1. Life is lived alone. We are the same person when born as when we die; I am an individual, and there is nothing else which is real. My memories aren’t communal; experiences aren’t communal or common. We are generally locked in. We only experience one life, and our personality is single, unique. Our fate is solitary. Events happen outside the mind; the mind is transcendental and aloof, necessarily so; I have no choice but to be alone. Existence is unique, and once only: it is bounded by my birth and my death, and it happens at a specific point of time, so it is aleatory, a matter of chance, hanging by a thread. But everyone, no matter where and when they are born, is unique and alone, entirely the origin of the whole of life. It is their life, their world, and it ends with them. Events come and go, by choice and decision sometimes, but mostly as a given. A world. But always, world is filtered through a lonely isolated consciousness. That’s existence. Other people are objects we encounter. Other people are sense perceptions, objects, confused perceptions, reaching out to each other. The only guarantee that other people have a similar experience to mine, is: ah… but there is no guarantee. I am the only verifiably living thing in my world; and when I say living, I mean self-aware and with a command over thoughts, senses, my position in the world. The weight of responsibility is hard; reality is cruel, and as arbitrary as I myself am. I am alone entirely, faced with a drama in which I can take part, or not. I can leave it, or close my eyes and not see it; I can defile my senses and my mind. Even my mind is not my own, but inherited, given; a terrible gift from nowhere to no-one; and yet, I am. I have been thrown here, precariously hung over an abyss of not being alive. But someone else is with me. The most real other person is, the one who gave me this mind, this world, this life. Out there, is not nothing, but another. I just feel absolutely, as the only thing I am certain about, that there is another person who is as certain and crucial as I am. Without me, there is no world. Without Him, I would be less than nothing. I speculate that he gave life to me. The experience of my own self, this life whose borderline is simply death and nothingness: or else, whose borderline and beyond is that Person. What I can conceive is a Person the other side of this, near or far from me. In this way, I am sure beyond any doubt, that there is God. I just know God. He is the one who threw me here into life, into existence. To me at least, the borderline between my existence and my non-existence is actually the borderline between my existence, and God’s existence. It is impossible for me to imagine not being, to not be here; I think that’s impossible. What I can imagine is God. He is the face of what would otherwise be total nothingness, or, at best, the randomness of normal life, my pointless solitude. For without God, life is pointless solitude. Rather than death, I look beyond my life, and see God. God instead of Death. That is how I have always lived.
2. To guarantee that other people do exist, and that the world is real and holds together, and that I am myself real, and that there is any sort of point to all this which I am, God is a necessity. This world is a solid, real, predictable world. So, God must exist for that reason, too. He sustains it in its passage through time. He gives it space, character, shape. I say this in explanation of an intuition, more than a reasoned conclusion. These thoughts are not philosophy. They are me struggling to say what life in its deepest ground, is. God is in some sense a necessity logically speaking; but for me, it’s mostly a matter of immediate, pre-rational state of shock, and response. Like, I see a disaster, or a fearful thing, I see my life, I feel alive, I stand back and observe life: now, they say that fight or flight is the response. I say, rather, that I see God at work, making me aware of himself. The magic of being alive, the completely unspeakable passing of life, and my aware mind, it makes me want to communicate. But communicating with other people is silly, superficial. For, I ask myself, why is there a mind at all, unless for communicating with God?
3. To summarise, God is what is beyond me and my world. And, God is the creator; he has a mind of his own. I don’t need faith in God; to me his existence outside the world and as a challenge before me is simply a fact.
4. In this vague sense of being watched, and destined to learn more about my maker, I began meditating at some point in my life. But I had been searching for that skill, too. I think certain children, as I was, just get in the swim of meditation. The self-possession it brings to me, the certainty and safety of being in possession of my absolute mind, led me to wonder just how human God must be. I conclude that God must be as human as us, if his way of making us secure, peaceful, in the flow with life, is this simple withdrawal into a human self-awareness. My meditation is another word for asceticism; meditation is the life of stillness, it is stillness; it is closing of the senses for periods of time, in a rite of withdrawal. Because my life is suited to being at home in myself, by gaining control of my mind, which is a higher state of consciousness, I have concluded that God is very human. I think that the true nature of reality is revealed to a man when he prays in stillness; so, therefore, the world was made for a human being like me; my solitude and stillness was a thing planned by God, and he planned it because he himself has a human Son, Christ. Praying in total stillness to the God I am secretly aware of, is this: letting the mind reach its uttermost, and fall silent. The mind closes down, in the rite. A larger mind comes. This is what I think the Holy Spirit is. And Christ, who was a man like me, and who knows that calm, peace, selflessness is the key to the world, said that when we are calm, at peace, and selfless, then the Holy Spirit will come. In this sense, we are transformed – converted; it is part of why they say, that a Christian is reborn. A Christian is not the same sort of person as non-Christians.
