Writing in his preface to Jerusalem Simon Sebag Montefiore comments: ‘Religions must explain the fragile joys and perpetual anxieties that mystify and frighten humanity: we need a greater force than ourselves.’

Religion will indeed never go away, despite the best efforts of campaigning non-believers. True it’s more divided, but in division there’s strength. Old-style belief systems and liturgies still have loyal followers but many look for more personal, more tailored versions, liturgy less important, individual morality (taking ownership of life) more so. Evangelical  churches are thriving, with their prescriptive, literalist approach. For others (including myself) religion is better defined as a sense of otherness, of truths (rather than some entity) beyond our comprehension, but which nonetheless define our lives. And at a practical level religion is a spontaneous celebration of life – of living with others, of human connection. If that’s not common ground between all believers of all faiths we need to take a hard look at ourselves,

The major churches and religions have in the past have been the ‘greater force’ Sebag Montefiore refers to.  That force is now more personal, found within each of us, or within our own personal responses to sacred texts.

As a warning, there’s the deep irony of the Buddhist and Muslims (Rohingyas) violence in Burma, the Buddhist perpetrators substituting a national/cultural for a religious identity. But it’s also of course about fears of survival – higher Muslim birth rates. We have the same worries. Cultural survival: Buddhism was all but wiped out of course by the advance of a resurgent Hindu culture. Islam took over the Christian Middle East and Asia Minor.

Religion ties closely with nation and culture but true religion stands apart.

The ‘new atheist’ approach to all such issues is mired in academia, in squabbles (Richard Dawkins and  EO Wilson aren’t too friendly) and assertions and misses a simple reality – religion is about connection, celebration, wonder. It’s more about others, less about ourselves, about God defined in many ways from the – by definition – unknowable to the intensely personal.

I’ll always argue passionately for rational solutions, I’m not comfortable with the idea of an interventionist God. Natural selection is why I’m here and the path life has taken to culminate (in my mind) in the brief moment of my own existence is inspiring beyond all awe and wonder. But nothing explains life, and by that I don’t mean simple consciousness. I mean life in an experiential sense: our capacity for thought and understanding, for joy and wonder, for love and compassion, our capacity to synthesise and however temporarily make sense of the world. That sense of ourselves in silence, at peace, at one with the world, with the flow of the world. We are where we are because time has brought us here and yet we’re beyond time. We are each of us unique and extraordinary and in that very fire of life lies the only ultimate unquestionable truth.

Religions express that sense and embody it in myriad ways, and they will always do so. If they do so with connection and love and warn us all the while against false instinct and phoney intuition, if they support and intertwine with reason rather than resist it, then generations to come will only benefit.

In the best sense that will be the triumph of religion. God in a different understanding will to the chagrin of the (late) Chris Hitchens and Philip Pullmans of this world be uncaged and be great again.

Honfleur, by the harbour, sitting, reflecting, focusing on the stillness of the water and the boats moored around the quayside, the sun shining, the air cool but the morning chill already departed … understanding in those moments when nothing moves the impermanence of everything, for it’s only in such moments that we’re not clinging on to the world as it rushes by, trying to stop it and make sense of it.

A time of rare peace, with coffee and croissants to follow…

Lying in bed 4.30, it’s June, the birds have just started to sing, and there’s the swish of rain through the open window, for it’s a warm night in our cold climate, and we seize the nights when we can leave windows open. There’s no wind, just that summerish swish, starting gently, building to … not quite roar – it’s not a deluge – but it would be a drenching rain were we out in it.

Back forty years ago I took myself off up the Rigi, on the north side of Lake Lucerne (it’s that wonderful mountain you see, painted in different shades by Turner, as the paddle steamer chugs out from the Lucerne quayside), and slept rough, just me and my sleeping bag, under the stars. But as last night, the rain came out of a seeming clear sky, and I found some rough shelter. An hour or two later came dawn, still grey over the Rigi, but the cloud higher, and to the far south, over the Bernese Oberland, the sun lighting up the snowfields on the Jungfrau and Eiger, just a thin horizon strip, no blue sky to see, just the mountains,  illuminated.

There were no such views from my bedroom window last night. But my memories took me back, and there’s still a sleeping bag in my cupboard, and there could yet be other nights on hard ground with surprises in store, be they meteors or the breaking dawn or something I haven’t yet dreamed of.

There’s Simone Weil’s phrase about God seeing the world through our eyes (‘God, through us, should see the things that we see’), and the perceptive poem by Kerry Hardie, Sheep Fair Day,  responding to it.

Taking on the metaphysics of it all, which probably I should leave to others….If God is the consciousness of the world and the consciousness of each of us, then he will indeed see the world through our eyes. It could be an invaluable corrective to know that he’s not only, or not at all, a moral authority looking down and judging us, but a presence within us looking out, one that requires a clear, unslanted, unscrambled vision. The more loaded with extraneous stuff the less clearly we see, and the less clearly sees out the God within.

God as our Buddha nature, or close to it.

Not the Old Testament God, a God without, nor an unknowable God beyond our comprehension, but a down-to-earth God, simply a voice and vision within.

