Levels of life

Yesterday, The Times carried a story reporting that the Booker Prize winning author Julian Barnes is to publish a semi-autobiographical work next month, entitled Levels of life. The book, David Sanderson reported,  makes mention of Barnes’ anguished sense of loss following the death of his wife the literary agent Pat Kavanagh from a brain tumour in 2008.

Writes Sanderson ‘In searing and moving passages, Barnes describes their last days together following the shock of diagnosis, his bitterness towards the world that “couldn’t, wouldn’t save her”, his angry response to friends’ inquiries, the failure of religion to offer solace, as well as his own thoughts of suicide.’

Barnes describes meeting a Christian friend, and commenting that his God ‘didn’t seem to have been very effective.’ The friend replies that it might be worth considering that Kavanagh might have suffered more than she did – implying, in other words that the manner of her passing was kinder than it might have been, and that this might be evidence of God’s intervention. Barnes writes ‘Ah, I thought, so that’s the best your pale Galilean and his dad can do.’

Now I don’t know the context of this conversation, or Julian Barnes’ previous encounters with Christianity, and I look forward to reading his book when it appears. But the conversation  does flag up how sensitive we need to be as Christians when speaking of our faith to those who suffer. How much better it would have been, we feel, had the author’s friend simply spent time with him, sharing his pain,  feeling the force of the ‘Why?’ question which can never be satisfactorily answered in this life at least. Why must we always be trying to answer questions which only God can answer?

But if and when the time comes for talking theology, the point is that Barnes is right – a anaemic Jesus and the anaemic God such a Jesus would reflect would to irrelevant to our pain. The truth is, we believe, that Jesus, not the Jesus of myth, but the robust, courageous, fearless, tender, passionate man we encounter in the gospels was anything but a ‘pale Galilean.’  He submitted to crucifixion, he felt the darkness, he lived the unanswered question – ‘My God, My God, why?’ In Jesus, we believe God entered into our pain, into the mystery of our suffering. And on our clearer-seeing days we believe that somehow, through the suffering of Jesus,  easter daylight will come, in this world perhaps, in the dimension beyond certainly.

A robust, courageous Jesus reflects a robust, courageous God, and this is the God who calls for our trust. Mystery, pain, waiting, empathy – none of this will on its own draw a suffering person to believe, but it will show that Christianity is not a faith of glib answers, but of deep reflection on the ultimate  imponderables.  The bottom line is that God is with us in our pain even when we do not believe in God.

Last night I was reading in Ron Ferguson’s biography of George Macleod, the founder of the Iona Community and came across  Macleod’s advice to a fellow-minister during World War II on what to say when his parishioners were praying for the safety of their sons in the battle.  Wrote Macleod:

‘What does our God offer? Safety from death? Not in the New Testament. Safety from sin – that is what is offered. Cold comfort? No, it is everlasting life now; his happiness if he returns; his happiness if he dies. Then the other world breaks through as a reality at last, and prayer, and true theology. God ceases to be the one who may hold the scimitar and becomes the God of love now. His love is not dependent on the casualty list.’

Barnes describes how, in the end it became less likely that he would commit suicide, because he realised that Kavanagh still lived in his memory. ‘I was her principal rememberer… I could not kill myself because then I would also be killing her. She would die a second time.’  We are so glad that Barnes has in this way found some healing.  And we reflect on our Christian belief that God is our ‘principal rememberer’. We exist because God remembers us.  And divine memory and divine recall are  both perfect and eternal. Even in the darkest night we are not forgotten.