Be your own sunlight, not a religious reflection

Thanks to an email from Alex, a regular Church of the Churchless visitor, I learned about Don Cupitt's book, "Above Us Only Sky." It's short and inspiring, a paean to finding meaning through "solar" living of our everyday life.

By solar, Cupitt means...

We accept and we joyfully affirm life and its limits, traditionally described as Time, Chance, and Death. We no longer wish to veil the truth about life, nor do we dream of somehow being able to transcend its limits. Instead, our religion is now our joyful and immediate engagement with life, just as it is.

Right on.

For a long time, during my true believing days, I felt that my goal should be to attune myself with some hypothesized Sun of Ultimate Reality -- to find a way to bask in its warmth and be absorbed into its gravitational attraction.

Now, I'm comfortable with being my own source of meaning. In other words, I'm much more concerned with what is radiating from me, rather than what is being beamed into me.

This is an active, not passive, approach to living. It doesn't deny that other people and the physical world exist, but accepts that how we relate to reality is our subjective responsibility -- not an objective given to be imposed from outside.

Here's how Cupitt describes solar living in more detail.

Solar living, then, precisely reverses the traditional Western account of the religious life. It is living by continual self-outing, or expression -- which explains why modern people attach so much importance to coming out with it, declaring  themselves, and generally feeling uninhibitedly to be themselves in public without concealment.

But since the Middle Ages in the West the individual's religious life has commonly moved in the opposite direction, being described as a second 'interior' or 'spiritual' life, a life of hidden inwardness in which the soul related itself to the invisible God who was its Ground and its End.

The language used implied rather sharp distinctions between body and soul, and between outer appearance and inner reality. Everyone was an amphibian, living simultaneously in two worlds or at two levels, like an actor or a spy.

Your apparent, outward or bodily life was a life of social relations with other people in this visible world, but at the same time you were also withholding part of yourself in order to live a second, inward life in which you continually referred everything to the eternal God.

To do religion you sought solitude and stillness, sat still, shut your eyes, recollected yourself, and turned into your own interior mental space.

I reject this traditional Western [and also, I'd say, Eastern] picture utterly, insisting that there is no interior core-self with a hotline to Eternity. We just are our own outer lives in time, and our public life of self-expression just is our religious life. There is only the outward, passing show of things.

Our language is a single, outsideless, human continuum, and the world that our language gives us is also a single outsideless continuum. There is only one world, and only one self.

We are not dual, amphibian creatures, and religion is not concerned with any other world than the everyday world. Religion is simply our own activity in trying to get ourselves into the most affirmative and productive relation to life that is attainable.

That is not easy, however: we will not get it right until we have learnt to look head-on at the insubstantiality, chanciness, and transience of everything -- including ourselves -- and have found the courage and the faith to say Yes to life in the face of all that. All of which, I warn you, is going to be very tough.

Comments

[Suzanne]

Hi Brian,

Towards the beginning of your article, you write:

"For a long time, during my true believing days, I felt that my goal should be to attune myself with some hypothesized Sun of Ultimate Reality -- to find a way to bask in its warmth and be absorbed into its gravitational attraction.

Now, I'm comfortable with being my own source of meaning. In other words, I'm much more concerned with what is radiating from me, rather than what is being beamed into me."

This is interesting. Underlying the first part of your statement is the unspoken goal of humanity, borne of the survival instinct: the imperative to feel good. If we feel good, there is the absence of pain that tells us something is wrong with our bodies; the absence of fear, which tells us that danger is near; and the absence of guilt, which tells us our social interaction - so important for the survival of our species - is in good order.

The second part of your statement has as its subtext unselfishness, which is also a useful mechanism for keeping social interaction in good order. That we may be unselfish, we must first have our basic needs met. If this is in place, like it largely is in Western society at least, we have the opportunity to effect the needs of others, thus keeping them "feeling good" and further ensuring the continued survival of the species; in fact the species moves from mere survival to thriving.

The other possibility prevalent in societies whose basic needs are attended to - restlessness, irritablility and discontent - is yet another function of survival: in a species whose mental function is so evolved, and complex societies are so common, overpopulation is often the result of thriving. Thus, we have a built-in mechanism to feel alienated from our fellow humans, causing us to either eliminate some of the population through conflict or avoid procreation by isolating ourselves from each other. So all the discord that people so lament is simply a natural function of survival, and in fact, is necessary for our species to flourish.

This is simply a spur-of-the-moment hypothesis, one that I'm sure isn't unique. Further, our evolved minds are certainly capable of more systematic organisation, informed by the compassion made possible when all basic needs are met, that can allow our species to thrive without overpopulation or the destruction of our environment - so common when a species gets too plentiful, or dominant.

Getting back to the first part of your statement, in my opinion, a full life has in it everything: pain and suffering, joy and comfort. In our desperation, borne of survival instincts, to avoic anything uncomfortable, we perhaps miss out on the great panoply of life's offerings. What radiates from us individually can, perhaps, not always be dictated by our will and ego; but perhaps whatever radiates fills a void we are not conscious of, and maybe the human species and his environs are functioning at a level of efficiency and order that we are not always able to apprehend.

How are you, Brian? It's lovely to see you continue to blog so enthusiastically! Apparently, you are thriving.

[chauncey carter]

"Religion is simply our own activity in trying to get ourselves into the most affirmative and productive relation to life that is attainable."

Affirmative, perhaps, but "productive"? The most productive people are producing the most useless and awful things.

[Mike in Wisconsin]

Brian,

Your post reminded me of this wonderful quote from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius:

"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. I am not afraid."

That's as good a rule to live by as I have found.