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The topic this evening has been designated as liberating the self. It is an inter faith evening to discuss and explore the religious view on fasting and spirituality. The month ofRamadhan in which the Muslims observe a fast from dawn to dusk provides an admirableopportunity to cleanse both the body and the soul – the detachment of the body from earthly desires makes it easier for contemplation, soul searching and provides a truly spiritual experience. How can faith attract those seeking.
There was an interesting debate started in California where technology comes in and even some weird religions. The whole concept of spirituality was discussed. Can one have spirituality without God. Can one have spirituality without actually the creator being there. It is an interesting debate and I am of the view that is a flawed discussion because if one observes and sees plants and the creation itself one can find spirituality. But really the anchor and the embodiment of spirituality is really the creator. Without the creator being in that equation one cannot really take the journey of spirituality.
The whole debate moves into whether religion is important or not in people’s lives. I am sure both of the speakers will address these matters in their presentations. Before I begin the programme I will tell a joke. There were two gentlemen. One was called David and the other one was Michael. They were in the desert and they saw a mosque in the distance. David and Michael said we are hungry and they will probably be hospitable to us. It is the month ofRamadhan and I am sure they will have good food. David said: “I will change my name to Ahmed.” But Michael said he was not going to change his name. They go to the mosque and knock on the door and the imam comes out. He says: “Come in, you are welcome.” The imam asks about their names. One says: “ I am Michael,” and the other says: “ I am Ahmed.” The Imam says to the people in the mosque: “ Take Michael, give him food, look after him. Ahmed will wait until iftar for food.
Rev. Jon Sermon: Thank you for the invitation to come and speak. I will not be concentrating just on fasting. That is a small part. What Fatima was asking me to concentrate on was the Christian perspective on faith, spirituality and the salvation of the soul. That is what I will try to do. It is a great pleasure to come and share with you.
I am glad you told a joke because I was wondering whether my humour would be inappropriate. My joke has pictures to go with it. It concerns a white Western woman travelling in Saudi Arabia in her Volkswagen camper van. Unfortunately she misjudged the amount of petrol needed to cross the desert and reach the next city. About half a mile short the van stopped completely out of petrol and she realised she would have to walk to the city, buy some petrol and walk back. No problem except she had no jerry can for carrying petrol. And as she thought about it she realised there was a contained she could use. It was a potty. So she carried this to the city, had some petrol poured into it and started pouring it carefully into the vehicle fuel tank. Just at that moment a large limousine pulled up. The man in the back, an Arab, a Muslim rolled down his window and he looked at this women. He made the assumption that as a white Westerner and a Christian. He said to her: “I made not agree with you theology and your doctrine of the trinity but I really admire your faith.”
There is a reason for this joke. I think there are common misconceptions including the one made by the gentleman in the story. A white Westerner equals a Christian. But that is not necessarily true. In the same well, certainly in British culture, the word is sometimes used to mean that a good person equals a Christian. That is not necessarily true either.
These assumptions stem from history and historically Britain has been thought of as a Christian country. Maybe there was truth in that at one time. Now we are undoubtedly a multicultural country and therefore a country that embraces many different religions. We are also a country that has become very materialistic. Many of the indigenous white British population who might be labelled as Christian by outsiders may be people of no faith, no belief, no spirituality and no spirituality. And they may be people whose God is literally their possessions.
That may be a controversial thing to say. In the old testament scriptures there was false religion and worship of false gods and they would tend to be statutes that people would bow down to. And in a more sophisticated age we would like to think we are in that is not how it works. A belief that our significance comes from our possessions is so deep in western culture that we run the risk of being completely separated out from what Christianity is and therefore neither does an ethnic origin imply that someone is a Christian nor does the fact that someone may be a good person imply that they are a Christian. Christianity is actually an optin. That is important.
I wanted to come to a brief extract in the New Testament scriptures in which Paul is writing to the church in Corinthia. This is Saint Paul the apostle, the great missionary of the early church whose history that as a very religious Jew he did not believe that Jesus was the messiah. He thought that the Christians should be persecuted and he took a lead in doing so.
