One of the useful purposes of religion in the past was the way it reinforced society’s moral order by hallowing it with divine authority. Inevitably, it overdid the reinforcement. Stable societies benefit from operating a moral consensus that most of their citizens accept. But for everything to stay the same, everything has to change. For society to keep itself together and endure through time, it has to respond to the creative dynamism of the human mind and its constant search not only for new ways of making things but for new ways of ordering its moral economy. Ethics, like everything else, is subject to change. That’s why we should hold our values and moral norms with a sense of their provisional nature. We never know when we’ll want to change them because we have been persuaded there is a better way to organise society:
For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation . . . 24
Revealed religions find this hard to deal with. Their authors have persuaded them that they are in possession of a divine instruction that, unlike everything else in human history, isn’t subject to change and decay. It’s a mountain not a river. It stays put and never moves. That’s why the biggest junk yard in history is the one marked Abandoned Religions, abandoned because they were incapable of adapting to the flowing currents of human history.
To be fair to them, some Christian groups have tried to keep abreast of the currents of human history, but they have always been double-minded about it: one of their minds telling them to rope themselves to the mountain of eternal truth, the other telling them to throw themselves into the river of time and enjoy the swim. That’s why they were late in joining the campaign to emancipate women and sexual minorities, two of the great moral causes of my lifetime. That resistance to change is one reason for their decline amongst many young people today. The so-called millennial generation, both in the UK and in the USA, is the least religiously committed cohort of the population there has been in the last sixty years, so the future for organised religion does not look promising. There is still a spiritual hunger and interest among the young, but they show a marked contempt for institutions which claim that they alone can perfectly satisfy it.
It’s tough for believers to know how to respond to this situation, and I have sympathy for their predicament. They are fighting to stay afloat in the rushing flood of time. And the myth of the golden and untroubled past is always a potent attraction to those who have lost their moorings. Hence the busy reactionary churches many of us no longer feel at home in. As a tactic, it’ll probably work for a while. It just doesn’t work for me. But that doesn’t matter. I won’t be around to see how it plays out in the long run. I feel sad about that, but only a little. There are places where I can still find some spiritual comfort.
If, like me, you cannot halt the search for meaning in a universe that does not explain itself; but if, also like me, you can no longer cope with the compulsive chatter of what E.M. Forster called ‘poor little talkative Christianity’; then find a place where they don’t talk, they sing – and leave your soul unmolested for an hour. Slip into choral evensong somewhere to experience the music and touch the longing it carries for the human soul. For that, you may have to find a cathedral, which brings us to a significant fact. In Britain today, cathedrals are among the places of worship that continue to thrive in an era of religious decline. There are doubtless a number of reasons for this, but I am sure that one of them is the fact that cathedrals are spiritually and theologically more spacious and welcoming than most parish churches. And as well as music, they have more quiet corners to sit in where you can avoid recruiters out to press-gang your mind. Cathedrals are perfectly apt for the complicated times we live in. I am fully aware of the paradox here. I have mentioned it already. It is those who believe in the prose of religion who keep it alive for those of us who can now only survive on its poetry. I just hope they’ll go on saving that space for me a little longer. I am weary of the argument I’ve been engaged in all my life with religion and its volatile certainties.
What I want to do with what time I have left is to cherish those I love and indulge myself in that delicious form of reflective sadness we call melancholy. There are many ways to do it. The easiest is with an old friend or colleague over a meal and a bottle of wine, when you both look back. It has been said that the past is another country. Well, visit it in your memory, explore its foreignness, and see how different you were then. Be embarrassed by that other self, but be forgiving too. None of us really knew what we were doing. We were making it up as we went along; trying to figure it out; get the hang of it; find ourselves. Smile as you remember the way it was back then. Shake your head, but be kind.
And call up the dead. Remember them with fondness as well as exasperation. Their stories are over, so it’s okay to try to assess them or reach a verdict on them. Don’t be too hard on them. They were less sure of themselves than they seemed. It’s not only the past that’s another country. Most of our friends were strangers to us as well. They all had their own secrets and sorrows. The truth is, like us, they were fumbling their way through life. They were all a wee bit lost. So tenderness is all. They can’t change their story now. It’s told.
Ours isn’t. Not quite. But maybe it’s time to turn our mind towards our own ending, which might not be that far away. The bus might already have left the depot. As we begin to contemplate the end of our own story, it is important to get in the right mood. The mood I recommend is the last day of the holidays – another summer gone, and the sweet sadness of leaving. Poets do reflective melancholy better than anyone else, another reason the old should read them religiously as they close the story of their lives. Here’s a poem that captures the mood I recommend: ‘Goodbye to the Villa Piranha’ by Francis Hope:
Prepare the journey North,
Smothering feet in unfamiliar socks,
Sweeping the bathroom free of sand, collecting
Small change of little worth.