Sometimes the simplest notions may be best.

The small and rather wonderful Hawksmoor exhibition at Somerset House is all about the Hawksmoor churches across London city, but it’s also for me about the way the photographer, Hélène Binet,  frames the churches. There’s the focusing down on to wall or window as well as the broader view without, and the marvellous angles within, which bring out the mass and weightiness of stone matched to an lightness and sureness of touch such that it seems Hawksmoor never got the angles wrong. The geometry still amazes today, and the mind marvels how such churches could be envisaged let alone built.

Hawksmoor weighed the sky-born Gothic down to earth, he built mass upwards, and created structures that fly high but never soar, there’s always that very biblical tension between earth and air. In medieval times in church you took off to heaven, for a brief sojourn away, in Hawksmoor churches you stay firmly on the ground, which is where by the early 18^th century wise men thought we all should be.

( http://www.somersethouse.org.uk/visual-arts/nicholas-hawksmoor-methodical-imaginings )

All the joys of the world are like this/The many-evented river flowing east

(Li Po, Climbing the Peak at Lin-Hai, trans Barricelli)

January can be a quiet month, where you batten down and escape the chill, the damp and the storms. Why venture out unless you have to? The urban world is different but out in the country nature is in hiding, only a few – the brave gorse, jasmine and aconite – show their faces. The seed is planted and all is dormant until under the first warm rays of March nature breaks cover.

This is a time to retreat inward, not to engage the world, but to watch. Nature on cold days lies becalmed beneath a sparkling sun, on mild Atlantic days the wind blows steadily, the cloud never breaks and the day begins and persists in gloom. Yet the sun will rise and the day will be its predicted length. The wind will blow from its expected quarters, and sometimes its unexpected, but whatever direction we know well the outcome, the wet or the gloom or the chill.

The rooks blur the dawn sky and return well ahead of dusk from their feeding frenzies. We only catch the occasional dart or flurry of garden birds, with rooks nature writes with a sweeping hand.

And the river flows, strong and sure, but the storms and floods of autumn are past. We may sit and watch its flow, imagine our lives caught up in that flow, the ripples on the surface, the sense of passage of time all the more real because the adventitious and distracting events of life are stilled.

Life, we think, has an even flow.

But out in the chalk the water is rising beneath the land and as it rises new and unused springs bubble out and the river rises though the rains may have been weeks gone. The flow is strong and wells up and breaks boundaries, slowly, insidiously. Sun and rooks keep to the January rule but the river breaks the pattern. But it is all so predictable, measured, slow. We can anticipate our fate, count the days, as the river rises and fills out its natural course, until the moment when the first trickle or damp crosses the flags or damps the carpet.

Chalk, its springs and aquifers, its bournes – its river courses – obey a hidden subterranean rule. Not only comes flood, but the ground water rises. The dry land beneath our feet saturates and the first film of water becomes a puddle, a pond, a lake.

We may have wished to contemplate by a stream or river, we hadn’t imagined a lake, our own, private, unwished-for lake, which will have its own beauty in the morning light, and if we’ve secured our possessions and our feet are waterproofed then the lake stillness will balance the water flow, and we may enjoy again the equilibrium, the stasis, that lies at winter’s heart.

But it’s a proposition none of us would wish to test. Better our protected bolt hole. Better the quiet moments to look out on a river which keeps its bounds and imagine lying within it all the events of our world swirling and breaking in the currents, a river which like the Lambourn flows east, as the great rivers of China flow east.

I’d looked forward with great enthusiasm to Nick Dear’s new play at the Almeida, and the reviews were good and I wanted to love it, and part of me did. But maybe not surprrisingly it tried too hard to be a play and the play became disconnected from the reality.

Why should I be closer to the reality than Nick Dear? I can only claim reading Matthew Hollis’s wonderful biography, my own reading of Thomas’s poems and writings, and two long contemplative walks this summer that took me from Selborne to Steep, following the paths he would have walked, and from Steep church up through the village to Shoulder of Mutton hill, and back down again… I walked his landscapes with him.

So yes, I’m party pris, and others will disagree with me. But there’s a contrary case to be made to Nick Dear’s and that’s what you’ll find  in my review, for which see the-dark-earth-and-the-light-sky

“By now it was ten o’clock [in the night of December 5, 1812].  The Emperor rose, pressed their hands affectionately, embraced them, and withdrew… Outside he found a crowd of officers drawn up on either side of his path.  His farewell to them was expressed by a sad forced smile, while their wishes for his success were confined to respectful gestures.  He and Caulaincourt entered a closed carriage…”  (source: Philippe-Paul de Ségur quoted in Scott Armstrong’s excellent Napoleon in Russia blog)

Why out of the blue do I suddenly restart a dormant blog – zenpolitics? And is there anything zen about this event? Well, it’s my birthday, and it’s 2012, so it’s two hundred years ago this evening that Napoleon bade farewell to his officers and to Moscow. Already underway was the most fearsome retreat of all time.

