Religion is Strange Again

A Poem

At Greenbelt in August I found myself on a panel with my good friend Liz Slade, one of my heroes Gail Bradbrook, Martin Rowe who I enjoyed meeting for the first time, and the disembodied voice of Brian Eno. The subject was either The Future of Religion or The Religion of the Future… I forget which. In fact I had the two jumbled up from the get-go.

Here’s the poem I wrote for the occasion…

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Did it come as a surprise to wake up one morning and find that the world had become a religious place again?

It has been a matter of curiosity in certain quarters of the civilised world 

They once believed they had overcome the days of superstition and lit the way to some new dawn

Even for these, the world is become religious again 

But religious, how?

Religion, friends, is strange again

It doesn't behave the way it used to when we kept it in carefully labeled jars on shelves

It doesn’t move the way it used to, when we drew up its boundaries and said, “this far and no further…”

Religion is strange again

I don’t think it’ll happily return to the old enclosures

I’ll not draw up those kinds of maps

*

Perhaps it would be good for me to draw some creaturely limitations around myself

First:

“I don't predict the future, I predict the present,” said Marshall McLuhan

It’ll be enough for me to try and experience what is happening now in slow real time

It’ll be enough for me to escape the compelling reflux of the past for a moment

Second:

Neither is it for me to decide the future of religion, or to manage it into existence

The people who believe this is their task are the very people I distrust

“The Kingdom comes not with your careful observation”

All I can do is share with you my small longings and experiences

Third:

I cannot speak for anyone but myself

Nor do I wish to decide upon the futures of others

Of greatest use in the pockets of my mind are two things

The question that leans in 

And silence, for the hearing of another’s tale

*

I want to relativise myself amidst you all, my relatives

I want to be small

I want to be a creature again

It sounds rather ascetic or self-diminishing

But let me tell you about my desire and my longing

Let me tell you about the eros that moves me

I am driven by awe

Power is boring

Control always leads me to the wrong kind of chaos

I’ll exchange them both for the joy of creaturely awe

*

I pray lovingly to the Creator, but I don’t desire their seat

Nor do I want to be their keeper or manager

I doubt they need looking after by me

I identify with the soil from which I came

With every cell and atom of this round gargantua, this material creature

I receive this interdependence as miracle and gift

Realms of heavenly citizenship are hid horizontal in plain sight

I am a member of all things

I thrive when all things thrive

I lose when all things loses

Who can accept the crucifixion of today?

To identify with all things in an age of death and despoilation?

*

To be small is to be in awe and to be in love

And there is nothing so measureless as this

And there is nothing so diminishing as power and control

I’m not interested in the management of some linear story

Or in traditions that occupy themselves endlessly with the question of themselves

I am here for the tradition that is in love, with everything else

A complex ecology of folklore 

Creaturely awe amidst a tapestry of relations

I want to be a creature again

I want to be small