'Doing God'?

Madeleine Bunting writing in today’s Guardian about the flurry of atheist books on the market, says that “religious faith in the west came to be interpreted as a matter of the head and the intellect, and was bound up with the authority of an institution which expected submission: God was regarded as something to think about rather than do in large chunks of western religious practice which, preoccupied with institutional power, ended up in this current cul de sac.” Looking back it’s obvious that I spent my thirty five years of priestly ministry in the dying years of that mindset. The clues to what might become the future were there for us to see but those of us who stayed within the institutional church (in my case, of England) didn’t really get it in spite of our unease with what we were expected to believe. It was something to do with the steady drip, drip of the liturgy which still emphasises the gap between us and God, in spite of Paul Tillich’s ‘ground of being’ approach, which Bishop John Robinson so controversially spelt out in 1963.

So now, says Bunting, it’s OK to ‘do God’ and I agree that praxis is more important than belief. It’s just that I’m a bit unhappy with that phrase, ‘doing God’. These days I prefer a much more controversial phrase: ‘being God’. In his ‘The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality’ the French philosopher, Andre Comte-Sponville, writes, “Whether they are believers or not, mystics are those who no longer lack God. But is a God who is no longer lacking still God?”

I don’t know the answer to his question. My response is to ask another question: Why is it that when human beings, in our left brain dominated world, learn how to access the right brain (i.e. to meditate) they experience love, compassion and a sense of connectedness with all living things? And what did Jesus mean when, according to John’s Gospel he said, ‘I and the Father are one’ and ‘I am the vine. You are the branches.’?