On Sacred Spaces, or I Went to Israel and Nothing Supernatural Happened

“And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine look forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here among those dark satanic mills?”

William Blake, Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1804)

I mean, don’t get me wrong, Israel was a brilliant time. I’m unequivocally chuffed that I got to go, and especially that I got to go with some excellent people whom I love a lot and basically consider to be my academic siblings. We had eight full days there: three at a conference, five seeing the sights. And boy, were there some sights. We explored Magdala and Capernaum and Caesarea;¹ we swam in the Sea of Galilee and roamed the rooftops of Jerusalem; we traced the route from the Mount of Olives through Gethsemane to the heart of the Old City and the remains of the western wall of the Temple; and yeah, I spent a good deal of time staring at ancient texts trying to read them, because what can I say, my job is also my hobby.² This post isn’t intended as a travelogue, so I’m going to spare you the details, but suffice it to say that the trip was an epic one. The place was just absolutely swimming in history and it was great.

 

View eastwards from a random rooftop at roughly the intersection between the four quarters of Jerusalem. The highest tower you can see in the background is on the Mount of Olives; Gethsemane is quite close below that.

But people had been telling me that something supernatural would happen. They had been telling me that it would be a life-changing experience, that walking where Jesus walked would bring me closer to him, that the very air is different in the Holy Land, that the impact on my faith would be profound. And, as I’d suspected, none of that proved true. If anything, I was less focussed on God than I usually am at home, because, as other experiences have also taught me, having both a) a packed schedule and b) a roommate does not exactly help one maintain a decent routine of personal prayer. I walked the ground that Jesus did, and as it turns out, it didn’t feel any different to any other ground. I saw sites mentioned in the scriptures, and it was really cool and all, but I enjoyed them the same way I enjoy any historical site: lapping up all the facts about the story of the place; grinning at little bits of realia, hints of the lives of the real people who inhabited it; staring at any inscriptions present trying to read them. And granted, it’s even cooler when the stories and realia and inscriptions pertain to matters that are of especial interest to me because of their relevance to the scriptures in which I believe God has revealed himself, but there’s nothing about that that goes beyond the natural. People get particularly excited about stuff they particularly care about; that’s just a perfectly normal, logical, expectable thing, and indeed so fundamentally obvious that it hardly bears stating. But it means that when I pretty much jumped up and down with excitement in the Shrine of the Book because a brother in Christ and myself found and read the bit of the Great Isaiah Scroll (or technically its facsimile, I think)³ where it says they shall call his name Immanuel,⁴ it wasn’t because God filled me with some kind of supernatural ectasy, or was any more tangibly present than usual. It was because this was a prophecy about the one to whom I consider myself to owe everything worth having, and we were reading it off a facsimile of a scroll written many years before its fulfilment, and, you know, that’s pretty blooming amazing.

As you can tell, I’m making a distinction here between a natural feeling and a supernatural feeling. We all experience the former; that’s just, you know, feeling stuff. But I gather that some people also experience the latter: they perceive, react to, feel things that are not discernible on the natural level. They feel, in whatever manner, the presence of God. And that’s, you know, cool and all. I don’t begrudge them it. But it doesn’t happen, or at least hasn’t yet happened, to me.

Funnily enough, I don’t think this situation is without its advantages. I mean, I’d love to feel God’s presence in a tangible way, I’d be well up for that, but the fact that I haven’t surely makes the faith he has given me all the more remarkable. I have no dramatic personal encounter with God on which to lean my trust in him. He has never opened heaven to my eyes; I have seen only earth, and yet somehow he has still granted me to walk in faith that heaven is my true homeland. If those who have not seen and yet have believed are blessed, ⁵ then blessed must I be. I don’t say this to elevate my own faith as purer or realer or better than anyone else’s; faith is a gift of God, so that no one might boast, and my point is that it surely glorifies him that he can put that gift into effect without revealing himself to a person in any supernaturally spectacular way. That I believe in the gospel, that I understand and am changed by the scriptures, that I am increasing in obedience and holiness, that I am learning to place my hope in an inheritance I have no proof of at the expense of gain in the here and now – these things are supernatural enough in and of themselves. God is glorified in one way when he manifests himself to someone in a tangible way, and in another when he manifests himself by shaping her after his likeness despite her never having perceived his presence directly.

