Lent 2020 - the summing up

Lent 2020 - Easter Sunday

We start with the basic. Your consciousness. Pure, free of ego. Your subjective experience. Detach yourself from your here-and-now material concerns and look around you. Feel; observe. What you are aware of is your soul - your consciousness. Free of ego.

Consider the Universe. Expanding; a billion galaxies each of a billion stars. It started with Big Bang. How will it end? God is the totality of awareness of all matter across the Universe. And your place in that Universe. Our understanding of it is extremely limited - like a cat trying to figure out how a light switch works.

Our destination is God; it is a continuum that tends towards wholeness - All in God, God in All. The journey is, quite literally, eternal. You will not be one with God after just a single lifetime! You will need myriad lifetimes; each one a tiny step nearer.

Reincarnation is the thread, the continuum of consciousness, unfettered by the bonds of biology, by your capricious ego. The pure subjective experience of awareness knows no you - it is ageless, it does not anger, it observes. Here I speak for myself alone, for no one knows what goes on within the conscious minds of others. You may have experienced this yourselves or not - I can't tell. My qualia memories are of place and time rather than of my ego. The purest flashbacks, either triggered (by smell, sound etc) or unbidden are of sensations experienced, rather than things that I did. And such flashbacks from lives outside of my own (xenomnesia, anomalous qualia memories) have convinced me that this thread, this continuity, is real.

These 'intimations of immortality' will get stronger from life to life, gaining in intensity, awareness, insight and understanding. This is spiritual evolution. At present, such metaphysical phenomena are extremely weak, in most cases too weak to even recognise. But great artists, musicians, poets, can touch it and communicate it clearly to humanity. Over Lent, I have mentioned several that have moved me sufficiently for me to consider them as being driven by a consciousness above time.

We need to pursue spiritual goals, to deepen our understanding of our place in the Universe. We are best placed to do this when our material needs are satisfied. Find the balance. Live in comfort, not in luxury. Know when enough is enough, then focus on reaching the Higher Ground. It is difficult to be able to do that when you are struggling to make ends meet, distracted in unheated, cramped or dingy accommodation. So work hard enough to achieve material comfort - but no harder. Shun ostentatious displays of wealth for yourself, shun those who show off - a sure sign of vanity, of an ego that has shut off the consciousness from the Eternal and Infinite. Power-play and office politics should also be shunned for the same reasons.

Complacency is our lifelong foe, we must be on guard against it creeping up on us. Because yesterday was good and today is good, it doesn't automatically mean tomorrow will be good. The best defence against complacency is consciously grateful attitude. There will always be another go - if you want it.

Thank you Jed, thank you Adam, for mentioning kindness, for it is the basis for human interaction. Thank you Beata for stressing the importance of gratitude in one's spiritual life. Thank you Jacek for questioning my assumptions so thoroughly. Thank you Teresa for your insights into the role of epigenetics in our lives, the biology we need to rise above. Thank you Adelaide for your thoughts about Spirit of Place. Thank you Bożena for mentioning suffering and epiphany. Thank you Marek for walking alongside me and constantly offering me new ideas (and the artwork below). And thank you everyone who's been following the blog this Lent - I hope in some small way it was of value to you.

Golden ratio ellipses

Lent finished well - no alcohol, no meat, no salt snacks, no confectionery consumed; exercises done, paces walked - the physical side of Lent taken in my stride.

This time last year:
Strength in numbers

This time four years ago:
Cultural differences: distance to power

This time eight years ago:
Painting the Forum Orange

This time 11 years ago:
That's what I like about the North

Not followers nor leaders - but one's own way to God

Lent 2020 - Day 46 - Easter Saturday

Well, this is it. Lent has come to an end. It will soon be midnight, and it will be time to rejoice, have a drop of something alcoholic, and hope for a Miracle.

How the world has changed over those 46 days! On Shrove Tuesday (Ostatki), I drank the best part of a bottle of red wine; a small group of us was sitting up late at the Hotel Bristol chatting. Yes, we talked about this virus that was closing down China, but none of us realised what was about to come. The hotel itself would soon close its doors for the duration, along with our offices; everyone confined to their homes. Boris Johnson in and out of intensive care and here we are, 46 days later. No one has any slightest idea of what will come next...

