Some time ago I was asked to contribute to a series of short videos for a local parish on Catholic doctrines that people found difficult. The doctrine I chose was that of original sin which I described as one of the most pernicious teachings of Christianity. The teaching is based on the story of the first human beings who disobeyed God’s commands and were expelled from a beautiful and fruitful garden. The belief is that this original sin has affected all human beings who are born in a situation of alienation from God. The only way to overcome this alienation is through Jesus who as both man and God redeemed humankind and brought about a reconciliation between God and human beings. Human beings accept and share in this redemption through baptism.

What I don’t like about original sin is how it has affected Christianity’s tendency to convince human beings that they are sinners, incapable of being saved apart from accepting Jesus as their saviour and being baptised. This resulted in many people having a poor self-image, thinking of themselves as unworthy sinners and full of self-loathing while others thought they had the right to punish or abuse them and others the right to subject people to forced conversions and baptism. Recently I was challenged in my thinking about original sin. The challenge came from the historian Tom Holland in a video in which he simply commented that in the 1960s Christianity had cast off original sin. In his view that had led to a judgementalism which considered self as good and others as bad, instead of recognising that we are all equally sinners and therefore more accepting of one another. So, was I simply being caught up in a trend as to what original sin was about without thinking it through?

It is true that in the 1960s with the Second Vatican Council there was a change in attitude within the Christian community about living in a sinful vale of tears, but it is the book Original Blessing, written by Dominican theologian Matthew Fox in 1983, that caused a stir.  In the book Matthew Fox suggested that before the fall-redemption model used to describe the reality of humanity for centuries within Christianity there was original blessing and that this is humanity’s fundamental state. He pointed out that the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is one that Christianity shares with Judaism and yet Jews do not interpret that story as a Fall with the consequence that ever since human beings are born in a state of alienation from God in need of redemption.  Rather Jews believe that they are born in a relationship with God with a free will that allows them to choose good or evil. As a Jew this is how Jesus would have understood the story. The Catholic Church opposed this view because, I presume, it was such a challenge to the idea of the need of a redeemer and thus belittling the saving and transforming death of Jesus.
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But how did such and idea take hold of the Christian imagination? Nothing comes from nothing. So why did St Augustine develop the idea? St Augustine lived in the 4th century which was a tumultuous time for the Christian Church. Christianity, having moved from being a persecuted minority to the state religion of the Roman Empire was caught up in theological debates which led to the definition of doctrines and creeds and the rejection of certain views as heretical. Augustine had been a Manichean but had rejected the dualism that suggested equal powers of good and evil for a belief in the supremacy of the one true God. He also rejected the Donatist heresy believing that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on Christ and not the personal holiness or moral state of the priest, maintaining that the church was a mixed body of saints and sinners. And against Pelagius he rejected the notion that humans could work out their own salvation rather than relying on diving grace.

Does this context help in understanding original sin? I think it helps me in that as a teaching it was not one sided, focussing on undermining individuals and their alienation from God. Rather, it was an answer to the question of perfectionism as in the case of the Donatists. We are indeed all sinners, and this should in fact free us from the burden of expecting perfection in ourselves and others. Can we even rejoice in it? Perhaps Tom Holland is right and if we recognised how we are all fragile, incomplete, imperfect we might be more tolerant of ourselves and others. And in the case of the Pelagians Augustine was emphasising the need of grace that can come to us through the Church but also through life and other people. We are not self-sufficient.  Augustine has a famous saying, “you have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.” Is this not a better way of looking at our original nature, that we are born with an attraction towards love, towards growth, towards well-being, towards the adventure of living. But are we always aware of that attraction, do we listen to it and respond? There is also the opposite, something in our nature that leads us to selfishness, complacency, individualism. This might be called original sin, an attitude that inhibits and closes us off from others – but whatever it is it never alienates us from God and other people.
   

