Seeing the Good in Unfamiliar Spiritualities

By Gethin Abraham-Williams

‘Eastern spirituality, paganism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, alternative science and medicine, popular psychology’ and ‘a range of beliefs emanating out of a general interest in the paranormal’ are the marks of today’s ‘new spiritual awakening’. Add the presence and practice of sizeable numbers of people pursuing some of the other Great Religions of the World, not the other side of the world but on our own doorstep, coupled with a scientific revolution quietly broadening our perspectives, and it is not surprising if many feel disoriented and confused. It is, however, not the first time we have had to face the prospect of a spiritual re-alignment on such a seismic scale. Something similar was going on in the time of the prophet Ezekiel, who had the insight and the courage to reshape his people’s beliefs in a way that not only served their needs at the time, but bequeathed a challenge to the world ever since. This book is addressed to those who feel themselves to be similarly stranded between two worlds: the familiar, but seemingly untenable one they grew up with, and the unfamiliar, but possibly more responsible one, where they can rediscover God as both credible and attractive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Oct 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781780991481

Gethin Abraham-Williams

GETHIN ABRAHAM-WILLIAMS, an Oxford University Theology graduate, is a Baptist minister, a University tutor in the Bible in the Contemporary World and member of various ecumenical and inter-faith groups.

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Hauerwas

Between water and water

1. Making for the Middle Ground

To be, or not to be, that is the question

Shakespeare: Hamlet (III, i, 55)

It is Sunday morning, and the sheltered, sheltering town between the Ystwyth and the Rheidol rivers is not yet wide awake. Students of law, agriculture and international politics turn over in their university sleep, and holidaymakers search the uncertain horizon for signs of the sun. In the bay, deep below the waves, only the dolphins enquiringly hear the muffled peal of a lost Atlantis, Cantre’r Gwaelod. Beyond the pebbly beach and the concrete breakers, the crumbling cliffs and the prim promenade, other bells soon rouse some to pray, and some to sing, and some to test another sermon. Not as many as once. Not anymore. But not so few either.

And in the town’s church-peppered, chapel-salted streets, many will still turn out and turn up to celebrate the certainties of faith; or to face, or face down, its uncertainties. Some to find their doubts anaesthetized by notes from organ and choir and time-worn liturgies; others to take their battered heads and bruised souls back into the ring for more bouts with words, ancient and modern, enunciated and garbled, from pulpit, altar and lectern, only to limp out an hour later defeated, but unwilling to retire. Cultural believers, harboring a hole where their predecessors caressed a Christ; envious of anyone who could begin a Christmas poem,

And is it true? And is it true,

this most tremendous tale of all?

but more, to end it with the certainty,

That God was Man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

Springtime Hill

But our story starts further back, much further back, and farther away, in a place that is also between two rivers, the Jordan and the Tigris. The Jordan watered the land that the Hebrews inhabited, and the Tigris spawned the mighty Mesopotamian Empire of Babylon that held sway over most of that part of the world in the sixth century BCE.

In the year 597, those two rivers were destined to become symbols for a development of ideas with far reaching consequences for the world ever since. In that year, a large contingent of Hebrews was forcibly removed from the banks of the Jordan to be resettled by their Babylonian conquerors on the banks of the Tigris, at Tel-abib, Springtime Hill, and the Keber canal. It was an exile that traumatized the Hebrews, but that also gave birth to some of the most original spiritual thinkers to have come from that part of the world. Among them, Ezekiel: an odd genius.

Babylon, the center of the Chaldean hegemony, has come down to us in the Biblical record as the epitome of a debauched and cruel place, carried over into Christian writings as a code name for an equally oppressive, successive world power: Rome. But Babylon must have been an eye-opener for the God-fearing exiles from provincial Jerusalem.

The city itself was utterly magnificent. Here was wealth beyond their imagining and architecture on a grand scale. Here they would be made to question whether the Mosaic Decalogue itself may have been a derivative of the legal code of Babylon’s first king, Hammurabi. Here were philosophers and artists, thinkers and craftsmen, performers and entertainers in abundance. The place was spectacularly cosmopolitan, teeming with life and color.

