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SERMON:
The Golden Compass
DATE:
January 27, 2008
SPEAKER: Rev. Tim Ashton
TRANSCRIBER:
David Irvin
I got acquainted with “The Golden Compass” and Phillip Pullman gradually. I
didn’t take the book seriously until recently. It was copyrighted in 1995, and I think my
wife, Gretchen, began reading it sometime shortly thereafter when it came out in
paperback. And she said “Oh, you’ll like this. It’s sort of an adventure book with trips to
other worlds; it’s not like the kind of heavy things you read all the time”. So she passed
it along to me, and I used it for bedtime reading when I like a fantasy book that takes me
into other worlds and let’s me float beyond for a while.
Well, it was true. It is quite an adventure story. I was captivated. I eventually
read all three of them. There were many trips to other worlds, and elegant Victorian
Oxford. I met the captivating little heroine, Lyra. A girl, a little girl! How different. A
little red-haired kind of tomboy girl. I thought, Gretchen, now I know why you identify
with this one.
Lyra was the pet of Jordan College at Oxford. The scholars doted on her.
Meanwhile, tomboy she was and inveterate liar, I don’t think Gretchen was that. An
adventurer, hanging out with the kitchen help, running around on top of the roofs and
down in the cellars and off with the Gypsies in the fens and boatyards of Oxford (before
they were filled in).
Maybe it was because things were different back then in the 90s when I was a
District Executive, and I didn’t have to preach every week. I wasn’t constantly looking
at every single thing that crept along near me as something I could suck up for a sermon.
The weekly “What are you going to say?” That’s something else. Anyway, I do note
that I made margin notes as I always do, so I was sort of paying attention. However, I
didn’t really notice there were these things called demons, which are actually your soul,
only they’re on the outside of your body. They are in the form of an animal that follows
along with you all the time. You converse with them; they are a kind of an alter ego, an
observing ego. During childhood, one’s demon change form. It can be a butterfly, it can
be a dog. It just changes all the time, but once you come into your maturity, your demon,
your soul, fixes its form and that begins to say something about who you are.
Then there’s dust. Dust! It took me a long time to figure out the meaning of dust.
But eventually I saw it this way. Dust is like particles that are everywhere, that connect
everything together.
Conflict? The evil Magisterium, the Church, as it is openly called, represents all
authoritarian efforts, sacred and secular, to make other people do what you want them to
do.
Nonetheless, it was not a simplistic black and white kind of writing. For example,
the master of Jordan College, who was deeply concerned for scholarship, the survival of
the college and little Lyra, the heroine, put poison, we presume, in (Lyra’s father) Lord
Asriel’s wine. Why did he do this? A puzzle of motivation.
I read them. They went back on the shelf. I don’t think I gave them a whole lot
of thought again until sometime last fall, maybe earlier, when I heard a recording of an
interview with Philip Pullman on NPR. Such a lucky accident. I got 10 minutes of it and
then I had to do something else, but it was the perfect 10 minutes.
In that interview, Philip Pullman was talking about the relationship of innocence,
experience and wisdom. My philosophical antennae shot right up: Oh, what is this? We
usually think of losing the innocence of childhood to experience as a kind of tragedy; the
once perfection of childhood is lost to the reality of the struggles of this world. But
Pullman said, “Oh, no, innocence is lost through experience. And from experience, one
gains knowledge and with work and further maturity, it becomes wisdom. And wisdom
equips you to live your life with decision, meaning and purpose. I said “Oh, great UU
philosophy. This is good!” Innocence is transformed, through experience, and we gain
knowledge from which we develop wisdom, which gives us the tools to live adult lives,
with good decision-making and ethical purpose.
But then he contrasted his views with C. S. Lewis. I love Lewis, especially “The
Chronicles of Narnia”. Pullman says that Lewis would prolong the innocence of
childhood forever if he could, and that he sees the loss of innocence as tragic, symbolized
in the fact that the post-adolescent children cannot return to the magical land of Narnia.
Says Pullman, “Susan, who becomes interested in lipstick, nylons and invitations, is
excluded forever from Paradise”.
With that, I thought, I guess I have to go down and dig up my C. S. Lewis books.
So I go get “The Chronicles of Narnia”, there are 7 skinny little books in a gift box. I
remember reading those in the early 70s probably; I was probably still reading them in
the later 80’s. So I got out “The Voyage of the Dawntreader” and I started reading. I
don’t think I was more than 2 or 3 pages in when I whipped back to the title page, looked
on the other side of the title page and said “God! When was this copyrighted? 1952!”
Well, that explains it, it is kind of dated. India was partitioned and gained independence
in 1947, just 5 years before. We hadn’t even gone near the liberation movements of the
second half of the 20th century confronting racism, sexism, understanding feminism,
dealing with homophobia, learning about multiculturalism and interfaith life.