Over the 46 days of Lent (28 days of which have been spent in reclusion), I have taken the opportunity to reexamine my spiritual beliefs and put them into some kind of order. Away from material distractions.

The 'build your own religion' idea is but a trope. It has served me well as a bookcase into which random thoughts can be collected and sifted. And I shall return to these in time, who knows - maybe next Lent.

The Lenten journey from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday begins (in the Northern Hemisphere anyway) in winter and ends in spring, sometimes earlier, sometimes later, but each Lent does see that transition from shorter, darker, colder days to longer, brighter, warmer days. And with the coming spring, the rebirth of nature, symbolic of how despite Entropy, life triumphs. And with life, consciousness.

Conclusions will come tomorrow - Easter Sunday, a summing up. Today I want to finish this series of 46 Lenten blog posts about the role of spiritual leadership.

"Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters"

Don’t follow anyone. I'm not seeking anyone to follow, nor do I want anyone to follow me. I want someone beside me, talking with me, debating, construing, taking the argument forward, building a more accurate worldview together. I neither want to walk behind someone who claims to know the way nor walk ahead of followers, claiming that I know the way. Nobody can claim full access to the Universe's ultimate mysteries. I'd be a charlatan if I claimed I did. I don’t know - I've got some ideas, which I have set out over the past 45 days, but I’m looking too. That's literally the only honest stance to take regarding the spiritual.

The very notion of religious hierarchies, from top down, assumes that those in charge have access to some greater truth than the rest of us. Follow a leader and there’s the danger that the leader will one day get a change of mind, a revelation, that will point them in another direction altogether. And then what?

Having built my own religion, it is ultimately one that does not need followers, it does not need buildings, nor a hierarchy, nor funding. My religion requires rather intelligent interlocutors prepared to question, to offer suggestions based on original insight that has sprung from their consciousness - rather than constructing dogma. A walk in the fields to talk about the essence of existence, the purpose of consciousness, the future of the Universe, the interface between faith and science.

Brian [to his crowd of acolytes]: “You don't need to follow me! You don't need to follow anybody! You got to think for yourselves! You are all individuals… You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves! …



By all means seek sources of knowledge and inspirations from which to build and shape your own spiritual view of the Universe. Create (if you wish, of course) your own religion. But seek no acolytes.

My religion would be an esoteric one consisting of a band of searchers, supporting each other with spiritual insights that help, step by step, get just that little bit closer to understanding, helping each other along the infinite path from Zero to One. Knowing that in this lifetime, we shall never reach One - total awareness of all, God in All, All in God.

This time last year:
Fancy a drink?

This time two years ago:
Klimat change

This time six years ago:
Wes Anderson's Central Europe (Grand Budapest Hotel)

This time nine years ago:
The Reader

This time ten years ago:
Fertile ground for conspiracy theorists

This time 11 years ago:
That's what I like about the North

Unconsummated memories

Lent 2020 - Day 45

Pottering around in the kitchen, and *PAFF*. [For some reason, such memory events often happen while I'm by the worktops under the kitchen cabinets.] Convoy, a 1975 single that had left little impression on me, flashes, unbidden, into my stream of consciousness.

Why?

A few seconds pondering and I have the answer. It's an unconsummated memory. A little piece of some pop culture I'd absorbed decades ago, without digesting, without giving it any thought. Like a memory burp or hiccup. And now it's back. "...hippies in a chartreuse microbus..." Duly, I looked it up on Wikipedia, but I couldn't be bothered to play it on YouTube - it happened, it passed. Today I remembered it. I'm sure many of my readers alive at the time will also remember Convoy, though it was not for any of us a noteworthy song, it did receive plenty of airplay on the radio at the time.

Are we destined to remember everything, every song we ever heard several times? I noted at my grammar-school class's 50th anniversary reunion last September that there were events that I could remember but my classmates couldn't, ones that classmates could remember but I couldn't, and of course the ones that everyone could remember, though each with slightly different spin. Some memories can be easily called upon, others you'll say "Of course!" when someone else remembers - but the ones that interest me most are those that suddenly intrude into your train of thought unbidden.

