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Sept. 10, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:05:28
PSALMS 139 with James & Gavin Ashenden

Gavin Ashenden grew up in S.W. London, and was educated at the King's School in Canterbury. After originally reading Law at Bristol University, he found himself with a vocation to the priesthood. In 2017, he resigned from his chaplaincy to the Queen in order to be free to speak out for the faith in the contested public forum, and subsequently appeared on media outlets across the world, including Fox News in the USA and the Bolt Report in Australia. Believing  that the consecration of women to the episcopate represented a fatal breach with the Church of England’s Catholic orders, he  resigned from  the Church of England in 2017. He writes as a lay Catholic apologist here < https://ashenden.org/> and also contributes articles in the secular and religious press. His youtube broadcasts can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDsEZkV8hLSQJbWyR_B4arQ ↓ ↓ ↓ If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold / / / / / / Earn interest on Gold: https://monetary-metals.com/delingpole/ / / / / / / Buy James a Coffee at: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole Support James’ Writing at: https://delingpole.substack.com Support James monthly at: https://locals.com/member/JamesDelingpole?community_id=7720

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Time Text
Psalm 139 O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me.
Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising.
Thou understandest my thoughts long before.
Thou art about my path and about my bed, and spiest out all my ways.
For lo, there was not a word in my tongue, but thou, O Lord, knowest it altogether.
Thou hast fashioned me behind and before and laid thine hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for me.
I cannot attain unto it.
Whither shall I go then from thy spirit?
Or whither shall I go then from thy presence?
If I climb up into heaven, thou art there.
If I go down to hell, thou art there also.
If I take the wings of the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall one hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, peradventure, the darkness shall cover me, then shall my night be turned to day.
Yea, the darkness is no darkness with thee, but the night is as clear as the day.
The darkness and light to thee are both alike.
My reins are thine, thou hast covered me in my mother's womb.
I will give thanks unto thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvellous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.
My bones are not hid from thee, though I be made secretly and fashioned beneath in the earth.
Thine eyes did see my substance, and in thy book were all my members written, which were fashioned day by day, when as yet there was none of them.
How dear are thy counsels to me, O God!
O, how great is the sum of them!
If I tell them, they are more in number than the sand.
When I wake up, I am present with thee.
Wilt thou not slay the wicked, O God?
Depart from me, ye bloodthirsty men!
For they speak unrighteously against thee, and thine enemies take thy name in vain.
Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee?
Am I not grieved with those that rise up against Thee?
Yea, I hate them right sore, even as though they were mine enemies.
Prove me, O God, and seek the ground of my heart.
Try me, and examine my thoughts.
Look well if there be any way of wickedness in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.
Welcome to the Psalms with me, James Dellingpole, and my very special guest, Gavin Ashenden.
Gavin, welcome to the Psalms.
Hello James, this is really interesting.
What a wonderful thing to be able to do together.
Well, here's the thing.
I have been planning my psalms series for a long, long time, and probably about a year ago, I said, Gav, you've got to do this psalms podcast with me.
What is your favourite psalm?
And I think you gave me two, and I ended up choosing the shorter of the two psalms.
I can't remember what the other one was, apart from 139.
103.
What was it?
103.
103.
Oh, 103.
103.
What was it?
103.
Oh, 103.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Which, which, which I wasn't familiar with at the time.
And I'm now I know it's one of the it's one of the good ones.
But we're going to talk about Psalm 139.
I think I can guess what appeals to you about this psalm.
I think it's a very beautiful, lyrical and intimate psalm.
But tell me, why is it your favourite psalm?
I think one loves it in proportion to one's existential angst.
Not everyone has existential angst, but I always have.
I remember as a child lying on the ground on a summer's day and looking up at the sky thinking, there is no up, I could easily be falling, only gravity holds me here.
What the heck am I doing here?
Why should I be?
Why should I be lying on the ground on this tiny I mean, why?
Just the why-ness of everything is overwhelmingly problematic.
My own journey was that I put the why to one side for as long as I could get the good things in life.
For as long as I could satiate myself with things that satisfied me, the why quietened down.
But if either you run out of the good things, sex, food, drink, entertainment music, or you have a crisis of some kind, or you have an encounter with evil, then suddenly the why comes back in a very big way.
And the reason this psalm is so powerful, just to put in brackets, there's a lovely letter from Saint Athanasius to a guy called Marcellinus.
And Athanasius is telling Marcellinus why he should pray the psalms.
And he says, the thing is, unlike everything else in the Bible, They get into you and they become your voice.
So it's as if it's your poetry.
I mean, you know, how clever of you to think something so profound and so wonderful.
And so this psalm, if you like, if one part of you is saying, what the heck am I doing here?
This is all nonsense.
I can't make any sense of this.
Another part of you with this psalm in you says, oh, but I'll tell you what you're doing here.
You are loved, you are known, you are treasured, you are adored, you are created with purpose, you are guided, you are companion of the compassionate intelligence with which everything hums and sings and resonates.
This is a very, very purposeful good thing.
And then my sanity is restored.
And so this psalm restores my sanity and deals with my existential angst.
Yeah, they are a sort of form of affirmation, aren't they?
They're very comforting.
And of all the Psalms that I've come across so far, this is the one that says, whatever you do, I suppose to a degree, actually, Psalm 23 says, for thou art with me, thou rod and thou staff, they comfort me.
This one says so at greater length and in greater depth, that whatever you do, my down-sitting and my uprising, thou spiest out all my ways.
Now that use of the word spy, you think about when Miles Coverdale wrote that song, because of course we're quoting the The Book of Common Prayer version, which predates the King James version, which will be more familiar to American viewers by about a century, doesn't it?
But I still like Coverdell.
And Coverdell was writing his translations in a period of great turmoil.