His encounter with the risen Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus changed him from the chief enemy of the church to the chief spokesman for the church. And he writes tothe Christians in Corint a place he had visited as a missionary and he founded the church there. He writes about Jesus Christ and his crucifixion in these terms:
The message of the cross is foolishness to these who are perishing. But to those who are being saved it is the power of God and the wisdom of God. He talks about God’s foolishness being wiser than human wisdom and he centres on the cross. I know that this might be a little controversial for some.
I want to step back into the life Jesus and the attitude of Jesus to sum up what is really particular about the Christian approach to spirituality. We can put it into one word and the word is aba. That is not a Scandinavian pop group. The spelling is . It is one of the few Aramaic words that was not translated when the writers wrote down what became the gospels in the new testament. And perhaps it is because it is a difficult word to translate which has such a deep meaning.
In the Lord’s prayer when Christians pray “our father who is in heaven” we translate the word as father. Father is perhaps a slightly formal word because aba is the word that a child would use on their father’s lap. So maybe daddy would be more appropriate.
What Jesus is saying and bringing uniquely to spirituality I believe as a Christian is that sense of knowing god in the daddy intimacy. All world religions – no, not all world religions – some do not believe that there is a god at all – all the monotheistic religions, theAbrahamic faith that Muslims, Christians and Jews share – see god as awesome, powerful, the creator but through Jesus we can know god through the intimacy of a daddy relationship. That is a distinctive thing that he brought about.
In the prayer Our father it is not just my father that Jesus praised but he is our father and that implies an offer of including everyone. We have a relationship with God our creator and also a relationship with each other that grows as a result.
This stems from what Christians really understand about Jesus himself who he really was and is. I know that in the Quran his name is Issa and he is recognised as a significant prophet. I think I am right in saying that he is the only prophet to whom performing miracles is attributed in the Quran.
For Christians our understanding, our belief, our spirituality is that he is not only someone who is a significant prophet telling us about god but someone who is god. God literally came in the form of a human in Jesus. His life, his death, his resurrection and ascension make a difference.
Some see the message of the cross, St Paul tells us, as foolishness. But to those who are being saved it is the power of god and the wisdom of god. In this letter he wrote about his time at Corinth. “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ andhimcrucified.”
So at the heart of the Christian faith is the cross. Foolishness, a stumbling bloc, even offensive. That is not surprising because the people of the time would have believed that a prophet being killed would have been a failure and therefore the whole message of Jesus willingly giving his life to make a difference was, and for some still is, offensive. It can be a stumbling bloc and it can seem foolish but it is at the heart of the Christian understanding of spirituality and indeed of the salvation of the soul.
This is a picture of a room in one of my churches. I am not much of an artist but this is the only significant painting that I have done since A level art. It is a whole wall of the room and it is a picture in which the cross is significant. But it is a cross without a body on it. And on the far side is an empty tomb with the stone rolled away. This is meant to be sunrise. It is a little after sunrise and the light from the sunrise is illuminating the empty tomb. And I painted this inviting anyone who chooses to come in simply to be listened to. And this something that I do in that venue every Monday for two hours and it is publicised in the community.
And in that picture I am trying to capture the most significant elements of Christian belief: that God himself chose to die on that cross for us. To explain this I think I want to take you through some of the common assumptions among many people in this country about how things work.
The scales picture is the the scales of justice. Or it could be a trader in gold where the weights are on one and gold jewellery is on the other and we try and see if they match. Many people seem to think that God’s judgement works like this. On one side of the scales are all the good things we do in life and on the other side are the bad things and they weigh to see which is heavier. The hope is that the goodness in us outweighs the badness in us and we are alright.
That is a concept that is very different from what the bible tells us and very different to the Christian view of the soul which is something that I want to illustrate throughsomething which I call the goodness chart. This is to help us to understand why it was necessary for Jesus to die on the cross. On the goodness chart zero is the worse possible and one is the best possible and everything else is somewhere in between. So I wanted to ask you to give some suggestions. Who might be right near the scale near the top? The prophets, certainly not Mr Blair, saints. Let us go to the bottom of the goodness chart. Who might be there? Blair. The Arab people would say their rulers.
