I think not mate

When I came to theological college I came with the willingness to question everything which was put to me - this is exactly what the 'person in the street' should do to me, I figured. And if Christianity is true, then it should be able to withstand wholesale rigorous scrutiny, I also figured. Only then would it be worth following.

After the questions, all I was left with was two propositions still standing in the ring - Jesus was a real man - and there are enough 'secular' facts to make this unassailable - and the default secular materiaist view of the world is just ignorant. It is from these two facts that I began to re-build, like any child who knocks a wall down only in order to test it and to put all the building blocks neatly back into place and see it rise up again.

So I find out that indeed, Christianity is true..... like the other day as I was in a mental health ward, taking communion with people who themselves were being crucified in one way or another, physically shaking, mentally incoherent, subdued, slightly psychotic, pacified having manged to survive another suicide attempt, unlike the G.P and the psychologist I have been hearing about recently.

Jesus was in the room. Through sheer necessity, and there was no working out how he was, or where he was coming from, but Jesus was in the room.

There are those who would say I simply have no evidence for this experience, as if the direct intuitive experiences perceptions and emotions they take for granted every single day of their lives were evidence enough for them, whilst my experience of Jesus in the same way is not evidence enough for me.

But just how do these more 'realistic' people know that the material world is even there when they are not looking at it? They either don't, or they just completely take this kind of knowledge for granted. It does not require evidence, even though there is no evidence for the physical world being there when you shut your eyes.

We sleepwalk in a world of unquestioned assumptions, and we think we exist as autonomous individual thinking beings who can forever manipulate the environment to suit. This is a conceit based on the idea that thought is certainty - I think, therefore I am, as Descartes said. I have a rational self.

But let me tell you a good joke about him. Descartes goes out for a meal and the waiter comes up and asks him if he would like the house soup of the day - asparagus. "I think not", replies Descartes, and promptly disappears in front of the whole cafe!

I am aware of thought, of perception and of sense evidence, but it is the 'I am' who really exists.

And without any evidence too - because the 'I am' is the experiencer. God the uncreated is just Being there, and what's more, he is perfecly reasonable.

If you can't accept this just try widening your shrunken notion of rationality a bit. You really won't have to believe in the Great Pumpkin and Rumplestiltskin.

Bless you and all you love, and all who need love - in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
One Lord, now and forever.
Amen.