On Monday May 15th Pope Leo XIV issued the first encyclical of his pontificate. As expected, it has received wide attention in the Catholic press, but it has also drawn notable praise from non-Catholics, including many of my friends and acquaintances. That response is understandable, since the document addresses an issue of growing importance in today’s world. Its subject matter was not a surprise. When Robert Provost was elected pope, he explained that he chose the name Leo XIV because, just as Leo XIII had responded to the challenges of the Industrial Revolution in 1891, he believed there was a need for our own age to face a technological revolution of similar seriousness, but one advancing at alarming speed. In continuity with Leo XIII’s concerns, Leo XIV has chosen to address the challenge of artificial intelligence. The title of the encyclical is Magnifica Humanitas, with the subtitle, “On the Safeguarding of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It’s the first encyclical to be written in English rather than Latin and the Pope departed from tradition by presenting it himself (in English, a Pope speaking English is something to get used to) alongside church leaders, theologians, including two women theologians and the co-founder of the  AI company, Anthropic, Christopher Olah who has an interest in developing an ethical framework for how AI handles moral questions.  At the presentation the Pope thanked Mr Olah for accepting the invitation to attend the launch and accepted in the name of the Church his invitation for the Church to work with him in considering the issues facing humanity as it copes with AI and its implications for the future. This is significant. What we have is an encyclical calling for reflection and consideration that is not carried out in isolation from the IT world but in dialogue with it.  

 Like many others I’m cautious about AI and disturbed by talk of transhuman and post human, not so much for myself but for my nieces and nephews and their children. I’m not at ease with AI or understand it and I don’t like it when friends or companions appear more interested in their mobile phones than they do in communicating with me or others. The phone becomes a barrier and much of their interactions and pleasure is taken from the virtual world rather than the real one. That is why I am so delighted at the title of the encyclical “Magnificent or Glorious Humanity”. I think we are not very good at being human and need to give some time and energy into thinking what does it mean to be human and to realise what a wonderful gift it is to be alive in the world today. I have often seen the evolution of the cosmos described in terms of one year and humans only appearing on the scene at three minutes to midnight on the 31st of December. We are very new in this cosmos and haven’t yet learned what it is to be truly human. We are infants who are in danger of destroying ourselves before we have had time to develop. 

There are many ways of understanding the human person and religions have their own perspectives on this. I particularly like and have been helped by the Buddhist notion of no-self which seems counterintuitive and the opposite of the Christian idea that each person is uniquely created and loved by God. Tich Nhat Hanh uses the concept of emptiness to describe no-self. He asks the question: empty of what? Nothing is totally empty he would suggest because to say something is empty is to say that it is empty of something.  Even an empty cup cannot be empty of nothing, it is in fact not empty of air. So, what are we empty of?. For Thay we are empty of an isolated, discrete, separate self. We are who we are because of the process of evolution. We began the journey of life at the moment when life started, perhaps in the Big Bang if that is the beginning of our cosmos, have journeyed through the lives of our ancestors to be given birth  at this moment in history and even then only kept in existence by our connectedness with others and the natural world that provides food and sustenance for our growth and development. We are indeed a unique manifestation of life as are all other sentient beings. We are part of and a continuation of life itself which will continue after our particular manifestation or indeed incarnation dies. Thay illustrates this through the notion of the wave and the water. The wave is a manifestation of the water, but it has no separate existence apart from the water. And if the wave thinks it has, it is existing in ignorance. Similarly, if the water thinks it alone exists it too is existing in ignorance.  The wave is water; the water is wave. One has no existence without the other. 
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 For me this notion of no-self is liberating and an insight into what Christianity might mean when it says that each person is created in the image and likeness of God, is a unique part of the human family and called to contribute to the human flourishing of all. It helps me understand what it means to be human as a basis for the Pope’s call to embrace the very essence of our humanity and to build a civilisation of love that will come from small and steadfast acts of fidelity.  What a glorious thing it is to be human and what a glorious thing it is to be able to  contribute to the future flourishing of our race. 

