Most of this week I've spent either writing an article called 'The Shameful Dying or Old People Are Us' or working on material for a website on social activism and dying, or thinking of ideas for the first Annual Glastonbury Day of the Dead. On my desk throughout has been a Guardian piece by a man, Theo Hobson, agonising over whether to become a priest. For some reason his article irritated me in the sense that I couldn't quite throw it away without commenting on it. Therefore I wrote to him:
Dear Theo Hobson,
Last week I read your piece in the Guardian and it has continued to irritate me – although I’m not entirely sure why. First, with respect, and in case it was a genuine question and you haven’t already heard the answer a thousand times, I can tell you that you certainly shouldn’t dismiss your doubts and, even more certainly, shouldn’t become a whatever it is you can’t quite get yourself to call it, a minister.
How can I be so certain when you are not?
Let us begin with god calling you. Or rather, as you say yourself, your thinking that god may be calling you. Put aside god’s poor calling powers (can’t god raise its voice a little?), and the fact that all are called but few are chosen, and examine what this call feels like, ‘muddled, messy, mixed of motive, full of questions marks’. Sit with these feelings, young man, (please say you are young, for why else the hubris?), feel them to their very fullness. These feelings are your inner thoughts which you are trying to suppress through action. They won’t go away until you’ve faced them, felt them.
Have you noticed this is all about you? What’s wrong with ministering? You don’t want to be dealing with people, just with ideas, so you’ll make a crap vicar. And what will you say to batty old ladies when they say god is calling them, it feels rather muddled and messy but they’ve decided to become vicars in your church?
Once upon a time I was involved in Hinduism in an era when a lot of westerners decided that god was calling them to be swamis, renunciants. Few of them remain as such. I’m reminded of a friend of mine who 40 years ago got his knickers into a twist about whether he should be a Hindu or a Christian. Sadly he’s never managed to unwind himself and only last week was on the phone wondering whether the solution would be to become a Buddhist.
While not questioning your infantile view of god as an entity that calls you, shall we discuss belief? Does it really matter if you don’t really believe what you profess to believe? Answer, yes. If I believe something literally that you believe metaphorically, or ‘quasi-factually’, then we are believing different things, describing different realities and our common ground is not common. Also, I may die for my beliefs, you won’t.
It seems you love ritual. It isn’t the meanings of the words that count, you infer but their ability as part of ritual to… (I’m not sure what you mean but I’ll ad lib here)… to elevate your spirit, to give you a taste, at least, of the experience of transcendence. With my catholic, Hindu, and new Age background, I’m quite in favour of a bit of ritual myself and have been to quite a few that engage all the senses before transcending them. I think you’ll find the liturgy best remains as incomprehensible as possible because it is the mind’s (left?) brain analytical meaning-parsing that you need to escape to experience wholeness. Bear in mind that human cultural traditions of ritual – and their essential tripartite nature – were often greatly assisted by entheogens (alcohols, somas, nectars, mushrooms etc.). Quite what you want of your ritual, I don’t know, but I recommend you try mushrooms with a Peruvian shaman and take LSD during a 7 day Indian chant, before settling on your preferred form.
Of course I’m not getting the christian bit. Has Christ revealed himself to you in some way or have you arrived in this confusion all by yourself? What is to be gained by calling yourself a christian and what on earth is liberal christianity? Liberal is a transient, culturally and time bound position in a mundane continuum world; it is Caesar’s world and has no connection with religious experience which, one supposes, is the cultic centre of christianity.
I’ll stop there; my itch is scratched.
Well almost. or could you not decide that those apparently social interactions and duties are the ritualistic and cultic centre of christianity. You raise people up with your love - that would be your vocation. Was it the teachings, the ritual, or the presence of the man that made people follow jesus? Did he not uplift them first?
AVATAR
AVATAR
Co-incidentally, or perhaps not, and much more important to me and this journal than the picked upon Mr Hobson, is the removal of one of the foundation stones of my grand plan, to resume my own ‘ministry’ in the form of teaching the Avatar course. (I gave this a mention a few episodes ago, as no doubt you recall.) What I hadn’t reckoned on was discovering that the rules have changed and that the Avatar Masters (i.e the qualified teachers) are no longer able to teach the course on homeground (as was once the case) and instead have to take themselves and their prospective students to larger courses either in Holland or Florida. As my whole creation was ‘Avatar in Avalon’, this news was, as they say in Avatarland, a rather massive ‘secondary’. Being a good student I wrote to ‘them’ and reaffirmed my goal. It is a bit like if Mr Hobson got a louder shout from god which said, ‘Stay away, we don’t want you,’ and decided to be a vicar anyway.
The Avatar Course is a great collection of exercises that I’ve wanted to share with people ever since I came across them but MONEY! Why does Harry Palmer need so much goddam money?!!
Time’s up, I’ll be back to this.
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