Escaping the Void

Years ago in Goremead I met Hari and Peter. They didn't worship at Goremead Church but had been members of a tiny independent chapel at the far side of the village. Peter had been a teacher and missionary many years before, but had lost his faith and by the time I met him had the beginnings of dementia. I had a couple of conversations with him about what Jesus had actually been on about. 'I don't believe in him any more,' said Peter, 'but I just can't forget about this man. I still love him.' His eyes glistened. Peter recovered his faith a few weeks before he died, and how much this must have been a relief to him and probably those around him too became clear from a volume of poetry Hari sent me after Christmas, compiled from Peter's papers after his death. I began reading them as a break in the middle of the Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown, whose relentless Orkney-ness does wear one down after 250 pages. But Peter's verse is not light relief. In fact it makes Thomas Hardy read like Spike Milligan. Meaninglessness and existential angst sprawl over every page: the Void doesn't so much stare back from the book as leap out and shake you round the neck. 

On the train taking me towards my meeting with S.D. last week I found myself trying to answer the question I encourage every Christian to try to answer for themselves, that is, What is it Jesus has done for you? There are general theological answers to this involving sin and redemption, but they didn't play a great role in my conversion, shockingly. If I'm honest, I can't say my sense of the cussedness and wrongness of things, the dark fault line that runs through all our human endeavours and so often turns them to the bad, formed a problem over which I fretted and to which God was 'the answer'. In fact, what Jesus rescued me from, if anything, was the horror of meaninglessness, and reassured me that I and everything around me mattered, on a cosmic level.

I knew about that, but sitting waiting for my connection at Clapham Junction revealed something else. I often say that without Christ we would not know what love truly is, but I hadn't seen the connection between this theme and the existential one. There was a time (very occasionally there still is) when I would look around at my fellow human beings and see what Dr Bones would once have called a parade of meat-puppets, busy microbes doomed to die and striving to ignore the fact. A lot of Peter's poems were about that. But if there was a God, and meaning, and love was possible, and he loved me, then he loved all these silly beings too despite their frailty, frail and silly in ways not much different from the ways in which I am frail and silly. And that meant I couldn't regard them so negatively any more. Jesus not only gave me an example of love, not only taught me what love is, but even made it possible. He made it possible for me to sit at a busy railway station and smile, and dance inside for joy. He not only rescued me from meaninglessness, he rescued me from contempt. 

God knows how I explain that to anyone, though.