'Faith is a Work of Imagination'
An interview with Alan Jones
by Julie A. Wortman

Alan Jones is Dean of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco, a place of wide-ranging and creative spiritual and theological exploration. The Forum at Grace provides "civil conversation on critical issues," often tapping the views and gifts of high-profile scholars, authors, activists and performers like Mickey Hart (former drummer with The Grateful Dead), Huston Smith and Jane Goodall (www.GraceCathedral.org/webcast/forum/). Jones' many books include Living the Truth, Exploring Spiritual Direction, The Soul's Journey, Passion for Pilgrimage, Journey into Christ and Soul-making: The Desert Way.

Julie Wortman: You've been engaged in a project of "re-imagining Christianity." I'm wondering if that has anything to do with the future direction of "progressive" Christianity? I'm thinking here of the brand of Christianity that is rooted in liberation theology and a justice orientation.

Alan Jones: Well, when the revolution comes, I will be with the progressives. But I will be very reluctant in that, I think. My quarrel with some progressives or liberals is that there's an absence of astonishment or wonder in their approach to faith. I know that's a blanket statement, but, in general, progressivism is a rationalist, we-know-what-justice-is approach. But faith is a work of imagination before it is a set of beliefs.

I'll give you an example. People come in and say to me, "I really can't believe in the virgin birth," and I have to suppress a yawn, because that doesn't interest me, even as a conversation. I want to say, "Let me show you a picture." And I would get an icon of Mary and Jesus. And I'd say, "Now, just forget that that's Mary. Forget that's Jesus. Just look at a woman and a baby. Forget about Christianity, if you can. Just look at a woman with a baby -- any woman, any baby, anywhere. A woman with a baby at the breast. Then ask yourself, 'In light of that image, how should I behave? How should I be in the world?'"

I think it is important to try and get to a way of looking at things from an imaginative point of view. Let us look at the primordial images again. Let us also acknowledge that history is messy and give up the utopian vision that somehow we're going to usher in a perfect church. Liberals and conservatives tend to want to be in the right, but in a messy history we often only have a choice between two evils.

For example, take the thorny issue of abortion. I find myself trying to be in conversation across the board. I am reluctantly for a liberal abortion law, but I would maintain that abortion is always wrong. Abortion isn't the way it's meant to be. But it's the better of the two options under certain circumstances. Still, when feminists say a woman has a total right over her own body, I think that isn't true. I don't think anybody does. There's no such thing as a private act. That is, totally private. Obviously, I'd say that in most circumstances like this the person may have 80 percent of the choice. But society has an interest in how we behave. All our choices have implications for other people. But I rarely see that as part of the conversation.

JW: It's the difficulty of embracing ambiguity?

AJ: And sitting with it, because it's human nature just to want to be totally in the right rather than saying, "This is where I stand now, and I'm going to choose this, and take the consequences, and repent as well."

JW: You've said that Christians can't go forward in their spiritual journeys without the help of other religious traditions. What do you mean by that?

AJ: The split is not between the great traditions, but within them. Last night my wife and I had dinner with some leading Buddhists in California. We were talking about the emergence of, not American Buddhism, but American Buddhisms. They're going through all the upheavals that the churches are. But, at the same time, I could say that they're my church, because they're people I can trust, I feel safe with and we speak the same language. I feel I have more in common with a lot of my Buddhist and Jewish friends in San Francisco than I do with people who call themselves Christians.

I think the real question for us is: Do we really believe what we say we believe? For example, if we say that Jesus -- and I'm going to say it as broadly as I can, to include as many people -- shows us who God is, or what God is like, or what God does, then how would the Christian claims be pressed? In other words, if Jesus shows us that the divine is a self-emptying center, a self-giving love, how would Christians press their claims? Would they kill people? Would they lock people up? Would they consign people to hell? If in the beginning was the word, and that word is in every soul, what is the word from other religions to us?

It wouldn't hurt to try to tease out the political and social implications of what we say we believe about God. If we say that the Trinity is the celebration of radical unity and radical identity -- that is, the unity of persons, but also with distinct identity -- and that we're made after the image of this God, that is saying an awful lot. It says an awful lot about civil rights, about every human being having the right to a place at the table. It says that it isn't a kind of collectivism of Marxist communism, where you are sucked into the collective. And it isn't radical individualism, where we're all autonomous selves. But it is the struggle toward true communion, where every individual is celebrated in a community which is just and provides the maximum opportunities for human flourishing. You could argue for all sorts of things, such as not cutting out arts programs in schools, when you begin by saying, "We are on the side of human flourishing."

But people say, "Oh, I can't believe in the Trinity." They won't do the hard work. And that's one of my quarrels with some progressives, that they chuck out everything without actually having thought about what it could mean, in a dynamic way, if you responded to it as a work of the imagination. If you took the Trinity as a work of the imagination, rather than clobbering people with a dogma that they can't even begin to talk about, you would come up with a very different kind of conversation.

JW: I like the way in which you talk about Christianity: "Christianity isn't an argument; it's a story."