 I have come to think of the catholic Eucharist as a kind of Greek drama. Central to it is a symbolic reenactment of the Last Supper which is related to the death and resurrection of Jesus. The story is symbolically told by the priest who officiates at the service and represents the person of Jesus while the congregation are a bit like the Chorus, entering into the experience through responses, the singing of hymns and the reception of the consecrated bread and wine. It wasn’t always like this. Before the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council the liturgy was conducted by the priest with his back to the people in Latin and the congregation left to make sense of it by following what the priest was doing in their missals or saying their own private prayers. They were much more observers than participants. Now it has changed. 

The liturgy of the Easter season is particularly dramatic and intense. It begins on Holy Thursday when the service recounts the story of the Last Supper which the priest enacts by washing the feet of 12 parishioners. At the end of the Mass there is a procession when the priest with the congregation processes to a spot outside the main body of the Church with the bread, consecrated and symbolically understood as the presence of Jesus and known as the Blessed Sacrament. This is placed on a specially constructed altar, representing the garden in which Jesus prayed before his death. Night prayer and morning prayer the next day will be conducted at this altar, allowing those attending to symbolically enter into the experience of waiting with Jesus in the agony he underwent before his arrest. The Good Friday service focusses on the Cross and there is a reading of the account of the passion and death of Jesus from the Gospel of John and after a large Cross is processed into the Church and displayed before the altar everyone in the congregation is invited to come forward and venerate it either by touching it or kissing it. There are also prayers for different categories of people. At the end of the service all depart in silence and in a spirit of mourning. The Easter Vigil on the Saturday evening (the liturgical day begins on the eve of a festival as it does in Judaism) has a different feel.  There is the blessing of new fire and the baptismal water, the lighting of the Paschal candle and its light distributed to the candles held by the congregation, readings beginning with the account of Creation, proceeding to the story of the Exodus and the promises of the Prophets when the People of Israel strayed from the Covenant, the proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus and a wonderfully glorious singing of the Exsultet, an ancient hymn of praise sung by one voice while all hold their lighted candles in a darkened Church. It is at this service that people who after a year’s preparation are received into the Church. The parish that I attended had 12 young people doing this. 8 of them were baptised and all 12 were confirmed. This is amazingly moving though I can’t help but wonder what has attracted them to the Church. The numbers joining the Church seem to be growing and this year 549 people in Scotland became Catholics.

The drama in these services is intense and if, like my experience, they are conducted by a priest with a flair for the dramatic, the homily is meaningful, the music and the singing is uplifting, the Church is packed and participation is high then the three days offer an experience of the core story of Christianity that binds the community together.  It is rather wonderful. For me to see it all as a drama allows me to disregard and sit lightly on some of the words of the prayers, hymns and even readings that raise questions for me. It means that I do not have to let their literalness spoil the experience which I find is more difficult at more ordinary masses throughout the year.

The three days of the easter liturgy focusses of course on the death and resurrection of Jesus. The new fire and the candle lit from it is a sure sign of a light that dispels the darkness. It is a celebration of Jesus who is not dead but alive in his community. Like Judaism this celebration does not just remember past events but keeps them alive in the present so that it is this night that “sanctifying power … dispels wickedness, washes faults away, restores innocence to the fallen… drives out hatred, fosters concord and brings down the mighty” to quote the beginning of the Exultet. In his easter sermon Pope Leo said that the paschal candle which now takes a central place in Catholic Churches represents the light of Christ, which “unites us in the Church as lights for the world.” Easter, he said, is ultimately the victory “of life over death, of light over darkness, of love over hatred.” And yet death, darkness, hatred still persist, the mighty continue to wage war, the world is in turmoil. So, what does it mean to say that Jesus is risen, and all has been transformed when it obviously hasn’t.

​This celebration of the resurrection is not just about the past or the present but (and maybe more importantly) about the future. It is a call to continue the presence of Jesus in the world by keeping alive his message of love, by working for justice and peace, desiring the well-being of all. The easter liturgy shows us what we can be, what we can become, what potential there is in us to be lights to the world. In so far as people are lights to the society in which they live they witness to the resurrection of Jesus. They can show that Jesus has not died in vain, that his memory is a force for good and that there is hope for a future that can only be realised by us through love.
​ In this sense Jesus has risen indeed.       

