and attribute the future savings and efficiencies. Or again notice how we describe as ‘efficient’ a situation in which money is saved by making people permanently unemployed, thus wasting human resources, or by throwing away slightly damaged things, thus wasting natural resources. Or, finally, notice how we do not count unpaid work as part of our GDP figures; the more we rely on volunteers, the ‘poorer’ we say we are. There are undesirable social and environmental consequences of all these examples of money idolatry, but that’s not the main problem, any more than the main problem with ancient idolatry was that the non-gods didn’t and couldn’t help their worshippers. The main problem is that idolatry of any kind takes our attention away from what is truly of value, what is truly to be ‘worshipped’.

And to be honest, we quite like to be so distracted by our idols. For one thing, it simplifies decision-making. You insulted my idol; I will kill you: simple. Or: We’ll carry out this scheme if it makes (or saves) money; if it doesn’t, we won’t: simple. No messy questions about balancing out how proposed actions affect the various aspects of life that are truly valuable, and indeed no questions about what those aspects are or what their relative values might be. For another, it’s a useful cover under which we can do what we’d like to do for our own private reasons. Just as ancient priests and kings used their people’s gullible idolatry to give themselves disproportionate power and wealth, so our money-idolatrous wealth-disposers can publicly regret that they have to pay each other ever-higher salaries on the grounds that, unfortunately, that’s what the market requires. They find it very convenient to base remuneration packages on the monetary value of what they do, rather than on its human significance.

                The snag of course is still the one the Psalmist identified: those who make and trust in idols become like them. To the extent that they put their trust in their idols, they – we – stop being vital, interacting human beings who can revel in the true richness of life as discovered through recognising awe and love and truth as our supreme values. We become instead figurines that look like real people but lack something that vital ‘something’. How you characterise that ‘something’, and what you think you might do to find it, are questions for another day. For now, it’s enough to be clear that they are questions that need to be asked and answered if we are to fulfil our human potential. 

CULTURE AND MISSION

Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Mt 5 vv27, 28

The more I learn about individual people, the more I understand how essentially alike we all are, allowing for the great divide between men and women. We are, literally, all descended from the same father and the same mother, the individuals science calls ‘mitochondrial Eve’ and ‘Y-chromosome Adam’, in reference to the Genesis Creation myth; truly, we are all cousins. By contrast, the more I learn about different cultures, the more I grasp just how different they are, often in ways that are far from obvious. Over centuries and millennia, choice and chance have made different groups of those essentially similar individuals adopt ways of thinking and living that are radically different and often almost incomprehensible to each other. It’s sometimes hard to keep both these insights in mind at once: it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that, if all humans are cousins, there can really be nothing to choose between the cultures they have created. The outcome of that kind of thinking is a moral and cultural relativism in which nothing can be legitimately criticised; anything goes.  On the other hand, if cultures are so radically different, surely some must be preferable to others, and those who belong to the less worthy cultures must in some sense be less worthy human beings. And the outcome of that approach is that we feel licensed to look down on those whose cultures are different from ours, and then pity, forcibly convert or perhaps enslave them.

                It’s into the second of these two traps that western religion has historically tended to fall in practice. Jewish religion thought of the Jews as being especially favoured by their God; many Christians and Muslims have felt comfortable with forced conversion and the enslavement of people from ‘lesser’ cultures. Yet always there have been voices quietly insisting on human cousinhood, sometimes perhaps without quite realising the cultural implications of that insistence. As those implications became clearer within Christianity, a new approach to mission became desirable, one that genuinely respected the humanity of people from other cultures and recognised aspects of those cultures that could be valued by Christians, even while trying to offer the most valuable-seeming insights from the Christian tradition. In practice this new approach has proved extraordinarily difficult to implement; missionaries, like the rest of us, religious and secular alike, have found themselves repeatedly falling into one or other of the old traps.            