AJ: It's not an argument. And God is not an idea. Not even a good one. God is not a concept. In other words, my first thing is wanting to talk to people not about God, but about their passions and their enthusiasms, about their fears, their moral imagination and their emotional life. I don't mean emotionalism, but I mean their life of affect in the world. And then we can give the word "God" some content. But sometimes we jump into God language far too prematurely.

JW: I recently read an essay by Hal Crowther in which he says that Annie Dillard's book, For the Time Being, offers a new theology for thinking Christians. He says, "The Book of Job is a rock that breaks all but the toughest Christians. Dillard's modest proposals, there's no hectoring or proselytizing in either of these books, offer the rest of us the way to steer around it. Acquit God of all charges. Strip him of the terror and testosterone of the Old Testament and the improbable tenderness of the New. Relieve poor God of the thankless task of loving, judging, rewarding and punishing the incorrigible race of men. Remove God from the center of the human dilemma and build him up along its edges with holy things we can feel and sense for ourselves. 'God,' Dillard writes, 'is the awareness of the infinite in each of us.' 'Panentheism' is her word for it and she quotes a theologian who calls it 'the private view' of most Christian intellectuals today. It's the opposite of atheism because its successful practice requires constant spiritual vigilance: an eye peeled, an ear to the ground to detect the divine."

AJ: That's very good. God is not a project of the ego. Iris Murdoch, in one of her novels, says, "Everything we concoct about God is an illusion."

JW: Well, that makes me think about all the "orthodoxy" talk that has been occurring in Anglican Communion circles, especially on the part of certain conservative church leaders.

AJ: My test for somebody's orthodoxy is, "If you were in charge, would I be safe?" Or, "If you were in charge, would there be room for me?" For me, epistemology is not first about what can I know, in an intellectual sense; it's about who can I trust? What can I trust? And then, within a community of trust, we can argue and fight and scrap like mad about all sorts of issues because we are rescued from having to be in the right.

I would also say that we are struggling with a church that is largely unconscious. That is very painful for those of us who have crept a little bit -- or stumbled -- into consciousness. Bill Swing, our bishop here in the Diocese of California, preached a beautifully moving sermon this past Maundy Thursday for the clergy at what we call a Chrism Mass. He talked about his sympathy for Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, having to keep engaging other primates about gay and lesbian issues again and again, issues which some of us have left behind 20 or even 30 years ago. But there are people for whom this is raw material, where the Bible seems clear-cut. I no longer argue with them. I say, "You're talking about my friends. You're talking about people I know and work with every day. You're not talking about monsters. You're talking about my colleagues. And what you say simply isn't so."

But it must be so wearying for somebody like the presiding bishop -- and God bless him for it -- to have to go over the same ground again and again with people whose consciousness is somewhere else, in a place we find both puzzling and unacceptable.

We must realize that the church becomes the playground for different levels of consciousness. And a person on one level cannot talk to people at another level. Huston Smith puts it well in Why Religion Matters. He says there's some merit in the traditional view, there's a merit in the modernist view, there's merit in the post-modernist view -- and there are also weaknesses in each point of view. He pleads for a new conversation between all the levels at their positive points.

JW: Do you think that that's possible? What would that look like?

AJ: I think that's probably very, very difficult. I see it sometimes at Grace Cathedral, in that we will have a lot of traditional things going on. We have a traditional Eucharist on Sundays, with incense and great music. And on Sunday afternoon, we'll have Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead doing a performance for Earth Day. And so we try and say, "Look, we don't want to trash history and say everything in the past is junk. We believe we're historical beings on the one hand, and yet we also believe in the openness of the spirit, God calling us into the future."

So I'm in a totally different world than Jack Spong [the retired Bishop of Newark]. And I don't find his Christianity very compelling or exciting. But he's obviously right about gay issues. He's obviously right, largely, about the New Testament. So here I am, wanting to get Jack Spong to appreciate High Mass, wanting him to appreciate that the medieval Christians weren't all stupid and that Thomas Aquinas actually had quite an intellect. And I'm wanting those things at the same time as I acknowledge the good things that Jack Spong has done to rescue some people from fundamentalism.

JW: You're dean of a cathedral and probably no one would disagree that Grace Cathedral is one of the liveliest cathedrals in the country, and maybe in the world, in terms of the sheer variety of things going on and the kinds of conversations happening at all different levels. I think about that, and then I think about this current drive in the church, or this current obsession in the church, around something called "20/20," a resolution that came out of the Episcopal Church's General Convention last year committing the church to double its baptized membership by the year 2020. It's been estimated that this would require the so-called "planting" of 2,500 new congregations during the next 20 years. So this would be a massive effort. I personally can't think of anything more unappealing. I find the church's congregational focus generally unappealing. When I think in terms of the kind of church life I would find appealing, it's something that's more like a cathedral, or the potential of a cathedral like Grace and other places where they allow themselves to be many different things.

AJ: What worries me about this 20/20 project is that there isn't an understanding that there's got to be a revolution in the whole life of the church if it's to expand. The parochial model, as currently understood, is unworkable. It's unworkable financially as well as spiritually. I like a cathedral because it is a community of communities. It is a 10-ring circus. And it is meant to be, with room for the traditional and room for the innovative, and room for all sorts of experimentation. What I try to do is first build trust so that we can risk things. Then we can make mistakes, and say, "Well, we won't do that again; it didn't work." But it is important to be able to risk.

