Divine Anarchy

Posted on by Vincent

Twilight on Christmas Day: Dashwood Mausoleum (illumined) & St Lawrence’s Church with Golden Ball

I want  to speak theologically, to say what I think about God and angels. But then, it’s a bit hard putting abstractions into words. No, that’s completely wrong. It is all too easy to put abstractions into words, and give them an imaginary reality. So I’m rather glad to find myself talking about bees and wasps, for they exist. I have known them for myself and as knowledge gathered up in words by other people.

Following on from my last (Wasp Honey) I’m still astonished to learn that a wasp feeds its babies live insects (after stinging them) or as I once witnessed, a morsel of ham from a sandwich I was eating in a pub garden. The adult wasp is a sugar-junkie, sucking the sweet saliva from its own babies when it can, otherwise whatever sugar it can get from the world outside the nest: over-ripe apples, Coca-Cola, it’s not fussy.

The wasp may not be a good role-model for a human mother, but it gets by. Through such facts and daily observations direct from nature, I get to understand life in a quite different way. As I explained in my last, I can’t share with you the angelic miracles I witness in people’s lives: all my stories of magic and redemption are too intimate to relate. But Nature is everywhere you look, even in our commercial world.

This morning I was in a “retail park”, one of those places where some distant boardroom once decreed the investment of capital, which it now tightly manages from afar by applying some proven formula. One of the lots was occupied by Pizza Hut, in a very peculiar-shaped building, designed to look like an oversized shack, casually built. Ugly but a design tried and tested not to deter customers. Big successful companies don’t make that kind of mistake. They are the fittest, ergo they survive. It’s tempting to say we are the slaves of big business, and that things I don’t much like—Hollywood movies and fancy mobile phones, say—are foisted upon an undiscriminating public. Not at all. Producers and consumers, both needy, attract one another by flirting, before falling helplessly in love. It’s a happy marriage because the adaptation works both ways. It’s symbiosis, as with the bee and the flower. Without the flower, no bee, for it lives on nectar. Without the bee, no flower, for it depends on pollination.

Which brings me at last to my desired destination, theology. I woke in the night of 25th December, and grabbed a notebook in the dark to scribble my sudden thoughts about God. I saw in a flash that my lifetime’s puzzlement was over: there’s not a single mighty boss at all. The question “Do you believe in God?” oughtn’t to be asked. It implies there are but two choices. Either there is one Almighty, who’s omniscient and omnipresent; or else all is chaos and blind evolution. Neither stands up to the reality in which we live and move, and have our being.

I saw that the world is not one big monopoly, not even a kind of retail park controlled from head offices far away. More likely aided by a host of freelance angels. They’re not employees subservient to a divine master-plan, any more than wasps, privateer cousins of the virtuous bee, are managed by their Queen.

In the still of Christmas night, I thought for a scary moment I might have a Vocation, to take down a scripture, “the gospel of All Angels” exposing these beings as a “wild orgasm of anarchists”*. Only when I had transcribed them would I sleep easy in my bed, only when I believed “myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems”†—of God, the Universe and Everything.

It was a relief when Dawn finally arrived, and I knew I know nothing.

* Attributed to President Nixon, who

referred to the anti-war movement as a “wild orgasm of anarchists sweeping across the country like a prairie fire.”

† from Wittgenstein’s preface to his  Tractatus, 1918.

13 thoughts on “Divine Anarchy”

  1. Its always a relief to know nothing. Nothing extended through all time and space. I totally hear what you're saying (if I can presume). There is always a natural order, that needs no controlling force to act as arbitrater (sp?), despite all the seemingly chaotic events.
    I think it was Browning who said

    If the world were understood,
    ye would see it was good,
    A dance to a delicate measure    .

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  2. Vincent, my wife came across your blog and thought it was so similar, in spirit, to my FLIGHTS OF PEGASUS, that I should see it. She was right. I've written on subjects very similar to some of yours. You have a very fine creation, and I am going to continue reading it. I wish you'd have a look at mine (preferably from the beginning a little over a month ago), http://flightsofpegasus.blogspot.com/

    Fleming

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  3. Vincent, thank you very much for reading PEGASUS and sending comments. I'm delighted.I put a link to your blog in the Links part of the right column.My email address is leef@cfl.rr.com. If you would like to send an email to me there it would be easier than “talking” via blog Comments. But if you'd rather converse with Comments, that's fine with me.I live in Florida, where I was born, but I used to live in Beaconsfield, Bucks.Best wishes,Fleming
    [Fleming was Fleming Lee Blitch, 1933-2013. I’m glad to see his blog (with posts up to 2011) still online]

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  4. It is purely a matter of control to want gods and angels and other deities to do things for us, and to presume on their favour based on our actions. The next step in that climb is to direct the favour of these entities against those who aren’t believing the same things as us.
    We are seeing this now on a global scale with nuclear weapons as the big stick.
    I don`t presume to know nothing, i’m not that enlightened, but what I do know has always concerned me regarding the arrogance of the religious and “spiritual” types that will judge and denounce and nit-pick.
    There truly is a natural order that needs no fiddling or fine-tuning…..it is fear that drives some to want to interfere in the natural order.

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  5. O Alastair, do you think it leads to this? To me, depending on the favour of angels is quite the opposite of control. It is a way of standing aside and let the universe's will be done.

    One of my final points, which I did not develop too well, was to acknowledge humbly that belief in one God and many other behaviours in the world, which don't please me, are very prevalent. I don't find it satisfactory to denounce others for their arrogance.

    If people want to interfere with the natural order, it's only because the natural order has created them with those tendencies.

    What I am saying is that I cannot condemn when I do not understand.

