A change of mind

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness and he remained there for

 forty days, and was tempted by Satan. He was with the wild beasts, and the angels looked after him.

After John had been arrested, Jesus went into Galilee. There he proclaimed the Good News from God. ‘The time has come’ he said ‘and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.’

Mark 1:12-15

We welcome a change of mind, sometimes as a sign of compassion, sometimes as a sign of weakness. But not often do we look at a change of mind as a sign of strength. In Greek metanoia means repentance, or better, a change of mind, or a reorientation, a new way of looking at our world, and our relationships with our God an with each other.

This kind of change of mind, or perhaps more appealingly for us, ‘change of heart’, is a deliberate choice that is made for me and for my relationships with others. It cannot be made after being brow-beaten or harried, it can only happen after I have reviewed where I am in my life, where I want to go and sorting out how I am going to get there. It will only be at my pace. This is how we would like our choices to be made – and when it comes to our life-changing decisions, this is how it should occur.

Life changing decisions don't get any easier with age, if anything they become more complex, and often decisions made years ago have to be reconsidered. Retirement may be put off for whatever reason; an elderly parent may come to live in your home; adult children may still be living with you; age itself might present health, emotional, financial, familial challenges. And sometimes there can be very little time or no time at all to make considered choices. Preparing ourselves to make the big decisions would always be preferable - sounding out the options, scaffolding a plan of attack, viewing the 'what-ifs'. Some decisions we choose, some are thrust upon us. Act in haste, repent in leisure says the aphorism.

Mark (1:12 – 15) leaves us in no doubt that at the centre of Jesus’ mission is the proclamation of the Good News, spelt out by Jesus himself as, ‘The time has come, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent (i.e., change your heart), and believe the Good News.’

It is quite possible that Mark saw an urgency in this message which we now no longer see. Yet in its wisdom, the church provides us with these next five weeks of Lent as opportunities for self-review, for making decisions big and small, for considering how best our lives can be lived in the present so that we can make a difference for the future. So yes, Lent is about abstaining from meat on Fridays, fasting, almsgiving and prayer. But it is also - de rigueur - about how better to conserve our world for our children’s children, using the resources we already have more effectively and more productively, and actively seeking to become who we are called to be by our God. This is truly metanoia from the position of strength.

Peter Douglas

 

Lenten discipline

Fasting is observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday by all who are 18 years of age and older, and who have not yet celebrated their 59th birthday. On a fast day one full meal is allowed. Two other meals, sufficient to maintain strength, may be taken according to each one's needs, but together they should not equal another full meal. Eating between meals is not permitted, but liquids, including milk and juices, are allowed.

Abstinence is observed by all 14 years of age and older. On days of abstinence no meat is allowed. Note that when health or ability to work would be seriously affected, the law does not oblige. Ash Wednesday, all the Fridays of Lent and Good Friday are days of abstinence.

Note:  If a person is unable to observe the above regulations due to ill health or other serious reasons, other suitable forms of self-denial are encouraged.

Fasting, almsgiving, and prayer are the three traditional disciplines of Lent. The faithful and catechumens should undertake these practices seriously in a spirit of penance and of preparation for baptism or of renewal of baptism at Easter.

OLD TESTAMENT PROPHET

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The Tablet Interview

Jordan Peterson is that most contemporary of creatures, an internet sensation, too often words that signify those who are famous for being rude, or simply for being famous.

Fifty-five-year-old Peterson, though, has plenty of solid achievements on his CV, most recently as professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and an advisor to the UN Secretary-General. It is his university lectures, which currently include a series on the psychological significance of Bible stories, that have attracted an audience of 35 million on YouTube. He is, one critic has put it, as close as academia gets to a rock star.

And, now you come to mention it, in the flesh, this tall, thin, gangly but unflinchingly direct talker does have a touch of the Australian rocker Nick Cave about him, with his long, thin, compelling face, hair high on his forehead but long down the sides, and a brooding, slow-boiling intensity that pervades our meeting.

It is already making me uneasy as we sit down to talk in his publisher’s office overlooking the London Eye. Perhaps Channel 4 news presenter Cathy Newman felt the same vibe coming off him, which may be one reason why their recent fractious interview has been hailed as classic car-crash TV. But more of that in a minute.

Professor Peterson is in the UK to promote 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, his new book – only his second, but why bother with print when your audience is used to you being only a click away. It requires commitment to work through a sometimes challenging text, as Peterson ranges wide and deep to demolish the current obsession that we are all made to be happy. But if you are wondering how we’ve got into the mess we are in, it certainly repays a careful read.

I am still confused, though, I begin by confessing, about his evident fascination and indeed reverence for the stories of the Old Testament, as revealed in the book. I couldn’t fathom, I say, whether he would count himself as in any formal way religious?

“Well, I don’t attend church, so I am not sure what ‘formally religious’ means.”

He says it with that lecturer’s tone that makes me feel very silly indeed for even asking. But I’m not sure if that is what he intends. It may just be his manner. After all he has a very warm, friendly wife, Tammy, sitting in the corner of the room with us, waiting for him to finish and smiling beatifically in a purple mac. She wouldn’t put up with him, I figure, if he was as withering as he appears at first.

I try again.

“Do you believe in God?”

And then regret it instantly, because I know he is going to focus on the word “believe”. As he does.

“I really don’t know how to answer that question because I never know what people mean when they are asking it.”

I am here to ask not to answer the questions, I remind myself, and grit my teeth.