5. God, or the Spirit, talks with me. Gives me a new mind. It is a higher mind. It is not proud and high up; rather, it is lower by the world’s standard. The new mind is calm, humble, pure, not arrogant or demanding. I aim to be selfless. By the world’s standard, I am a fool, perhaps. Careless about money, ambition – but a member of the Kingdom of the spiritually humble and poor in selfishness, poor in arrogant spirit. This makes me yet more aware of God, of my solitude, and of the meaning of life.
6. God talks with me, and gives advice. They call this conscience, sometimes. Sometimes the Holy Spirit can give insight. I am loyal to the promptings of the spirit. It is not demanding. There are a set of rules which everyone knows. I live in an intellectual quest, because there are others who have been like me, but more expressive, more talented in writing and thinking; other men from tradition have advised that God usually says, and asks us to do. Without knowing what the other men and women have done and said, I would not be able to know for sure that I am hearing God properly. I listen in prayer and in life, in a constant conversation. I trust God, and I have not been let down. But mostly, I am distracted, and what you should rightly call, a failure. I can easily fall now, into the rut of cliches, about how holy and silent and resolute I am. That’s not so at all, because for most of my time, I am involved in trivial things such as work, ambition, and failure. It’s not as if I consult God and sit down to pray all day. Rather, I fail.
7. I have only prayed once for a definite thing, an outcome and an event which I had struggled for alone, and which was too much for me. It was something important, touching on my most intense desire for good of myself and my family. And, just as, for example, someone might pray for money urgently, and the money arrives, so I have prayed in that way, once. It was not for money; it was for something of much greater importance, and related to other people and their welfare. The prayer was answered almost immediately, in a miraculous way. I could tell that story, but that is for another time. The prayer was not to God himself, but to the Theotokos, and it was answered immediately, in full. If people were to be sceptical about this prayer, the outcome, the miraculous outcome, they would engage in making a timeline, and trying to work out if the problem, the prayer, and the happy outcome were due to some other cause, or if they were an example of coincidence. I, personally, have not the least reservation. It was the direct answer of a prayer when I was at the end of my tether, and when I wanted only good for other people, who could not have my help by any other means.
8. The Church is the way that the memory of Jesus, and the way that we can understand God as a man, and Christ’s teachings, are handed down to us. Because God is for everyone, then everyone should be a believer. And, therefore, the whole tribe or country should be Christians. When the whole country has the same set of beliefs, then a country is a place where we can disagree about small things, but not the overall point of life. It is the groundwork for a happy land, and a happy life for each individual. The Church has been, and still largely is, the country’s culture.
9. The Church is also the place where communal acts take place: marriages, coming of age ceremonies, weekly gatherings, public and shared prayers; and in Orthodoxy, it is where God gives us the Spirit in a specific physical act. It relates to Christ’s death and resurrection.
10. We are these days mostly born into an explicitly atheist culture; even though it is tacitly Christian. The origin of my decision to be sceptical about atheism and to confront it, was more than a decade ago. I refined my idea of God down to a human being. A prayer and a miracle took place there, too. I made a mad bargain with Jesus. But that was just the start. The whole process of rebirth and avoidance of atheism took a long time.
11. We know about Jesus because his existence is presented as a story, with dramatic incidents, and festivals devoted to it. The festivals are our inheritance from the past, and they leave it open to us to follow them more deeply, and learn more about Christ, or to simply have a few days off while they happen. The story of Christ, and the significant events of his life as told in our holidays and festivals, reveals the nature of life in its deepest, most profound aspect. Once again, we are all alone; and Christ is the most lonely man. It is a story of God and man which cannot have been made up, in my view. An event in history: the birth of Christ, then his life, and death, and what he did during his ministry cannot have been invented or made up; they are the true story of God on earth as the Son.
12. It is said that Christ was prefigured by Apollodorus of Rhodes, whose life was written. But Christ was prefigured and anticipated by Socrates, too. And by the post-exilic prophets of Judah. The whole ancient world was as it were preparing for God’s birth.
13. I cannot conceive of the afterlife, so it has never been the reason why I am a Christian. I can only think of the Afterlife as follows: this world, but better. And morality, or being good, never interested me personally: the good man to me is the philosopher, and the guardian of his society. It is a heathen idea, the idea of leading a moral life. It is superficial, just a side effect of being with God. The world is largely the place where we meet God, whereas morality is a matter of how we deal with other people. How one achieves things is neither here nor there. Atheists are moral or immoral, too. To be Christian, you have to be moral in your whole being, so that even if other people didn’t exist, you would still love them and do right. But what characterises an everyday Christian morality is simply this: to follow the Commandments. I mean the Decalog, the Ten Commandments. When Christ says: all the Law is contained in this, to do to others as you would have them do to you – then this is for me very simple to achieve. I don’t think it is anywhere near the heart of the matter of life. Prior to that command to love each other, he puts this far greater command: to love God. Loving God is not moral, it is divine; it means dropping out of the world, being detached from it. The Commands effectively make you ready for the spiritual life and knowing that God is the only real Reality. Morally, the following things are crucial: Patriarchal rule of the family; marriage and avoidance of divorce; asceticism and restraint in all matters of the body, but feasting at appropriate times; innocence of all before the law or trial; justice done to others by judges and by the community. Kindness and generosity must be shown particularly for those who have no patriarchal place, who have not only dropped or fallen out spiritually, but literally. But general charity toward the weak and unfortunate must be accompanied by the demand that they join the Church; random acts of kindness to hopeless cases, or determined atheists who have no chance of knowing God at all, are simply useless. The first rule is to love God, and love of God is supreme – and on the other hand, God’s enemies should not be encouraged; where a man has a family, his own family is given priority – likewise his own country, which is an extension of his family and kin.
