Some years ago, “The Shack” was a popular book in Christian circles. It’s a novel, written by William P Young and published in 2007. It became a bestseller and stayed on the bestselling list for years. It’s the story of a father who returns to a broken, tumbled down shack in a forest where four years previously police had found evidence that his young daughter Missy may have been murdered after having been abducted during a camping trip at the time when Mack, the father, had left her to go save his son who was in danger of being drowned after the canoe he was in capsized. This was a tragedy that brought on what Mack calls “The Great Sadness”. His return to the scene of his daughter’s possible murder is in response to a note in his mailbox from “Papa” asking Mack to meet him that weekend at the shack. Puzzled as to who Papa is but suspecting it is God (his wife always refers to and talks to God as Papa) he goes.  The shack is as he remembers it, broken down and abandoned but the blood-stained clothing of his daughter is still there, and he vents his grief in anger and tears. Just as he is about to leave, the shack and its surroundings are transformed, and he is welcomed into a warm, cosy home situated in and idyllic environment where he meets God – not just as Papa but as Trinity. So, he meets God the Father in the form of and African American Woman, Jesus a middle eastern carpenter and the Holy Spirit, a young Asian woman. Mack’s interaction with each of these persons brings about peace and acceptance.

My memory of reading the book over 10 years ago was that I didn’t like it and was rather dismissive of it, thinking it was a bit of nonsense.  Most people I knew liked it, because of its account of God, especially God being a black woman, but I thought and still think that its portrayal of the Trinity gave a wrong idea of God. It’s not that I don’t believe in the Trinity but the portrayal of the Trinity as separate individuals and one of them being Jesus does not resonate with me, nor fit with my theology. For me the Trinity is an analogy that says if God is about anything God is about relationships and if God is that Reality in which we live, move, and have our very being then reality itself is relational. But how does an author, an artist, express this reality apart from depicting relations between people?

What has brought this book back into my consciousness is that I was flicking through Netflix and discovered it had been turned into a film which I watched and enjoyed. It may be that I was able to take the story less literally than I did when I read it and was able to sit more lightly on the theological issue of God and the Trinity. What I was left with was the psychology behind it and the power of religion to bring about healing – not in the sense of simply asking for it but in the encouragement of facing up to issues of heart break and tragedy that can lead to transformation. The film, and the book, is a reflection on the problem of evil, of unjust and senseless suffering, a problem that leads many people to reject any belief in God for how can a good God allow such things?  I’m not sure that the film will answer that question satisfactorily for unbelievers but looking beyond the images and metaphors there is I think a lot of wisdom.

In the first instance Mack experiences an unconditional love which does not judge him but supports and encourages him in his heart break. Do we not all need this and is it not a blessing when we have it? It is this acceptance that helps him face up to his grief. He does this in the film by Jesus inviting him to take a rowing boat out into the middle of a lake. Jesus is standing by the shore, and I found myself thinking, ‘oh no, he’s going to walk on water’. And of course, he does. The boat begins to let in water, horrible slimy oily-like black liquid and Mack is in danger of sinking until he steps out of the boat and with Jesus walks to the shore. This is a depiction of the gospel story when Jesus walks on the water to save his disciples from a storm. Did it really happen? Who knows but looking beyond the literal story the wisdom is that we must face the storms of life and religion can be a support in this as can family and friends?  Another scene is when Mack meets wisdom who teaches him not to judge quickly without understanding something of a person’s circumstance and conditioning, whether that be his own father or the man who abducted his daughter.
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The film doesn’t have the same ending as the book though both allow Mack to bury his daughter and so move on, realising that while this all happened when he was unconscious from a road accident that happened on his way to the shack, it had brought about a personal and inner transformation. So, a book, a film, not to be taken literally – maybe a bit like religion itself. It’s not so much what it says but what it means that’s important and if we were to look beyond the literal I think we would find a great deal of wisdom, not just in The Shack but in religion itself.  

CCOP 26 has started, and thousands of people have landed on Glasgow. Today is the day for world leaders and significant individuals to address the conference. Listening to them they all seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet. Environmentalists and young people from developing countries face the conference participants with the reality of climate change and its consequence for the world and their generation with strong, honest and challenging words. ‘You do not need to see my tears or pain to know what is at stake’, said one of them. Thousands of protesters have proved their commitment by walking in pilgrimage to Glasgow, demonstrating across the River Clyde from the conference venue to remind negotiators of what is at stake and how the world is depending on them for a just and constructive agreement. 

A lot of their concerns and hopes for the future were echoed by the world leaders themselves. There is no need to doubt that presidents and prime ministers are unaware of the urgency of the climate crisis, of the greed and selfishness that needs to be challenged, of the solution that is in their hands. But will the worlds translate into action? – that’s the rub.

In ‘The Home We Build Together’ Lord Jonathan Sacks maintained that people will only work together for the common good if they are faced with the same problem, a problem that requires cooperation for a solution. Now we have such a problem. It’s hard to think of any other issue that affects every human being, rich or poor and, beyond humanity, all sentient beings, and the very planet itself. We are in danger of making this beautiful blue planet of ours inhospitable and uninhabitable. And many of us know it and feel the pain of it.

This was very obvious yesterday at an interfaith vigil to pray for the success of this COP. It was simple and showed a great unity of purpose. It began with the reading of what has come to be known as the Glasgow Multifaith Declaration by a Catholic and Episcopalian Bishop, an Imam and a representative from the Sikh faith. The declaration follows on from the 2015 interfaith Lambeth Declaration and the Scottish Religious Leaders' Forum’s Statement of Commitment of 2020. It has been signed by religious leaders in Scotland and the UK and acknowledges the unity among faith communities ‘in caring for human life and the natural world’ and how people of faith ‘share a belief in a hopeful future, as well as an obligation to be responsible in caring for our common home, the Earth’. It includes the commitment to reflect deeply in prayer and meditation to discern how to care for the earth and one other, to make transformational change personally and communally through individual and collective action and to be advocates for justice for the earth and the poor who suffer most from climate change.

