Layers of Literacy, Experience, Ideology And Transformation
The Revd Canon Gavin Ashenden
I’ve called this Layers of Literacy, Experience, Ideology and
Transformation for reasons which I hope will become obvious. All
generalisations are misleading, including this one, but that said I have
often thought that we live in one of the most religiously illiterate
of cultures. As a society our rituals that relate to birth and death,
suffering and longing, have been sifted from having their roots in corporate
religious experience to the medium of entertainment and distraction.
So the first task really ought to be to define what we mean by religious literacy. I think the way it’s usually taken in the secular educational context is something like this: as the capacity to identify and interpret religion and religious behaviour as a reflection and expression of cultural identity. One could argue about that. In that sense, Religious education has set itself the task of teaching people about different religious festivals and preoccupations and if you know the difference between Eid and Easter you might consider yourself to be religiously literate. But I think this educationally imposed self-restriction to the contours of our culture is mistaken. It is certainly limited in scope. There is a rebuke in the scriptures which takes to task the people that uphold the outward sense of religion but deny its power. And I think this approach is the educational equivalent. Different commentators offer alternative analyses of what religioun is for It is certainly there to help us come to terms with the paradoxes that attach our experiences of consciousness and mortality, of longing and a search for coherence. But it also act as an engine of transformation and a mediator of meaning and I think one might say there are layers of religious literacy and we are invited to explore avenues of approach that take us deeper into the proper function of religion. I want therefore to suggest a definition that takes us further in that direction. We might try something like ‘the capacity to experience and interpret both the world and the self in ways that transcend the limitations of agnostic materialism and self-interest’.
The literate will have an informed map of cultural signposts, of course, but also some experience of the transformative energy latent in authentic religious experience. So in this very brief lecture I want to look at these three areas of religious exploration that require literacy and also develop it. Firstly, the recognition of religious experience. Secondly, the refining of religious ideas, and thirdly the reformatting of the associations of religion in the secular mind from conflict to transformation.
Among the opening questions that you have on the sheets in front of you, we are invited to look at this question; “What are the extents and significant territories of this literacy? Arts and literature, social justice and something more”. Well I want to suggest that the something more is the realm of religious experience. If one of the tasks of enabling literacy is to facilitate a move from a grasp of the structural coherence of religion to a personal encounter with what religion is supposed to engender or achieve, we find ourselves exploring the arena of religious experience. It may be the long shadow of Sigmund Freud, but until recently one of the truisms of our culture was that people found it very difficult to talk about religious experience for fear of being judged mentally disturbed or unbalanced. It’s hard to believe this stems only from Freud and a particularly significant paper he wrote in 1907. It certainly captures a similar set of prejudices and anxieties. But the effect that we experience has been to place the arena of religious experience off limits for so many people. One of the tasks of becoming literate involves re-encountering this dimension in a way that accomplishes a number of things. Including to replace fear with familiarity to be able to distinguish between psychological disturbance and the ingress of the numinous.
- Introduction
- Alistair Hardy and the recognition of religious experience
- Ideology, Neurosis and Projection
- Conflict
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