14. On Christ’s actual historical existence, and whether the Gospel writers record it properly, nobody can be sure. They differ in their accounts. Those are books written by men. It is enough that Christ was born, and died, and crucially, was resurrected from the dead. God can achieve this; he can also inspire his Gospel writers sufficiently, that they do not tell lies.
15. It is clear that we are free beings. We have free minds and are free to act. Just as gravity is strong enough to hold the Earth in orbit around the Sun, and the moon to earth, even so, gravity is still weak enough to allow us to walk about freely. Just so, the world is huge and its influence massive on us, still, we have complete freedom of choice in a vast area. That freedom of choice and freedom of orientation toward God or away from him, is the reason that God does not display himself clearly at all times, and to all people, in full. He allows us freedom. This is a blessing.
16. People will remind me of technology, and the great insights which treating the world as a real and technical thing has give us. Of evolution, and the big bang theory of physics. I think that evolution has been guided. On the ‘big bang’ as an the origin of the world, I think that God chose to make the world in this creative way, over billions of years. The mechanical practical sciences and technologies have almost nothing to add to what I have said about the Spirit, and the Son. God works with your spirit, and your freedom. Not the mechanical dead matter with which science is entirely concerned.
17. The psychodrama, the way that Christ’s life interacts with mine, is like this: I see him through the inadequate writings of the Gospels. I see his gentleness, and the Kingdom he invited us to join. I see his human side in his having to die; the great miracles which inspired people, and which made him appear to be so great: I see in them Christ as a humble king. He was like me. Fully human, and yet, miraculously, he overcame death; and overcoming death is the greatest wish of the heart. For, in the heart of everyone alive, we are afraid of the unknown, and besides God, the other side of this isolated existence there is only nothingness, extinction, pain, death. Christ experienced all of these, and I know him and his story, because I have felt these things, too. He is the ideal man.
18. You will say, that he did not have a family, and was not a soldier: no, he is spiritual, and he let others see to those things. He did not reject imperial Rome, or Greece: and Rome and Greece are the society in which he expected his followers to live. He wanted those things to remain and to flourish. God chose to live in them, so we should, too. A strong society, a place of productive work, a thriving culture, prosperity, activity, empire and nation state – they should not be diminished or despised.
19. I have no interest in other ‘religions’, other than to insist one way or another, that they turn to Christ. Every convert to islam at the time of Mohammad was before that a Christian. And they strayed from the path. The other ‘major religions’ are merely preliminary attempts at Christianity. I think the English failed to convert ‘the Hindus’ to Christianity because they were idle. They should have tried harder.
20. To return: it is my deepest wish to become Christ, or to be a Son of God. What does this mean? To know God in full, and to transcend the world, and see it for what it is, and maybe to make it more like the Afterlife. The point of life is this: to attain eternal life, and to see the world as God intended it. We should not be thinking in the Scholastic tradition. Rather, negative theology is right. So called ‘negative theology’ is merely this: to say that no description we have for God is ever adequate. We can say that God has a personality, but then we say, that his personality is something infinitely more than the human personality; this means, something you can’t know.
21. Respecting the Church of England, I think it has been consciously destroyed by the wealthy few. Just as the destroyed communities and towns, and organised labour; just as there are no great factories today, so there is no great church attendance. History has led us down a blind alley, and we need to retreat and begin again.
22. My years of early adulthood were obsessed by Christ and Jesus, the need to be important. I wanted to be important. I lost the flow, the blessing of God, the more I wanted to know and to be important. I wanted to know the key to successful action when I was a youth; I wanted to be close to the master of the universe. I wanted to live forever in the here and now. So, it was only in later years, that the practice of asceticism and the life of stillness, which is rarely taught, was revealed to me as the road back. It brings me back to God’s friendship; and then, I am as it were graceful, doing and living with the commandments, with God’s company.
23. As ever, I can only speak for the Orthodox Christian Church, when I say, that you should go to church, and learn more. There is a good deal to be said about just turning up, and being catechised, by listening to the readings, being blessed, taking part in the drama of it every week, being with other people, seeing that only God brings us truly into each other’s company. In this way, I break the profound isolation and freedom anxiety and guilt which are our inheritance and our immediate reality. And, I see glimpses of other people who are also profoundly alone, endangered, existentially thrown. The only way that you can be sure that they are out there, the same as you is, that God makes it so.
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Jason Powell