I have people like Hitler, mass murderers and child molesters. And I expect that most of us would agree that those are the sort of people who would be near the bottom. Mother Teresa could be near the top. She is in the process of being officially recognised as a saint. Most of us would be somewhere in the middle. Actually in reality it is like that. We are neither as good as the very best people and not as bad as the very worst. What about the hypocrites? They may be lower than those who are not hypocrites.
And where would god’s standard be on the goodness chart? Would it be more than 50 percent like in some exams. Would it be a bit better than lower down? Would it be near the top? Would it even be the sky? This is the way the bible put it. St Paul says that all havesinned and fall short of the glory of god. Even those near the top of the goodness chart do notmatchup to god’s standard. The bible uses the word sin to mean anything that is selfcentered, selfish and even behaving as though we know better than god and that is right back to the garden of Eden. And so we can’t earn the right to salvation through the goodness chart. That is the Christian understanding.
So there is good news and bad news. You know how these jokes work. You have good news and bad news. One day I came home from work having had a really tough day. And my wife said to me there is good news and bad news which would you like to hear first. And I said: “Darling I have had such a terrible day at work I have got to have the good news first.” She said: “The good news is that the airbag in your new car works.” How did she findout. I have to tell you that is a joke. It didn’t happen.
But the sense of how we can’t earn the right to salvation by our good works, by trying to reach the top of the goodness chart. Paul is saying to the Romans that all have sinned and fall short of god’s glory. But there is good news to set against it. That good news is what we were saying and what Paul was writing about regarding the cross. Later in that letter he says:”When I came to you I resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
In the whole second letter to the Cornithinas in chapter five he writes: “We are convinced that one died for all and therefore all died in a sense. We share in the death of Christ if we are his followers. He died for all and those who live could not longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
He goes on to explain what the death of Christ meant. He says that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. The old has gone and the new has come. All this is from god who reconciled us to himself in Christ. Not counting mens’ sins against them. And he committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though god were making his appeal through us.
And he said god made him, Jesus who had no sin, to be sent for us so that we might become the righteousness of god. Christian spirituality starts with the understanding that we cannot earn righteousness in god’s sight by our own efforts but that simply be accepting the grace of god through Jesus Christ we can receive it.
I will use my bible to represent a heavy weight. We do not have to think of heaven as spatially up but it might help. If you imagine that my hand is us humans trying to reach up to god. But there is a heavy weight weighing us down and that is what the bible calls sin. If my other hand represents Jesus what Jesus is effectively saying thogujh what he did I who had no sin and lived a perfect live am prepared to take that sin onto me. So we transfer the heavyweight from us to Jesus. And his words on the cross included that cry: “My god why have you forsaken me?” With the physical torment he went through we can understand why he felt like that. But where does that leave us? Completely free. And Christian spirituality is that we can get to know god personally in that aba, daddy relationship because Jesus took our sins.
It doesn’t become appropriate in any way to be triumphantilistic about this or to devalue or forget all that is good in other world religions. But that is the one thing that is specific and unique to Christianity. I wrote a little booklet a while ago: Christianity what is it about? It was specifically for Good Friday, the day that Jesus was crucified.
I would like to finish with a song on my machine. It is modern hymn called the power of the cross. I have images to go with it so I would like to listen and watch.
Imranali Panjwani: The purpose of Ramadhan: The need to locate and define spirituality and the concept of the self: In the name of God the beneficent, the merciful,salam aleikum, peace be upon you. Thank you very much for this kind invitation. May I begin by paying my respects to the wife of the Prophet (pbuh). Today we commemorate her.
The scope of my presentation in line with the title liberating the self is divided into three parts. I am not as funny as Jon, my family will tell you that. When I attempt to make a joke it fails.
Before we even discuss spirituality I think is important to understand the time and the context we live in and a term which comes to mind is secularism and I want to define that very specifically. The second part will be on what do we mean by this term spirituality andthe concept of the nafs or the soul or the self and finally what techniques can we use whether as Christians, Muslims or Jews – any human being to actually increase our spirituality. This term spirituality is often used in this month and but rarely is it defined and rarely is it defined in the very context that we live in. So perhaps we can think about the kind of life we are living in the 21st century.