This hub of the then-known world bombarded their restricted experience with ideas and images that were as exciting as they were disturbing. The scale and the sophistication of it intrigued as much as it unsettled them. Medicine, chemistry and alchemy rubbed shoulders with botany, zoology and astronomy in its souks; the Babylonian numbering system was more advanced than anything in the then-known world. What were the ideas that sustained this people and had allowed them to attain such a dominant position among the nations?

It was in this maelstrom of meanings that the exiled priest, Ezekiel, molded his thinking and started entertaining God-thoughts that seemed frighteningly novel, but that would eventually become the core of a renewed spirituality. He, of course, was not to know that, when the awesome power of the Chaldean Army broke through his settled world, its swords flaying, its arrows flying, its cavalry terrifying, to march him and many of his compatriots six hundred miles eastwards, away from Jerusalem, away from the Jordan, across the desert wastes; the distance, conceptually as well as geographically, unbearable.

Humiliated and mocked, paraded as the human spoil of conquest, they were led behind their vanquished king through the streets of Babylon, to be gawped at and gloried over by a populace hungry for the spectacle of triumph.

The young king of Judah, Jehoiachin, had barely three months to settle into the role after the sudden death of his father. But the old king had backed the wrong horse. The alliance with Egypt had come to nothing, and Nebuchadnezzar had decided to swat the fly that was Judah. He left enough of the old guard behind to maintain the basic functions of the country, but from then on it was to be no more than a Babylonian province.

For Ezekiel and some of his fellow priests, life on Babylon’s Springtime Hill may have been relatively easy. They were among the more fortunate ones, part of the elite of Hebrew society expected to keep company with their deposed King and his court. The rest, the hewers of wood and the fetchers of water, were put to work maintaining the enemy’s economy, many of them slaving away to complete the Keber canal, one of King Nebuchadnezzar’s key domestic projects. Others were in fear that their sons might fall for foreign women, their daughters be coveted and courted by foreign men.

They were, nevertheless, allowed their day of rest to say their prayers, sing their psalms, make their sacrifices, maintain their customs, but all the time this hankering after Jerusalem, Zion, the seat of the Most High, the guardian of Israel. Only this time he hadn’t protected them; and they couldn’t understand why.

What were the legendary Hanging Gardens compared with the wild and wonderful hills of Judah, the lemons and oranges of its citrus groves? Was not Jordan the entrance to their promised land? What was Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘ziggurat’, his stepped tower, his Babel, but a plinth for the idol, Marduk, compared with the Holy of Holies of their Jewish God in the temple Solomon had built? Were not the gates of Jerusalem, through which King David had danced when he brought home the Ark of the Covenant, more precious to God than those that guarded the entrance to this strange and alien place, with its foreign ways and its difficult, guttural tongue?

Over the years, the images and impressions multiplied and proliferated, never getting any easier to assimilate, absorb, process and categorize, until the day Ezekiel crossed an invisible line in his thinking and his praying, and began to feel his way to the uncertain possibility of a new theology, of a new understanding of the Numinous One they’d known and worshipped in the temple back in Jerusalem.

Putting aside the undeniable oddity of some of Ezekiel behavior, the account of his life and his utterances reveal a substantial figure with the moral courage and the inner compunction to grapple with ideas of God and of human existence in a highly creative way, His legacy contributed to the survival of his people by enabling them to redefine their beliefs in a way that restored their theological self-confidence. It also provided a model for successive generations in widely disparate cultures to cope with change by redefining the nature of the relationship between humankind and God.

A Religious Past

In some respects, Ezekiel bears an uncanny similarity to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, described by one scholar of the Bard as, ‘Poised between a religious past and a secular future’. In Ezekiel’s case, however, it seemed as if the religious past was all there was; a past centered almost solely on the Temple in Jerusalem: that special place between earth and heaven where the Hebrews had done business with their particular God, to become his particular people.

Ezekiel had been born and bred in Jerusalem. Buzi, his father, was a respected Temple priest; the family traced their lineage back to the High Priest, Zadok, when David was king. In such a theocracy, the priesthood is always supreme: the spiritual custodians and conscience of the nation as well as the final arbiters of the divine commandments. That was Ezekiel’s background; that was his destiny.

Watching his father offering the sacrifices, tending the lamps, chanting the psalms, wafting the incense, reading from the scrolls, Ezekiel had imbibed the faith as earnestly as he’d once sucked his mother’s milk. Sometimes he’d seen the lonely figure of old Jeremiah striding through the temple’s outer courtyard, and listened to his dreary lamentations and gloomy predictions. But it hadn’t challenged him.

