Three weeks ago I went to London’s Tate Gallery – the real one – and gazed at Stanley Spencer’s marvellous painting, The Resurrection, Cookham. There he is, naked, along with his wife and other villagers who’ve emerged from their graves in the church yard. The whole scene is glorious but surreal. Looking at this hugely enjoyable work of art by a fervent Christian doesn’t make it easier to believe in bodily resurrection.
Whether the early Christians intended the claims of resurrection to be taken literally or symbolically is unclear. But one powerful modern interpretation holds that it is about “the necessity of dying to various forms of superficial life if one is to have life abundant.” According to H. A. Williams, whom I featured in last week’s blog, the theme of life and death in closely associated with Christ’s theme of riches – “not necessarily material wealth but anything to which we cling in order to preserve superficial and bogus life and hence to evade the frightening necessity of dying and being born to our true selves.” Human life, he says in a gripping metaphor, “is very largely a wilderness, a dry land where no water is. Riches are the artificial grass and plastic flowers with which we ... persuade ourselves that we live in a watered garden.”
Dying, then, means acceptance of the wilderness. Once this takes place, “there follows the miracle of resurrection. The desert becomes verdant.” He gives the example of someone “who faces and accepts his inability to love” who “discovers within himself a power of loving which nothing external can destroy or diminish. And this is life through death.” As we saw last week, it is only by yielding to a greater power of goodness that we can find and become fully ourselves. We gain our life by losing it.
The book I’d like to highlight and encourage you to read is Williams’ forgotten masterpiece, The True Wilderness, written in 1965 and happily available from Amazon. It’s a short book, a collection of 21 sermons, each one pulsating with extraordinary insight. It’s a reinterpretation of Christianity – but speaking to everyone, regardless of creed – expressed in the language of modern psychology. Let look at two further themes explored in the book.
Faith is the acceptance of doubt
Faith, Williams says, is “the acceptance of doubt, not, as we generally think, its repression.” He points out that Christ, as he died, thought he had been forsaken by God. “And must not this show that He was facing the most terrible of all possibilities – that His critics had been right all along?” The whole point of Christ’s life, according to Williams, was that he trusted the Spirit inside himself, not the experts, not the religious establishment. Jesus could not have done what he did without immense faith, which also coexists with doubt. The whole point of faith is that we cannot be sure, but we trust to our view of what is right, to a view that says, despite all appearances to the contrary, love will triumph. The nineteenth-century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard regarded faith – the ability to believe without visible evidence – as the pre-eminent mark of someone truly human. All truth, he held, was ultimately subjective. In a similar vein, Williams insists that faith is the acceptance of doubt, but the ability to act fully in accordance with the faith.
Faith is also, he says, acceptance of our humanity. Our natural instincts and affections were implanted by God. Faith is closely related to courage, and “it is only by the courage to receive our natural potentialities without let or hindrance that we can become fully ourselves.” Faith is “an affirmation of the self, not a denial of it. We do not abdicate what we are when we give ourselves away”. The distinction between God and the self is a false dichotomy. “If God is our Creator then it is by means of our being ourselves to the fullest possible extent that He reigns. For God is not our rival. He is the ground of our being.”
The view of faith as necessary, including faith in ourselves and our potential, shines through in another insight from Williams, a breathtaking reversal of the traditional view of repentance.
Repentance means discovering ourselves
Repentance “doesn’t mean feeling guilty. Guilt is a form of self-hatred.” Hatred always does harm. “The trouble with a great number of Christians is precisely that they feel guilty about being themselves.”
So what does repentance mean? It is “discovering that you have more to you than you dreamt or knew, becoming bored with being only a quarter of what you are and therefore taking the risk of surrendering to the whole, and thus finding more abundant life.” The root of repentance is the discovery “that we are keeping a large part of ourselves locked away”, that we are living superficially. Repentance involves vision, discontent, and surrender. Vision “unlocks areas of my being which have so far been inaccessible to me. I begin to discover what sort of person I am”. We find out fullness only by giving ourselves, by reaching our full potential. “The ultimate root of repentance is the discovery that we are sons of God, that we have it in us to be what God is like, to be alive as God is alike – by giving, by generosity, by love.”
This doesn’t happen suddenly or once-for-all. Confidence in ourselves, in the superior version of ourselves, will ebb and flow. When faith fails, we try to express ourselves and achieve by grabbing instead of giving, by acquiring rather than receiving. This doesn’t work. We become frustrated; we despair. We find life unsatisfactory. And that can be the stimulus that tips us back into constructive engagement. We repent once more, we change our attitude, and we become again what we are really like, in the best version of ourselves.
Such oscillations will go on for the whole of our lives. “For we can’t expect to take in something absolutely stupendous all at once. And the good news, that we have it in us to become more like God” can only be assimilated “slowly and by degrees.” “The discovery of ourselves cannot but continue, because our potentialities are unlimited.”
These are only a few of the jewels to be found in The True Wilderness. Buy the book and keep it with you; dip into it when your faith in yourself is floundering. As a tonic, I find it even better than a long walk or a glass or two of wine.
I hope you have enjoyed this little excursion, last week and now, into some rather deep waters. From time to time, I’ll highlight another forgotten classic. Next week I will be back on more familiar ground, with ideas for business and your career. But please let me know if you’ve found the excursion useful or boring, enlightening or banal. I want to write not only for myself, but also for you, and I need your feedback.