An Italian, an Ecuadorian, a Malaysian and a Brit walk into a pub… (or What-ya-gonna-do-with-all-these-worldviews?)

I’ve had an epic week so far. I’m doing a year volunteering at Warwick Uni helping the Christian Union there to give students a chance to think through the big questions of life and meaning and God – and this week the international students have arrived. I have met so many fascinating and friendly people from literally all over the world – France, Italy, Spain, Russia, South Korea, Malaysia, Tanzania, Ecuador – and because my answer to “So what are you studying then?” is such a weird one, I’ve had some fascinating conversations about their personal takes on the meaning of life, the universe and everything!

One thing that’s particularly interesting about the encounters I’ve had this week, is how drastically different people’s responses to the idea of Jesus and Christianity are – and the way that relates to their cultural background.

I met a guy from India today who explained to me that he wasn’t a Christian himself but he had always been fascinated by the stories of Jesus – he had had a Christian teacher at school who had told the class these stories – and when I offered him a copy of John’s biography of Jesus he said he had already picked one up and put it in his bag! For him, as far as I could pick up from our little conversation, religious identity was something that was set – inherited from one’s parents and community – but the stories of Jesus himself were a source of genuine interest; surprising, even captivating.

At the same table I met another postgrad, this guy from mainland China. He said he had never known anything about Christianity before – although once we started talking the very barest of bones started coming back to him – and he was very keen to discover what it was all about! He wanted to learn everything about British culture, and that included religion. It was hard to tell if his interest was purely anthropological or whether there was a deeper curiosity involved.

Moments before I met two guys from Malaysia. One of them said his Dad had been a Buddhist, but started following Jesus two years ago. This guy himself was still a Taoist – or at least I think that’s what he said to his friend as he gestured to a bracelet he was wearing – but he went to church with his Dad when he was with him, and was going to find the Christian society at university because his Dad had asked him to!

Just before that I met two Japanese guys. When I asked if most people in Japan were atheist, they said that most people in Japan are not religious at all. The difference seemed very significant to me. In our conversation it seemed that personal engagement with any kind of religion wasn’t really a live option for them – it was something that friends might do, but however much it seemed to have made an impact on one particular friend, the thought that it might be for them as well had never crossed their mind. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me – the powerful assumption was that religion was a very much optional and rather eccentric extra.

Two nights earlier I had been round for enchiladas and drinks with some European postgrads – which was great fun and very interesting. Emerging from largely post-Catholic or semi-Catholic cultures, these guys had more ideas about Jesus – both helpful and misleading! For some, discussion about Jesus would always be intermingled with discussion about politics – because the politics of religion was so prominent in the recent history of their country. For others, the question of God was obviously not appealing as a topic of conversation – a polite nod and face that clearly communicated that religion was a private thing in their opinion.

One guy though, an Italian, starting asking some really interesting questions. “Why do you have a desire to convince other people to share your faith?” was enough to get a properly deep interaction started! “Why can’t people just be unselfish and have solidarity without Jesus?” “What is this ‘evidence’ you’re talking about that Jesus came back from the dead?” “How do you think about other religions?” “What’s it like to be a Christian in the 21^st Century, because it’s in decline isn’t it?” “What do you do when – like Job – you’re trying to do what God wants and then s*@t happens?!” Genuine questions – each profound enough to elicit much more than a blog of their own!

Just now I was reading a book which mentioned the Christian belief – my Christian conviction – that just like Jesus was resurrected, those who are united to him by trust will be resurrected too, when God renews the whole of creation (often slightly simplistically referred to as ‘heaven’). As I read it, my brain thought,

‘Do you really believe this? Can you actually conceive that this is what will happen either when you die or when Jesus comes back? Or do you just agree intellectually but deep down reckon we’ll all just die and rot?’

And I realised that it’s very hard for my actual imagination, the shape of my brain at a deeper level than it’s fully stated beliefs and ideas, to genuinely acknowledge that there is a reality beyond the merely visible, measurable stuff of matter, and that God really will bring about a life later on which is far more real than my current experience. I think it’s a difficulty pretty common to all white Western 21^st Century Generation Xers. (Or are we Y now?) But my conversations with all these brilliant people from different contexts reminded me of something important: just because a certain way of seeing the world is automatic for white Western members of Generation X, doesn’t mean it’s the way reality actually is.