I remember when I came out of the seminary in 1970, back then it was tough for
UU chaplains to get a job because we didn’t have valid, Christian ordination. How
different it is today; sometimes UU chaplains even have an advantage, because more and
more institutions, colleges, and hospitals are seeking somebody whose religious brain is
multicultural/interfaith, because folks that flow in and out of the hospitals and nursing
homes, or whatever the institution may be, come in quite a variety of faiths and cultures.
Many of Lewis’ offhand comments, were terribly dated. I’m not sure what I think
of the exclusion of adolescents from Narnia. There are times I forgive it a bit and think it
grows from the idea that, indeed, a mature child doesn’t play fantasy games in a play
world of knights and kings and so forth. I must continue to reread it and think it over.
Pullman published his first volume of the Dark Materials Trilogy in 1995, quite a
different era.
Then I became kind of concerned about Pullman: Isn’t he sort of a strawmancreating atheist, who sets up a gratuitous critique of the obviously authoritarian Roman
Catholic Church? Intellectual and critical philosophers who are not Christian apologists
long ago showed that classical understandings of the monotheistic and all-powerful
divinity are not defensible philosophically. If you want to believe it, take it on faith, but
the absolutely all-powerful divinity who knows everything cannot be balanced with real
choice.
Reading a little further about Pullman, I began to realize there was a greater depth
there. His grandfather was an Anglican clergyman and he loved his grandfather. He
considers himself a son of the Anglican Church, although obviously he is a strident
atheist and a fierce opponent of authoritarianism. And yet he venerates the 1662 Book of
Common Prayer. He is a scholar of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and an appreciator of
William Blake. He knows something about Christianity in its more unusual forms, for
Blake was a mystic who saw the world quite differently, and many assert that Milton
was, indeed, heretical in his theology and Unitarian in his underlying Christology.
So Pullman is a different kind of atheist. He is an atheist with depth, who can
ground his humanistic philosophy in the categories, iconography and stories that form
the depth of western culture. For example, he gives his interpretation of the Creation
story, the second one in which Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden. Pullman
asks “Well, what was Eve about? What was she after? She was after knowledge,” he
said, “and that can’t be bad. It wasn’t sex, it wasn’t money, it wasn’t power. She was
after knowledge and she picked the apple from the Tree of Knowledge in the center of the
Garden. She fed it to her husband, their eyes were opened, they had knowledge of Good
and Evil”.
They had to leave the Garden; they were expelled; but it was not a fall. It was the
beginning of human life, for before that, what were Adam or Eve except, in the words of
Pullman, “a pretty pet of the authoritarian God”. This description is nicely paralleled in
the words he uses to describe Lyra when she was spending time with Mrs. Coulter in her
glamorous life, doing little or nothing in elegant circumstances. Whitehead said
“Religion is expressed in the worship that it commands and that worship is not a rule of
safety, but an adventure of the spirit, a flight into the unattainable”.
Pullman, through out these books, continues to offer intriguing reinterpretations
of the categories of religion. Dust forms a very nice example. It is a name for God.
Dust! But it is so parallel to Emerson’s vision of the Oversoul which he compares to a
river of water, this the flowing river of dust, particles that connect us together. Emerson
says
We are from a stream whose source is hidden; our being is descending to
us, we know not whence from. When I watch that flowing river from places
which I cannot discern, it pours its streams into me and I realize I am a receiver,
not a cause. The great nature in which we rest, just as the Earth lies in the soft
arms of its atmosphere, is that unity, the oversoul within which every person’s
particular being is contained and made one with every other. We seem to live in
division, in parts and particles; within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence,
the universal beauty to which every part and particle is equally related. The
eternal One.
Sounds like dust, doesn’t it? Sounds like the interdependent web of which we are
a part interfused with the transcending mystery and wonder that creates and upholds life.
Another Pullman concept is demons. This is Pullman’s name for the soul, but
intriguingly not some invisible, immutable substance, which is us, though we can hardly
know it or find it. Here it is, an observing ego, a companion of our consciousness, an
expression of the essence of who we are, and with whom we are in dialogue.
The Magisterium would, of course, restrict our knowledge, especially of dust and
keep people in an infantile state of submission, offering their paternalistic protection of
our supposedly irreplaceable innocence, saving us from the pain and the struggle of
making decisions and actually living our own lives.
To more fully achieve their agenda, the leaders Magisterium have come up with
an horrific idea called intercision, to cut the demon, the soul, away from the person.
They are experimenting in the arctic, in the frozen north, abducting minority, poor, and
Gypsy children, for experiments in the techniques of intercision, to see what would
happen when you cut away the soul. If you can do this surgery, you could stop the child
from growing up. But the result of the actual surgery is child in a zombie-like state,
barely a life at all. And what should one expect? A life without choice is no life at all.