A recent news item caught my attention. It was the story of how Death Valley National Park, the hottest place on earth and the driest place in North America is currently experiencing its best wildflower display since 2016.  The dry landscape is carpeted in an array of wildflowers, yellow desert gold, violet phacelia, brown-eyed primrose, desert star, and pink desert five-spot. It has come about because of an unusually wet autumn which allowed the seeds to sprout and a wet winter that allowed the roots to develop. It’s not the only place that such a phenomenon occurs. The barren landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile was transformed by a carpet of wildflowers last autumn because of the rain.  What captured my imagination was the thousands of seeds lying dormant in such desert places only to come to life when the conditions were right. They were there all the time, waiting to be brought to life, waiting with a potential that was not visible but real. For me there is a lesson in this and a sign not to lose hope in a world that seems set to destroy itself through war, climate change, consumerism, hatred, whatever. How many of us shake our heads and wonder at the state of things when we watch the news which, through television, brings conflict and violence into our sitting rooms. How can we be making such a mess of things.

The story of the blooming desert reminded me of a story which I recently shared when I was asked to speak at an iftar meal in a local mosque. Several years ago, a mutual friend asked me to show an American visitor round some places of worship in Glasgow. I did so happily and focussed on the west end of the city where I live. It’s an amazing place in that within the vicinity of a couple of miles there are two Christian cathedrals as well as churches, several mosques and an Islamic centre, two gurdwaras, a mandir across the park, a synagogue up the hill as well as a Buddhist centre and a Christian spirituality centre. It’s a great place to go on an interfaith pilgrimage. It had once been a vibrant multifaith part of the city but now, because of its proximity to Glasgow University, and immigrants moving out to more suburban areas it’s more a student area than anything else. There are small businesses and plenty of cafes and tea shops. As I was taking the visitor around, I was telling him about the area and how there had been many immigrants here, particularly from India and the sub-continent and this was the reason for the different places of worship. He stopped me and said that in his opinion it was because of a spiritual energy. He was sure this was what drew people to the area and got them to set up places of worship. I like that idea and while on the surface this spiritual energy may not now be so visible it is there.

In my last blog I wrote about this time of fasting being a time of spiritual energy but every week and in some instances every day, people of faith come to the various places of worship to pray. Every day there are people going to the mosque for the daily five times of prayer, every day there are Christians from the Catholic, Episcopalian and Orthodox churches attending services, each Saturday the Synagogue has its Shabbat service and on Sundays people are going to the Gurdwaras, the Mandir, all the Churches and the Mosques. That’s a lot of praying. This area is a dynamic community of faith, expressed and manifested in different ways through different religions. But, I believe, all the worshippers are attracted by and to the same God (there is only one after all), want to serve that God with their whole heart and while each one will have different loyalties and points of view about the world situation they all desire peace and want to live in harmony with one another. I do think this energy can be harvested and used by those of us who live in the area to be positive and hopeful about the future of our society and world. It would be powerful, I think, if each of us believers, when we go to our own place of worship could be aware of all the other believers at their place of worship. This might help those places of worship that feel their numbers are dwindling.
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Another reason why this area is so special is because it is from the International Flat in Glasgow St. that Interfaith as a movement has spread from the original Sharing of Faiths to the rest of the country and to the establishment of a national interfaith body ‘Interfaith Scotland’. There’s a lot of good going on and much more than I am aware of. And this good has the potential like those dormant seeds of producing unexpected flowers and blossoms. I may live in a vibrant but ordinary area of the city of Glasgow but underneath the ordinariness of daily life there is a potential and an energy just waiting to expose itself. Could I live elsewhere? I don’t think so. 
 

