Expeditions into Faith

Well, I've skipped church this morning because I have a hangover :-( Not a good start. Still, I might as well use the time to add my next post...

Of course, the most obvious form of personal devotion is Prayer. I was brought up with the assumption that prayer was an individual 'conversation' with God, usually personal though sometimes from a book. It always struck me as something extra-pious, rather selfish (please god let me pass this exam, etc.) and generally as something which I would feel very silly doing. When I decided that private devotion was an essential part of my experiment, I steered clear of anything that felt like talking to myself. I decided it was safest to start with meditation, since it's fashionable and free of doctrinal additives, and doesn't involve the P-word. I chose the sanskrit mantra So Ham (or Ham So) meaning "I Am That" - which had interesting judeo-christian resonances as well as expressing (according to wikipedia!) a union with creation. Unfortunately, keeping focused was difficult. It was a surprise to me how many minds I seemed to have - the one that was chanting and breathing, the one that was watching the chanting and breathing and thinking how well I was doing at not thinking, the one that was watching the second one and realising that after all I was thinking about not thinking, the one that had wandered off and was writing a shopping list... I decided I need professional instruction.

In the mean time, I tried the rosary. After all, that involves repetitive words but also thinking and concentrating. It took me a while to find out how to use it, and longer to get over the 'weirded-out' factor of doing something I associated with devout catholic ladies in their mantillas. But there I had the opposite problem: I just had too many things to think about at once. After all, how do you 'meditate on the joyful mystery of the Annunciation'??

One option is to give somebody else the responsibility: use regular structured Offices. From an atheist or indeed a protestant perspective, that seems rather mindless and implies that the prayer is something God needs rather than something that people need. But one thing that Christian writers often emphasise is that one shouldn't get too hung up on 'feeling the right things'. If you don't feel inspired, that doesn't mean you shouldn't pray and see what happens.

I recently spent a couple of days in a monastery. I loved the regular services, with their focused, unhurried, repetitive chanting. I didn't have to concentrate on thinking or on not thinking - just on singing. The words and notes weren't easy at first, but they were a damn sight easier than trying to sing some stodgy Victorian hymn, when you haven't got the music, everyone else in the congregation knows it (or thinks they do) and the organist is playing seventeen different harmonies with the volume turned up to eleven. After a while, you're able to chant without worrying about it, and either give your mind a rest or think about something appropriate.

The most spiritually moving service I've been to was a Taize service, named after the non-denominational monastery of Taize in France. They use songs with a single repeated verse, and often with candles and icons. After a certain number of repetitions your mouth just starts singing automatically and instead of looking forward - thinking about the end of the song or what's happening next - you just accept it as an ongoing state which you could remain in all night. I was thinking about a number of things which were worrying me, and I found that the service gave me space not just to think but to let out my emotions. Perhaps that counts as praying.

But it's not so easy to recreate regular prayer at home. For a start, I couldn't get hold of a book of hours at a reasonable price, and nor could I find any simple plainchant. I was left with the Book of Common Prayer, which might as well start with the words Caution: Do not try this at home! Perhaps the compilers of the book were distrustful of private devotion; certainly the morning and evening prayer need a priest, a church, and half an hour.

I found I enjoyed the psalms. They're often maligned as having a violent and selfish attitude, which they do - but it's refreshing to realise that these elevated texts are actually the voices of lay people from over two thousand years ago, being petulant and self-righteous and demanding, and getting angry with God. It's a reminder of the very immediate, present, practical relationship the writers felt they had with God, and it's encouraging that even the most ignorant and self-serving kind of faith can be made holy.

I also found, after a few weeks, that I started to feel as if I had prayed even if I hadn't. Everyday things began to take on a quality of worship.

On the other hand, that could be just an excuse, because I've very quickly lapsed from saying prayers twice a day. I've begun to see why monks make a profession out of this - you really can't say the morning office with any degree of seriousness whilst waiting for the kettle to boil. I always feel too hurried or too tired to do it justice. It's starting to look as though, if I want to make a go of this prayer-life lark, I may have to make more changes in my life than I thought.

Mortification of the flesh is not really my thing. When my body is in discomfort or pain, it demands my whole attention - it's certainly not an aid to spiritual contemplation. So I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed a bit of fasting.

My only serious experience of fasting was one Lent, when my sister and I decided to become vegan for a while. I did a bit of research on the history of Lenten fasting, and found that originally Christian fasting was very similar to the Muslim Ramadan - they didn't eat anything during the day, but could have one meal of any kind of food in the evening. Over time, the one meal got earlier and earlier, but more types of food were restricted: no meat, eggs, dairy, alcohol or olive oil. Partly it was to do with the idea that animal products are 'carnal'; partly it was simply that they were luxuries, and often in short supply during Lent anyway.

