We receive all we venture to give

Dec 10, 2025 | Uncategorized

As most readers of this blog will know, my first degree was Divinity. I began the degree in October 1977 with the intention of taking the cloth but there’s nothing like  a rigorous theological education to make you question your faith – that, indeed, is the point of it. I completed the degree from an academic rather than vocational standpoint and enjoyed it. For a long while I described myself as an atheist; I no longer do. It isn’t that I profess any particular belief, just that I distrust dogmatic unbelief as much as I do dogmatic belief. It’s why I don’t have much time for prominent humanists qua humanists: they’re too dogmatic.

Despite my loss of faith, or maybe precisely because of it, my interest in religion and spirituality remains just as strong as it ever was: one of my favourite novels, and one that I reread often, is Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha which, if not explicitly tied to a particular world religion (in fact the protagonist rejects the Buddha’s teaching and goes off in search on Enlightenment in his own way) ties into deep themes of Being and Self. Whenever I meet my friend Neil, now retired from parish ministry, we always end up talking about theological themes and topics that usually revolve around the New Testament and what one might call Christian origins and the process of transition from Jewish cult to Roman establishment as well as side ventures into Gnostic thought and the many varieties of Christian faith before canonicity became a thing.

And lurking beneath all that is something else: I was brought up at the bells and smells end of Anglicanism and, like learning to swim or riding a bicycle, it never really leaves you. To this day an old church saturated with living memories of incense and choral music reaches parts of me that even Carlsberg cannot reach.

I mention all of this because I have been dipping into the thought of Owen Barfield. Amongst other things in his long life, Barfield was an Inkling, friend of and fellow pipe smoker with Tolkien and CS Lewis, and influential on both them in both their belief and aspects of their literary output. Barfield took the position that Christianity was a/the true myth, a/the master myth that unlocks all the others (I paraphrase wildly for the sake of a blog post of course). I don’t agree with that; I think that is a form of motivated reasoning from a pre-existent position of Faith rather than profundity, but it did get me musing on aspects of my own belief and lack of it.

To be fair, this is something that I often think about and it undoubtedly feeds through into my fiction, but I generally end up with fairly vague outlines of things that I probably think rather than reaching any conclusions. This time, however, what struck me was that there are aspects of High Anglican ritual that I find deeply attractive even though I do not share the framework of belief that houses it. This  relates as much to sung Evensong as to the Eucharist. My sticking point is what the jargon calls Christology: as a minimum, to call oneself a Christian means believing that there was something of universal significance about the man Jesus; I do not believe that. But the act of participating in ritual, in the encounter with the numinous, however you wish to define that, and the sharing of it with other people in a ritual context remains appealing: Reducing some experiences to mere words always involves a degree of loss, but I think we are creatures of symbol, myth and ritual and it is something we should embrace.

Common to all major belief systems whether one of the ‘big’ religions or whether something more diffuse and demotic such as the many strands of paganism are three things,

• • reflection
  • behaviour
  • ritual

I spend a lot of time in reflection and I do my best with ethical behaviour: ritual is the thing that is missing, by which I mean interaction with and participation in Myth. So something I want to focus on now is teasing out aspects of my relationship with the numinous (for want of a better word) and finding appropriate symbols and then working something out for myself. It would be grand to find other like minded people and meet in the sanctuary of a good pub (which means real ale, good whisky, and no TV) or to share a dram or two by an open fire.