The Constant Courageous pursuit of Curiosity

Death certainly gets your attention! Two friends died in recent weeks, and my wife and I have been redoing our wills. It turns out that you can leave a ‘Letter of Wishes’ attached to the Will, where you tell your family what you want to do with the ‘little’ things that Wills don’t concern themselves with – who gets my books and my bikes etc. It also invites you to spell out what you want to happen at your funeral. That is a whole other thing! As I’ve been reflecting on that question, I realised that if I have a choice in the matter there are a whole lot of things I don’t want to happen or be said in my name at my funeral. Not least of all the issues is who could accurately sum up what my faith position actually is, when I struggle to know the answer myself most of the time? 

I’m at a stage of life where the Christian tribe I used to be part of now views me as an outsider, backslider, given-up, given-in, post-evangelical universalist. Whilst some of the people I now hang out with still suspect that I’m part of the Christian tribe, with all the baggage that that carries in their minds. At one level it is a pleasure to confound people’s pigeon-holing and at another level I find it frustrating. Given that I can write my ‘Letter of Wishes’, I shall probably write my own ‘sermon’, so no one can muddy the water on my behalf.

The issue of funerals and Wills and Wishes has also had me reflecting on my own complicated faith journey. Born into a largely secular family, with a strongly atheistic father, I was ‘converted’ in late teenage, in a barn, on a farm in Essex. The message I heard in a very rural, non-ecstatic environment was, ‘come follow this Jesus and change the world’ and “grace – everyone is welcome”. That is what called me then and it is still the core of what calls me forwards to this day. It was nothing about heaven as a way of escaping the judgement of hell and getting an escape route out of this world. I quite clearly remember the culture shock when I did start going to a church, which felt like a time warp to the mid Victorian era, where young people I met were saying how much they were looking forwards to going to heaven. “What!!??” My jaw dropped, as I was thinking, “have I signed up for the wrong thing? This wasn’t mentioned in the barn! Did I miss the small print??” I wanted to live life to the full…now…and change the world!

The next few decades were a melange of trying to make sense of the very real experience and convictions I’d had, the cultural belief system I was being told I should adopt, and how to navigate my way through trying to change the world and trying to hold on to my integrity.by not being swallowed up into the churchy culture I never felt at home in.  And not give up.

Give up? Over those decades I slowly watched most of my friends give up on their faith altogether. Some quietly let it die and they faded into the background, while others engaged with full force at the shrine of the new gods of atheism. Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Dennet – who became affectionally known as The Four Horsemen of the New Atheism[1]. It became uncool to hold on to one’s faith and very cool to join this new, ardent no-faith mission and snigger at  the naive faithful. But here was my challenge. Whatever I am, I am not an atheist. I am not a scientific-materialist, although I am firmly not a la-la-landist. I’m a something-more-ist, a something-beyond-the-material-ist. On one side I found myself firmly agreeing with much of what the new atheists were debunking. There was a lot of tosh wrapped up in cultural statements and subtle power plays. But that wasn’t the whole story. Discerning that something is a myth rather than an actual event doesn’t make it less true. Myth is simply (not simple at all) a way of explaining an unexplainable truth and is therefore so much richer and deeper. What worried me most about the new atheists was their certainty. Wasn’t that the exact same problem with fundamentalist Christianity? It’s certainty, it’s having a closed system that neatly wrapped up every single issue and question and doubt you could think of. Whatever way you look at the world, through whichever lens of beliefs or science, there is so much we simply don’t know. So, when an atheist, or a fundamentalist ‘knows’, then alarm bells ring. Richard Rohr once wrote,

“People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.[2]”

The word agnostic literally means ‘I don’t know’.  When scientists of the highest pedigree and theologians of any and every faith have sincere disagreements then humility is probably the best option. As we see in the world of leadership and almost every other part of life, the hardest thing is to sit with paradoxes, tensions, betwixt and betweens – not knowing. 

Somewhere within all of this fog I realised that I made a decision that was different to most of my friends. And it was a choice. Whilst agreeing with what these friends gave up on, with so much of the cultural, fantastical, elements of a faith, I also made the choice to keep going, keep searching, remain curious and not sign-out of faith. My experiences had been real and formative, and it felt like an act of violence against myself to pretend it had all been one big adolescent joke.  A few people I respected had carried on walking through the mire and the maze and that, to me, felt like the calling to follow.

Whilst shedding the baggage of many cultural beliefs I found myself in the path of the mystics across the centuries, who had kept going against all the odds in their search for life and its truest meaning. People who had tested and had credible experiences and kept an openness to keep on learning. A curiosity. And a courage. A courage to stay curious rather than arrive at an ‘I know’ position of either the faithful or the new atheists. 

The pursuit of a Way, rather than a creed or cultural code. A Way, rather than a destination.

And that where I still relate to the Jesus story. All he ever did was extend a gracious call to all people to follow him, not worship him. The early Christians were called people of The Way. Whilst Christianity seemed to have largely lost that call in favour of escaping to heaven when you die plus a moral code while you wait, it wasn’t lost on me that Buddhism has a long tradition of Practices in the Way. It wasn’t lost on me that Thomas Merton was a dear friend to Thich Nhat Hahn and that Desmond Tutu was a lifelong friend to His Holiness the Dalai Lama. None of these dear people were trying to convert each other to their tribe because they spotted something true and unifying in each other, As Rumi once said,

‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, 

there is a field. 

I’ll meet you there’

I think Rumi’s ‘there’, the field, is probably my church and it’s with people like Merton, Rohr, Marion Gilbert, Nahum Ward-Lev, Thich Nhat Hahn, Julian of Norwich, St John of the Cross, Rumi, Hafiz, Keating, Heschel, Sri M, Mirabai Starr, Wright, Finley & Cynthia Bourgeault – a veritable cloud of witnesses[3] - that I like to hang out with. And it’s asking questions like these below that keeps me moving beyond giving up on faith, to a constant courageous pursuit of curiosity, to uncover a full and meaningful life, now, that changes the world a tiny bit.

What is the nature of this reality I find myself in today? Is it as much unseen as seen?

Is my ego the pinnacle of self-realisation, or is surrendering to a higher power, as AA would say?

What does it mean to be fully and truly human?

Do I change more in response to judgement and criticism, or to grace and kindness?

Is the resurrection an event only on the past or future, or is it the very adventure I’m invited to live out in changing the world today?

Is it Ok to fully embrace the tension, the mystery, the paradox and the liminal spaces of life, in every breath I take?

TW Aug 2026

[1] A phrase that grew out of a filmed conversation with the four of them in 2007

[2] Richard Rohr       Falling Upwards        SPCK    2011

[3] Hebrews Ch 12. v 1