                We naturally tend to characterise what we believe and how we behave by contrasting them with the beliefs and behaviour of others. Within our own western culture therefore religious folk and secularists find in each other foils for the development of their distinctiveness vis-à-vis each other. What this inevitably obscures is the extent to which they have values in common. It is only when we see the other, very different, value systems that have been developed by humans that we can begin to see just how much we westerners have in common with each other, and how much those shared values mean to us all. I’m thinking of things like human relationships, forgiveness, the value of human life, love, empathy, kindness. We shouldn’t make too much of this: running through western culture are important threads of value systems that give pride of place to wealth, power, will, duty. It was perhaps the German philosopher Nietzsche who crystallised the matter most succinctly by defining a ‘master morality’ and a ‘slave morality’, and identifying the latter with Christianity. Nietzsche didn’t think much of slaves, and one of the most important questions for our modern secularists is whether or not they share his contempt for the values of ‘slave morality’.

But perhaps Nietzsche was only speaking for the inner, unconverted, self in all of us, the raw, almost pre-human, drives that we usually keep hidden from public view and whose power we can learn to harness in order to pursue what we honour as higher purposes. And of course to a considerable extent our universally shared humanity is defined by those raw drives, including – and I think this was part of what Jesus was saying in our text – the sex drive. How you employ your raw drives matters hugely of course, but that you share them with the rest of us is critically important for self-understanding. It is only when you understand how similar you are to every other human being that you can begin to engage truly meaningfully in a debate about the values we might pursue. It is no doubt because I’m a westerner, brought up with values shaped by Christianity, specifically in its Anglican form, that, for example, I find it hard to make very much of the pre-eminence Confucian thought gives to obedience and rigid social order, or to find much depth in Japanese or Afghan notions of honour and shame – or come to that to have much patience with American-style bible-bashing Christianity. Yet so convinced am I that there is in the values I have inherited and developed a great deal that could help everyone who has the shared human drives to flourish wonderfully and to be makarios, that I must be a kind of missionary for them.

Any such missionaries must, I think, observe three principles, pre-eminently the understanding of the essential similarity, the cousinhood, of all human beings. Then the acceptance that, however rich the missionaries believe their own culture to be, there are always likely to be elements of it that are at least open to question – and similarly however impoverished they think the cultures of their interlocutors are, there are always likely to be elements of it that offer valuable insights that are lacking in the missionaries’ own culture. And finally the principle that underlies the method of the Jesus teaching: it is not by logical argument or passionate persuasion, let alone by force, that values can best be commended; it is by example and guided observation. It is the business of missionaries of any kind to engage with those who see life differently; no such engagement can be serious unless the missionaries are as genuinely open to what may be learned from them as they are enthusiastic to share with them their own understanding. That is the real risk that missionaries must be prepared to face: not that they will be persecuted but that they will themselves be converted.

MODELLING DIVINITY

… The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. … Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. Ezekiel 1

Debates between scientists and religious folk irritate me when one or other side seems to misunderstand its own professional way-of-thinking – or at any rate for the purposes of the debate sticks with a way of thinking that was long ago abandoned as inadequate by their predecessors in science or religion. What’s more, each side – a most unhelpful way of speaking, incidentally – likes to set up straw men to represent their opponents, just for the fun of blowing them away. But this fun is not harmless, and it certainly doesn’t lead to enlightenment.

                We live in a world which presents all living things with phenomena with which we have to deal. We humans deal with those phenomena at least partly consciously: we know what we want and we can work out ways of getting what we want, on the basis of some understanding of how the phenomena are caused and relate to each other. For hundreds of thousands of years, humanity and its recognisable precursors operated in the world pretty successfully without making any attempt to systematise its understanding of the causes and relationships of the phenomena being experienced. Of course, this limited what could be achieved, but that didn’t seem to be a problem at the time; life was good enough as it was. As consciousness evolved however, humanity gained the ability to understand more about how the world worked and to formulate more distant objectives than had hitherto satisfied it. Western religion calls this the ‘Fall’ and regrets the need for artificial ways of dealing with the loss of contentment that it brought; science sees in this same development the earliest stirrings of a more scientific approach and rejoices in the dawning of a richer understanding of life. They both have a point.