I mean, because of the changing monarchs, depending on whether they had sort of Catholic affiliations or Protestant affiliations or proto-Catholic or Protestant affiliations, that his life was in danger.
So I suppose the concept of spiest out all my ways might have had sort of slightly sinister undertones, but I'm not getting that from this psalm.
I'm not getting that the God in the psalm is anything but a loving figure.
He's not kind of Well, you're right.
I suppose he's judging us as well, but... Well, the context of Coverdale was contested, as you said.
If you think of a spyglass, there's nothing dangerous about a spyglass.
It just shows you things clearly.
And my translation, I use the RSV, is that I'm not acquainted with all my ways, but I love Coverdale.
And I think one of the most wonderful things that ever happened in any culture anywhere is something we're talking about because the whole of the Bible is just the most extraordinary book.
And you only get a sense of how extraordinary it is if you compare it with other stuff.
I mean, if you compare the book of Genesis with the Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, you say, well, this Gilgamesh stuff is all terribly interesting, but it lacks depth, authority, insight.
I mean, it's a great drama.
I fancy these people being clever enough and insightful enough.
But it's nothing like the book of Genesis, which poses these extraordinary questions like, just because you can do something, are you able to live with the consequences of it?
So the whole of the Bible, for the fact that the Bible was translated into our language just at the point when it was at its most beautiful, I don't subscribe to notions of progress in the teleological sense that contemporary culture does.
I think instead of height and depth.
And in the 16th century, if you look at the music and the architecture and the language, it achieved a height that was really totally unsurpassable.
And just at that moment of exquisite height, the high watermark of beauty, that was when they took And one of the reasons, quite rightly, why people complain about modern translations is what they're really complaining about is the decadence of culture and the fact that we no longer have words sufficiently beautiful to carry the extraordinary meaning of this.
Just for one moment, for 100 years, the beauty of the language and the beauty of the meaning synchronized together.
And fused in this kind of love child of aesthetic wonderment.
And we have Coverdale and the authorised version.
Yeah, you just remind, you give me a horrific flashback to my days at my prep school.
And we had this, we had this progressive, he wasn't a bit, he was, he was, he was the music teacher.
So he, He ran the choir and fiddled with the choir when he could get away with it.
One of those, yeah.
He was that sort.
But I remember him announcing one day that this new service book had been introduced and it was satirized in Private Eye as the Rocky Horror Service Book.
And I seem to remember, correct me if I'm wrong, it was in yellow binding, it had a yellow cover.
Yes, one of the offshoots, the alternative service book it was called in those days, about 1980, and it had a yellow cover, you're right.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And it introduced all this modern language to try and update Christianity and make it relevant.
Which is a bit like trying to make Shakespeare more relevant by translating him into modern English.
You're right.
I think the 16th and 17th centuries, the English language was almost at its peak of beauty.
Anyone trying to update that is on a hiding to nothing, because you're just killing the beauty, which is an essential part, I think, of the liturgy.
That's true.
I'm a bit of a slow developer.
It really has taken me a long time in my adult life to see through the claims of progress and the notion that we're going somewhere.
It's taken me a very long time to discover that the people who want to improve society have no vision at the end of it of what it's going to be like.
Their utopia becomes dystopia.
And they never say that if you give trans rights, or you have gay marriage, or you have a so-called equality of the sexes, where they don't even understand what equality means, which they don't, then it'll look like this.
So the whole progressive agenda is one actually of destruction, in fact.
And it's taken me a very long time to see that in our culture, Welcome back, Gavin Ashenden, to welcome the Psalms.
Now, sharper-eyed viewers or sharper-eared listeners may have worked out that there's been a bit of a kerfuffle in between this section and the last, and the reason is, and Gavin you'll understand this because you're not averse to this kind of stuff, it always happens on my religious podcast or anything to do with the subject of the demonic.
The gremlins, well the demons actually, start interfering.
It's weird how often it happens and it tends not to happen or happens much less as a proportion on my non-religious podcasts.
Anyway, you were telling me about your angelic presence which is telling you not to gabble your psalms.
Can I ask you, by the way?
Yeah, go on.
No, tell me your thing in brackets.
Well, in brackets?
Well, no, I was going to ask you, I was going to change the subject, but...
But when I was a vicar on Jersey and I used to spend Saturday nights praying in church for the Holy Spirit, so I'd have a decent sermon and to prepare the next day.
It seemed to me that three hours on my face in front of the altar was a better preparation than watching television.
I'm a bit of a last-minute person and I would print out the service sheet every single Saturday night.
The bloody printer would
would fail but no other day of the week would it fail to print stuff out but Saturday night when I needed the stuff just so that was the point that was the point when just you know simply experimentally over a period of four years it became perfectly clear there was some force some energy some intelligence um screwing up my bloody printer to say nothing of the fact as you quite rightly say that that um when we find ourselves
I remember when I came to see you last.
I got the one and only puncture I've had in the last 15 years.
You know, I was scooping along on my motorbike, coming to see you, looking forward to it very much, and bang!
My back wheel goes.
It was a nail, right?
You know, so OK, it's a coincidence.
But after a while, these coincidences add up and they become a pattern.
And you'd be a very stupid person not to say there is a coherent pattern here which needs, in some way, responding to.
And the only response, of course, is prayer.
And in my case, Remembering to pray to Our Lady in St Michael more assiduously, lest my equipment gets sabotaged.
Because there simply isn't any other explanation for it.
Yeah and have you noticed they're a bit crap these demons?
I mean they do silly things like giving you a puncture and stopping your recording equipment working and stopping your... They're just malicious in a very primitive kind of way.
Yes they've only got certain power and they just use it maliciously to annoy and partly to put us off but I think it has a sense of sort of It's ludicrous but on the other hand it's quite interesting because there's something I'd like to have said about the Psalms if I can just for a moment.