For a religious person faith is an important part of their identity and yet the religion we belong to is for many people an accident of birth and were any of us to have been born in another part of the world, at another time in history, our religion would have been different. The religion we follow is the result of happenstance. And would we be the worse off for that? Does it really matter what religion we believe in or follow when all religions have produced their saints (and of course their sinners). What is important is whether our religion is a vehicle for faith and a meaningful way for us to grow in love, justice, compassion, honesty, all the virtues that make our life worthwhile and allow us to make a positive contribution to the world in which we live. It’s easy to focus on the externals of religion and not let the practice take us deeper into what it means to be human.

For me call is at the heart of faith. And what I mean by call is that impulse deep within us that attracts us to a future that can be better, or different from the present. It is like a magnet drawing us ever forward to explore life, seek truth, show love, serve others. Life doesn’t stand still and each day offers the possibility for change, growth and development. We are on a journey, and our personal journey is a part of the much greater journey of humanity itself and indeed the cosmos. To participate in this journey means to accept life with gratitude but also to honour its pain and incompleteness, and to contribute what we can to its well-being.

A good depiction of this journey is for me the 10 Zen Buddhist ox-herding pictures. These metaphorically illustrate the journey to enlightenment.

1. the journey begins with a sense of dissatisfaction, a realisation that there is a more to life.
2. there is an indication of where meaning and enlightenment might be in the glimpses of the ox’s footprints.
3. this is followed by glimpses and sightings of the ox itself.
4. then we manage to catch the ox, but it is a struggle to keep hold of it.  
5. after much wresting we find harmony, sitting atop the ox and viewing life from its perspective.
6. we are able to ride the ox home and feel very at ease in it
7. then we realise there never was an ox to be sought after and are content in the knowledge that what we were seeking was always in us and around us
8. now the ox and the seeker have disappeared. It is total immersion in the world, realising that we are not a distinct, separate entity but as Rumi would put it, ‘Not a drop in the ocean, but the whole mighty sea in a drop.’
9. we return to the beginning – no ox, no man, just life of which we are part – it is as TS Elliot says, to know it for the first time
10. then finally a return to ordinary life, to the marketplace to become a bestower of blessings.

The ten ox-herding pictures dramatize the Buddhist teaching that enlightenment reveals the true self, showing it to be the ordinary self doing ordinary things in the most extraordinary way. Although I am not a Buddhist I recognise a truth encapsulated in the teaching and respond to it. For me it illustrates well the journey of conversion, the development of the life of faith, the attraction and call at the heart of religion and of life itself. But we need to stop to recognise this call. We need to be open to it and we might not hear it amid busyness and noise. We need silence, space, deep listening to our hearts and our circumstances. We need to recognise how much we fill up our inner space with noise, distractions, material goods. We need time out.

Religions are good at giving opportunities for time out to reflect on self, to pause and to listen. In Judaism it is Shabbat that allows for this and it would be so healthy for us all to have such a day each week. Next week begins lent and Ramadan followed at the beginning of March by the Baha’i fast. For the next six weeks there will be millions of people fasting each in their own way. For Muslims and Baha’is this is to abstain from food or drink during daylight hours; for Christians it could be discipling self by letting go of some comfort or obsession, giving up alcohol, meat, sweet deserts, social media, television. It could be decluttering, learning a new skill, doing voluntary work. The fasts are important and the discipline is good but only if they lead to conversion of heart, offer an opportunity to reflect on life to consider our pattern of living and open ourselves to personal and spiritual renewal, not just for our own sake but for the sake of the world. As millions of believers around the world embark on these times of fasting I think  it is good for those of us fasting to remember and unite our efforts with all those who are sharing in this spiritual exercise. There will be a lot of specific good energy around in the next six weeks and a concern for the future of humanity. Can we harness it so that it so that we are aware of it and become blessings of peace and reconciliation for others?    

