Call Me Temple Cloud

Somerset has wonderfully evocative place names.

You could people a fantasy novel with them.  Probably Rodney Stoke is an ordinary, rather nerdy man until he stumbles into a parallel universe, where he is befriended by the mysterious Ben Noel Hill and his huge, hairy friends Yarley and Chew Magna.  There are exotic monsters, such as Vobsters and Mendips.

I think this world would have several religious traditions.  There is the established church in which the sinister Bishop Sutton is garnering power.  The Bacchanalian, sometimes violent rites of the Goat Church are presided over by bearded, horned priests, irreverently known as the Beardly Batch.  But the most mystical form of devotion is found in the way of the Temple Cloud.

In real life, the village of Temple Cloud, in north-east Somerset, was probably named Cloud after someone called Cloda, and later ‘Temple Cloud’ after the Knights Templar who held the manor of Cloud in the 13^th century.  The Templars, in turn, took their name from Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which was believed to be the place where King Solomon’s Temple had been built, and was therefore sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

I could go into details about the Crusades, and about Crusaders murdering or robbing Jews they met on their way to the Holy Land, and about two thousand years of lack of brotherly love between three religions who believe in the same God.  I could point out how often, from the first century onwards, Christians have refused to love each other, let alone loving Jews and Muslims.  But you probably know all this already.

Instead, let’s look back at the story of the original Temple of Solomon.  According to the Bible, there was a king called David who felt guilty about the fact that he lived in a big house and God didn’t.  God pointed out that he didn’t need a house built by humans and had never asked for one.  But because he was touched that David loved him enough to want to build him a house, he promised to give David a son who would build him a temple.

Of course, David’s son Solomon also realised that God doesn’t live in a house.  He understood that God is everywhere, and therefore cannot be contained within the whole universe, let alone in one building on one planet.  But he had a magnificent temple built anyway, so that people had something to focus on when they prayed.  Perhaps he felt that the trouble with believing in a God who is everywhere, is that sometimes people forget that God is anywhere at all.

When the temple was opened, people knew that God was there, because there was a cloud filling the temple.  The priests couldn’t go on with the service they had carefully prepared, because they couldn’t see what they were doing.  If they had a list of prayers to be recited, rituals to be carried out, animals to be sacrificed – God wasn’t interested.  Right then, God just wanted them to be aware that he is real, and beyond our understanding, and not tied down to our plans.

So this blog is called Temple Cloud partly because I need a cloud to fill my understanding of God.  As a child, I grew up assuming that the Bible gave us clear, reliable information about God.  I realised it probably wasn’t meant to be taken literally about scientific facts, like believing that the world was made only six thousand years ago.  But if the Bible said that God says every inclination of our hearts is evil, then that had to mean literally everything we had ever thought or felt was evil.

Lots of people believe that they believe the Bible literally, taking its clear, unambiguous meaning.  The trouble is that they don’t all conclude the same things about what it means.  And to the best of my knowledge, no-one interprets it the way I do in a pessimistic mood.  Even people who believe in six-day creationism don’t believe that Jesus meant it literally when he commands us to hate our families.

And the reason for this is that I have a cloud of my own.  Mine isn’t a holy cloud of honest acceptance that my limited human brain cannot fully understand God.  Mine is a choking smoggy cloud of depression and paranoia and self-loathing that gets in the way of seeing anything that God might want me to understand. 

It is a filter through which, when I read the Bible, I can see only the verses that suggest that God is malevolent.  When other people point out verses that suggest the opposite, I retort, ‘But we know that can’t be true, because the Bible says this!’  I know this doesn’t make sense.  If not all of the Bible is both (a) true and (b) easy to understand, why should I assume that the verse I’m pointing at is true and that I’ve understood it correctly?  But by this point, I’m usually too angry to care.

Some people yell at anyone who contradicts them, because they love their own egos so much that they are convinced that God loves only them and hates anyone who thinks differently.  I do it because I hate myself so much that I’m convinced that God hates me, and so I’m scared of being offered hope that maybe he doesn’t.  This doesn’t make me less insane than other people, just insane in a different way.

I’m coming to realise that most mature Christians, even if they claim to believe the whole Bible, don’t really start from the premise that the Bible is the ultimate authority.  They start from the premise that God is love: that he loves us, and wants us to love each other and ourselves as he loves us, and that we can trust him.  Beyond this, there is plenty of room for doubt.

I need to find enlightenment.  But I need to walk through a cloud of uncertainty to get there.