One of the things that has brought me back to Orthodox Christianity, I went through a period of being very liberal.
I had a Jungian period during my 25 years as a university chaplain and When I was in favour very much of all things gay and all things liberal ethically.
And it was encounters with a demonic that brought me back.
But one of the things I find difficult about the spiritual life and the struggle, and some people may identify with this, is when you get a kind of roughing up from the enemy, what happens is, in my case, is he inserts voices into my head that I mistake for my own.
So he tells me, for example, that I am a useless shit.
Nothing good, nothing I can do will ever come to any good.
And it's almost always finished up with, why don't you kill yourself?
Now, I need to explain, James, I'm not suicidal.
I'm not neurotic.
I'm not given to that kind of thing.
And I strongly resent a voice in my own head that resembles my own voice saying, don't you think it's time you talked to yourself?
Now the reason, and I've got a very good friend who's a bit braver and more muscular than I am in a spiritual life, and he says, well you know the thing is Gav, you should stop these voices before they get that close.
And he said, I do, you know, I hold them off long before they get inside.
Now I don't know why they get inside before I've noticed, but they do.
But here's the beautiful thing about the Psalms.
We began our conversation by saying, by quoting St Athanasius talking to Marcellinus, that the thing about the Psalms is, You can adopt them and they become your voice.
They internalize you.
So while you're praying the Psalms, you feel like, well, you know, my goodness, this is good poetry.
Me and God, we're like this, this is going awfully well.
This relationship I have with God that the Psalms is giving me is quite something.
In other words, they become an antidotal inner voice to this other inner voice, which is destructive.
And for anybody who's serious about their Christianity and will find themselves engaging with the other side, I think the Psalms are one of the most valuable ways of dealing with the other side and the other voice.
And another thing I discovered is that we have to, we don't have to, but it's a good thing to say them out loud.
Time and space likes the psalms, which is why I think all the monks did it.
I think the monastic vision in the Middle Ages and beyond was to come to a place and to make it dance with the music of love by articulating the psalms out loud.
And that does more It has an effect.
It is not just local.
I don't know how that works.
I mean, I remember I had a spiritual director who was an Anglican abbot explaining to me that he was a physicist, that it had something to do with the law of thermodynamics.
But the monks saw themselves as contributing to a kind of nuclear reactor that energised and was on behalf of other people.
And so I think when we come to the Psalms, it's not just a matter of me and my piety, though that's good, nor a matter of me finding an internal voice.
to subdue and to counter as an antidote to the other voice.
But actually, we affect the world in some metaphysical way.
Evil is somehow diluted, repulsed, distorted, We demoralize evil by saying the psalms out loud.
I don't know why but increasingly I found that that seems to be the case and I therefore think that we're back to traditional Christianity.
We need people who stop morning and evening at lunchtime or seven times a day and say a psalm out loud and that's one of the ways in which we begin to loosen this asphyxiating grip that evil has on our society.
Well, I think that we were talking earlier about the Rocky Horror Service book and I think in our lifetimes that we've witnessed the The ongoing destruction of Christianity, the ridiculing of it, the turning of it into this uncool, embarrassing, cringe thing that, I mean, I even think Songs of Praise was actually part of the war on Christianity.
It wasn't really about... When the BBC has a religious slot, the BBC, you know, it's not doing it because it loves God.
It's got an ulterior.
purpose yeah yes it's fine you remember there used to be this thing called school prayers i mean every schools used to have assemblies at which prayers were said aloud and i'm sure that that those prayers had an effect on well i'm i'm by coincidence i'm just reading daniel and the bit where daniel says his prayer
And he gets a visitation from an angel who explains that there's been a hold up in getting his message.
Anyway, you know the scene I'm talking about, but it seems to me that that spells out that when we pray, we are helping the forces of God do their work and fight the forces of darkness.
Isn't that it?
It is, and both praying out loud and reading the Bible out loud, or whenever it can be done, acts at a variety of levels.
So at one level, you would say, well, this was, you know, Victorian public piety.
Teaching boys that prayer is a good thing, stopping and being grateful for a moment is a good thing.
And at some sort of, you know, some Dorkheimian sociological level, no bad thing to have communities stop and reflect.
But in my case, I remember So, you know, I didn't know what I'd end up as.
I had no idea I was called to be an Anglican priest and Christian agitator.
I thought I was going to be a lawyer.
Because my father was a lawyer, my godparents were lawyers, I went to university to study law.
But at the age of about 11, I remember having the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when they read the Bible out loud.
And in particular, the prayer of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, inviting us to fight as God's servants without seeking reward or rest.
And there were some periods of some things in the Bible that absolutely knocked this 11-year-old sideways.
I remember Elijah confronting the prophets of Baal.
I remember being astonished by Elisha and the axe heads and Merkava mysticism, Ezekiel going up in the chariot.
I remember being absolutely overwhelmed by Solomon, not Solomon, by Samuel in the temple.
And they didn't make me a Christian.
But they buried, I suppose they put a kind of coding inside me so that when the electricity finally came and my soul leapt into life, these neural pathways of trust and experience were already formed to some extent.
And that gave me a kind of quicker start than if you'd had to start from the very, very beginning.
And I think that you never know how Making the presence of God available is going to sow a seed of some kind.
We need to move beyond the functional and beyond the here and now and realise whenever you say a psalm, whenever you say a prayer, Whenever you make an act of witness, there is a potentiality for something to be born, to grow, and to work for good in human affairs.
And there are enough ways of doing it, which we want to avoid.
We're not Americans.
But there are some quite sophisticated ways of doing it, which we're perfectly entitled to make use of.
And they include celebrating the beauty of the most extraordinary music that's ever been created, or the most extraordinary literature.