So I didn’t mind that I went to Israel and nothing supernatural happened. I was expecting as much. It was enough to experience what I did on a natural level. And again, neither do I begrudge anyone who has had a supernatural experience during a trip to Israel. The thing I don’t get is the suggestion that Eretz Yisrael is some kind of special zone where access to the supernatural is readier than elsewhere – a sacred space, in other words. Because I was under the impression that, as Protestants, we don’t believe in sacred spaces.

I don’t deny that the land is special – a chosen and designated inheritance for the children of Israel, and of profound importance of God’s plans not only in the past but also in the future. In that sense, I suppose, it’s sacred. But that isn’t my covenant, and it isn’t actually as good as my covenant either. Even when God’s presence really did rest in a physical building in Jerusalem, the quality and intimacy of the relationship that that enabled wasn’t a patch on what I – Gentile sinner that I am – enjoy now. In England. Where we can safely say those feet in ancient times did not walk, whatever you might find in certain Arthurian legends.⁶ Think about it: God himself dwells within us by his Holy Spirit; and when we meet together in his name, we stand in congregation with all saints, present and departed, and with all elect angels, in the heavenly throne-room; and we are commanded to boldly approach the throne of grace, God’s own heavenly mercy-seat – the reality that the earthly mercy-seat in the Holy of Holies reflected – confident in the knowledge that we are righteous and deserving through the blood of Jesus shed on our behalf, that as our High Priest he carries our prayers as incense, that we are adopted as his brothers and co-heirs and nothing could separate us from our Father’s love. The veil is torn. We are beyond it.⁷ You think any site on earth could even begin to claim to be a fraction as sacred as that? If you’re a temple of the Holy Spirit, then it follows that you yourself are the most sacred site that currently exists on the earth. So, you know, there’s something to add the CV.

 

The model of Herodian-era Jerusalem at the Israel Museum. Spot the Temple. Back then, it really was a sacred space where there was special access to God, but not so in the Church age.

It’s easy to apply this stuff in contempt of the people who queue up to kiss altars at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or whatever, but I don’t think that considering the land of Israel to have some special power to bring the Christian closer to her God is very far from that. If there are, in this the Church age, no sacred spaces, then there are no sacred spaces; it isn’t just that those Other Christians are honouring the wrong sacred spaces – church buildings rather than the land as a whole. No space of any size or nature can provide better-quality access to God than we already have.

This isn’t to say that it’s automatically wrong or not from God if someone experiences something on the supernatural level that’s ostensibly triggered by being at a site of significance in the Biblical narrative. After all, it’s quite likely that being there might prompt one to a focus on God and a reflection on the wonder of what he did in sending Jesus to walk among us in real, physical, mappable existence, and I imagine that that’s the sort of thing that might provide fertile ground for supernatural feeling. But anything supernatural that does happen is not the result of some inherent property of the site itself. The site is not, after all, magic.⁸

I went to Israel and nothing supernatural happened. But then, there was no reason it should. There was a lot there that was extremely cool and interesting, and I feel very privileged that I had the opportunity to visit, but even as I sit at home in my pyjamas typing this,⁹ the space I occupy is more sacred than any site I visited during my week-and-a-bit in the Holy Land. And if that sounds like too bold a claim, then I suggest we need to take a more careful look at what God claims to have achieved in making us the Church his Temple, the site of his holy presence, in the current era.¹⁰

Footnotes

¹ Caesarea was a particular highlight, especially given that I started out as a Classicist; here’s a quick description of the place: https://www.britannica.com/place/Caesarea.

² I was quite pleased that my palaeo-Hebrew skills proved sufficient to read slightly more of the Tel Dan inscription than was already specially pointed out in the display. The Tel Dan inscription is a huge deal, so if you don’t know about it already, here’s your chance to learn: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-artifacts/the-tel-dan-inscription-the-first-historical-evidence-of-the-king-david-bible-story/.

³ The Shrine of the Book is dedicated to the first of the manuscripts discovered at Qumran, what you’ll know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. You can browse the archive online, hooray: https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/.

⁴ Isaiah 7, if you need a reminder: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=is+7&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Which they are; check John 20:29.

