Carlisle Cathedral - East Window etc.

We had a very enjoyable visit to Carlisle Cathedral recently, not my first, or second - but I still feel there is a great deal more to discover about this marvellous building. 

There were only three cathedrals in the whole North of England in Medieval Times, after the Normans had wiped out of impoverished most of the population - and of these Durham and York are by far the most famous architecturally, and indeed internationally. Nonetheless; Carlisle has all kinds of wonderful stuff, and a fascinating history - and should not be missed! 

Above is the East Window which is an enormous creation in the Decorated (middle-gothic, about 1350) style. It is perhaps the largest, most complex ancient stained glass window; and a great favourite among those who especially admire such things.  

More than any other similar window, this seems living and growing. 

Standing outside, we were fascinated by the extraordinarily organic - branching, curving, stone tracery - enclosing the stained glass; much of which is also medieval in its upper parts, having survived the iconoclastic eras of Edward VI and Cromwell - and misguided Victoria Restorers (albeit without the Victorian piety and energy, many of our oldest churches would have been lost altogether).  

There are many other delights such as (unrestored) Medieval wall paintings:

This is St Augustine and the devil, with some Middle English dialect doggerel verse:

One of the loveliest effects is produced by the Victorian barrel-vaulted Choir, with its starry painted ceiling. 

And in the choir stalls are many Chaucerian era, and Canterbury Tales-like themed, carved-oak misericord seats; such as a wife (of Bath?) beating her husband with a butter paddle:

And a mermaid with mirror, symbolic of Vanity:

 

Note: The photos aren't mine, but were pillaged from the interwebs. 

How much do you trust your church?

In the past it was natural and spontaneous for people to trust institutions more than themselves - including churches, and especially churches. 

People trusted their church more than any other authority - to the point of leaving home, moving house, losing livelihood - and even unto death. 

Nowadays this does not happen. People do not trust their churches any more than they structure other specific social institutions; and indeed people trust their churches less than they trust the consensus of high status secular institutions (when, which happens rarely, their church opposes the dominant ideology in some particular respect). 

Nowadays, traditionalist Christians (leaders and laity) are put into the position of arguing that people ought to trust their church more than themselves -- but in the past this did not seriously need to be argued. 

And nowadays? - well, it is easy for someone (whether a church leader, or devout lay member) to say that they trust their church above all other authority...

Yet in practice churches are never clear and unanimous when it comes to any serious matter; so the individual must (at least) discern within his trusted church...

Which means, in effect, choos-ing to trust... that-which he has chos-en to trust. 

At the same time most people are afraid to trust themselves when it comes to serious matters; or, at least, they are afraid to acknowledge that they are relying on their own best judgment. 

The disadvantage is that this means nearly everybody including devout Christians) is spiritually adrift and impotent...

But on the "positive" side, they never need to take responsibility for difficult decisions!

Since they can always (dishonestly) claim (even to themselves) that they are operating on the basis of trusting in the wisdom of a higher authority. 

The Bible is ultimately (just) a means to the end of understanding Jesus (and Christianity)

How should we read The Bible? 

All possible answers to that question are necessarily based upon non-Biblical (extra-Scriptural) assumptions - and yet how* we read the Bible tends to determine, or at least substantially shape, the nature of a person's Christianity. 

(*And there are many ways of reading The Bible - see the beginning of my Lazarus Writes - even currently among Christians; as well as among the much greater numbers of pseudo-Christians and not-Christians.) 

My conviction is that we ought to read The Bible as a means to an end; and that "end" ought primarily to be: to know and understand Jesus Christ, what he did for us - and what this implies for me. 

I say this in context of an overall belief that some of The Bible was written with the help of divine inspiration; and that this (by my judgment, and for people such as me) especially applies to the King James or Authorized Version (which is therefore significantly autonomous in relation to the versions from which the KJV was "translated"). Divine inspiration makes the source potentially more likely to be valuable to my personal quest - but is not an absolute; and cannot be.   

In other words; we should (and I do) read The Bible as a source of ideas, rather than a set of instructions; nor is The Bible an objective and imperative historical account that of itself is supposed to tell us who Jesus was and what he did - and what we ought to do about it.

The Bible does Not of-itself answer such fundamental questions - and clearly cannot, because communication entails interpretation. 

What reading it may (or may not!) do is provide us with some ideas, some accounts, possible descriptions, concepts etc; any of which we may personally use (or reject) as leading us towards a state of understanding and personal affiliation. 

The bottom-line is Not The Book, nor any particular translation of The Book, nor any particular set of theological expositions of how to read The Bible, and descriptions what it means... 

Instead the bottom-line is what we feel convinced about, what our deepest and most considered intuition tells us actually is the case, here-and-now, and what we personally want and need to do about it.    

Otherwise stated; we are personally responsible for whatever truth we get from reading The Bible; we therefore use The Bible as a means to the end of getting an understanding that we personally can take responsibility for. 

The obvious objection to this is that surely this is compatible with reading-into The Bible whatever we most want to find in it. 

Lots of people have done, and continue to do, this - indeed to anyone who disagrees with a Biblical interpretation, this seems very obviously to be whatever the other person is asserting. 

For instance: Conservative Evangelicals see Liberal Christians as reading-into The Bible modern left-wing political ideology; while the Liberals see the Evangelicals as using The Bible to justify conservative social attitudes. 

How can we avoid mere self-gratifying wishful thinking? 

The fact is that if we want to fool ourselves, if we want to discover that The Bible (in the way that we choose to read and understand it) merely confirms what we believe for other reasons and from other sources - then fool ourselves is what we will do. 