Make one last visit to the tip
(Did we drink all those bottles?) and throw out
The unread heavy paperback, saving
One thriller for the trip.
Chill in the morning air
Hints like a bad host that we should be going.
Time for a final swim, a walk, a last
Black coffee in the square.
If not exactly kings
We were at least francs bourgeois, with the right
To our own slice of place and time and pleasure,
And someone else’s things.
Leaving the palace and its park
We take our common place along the road,
As summer joins the queue of other summers,
Driving towards the dark.25
III
LOOKING BACK
Most of us were brought up to believe we made ourselves and constructed our own destiny. God — or the universe – had given us the freedom to choose the actions that would define our characters. We could choose to be good or bad, faithful or unfaithful, brave or cowardly. When the moment of trial came, we could choose to stand fast or run away. The short-hand term for this belief is ‘free will’. The idea behind it is that each of us has agency or control over our lives. Whatever we did at any particular moment, we could have done the opposite, chosen differently. It was entirely up to us. Our actions were freely willed decisions.
And it is not just a piece of theory, a philosophical issue we debate. It has solid consequences in the way societies have ordered themselves for centuries. It lies behind the criminal-justice systems we have developed. It is why we build prisons and incarcerate people in them because of the crimes they freely chose to commit. It is why people have been stoned, flogged, beheaded, burned at the stake or drowned on ducking stools for forbidden practices they freely chose to take part in. In societies where the cruellest penalties have been abandoned, they ha
ve been replaced by public shaming in newspapers or social media, psychological ordeals that can be even more painful than physical punishment. As we say of those we punish: it serves them right; they got what they deserved.
As well as these external punishments, and the public blaming and shaming that go with them, individuals have internalised society’s belief in free will deep within their psyches, where it prompts them into a wide repertoire of self-punishment. Disappointed at their own behaviour, they go through life burdened with guilt and self-hatred. And it can darken their final years as they look back at what they have made of themselves:
I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me . . . 26
A friend of mine who is an expert on Norse folk tales wrote an essay that challenged this understanding of free will. In the essay, she explored the metaphor of weaving cloth on a loom as a better way of thinking about how our lives develop and our characters are formed. The metaphor suggests that we were more passive than active in the movement of our lives. We were never in charge. The weaver was. Another name for her is inheritance. She gathered the threads already formed by our DNA, and all the other circumstances that went into the making of our unique existence, and slowly wove them into the story of our life. The threads shuttled across the loom of time, and our portrait was gradually revealed. And by old age the picture is nearly complete, apart from a few threads yet to be tied up to finish the story. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that though we live our lives forwards, we can only understand them backwards when they are nearly complete. But even the perspective of old age cannot give us the complete picture — because the loom is still moving, and there is still time for a final twist to its pattern. Here’s how Kierkegaard put it:
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really be understood in time because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it.27
Kierkegaard’s ‘resting place’ sounds a bit like Cupitt’s ‘ungetbehindability’, the impossible place outside our lives, the only place from which we could see them in the round to justly evaluate them. Maybe Kierkegaard thought death would be ‘the necessary resting place from which to understand’ them, but since we won’t be there to do the understanding when we are dead, the best perspective will be to get as close as we can to death and look back from there.
But what if we dislike what we see? What if we compare the person we turned out to be with the person we wanted to be and are disappointed at the difference? The performance is over, the curtain is closing, and there can be no encores. What if we give ourselves a bad review? That can be tough. Here’s how the poet T.S. Eliot describes how the old can feel as they look back at events in their lives that now fill them with dismay:
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm . . . 28
In the medieval Ars moriendi (The Art of Dying) that we looked at in the first chapter, the essential element was self-examination followed by confession to a priest and absolution, all designed to keep the soul out of hell. But there was probably more to it even then than a desperate act of self-protection before it was too late. It would have had earthly benefits as well. It might have healed damaged relationships and brought peace at the end, as the final threads were drawn together and the life was completed.
Whatever our views on religion and its rituals, that is still a wise approach to our end. And the re-enactment of all we have done and been need not result in Eliot’s rending pain. The Norse folk tale of the weaver and the loom will give us a more generous perspective than squinting at ourselves through the narrow lens of the doctrine of free will. The ways we acted, the decisions we took, all revealed the kind of person we were predestined to be – because we were never as free as we thought we were. From the beginning, we were being driven by facts and circumstances that were never in our control. But it is important to get the attitude right here. In our self-examination, we are neither to blame nor to make excuses for ourselves: we are to try to understand. It’s a bit like reading a compassionate biography that tries to show how the subject came to be the person she or he was. Ah, we say, that’s where all that came from, that explains it.