⁶ Yep, William Blake’s famous poem had its basis in preexistent traditions about Jesus having spent some time in Cornwall. On the grounds that Joseph of Arimathea was actually his uncle, and took him on a business trip to buy tin. It sounds pretty mad, but there are people out there who are prepared to argue the case: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8380511.stm.

⁷ In this section, I riff mainly on the book of Hebrews. Too many references for me to be bothered to footnote them individually. Go and read, and decide whether I’m handling the text legitimately.

⁸ I say this with some hesitation given that the conference I mentioned was on late-antique magic, and the academic consensus is that magic and religion cannot be meaningfully distinguished. But nonetheless, the scriptures oblige me to distinguish them, and that forces me to put an awful lot of stuff that goes on in the Church and in my own heart into the ‘magic’ box. More of my thoughts on this are in ‘The Magic Word’, under November 2016 in my blog archive.

⁹ I recently got some new pyjamas from PJ Pan, and I love them because they are a) actually long enough, b) really comfy, c) super cute, and d) made in Britain. Only downside is the price, but hey, I get paid now: https://www.pjpan.co.uk/.  

No Infestation: Weathering With You and the Value of Humanity

“Who cares if we don’t see the sun shine ever again? I want you more than any blue sky. The weather can go crazy.”

Weathering With You (2019)¹

 

Tokyo in the rain! Surely there could be no more appropriate cover photo for a post about Weathering With You.

It came as no surprise at all that I absolutely loved Weathering With You.² After all, Makoto Shinkai’s previous film, Your Name,³ is my very favourite film ever, and basically all of the elements that secured it that lofty and coveted title were also present in Weathering With You. Adorable, wholesome plotline with heroes I could really root for, tick. Sweet-spot magical realism, pushing just far enough beyond the possible for the thing to properly feel like an escape, tick. Neat, engaging scripting that felt beautifully well tied together, tick. A good blend of funny bits, dramatic bits, slow bits to build the plot, and heartbreaking-yet-uplifting emotional bits that reach right down into your soul to stir it properly, tick. Animation so breathtakingly beautiful that I could wish, contra Paul, that my whole body really were an eye, in order to be able to drink in each frame more fully, tick. Well, except for the fact that were that so, I wouldn’t be able to hear Radwimps’ gorgeous, soaring soundtrack, or the way that the sound marries up with the visuals so perfectly: there’s a moment, for instance, when a huge, heavy rainfall suddenly erupts out of what had been a clear sky, and it’s so beautifully done that you can practically feel the water hit the ground. Tick. It hasn’t usurped Your Name for the top spot on my list, but only because I think Your Name’s plot is cleverer – pulls you through more twists and turns that make you marvel at it, kind of thing. That said, the two plots have a great deal in common (spoilers for both films ahead, proceed at your own risk). Teenage love story between a city kid and a country kid; magical realism, with the magical elements being explained through things related to the Shinto religion; random episode at the beginning of the film that’s very significant but only explained later; climax involving the boy doing something a bit crazy in order to save the girl from some kind of natural-disaster-related threat.

Although what that natural-disaster-related threat actually means for the girl is pretty different in each case. In Your Name, the threat is a meteorite that’s going to destroy our heroine’s entire town, and so the way she has to be saved is by all the people being evacuated from the impact zone. In Weathering With You, by contrast, our heroine Hina, as a so-called ‘weather maiden’ with supernatural influence over the weather, knows that she has to offer herself as a sacrifice in order to stop the freak rainstorms that have been plaguing Tokyo of late. When protagonist Hodaka follows her up into the clouds and brings her back to earth, the rain starts again. And it never stops. It rains so much that three years later, much of Tokyo is underwater. Hina doesn’t need to be saved from the natural disaster; by being saved, she causes it. Her life is bought at the cost of great swathes of the city lost to the sea.

It wasn’t the ending I was expecting. I suppose I was anticipating that there would turn out to be a way whereby Hina could survive and the weather could be put back to normal, because, you know, that’s the kind of thing that tends to happen at the end of wholesome animated films. But no – the decision was made and it came at its price. I liked that. It forced us to ask whether it was worth it.

