Simon Cross: Looking for what is Becoming

“Seasons don’t fear the reaper, nor do the moon or the sun or the rain, we can be like they are…” 

When Buck Dharma (aka Donald Roesner) wrote the words of Blue Öyster Cult’s classic track ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’, he intended it to be a song about enduring love. Its catchy riff and spooky lyrics made it an enduring hit too. 

More than this, though, the song neatly summarises a way of thinking about the never-ending process of life. 

According to ‘Process’ thought – a school of philosophy and theology that comes, mainly, from the work of Alfred North Whitehead – what we perceive as somewhat static instances of life, or reality, is really a constant stream of perishing and becoming. Or if you like, constant, iterative, death and birth. Each moment is a moment of perishing, just as it is a moment of becoming. This process never stops. 

The necessity of death and new life, or new birth, is also baked into the story of Christianity.

Looking at the world through the lens of ongoing, constant ‘process’, puts things into a new perspective, particularly things like the decline of the church. 

There’s no doubt that the church is in decline in Western Europe and North America. The only question, really, is what to do about it. Lots of money and considerable effort has been spent on trying to arrest the decline, or to put it another way – to prevent the perishing. Everywhere you look, people are burning out as they do their best to shore up declining congregations.

In a recent research paper for the United Reformed Church’s research group, I posed an alternative perspective: What if, instead of trying to stop the perishing, we accepted it as part of the natural order? 

What if we all followed the advice of Process thinking, or just listened to Blue Öyster Cult, and stopped trying to stop the perishing, and instead looked for what is becoming? What if we stopped trying to hold up the building and instead looked among the rubble for whatever is growing in the ground?

From the perspective of Process thinking, perishing (The Reaper) is not something to be feared. That’s not to say perishing isn’t painful, sometimes it can be very painful. But it is, nevertheless, necessary. 

‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ was, I think, heavily based on The Byrds’ version of ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ by Pete Seeger – listen to the guitar and the vocals, reflect on the content – I think it’s quite obvious. That song was, itself, a reworking of a passage from Ecclesiastes chapter three. All things have their season, even songs. 

I think the wisdom that all things have a time, and that time is limited, is a grand truth. And when seen through that lens perishing/death/The Reaper can be something very positive. It offers the promise of something new to come, because perishing leads to becoming.

What would happen if we stopped trying to prevent the process of ecclesial decline from taking it’s natural course, and instead we embraced it? 

What might we see if we stopped desperately burning ourselves out attempting to prevent the inevitable, and started, instead, looking for what may come next? 

After my presentation to the research group a friend told me of a project he had done with a church in which they first considered what the world would be like in fifty years time. Having come up with some ideas, they began to ask how the people living in that imagined future might seek to engage with the church. What sort of society would they be living in, and how would that shape their engagement with Christianity? 

Their imaginative exploration gave them a hope-filled stimulus to begin looking for examples of the kinds of things they had discussed, and working on ideas that would bear fruit after their own deaths. They moved away from trying to prevent the perishing of the present, and looked instead for that which would become in the future.

Seasons don’t fear the reaper, nor do the moon, or the sun, or the rain. We can be like they are… can’t we?

Simon Cross is the chair of the Progressive Christianity Network, Britain (Homepage | Progressive Christianity Network Britain (pcnbritain.org.uk)). His writing can be found at simonjcross.substack.com