    I liked what the Archbishop of Canterbury said today about not wanting Saddam Hussein to be hanged because the death penalty assumes that redemption is not possible in some instances, whereas his understanding of Christianity is that redemption is always possible.

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  8. Vincent,
    Wonderful, wonderful piece, as always. I think I too have arrived at the same conclusion that I do not know, and amazingly the freedom of not knowing has provided me a comfort in being allowed to be free to allow my Spirit license to be free in a way that has opened me to possibilities and ponderings and Spirit-filled Love that for me I sense is the basis of my existence.

    I'm not sure my mood today is quite as gentle as it could be regarding those who claim to know, and claim to know for everyone else. Probably a phase I'm going through based on old remnants of my own personal experience of religion.

    So you ask as you close your entry how it is that belief in one God has held so long. Who knows. We can make a few guesses. Perhaps part of it is a sort of mass “hysteria” so to speak. If THAT many people believe it, surely it can't be wrong, and if THAT many people through the ages have believed it and have fought for it, surely it can't be wrong. But is that belief? Or is that merely jumping on a comforting bandwagon because it is easy, requires no effort to question, to seek, to wonder, to reconcile one's own inner Truth, which might be something altogether too frightening and tumultuous to have to face? Being led into a comfortable coma, where everything is neatly defined about life and death just “feels” more comforting. And ultimately, humans want comfort of their fears. So it seems reasonable that some might adopt the attitude that just in case they are right, the choice will be to follow the crowd. That way, you are covered either way.

    Secondly, it would also seem that as religion has taken shape, it is a convenient dumping ground or way to deflect responsibility for one's actions and attitudes. If a righteous God is demanding that you take a course of action in your life, then it is his responsibility if you have gone to war or judged someone, etc. Using God's will as an excuse and explanation for behavior and attitudes provides convenient justification for just about anything.

    Third, I agree that it is partly about control. Human beings want to be in control, and yet there is so little they actually do control. We will all die, and there will be natural disasters, and other such painful experiences of living that we lack control over, and this makes us vulnerable and fearful. So if one can divert that control to God, and be convinced it is okay not to be in control because God is, it comforts those fears and soothes the anxiety. As long as you are living according to God's will and direction, that is. And taken to its extreme, we hear things like tsunamis are sent by God to teach mankind a lesson about his evil ways, or plagues are sent because of immoral behavior, etc. In an odd way, this soothes the fears of such individuals, because surely since they are living in God's word, nothing bad will ever happen to them.

    So I guess I would have to conclude that fear, as Love, is a very powerful force in the hearts of men. When fear is given the power, rather than Love, it manifests in ways that seek out comfort and soothing of the anxiety. So God is interpreted from that basis of fear, rather than from the basis of Love, which is a shame. For me, there is no differentiation between God and Love. God IS Love, I AM Love. Do I “know” this? Probably as much as I can “know” anything.

    Thank you as always for your splendid writing and thoughts. You inspire, uplift, and and challenge, and have grown enormous respect and appreciation not only for your writing, but for the YOU behind the words.

    Peace and joy be with you.

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  9. Interesting ideas, ones I hadn't really considered much. How do you think the construction of a coherent shared reality would work in such a non-centralized universe? Do you think we could even talk about a coherent shared reality at all in such a universe. Intriguing to think about. Thanks for the shout-out, by the way — I'm glad to be in the conversation.

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  10. I very much enjoyed this post. For me as well, it is such a relief to know nothing. For me it is a relief to let go of the compulsion to need to know, to let the Mystery simply be. To let God be God, as sister Meg Funk says.

    I have enjoyed reading your essays.—Tom

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  11. “More likely aided by a host of freelance angels.”
    ~ haha that’s too funny.

    “a scripture, “the gospel of All Angels” exposing these beings as a “wild orgasm of anarchists””
    ~ also, very awesome.

    I love your posts, because I believe you do know angels quite well. To the above, I’ve often wondered if it is a sort of ‘vested authority’ kind of thing, where angels have the ‘vested authority of God to ‘do a lot of whatever.‘ Something like that, which looks similar to freelance or anarchists.

    I know this post is old, but I was wondering if you still think like this (below):

    In the still of Christmas night, I thought for a scary moment I might have a Vocation, to take down a scripture, “the gospel of All Angels” exposing these beings as a “wild orgasm of anarchists”*. Only when I had transcribed them would I sleep easy in my bed, only when I believed “myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems”†—of God, the Universe and Everything.

    It was a relief when Dawn finally arrived, and I knew I know nothing.

    …because isn’t it ok to ‘know some things, and take down scriptures’ without needing to know ‘a final solution of everything?’

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  12. In answer to your questions, well it was 14 years ago, and the world is a different place, including the blogosphere, where we seemed to be a small community of the like-minded reaching across the globe with our spiritual aspirations and experiences.

    For me, every post is like a a snapshot in a photo album, faithfully offering reminders of what would otherwise have been quite forgotten, especially these days when my memory & mental stamina are not what they used to be.

    As for final solution to the problems, the Universe and Everything, these were tongue-in-cheek rhetorical references to Wittgenstein’s early work & Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide. He actually said “Life”, not “God”.

    I didn’t think there could be a Theory of Everything. I knew nothing then—less now. Not only is everyone different in their perceptions and concepts, but these things can change within one’s lifetime.

    I can’t help clinging to a sense of mission, though. We could continue this discussion on <emThe End of the World.

    Thankyou, dear gw69, for opening out these things into a discussion. And thanks to Alacrity too, for answering my plea for such a correspondent. Now she will witness my public request in writing that you gw69 will try to write more often, no matter what springs to mind, which would encourage me and your other readers to “go thou and do likewise”.

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