As I was pondering about my sudden reminiscence of Convoy, it occurred to me that qualia, those moments of subjective experience, define most intimately who we really are. The sum of our conscious experiences, experienced purely, not through the filter of the ego.

For memory is selective, and yet it shapes who we are. We have a tendency to exaggerate, to story-tell, to create a bigger narrative around an event than it really merited - or talk down our own negative behaviour. Our egos, our biologies, driven by the reptile brain, forge narratives about our past that are often at odds with the pure experience of consciousness. An overlay; a crutch. Imagine Trump being confronted with the monstrous reality of what he really is - he couldn't. Instead the sick man creates for himself a comforting story of 'no one is better than me'. "No one has more friends than me - millions and millions of good friends".

We all have a bit of that narcissism in us; it's that ego that we need to learn to overcome.

The promotion of the ego, the glorification of gratification promoted by lifestyle advertising that bombards us ceaselessly is the materialism that distracts us from the deep search for meaning of our universe. From our own perspective, the entire universe seems to have been put into place with ourselves at its epicentre. If it were not for us to observe it - would it even exist? How can you be sure? Because as biological entities, in the grand scheme of things, we are insignificant. The existence of an incalculable number of stars that make up our universe puts  our day-to-day troubles into perspective. We need to be able to balance those two entirely contradictory positions - "My conscious self is at the centre of Universe, existing to experience it subjectively" - and - "In a Universe of a billion galaxies, each of a billion stars, my bodily ego is insignificant."

[And yet materialism inherently makes us dissatisfied, an endless treadmill of doing a job you don't like to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't know. Happiness comes from pursuing the conscious path towards understanding. Many recent surveys point to the health (and mental-health) benefits of meditation.]

Our deepest, truest memories define who we are. What we know defines who we are. Cherish your memories. Consummate them. Especially those ones that come to you unbidden - those flashbacks to qualia - to those moments of absolute understanding and deep awareness. The texture of reality; snow crunching underfoot on a blue-sky frosty winter's morning; the smell of a fresh newspaper opened with a small espresso waiting on a copper-topped table; the twinkling of stars seen from a mountainside on a clear summer's night. Moments of pure awareness. Roll their memories around in your mind, savour their intensity, feel that's what it's like to be alive, to be conscious. The collected memories of joyous moments, moments of intense consciousness.

Deep memory - when memories from the distant past metamorphose into something more than synapses and neurons, taking on a supernatural quality - remains something beyond the ability of science to explain. It is metaphysical memory and will remain so.

At the heart of awareness lies a sense of purpose and understanding - your knowledge evolves, blossoms, expands, your consciousness takes on a many-layered structure. To be aware - to search, to be curious, put your ego - that most manifest representation of 'you' - in the back seat. Universally, your ego is insignificant. Your conscious being, however, is the most significant.

We each believe ourselves to be unique, and of course we are. But what is the source of our uniqueness - is it spiritual? Evolutionary? Extraterrestrial? All three? Extraterrestrial origins? Where do you think the heavier elements in your body have come from? The atoms of which we are made were originally created by fusion within stars many light years from here, billions of years ago...

So here we are. Some of us are aware of this fact, many of us, sadly, are not truly aware - the ego is in the way. Who am I? The essence of my me-ness resides within the long-term memories that remind me where I'm from.

Building my own religion, I would hold dear the sanctity of such memories, deep and true, those which have been consummated and those yet to be consummated. It has been suggested that no part of us, not so much as a molecule, was part of us nine years ago. If this is the case - where do memories from before nine years ago reside?

In his book Are We Bodies or Souls, Richard Swinburne devotes two chapters to how our personalities are formed through memories. He notes that there are no atoms in our bodies that have been a part of us for more than seven years, but that the present 'I' is a continuation of the old 'I', and that memory is the link. It defines the 'this-ness' of 'I', and this is, he says, the soul. I entirely agree. While believing that each morning we return to consciousness with our pasts nothing more than a tool-bag of practical experiences to be put to use in the future, I often react with embarrassment or shame at memories of an event from my youth that pops up, unbidden, in my consciousness. This proves to me my spiritual continuity; here I'm entirely in agreement with Prof Swinburne. However, my life-long anomalous unbidden memories of qualia from beyond my experience (xenomnesia - who knows? The past? Leaks from parallel universes?) cannot be dismissed. On I search!