Achieving an objective perspective on the self is hard, but it’s worth the effort. Yes, we have to say, that’s who I was, that’s what I did. No point now in wishing I had been someone else, someone who didn’t fall apart under pressure, someone who did not betray a loved one, a better parent, a more loving spouse. For better or for worse, that’s who I was. That’s why the view from the summit of life can be challenging. As death approached them, I have sat at the bedside of people eaten up with regret because of mistakes they made in their lives. Wrong roads they took; relationships broken and still unrepaired; troubled children who blamed them for their own failures. Looking back from old age can add an extra burden to what is already a difficult time. So I want to suggest a way to take some of the pain out of regret. And I want to begin by looking at a great painting from the seventeenth century.
The painting is Peter the Penitent by the Italian artist Guercino. It was painted in 1639 and now hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland. It shows Saint Peter the Apostle, his face stricken with anguish moments after his betrayal of Jesus. Peter’s betrayal is a well-known story, but it’s worth thinking about again for what it can teach us about human nature. Peter was an impulsive man, a loudmouth who was always protesting his devotion to Jesus. As it became obvious that Jesus’s challenge to the religious and political authorities had placed him in danger of arrest for sedition and blasphemy, Peter got louder in his chest-beating. Everyone else may desert you, Master; I never will. I’d rather die than forsake you. So I say to those coming for you, bring it on! If you want Jesus, you’ll have to go through me first. And it wasn’t just boasting. Peter meant what he said. That’s what he intended to do. Because that was the kind of man he thought he was – or wanted to be.
The secret police came for Jesus in the middle of the night, the way they always do, and they took him away to try him, his death sentence already written. Peter followed, staying in the shadows, watching what was happening. Three times in the hours that followed he was challenged to admit he was a friend of Jesus. And three times he denied it, each denial louder than the one before. ‘I DO NOT KNOW THIS MAN,’ he finally screamed at them. The Gospel of Luke tells us that after his third denial, Jesus turned and looked at Peter. And Peter went out and wept bitterly. Anyone who has ever let a friend or a loved one down badly will know that feeling. Guercino’s painting captures Peter’s desolating grief at his own perfidy, and it makes one weep just to look at it.
The thing to understand is that Peter didn’t know he was going to betray Jesus until he did it. He really did love him. He really did want to die with him. Yet when it came to the test he did the opposite of what he wanted to do. It’s easy to imagine the desolation he felt after his denials of Jesus. He hated what he had done, and the kind of man it showed him to be. The fact is he didn’t know who he was till the moment in the courtyard, when he discovered he was not brave and loyal. He was a weak man, as solid as water. We don’t know enough about Peter to understand the factors that destined him to be a betrayer. The gospels are not biographies. They are sketches. But a skilled cartoonist can reveal a character in a few lines. We get the type instantly, because we are already aware of the complex patterns of human behaviour. There are the boasters hiding from their own fears. There are the haters who despise in others desires they cannot admit in themselves. The contradictions of the self are limitless. And most of what Eliot called our self-l
acerations come from our refusal to know ourselves.
Let me draw some conclusions from Peter’s story. In the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, they were to say: ‘lead us not into temptation’; or as a modern translation has it: ‘let us not be put to the test’. There may have been an element of irony in what Jesus was trying to get them to learn about themselves. He was surrounded by men who boasted they would never forsake him come hell or high water. Yet when the time came, they all ran away. And the loudest boaster and most abject failure was Peter, his right-hand man. Jesus knew how easy it was to go through life untested and therefore ignorant of our own true nature. That’s why he warned us not to condemn others for failing tests we had not yet had to face ourselves. That’s why the understanding look Jesus gave Peter broke Peter’s heart. But it was also the moment Peter began to grow in self-understanding. We can go through life not knowing who we are until the right combination of circumstances puts us to the test and reveals our true character. It’s as if our part in the play had been kept from us till the circumstances called it forth and we discovered who we were. But if the moment comes and our character is revealed to us, we must accept it and admit who and what we are.
Once that act of self-acceptance is made, a number of healing acts can follow. The first may go against the grain of everything we have been taught about free will, but it is where we must start. We must acknowledge that our lives were propelled by factors that were never under our control. All the facts of the universe since the curtains lifted on the Big Bang created a script in which we all briefly appeared before leaving the stage to other performers. We are characters in a production that’s been running for 14 billion years, and our roles were written for us long before we appeared on the scene. And we don’t even know if the show has an author. All of us alive are on stage at the moment, but we’ll soon disappear like the 100 billion human beings who preceded us.
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