So, anyway, there we are.
Yes, that's the point.
Well, yes, I want to borrow for a moment all your scholarship.
Because, I mean, just tell us briefly about your background, about what you've done.
So I went to university to read law thinking I was going to be a lawyer.
I've always been a bit of a reformer.
I tried to persuade them to change the syllabus so we learnt more legal philosophy rather than just convincing.
I then had very nasty experiences which made me go to church.
I heard about Jesus for the umpteenth time and my situation was so serious and I thought I'm willing to provisionally convert.
So I became a provisional Christian for periods of 48 hours to be examined.
I didn't want to be caught by a stupid philosophy that wasn't true.
Billy Graham terrified me.
Because it was this idea, which was nonsense when you look at it in the light of day, but it's one of these things that get into your head and tell you untruths and confuse your brain, that somehow Christianity was about brainwashing and trapping you.
And so I thought, well, okay, if I only convert for periods of 48 hours, I can de-brainwash, de-trap myself.
But I started going to church and then the struggles in good and evil became more vivid.
I began to think I had a vocation to be an Anglican priest and I became one.
And part of me said, well this is good because I can get other people to fund my intellectual quest.
So the church is going to pay for me to do a theology degree.
There's no harm in that, what fun!
So I did a theology degree and then it was ordained.
And then my bishop said, we think you have untapped intellectual potential.
We'd like to pay the Jesuits at London University to give you a postgraduate degree in psychology.
So I said, well, yes, please.
Thank you very much.
So I did a postgraduate degree in the psychology of religion with Jesuits and then Some later stage I began to embark on a PhD on the work of the Oxford Inklings, in particular Charles Williams, which was a very interesting area indeed.
And so I got a doctorate and then I, so I had four degrees, all in different areas which Makes me shallow but encompassing a fair area.
Then I went to a university where I got a tenured job both as a chaplain and as a senior lecturer and I taught psychology and philosophy and English literature for 25 years at our most radical red brick university there is.
And this was great fun because there were a lot of atheists there who wanted to torment the chaplain so they would wait after work in the bar.
There was a marvellous biologist, what was his name?
We put up buildings with his name.
And so I'd go into the cultural centre after work and the atheists, all of whom had Nobel Prize sitting in wait, We'd drink beer and we'd argue together.
It was a marvellous time when Dawkins came and we gave him a degree and he stood up on the stage and made fun of Christians.
He and I both had our academic dress hooked next to each other and I said, Richard, you're a bully!
You know every time you do this you just pick up on stupid Christians but I'm not stupid and I'd like to have a public debate with you over the graduation lunch because you know I've been doing this now for a while and Dawkins just wasn't well read and his thinking processes were not very elastic.
So I said, you know, we've got three hours of eating and drinking.
Why don't you and I have a public debate and entertain our peers over lunch?
Because I want to reply.
So he said, I'm not doing that.
And he tore off.
So some of my Nobel Prize scientist friends came up to me and said, Gav, were you rude to our mate Richard?
And I said, no, I was very polite.
What did you say?
I said, have a public debate over bloody lunch, you coward.
They said, well, it looked like he ran off.
I said, yeah, he scuttled.
Well, we'll do it.
We'll do it.
So we cleared one of the bigger tables, and I had half a dozen fairly eminent worldwide scientists together, and we argued about Christianity.
If you'll forgive my saying so I whooped their arse because the thing about clever scientists is they all grew up as clever little boys and they got good at science but they stopped having any philosophical thoughts or religious thoughts about the age of 11.
So it's like taking candy from a child.
I mean they just haven't thought it through.
They're so convinced of their empiricism that all the philosophical issues are ones that they haven't even begun So I spent 25 years arguing with scientists, and in the end, the nice thing was, my atheist scientists asked me to bury them.
So they say, would you please conduct our funeral services, but you're not allowed to mention God.
So for a while, I wasn't sure if this was the right thing to do or not.
I consulted my colleagues.
Well, you know, with a bit of imagination, we could make something of this.
So I agreed to do it.
And then the chapel would be full of 300 people, saying goodbye to an eminent scientist.
And we'd tell all the usual lies, you know, what a nice and wonderful man he was, knowing perfectly well he was a bit of a shit.
Although a clever shit.
A clever shit we quite liked and admired.
And then we'd come to a bit where, in the Christian liturgy, One would give thanks.
So I would stand up in front of them and say, well, guys, you know, we've we've we've done the sociological thing of letting go of Professor Bloggs.
Now, you know, in terms of indigenous spirituality, that was my sort of getting myself a bit of a ticket, because you can't be against anything indigenous or anything spiritual.
You'd be against Christian things.
You'd hate those.
But if I said I was speaking in the name of indigenous spirituality, that always rocked them back a bit.
I said, the practice of indigenous spirituality here is to give thanks to God for this man's life, but I've promised not to mention God in these, so I won't.
But there's going to be a period of five minutes silence, and during this five minutes I'm going to say thank you to you-know-who, because I'm very grateful for his friendship and for the intellectual battles we had and for the teasing.
I really enjoyed it.
I'm very grateful.
So I'm going to, you know, I'm going to say thank you to him.
Now, I said, you too are grateful.
I have absolutely no idea what you're going to do in this next five minutes because you're a bit stuck.
Normally I would offer to help you, but we've agreed that the God is taboo.
So, you know, I'm going to start the five minutes now.
You'll see my lips mutter and a smile on my face and I'll meet you the other side.
It's going to be quite uncomfortable for you, but good luck.
And then there'd be five-minute silence.
You've no idea how uncomfortable five-minute silence can be.
And they'd wriggle and they'd smile and they'd, you know, because the fact was we're dealing with life and death.
You know, here's someone we knew.
They were there.
