Sometimes I feel I just keep digging a deeper hole for myself, my questions unanswered, my thoughts and ideas constantly changing.
I just finished reading Barry Taylor’s “Sex, God and Rock ’n’ Roll”. Taylor, as some of you might know, was part of the AC/DC tech crew, then turned theologian/priest and is an affiliate professor at Fuller.
This book rolls almost like a memoir, a collection of short essays, it’s where the sacred and the profane intersect. Taylor’s book captivated me for the simple reason that he has put into beautiful, well-framed words, the very thoughts that keep swirling inside my head.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked about philosophy, “If you scratch an itch, do you need to see progress?”, implying that the task of philosophy is not so much to offer cures, but to scratch at the things that itch. And Taylor feels the same about the theological life: “I’m scratching at the things that itch me. I don’t need an end result or a fuller meaning to emerge from my questions. I have grown comfortable with a life absent of ultimate meaning and I thank theology for that.”
D.H. Lawrence said poets tear a hole in the firmaments and let some chaos in. Similarly, Taylor indicates that theologians are tasked with opening the safety nets people build with their beliefs and creating news space for expression.
Taylor says that as a theologian, “I live at the edges of the world, digging around in the profane sacredness of life, casting spells and enchantments and singing songs that need to be sung. Songs of the wonder of this meaningless existence riddled with meaning.”
On religion and Christianity, Taylor goes on to say that they have long provided a sense of harmony and order to the chaotic human existence. They have offered meaning and given shape to the experience of being human by addressing our craving for order, our desire for purpose. “I have given up on that view of religion and the gods that go with it. If Christian faith is essentially believing certain things about a supernatural God and surrendering to a magical thinking about reality, then I no longer have faith. If Christian faith is about a way of being and a posture toward reality that sees out for what it is, then maybe I still have some”.