The permeable membrane

The Book of Strange New Things is a powerful new novel by Dutch-born Michel Faber, who now lives in the Scottish highlands. Its main character is Peter Leigh, a Christian pastor sent to minister to the native beings on the distant planet Oasis, which has been colonised by a secretive, organisation called USIC. Peter must leave his wife for the duration of his visit – their only contact is via an intergalactic email system.

One theme of the novel is communication – between Peter and Bea, formerly so close; between Peter and his colleagues at the USIC base on Oasis; between Peter and the brilliantly imagined, Jesus-loving Oasans; and between Peter and the inner voice which as a child he identified as conscience, but now recognises as God.

Another theme is the risk of excluding reality – ‘home is in here,’ says one character, pointing at his chest, indicating he is self-sufficient, with no need of others. Peter is said to be on ‘Planet God’ by someone convinced that his faith and engagement with the Oasans have distanced him from the reality of what’s happening on earth.

And a third theme is an exploration of the nature and experience of religious belief.

 

Faber is said to be an atheist, but he writes with insight and deep understanding of the Christian’s inner life. Either he has been there himself, or else he is gifted with a quite outstanding empathy. He rarely puts a foot wrong in describing Peter and Bea’s faith, and Christians will find nourishing insights in this book.

But it also depicts faith under threat, faith struggling to cope with the social and economic implosion back on earth. My initial reaction was a sense of betrayal that someone who writes so well of Christian faith and experience should remorselessly describe the undermining of faith.

But the book is fiction. Another author could have written differently, but with equal integrity, of people finding, and keeping, rather than losing faith. (But perhaps Faber would argue that he has shown this in the tragic Oasans.)

I wish there had been more context: reference to people of faith and intellectual integrity who, faced with unspeakable evil, have held fast to their faith not from fear, but out of conviction that God is present in the pain; reference to the work of faith-groups who would, I trust and expect, have been bringing comfort and order to the troubled world.

‘Belief is a place that people didn’t leave until they absolutely must,’ Peter reflects. But it’s a fact that some Christian s do lose their faith. In the novel the time comes when there are simply too many unanswered questions, too much pain. Apparent answers to prayer are re-interpreted as coincidence; the inner voice as merely self talking to self.

At one point atheism seemed attractive to me, and I hope I was prepared to walk that way if truth led in that direction. It would be easier as an atheist, I reasoned – no longer would there be the endless questions about why a good loving God allows evil, or why God seems to play hide and seek, simply a wonder at the miracles of nature, a stoical acceptance of darkness and tragedy, and a resolve to nurture the flickering candle of my life and the lives of others.

But it seemed to me I could not with integrity reject the uniqueness of Jesus and the circumstantial evidence of God’s immense reality and presence in the world. I may be wrong, but I choose with joy and conviction to remain part of the company of people who, across the centuries, have followed the One who is both love and mystery.

The four sections of Faber’s novel are headed with words from the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy will be done,’ ‘On earth’, ‘As it is’, ‘In heaven.’  Initially we imagine that God’s will is referred to. But by the end, we re-read the headings as a godless statement of human consequences – our futures, Faber implies, are shaped by the choices we make.’

There is some hope at the end of the novel. I think Faber leaves room for God in whatever happens after the novel ends. In some respects Peter is never more Christian than in its closing pages.

‘There can be moments when grief is stronger than faith,’ Peter remarks earlier in the book. The implosion of our circumstances sometimes overshadow God, but as grief heals, and (as Peter puts it) ‘the membrane between ourselves and Heaven becomes permeable’ we may hear once again the inner whisper, and know its source.

And atheism too is hard to leave until we must, until our experiences cry out so stridently as to leave us no option but to embrace, with both reluctance and joy a new way of seeing.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the issue dated 25th December 2014)

A life in letters: Betjeman, Sir John (1906-1984)

One afternoon in the late 1960s, our English teacher Mr Mason put on a long-playing record for us to listen to. (He was the best English teacher we had – was his first name really ‘James’ or did we just call him that after the well-known actor?) Anyway, the record was of John Betjeman (poet, broadcaster, writer) reading his poem A subaltern’s love song, a paean of passion for tennis-playing Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

For the first time, I was hearing poetry which used what seemed to me to be contemporary language (although in fact already by the 1960s it was rather dated) and addressing everyday issues. Older poetry might deal with similar themes, but in their lines  experiences were expressed in complex language which I didn’t yet have the linguistic skills to penetrate. But Betjeman – this was visceral, powerful, real – I found in these lines an intense relevance which others of my age probably found in the Beatles’ songs.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn

How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won.