So over a birthday supper tonight in west London I will raise a glass to their memory,  to tens of thousands out on the Russian steppes facing snow and despair, and the most bitter cold imaginable.

I feel so small compared to something so vast, but somehow connected with it. Of all the anniversaries associated with my birthday this one has always resonated most, and today, 200 years on, more than ever.

As for zen, maybe nothing so clearly illustrates the folly of conflict. But somehow that’s facile. 1812 was something else.

Long gone are the days when we had barbarians at the gates. The Romans had taken on the tribes and pushed them beyond the limes, and fortified the frontier, but there was always that threat beyond. When they broke through the limes from the end of the third century onwards the sense of fear and threat must have been palpable. Fast forwarding one thousand years the border between Christian and Slav, in what is now modern Germany, was for centuries a battleground, with death or slavery the penalty for defeat.

Such is the nature of frontiers, and death was an ever-present reality as settlers pushed the way west beyond the Mississippi in nineteenth-century America. California was the final frontier, but untypically it was a land without threat, from sea or land. The Spanish missions had deprived the indigenous Indians of their lands, and once the Mexicans had been expelled the way was open, with the high Rockies the last barrier, the California dream beyond.

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California was the ‘golden land’ in American mythology. Joan Didion refers to a Faulkner short story of that name in her memoir, Where I Was From. How did the dream progress? First came gold, then the railway, then the land was parcelled out, and bought and sold, great landholdings accumulated, which in turn were sold off. The Sacramento valley was a swamp, 150 years on it is agribusiness taken to its furthest degree, with big dams ensuring the rivers always behave. It’s only 150 years since settlers were losing wagons and lives trying to beat the winter over the passes. Most lived and told the tale, the experience seared on memory, but many didn’t.

In Didion’s words by the 1880s Californians ‘had already sold half the state to the Southern Pacific [railroad] and [were] in the process of mortgaging the rest to the federal government’. She continues to chart a reality that never lives up to the high promise of the California dream. Such is the dysfunction of the modern Californian state I wonder if they’d be emigrating if there was anywhere left to go to. Instead they turn in themselves and protect what they have, building new prisons, cutting taxes so the state can’t fulfil its obligations, and showing the same paranoia toward immigrants as other southern states.

Silicon valley opened up a different frontier for California, entrepreneurs creating a reality quite different from the aerospace and agribusinesses that had underpinned the California economy for many decades. But the rest of the world, first Seattle, now New York and London, India, China, Singapore, is answering back with huge hi-tech investment. So that frontier looks dodgy too.

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How quickly frontiers turn from opportunities into places to defend. We talk now of liminal experience, but we’re looking for challenges from a position of comfort, we’re frightened of the old frontier mentality. We like talk of being at the edge, but we want to be safe. In earlier times that wasn’t an option.

Where will the new barbarians come from?

Why do people radical in youth often become blinkered and right-wing in their older age, often throwing out the humanity and compassion that they felt when younger? We feel after a decade or two of adult life that we have the answers, we resort to our own big ideas, which readily turn into prejudices. Youthful ideals get left behind. Withdrawing into more private worlds, identifying with family rather than the wider world, we lose touch with the wider world, and with it our wider sense of compassion.

That’s how for years I’ve looked at the world, and how I’ve interpreted the political divide. It’s not so simple of course. One big idea of our time, now well-established in the centre ground of politics, is that entitlements and the culture that they encourage do more harm than good. True compassion lies in encouraging self-reliance. But taking benefits away can be a cold and cruel process, bereft of compassion. 

Two approaches, present and past, illustrate the dilemma. The second, Victorian, example doesn’t provide a solution, but it does point a way forward.                                                                     

Ian Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms have much of common sense about them. The country is living beyond its means, and we expect too much from the state, too little from ourselves. But whichever report I read, whichever reform is discussed, I ask myself – where’s the compassion? How does this reform relate to the everyday realities of people’s lives. You’re in a corner, unemployed, employable in theory, but you’ve tried everything you can think of, maybe you’re depressed, not knowing what to do next, and some bright spark employed by the government tells them you could be working and your benefits are going to be cut. Maybe you’ll be shaken into action, but maybe that sense of hopelessness will just take a deeper hold. 

Going back 150 years, there’s an article about a wonderful lady, Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, in the current National Trust magazine, arguably an unlikely place (as it is these days, not as it was founded) to find a social conscience.  She set up housing projects in London, back in the mid 1850s, backed by private investment, with housing managers who engaged directly the poor, tackling worklessness and homelessness. She was against government involvement, council housing, free school meals. Everything should be paid for, but no-one exploited. It was a great Victorian charitable enterprise, and that sense of charitable involvement is something that the state’s engagement with our welfare can take away. 

There are some remarkable social entrepreneurs in our own time, and we need more.

So  the same goal, but two different routes. One top down, the government pushing you deep into a hole in the hope that you will somehow feel empowered to climb out, and the other actively empowering you. Charity shouldn’t and can’t take over from the state, but they can be much more in balance. If there are more opportunities for hands-on charitable endeavour, will more people take them up?