There was a point earlier in the film where Hodaka’s employer Mr. Suga, not really believing in the weather-maiden story, made an offhand remark to the effect that one death for the sake of fixing the crazy weather seemed like a fair enough deal. It was clear, though, that that remark came not from a place of thoughtful rationality, but one of bitterness: Mr. Suga is still reeling from the premature death of his wife and resenting that he is permitted only limited contact with their young daughter, and what he seems to really be saying is something like, well, at least that death would do some good; why should this weather-maiden person live while my beloved does not? One can sympathise on those grounds, but not agree. Another perspective is offered by a sweet old lady that Hodaka and Hina helped out earlier in the film. After Tokyo begins to be lost to the rising waters, she takes an equanimous approach: sure, her old home is gone, but centuries ago, this entire area used to be underwater. The freak rainstorms are just the sea claiming back what belongs to it, the planet shifting through its normal, natural cycles. Hodaka repeats this idea to himself as he goes to meet Hina after three years apart, testing it, trying to work out whether he thinks it accounts for what has happened. He sees Hina and concludes not. The neverending rain isn’t just nature doing what nature does; he and Hina made a choice. They decided that it wasn’t acceptable for her to be offered as a sacrifice. They decided that if the rain never stopped, that was a price worth paying for her life. It was they who, to that end, sentenced whole districts of Tokyo to be slowly swallowed up by the ever-increasing flood – and Hodaka is glad, very glad indeed, that they did.

 

I, of course, already know what it’s like for the rain to never stop, because I live in Britain. (That’s a joke. The rain does stop sometimes.)

Well, that was how I understood it, anyway. I think of Weathering With You as a bold, uplifting affirmation of the uniquely great value of human life. Which is a bit of a contrary idea, actually, when held against much of fashionable modern thought – particularly if you take it specifically as affirming the uniquely great value of human life at the expense of disorder in the natural world.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, but there’s a strand of thinking within the modern sustainability movement that sees population control as a necessary part of the solution. Some people call this view neo-Malthusianism, after a Georgian clergyman called Thomas Malthus who wrote an essay about population in which he posited that, whereas population growth is exponential, growth in food production is linear. Consequently, he argued, if left unchecked, the human population will end up increasing faster than food production can be ramped up to sustain it, leading to catastrophes of famine, disease, and war. A better solution, Malthus reasoned, is just to get people not to produce as many new humans in the first place.⁴ His ideas have experienced something of a revival of late, though with a new climate-emergency sort of flavour. Remember the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (or whichever titles they’re going by now they’ve ‘stepped back’) saying that they won’t have more than two children, in the interests of the environment?⁵ Or have you come across the BirthStrike movement, with people trying to bring about large-scale changes to How Things Are Done by refusing to have children until such changes are made?⁶ Or what about Population Matters, which claims Sir David Attenborough as its patron, and advocates very straightforwardly for having fewer children, and also achieving certain changes to get people in the developing world to have fewer children?⁷

I’m with Population Matters on the benefits of women’s education and proper access to contraception, but I approve of those things because, you know, because they give women greater freedom and access to a better quality of life, not simply because they tend to result in there being fewer humans in the world than there would otherwise have been. Neo-Malthusianism comes way too close, in my view, to seeing humans as a kind of harmful infestation in what would otherwise be a nice, orderly, balanced world. And the focus on the developing world strikes me as particularly yikes: like, sorry, all you folks living in poverty in Africa and Asia and Latin America, but there are just too bloody many of you already and we don’t want any more of you. No, worse than that: there are just too bloody many of you already and if you cause your children to be too numerous, you render them guilty of destroying the planet merely by existing. Like an infestation. Shudder.

The trouble with seeing the problem as being that there are Simply Too Many Humans, is that that’s such a dehumanising position to take. It views humans not as individuals, not as people, not as precious lives of uniquely great value, but as a mere statistic. Humanity as nothing more than a great ever-consuming Blob that needs to be cut down to size. The right to exist is the most fundamental individual human right there is, and yet somebody here is necessarily being stripped of that right. But having said that, who? Because even the most strident neo-Malthusian is also, whoops, still a human; still another sliver of colour pushing the population bar higher up the chart. Surely she’ll be compelled either to determinedly focus the blame on other people – those peasants in the developing world being the obvious target⁸ – or to end up deeply insecure about her own right to exist?