Make the most of it while you can.

This time four years ago:
Speeches for Leaders, by Charles Crawford

This time last year:
In Memoriam - those who died at Smolensk

This time seven years ago:
Warszawa 1935: 3D film reconstructs lost city

This time eight years ago:
Cats and consciousness

This time ten years ago:
Smolensk - why did this happen?

This time 11 years ago:
Britain's grey squirrels turning red

A myriad paths to God

Lent 2020 - Day 44

Here we are then, building our own religion. "How shall we reach God?" we ask. There are as many answers as there are conscious beings within this Universe.

Looking at our religions - earthly constructs driven by a desire for Divinity - there are some shared elements that we should draw on. I would here set aside those aspects of religion which exist primarily to control societies (such as notions of sin, karma, dietary regulations etc). And aspects of dogma.

I am looking instead for shared and valued elements, such as the notion of God is good, that God is a destination for our consciousnesses (otherwise known as 'souls').

In a spirit of extreme ecumenism, I would posit that one should seek the highest common factor from across all religions. Looking for that which most humans, regardless of their religious background - or even those who were not brought up in any faith - would automatically recognise as being intrinsically good.

There are different ways of understanding; different orders in which one gains wisdom.

The road to enlightenment is not serial. It is not a Step One followed by a Step Two, with Step Three being unattainable without first having mastered Steps One and Two. No, the road is in parallel. Lessons learned, insights gained can come in a different order. Something I've only just learned you might have absorbed decades ago. And vice versa. There are so many different lessons, so many different routes just along our one short stage of the Eternal Journey, that rarely will two people be at the same level. Indeed - what is 'same level'?  I may not see eye to eye with you today, but in ten years time - who knows? Our views may have converged or diverged.

We should not therefore judge others' pathways - as long as they are sincerely seeking. Some paths have been taken because of myths and legends handed down to us. Some of the paths have been taken because of scientific curiosity. Some have been taken because of one subjective experience, others because of a more objective experience (a war survived, a disease beaten).

Yet there are those who are closed, who seek not, believing that the answers have been given to them, predigested, and that anyone who questions that are heretics, unbelievers - the damned, for whom there is no eternal reward. Similarly there are those who seek not, believing that the Universe is a preordained mechanism and that science has or will explain away everything.

Possibilianism is a a new notion, with roots in scientific, rather than theological thinking. I have mentioned neuroscientist David Eagleman's book Sum - Forty Tales from the Afterlives in the blog before. This is Mr Eagleman's view: "Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position — one that emphasises the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."

I agree about the multiple ideas; but there is, I would argue, a commitment to at least getting closer to an answer, even it's still a long way away from being the answer. Hence the need in my mind anyway for a countless series of conscious existences, each one being a tiny bit further along that road. (To me personally it's more than a need, above all, it is an experienced sensation of past lives, and something I want to make sense of.)

Multiple ideas, and multiple paths. We'll all get there in our own good time - providing we want to.

God in All, All in God. Whatever your faith, or whether you're seeking a faith, or in the process of building one.


This time last year:
No God for those who don't believe, a God for those that do

This time two years ago:
Work proceeding around Jeziorki

This time three years ago:
Karczunkowska reopens to traffic

This time eight years ago:
Goodness gracious!

This time eight years ago:

Muddy feet, Warsaw 'pavements'

This time nine years ago:
Cycling and recycling

This time ten years ago:
Winter clings on to the forest

This time 11 years ago:
Toyota launches the iQ

This time 12 years ago:
Old school Łódź

...But is it important?

Lent 2020 - Day 43

Happy Easter to all Quartodecimanists! (If you're not in the know - this was the name for early Christians who celebrated Easter on the 14th day of Nisan, the first month of the Hebrew calendar.)

Unlike the birth of Jesus (for which there's no biblical reference linking it to 25 December), His crucifixion is noted in the Gospels as having taken place at Passover. Now, given the fact that the Hebrew calendar is both lunar and solar (using seven leap months every 19 years to keep the seasons in place), the date of Easter keeps jumping around. It can be as early as 21 March, as late as 24 April.