Now they're not there.
How the hell do you explain that?
And the great thing about Christian liturgy and funeral services is it's designed to walk you through a process of recognition of mortality and mourning and thanksgiving and commendation.
It's all sociologically and liturgically very good, but these idiots refused to take part in it.
They just wanted to, you know, they had to mark the death and the form of celebration.
So we'd come the other side and I'd open my eyes and I'd smile and I'd say, how was it for you?
They'd wink at me and smile and shift uncomfortably and then we'd go on to get drunk downstairs.
So I had a great time during 25 years at the most atheist university in the country and I continued to read and teach and research and engage in public debate with people who are very cross with God or who are very
I'm anxious to find him and really I could hardly have had a more colourful place to spend 25 years arguing, discussing and dealing with some fairly serious stuff as well.
A whole string of kids who wanted to kill themselves because they were profoundly depressed and existentially undone and they would come to the Chaplin as a last resort.
So it wasn't just having enjoyable conversations.
A great deal of rescue work to be done.
I remember, if I can just tell one story...
One of my favourite lesbians.
My number's on a Sunday.
You need to know that university chaplaincies don't get many people coming to them.
And I had about between one and two dozen, but most chaplaincies are closed on Sundays because they don't get anybody.
And when we got down to about one and a half dozen, I said to the kids, you know, there are some big university student churches in town and maybe I'm keeping you from being surrounded by a couple of hundred cheering, tambourine waving, Maybe we should close it down on Sundays and just do our stuff in the week.
I'm just asking myself the question.
One of my favourite lesbian postgraduate mathematicians said, Gav, come and do the washing up with me.
So we went into the kitchen and we went through the sink.
She rolled up her sleeves and I rolled up my sleeves.
But her forearms were very badly scarred.
They were absolutely mashed to pieces.
And I said to her, oh, so you've been through a period of self-harming?
And she said, yes, you know, and she really, I mean, she cut herself to bits.
And I said, I'm really sorry, I didn't know that.
She said, no, you know, I wear long sleeves, nobody knows that.
But she said, I don't think you, I don't think you, you're fully informed.
So you need to know that there was one point sort of when I was early in my postgraduate life when I had decided I was going to kill myself and I'm a fairly methodical person, I'm a scientist, I got it all ready but I wasn't absolutely sure there was no God so I thought before I do the act I'll give God one last chance and go to church and so I walked over to the chaplaincy and you had a service on and I walked into the service and you said something in the context of that service that changed my mind and gave me hope
And I didn't kill myself.
No, she said, gave me a very fierce look.
Do you think that saving one life is worth keeping your bloody doors open on a Sunday for?
And I said, yes, I suppose it is.
Well, she said, let's hear no more of closing the place down and sending people into town.
You know, I wouldn't have made it to town.
So there were spectacular Moments of spiritual journeys taking place, as well as the opportunity to argue with some fairly pugnacious and interesting people.
But it means that there aren't very many places or people where I can go and feel at a loss after 25 years there.
So that was a very delightfully long answer.
Sorry, I'm becoming a verbose old man!
No, that's fine.
Gavin, I said you could talk about whatever.
I note that we have not talked very much about Psalm 139, but that's all right because it means I can come back to it with another person from a different angle.
Because, you know, I'm not going to learn all the Psalms.
I mean, I probably will learn Psalm 119 at some stage, just because it's the Everest of Psalms.
I mean, it's really long.
It's about, you know, a dozen Psalms strung together.
But I wanted to ask you, wearing your religious scholar hat, how kosher are the Psalms?
I mean, how important are they for Christians?
Because one of my I have mixed feelings about C.S.
Lewis.
I love some of his stuff and he's a great Christian apologist or whatever, but his book on the Psalms is rubbish.
He has no feeling for the Psalms.
He actually is of a mindset where he thinks that the Psalms are an Old Testament thing and pretty much they're the Jewish domain rather than the Christian domain.
You sense that from his book on the Psalms.
He doesn't get it at all.
Whereas for me, The Psalms, correct me if I'm wrong, the Psalms are absolutely integral to Christian faith and time and again through history you see In the period of the Benedictine rule, when every novice, his first job was to learn the Psalter, that was the deal.
And you see it at moments of crisis in history, every great Christian has recited the Psalms pretty much, particularly in martyrdom, but at other times as well.
But I just want you, so can you just briefly put the Psalms in their context, why they matter?
So we'll start with Lewis, where you began.
Lewis was an Ulsterman and he had some residual prejudices against Catholicism.
He was a very clever man and if you read the Screwtape Letters or Letters to Malcolm, you very quickly realise that he had a profound mystical life and had himself engaged in some very muscular spiritual struggle.
You don't get the insight into the things that he writes so clearly about, often with his tongue in his cheek in order to allow you to cope with them.
Without having really been on a very profound journey.
I think people don't understand how profound Lewis's own spiritual struggle and discipleship was because he wears it so lightly and he offers it to you in fairy tales and humour in order to give you access to it because a full-on thing would be too difficult otherwise.
But he was an Ulsterman and he found Aspects of Catholicism are very, very difficult.
Now the one aspect, the reason I mention that is not because I'm doing a tribal thing of going, yeah, yeah, Catholicism, far from it.
But one of the really interesting theological differences between Protestantism and Catholicism is the relationship between the Old and the New Testament.
So I remember going to my very evangelical seminary and saying, you know, where is the course on the relationship between the Old and New Testament?
And there wasn't one because Because of this implicit view in Protestantism that the Old Testament acts the kind of dressing up box which you can open from time to time and reach in and find something you like and you know it's very nice and then but you don't but you can pick and choose as you want.
But actually, let's call it Historic Christianity, which includes Orthodoxy and Catholicism, everything pre-1520 in the West.