Christmas has come to an end though it so happens that today, the 7thJanuary is the date that some 250 million orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas. This is not because the churches they belong to think 7th January is the correct date of the birth of Jesus and the 25thDecember is wrong but because they follow the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian one which the western churches follow. This calendar was an innovation brought about by Pope Gregory XIII in the 16th cy as it was regarded as a more accurate approximation of the solar year. Neither date of course is the actual date of the birthday of Jesus, but a date chosen by the Church to celebrate it, perhaps as a way of christianising pagan mid-winter festivals.

We know little about the birth of Jesus despite the stories in the New Testament that are told and sung about at this time of year. I once suggested to a class of student that they should not be telling pupils in school that Christmas was the day that Jesus was born, much to their consternation. They thought that this was an article of faith. Rather Christmas is a time to celebrate the birth of Jesus and while remembering his birth it is his significance for believers and the world that is important. Like many founders of religions the birth of Jesus is told in stories that are not meant to be taken literally. In reading them or listening to them the question to ask is not what they say but what do they mean, what message does a particular story hold for us.

Traditionally for those of us following the Gregorian calendar the Christmas season ends on the feast of the Epiphany i.e. 6th January though for some churches the season can be extended to the Sunday after the Epiphany which celebrates the baptism of Jesus or even to February 2nd which is Candlemas day and remembers Jesus being taken to the temple when he was 40 days old. The story associated with the Epiphany is that of the wise men who followed a star in their search for a messiah foretold by their scriptures. There has been much debate about these magi, where they came from, what kind of star it was, and many biblical scholars believe the story  could come from a Jewish source and is midrash which is a retelling or elaboration of an Old Testament prophecy or passage of Scripture to give it new significance and meaning, something we find quite a lot of in the gospels. But the important thing is not what happened but what meaning might it have for us.

One of the symbols in the story of the magi is the star and following our own star has captured the imagination of poets. It suggests that there is a destination, future possibilities laid down for us all that will bring us fulfilment. There is I think within human nature a desire for more, an inquisitiveness to know what lies beyond ourselves and our own little world. whether that be in a cosmic, experiential or geographical sense. This inquisitiveness does not necessarily lead to a good place as in experimenting with drugs or engaging in dangerous and harmful experiences or relationships. But it suggests there is a truth in the saying of St Augustine that our hearts are restless though for St Augustine the destination that brings fulfilment is resting in God. We human beings are adventurers, participating in the great adventure of the cosmos of which we are but a small part and seeking the more in life. It is this sense of adventure that led our race to leave the plains of Africa and travel to the ends of the earth, to conquer lands not our own and establish empires. It is this desire for more that led us to put our trust in the acquisition of money and possessions, to pillage natural resources and steal from other nations. But all this does not necessarily bring happiness or fulfilment. Rather it can awaken within us a greed that is never satisfied, that sets us up in competition with one another and leads to violence and conflict.
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But I believe there is also within us a desire to be better and a belief that we can be better, if we but try.  Many people begin each new year with resolutions to do better in some aspect of their lives, even though many don’t sustain them. For religions this desire can be described as a call, a call to a deeper and fuller life which has to be worked out within the ordinary and mundane events of daily life.  Religions speak of this fuller life in different ways. For some it is called salvation, for others enlightenment.  It is not something offered on a plate but it comes with a promise of future possibilities as a result of life choices and practices that take individuals beyond the self to encompass what the poet Mary Oliver would call ever widening circles that recognise our interconnectedness with others and our responsibility for the world in which we live. Buddhists talk of the Kingdom of Shambhala, established through the virtues of wisdom and compassion, which grows silently and even secretly; Christians talk of the Kingdom of God which too comes about quietly through individuals working for peace, love, justice and mercy. These are kingdoms that are all around us if we have the eyes to see them. And they are not restricted to people of faith. This attraction, this call to a fuller life is something deep within our humanity and to be found outside of religion as much as within it. Good religion gives us a language for expressing it, bad religion is in danger of obscuring it. But above all, whether we are religious or not, we are offered future possibilities which depend on us for their fulfilment. Perhaps all will be well in the end – but perhaps not. It’s up to us.