Within the early church there was fierce debate over this subject. The most important celebration in the Christian year - commemorating the bodily resurrection of the Saviour Jesus Christ - and yet no one really knew when to hold it. Those who held different points of view could be excommunicated or even executed as heretics.

The debate over the Easter Controversy is intriguing, not least because it has resulted in an endlessly shifting date for the feast, as opposed to Christmas Day which unfailingly arrives on 25 December, despite any historical evidence it happened on that day. If one wanted to be as accurate as possible as to the historical date of Easter, the date generally accepted by Biblical scholars and historians is Friday 3 April, 33 AD for the crucifixion and Sunday, 5 April for the resurrection. And yet, the movable feast, based on the Hebrew calendar - but fixed on a Sunday - remains the tradition. We abide by it, Christians and the unbelievers.

Is it important to us in our lives whether Easter falls on the same day of Jesus's resurrection or not? People are much less bothered these days about matters of dogma that they were even half a century ago. [A reminder of how things were, read about the heated exchange of letters between Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman in the late 1940s about Catholicism and Anglicanism here.]

So what is important to us in our lives?

Important are moments of joy. Our lives have their own characteristics, but rich or poor we all have the capacity to experience joy. These moments are fleeting - such is their nature. We must recognise and cherish them. I don't think anyone could argue that joy in this life can be a permanent state. But can it be replicable, I ask?

The nature of joy is its transience

Important too is is an awareness of just how precious, how unique, how statistically improbable our lives are. Everyone of our ancestors managed to procreate successfully in a direct line leading to ourselves - a line unbroken by premature death resulting from plagues, famines, wars, accidents or general illnesses. Since the dawn of homo sapiens as a species - and then going back some, since creatures first emerged out of the oceans onto the Earth's landmass - and going back some more since the First Common Ancestor of all life forms, some 4.3 billion years ago. Was that just a coincidence? Or is there some ulterior purpose to your consciousness?

It is also important to put our lives, our concerns, our woes and indeed our joys into the context of the Universe - those billions of galaxies containing billions of stars - that stretches back 13.8 billion years to the Big Bang and stretches forward to - who knows? We are connected to this Universe through our consciousness, something that lets us subjectively experience reality in a way unique to each one of us. Sense it, let it play through your mind - the past and the future...

Be aware, be grateful.

You are so important, the Universe was made for you.

The Universe, in which you are a speck of dust, a grain of sand.

If you can balance those two statements - both true - then you are have made one important step forward in this existence.

This time three years ago:
Conscious prayer

This time five years ago:
Putin - Stalin - history repeating?

This time  seven years ago:
Remembering Margaret Thatcher

This time ten years ago:
Katyń - genocide?

This time 11 years ago:
Blazing Warsaw bus

This time 13 years ago:
Warsaw's suburban electric trains

From Zero to One

Lent 2020 - Day 42

Imagine a beam of light, of energy, of consciousness. It extends from the Big Bang all the way out through space and time to the very edge of the Universe. All the while it is rising in intensity, amplitude and frequency, constantly striving towards its infinite conclusion, a final unification of all consciousness and God; becoming total awareness. All in God, God in All. Long after humanity has evolved from its present condition into a more angelic form. [We are 13.8 billion years from Big Bang; life on earth has been around for 4.3 billion years; mankind for a mere half a million years. Imagine us, but evolved for a further billion years!]

Imagine that beam - on its way from Zero to One, the beam - it passes through you. And before it passed through you, it passed through other living matter. After your body dies, the beam will pass through more living matter. This beam, this thread, is constant in its evolution; it is not you, but it becomes a part of you during your existence, and afterwards, moves onward.

As you live, you are riding the beam. Memories are all there is to let you know that the beam is there, that it is passing from past through present to future - your memories, earlier memories. Those memories will grow in intensity and definition with each subsequent existence. At present, it's only a weak signal, but it is one that those who are sensitive to it will pick up. They will recognise its familiar touch; atavistic congruences, anomalous qualia memories. Those signals will intensify as that beam nears its goal. Each subsequent life touched by the beam will experience ever more tangible sensations, and will feel ever stronger past-life memories, as spiritual sensitivity deepens along the path towards Unity.