Historic Christianity has understood that there's a far more homogenous relationship between the Old and the New.
And if you read the Epistle to the Hebrews, you can see that he's working almost completely out of Old Testament paradigms, what we call Old Testament paradigms.
We'd better call them First Covenant, actually.
Now, one of the reasons One of the things you have in historic Christianity is experience.
Things only last if they work.
So the mass only happened because it was discovered that it worked.
When you look at the different monastic rules, and the monasteries in a sense really are Christian SAS, these are people who've decided they're going to spend their life on their knees, and obviously they do things with their hands, they garden, they do calligraphy, they write music, I mean there's a whole load of things that they do, but their job is to open wide the window between heaven and earth
Simply by saying their prayers on behalf of themselves, on behalf of the whole church.
And as they set out to say their prayers, they discovered that the best way of doing it was the recitation of the Psalms.
So whatever we think of the Psalms, whatever we think of the Old Testament, we've got a whole We've got a whole civilization, a whole group of people who've made it their life's work.
So we ought to take that seriously because really the question we're asking is, does this work?
Is it good for us?
Should we be doing it?
And so the answer is, Well, if the whole of Christian civilization was based on communities who converted to society, because it was the monks who converted to pagans, you know, the early pagan Nazis, the god of Thor and other gods, including the Roman ones represented.
So we've got to give them some credit and people often don't they don't give credit to the Celtic monks who converted the whole of Europe to Christ instead of Thor.
But the Psalms are clearly a real part of that so then we should use the Psalms.
What are our objections to them?
The objections might be, for example, like the end of Psalm 139, let's go back to it, where it says, Oh Lord, I wish you'd smite the people who hate you.
And, you know, I remember in Anglican services where... Blessed shall he be that taketh my children and throweth them against the stones.
Well, yes, the Babylonian.
Blessed is he who takes a Babylonian child and smites his skull against a stone.
I'm sorry, you were talking about 139.
Sorry, I'm getting confused.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think it's 137, but anyway, never mind.
There's full-blooded rage in the Psalms.
If you're practicing the religion of Nice, which on the whole is what Christianity is, through homeopathic treatment to send it to isn't acceptable.
But if you've taken a look at the way evil works and if you've seen documentaries of German soldiers and lady bureaucrats stripping young Jewish children of their spectacles and their leather boots in order to throw the children into the gas ovens, You might find yourself getting very, very angry with evil.
If you've had any glimpse of the holocaust of living children who were conceived in their mother's wombs and have then been stripped out and burnt or used for spare biological parts, which the abortion industry has done, you might find yourself Angry, not only at the thing, but at the people who closed their eyes to the humanity that they were dealing with and destroyed other people.
Well, I can get, you know, I have no trouble at all saying those lines.
Bloody well destroy them, Lord.
Give them a chance to repent by all means.
If there's any chance at all of throwing them a lifeline so they can be saying, well, do it and I'll help you do it by being as muscular and as argumentative and as determined as possible.
But if they refuse, Get rid of them!
Get rid of this evil because we're talking about the evil and what evil does is it always seeks victims who are really vulnerable and particularly children.
What we're doing to children in our age in terms of their sexualization and their abuse is really bad and if you have a glimpse of what holiness is and what goodness is and what love and compassion is Then those people who make holiness and goodness and love and compassion inaccessible to those who most need it are ones entitled to be angry with them.
And in the Psalms, You don't find a bourgeois sentimentalist who's censoring the full range of emotions that a struggle with good and evil deals with.
You get a full-blooded response to this struggle.
And so I have no difficulty at all with these things.
But also I think they should be moved.
This is the difference between Christianity and Judaism, or rather the original context.
If you aim them at the demons rather than at the people it makes perfect sense.
Because in a sense the people have been corrupted by the demons and so let us cut some of the people some slack and hope that they find a moment of repentance.
"Petwixt the stirrup and the ground, "I mercy sought and mercy found." Who knows at what point people will have a sense of the call of the living God on their soul.
But if I'm feeling it all queasy, then I go for the demons because on the whole, this is about spiritual evil, spiritual corruption, the spiritual origins of our struggle.
And so I think no one can have any real difficulty in using These cross parts of the Psalms and what the Psalms do all the way through is they take the whole of the human experience, depressed, delighted, longing, satiated, questing, finding, and they put it into a poetry of love and they give you an instant relationship with God.
All you have to do is to recite the Psalm and it becomes It carries you into a relationship with God that is ready-made.
It's pre-formatted.
You just have to hang on and not get thrown off.
And there's no other part of the Bible that does that.
I mean, some of the prophetic bits do, bits of Daniel, bits of Ezekiel.
You get carried into the prophet's experience.
But what the psalm does is it makes prophets of us all.
It allows us to grab on and hang on for the ride.
Yes, I mean, by the way, just a word for the Calvinists.
I had a Calvinist on the other day and his church was well into the Psalms, or the Psalms he called them, I don't know, maybe that's some sort of American pronunciation.
They're really into their Psalms, so it's not just the old churches that do this thing, but I agree that there is this awkwardness in the Let me move beyond the tribalism.
I've become a Catholic simply because I found it's true and if it's true I'd like to share it with other people.
In Catholicism, I've become a Catholic simply because I've found it's true.
And if it's true, I'd like to share it with other people.
But that in no way denigrates other Christians who belong to the Protestant tradition.
And one of the things about Calvinists is they take Jesus seriously.
They're wonderful Christians.
In almost everything they affirm, I'm with them.
I'm just cagey about what they deny because I think they've been taught to deny.
I think they've been given a false target.
But what they're good at in the Christian life, they should be applauded and admired and loved and treasured.
I was going to say, there is the kind of the Jesus is my girlfriend strand of Christianity, which I suppose is kind of a branch of the evangelical end of Christianity.