“How about afterlife, then? Does it exist?”

This time there is a very long pause. So long that Tammy edges forward slightly in her seat.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if it did,” he finally articulates, and then laughs at himself for taking so long to say something so vague. It’s a good, self-deprecating laugh. The ice is finally breaking.

“I don’t think we understand the relationship between space and time and consciousness,” he continues. “At all. And I certainly don’t think we understand the role that consciousness plays in being. It is central to being – in some sense. And what that means about consciousness in relationship to space and time, we don’t understand.”

You have to be quick to keep up with Professor Peterson, I realise, which may be one reason he gets so many views on YouTube. It allows you to rewind repeatedly while you look up the definition of the words he uses. 

“I have read most of the primary works on consciousness”, he explains, “and I have kept up with the neuroscience literature. We can localise conscious experiences more effectively to certain brain areas than we could, but I don’t think we know any more about consciousness than we did 50 years ago. And that leaves everything open.”

So heaven is possible? He eyes me suspiciously for a moment.

“People have had intimations of mortality for a long period of time. And there are states of mind that can be invoked, not least by psychedelic drugs, that produce in people very powerful intimations of immortality. We shouldn’t brush them off lightly. There is a finite part of us and there is an infinite part of us. We are a weird mixture.”

It is sounding like a “Yes” to my question but then, with no warning, he goes tantalisingly confessional.

“I’ve had experiences of God,” he offers.

“Have you?” I reply. It’s my turn to edge forward in my seat. “So tell me?”

“No, I won’t,” he comes straight back. “It’s just too much to go into. But you asked me if I believed, and I am never satisfied with my answer. I can have powerful religious experiences, intense, and of all sorts. So does that make me a believer? I just can’t get round it. Belief is a terrible word.”

Jordan Peterson is, it is fast becoming clear, a man who is not easily satisfied with any loose use of language. He prefers to follow things right back to source. It’s a habit that makes his exploration of the Book of Genesis – in his online lectures and in the new book – so compelling.

“I’m a psychologist, not a theologian”, he notes, “but they’re interesting stories. No matter how much you dig into them, they get deeper and deeper. I’ve learned a lot of respect for these stories. I’ve been thinking about the Cain and Abel story for, really seriously, about 20 years. And that story is 12 sentences long.”

What in it has fed his demanding intellect for so long?

“It’s an amazing story. It is the story of the first two human beings and there is fratricidal murder, and rebellion against God, motivated by resentment about the conditions of being, as a precursor to genocide, chaos and the flood. That’s pretty damn good for 12 sentences. It’s really something.”

Once he gets going on the Bible, how Eden was a balance between order and chaos, what the serpent represents psychologically, I could listen all day, but time is limited and Jordan Peterson’s enthusiasms do not exist in a vacuum. He grew up, the book jacket says, “in the frigid wastelands of northern Alberta”. Frigid? “Dark, flat, windy and 40 below in winter; 400 miles from nearest city. We were at the end of world, the northern end of habitable land in North America.”

There is something of the pioneer spirit in him, I realise, stubborn and not one to do things for an easy life. He was raised in the United Church of Canada, the mainstream Protestant denomination there, hated his mother taking him to services “with every fibre in my being”, and lapsed at 13 – as soon as he could, he says – after a row with the minister over evolution. I can picture it.

He started off reading politics at university, but changed to psychology, gained his PhD at McGill and was an associate professor at Harvard before returning to Canada to take up his current role at Toronto. Over the past 18 months, though, there have been moments when he looked like he might be out of a job.

It brings us back neatly to his much-reported spat with Cathy Newman. Peterson has become a cause célèbre in Canada – fuelled by his internet following – after refusing in 2016 to use gender-neutral pronouns at the university that new anti-discrimination legislation, Bill C-16, demanded. He took his stance on a matter of free speech, even if it would cost him his job. And the university has, by his account, been pretty weak-kneed when faced by demonstrations on campus by transgender activists attacking his presence there.

At the same time, the dispute has turned him into some kind of mascot for reactionaries on America’s alt-right, a martyr to political correctness and everything-goes values. Both sides, though, have got him totally wrong, he insists, describing himself instead as a “classic British liberal”. It was extreme conservative voices on social media who made such violent threats against Cathy Newman, following her interview with him, that her employers felt they had to review her security. Peterson disowns those who claimed to be acting in his defence.

The whole experience since he took his stance on Bill C-16 has, he reflects, been similarly surreal. “I’ve had what psychologists call ‘derealisation’ – which is when something happens to you and you can’t believe it is your life. That is how I feel every morning when I wake up and remember.”

Does it make him regret being so outspoken? I’m not sure why I’m asking because I already know the answer.

“I said what I had to say,” he replies. “I think we have got to a point in our culture – I’m sure of it, in fact, especially because of my experiences over the last year – where all the talk of infinite rights and continual freedom has just left a huge gap on the other side of the equation, which is order and discipline and responsibility and all those things that your grandmother would concentrate on, and wag her finger. But rules give purpose. That’s the thing about rules.”

So Professor Peterson is keen on rules – as indicated in the title of his new book – and on purpose (or, as he puts it in the text, on meaning) as the antidote to what he sees as a glib, juvenile search for happiness that has bewitched modern culture. “Death is always round the corner,” he points out. “People are fragile and terrible things happen. And if you think happiness is the solution to that, then you are over-sheltered, unwise and weak.”

12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson is published by Allen Lane at £20.