Where Everybody's Crazy

Well, today has been quiet day, so I have been - mainly - quiet. I always feel a little uneasy talking about the quiet days we have here each term, because they're all bound up in spirituality, and all along I feel like I've presented a rigorously intellectual Christianity; and then I want to talk about spirituality and blow it all out of the window.

As with all things, you need a balance. A purely intellectual Christianity, with no tangible experience of God, is more of a philosophy than a faith. In the sophisticated middle-class West, this has been traditionally seen in the conservative evangelical wing of the Church as being the right way to reach out to people: present Christ logically and rationally, and don't get carried away with your feelings, or else they'll think you're a religious nutter and stop listening. At the same time, the same conservative evangelicals watch the rise of the New Age - which goes to completely the other extreme, and encourages spirituality above and without a rational framework of belief - with equal amounts of horror and perplexity.

I've been thinking recently, possibly as a result of Sociology of Religion, that man has some basic religious needs. He will go somewhere to fulfil those. Typical Japanese will feel a cultural and religious need to venerate their ancestors. We don't need to go into the reasons why they do, or why they shouldn't, but they do. The church in Japan gets upset about this, because new Japanese converts come to church on Sunday and worship/venerate (Hello to my Roman Catholic audience!) at the butsudan every other day. Why? Because they have a religious need, and the church hasn't fulfilled it, so they go elsewhere.

The same goes for spirituality. The rise of the New Age (although it's pretty much the Old Age by now) demonstrates that man has a need for a contact with the numinous, as Otto put it. Presenting an intellectual Gospel can actually mean doing a disservice to those people - most people - who need more than that from a faith. Christians in Japan are often criticised, according to Spae, as being "intellectual" and "unfeeling"; where for the Westerner, head-knowledge is "ultimate truth", the Easterner puts more emphasis on feeling and intuition. A head-knowledge gospel in the East is only half the story, and the reason why you often end up with only half a Christian.

So I hope I've established that spirituality isn't merely some pie-in-the-sky thing; well, if it is, it's still necessary even in this benighted Age of Reason. Now, what have I actually been doing?

I went for a walk - after all, you can hardly see God with your eyes closed. I took some photos. I read some Psalms; majoring on Psalm 86, verse 10: David's statement of the peerlessness of God. I wrote a song based on it, and finished off a couple of other bits of music.

Then, of course, it all went wrong, and I had to go and buy beer, and debug a broken network. It turned out to be some nastiness in the firewall producing huge logs filling up the disk of the DHCP server, so taking out two important network functions for the price of one. Still not supposed to be doing this rubbish.