Which really is, as you say, uncomfortable.
And I, part of my process of falling upward, as Richard Rohr might put it, when I sort of rediscovered Christianity and became reborn when I sort of rediscovered Christianity and became reborn as a full-on Christian as opposed to a cultural Christian, I felt very much God's voice steering me towards the Psalms.
I mean, why would I have done it?
Okay, it could have just been a kind of random A random notion that was plucked from the ether and ended up in my head, but I don't think so.
I really think that God was saying to me, look, have a look at the Psalms, they're really solid.
And I was really just wanting you to confirm that, which you more or less have, that the God of the Psalms is the same as the God of Jesus' Father in the New Testament, is he not?
Yes, but more than that.
There are some lovely nuns and holy women who've had mystical experiences in the New Testament.
One of my favourites is a woman called Maria Valtorta.
She was an Italian woman who was mugged in about 1919 and spent the rest of her life on her back and had visions of the New Testament.
"People aren't entirely sure how reliable they are, "but I like them very much.
"They seem to me to have profound ring of truth." And one of the things she suggests as she gets this kind of re-presentation, visions of our Lord's life, which are very, very powerfully rewritten, She says our Lord walked around Palestine doing what good Jews would do and he sang the Psalms with his disciples, a bit like American soldiers at boot camp singing as they trudge, singing American ditties of
of survival.
Our Lord's life was built around the Psalms, and you can see from the Gospels that he's forever quoting from them.
And very often, I mean, they act as theological time bombs.
How many people get told in the verse of dereliction in Psalm 22 when Jesus says, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And sort of, you know, preachers go, oh isn't that sweet?
He went through it just like we went through it.
Poor love!
But actually he's, rather like T.S.
Eliot, he's quoting in order that you deal with the whole thing.
Psalm 22 is a psalm of dereliction but it ends up with four verses of the most powerful affirmation of the victory of God in the face of evil.
And so he, you know, he was doing two things.
Of course he was entering into utter Human dereliction with us and on our behalf.
Of course he was.
But by using that psalm, he was telling anybody who knew the Psalms, it's going to be absolutely fine and better than fine.
Look at the end.
Look how this is going to end up.
So the psalms, our Lord uses psalms all the time, the disciples use the psalms, the churches use the psalms, and if I just want to, in terms of your discernment, I'm a great fan of William James, who was an agnostic psychologist and philosopher, brother of Henry James.
William James remained agnostic for the whole of his life, but he wrote a very interesting book called Varieties of Religious Experience.
One of the things he was involved with was trying to catalogue people who'd had strange experiences about God.
And of course metaphysical experiences are mixed things.
Some come out of a messy mental state, and they're nothing other than a messy mental state.
Others are from the Holy Spirit and some are from the bad spirit.
Actually telling the difference between these things is not straightforward.
One of the things William James said was if you think you're having some kind of encounter with God One of the ways of telling whether it's real or not is to look at the effects of it.
So you know there are lots of people who said I've been converted or I've had an experience of the Holy Spirit or I've been baptized from the Holy Spirit and then William James said well let's look at their life five years down the road and if their life's been turned around then we may give some credit.
Potentially we may give some credit to their claim.
If it hasn't been then we won't give any credit to it.
So here are you saying, I thought God spoke to me and said, involve yourself in the Psalms, and I did.
How's the outcome been?
What's the outcome?
If the outcome has been to deepen your Christian life, to make God more vivid and real, and to create a bridge for other people to make it more vivid and real, which is what I think you're doing, then there's a very good chance that you did hear God, rather than your imagination.
That's the more important thing.
I'm definitely evangelizing.
Do you know what?
I think that the thing that used to put me off Christianity was the kind of, oh, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he, or even one of my pet hates, Crimmond.
Crimmond, the tune to which that warbly version of the Lord is my shepherd.
It's kind of, oh, isn't Jesus cute?
Isn't it?
It just, I'm sorry, it makes me want to chuck.
Whereas, whereas, I look at the Psalms and I think, yeah, Vicar of Dibleyshire, who wears an inverted cross.
I mean, that's another, that's another part of the war on Christianity.
That is satanic or certainly Luciferian.
But the Psalms, I just feel like they are righteous.
And I feel no embarrassment about talking and evangelizing on their behalf and encouraging people to learn them.
I've got to go and get my hair cut.
You can see it.
I could talk to you for hours Gavin and especially given that you've we've spent the whole podcast virtually talking about nothing About everything but Psalm 139, but here's a question.
I wanted to ask you going back to the the topic briefly Well that pains me to do so because I I hate I hate staying on topic is that It's such an intimate psalm.
Thou hast fashioned me before and behind and laid thine hand upon me.
There's something, well, literally tactile about that moment.
God is with you, God is inhabiting you and watching your every move and is with you whether you're up in heaven or down in hell and so on.
My experience of Christianity has been Very much about this intimate relationship with God, with Jesus, talking to him daily in the morning and the evening, midday, through prayer and through reciting the Psalms.
But I know that there's a certain kind of Christian, who will say that people who talk about their personal relationship with God is sort of bordering on the Gnostic, and that you're kind of inventing your own religion.
But it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong Gavin, that one's relationship with Christianity is an incredibly personal thing.
That one Christian's relationship with God is not the same as another Christian's.
Am I wrong here?
No, you're right and I'd like to explain it in reference to the Holy Trinity because I think it works best.
I remember being teased by, I used to have a radio show on the BBC in Southern Counties and I would interview people and I got on a rather clever rabbi and he said, he teased me of what he called about your complex monotheism by which he really meant polytheism.
You Christians are polytheists, you believe in Well, he can talk.
They're not monotheists, the Talmudic Jews.
Let's put him on one side.
But I remember thinking that the Trinity requires some defending.