I didn't want to do anything extreme, which could have a negative effect on my health, my ability to work, or my relationship with my family, so we just restricted the types of food but without reducing the number of meals. She became properly vegan, as she was veggie already; I also ate some fish, in line with christian fasting practice. Luckily, chocolate hadn't been discovered by Christians by the time they wrote the rules :-)

I've never been able to stick to a diet in my life, but I found that the hard-and-fast rules and the fixed length of time worked well for me - we had fun trying out peculiar recipes (chocolate cake made with vinegar, anyone?) and I lost two inches off my waist. More surprisingly, I found that it did have what you might call a 'spiritual' effect. Now, I certainly didn't starve myself - we're not talking here about some kind of religious experience involving light-headedness brought on by lack of food. But I did find that I was thinking far more about what I ate, and appreciating it more. I used to crave good food, and I was very disappointed if I couldn't have what I wanted or it wasn't as nice as I'd expected. On the vegan diet, my choice was determined not by what I wanted but by what was available. When choosing food, I found that I really did care more about following the rules than about having exactly what I wanted, and I appreciated it just as much if not more. It reminded me of something a Jewish friend of my sister's said: that it isn't the rules themselves that are important, but that following the rules makes you think about what you're doing and about God.

However, I also learned the importance of fasting with someone else. When I tried the same experiment the next year, I couldn't stick to it, because my husband wasn't fasting. I also found it hard to explain to people why I was doing it, and tended to say that it was to lose weight (which was also true). Once I started thinking of it as 'a diet' and treating it that way, it was much harder to motivate myself. Instead of having absolute, unbreakable rules, I was looking for a reward (a better figure) and that was counterbalanced by other priorities, such as keeping my husband happy with big hunks of meat and cheese! The long-term aim of losing weight always lost out.

It reminds me of something I heard on the radio which was very moving. A chaplain asked an experienced prison guard what things he thought could truly reform an offender. The prison guard replied that there were only two things: religion or the love of a good woman. It's both tragic and rather wonderful that human beings are so often unable to change themselves for their own sake, because they deserve a better life, but are so remarkably able to change for the sake of someone else. If we choose to do something for ourselves, we can always change our minds - but a promise, witnessed by others, stops us from giving up.

UPDATE: A Muslim friend has challenged me to observe part of Ramadan with him. I feel I can't really take this experiment seriously and turn down such a challenge - so watch this space...

I realise that my previous post concentrated rather heavily on Christianity. And that's likely to carry on being the case. But why? It certainly wasn't my initial plan. In fact, it disappoints me that so many of my fellow-atheists define themselves against Christianity to the extent that they don't really consider other religions. Some will 'go easy' on non-Christian religions, because they don't feel they know enough about them to criticise. Some even enlist them as part of their arguments against Christianity - praising the scientific advances of early Islam or the peaceful nature of Buddhism. I certainly planned to be different.

But in practice, sadly, it just isn't possible to give all religions full attention, especially when they're from outside one's own culture. I realised pretty early on that I wasn't getting much sense of the true lived faith of Christianity by reading books and websites - you have to talk to the people and take part in the worship. With other religions, it's that much harder to find a broad range of believers to talk to, or to go to religious services without being stared at.

The sheer number of religions is one of the great barriers to exploring religion at all. If you are a believer, it's likely that your own faith seems sufficiently convincing that you don't feel exploring other options is really a pressing need. But if you were generally unsure about the whole 'religion thing', how would you know where to start?

Many religious people would, I think, be happy for such a person to start by believing there's 'something there', god-wise, even if they didn't immediately pick a religion. At least they would be 'a believer'. But there is so little agreement between (and even within) religions on the definition of God/the gods/the Divine that this is harder than you might think. As soon as you start believing in a god - if your belief means anything more than just assent to the words - you're already believing in one person's god rather than another's. Moreover, it seems rather peculiar to decide that there is a deity without this making any difference to your own life. Unless you end up as a strict Enlightenment-style deist (in which case, it was barely worth the effort) any question of god's existence is also a question of your own relationship to that god - in other words, your religion.