A Canadian philosopher who I believe is a Christian by the names of Charles Taylor has written two very good books: Sources of the Self and A secular age which I recommend to your. He makes a very interesting hypothesis about this term securalisation. It is important before I go on to define what I mean by this term.
In the late 13th century: Saecularis (latin) was first used in English as ‘secular’ to denote clergy living and working in medieval world as opposed to being in monastic seclusion (William of Ockham and John Wycliffe strengthened the word by distinguishing those institutions that were concerned with civil affairs and those that were strictly religious)
The in the 16th century you have a shift: Secularise ( from the French: seculariser) meant making someone or something secular, from ecclesial to civil possession or use. You can have an institution or be part of something that is not just connected to the church. So you therefore have a transition from something which is purely holy to something which goes into the world and society. There is nothing controversial about this. We have always made these distinctions and we always will. But where the bit comes is during the enlightenment period and especially fast forwarding to the 19th century where you have this notion of secularism which is where you have the separation between the church or a religious institution and the state. And more specifically George Holyoak said that society and the world should be devoid of God. And that was when ‘ism’ came in. When you use ism it means you have an ideology and a movement.
It is okay to say there is some kind of separation between a religious institution and a government for various reasons. That is not so controversial. But when you start to say a society and the world is devoid God purposefully you are advocating a specific type of movement.
In the 20th century you have Charles Taylor and he comes along and says: “Secularity in this sense is a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual or religious experience and search takes place.”
He says we live in a world which is disenchanted from the cosmos. We used to believe that there was such a thing God, such a thing as power, such a thing as transcendence, such a thing as something beyond me. This is not disenchanted. We now live in a world which moves from the so called enchanted view in which we want to believe things to a view which is very sullen, very disenchanted from anything that is beyond us.
I am going to wake up and go to the Olympics. I am going to wake up today and I am going to watch east enders. I am going to go and get my food. That is what he means. That sense of a reality which his so earthly, that is not connected to anything else.
The second meaning in secularity or a secular age is that there is a decline in religious commitment. It does not matter of what faith you are: Jew, Muslim or Christian. There is a decline in personal religious commitment and a withdrawal from your community. How many people go to the mosque on Friday? How many people go to a church or a synagogue? How many people find what they listen to in a church or a mosque or a synagogue meaningful? Have we carried out a survey on that? When people come out of religious institution they often say they spoke about spirituality but how do I become spiritual? How does it connect to my daily life. I am going to university. There is peer pressure. I am doing a degree in this and that and there are high fees today. How is the mosque going to help me feed my family? Or the church or the synagogue?
These are questions which the great prophets answered. Prophet Mohammed (pbuh) said I came to perfect people’s morals. There is a hadith or a narration which says that the one who gets his fill of food while his neighbour is hungry by his side is not considered as a believer. I grew up thinking that not praying salah made me not a believer but that makes sense to me. There is something at the core or religion which is very universal.
The third thing which Charles Taylor says which is very scary is that the whole socialorder has changed. You could say that at one point the Arab nations were Muslim countries just as you could say that at one point Britain was a Christian country. Can you say that now – possibly not because of the way rulers run their countries. You could say that about many countries. He says that faith is an option amongst many. It is not about faith anymore. It is not about Christian and Muslim dialogue. It is not about that. It is about personal choice. I makea personal choice today to live my life playing golf and eating that food and this food and leading a happy life. That is my personal choice. Am I a faithful person? Yes I am faithful in honouring my contracts and my relationships.
Has it got anything to do with religion, spirituality, self? Not really. The whole nature of the social order has changed and when we say we live in the 21st century a lot of people say that the 21st century is characterised by the following. This is a quote from Bauman. He is a very famous scholar in post modernism. He said: Human beings are vagabonds. A ‘the vagabond does not know how long he will stay where is now, more often than not it will not be for him to decide when the stay will come to an end…What keeps him on the move is a disillusionment with the last place of sojourn and the forever smouldering hope that the next place he has not visited yet, perhaps the place after next, may be free from the
