Alive in God December 2020

a very warm welcome from saint paul's cathedral my name is paul gooda and i'm the cannon chancellor here at saint paul's which means that i oversee the theology and learning that takes place within the life of the cathedral now normally at this point i would be welcoming hundreds of you under the dome as we ready ourselves to listen to our speaker but of course at the moment this isn't possible so instead we have pre-recorded a conversation between myself and timothy radcliffe which you will hear in a few moments timothy radcliffe is a well-known dominican friar and best-selling christian author he has written a large number of books and the book we'll be discussing today is his most recent book alive in god a christian imagination as you will notice our conversation ranged widely from catherine of siena all the way through to bette midler taking in music and novels and theology on on the way you'll even discover why timothy nearly got expelled from school and what he was reading at the time this is the first in a series of conversations and we're still working the technology out so you'll notice a couple of times in the conversation that the sound crackles but we hope that you'll still be able to know what's going on through the captions we've now fixed the problem and hope that that for the next two conversations the sound will be perfect our conversations coming up are with john swinton talking about his book finding jesus in the storm and with bishop sarah mullally talking about her new lent book timothy a very warm welcome to you and thank you so much for joining us today um i absolutely loved reading your book alive in god can you tell me a little bit about what made you write it was there anything in particular that said now is the moment to write that book well first of all what happened was i had dinner with some friends and they had two children we discovered in the in the course of dinner that one of them was a devout christian really turned on by her faith whereas the other had no interest at all and i found this fascinating they'd grown up in the same household they they were very similar in character the same interests the same passion for justice but for one of them religion was exciting and the other simply couldn't see the point of it it was it was a sort of an analogy for her it was a language that didn't mean anything to her i was reminded of my dear mother when she came to visit me in santa sabina and i was extremely enthusiastic about this painting by korean dominican kim very abstract wild colors and i took my mother into my office and i said isn't it wonderful my mother said well my yeah it looks rather like your habit after an exceptionally dirty breakfast so i thought somehow we how can i touch how can i touch the imagination of someone like that child for whom it means nothing and then i was always i wasn't busy to have time to write it there were always lecture tours and pastoral work and people to see but then i got cancer and uh for months i was confined to my room it was even suggested that i might not be able to speak publicly again because of the operation which was rather frightening so this gave me a time alone when i thought what can i do so i sat down and i wrote the first the first draft of the book so what would you say is the real heart of the book if someone read it and got what you really hoped that they would get from it um what would that be i think the very heart of it is trying to enter the imagination of somebody for whom religion doesn't make much sense and in a way that's quite easy because that's me uh one of my close friends david sanders who died of cobid uh a few weeks ago david often used to say to me timothy you're a pacer and an important he's right i'm not a naturally tired person liturgy doesn't get me excited uh i don't boil with excitement about going to mass on a sunday so a lot of my own sort of uh my own imagination isn't very religious at all in fact i like to tell how i was almost thrown out of school for reading lady chat his lover during that addiction that's very funny uh i think i'm very much the sort of person who has to say periodically i believe help my unbelief so i was having to to look carefully at my own struggles if you want to make sense of my life that meant looking for god in the ordinary i love that phrase from george herbert easter in ordinary and trying to find that religious experience isn't something apart you know religious experience the hints of transcendence they are there in our ordinary lives in our ordinary falling in love and enjoying life and friendship and having feasts and being with friends all this is part of our journey to god and i found struggling to understand to come to terms with the non-religious imagination there were two areas the particularly fascinated two of the chapters that i most enjoyed reading one was the question of violence and the other was the question of liturgy because i think we live in a very violent society it's filled with verbal violence we're more and more aware of the violence against women the violence against children which is the terrible affliction of sexual abuse violence against the planet and what i came to realize was that in our violent world jesus appeared as the one who said put down your swords and at the very heart of early christianity was this non-violence and this is something that can speak to our society very powerfully it's something that speaks to me very powerfully while i'm grappling with my own bits of unbelief how to return to the non-violent jesus who has god's deep