If we want The Bible to justify our primary allegiance to a social institution (such as a church or denomination), or a political ideology, or an academic specialism - then that is what we will do. The Bible will be read such as to accomplish this over-arching goal. 

Yet, anyone who fools himself thus, will have to contend with the fact that he is fooling himself. If that is all that is wanted, then he will get what he wants. 

And he will not be guided by The Bible, but instead by the primary allegiance that shapes his reading of The Bible. 

But if you are instead someone who wants to know the truth about reality and to live in accordance with it - then there would be no point in fooling oneself. 

Indeed, the reason for taking personal responsibility is precisely to escape the knowledge that other people are trying to foist their own (often self-interested) Biblical understandings upon us, for their own reasons. 

Perhaps for reasons of what they regard as a better society; or maybe they want to fool us, manipulate us - for their personal benefit. 

There are some matters upon which we do not want to trust anybody else - and this, for me, is one of them. 

This is my life, and I shall be the one to take the consequences of my decisions. Therefore, I will take responsibility for my understanding of Jesus, and for deciding how to read The Bible. 

Why on earth should I want to hand-over such matters to... somebody else, anybody else? 

To a church, or other institutions; to historians and linguists, to past "authorities" (whom I only vaguely know, and at second-hand or worse). 

No: I must myself be satisfied, ultimately. All else is a help, or a hindrance, to that goal.  

**

In particular, I regard it as unacceptable for my faith to be built upon the shifting (and mostly secular) sands of historical/ palaeographic/ linguistic/ cultural scholarship; theology and philosophy or the like. It is vital that I can reach behind such distortions and contingencies, to discover, devise, experience what I need to know - and that I do this ultimately for myself.  

It is my job to seek my salvation, and I read The Bible in that spirit; evaluating and selecting on that basis. 

In practice I have found great help from reading the (King James translation) Fourth Gospel, called "The Book of John" - but it has been a help, a source of ideas, a basis for further consideration - it has not been regarded as something that told me what to believe and do. 

It is not so much a matter of being selective about the IV Gospel; as that there are parts of it that I evaluate as untrue (for whatever reason, and there might be many reasons). 

Furthermore, there are many vital truths (as I regard them) unsaid in this Gospel, or anywhere in The Bible (or, indeed, anywhere in any of the Christian churches that I know of). 

On the other side; as for the rest of The Bible. I have found very little positive in the Old Testament; aside from phrases of wonderfully evocative poetry (in some of The Psalms, for example) and copious accounts of wrong-headed and mistaken things that I ought to avoid.  

In sum; The Bible is not essential to understanding or knowing Jesus - nor to salvation  - nor to living well in this mortal life. 

The Bible is "just" a potential source of information and ideas; that in principle might be found elsewhere or discovered for oneself.  

And the same applies to all other external sources: to the churches, traditions, theories and whatever. These are all sources to be used - not authorities to which it may be expected that I hand over responsibility for my life, my soul, and my eternal future. 

  

The question of how your mind is connected to a group mind

Is this the fundamental nature of inter-personal communication?

It seems evident that people in the past knew, or at least all assumed, that an individual person's mind was, or could be, connected with some larger group mind. 

The exact group mind to which an individual was connected seems to have varied between families, tribes, and clans; to larger groupings such as co-religionists, nations, or all of humanity. 

This assumption seems to lie behind, and justify, many Christian practices of the past and present; such as the phenomena of monasticism and hermits. These few were meant to be working on behalf of many others, in a way that seems to entail interconnectedness. 

Nowadays, there are group prayer meetings (to pray for some persons, outcomes, or general purpose). All of these assume a link between the individual and a larger human group. 

Furthermore, such a connection is a spontaneous assumption built-into young children; related to the belief that their thoughts are known to others, and may influence others - albeit this may mostly be related to fear of the discovery or harm, from guilty and "naughty" ideas or imaginations. 

Of course, nowadays and among adults; this kind of thing may be more of a social than spiritual activity; or it may be more like a "superstitious" observance than a genuinely spiritual activity. 

This practice is merely an enfeebled residue of earlier historical and childhood assumptions. Also, there is more conviction of the power of negative thoughts than of positive ones (which may be rooted in the intrinsic entropy of this mortal life where destruction is so much easier than creation). 

Nonetheless, I think there must also be positive potential in the connection between individual and group minds - in the right circumstances. 

One problem, as usual, is we tend to want other people to serve our interests, and not their own. Such that people are often praying (in effect) to control other people's attitudes, desires, decisions, actions... Such is the nature of many political intercessionary praying. 

Also we tend to become falsely focused in the supposed situation (as reported in mass media and by the leadership class) of people we know essentially nothing about, except what we are told by known liars and malign manipulators. 

So much so; that perhaps the most usual cause for group prayer nowadays is political: e.g. foreign wars, famines, natural disasters etc. - where the whole exercise is wholly framed by the information and moral-imperative of global media. 

In such situations; the group mind is highly politicized, with all the problems of insincerity and superficiality. 

And, in sum, such an exercise serves mainly to discredit the idea of an real and valuable connection between our mind and other minds; and to increase the already strong (and naturally despair-inducing) feelings of alienation and atomization that plague us.

Because if there really is no direct connection between our thinking minds and the minds of others, but instead it was true that we can only know people via perceptions and their interpretations; then we really would be isolated - ultimately "each on our own".

This is why I think we need to consider how, and in what situations, we are, and directly connected with a group mind. 

Because the alternatives are either the reality of your mind connected to a group mind; or else inescapable existential alienation.