The other element in the vigil was a prayer for the environment from each of nine faiths - Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Brahma Kumari, Sikh, Hindu, Baha’i, Pagan and Muslim. What struck so many of the attendees was how similar the sentiments of the prayer were even if expressed differently. For some people new to interfaith this was a revelation but others like me, who have been involved for some time, know there is a unity among people of faith and some of us feel closer to people of other faiths than we do to people in our own. One of the joys for me was to meet friends whom I have known and worked with over the years but have not seen for some time. One of them mentioned that it was her visit to the International Flat in Glasgow and meeting Stella Reekie that started her on her interfaith journey, which is my story too. Stella began the first interfaith group in Scotland, and I consider her the pioneer of interfaith in Scotland which now has a national interfaith body and twenty local interfaith groups. My friend said, ‘you can feel her presence here’ and so you could.
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It is wonderful to know so many people who share a love and concern for the planet and it can be easy to forget that others might feel differently. Some people have too many survival concerns to be thinking of climate change, others are just not interested and don’t recognise the problem, but others are quite cynical about conferences such as COP. This is COP 26 – why, if the other COPS did not produce a result, will this one?  Climate change has always been with us, human beings will eventually become extinct just as the dinosaurs did, how can politicians speak about climate change and fly all over the world to these meetings, the suggestion for combatting climate change are just not possible – all arguments put to me in a recent conversation. There’s no answering these statements. A desire to care for our planet cannot be developed through argument, I suspect, but only by a new vision that appreciates the interconnectedness of all life and our place in the great story of the universe – a story that we don’t hear enough of but one which might help us see with new eyes.  

 Religion and science are often seen to be in opposition to and suspicious of one another. Scientists like Richard Dawkins would see science as having superseded religion and religion and belief in God as superstitious and belonging to another age, believing that in science humankind has come of age.  Some like the late Lord Jonathan Sacks would suggest that the two disciplines are asking different questions, one about how the universe works and the other about what meaning is to be found in the world as we know and experience it. But is this a satisfactory answer for surely what we now know about quantum mechanics, evolution and the origins of the universe can give meaning to our lives and influence our relationship to the environment and to our fellow human beings as much as religion can? If science and religion are windows into reality and are seeking truth in their own way, they can surely learn from one another, rather than fear one another. Pope Francis has said as much when he addressed scientists at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Science “we ought never to fear truth, not become trapped in our own preconceived ideas but welcome new scientific discoveries with an attitude of humility”. 

Someone who is doing this and whom I have recently come across is Professor Steven Phelp, a physicist, philosopher, and member of the Baha’i faith whom I recently heard talk on religion and science. What he said made a lot of sense to me and is, I think, worth sharing. Science, he pointed out is seeking a truth greater than itself. After all it discovers truth, does not construct it, and is limited in its expression of this truth by historical circumstances or the state of knowledge at the time in which it was discovered. Stemming from an intuition about experience and observation of the world it sets up a hypothesis and, through the language of mathematics, comes to a conclusion which only later, and sometimes many years later, is confirmed by observation and experiment. So, Isaac Newton made a great breakthrough when he discovered gravity in the 17th cy. and while it truly expressed reality and has been useful for understanding relationships within the universe it is also wrong because it is based on a static notion of time and space which were at the time thought to be separate realities. It has been superseded by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity which shows that space and time, like matter and energy can translate into one another and are therefore relative rather than absolute. And, suggests Prof. Phelps, Einstein’s theory will also be superseded as knowledge of quantum mechanics grows. Recognising the limitations of these theories does not invalidate them nor render them useless but it does contextualise them. It recognises that while reflecting aspects of the truth they do not contain the whole truth which is still waiting further discovery.
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While I do not understand the science, I can see the similarities with religion. It too has an intuition about reality which it expresses in the language of analogy and myth, but it is also limited in its expression by the understandings of the cosmos prevalent at a given historical period. In a three-tiered universe the sense of Ultimate Reality was seen as existing in a higher dimension – heaven, paradise, nirvana - and the wonders of nature as a gift of a Creator or God – at least in most religions apart from Buddhism that does not posit a creator. Within the context of religions there are many ways of describing God or Ultimate Reality and different ways of relating, not just to that Reality. But all of them are conditioned, as the Buddhists would say, and need to be rethought in the light of scientific discoveries. As with science past theologies and religious categories can be true and useful for living a wholesome life but can appear limited and inadequate in another age. Therefore, they need to be rethought.
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For Prof. Phelps science and religion are maps to help us understand and find meaning in a world which is essentially relational. But maps are always approximations of reality. They are not accurate descriptions of how things are but are useful for helping us negotiate and relate to reality. For a long time, I have felt that the way religious believers, religious liturgies speak of God and address God in prayer does not fit in with what we know of the universe. How can there be a God outside of time, seemingly existing in another dimension and waiting to direct us or answer our prayers or even punish us if we stray and reward us if we live a good life? This concept of God fits in to a three-tiered universe much better than our present understanding of the cosmos and it has been helpful to people in the past, perhaps to some even now but does not resonate with others. For these people, including myself, concepts such as Ultimate Reality, the Ground of Being, that Reality in which we live move and have our very being reflect what I know of the world and lead me to a sense of the Mystery that is at the heart of life. They do not trip off the tongue, however, and while God is a possible substitute for these there is a danger that a simple use of the word God obscures rather than reveals that Mystery and that many who reject any notion of God are doing so without understanding the nature of religious language or the Reality that it is pointing to.