Remember, you are not the beam, it is not your ego. It is not your DNA, it is not your biology. The beam is not you; it is living you - you are riding it. Your body, the ego that powers its biology, is but the vessel that carries your most profound conscious experiences - and it is these that are transmitted further on down the line.

Remember such a dusk five hundred million years ago.

Of course this beam is only a metaphor, a simile for something I feel. I cannot - indeed daren't - try to build any scientific (or indeed pseudo-scientific) structure around this feeling. I would rather leave it as an artistic - poetic - fancy, leave it until one day the science catches up and can put theory and physical laws to it all. Maybe it's some kind of a quantum construct; maybe consciousness is a property of matter along with mass and energy. Maybe the dark matter and dark energy which science cannot touch or measure - maybe that's the force of this beam. Who knows - not me, certainly not in this lifetime.

But let's be practical about 'this lifetime'. It shouldn't just be spent theorising. We should strive to improve as human beings. Avoid hurting others, quashing those flashes of rage that betray our biological roots - the instinctive, the base, the  reptilian - and aim for the angelic.

Your experience of God* is through those spiritual, numinous moments when you feel that clarity, that unity, may occur at any time throughout your life, sought after or unbidden - is but a foretaste of emotions that will intensify within future existences. Like light, a wave and a particle, the beam of which I speak oscillates and spirals along its way. Experience it will gain, it will witness, it will carry wisdom unto the ultimate Consciousness.

*God does not take the personal pronoun 'he', or 'she'. If at all, God takes the personal pronoun 'God'. One stylistic commandment I would lay down.

This time last year:
Childhood memory flashback

This time four years ago:
In which I learn to speak

This time seven years ago:
Sunshine and snow, Łazienki

This time ten years ago:
Wealth and (social) mobility

This time 11 years ago:
Six weeks into Lent

This time 12 years ago:
Foggy morn in Jeziorki

'God' and 'Nation' don't go together.

Lent 2020 - Day 41*

'Gott mit uns' read the buckle on German Wehrmacht belts as its soldiers invaded Europe. 'God with us.' But God was also with us, the Poles, us, the British, us - just about any country other than the Godless atheists of the USSR. On whose side was God in 1939-1945? Where was God in Auschwitz? Which is God's favoured nation?

Poland decided in 1791 to erect a large Temple of Divine Providence in Warsaw to cement the bond between God and the Polish nation. Three years later, Poland was to disappear from the maps of Europe for over a century. Undeterred, as soon as Poland regained independence, its parliament passed an act to build an even larger Temple of Divine Providence in Warsaw. Plans were drawn up, money was raised. Construction was due to start in 1939.

By the time Poland threw off the shackles of communist domination in 1990, you might discern that God might have been trying to tell the Polish nation something. Or else you might just say, "hey ho, third time lucky" and carry on regardless. Poland's rulers went for the second option, and so the Temple of Divine Providence - looking like a giant citrus squeezer - was built, and finally opened on 11 November 2016.

Yet since that day in 2016, things have not looked so rosy for Poland. Today they're looking very grim indeed. Indeed, all over the world.

Were I a still Christian, following the message of Jesus Christ, I would look askance at any nation's attempts at appropriating God for itself. Or indeed Christ or the Blessed Virgin Mary. The very purpose of Christianity, as developed by St Paul of Tarsus, was a rejection of a nation-based religion - Judaism - in favour of a universal one that could appeal equally to Jew, Greek and Roman alike. Were I still a Christian, I would reject the nationalist turn in Poland's Catholic Church, considering it contradictory to Christ's teachings.

Wrapping spirituality in any nation's flag has tragic consequences - witness wartime Japan, where Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan was an arahitogami - an incarnate divinity. One who authorised the use of poison gas against civilian populations hundreds of times during the invasion of China. Hubris visited Japan in 1945, but spared Hirohito, who was merely forced to renounce his divine status.

Using the language of spirituality, of divinity, to inspire aggression and violence against an external 'other' is abhorrent. Living our spiritual lives, lost in amazement at our conscious existence in this Universe of wonders, we should reject all those who try to hitch religion to nationalistic politics.