                The scientific approach was honed over the centuries into what we call scientific method – the process by which explanations for a particular phenomenon are formulated as hypotheses, which are then successively tested until we arrive at a theory that we haven’t found a way of disproving. These theories are practically certain explanations of the phenomena around us, and we rely on them both to predict future discoveries and events, and to guide our actions to get what we want. Among the hypotheses that have been formulated is the idea that a supernatural supreme being – ‘God’ – is directing the phenomena, but this is impossible to test, not least because, as Laplace famously told Napoleon, we can explain the phenomena around us without recourse to such a hypothesis; it may or may not be true, but we can’t know, and in any case for the purpose of explaining phenomena it doesn’t matter. Consequently, the idea that God exists is a hypothesis that cannot become a theory. It is not the kind of idea that classical scientific method can do much with.

                But classical scientific method struggles with something else. Many hypotheses cannot be rigorously tested, maybe because the variables cannot be properly isolated, or because it is impossible to carry out the necessary experiments; meteorology and economics present familiar examples of these difficulties, as does astronomy. Untestable hypotheses cannot grow into theories. Yet we still want to have sufficient understanding of the phenomena for us to be able to use them for our own ends or manage their impact on us. So we formulate, not theories, but models. Scientific models are quite distinct from theories built upon hypotheses: we know we can’t say they are exhaustively accurate; we understand that they are tools for our thinking rather than exhaustive explanations of reality; we accept that for different purposes incompatible models may be needed. Theologians will no doubt find these limitations on scientific models somewhat familiar. After all, they have long acknowledged that the divine is finally beyond our understanding, and that while the language we use to speak of God may assist our thinking it cannot fully express the reality of divinity; they have also had to find ways of expressing the awkward insight that the one God of monotheism has to be spoken of as relating to us in apparently ill-assorted ways, as, for example, loving saviour, righteous judge and first cause.  

                Religious people, as distinct from theologians perhaps, will be quick to point out that they experience their God as a personal god not as an abstract model. Abstract models in meteorology or economics do not alter the very personal experience of being soaked in a downpour or losing your job. You would not make much of a meteorologist or economist if you forgot why your subject mattered to people. Nor would you make much of a theologian if you forgot that the point of religion is not so much to plumb and explain the deep mysteries of the universe as to enable and encourage people to live richly in their personal lives, to be, in the term used in the Beatitudes, makarios – blessed, happy. That is the great purpose of formulating and developing religious models. That ‘… and developing’ is important. Religious people seem to have a greater tendency than do scientists to feel unable to develop and finally let go of models that experience has shown to be less helpful than newer ones. It is a tendency born of fear; it lacks the boldness of, say, an Abraham or Ezekiel or Jesus or Paul – or indeed a Gautama, a Muhammad or a Gandhi.

                This is not a call for religious people to be more sophisticated.  On the contrary: religion, particularly Christianity, has got far too sophisticated over the centuries. It is a call rather to be less sophisticated, to accept our models and rituals and music and sacraments as what they are, and nothing more: means of helping ourselves and others to make the most of our human life, overcoming its inevitable setbacks and enjoying its richest potentialities. The fact that the resources – the support, the guidance, the understanding – that we need to be able to do this are unseen, unconstrained and finally incomprehensible to us does not make them any less real or valuable. When scientists remind us of all this, they are not combating religion; they are recalling it to its central essential purpose, and for that we should be grateful to them; it will help us take our religion seriously, but not too seriously.

GOD IS LOVE

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 1 Jn 4 v7

To say ‘I love you’ seriously in any circumstance is among the most significant things we can ever do; it can have huge and long lasting implications for both the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, whatever happens next. It’s not the kind of thing anyone should want to say insincerely, or thoughtlessly, or out of obedience to convention, or against their better judgement. So it’s a good idea to be as clear as we can be about what it means. Unlike ancient Greek, English doesn’t distinguish different sorts of love: lovers ‘love’ each other, parents ‘love’ their children, friends ‘love’ each other; God is said to ‘love’ us. Always the same word: love. The fact that English has a bigger vocabulary than any other language suggests that this isn’t an accident; it suggests that maybe there is something similar at the core of all these loves that perhaps the Greeks overlooked in their desire for unambiguous definitions. At its most basic level, ‘I love you’ conveys a speculation: ‘I being I and you being you, I sense that we could do wonderful things together’; in the light of that speculation it offers an invitation: ‘I’d like you join me in enjoying doing those wonderful things.’ The first thing to notice is that love is personal; it’s about you as you and me as me. That means that to love someone you need to have a reasonably clear understanding of who you are yourself – your strengths and limitations, hopes and fears, expectations and blind spots, values and hang-ups, sexuality and status; that’s one reason why love is for grown-ups. You also need some idea about these aspects of the person you may be about to tell that you love them; at the very least you need to understand that he or she has all these aspects, just as you do. You can’t love humanity in the mass; you can only love individuals.