Buzi had told the boy not to worry about Jeremiah. What mattered was the Temple and its rituals. That was where he, and indeed all of them, would find the throne of God: mysterious, elusive but always faithful, behind the great curtain in the inner court.

‘Have you ever seen God?’ the bright eyed, intelligent, wildly imaginative child had remembered once asking his father.

‘No, son,’ Buzi had answered. ‘Only the High Priest goes behind that curtain, and then only once a year at the time of the Great Festival of the Atonement.’

‘Did the High Priest tell you what God looked like?’ the boy had persisted.

‘Son, no one can see the Holy One, the I will be Who I will be. Even Moses, who gave us the law, who led us out of Egypt, only caught sight of God’s shadow. It is enough that we know God is among us.’

Ezekiel had believed his father, but he had also not disbelieved the unpopular prophet who’d haunted the Temple precinct telling them to mend their ways, warning that otherwise there would be an end to their rituals, a cessation to their unique existence. Jeremiah attested he’d been chosen by God before he’d been formed in the womb, consecrated before he’d been born. How could he be so sure, the growing boy pondered? How did he know?

On the banks of the Tigris one hot July day in 593 BCE, all that seemed a lifetime away to the man pacing restlessly in preparation for the delivery of the first of his messages from God. In his mid-thirties, married by now and most likely with children, we can imagine a figure of middling height, perhaps of spare build, taut, austere but impressive, with dark penetrating eyes that could twinkle when he smiled; his thick ebony hair neater than his demeanor suggested; his beard already flecked with stabs of grey.

A sensitive man, Ezekiel’s social interaction could, nevertheless, be quite acerbic, even off-putting, as he reacted sharply to a perceived or actual failure by those who should know better. It mattered more to their special and particular God, how they lived than whether they observed religious rites.

He was that strange anomaly: a Temple priest without a Temple; respected, but often misunderstood; his burden to be a prophet to a rootless, landless people. And always the question:

Will such a vine flourish?

Will not its roots be torn up

and its fruit stripped off,

and all of its freshly sprouted leaves wither,

until it is uprooted and carried away

with little effort and a small force?

How was his God, the eternal, faithful, particular God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, of Jacob and Rachel, to be worshipped among this abhorrent pantheon of gods and goddesses: Apsu and Tiamat, Lahmu and Lahamu, Anshar and Kishar? His people had lost their land. Had they also lost their God? The psalmist’s agonized prayer was his too:

My God, by day I cry to you, but there is no answer;

in the night I cry with no respite.

Could their God be found anywhere, or had they now to suffer that worse exile, of separation, not only from the soil that was forever associated with the God who had moved on the face of the waters and fashioned Adam from its precious clay, but also from the wellspring of their identity

Reviews for Seeing the Good in Unfamiliar Spiritualities

[dubiousdisciple · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If Gethin is not a poet, then certainly his love of poetry shines. Verse mixes with prose to lend richness throughout. I think this is a book which should be read outdoors, in the squares of our busiest cities or beside the brooks of our remotest parks. It's about God, our perception and experience. It meanders thoughtfully around the topics of faith, mercy, sexism, and hell, on its journey to "reaching middle ground" between the various world religions. The stability of our society rests on "mutual respect, and a genuine attempt to understand and to appreciate the other, to detect the voice of God in the other, and to pursue a thoughtful, caring life with the other."Religious thought is evolving, but the evolution of our understanding of God has been a gradual process, and we are by no means at the end of it. Enchantment is coming back into vogue, and society may be experiencing sacralization rather than secularization. May of us yearn to "feel the Greatness and the Glory, and all those things that begin with a Capital Letter," but we're unsure how to proceed. The closer we approach the mystical (though not the magical, that stuff is evil, right?) the further away we appear. Gethin's gimmick of threading the story of Ezekiel throughout the discussion is what makes the book real. I laugh out loud as I write this, but it is so; Gethin doesn't feed us the wild-eyed, theatrical Ezekiel most of us avoid, but the human, struggling-to-understand-it-all Ezekiel. The Ezekiel strolling mournfully beside Babylon's Tigris, dreaming of Israel's Jordan. For all his extraordinary visions, Ezekiel never actually gets to see God. This book is a joy to read, and one to fill our dreams with hope.