Hay Fest: Karen Armstrong – Faith at Work
Interestingly, in 13 sessions at Hay, I have seen only one female speaker (excluding two women in the Saturday night Guardian Debate: Is Reason Always Right, in which all six panellists managed to both agree and disagree with not only one another but also the motion, to varying degrees, regardless of whether they were in attack or defence of it), and that was religious historian Karen Armstrong, asking Does God Have a Future?
About half way through her hour, I still didn’t have a clue whether God had a future or in fact how she was addressing the topic at hand; early on, her talk largely consisted of entertaining but inherently fictitious anecdotes about conversations between God and his apostles. She started though by noting that we often first encounter God along with Santa Claus – hardly an auspicious point of introduction for a child, and Santa Claus has the benefit of being much more easily understood. Discussing God, she continued, involved talking about a different level of reality to the one we see and routinely exist in – and not for instance an alternate, unseen but detectable reality such as the atomic world, but the Ultimate Reality. By this time, I was feeling my atheism to be increasingly confirmed, not challenged.
And then with Santa Claus, Ultimate Reality, apostles and fictitious conversations with God aside, things started to get interesting. Karen began to explain Brahmanism, the Indian search for the connection with God in the self, or more specifically, in silence. Brahmanism priests apparently had a little competition where they would take themselves to a trance state – a receptive state far beyond what we operate on in everyday life – to connect to Brahma. They then collected together to explain their experience of God to one another, and they would argue amongst themselves. The “winner” was the priest whose explanation reduced the others – or rather produced within the others – silence. Brahma, they believe, is in the silence. The silence of the soul when the self and ego are superseded, the silence in the audience the moment before applause – any silence in which an experience is felt truly, not thought or spoken. That, Karen declared, is Theology “at its best” – to seek and live within that beat of silence, that connection to God.
This tale bought us to the crux of the session with a quote (I regret that I cannot recall which distinguished figure it came from) that goes along the lines of ‘I believe in order that I might understand.” At first, Karen misunderstood this (as did I) to mean that one chooses to believe, and from the simple act of belief, understanding will come. Now though she understand the intention of the quotee’s “I believe” to be in the sense of “I engage/involve myself”, therefore the intended meaning becomes “I engage myself, in order that I might understand,” and therefore encompassing the inverse, wherein “if I do not engage myself, I cannot understand.” The difference is not subtle, it is as significant as that between mice and men. Religious truth, Karen proposes, is like driving a car. You cannot learn to drive a car from reading the manual and Highway Code. You learn only from the act of driving. Likewise, you cannot – as many do – decide from thought alone that you will believe, and expect understanding of the religious experience to spring from that decision. You must engage yourself with physical, mental and emotional acts of religion, in order to find or comprehend religious experience.
Perhaps this is all a statement of the obvious to you. Perhaps I am acutely daft in thinking of religion as an exercise in thought and “belief” wherein I choose “to believe” and so it shall be. So it shall not be, and perhaps this is why many people who commit only to part-time, cerebral religion eventually find it unfulfilling. The teachings of the Buddha are based around practical theology. The five pillars of Islam (prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, the giving of alms and to bear witness to God) are all actions that must be practiced by body, soul and mind. The 10 Commandments are actions, even though, as with so much of Christianity, they often work from negatives (thou shall not…). We must do and experience and commit in order to receive.
A cardinal at the time of Galileo apparently made the sly and wry observation that “scripture tells us how to go to Heaven, not how it is that Heaven goes.” The Bible, Karen believes, is only a commentary surrounding one golden truth – the practice of religious experience. It should not be read as a set of laws but introducing principles to be practiced. St Augustine said that anyone who argues about fine points of scripture has failed to understand their function at all. Fundamentalism, in other words, is for fools who have missed the point of God.
A member of the audience asked how one chooses – when Karen herself has referenced a myriad of religions upon whose prophets and tenements she draws her personal experience of God – which religion/version of God to begin engaging with, that they might seek understanding. She carefully circumvented the stickier particulars of the question by suggesting a place – not a religion – with which to start religious practice, and that place is compassion. She quoted Confucius’ golden rule, also a pillar of the Christian philosophy, wherein we must “do not unto others what we would not have them do to you.” We all know it; the question is, do we really practice it? Every minute of every day? This is how we engage – with our minds, souls and actions. Karen openly admits she fails in this every day, often several times a day, but this does not stop her looking upon herself, considering what harms her, and trying to outright refuse to inflict such acts upon anyone else. Ever. This, she concludes, is our endless challenge. Action follows belief, and from action follows, in time, understanding. This one simple commitment to action can become the centre of your religious experience.
So. Does God have a future, Karen finally asks. She has no idea. She does however believe that God will remain an abstract concept for as long as those who follow Him fail to work resolutely at their understanding of his nature. Talking and thinking alone are not enough.
The session rounded out with questions, and the corker opener came from a woman who said she was bloody terrified of Hell: does it exist, and if not, where did it come from? Karen just laughed and I loved her intelligence and humour in the face of such a passionate and key question. She confessed herself to be no expert in hell – yet. It is, she believes, as unskilled idea. A most terrible idea. Heaven is supposed to be the loss of ego, the place beyond the ego, not it’s eternal survival under optimum conditions. This rails strongly against the ego-ridden concept that those in Heaven should look down upon those in Hell. Hell is an idea generated by ego. But if there is a hell, she concedes, it may not be a place, but merely the self without God. To choose oneself might be to live with oneself alone for all eternity. But more importantly, she adheres to Jesus’ teachings that the Kingdom of God is here, now – it is for us not to rush towards it as a reward, but to find it along the way.
Karen concluded with a number of thoughts. The first is that to directly question God’s existence is to lose the symbolic point of his existence. That certainty is a self-defeating religious experience; silence, open-heartedness and a commitment not to a destination but the journey to God (The Way, in Chinese belief) is the road to transcendence. That along the way the achievements are small and come in silence, while the failures are many. And this is the way of things.
I am still an atheist, but should I ever set in search of a religious experience, I rather admire and would set forth on Karen Armstrong’s version of The Way.
‘To choose oneself might be to live with oneself alone through all eternity’ What a thought. better to be with someone we might not completely understand… than to be alone.
Lucid lines to leave me thinking. A
Simon Blackburn discusses the argument that religious experience can t be discussed. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process.