Pope John Paul II was unique as a Polish pontiff, but his message was universal - no nation should stamp on the face of any other nation. The dividing line between patriotism and nationalism is a clear one - you can love your country while not feeling any animosity towards other countries or their peoples.

[*Incidentally, for those of you who are wondering 'I thought Lent lasted 40 days' - it does if you don't count the Sundays. Traditionally, Catholics could take Sundays off, enjoy meat, wine etc. Not me - I'm going the distance. Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday - one second past midnight :-) ]

This time last year:
Działka update 
(Gosh! so much got done last April!)

This time two years ago:
Łódź is a film set

This time three years ago
Contemplative imagery, Ealing and Warsaw

This time eight years ago:
Baffled: my first visit to Jeziorki's Lidl 

This time nine years ago:
In vino veritas?

This time ten two years ago:
Are we getting more intelligent?

This time 11 three years ago:
Lenten recipe: tuna, chickpea and pesto salad

This time 12 years ago:
Coal train sidings, Konstancin-Jeziorna

This time 13 years ago:
Jeziorki from the air

Coercion, persuasion, conversion and faith

Lent 2020 - Day 40 - Palm Sunday

To quote from Blackadder: "Sir Thomas Moore, burned alive for refusing to recant his Catholicism, must have been kicking himself as the flames licked higher, that it never occurred to him to say, 'I recant my Catholicism'."

I certainly wouldn't give up my life on a point of theology. Only God can see into my soul; my consciousness is judged by the Infinite Universe, my true faith known only to myself. The dialogue between myself and my God is a phenomenon of purest subjective experience.

So many people have been slain for religion over the centuries, for not publicly recanting their beliefs. Adherence to one creed or other has at certain points in history been exceptionally dangerous. Unlike wars fought between nation states, where your language determines the side you fight for, religious wars defined by dogmatic difference are subtly invidious - who is friend and who is foe?

The Crusades are a rare example of an explicit religious war between two separate religions; more usually, its wars between denominations of religions. To this day, Sunnis are blasting Shi'ites and Shi'ites are blowing up Sunnis because one lot believe that Ali ibn Abi Talib is Mohammed's successor while the other lot are convinced that it's Abu Bakr.

The Thirty Years' War claimed the lives of some eight million Europeans, including some 30% of the population of Germany, along the front line of the religious battles between Reformation and counter-reformation. Prior to the Reformation, Europe was Christian, beholden to the one Pope, with the exception of Jewish communities here and there. Martin Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517, and thanks to the power of the printing press, his ideas had spread across Europe in two years.

Christian communities found themselves split on theological grounds - those who supported the Reformation, and those who remained loyal to the Pope. Religious wars (of which the Thirty Years' War was the culmination) raged from the 16th to the 18th century. What divided people were matters of dogma, of creed. Was the Holy Eucharist the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ - or did it merely represent them? Did Jesus have any brothers and sisters? Was the Pope infallible? Millions of human lives were prematurely terminated because of perceived heresies.

But what was really at stake? Was this about temporal power, or about the Divine mystery? God cannot be reduced to words, any more than a cat's miaowing can express the truth about its condition. Humans creating dogma, using tightly defined language, like a lawyer, can never define the metaphysical. Dogmas achieve nothing more than segregating true believers from heretics or unbelievers; and thus conflict between 'us' and 'them', leading religions and religion-based societies into conflicts and barbaric behaviour - torture, persecution, death and war.

Today in the 21st century, we can see that converting heathens to Christianity at the point of the sword was wrong. It was not the way that the Jesus Christ portrayed in the Gospels would have behaved.

Attempting to change a person's view of the Divine, one has to ask - why? In most cases, it is about social control, about the creation of a cult around a leader; it is the biology inherent in the ladder of authority. Stand up to bullies who threaten your livelihood, your peace, your physical freedoms, your right to vote - but then it comes to matters of religious doctrine - the spiritual realm is exclusively a matter between you and your Maker.


This time last year:
My father at 96

This time two years ago
My father at 95

This time three years ago:
Happy 94th to my father...

This time six years ago:
Happy 91st to my father!

This time seven years ago: 
My father at 90

This time eight years ago:
An independent Scotland - what if?

This time nine years ago:
Królikarnia

This time 12 years ago:
Happy 85th to my father!