If you love someone, you will take time and make efforts both to build your relationship with that person and to work on your shared activities – those ‘wonderful things’ you could do together. But it’s important not to think of these contributions as fulfilling the demands of the other person; if you make that mistake, you will resent making them, and your resentment will communicate itself and rot the foundations of love. They must rather be freely given – and that ‘must’ is a logical not a moral ‘must’. Similarly, the contributions the other person makes must not be thought of by you as some kind of quid-pro-quo for your contributions. As the Jesus teaching points out, life in everyday society can be successfully managed only through a common sense of reciprocity, of give-and-take, forgiving as we ask to be forgiven. Love takes this a stage further, because it envisages doing wonderful things with a particular person, not just rubbing along with the people you happen to come across. For reciprocity to work, both sides have to know about it; one of the characteristics of love is that it sometimes makes us want to do things for the other person that they will never know about, and it may be that it’s when we find ourselves doing such never-to-be-known-about things that we discover that, yes, it really is love.

Love is about doing wonderful things together, but it’s not about achieving wonderful things. It is the ‘doing together’ that makes it love, not any ‘achieving’ that may or may not be the result. Take the most obvious use of ‘I love you’, said between a man and a woman: the wonderful things they will no doubt do together include sex; if that sex produces children that’s a wonderful added extra. And if they do have children, the possibility of a further wonderful thing to do together opens up, the wonderful shared activity of bringing up members of the next generation; if what those young people do with their lives is itself wonderful, that’s a wonderful added extra. Of course some people do marry in order to have children, and they do their best for those children in order to see them grow into successful adults. Love however never does anything in order to achieve something wonderful; love does what it does because doing that is itself wonderful. And when people get together in order to achieve something beyond their relationship, there is the rather unsettling question of what happens if they don’t achieve what they set out to achieve, or indeed after they have achieved it.

The reason that question is unsettling is that we humans are not principally satisfied by achievements; we are not made that way, because for tens of millennia, our fully modern human ancestors ‘achieved’ practically nothing: no ‘progress’, no ‘development’, no ‘improvement’ – or at any rate, none that any individual would have noticed. We like them are evolved to enjoy principally our relationships with each other.  We often, quite rightly, contrast love with law as a guide for life, but love also contrasts with being results-oriented. What both law and being results-oriented have in common is that they are consciously controlled activities: we consciously write laws and consciously obey them, or we consciously stipulate our goals and consciously work out how to attain them. They are activities we feel we can do without having much awareness of anything beyond our conscious selves. Love calls for a great deal more self knowledge, or at least self awareness, including awareness of the resources we have access to that are not under our conscious control. And one word that can be used for such resources is ‘God’.

Can anyone really promise to love someone else ‘till death us do part’, rather as they might promise to pay back a loan over the course of a lifetime? No, because loving someone is not a contract. But because we are made the way we are, long term relationships give us immense satisfaction, richer and deeper than either our achievements or any relatively short-term relationships. If sticking to the letter of a contract is not the way to make relationships last, we need some other more effective glue. There can be no more effective glue between people than the recollection of an ever-growing number of wonderful things done together. No surprise then that some of those wonderful things are called ‘making love’.

WASHED AWAY

The flood continued forty days upon the earth. … and all flesh died that moved upon the earth. … Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. Genesis 1 vv17-23

You might almost worry about the independence of science from the religious tradition of the Old Testament. Not only does the creation myth in the first chapter of Genesis foreshadow our modern understanding of the beginnings of the universe and of the development life on earth, but the story of Noah and the Flood seems to point towards our modern understanding of mass extinctions. We now know that in the long history of life on earth vast numbers, not only of individual creatures, but of whole species and genera have repeatedly been wiped out through natural events that have overwhelmed them. In each case the catastrophic effects of the natural disasters wore off and left the earth a different kind of place from what it had been before; many kinds of animals and plants disappeared but life survived, including of course our own ancestors. As a matter of scientific fact, counting the numbers of species that become extinct each year, we seem to be living through a rapid mass extinction at present, and uniquely in this case it’s one that a single particular species – us – has initiated through its conscious, intelligent actions. You and I cannot know whether homo sapiens will go the way of the land-based dinosaurs that were wiped out in the previous mass extinction, or will instead survive, albeit in smaller numbers – saved, you might say, though some miraculous-seeming intervention like Noah’s Ark.