Real life is an adventure of learning, creation, moral choice, which choices create and
build the universe generation by generation. What we do makes a difference.
On the other hand, the book is not singularly devoted to philosophical and
theological concerns. I’m intrigued with Pullman’s observations on other subjects:
Here’s some paragraphs on beauty and glamour. This is about Lyra and her experiences
in Oxford and later with Mrs. Coulter in the elegant world of glamorous London.
She had seen a great deal of beautiful in her short life, but it was Jordan
College beauty. It was Oxford beauty, grand and stony and masculine. In Jordan
College, much was magnificent, but nothing was pretty. In Mrs. Coulter’s flat,
everything was pretty. It was full of light, for the wide windows faced south and
the walls were covered in a delicate golden white striped wallpaper, charming
pictures in gilt frames and antique-looking glass and fanciful sconces bearing
electric lamps with frill shades and frills on the cushions and everywhere and on
the curtains.
But eventually Lyra learns that just because it looks good, it doesn’t mean it is
good. Eventually Lyra learns that Mrs. Coulter is head of the experimentation group to
practice intercision on children. After she learns of Mrs. Coulter’s dark side, she escapes.
Her Gypsy friends from Oxford save her. She’s hidden away on a Gypsy boat and in
these scenes we pick up Pullman’s sense of the importance of work.
In the Pullman mythology, only upon being cast out of the Garden of Eden can we
become our real human selves. In real human life on earth, we must work to earn our
bread and create our own lives. Work is a gift, not a curse.
Lyra’s now on the Gypsy boat, and the boat is a working boat. Pullman writes,
“Now that Lyra had a task in mind, she felt much better. Helping Mrs. Coulter
had all been very well, but, as her demon reminded her, she wasn’t doing any real work,
she was just a pretty pet. On the Gyptian boat, there was real work to do, and Ma Cossa
made sure she did it. She cleaned and she swept; and she peeled potatoes, and she made
tea. She greased the propeller shaft bearings and so forth.
And finally I want to read you a brief passage on revenge. This is really fine, I
think. The Gyptians or Gypsies have decided they are going to make the voyage north
and they are going to rescue the children who have been carried off to these dreadful
intercision experiments. So they are having kind of a communal pow-wow on the boat to
decide how they are going to do this. This is a very personal concern because the
Gypsies have been the primary targets of kidnapping because little Gypsy street urchins
are not much noticed by the police. In the discussion on the boat, one of the women says
I hope you’re going to take powerful revenge. I hope you aren’t going to
let thoughts of mercy and gentleness hold your hand back from striking and
striking hard.” [she says to the leader, John Fah. And Fah says] “Nothing will
hold my hand, Margaret, save only judgement. To be sure, there’s a warm
passion behind what you say, but if you get into that passion, friends, you are
doing what I always warned you against. You are placing the satisfaction of your
own feeling above the work you have to do. Our work here is first to rescue, then
punishment. It isn’t gratification for upset feelings. Our feelings don’t matter. If
we rescue the kids and can’t punish them that took them, we’ve done the main
task, but if we aim to punish first and by doing so, lose the chance of rescuing the
kids, we have failed. Don’t worry that John Fah’s heart is too soft to strike a blow
when the time comes, and the time will come, under judgment, not under
passion.”
As I am wont to say, and also in summary: Oh, fellow liberals, let us not feel so
alone. In the affirmation of the perennial wisdom of worldly and practical philosophy,
here’s a whole series of books that are quite popular and teach the basic humanistic
message. Nor need we feel torn from the core of western culture. These core elements
do not need to stay under the authoritarian rule of orthodoxy.
Pullman’s interpretation of Genesis is a perfect example. The fall and exile is not
a curse, but the necessary origin of human life and its purpose. God is not the authority,
God is dust, like the Over-soul, the combination of the transcending mystery and wonder
in the interdependent web. God, ever-present. Name that power and connection as you
will, dust is a very good name.
The soul is no immutable substance but a part of our own conscious selves, with
which we interact and observe and converse. Our souls guide us on our way and faith.
Whether we can prove it or not, Pullman commends us to live as if our deepest beliefs
were true, that they are the core directions of the universe: truth, beauty and goodness.
We cannot prove it. We hope it and we live “as if” and that is faith. We can
speak, if we choose, through credible traditional symbols, if you like that, and at the same
time we see that we have a philosophy at once popular, understandable, realistic,
attractive, and summed up in a story of the guidance and meaning for life. If you are of
another ilk, you can watch the films of Monty Python. I often feel they would make an
entire UU religious curriculum. But whatever the case, we are not alone in the
affirmation of a perennial, humanistic, and worldly philosophy that guides our lives.
Amen.