tranquility in his life and the other area of course was the liturgy because i'm not a naturally liturgical person and other people get so excited by coats and berettas but they rather turn me off i don't know about some paws and therefore i had to come to reflect on worship because i think we all worship we all have rituals of worship it might be money it might be sex power and god is the one whose worship is liberating god is the one who when we worship him he says stand up on your feet he's the only one who sets us free in our worship so beginning with with violence and with liberty i try to find the way in which the barriers between um do we say the non-religious and the religious are overthrown and anyone who helps us to understand those helps the religious imagination that our allies that's why when i want to think about some topic in theology i think who are the poets who are the novelists the filmmakers the blog writers who are going to help me to come alive and to think creatively all anybody creative it seems to me is the ally of the religious thinker so timothy i think that whole idea about imagination that you just mentioned is particularly interesting and it's clearly the key to this book it's in the subtitle and it bubbles all the way through your narrative really um but isn't the word just a little bit dangerous aren't there too many people who think that we already imagine god so can you tell us a little bit a little bit more about what you mean by the word imagination yes paula this is an objection that i've received from time to time but we were just making it up i've tried to avoid long definitions because i think they can be off-putting but perhaps like you just say this there's imagination as the imaginative and there's the imaginary my imagination i simply mean a way of looking at things it's the worlds you inhabit so when i was a young student i had the great joy of going to to live in paris for a year and i loved trying to to live in a french world i used to go to a cafe and then smoke growers and and have a little glass of beer and read le mans and pretend i was french to be french to see a french world but there are also scientific imaginations we have one of our brethren was a geologist and traveling with me um he could show me how to see the world geologically you or charitably so that's the first thing imagination i i mean just a way of being in the world obviously imaginative suggests a very vivid way of thinking and imaginary means that you made it up but of course they're not exclusive uh if you take the lord of the rings by tolkien it offers an imagination a christian imagination as it happens he's told gene was inspired above all by his christian faith the eucharist is also highly imaginative but it's also imaginary in a sense that he made up that world but it's an illuminating one or harry potter would be the same thing at the last i'm afraid i am not the uncle of daniel radcliffe and i'm just offering a christian imagination this is my christian imagination and there are many forms of christian imagination protestant anglican catholic orthodox medieval modern so this is just one example but what i would say is that all christian imaginations have this in common is that they are open they're not reductive because the characteristic of modernity i think is the temptation of fundamentalism it could be scientific fundamentalism i think the temptation to think that everything can be reduced to scientific terms or economic fundamentalism it's the market it's the economy stupid or even worse of all it could be religious fundamentalism the fact that our religion becomes reduced to a very literal narrow meaning of some text whether it's the bible or the quran or anything but i think a healthy christian imagination is always open it's always opening doors it resists what mary mitchell newcastle philosopher called nothing buttering something is nothing but economic soul or whatever it takes the roof off i loved a novel by emma donaghy room in which she describes this woman captured kept in a small shed with her son and they escape they go out into the open air they breathe fresh air now it seems to me that a healthy christian imagination is like that it releases you from confinement it takes you out into a world filled with color and oxygen so there's something about creativity in imagination then something that sees the world in a bigger form and draws us onwards would you say absolutely if we're made in the image and likeness of god i think that doesn't mean to say that god has got a couple of ears in the mouth and so on but he came to have one and jesus but what is that share a little bit of god's creativity and that chimes in doesn't it to this strand that runs alongside imagination in the book um the alive in god strand um i think one of the things that i really love about how you express things in the book is this whole strand of living fully the fullness of life that you get can you talk to us a little bit about what that means for you and why that's so important in the book i i love the phrase in deuteronomy when god says i put before you life and death choose life and i think the whole of of our faith is really choosing life jesus said i came that they may have life and have it abundantly not survive you just didn't say i came that you may survive and survive abundantly but what does it mean to be alive and it's not just a question of the heart beating you know the lungs filling and emptying being alive starts with our bodily existence um i think we are bodily thomas equine aquinas set up someone think