                It is truly astonishing that the people of the ancient world produced what appear to be mythologised accounts of mass extinctions, such as the story of Noah. They could have had no conscious knowledge of the various mass extinctions that recent scientific discoveries have revealed to us; even the most recent large-scale reduction of the human population that occurred when the Toba volcano erupted about 70,000 years ago probably happened before language had developed sufficiently to pass on a memory of that event in the form of stories. The idea is not one that would be likely to arise through speculation. Pure chance? Maybe, but then there is also the ‘pure chance’ that put equally astonishingly suggestive ideas into Genesis chapter 1. It’s tempting to wonder whether somewhere in our minds, out of reach of consciousness, we retain some kind of ‘memory’ of these things, and perhaps have a similar kind of ‘knowledge’ about a great deal else that we’re not consciously aware of. When such ideas bubble up, perhaps in a dream or in a work of art, and strike a chord with our conscious selves, we might speak of ‘inspiration’; earlier generations might have been prepared to call the inspiration ‘divine’ and to attribute it to ‘God’.

                In one particular respect, the story of the Flood as told in Genesis is quite unlike the mass extinctions, except perhaps the present one. It is seen as a punishment for, or, we might say, a direct outcome of, human action – ‘sin’ is what Genesis calls it. Two primitive ideas coalesce here. First, there is the feeling like the one children have when they believe that they are personally responsible for what happens around them; for example, they often feel that if their parents divorce, it is because of something bad they have done. Second, there’s the difficulty early people had in accepting that anything significant could happen without someone intending it, and since the Hebrews did not believe in a malicious deity, they had to suppose that the Flood had been divinely intended for some good and rational purpose, punishment for example. It was a long time after the Genesis stories were written down that Jesus of Nazareth pointed out that natural calamities and genuine accidents, like towers falling down and crushing people, just do happen without any unseen power causing them in order to punish people.

                That said, the current mass extinction is not principally a natural calamity or a genuine accident. Our crazily burgeoning population and our extraordinary wastefulness are what underlie it, and you’d think that both of these are in our collective human power to control. But we actually do very little to control them and tend rather to hope the problem will not really arise, just as, in the Flood myth, the people mocked Noah’s caution and carried on ‘sinning’. Perhaps we’re meant to imagine that Noah’s fellow-citizens only realised their mistake when the rains came and didn’t stop; and perhaps our successors here will have the same dismal experience of realising that it’s too late to avert the catastrophe. You might think that’s no reason for us to be troubled by the current mass extinction; after all, it’s most unlikely that any of us will personally witness its climax. The dinosaurs didn’t understand what was going on in their mass extinction event, and in any case could have done nothing about it. By contrast, we are conscious of what’s going on, and it troubles the best of us to think of a world whose development is being decisively and catastrophically transformed by us behaving as if we lacked the consciousness and intelligence that distinguishes us from other animals. It may turn out that we have enough consciousness and intelligence to get ourselves into serious difficulties but, tragically for our species, not enough to get us out again. And notice that when the people have failed to deal with their ‘sinning’, the Flood myth suggests that it will be dealt with by a force of nature. You don’t really need to posit a punishing god-out-there to understand that a sustainable equilibrium must somehow be restored.

                The Flood story ends with the rescued remnant of life coming through the crisis thanks to the insight and effort of Noah, and being promised that no such thing would ever happen again. We need something of that optimism, provided it doesn’t turn into the insouciant optimism of human-imitating-dinosaur that says there’s nothing much to worry about, and even if there is there’s nothing we can do about it, so we should just carry on as we are. The kind of optimism we need is Noah’s kind, the grounded optimism of a man who recognises what’s going on, who can see what needs to be done to tackle if not avert the coming catastrophe, and who gets on and does it, in the face of criticism and mockery.