Another aspect of this is that the evidence is that denominational loyalty is weakening. Not just with us, but with everybody. I recently read that 80 percent of Australian Roman Catholics don't practice their religion. So, thinking of this 20/20 effort, how would you expand an institutional church where the denominational loyalty is weak? There's an old adage: Pursue integrity and identity will follow. That is, let us do what we think is right as humbly as we can. Then we'll find out who we are. Then we either grow or we don't. But who cares?

As I've traveled around the church, I've found that a lot of clergy are in a low-grade depression. And they interpret that as faithfulness, which is very, very sad. There is also an absence of passion. There's an absence of passion around the intellectual life, too. When I talk about the recovery of the life of the imagination, I'm also pleading for what we used to call the feeling intellect, not cold rationalism, but the feeling intellect, where ideas matter and we can argue. I'd love to be in a church where we could argue more rather than demonize each other.

In England, when I taught in theological college, we had a discipline of Morning Prayer and the Eucharist. It was a small faculty and our theological arguments were passionate and fiery and yet we knew we'd show up together the next morning for that expression of solidarity and silence. But we would be able to argue and enjoy each other in a way that I haven't experienced in this country for a long time.

JW: To which of the communities at Grace do you belong?

AJ: I don't look to the church for community, though I know that a lot of people do. My community was at dinner last night, with my Buddhist friends. It could be people who support the Museum of Modern Art. My community -- my intellectual and spiritual community -- transcends the church. What I look for in the church is the connection with my symbolic and imaginative life and the rituals and sacraments to maintain a rich symbolic connection to things. A lot of people, I think, look to the church for that as well.

JW: It sounds to me like you are saying that you're looking to the church to help you keep your focus?

AJ: That's right.

JW: To keep your sense of ...

AJ: ... my sense of what really matters. And to help me with a sense of the transcendent. A lot of churches are warm, fuzzy places of community with no sense of the mystery -- back to my issue of astonishment. We have one fixed altar at Grace Cathedral and it's wonderful for me once a week to celebrate the Eucharist not facing the people. A lot of my liturgical friends would say, "Just as we suspected, Jones, you really are a reactionary." But it's very good, occasionally, for all of us to be facing one way, looking up at something above and beyond us, as well as inside us. The community gathered around the table is an important image, but another important image is the community actually transcending itself and becoming more than the sum of its parts. And then that should be an inspiration for action in the world. I think the old transcendence is not going to do, either, but whenever you come up with a program of liturgical practice you've got to be careful of what you're throwing out. l

Julie A. Wortman is editor/publisher of The Witness.

Spirituality in an age of consumerism

David Steindl-Rast, in one of his books on prayer, quotes from a poem by D.H. Lawrence: "All that matters is to be at one with the living God\ To be a creature in the house of the God of Life."

This poem came to mind as I read Witness contributing editor Jay McDaniel's new book, Living from the Center: Spirituality in an Age of Consumerism (Chalice Press, St. Louis, 2000) -- partly, perhaps, because McDaniel's book itself draws frequently on poetry; partly because McDaniel's worldview situates human beings firmly in relationship with all the creatures in the earth-household (a theme he has explored thoroughly in other works on ecotheology); but also, I think, because McDaniel has written a book about "all that matters."

What matters, McDaniel proposes, is to "live from the center," available to the creative, healing energies of "God's Breathing" in us, around us and through us. To do this, he believes, it is not necessary to call God by any particular name or affirm any particular set of doctrines. A worldview is important only in its capacity "to point beyond itself to a world beyond words in which the Spirit is present," and to enable us to live in greater wisdom, compassion and freedom.

Much of this work is given to examining traditional spiritual themes -- sacramental awareness, openness to grace, living-by-dying, faith -- against the backdrop of the consumer culture which surrounds us. McDaniel's intended audience is widely inclusive and the book contains a special welcome to the skeptic.

McDaniel offers a clear and accessible introduction to the key ideas of process theology that undergird his approach. I suspect that others who, like myself, have little knowledge of this field would be surprised by how many of its tenets have emerged in our collective religious consciousness and ring both familiar and true: "The universe is an interconnected web of life." "All creatures in the universe have their own inner aliveness and each living being has its own intrinsic value." "All creatures are immanent within one another, even as they transcend one another." "God feels the feelings of all creatures, sharing in their sufferings and joys."

Process theology, according to McDaniel, views God as the Lure toward fullness of life for each creature at every moment. Living from the Center reads more like a lure than a sermon. It is not a raging denunciation of consumerism; even McDaniel's imaginative portrayal of "Jesus at the Mall" portrays a Christ who is broken-hearted rather than angry. But in its gentle invitation to consider, in Mary Oliver's words, what each of us will do with our "one wild and precious life," it is a book that can offer support and encouragement on the spiritual path, even to those who find themselves outside traditional religious frameworks.

-- Marianne Arbogast, Associate Editor