wonderful he said no no anima i am not my soul we are bodily beings and so i think in a world of society which is often very ambiguous about the body there's a lot of hatred of the body a lot of fear of the body a lot of illness associated alas with the body i think christianity if it invites us to live says also don't be afraid of your bodily life your breathing the whole drama of redemption begins and ends with breathing god breathes into adam breathes out on the cross breathes in on easter morning into the disciples and i all the aspects of our of our bodiliness our touch our sense of of sight our faces christianity is the religion of the face the physical human face the spiritual life i think is learning to be a face and to see faces and of course facing death as well but there's also the question of being emotionally alive uh ezekiel says i've taken away your heart of stone and given you a heart of flesh a fleshly heart which therefore can feel pain and joy so we have to come alive emotionally creatively as i said so the opposite of being alive i don't think it's necessarily most radically being dead because we all die and we hope believe we rest in the lord the opposite of being alive is to be a zombie to and that's why i wrote the chapter on affliction affliction the favorite word of seymour the wonderful mystic she said that she met in the factory people who had become zombies slaves i'm really interested by um your connection there between bodies and spirituality is something i've long been interested in as well and it's it causes me to wonder what would our prayer life's what our spiritual lives look like if we were more serious about our bodies are the things that we need to do differently because often i feel that when we talk about spirituality we kind of mean stuff that's not your body it's not connected to how you live in your body and i wonder if you've kind of reflected on that at all well certainly said dominic the founder of the order to which i belong he has his nine ways of prayer and they're all bodily they're all physical yes they're involved kneeling and prostrating and standing up and stretching out your arms and when i joined the order our prayer when we recited the office was very bodily we were always bowing and standing and at last i think we made a mistake the second after the second vatican council of thinking that it was mental mental prayer and i think c.s lewis perhaps more than anybody deeply realized how physical prayer should be in the scrutiny letters you know the wise old demon says to the young demon always let them make the mistake of thinking that that prayer has nothing to do with their bodies so how we sit how we breathe these are all absolutely fundamental dimensions i think of the life of prayer and i think thanks be to god uh we've received much in the east i started practicing yoga when i was 16 at school and have practiced it on and off and i think that yoga has been immensely enriching for a lot of people in rediscovering how to set how to breathe how to be in our prayer one of the things that absolutely fascinated me when i was reading the book and of course i would love this because i'm a new testament scholar but i loved how you told the story through the lens of the life of jesus you know how it kind of i'm doing this in my arm because it's an arc of the story isn't it through the life of jesus and can you just tell us a little bit more about why that felt important to you to do um there seems to be something really quite significant in the way in which you've kind of stitched all of this together through the lens of the life of jesus well what he usually says at the beginning to any of his disciples is come follow me and that's the invitation to embark on an adventure and so often we're reductive with christianity we reduce it to being a moral an ethics a discipline whereas it is a setting out and it's a setting out on an adventure which makes gandalf's invitation i think to the hobbits look very tame indeed and all the way through the story you see how he takes us in different stages at the beginning basically he is a healer and he is an exorcist very standard things in first century palestinian judaism but these are just the initials he's preparing himself for the great combat against evil in which his life will culminate and so we see as he sets out to jerusalem that uh we have to travel with him forgiveness i love the fact that forgiveness is not just letting go of the past and wounds it's actually embarking on an adventure it's refusing to let yourself be cramped by caught by what has happened in the past it's refusing to be caught trapped in resentment i think back to that extraordinary scene on november the 15th when there was that terrorist attack in paris and the next day antoine levy i think he was called spoke about the death of his wife ellen and he said i will not be trapped in hatred i will not be trapped in fear who's going to go on living and there's you don't pull up as well as i do we live in a very scared society which is filled with health and safety regulations which is scared of adventure which always wants risk assessment every time we do anything and in such a society i think the adventure to which jesus summons us is frightening um but we must embark one of my favorite dominicans was a cave we lived next door to each other for almost 20 years and herbert loved to say if you love you will get hurt you may even get killed if you don't love you're dead already so let us embark on the adventure which is that of forgiveness and ultimately of getting hurt being vulnerable