When Pascal came up with his famous wager, he only saw two options: atheism or Catholicism. If you had any inkling at all of the existence of a god, become Catholic. And that's what probably happens with most converts - they start getting interested in religion because they encounter one particular religion and start to be attracted to it or convinced by it. Other religions don't get a look in. But if you are being intellectually honest, if you've started to take seriously the possibility of gods, miracles, afterlives and so-on, as proposed by one religion, you have to at least consider the evidence from other religious groups which make similar claims. Any argument that Religion A may advance for the existence of a divine force is also likely to be evidence for Religion B. It's even been used as an argument for atheism: why are you prepared to believe this about your own religion, when you would ignore similar evidence from another?

You can take the pragmatic approach. The main reason for an atheist to take religions with any degree of seriousness is, arguably, the large number of people who profess one, and the persistence of them through time and accross cultures. On those criteria, you can narrow it down to six or seven 'world religions'. However, that assumes that the main criterion for judging a religion's likelihood of being true is its persuasiveness or popularity - something that many religions would themselves deny. It also assumes that each religion has to be taken 'as a package' and that different religions are mutually exclusive. Whilst I'd say that's generally true, many people would argue that there is some truth in all or many religions, and that the real 'answer' is a mixture. To give a fair hearing to every possible combination of religious beliefs would take a lifetime.

So it's more or less chance and practicality that have determined my concentration on Christianity. But to my surprise, Christianity is so far in my personal Top Two of world religions (matched by hinduism, though I know much less about that). I like it because it's complicated - although that may, of course, be just because I know more about it. Buddhism seems to be offering a personal solution: how to avoid suffering and escape rebirth. Islam says this is how it is and this is what you should do. It's pretty simple. But Christianity tells a story - and if there's a moral to the story, it's that you can't expect it to be easy.

When it comes to exploring religion, I've always been a bit of an armchair traveller. I'm fascinated by religion, both by doctrine but also more particularly by people's experiences of it and what they feel they get from their faith. But until a few years ago, I had never been to any religious service (other than school Carol Concerts) or read any holy books. I suppose I saw those things as aspects of worship, and therefore only permitted to those who were already members of the faith. Inevitably, the result was an extremely skewed idea of what Christians believe, and barely any idea at all about other faiths, all based on RE lessons, the very public vitriol of religious campaigning groups, and mediaeval church history.

A few years ago, for reasons largely unrelated to my own spirituality or religious interests (more to do with my interest in members of the opposite sex, in fact), I started going to church on a semi-regular basis. Various friends took my interest in matters religious as a sign that I must have some kind of 'spiritual need', some 'god-shaped hole' which was causing me to doubt my atheism. This was far from the case. In fact, if I had ever felt that I was faltering in my atheism or at risk of an inconvenient conversion, I'm sure I'd have run a mile. Instead, I was so secure and content with my position that I was prepared to immerse myself in religion without any fear of catching it.

In fact, I felt the gauntlet had been thrown down. It's not uncommon for Christians, like anyone with a strong view, to think that their belief is so self-evidently true that anyone who disagrees must either be ignorant or prejudiced. Some people were convinced that if I simply read such-and-such a book, or went to church regularly, or 'pretended to believe' for a while, then I was certain to start believing for real. So I read C S Lewis' Mere Christianity - and picked holes in it. I went to church most weeks for over a year. I crossed myself. I received blessings. I went on retreat. I went so far as to marry a Christian. I enjoyed it all immensely - but the blinding light didn't happen. I didn't come out thinking that I'd been getting it wrong all my life and that it was all perfectly obvious now.

What I did come out thinking was that Christianity is not unbelievable. I don't believe it, but it isn't unbelievable. I'd had so many conversations with intelligent, thoughtful Christians where we just seemed to be talking a different language. I decided that the 'problem' with Christianity was not internal incoherence, but that it was based on such a radically different set of assumptions that it couldn't be reached from where I was starting. From the inside, it would probably make so much sense as to seem obvious; from the outside it could only be nonsense.

A few months ago I heard a sermon by a very fine preacher, Fr Ivan Aquileia. One of the points he made was that the first step in understanding and / or accepting the message of Christ is "initial goodwill". It's what we might call an open mind - a willingness not just to listen but to accept the possibility that we could be convinced. I realised that my position of 'open-minded observer' was not sustainable. I'd always been willing to give faith a hearing, and to engage with what believers were actually saying rather than a set of easy stereotypes. But I was no closer to understanding what it really felt like to believe than I was when I started. Although I thought I was open-minded, my open-mindedness extended only so far as accepting that an intelligent person could have an honest and well-considered faith - it did not extend to thinking they might be right.

But how do you explore something if the best way to get there is to be there already? I approach it in two ways. The easy way is through books - not just books about religion, as I've done previously, but also books intended for believers. The scary way is through religious practices: prayer, fasting, retreats. This is not a spectator sport - it's a journey into my own head.