 

Though you can see who’s using the most electricity there.

There is, I think, a pretty interesting – though not so interesting as troubling – intersection where these kinds of ideas collide with Christian doctrine. We all know that God made the world and it was very good; and then our first ancestors, daft things that they were, went and disobeyed him, and thenceforth everything was messed up. So humans are the problem, right? The world was ‘very good’ before our sinfulness sent it all to hell in a handcart, and it follows that it would have been better off without us. Turns out we are a kind of harmful infestation here.

                                                                                                                                

Except that that’s not actually true at all. For starters, the world wasn’t ‘very good’ until it had human beings in it: everything else in creation was just ‘good’.⁹ Categorically, then, the world would not be better off without us – not in the eyes of God, the only one whose opinions are actually completely true and indeed the measure for truth. Also, I know I’ve written about this before, but the pre-Fall world wasn’t perfect. The potential for sin was there, and that made it flawed. And so this whole mess that we’re living in now isn’t the result of everything having gone off the rails; it’s part of the necessary plot to bring us to the truly perfect happy ending.¹⁰

So humans are the one vital component that elevates God’s creation from ‘good’ to ‘very good’; and humans, moreover, are the one thing he specifically redeems for participation in the new creation. Jesus died to save people – people, not ecosystems. And beyond that, he died to save individuals. He knows each of his sheep by name; he indwells each personally by his Spirit. Humanity is no statistic in God’s eyes, no Blob. It’s no infestation of an otherwise nice, orderly, balanced world. On the contrary, it’s the one bit of the world that God cares enough about to have sacrificed his dearly beloved Son to the worse fate that exists on its behalf. He places that kind of uniquely great value on the life of each individual he has chosen to be blameless before him.

So was Hodaka right? Was saving Hina worth it – worth the freak weather, the sunken city, the disordering of the natural world? If we’re going by God’s standards, then yes, yes it was. Indeed, when, one day, God completes the rescue from sin and death that he has begun in us, he’ll do a lot worse than flood Tokyo: he’ll set the whole world on fire. He’ll bring the present cosmos to an end, and establish a new heavens and new earth in its place – and this so that we whom he has chosen might survive, might live with him forever and ever. Humanity is no infestation in creation. Humanity is, in no insignificant sense, the point of creation. We’re kind of what creation is all about.

This isn’t an argument against trying to make the best use of the resources we have; I’m all for doing our best to live sustainably and keep the natural environment healthy. It is, however, an argument against seeing Too Many Humans as an inherent problem.¹¹ Humans aren’t just some population that needs to be controlled for the sake of maintaining balance in the world; they’re individuals of uniquely great value. They’re no infestation in creation; they’re the only thing that makes it ‘very good’.

Footnotes

¹ The exact form of the quotation may not be reliable, as I am relying on random people on Reddit for it, but that was the gist.

² Here’s a trailer to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6iK6DjV_iE. I think it might still be in UK cinemas if you fancy it – definitely worth the big screen experience.

³ For that one, you can have Radwimps’ music video for the theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2GujJZfXpg. I could seriously cry from how beautiful this animation is.

⁴ Thanks, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism.

⁵ This should jog your memory if not: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7301321/Prince-Harry-interviewed-Dr-Jane-Goodall-Meghans-edition-British-Vogue.html.

⁶ I should add that they say they ‘disagree with focussing on the topic of population before equality based system change in regards to tackling the environmental crisis’: https://www.birthstrikeforfuture.com/.

⁷ Have a click around, see what you think: https://populationmatters.org/.

⁸ I feel I should clarify that I’m using the word ‘peasants’ ironically there.

⁹ See for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+1&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ See ‘Better, Not Back’, under November of last year in my blog archive. Or, you know, don’t, if you have stuff to be getting on with.

¹¹ There’s also, on a natural, practical level, the fact that humans are also the only beings in the material universe who have yet proved any good at coming up with better ways to use resources so that they can suffice for larger populations. Deprive the world of more humans and you deprive it of more ingenuity. But that wasn’t my big point today, and I didn’t want to confuse things by putting it in the main body.