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OPEN FORUM

Please contribute your comments

1/1/2024

7 Comments

 
Hello. As we say on the home page, we want this website to be a cooperative venture involving like-minded explorers, so in that spirit, we welcome your comments (negative as well as positive). Use the comment function below. It will ask for your name. Feel free to use a pseudonym if you wish.  And if you felt able, please indicate the country/area in which you are based. Comments are moderated to deal with spam, and so there may be a short delay before they appear.  To contact us directly (and privately) use the Get in touch page. You can also post individual responses for each of the Feral Stories if you wish to respond, publicly, to the author.
7 Comments
peter challen
14/9/2022 09:58:57 am

Thanks for your vital initiative.

God is a new language,
the grasp of ever new awareness
that prior unity issues in rich diversity,
dependent tribalism and our own egoism giving way
to universal wholeness honouring all its parts;
otherwise, God is a dead word

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Pat P-T
19/9/2022 06:39:40 pm

There's a cat visiting my patio garden from time to time. He (I and others think of it as he but there's no chance of examining the evidence) takes long drinks of water from my watering can. He is beautiful and has the long legs and spots which suggest Bengal lineage. Sadly he has only one eye, probably as a result of a fight; local cat owners regard him as the neigbourhood bully.

Someone who has lived here a great deal longer than I have told me his story. His owners lived in my neighbourhood but some years ago they moved away. The cat left his new home and returned to my/his neighbourhood so many times that his owners eventually gave up fetching him and he became feral. My informant thinks that a local household has since 'kind of' adopted him.

He is very wary but if my door is open he will venture inside until he realises I am here and shoots off again.

It seems to me there might be a sermon or two here - anyone interested in having a go?!



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Mike Catling
21/9/2022 11:50:26 am

What is it about cats that can teach us so much about ourselves? The place I used to stay for retreats had a feral cat. It never entered the building, but would turn up twice a day for food that was provided by the Guest Brother. Every time I stayed I would watch this cat from my bedroom window, who waited patiently for his breakfast and tea and his patience was always rewarded. I have related to church communities since I was 15 both as an attender and later in life as an ordained member. Yet through all those years I never fully felt that going into the 'building' of the Church Institution was a place that I truly belonged or ineed wanted to. Somehow I was always a boundary-dweller - of the Church but not in the Church. Yes, I was fed by the local Christian communities to which I belonged, and I deeply arreciated and gave thanks for that fact. Yet, like the feral cat in this story, and maybe your story too, I was wary of entering too far in to an institution that, for me, so often got in the way of the sense of God's presence and often denied aspects of people's true humanity.

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Andii link
21/9/2022 09:13:25 am

The stories are helpful and the range of responses gives points of connection to different parts of my journey. One of the things I got to wondering about is that the age of the narrators looks to be in the last third of a normal life span. I work with younger people and wondered if some of this applies or whether we're dealing with something that is a function to some degree of ageing. I do find some younger people resonate with some of the concerns expressed but also more willing to tolerate the negativities of institutional church probably for the sake of connecting with others -maybe. Certainly I recognise something of that dynamic in my own journey through life and faith. There's more to be discussed in this, but maybe raising the matter might bring more perspectives to the observation?

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Pat P-T
27/9/2022 04:45:58 pm

Very interesting, Andii, that you meet younger people who are 'more willing to tolerate the negativities of institutional church' because of its social benefits. My experience is quite different in the sense that most of the younger people I talk with are much more inclined to see no point (and a lot of things which they don't like) in church and church going. I've grown through many iterations of what might be called churchmanship, from fundamentalist independent via FIEC, Baptist and liberal Anglican to my current position as an erratic Quaker attender. My own children, whose family experience was mostly Baptist, wonder why I bother at all - they don't. But they do think, they do contemplate, they do wonder. They just don't see any need for church in order to do so.

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Andii link
29/9/2022 06:31:18 am

I do also have experience, like you Pat, of younger people who simply don't connect their spirituality with institutional religion (or even actively see it as inimical). However, that still leaves me wondering about the age profile and the dynamics that may underlie it. I still wonder whether for a lot of younger people who do stick with churches, whether the social aspect is weighed more heavily than it is by some of us who have a 'been there done that' strand to our accumulated thinking. Obviously not in all cases as we've both attested. And now I think on, a number of older people stick with it for similar reasons. So, what is it about 'feral spirituality' that is drawing older voices? (And maybe whiter voices too?)

Sue (& Henry)
24/9/2022 05:32:07 pm

FROM SUE: I’ve read all the stories with great interest. I don’t know whether I’m feral or not (it seems such a strong word, wild almost) but I do know that I don’t fit in the institutional church any more. Reading Karen Armstrong’s latest book Sacred Nature: ‘A religious ritual should be a transformative event- it can never be a matter of simply going through the motions, however piously’. Church services for me feel like ‘going through the motions’. Where is the beauty, the mystery, the silent wondering. I feel bogged down in a mass of words. There is another way of communicating that doesn’t involve talking! Your sense of being free when you left stipendiary ministry resonates very strongly with my sense of feeling free when I came out of the monastery. Though I believed it was of God I continue to wonder if it was just me wanting to ‘do my own thing’. I have to trust.


FROM HENRY: Thank you Sue for raising questions that I reckon are worth pondering. How do we know that something is of God, and not just ‘me wanting to do my own thing’? [It might of course be both.] Maybe we just have to take a risk, one small step at a time, and trust that it’s of God, knowing that if its not God will somehow make it clear, and with confidence that this unconditionally loving and non-judgemental God knows that the only way we’ll grow is by being willing to take risks.

‘A religious ritual should be a transformative event’ Amen, and sometimes it is. But is a transformative event always potentially religious/spiritual?

‘Where is the beauty, the mystery, the silent wondering’. Where do we find these things? I find them in the natural world, and have come to understand that when I do, I am engaged in worship that I’m sharing with the trees, the grasses, the stones, the sky. I am a part of a community of all God’s creation worshipping together. If there’s truth in that, then I have to assume that other humans out in the natural world are likely to be doing the same thing, whether they name it as I do or not. You write of feeling free when you left the monastery, and I felt that too when I left parish ministry, but freedom into what, freedom for what? That’s the question.

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    Just wanting to say “yes” to this. You will be speaking for, and to, many. I will certainly be passing this on to others, and will contribute some thoughts myself later.

    So, I was delighted to see Feral Spirituality make an appearance.  I'd think you could find many wanting to join in

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