400 years ago in this country, it must have taken serious mental audacity and tenacity to push against the grain of the ‘social imaginary’ (Charles Taylor, A Secular Age) and conceive of a world utterly devoid of anything beyond the measurable. An atheist in that context must have found themselves asking, ‘Do I really believe that reality could at root be without any mystery, purely matter plus time plus chance? Do I really believe that life originated of its own accord, and that when we die we simply cease? Is it even possible for my consciousness to be aware of itself while believing itself to be nothing beyond the natural?’ No doubt I phrase these doubts and difficulties in a horribly anachronistic way, but something like that must have been there – nagging away, making it hard to unbelieve. It will be the same today in large parts of South America, of Africa, certain areas of Asia. But I don’t think the difficulty of being an atheist in Britain 400 years ago is a good reason to believe in God – it was an awful reason. And in the same way the ‘normalness’ of a secular, materialist way of seeing reality is not a good reason to disregard the idea of God, or the evidence for Jesus. It’s an awful reason. At best, it’s a form of intellectual laziness; at worst it’s an ugly cultural arrogance, the usually only half-formed sense that we white Westerners are ‘more advanced’ than other societies, we have made ourselves richer and built more spectacular machines and so we must have a better grasp on the nature of reality.

Instead, I think the only humble, reasonable response to a world and a world history full of so many different assumptions, convictions, conceptions of reality, is the approach of my Italian friend: to ask good questions. It’s to refuse intellectual laziness and make the effort to really think, really discuss, really investigate arguments and evidence. All people are equal and of equal worth. All arguments and ideas are not. (If you’re not sure you agree, think about for a few minutes, with concrete examples, the claim that all ideas and arguments are equally valid. If you’re still not sure try eugenics.) So we have to actually evaluate different beliefs about reality, and different reasons for beliefs about reality. We have to listen, and ask, and listen, and talk, and think, and repeat. And in time, we will reach a working hypothesis. And on the way, we will have begun to acquire true understanding, true respect, and maybe even true wisdom.

REASON - a new poem & my mate emma* and refugees in Lebanon

Last Easter time, my mate Emily filmed me doing this poem – it’s a story, not my own, probably a fictional story rather than a real life one, but the poem is my own retelling of it. And it’s called ‘Reason’ because I think it is a good reason. Have a watch…

I’ve been thinking for a while about what I should write about, to go with this video, and then today it was completely obvious.

The thing is, the beauty of that story is the idea of this man, this soldier, who despite all his strength and power, realized that what the hostage needed – the only way he could really be rescued – was for someone to join him in his weakness, his vulnerability, his pain. Only then could there be trust; only then could there be the rescue; only then could he set the captive free.

There are a thousand ideas, ideologies, ‘gods’ and gurus around that will stand there shouting at us. It might be legalistic ‘Christians’ shouting that we need to smarten up our moral and religious act – stop smoking, stop drinking, go to church – so that God will accept us. Or ‘self-help’ books shouting that we just need to believe in ourselves, that we need to stand in front of the mirror and tell ourselves that we are successful until we force it to be true. Or maybe just a dizzying array of bloggers and journalists insisting that we simultaneously refuse to force our opinions on others and stand up against injustice; pointing out to us a thousand good reasons to feel guilty before breakfast and offering us zero help to put things right. And I don’t know about you, but even if sometimes I really make an effort to obey whatever or whoever is shouting at me, in the end I revert to giving up and trying to screen it out. Whether you give me three simple steps or a hundred, I can’t find the energy, the passion, even the compassion to rescue myself for very long. I read a blog explaining very convincingly that I should be checking the ethical status of any shop I buy clothes in, or getting everything from charity shops, and I completely agree at the time but something in me knows that by myself, there’s no way this is going to stick. Because it’s hard. And tomorrow there will be another hard thing that I know I should do. And I might make some progress, I might make some changes, but I’m never going to be able to carry the full weight of everything I know I should be, everything I know I should do.

And this is just one of a thousand reasons that I am deeply glad that I’ve come across Jesus – or more accurately, I suppose, that Jesus has come across to me. God has every right to shout at me – to shout at all of us and tell us to get up and sort our lives out. We more than owe it to him. But he doesn’t just want to assert his rights, he wants us to be restored, transformed, put back together in the full beauty we were created for in the first place. And so instead of shouting down at us, he came in Jesus. He took off his helmet and laid down his gun, he laid bare his chest and lay down with us in the darkness. He lived as a human – with flesh and blood and skin just as thin as mine, just as easily broken, just as easily scarred. He got hungry and thirsty and so tired he could sleep in a fishing boat right through a storm. He felt anger. He felt fear. You know when you feel so frustrated you actually find yourself crying? He had that. He felt the uncontrollable pangs of grief that come from the loss of a close friend. He went through the bitterness of betrayal, and got horribly humiliated. He has lived everything that it is to be a human being – even the one part that all of us reading (or writing) this blog are ignorant of: death itself. God knows what it feels like to die. He knows more about the pain of being human than I do. He has come and laid down next to us in the dirt and dried blood of our broken world and broken lives, and he has curled himself around us. Because he cares about us, and he came to rescue us.