and of sharing the victory over all that may mortify us all that might make us into zombies and i loved the whole book actually i kind of i was absolutely gripped by it but there was a chapter that really snagged my attention and i kept on coming back to it time and time again because it snagged my attention so much and it was the chapter on growing up there was something that resonated very profoundly with me that idea of the importance in the life of discipleship of growing up and becoming mature um i'm wondering if you would just like to talk to us a little bit about why for you growing up is significant because it did feel like it was an important moment in the book i mean what happens if we don't i think growing up is is so important because we live in a crisis our society is going through a crisis of childhood i think the sex abuse crisis is symptomatic of a society in which children often don't get their childhood and grown-ups don't often grow up either children get secular sex sexualized and grown-ups get infantilized and so the adventure of growing up is a fundamental one i think for our society and for our church given the history of abuse how can we dare to talk about it i hope that because we fail so badly we can learn to do this well and i think one of the first things about being a child is that they have to have time they have to have time to grow up they have to have time to make mistakes so i took the parable of the prodigal son because here you get a kid it could have been a song who just has uh he tries to grab adulthood prematurely and of course in the early church one of the models of the fall was not some terrible terrible failing a drastic sin for irenaeus for example second century theologian it was a premature grab at adartle christ comes to give us our children our childhood again that we may grow up into being joyful spontaneous childlike adults one of the ways that we do this is getting outside the self because i mean i've never had any children probably just as well for them but i think so often in childhood we can be caught in the eye i remember as a child stalking i was caught in my selfish stock i was the center of the world the eldest son the end of the parable he's a child trapped sulking on the edge of the party how do we release people from this narcissism and in a society which is often fascinated by the idea i phoned the ipad you know the ipod i i i so learning to let go of the center i always love that line bet midler from the beaches when she says that's enough about me let's talk about you what do you think about me [Laughter] the elder son in the end is invited to to give himself to the music to give himself to the dance to surrender i came across a song the other day surrendered to the boojie by the mojo machine and that letting go is the liberation that we need and if you do that you might become like the parent because the parent is the childlike adult he has the spontaneity and the joy for which uh we all long i first met it i think in my great uncle dick who i've often talked about who's a benedictine monk uh dom john lane fox and he was the most joyful person i think that i've ever met and he he was a chaplain in the first world war terribly wounded he lost an eye and some of his fingers but the sorrow the pain of the first world war tenderized him it gave him a large heart so that he was able to rejoice and be filled with joy almost like a child-like way he would never get to bed at night even when he was in his 90s my mother would have to lure him upstairs by leaving glasses of whiskey on the on the staircase so i think that growing up is a a task that awaits us always certainly awakes me yeah very aware that i i haven't made it yet fully and i love that line in the prodigal so one of my favorite moments is you know when the um the sun is in the pigsty in the far off land um and he comes to himself and when he comes to himself he suddenly realizes his relationship and so the thing that he remembers is his relationship with his father and i think that's the moment where he as you say grows up because in coming to himself he realizes that in looking at the eye he's forgotten his network of relationships and what that gives to him exactly and he sees his father a new way yes you think at the beginning of the of the parable the father is the problem the father stands in his way stands in his way of pleasure and wealth but when he comes to himself he says that his father cares for all his servants he sees his father differently he doesn't see his father as a rival and i think that that growing up is largely about learning to see other people in ways that are not rivalrous they don't compete for oxygen in fact they give us oxygen that we may live and they help us to understand the trinity which is of course the ultimately non-rivalrous love um one of the things that is also absolutely fascinating about this is is of course you are a dominican and the dominican order is about teaching and particularly teaching dogma um how do you think dogma relates to imagination it's in on one if you'd asked me in advance i'd have said well they don't really go together but as i was reading the book i began to see how they do go together and i was wondering how you if you'd like to talk about that for a little bit well i'm extraordinarily grateful that you say that paula you know you right away and you wonder whether it makes sense to anybody the initial conviction of course is that jesus was a teacher his final act in the face of death in john's gospel is to teach faced with death he teaches you i think it's an