So let me, I'd like to defend the Trinity and answer your question at the same time.
If I can.
The reason we believe in God as triune is because it's forced upon us.
No one would invent this if they could get away with it because it's intellectually difficult and painful.
But the fact is that we encounter God in different dimensions.
So first of all, here we are stuck on a tiny speck in the middle of what science tells us is an inconceivably large space.
And yet we appear to have been fashioned by an intelligent energy with an appetite for truth and beauty.
And if you just have an empirical view of matter, this is nonsense.
It's impossible to square our quest for beauty and truth and love with with a materialistic view of what we're doing here.
So the first thing that we discover from the Trinity is that God is the Creator and that the Creator is in fact like us, or rather, to revoice the Feuerbachian telescope, we are like Him.
So we're like him and therefore we have a relationship of intimacy or of likeness with the intelligence that lies outside time and space and has made this.
Well, that's an extraordinarily mind-blowing thing, but he's a bit distant.
So the question is, how can that distance be covered?
And he covers the distance first of all with the prophets but then he comes himself because one of the problems we have is that having free will it's extremely hard to justify the fact that we caused so much damage with our free will and in particular that our free will has allowed evil so much play between us and the only way in which God can justify giving us free will is if instead of asking us to go through this whole risky enterprise of autonomy and quest
and hurting ourselves while we do it is if he comes and gets hurt with us because it's a dangerous process that we're in.
It has its ecstasy and its beauty but it's bloody dangerous and hurts a lot and it's very hard to imagine how a good God could justify what looks to some people on a bad day like an experiment unless he enters into the experiment and so then you have God
from out there becoming God closer in Jesus and although people didn't want to think of Jesus as God because it looks like an idolatry, everything he did, everything he said, everything that happened to him lead to inescapably to a conclusion only this can only be God but that's but that's still only two two-thirds of the stage.
What Jesus then said is we're coming closer We're coming right into your heart.
We're going to pierce your heart and make our home in your heart.
And this is what the Holy Spirit does.
So the whole dynamic of a relationship with God in the Christian narrative is that he starts out there, explains that you have an ontological reason for being, Psalm 139, Lord you have made me, I am wonderfully made.
You know everything about me.
You go everywhere.
There isn't any way you're not.
I have a reason to be here.
And then he slowly approaches insofar as you let him.
You have to say yes at every stage.
And in fact, there is no end to the stage of saying yes to God.
It never stops.
Just because we've said yes to Jesus once doesn't mean that the whole process is complete.
There's a constant journey to the centre of our hearts and when it gets into our hearts he then starts the job of reconstruction, of dealing with hatred and wounds and unforgiveness and mess and dysfunctionality and what he asks of us is we just continue to say yes to him.
If you love me you keep my commandments.
The Father and I will make our home within you.
And so what you've been talking about is how do we describe this relationship of intimacy when God makes his home in our hearts and begins a job of reconstruction of who we are, how we love, how we live?
Well, it will partly depend.
It's a bit like instruments in the orchestra.
Tubers make a noise like tubers.
They're not very nice to listen to sometimes.
Some Christians are tubers and they explain their relationship of intimacy with sort of ungainly farting noises and you can't listen to them very long.
Other Christians are like futes or violins and they carry the melody of God rather better.
But one of the things I've had to learn is the fact that there are people who do Christianity badly or in a way that I find aesthetically improbable or I shouldn't Shouldn't stop me appreciating the fact that there are people who do it most wonderfully well and heartbreakingly well.
So we all have to find a way of giving an account for this extraordinary experience of having been pierced by God.
I will make a new heart and set it within you, he says in Jeremiah 31.
You know, Jesus talking with those very familiar words.
You're going to have to have A relaunch.
A rebirth from above.
Some kind of reboot, if you like.
And in this reboot, he then starts to work on us.
And he works on us especially through reading the Bible, but especially through taking the sacraments.
And I'm afraid, even through one another, one of the most difficult things is that when God comes to us through other Christians, which is the most difficult avenue imaginable, and through our love, our forgiveness, our patience, our encountering with one another, God smuggles himself into our relationships and changes it.
And I must say that it's not Gnostic, because it would be Gnostic if it was confined to praying and to the Bible, but But the effect that living in community with other Christians, having Christian friends, having Christians you go to to ask you to pray for, praying for other people, forgiving, loving, accompanying, helping, charity, all this stuff denostifies it and makes it really quite concrete in terms of a reconstruction of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Here and now.
So we do have to find ways of trying to talk about this intimacy.
Some of us are better than others, but it's a fact of what's going on.
This is how human beings operate.
We operate both externally and internally, and we have to talk about... we don't have to, but if we're going to talk about God, we need to talk about him externally, intellectually, aesthetically, scientifically, cosmologically, but also in terms of the way in which he reconstructs the human heart.
Gavin, thank you so much for talking about everything but virtually Psalm 139.
We'll do another podcast sometime because it's always great talking to you.
Just one thing, Gavin, you do kind of remind me of that joke about vegans.
How do you know someone's a vegan?
Wait five minutes and I'll tell you.
You do similar work to Coniston, Gavin, and I love you for it, but you are slightly biased.
Anyway, thank you so much.
No, no, I'm experienced.
No, I'm not biased.
Come on, James, it's not bias, it's experience.
Now, you may say my experience is...
Yeah, your Pope is a wrongman.
I'm sorry, mate.
He is.
I mean, I'm not saying that... I wouldn't even call him... I'm no fan of the present inhabitant.
He bats for the other team.
He certainly... the work of reconstruction has been hall to do early.
It has.
Thank you so much.
I'm just going to get my hair cut now.
Otherwise I'd talk for longer.
And thank you everyone for listening.
Thank you.
God bless.
End recording.
Yeah.
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