But it’s easy for that to sound like a lovely theory, that’s all very far away because it happened 2000 years ago. It’s easy for our modern chronological snobbery and our postmodern disregard for history to make it all feel somehow primitive and irrecoverably distant. I think both those feelings are culturally determined silliness, but we feel them powerfully nonetheless! So what occurred to me today as the obvious thing I should write about in this blog is my mate Emma.* [*That’s not her real name, I figure it’s best for me to write this somewhat anonymously]

My mate Emma is actually Rachael’s mate Emma, but she’s very friendly and she does spoken word so I feel involved too! She acted in the same theatre company as Rachael – she’s a beaming, passionate, naturally quite anxious woman from Essex, I think she’s in her late 20s, with brown hair and eyes. Just to give you some kind of mental picture. She’s super lovely. And she really loves Jesus. She used to be really paralyzed by anxiety and guilt, to the point that in her first year with the theatre company she had to stop performing she was so scared – but she says that gradually God has set her free from that anxiety and shown her more and more of his grace, his kindness and forgiveness which means she doesn’t need to be full of guilt!

And now, after a very long journey of praying and discovering and changing and scariness, she is going to move to Lebanon, to live and work there with a Christian theatre company, reaching out to the thousands upon thousands of Syrian refugees in the country. The plan is to move to an apartment in Beirut, and for the first year to spend 3 days a week learning Arabic, and hopefully also learning to drive in the crazy dangerous way required to get around on the streets of Beirut. Then she’s going to see where she can serve and what she can do – but her deep, deep passions are for a few simple but huge things. She wants to help bring people together across the huge divisions in Lebanese society – to help Sunni and Shia and Christian to meet each other, and learn to love each other and understand each other. She wants to do anything she can to care for the refugees, especially the children. The young children whose parents couldn’t afford the paperwork for visas and things are being born stateless, with no country they can officially call home or return to easily, living in makeshift camps with barely anything we would call ‘facilities’ and nowhere near enough schools. When she went to visit for 2 months, she went with the theatre company as they performed a hygiene play, after which World Vision gave out soap and flannels – trying to encourage the children to wash, even when it’s snowy in the Baka Valley and they don’t have hot water or proper houses to keep out the cold. And she wants to love and care for and pray with the refugees whose homes and lives have been and are being destroyed by ISIS. And in and through all of this, she hopes to see these Muslim refugees that she loves coming to know Jesus, and find freedom and hope in him.

Years ago, she prayed that God would really break her heart for the refugees like his heart is broken for them – and he has answered that prayer. Answered it so emphatically that she is actually willing to leave her family and her friends and her home (the organization she’s going with suggest you don’t come back to visit at all in the first two years), and to pour herself out, risking her actual life, to show them some of his love. The other night, as Emma shared her hopes and passions and dreams, and the story of how God had brought her to this point, both me and Rachael found ourselves with tears in our eyes. And in the car as we drove home we kept trying to express to each other how exciting and beautiful it was to hear what Emma was doing.

Because it is just so completely like Jesus!

This is what Jesus said he would do for the people who trusted and followed him – he said that he would live in us by his Spirit, and that he would transform us so that we would grow to actually be like him. To love like he loves, to live like he lives, to suffer like he suffered, maybe even to die like he died, and then to genuinely, literally, rise to new life like he rose to new life. And right now you don’t have to look very hard at Emma to see that he’s really doing that. She’s not just throwing money at the problem – neither did Jesus. She’s coming alongside real people in their pain and brokenness and joining in with their vulnerability, so that she can love them and help them – so does Jesus.

That’s all I have to say really! (But if you just from this short thing are feeling anywhere near as stirred up by it as me and Rachael are, and you think you’d like to support Emma by praying for her or in some other way, do drop me a message and I can put you in touch.) So yeah, I hope that helps put some flesh on the bones of that poem – do please feel free to share it and this with anyone and everyone who you think might appreciate it!