And that evening, as speaker and girl sat in the Hillman outside a Golf Club Ball which they never quite managed to enter, there was a (to me) satisfactory conclusion:

We sat in the car park till twenty to one

And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn

After this introduction to Betjeman I explored his work, and came across some further lines (from Chapter VIII of the poet’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells) which I was drawn to:

An only child, deliciously apart,

Misunderstood and not like other boys,

Deep, dark and pitiful I saw myself

In my mind’s mirror, every step I took

A fascinating study to the world.

The apartness and self-scrutiny of the only child described here resonated with me, although I don’t think I would have described the experience as ‘delicious’. I remember reading these lines to my mother, and her suspicion (unarticulated) that Betjeman was claiming to be gay. Perhaps as a teenager I was seeking to characterise myself as different, and somehow eccentric as a way of coping with, or making a virtue of the difficulties I found in relationships, and the poet’s words helped to authenticate the difference I aspired to.

(Incidentally, I distinctly recall seeing in print another version of the line ‘A fascinating study to the world’ – perhaps it was from a draft? – which read ‘An object of absorbing interest’ which seems to me to be more powerful and effective than the final version.)

The poignancy of another of Betjeman’s poems Five o’clock shadow has haunted me ever since I first read it. It describes terror experienced in the men’s ward. The doctors are playing a ‘foursome out on the links’ at the end of their shift; Sister ‘is putting her feet up’; the visiting relatives, having done their bit, are ‘making for home and a nice big tea and the telly.’ The patients (or at least one patient) are left to their visceral fear and sense of abandonment. ‘This is the time of day when we feel betrayed’ and (a line of aching sadness) ‘this is the time of day which is worse than night.’

I remember in the late 1980s staying overnight with friends in the north of England on a trip down to Wales. It was at a time when I was depressed and anxious, and overnight, unable to sleep because of heavy traffic on the road outside, I had decided I simply couldn’t cope with the planned holiday, and would (without telling my friends) head home in the morning rather than continuing south. Sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for it to be time to head downstairs for breakfast, I read the only interesting book in the room, a copy of John Betjeman’s picture book for children, Archie and the strict Baptists. It’s a fictionalised version of scenes from the life of Archie is the poet’s teddy to which (together with a toy elephant) he was attached throughout his life. In the book, Archie appears as a member of the Strict Baptist denomination – to which the folk I was staying belonged.

One Christmas in the 1970s, my mother pointed out in the Christmas issue of a women’s magazine the last three stanzas of Betjeman’s poem Christmas.

And is it true? and is it true?

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was Man in Palestine

And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

Could this man be a Christian, my mother wondered, considering the issue from her very polarised perspective on whether one was ‘in’ or ‘out’. Was he saying it was true, or wasn’t he, she mused.

Well, John Betjeman had a long-term commitment to the Anglican Church. He celebrated faith, but he also struggled with doubt, and I believe the tension between believing and doubting is reflected in these lines.  Betjeman wrote to his friend Evelyn Waugh in 1947 ‘I do know for certain that there is nothing else I want to believe but that Our Lord was the son of God and all He said is true.’

And seven years later he wrote in the Spectator ‘The only practical way to face the dreaded lonely journey into Eternity seems to me the Christian one. I therefore try to believe that Christ was God, made Man and gives Eternal Life, and that I may be confirmed in this belief by clinging to the sacraments and by prayer.’ *

Betjeman concludes his poem on The Conversion of St Paul with these moving lines which speak to all of us who ever find ourselves living, somewhere between faith and doubt:

What is conversion? Not at all

For me the experience of St Paul,

No blinding light, a fitful glow

Is all the light of faith I know

Which sometimes goes completely out

And leaves me plunging into doubt

Until I will myself to go

And worship in God's house below –

My parish church -and even there

I find distractions everywhere.

What is Conversion? Turning round

To gaze upon a love profound.

For some of us see Jesus plain

And never once look back again,

And some of us have seen and known

And turned and gone away alone,

But most of us turn slow to see

The figure hanging on a tree

And stumble on and blindly grope

Upheld by intermittent hope.

God grant before we die we all

May see the light as did St Paul.

*These quotations are from Faith and doubt of John Betjeman: An anthology of Betjeman’s religious verse, Edited and introduced by Kevin J. Gardner, London, 2005 p xv