odd way to confront one's own mortality and right at the end of matthew's gospel he commissions them to go away and teach so christianity is a doctrinal religion it gives us teachings dogma as you say and the temptation of our society is to think that doctrine is doctrinaire and the dogma is dogmatic which of course i believe them to be quite the opposite i think good dogma opens the imagination it says don't go down this road it doesn't go anywhere that's not a fruitful way to explore things but in the end it's always inviting you in the adventure of thinking and entering the mind of the lord the spaciousness of orthodoxy orthodoxy is broad heresy narrow it's it's uh idiotic in the literal sense of the world can narrowing us thought is only of our own understanding if you look at something like the the doctrine of of jesus christ he is truly human and truly divine the great temptation is to think that he's truly human just human a really nice guy you know a model for us all pleasant ethic but that's to diminish our belief drastically as it would be to say that he is just god somehow some sort of puppet figure adopting a adopting a humanity that is not really his own but the great doctrine he is truly human and truly divine is an invitation to go on struggling to understand to glimpse a truth that we never ever fully capture perhaps we only best express it when we get most poetic straining at the edge of language think of the trinity it's not basically about numbers you know like counting the number of angels on a pinhead in that mythical story the doctrine of the trinity takes you into the the mystery of a love which is both mutual and out turned which is the father and the son but it overflows to all of us and that's a truth which we can only explore i think in the end artistically that wonderful book by sarah coakley which i so love i think it's called god sex and doctrine something like that and sarah shows uh how when you really are trying to enter that mystery you're resorting to what languages like the triple has in panama cathedral dancing around each other or master eckhart the uh the early dominican mystic who uses lovely images of horses galloping in fields or the doctrine of the real presence which is of jesus in the eucharist which is important to so many christians how you can get it wrong but perhaps when you want to get it right he shares his best in his poetry so i think all dogma enlivens the imagination and it leads us to poetry to art to music to painting to films we're reaching the end of our conversation um for today but i just want to ask you one third question you wrote the book um before we entered um this time of coronavirus and lockdown and all the stresses and strains that have emerged from this time um is there anything in what you wrote that you would want to say particularly to those of us who are struggling at the moment with all the stresses and strains that come from the coronavirus and how we face it that's a fascinating question paul i i would say two things very briefly i should have been miles away if it had not been the coronavirus i had a really exciting travel programme of lectures going all over the world not very good for the environment i must admit i've learned that and what this virus has shown is that we are not as much in control as we thought central to humanity's self-image in recent centuries has been what we call the culture of control and charles taylor shows how this is developed in the 16th 17th century centralization of the state the idea that we can manage manipulate administer everything it's there for our use but the granovirus has shown how hollow that claim is we're not in control of everything we've been rendered a bit impotent by a tiny bit of jelly and maybe that can be a liberation if it helps us to become aware of the way that god's providence is secretly discreetly working in our lives not as if god was controlling everything but god is there quietly his benevolence is working away bringing us to himself into freedom into happiness and finally a lot of us have had to practice self-isolation we've been locked in our rooms i'm lucky i i live in a community but for many people it's been a time of isolation and that makes me think of some catherine of siena who in i think it was 1347 went into three years of of auto isolation and she wanted to discover god actually she discovered herself she entered what catherine called the self of self and in that self knowledge is it brings you face to face with yourself and when you see yourself may you discover that it is a self that is loved the masks go but you find that you're not alone and maybe you become more able to live with other people you can build stronger communities you can live with them because you can live with yourself so our final image i would offer is all those italians on the balcony they're on their balconies they're clapping and they're singing and it's the paradox of the pandemic because each of them is in their own apartment they're alone or with their immediate family but they're also a new sort of community because they're there together in song and so perhaps what this pandemic has taught us can teach us will teach us perhaps it's both how to be alone and how to be together and perhaps also how to be alive in god um timothy thank you so much for your conversation um it's been a real pleasure and i'm sure everyone has enjoyed it as much as i have thank you thank you very much paula

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Length: 39min 59sec (2399 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020