January 1991 (continued) Theology has led me into a-theology; liberal Christianity has become Cupittian non-realism. So I am now paralysed by the impossibility of using traditional church language, and conscious as a preacher of the most blatant dishonesty of speech and apparently assenting silence. This is a most painful experience. Yet the pressures upon me to remain, to continue work which I know sustains people and allows a platform for things which need to be said – these pressures are real, and good. A crisis of honesty, and one with which almost no one I know can help me.
But then I may not stay for the rest of my life at this point. I have moved often in my pilgrimage. As soon as I crystallise ideas into language, as soon as I assent to this particular brand of a-theology, I know at once how much I am yet again excluding: The known life of the spirit, known to all cultures and all centuries, not to be lightly dismissed with a puff of Freud and a squirt of Jung. I know well enough the folly of dogmatism.
There is another factor. In poetry, in work and love and friendship and everyday living, I have consciously loved life, celebrated life – been, if not always optimistic, certainly positive and joyous at heart. It may be no more than advancing years, but I find this to be no longer the case. I see the human race as irredeemable, and the planet it lives on as doomed. Even compassion takes a setback when I realise that there are too many of us and the Earth would be better rid of us – and a million years hence (or much less?) it will all have vanished without trace, our words and our aspirations melted as though they had never been. Ultimate pessimism. It is too large a view; it destroys, or at least threatens, any sense of purpose in one’s life. But life can only be conducted with any degree of sanity if we have some immediate hope – personal, political, ecological or some other.
My raison d’être as a leader of worship is to celebrate life, to support and encourage and challenge people as they strive towards the improvement of life. I have to offer them hope of some sort. One cannot be honest in optimism, for optimism is an ostrich. One cannot be honest in pessimism, if one’s own life is comfortable and happy.
The result is that I am enduring a lengthy period (possibly an endless one?) of knowing that I have nothing to say. Nothing to write a poem about, nothing to preach a sermon about, nothing about which I feel sure enough to venture a statement; and if I did feel sure, the statement wouldn’t come out right. It is as though a mainspring had snapped, somewhere quite deep inside me, too deep for examination. The clock continues to tick, but probably can’t be relied on much longer. It no longer chimes or shouts: ‘Cuckoo!’ So far this has been an attempt to articulate the negatives that seem to be dogging and paralysing me.
However, in my experience every statement has its reverse and obverse. (Come to think of it, this is probably my only settled conviction! It preserves me from being opinionated, on the whole, though also makes me indecisive and too easily persuadable by opposing arguments.) So what is the positive of this negative state? Perhaps it is the urge to simplify, an urge first given rein when I acquired my little cottage Poustinia. This is not exactly the ascetic longing to simplify life to its bare necessities. That is a kind of perverse blasphemy against the rich prodigality of life in this complex amazing world. But it is a strong wish to sort out priorities and winnow away the falsities which so easily beset us. Philip Toynbee quotes Neville Ward: ‘We can live with dignity only if we live on a few things, chosen for the way they speak deeply to us. We cannot live at all if we do not select from the plenitude of possible experience. We are simply distracted by meaningless shouts, whispers, pulls, wounds, nudges.’ This applies, amongst other things, to the life of the mind. I’m still avid for books and ideas, yet conscious that it is a kind of silly greed. In late years, how foolish it is try to cram one’s mind with all possible equipment – for what? Better to learn to relax, to think more slowly, using fewer words. There is a sense, apart from the superficially obvious one, in which poetry is too difficult, too complicated. Words fail, and the cleverest words, the most seductive words, the successful ones, even these are not good enough. As I was saying in the poem ‘When you come to the edge of words…’ Eve’s fruit was none other than language. That was the fall, as well as the ascent, the glory, the thing that made us human. Contemporary philosophers say we live inside language. That is our glory and our misery and our alienation from earth and animal. I hope to live closely with words until I die. Yet I also hope to learn how to ration words.
At the beginning of the Gulf War, I, with others, was briefly plunged into angry despair about the human race, this barbarous species that enjoys destroying its own kind. Have we learnt nothing? Must these boys be at their war games forever? On reflection I realised that not everything is as bad as ever. There is a true wish for peace, for civilised negotiation; a true aversion from maiming and killing; a genuine concern for the waste of resources which could be used to feed, house, educate, solve environmental challenges. And these, however we fail to implement them, are good desires and fresh insights. They were not available to the miscalled ‘noble savage’. Notions of human rights, of care for the disabled, of anti-sexism and anti-racism, of peaceful persuasion prove that some human thinking does advance, and advance morally. But towards what?
If, as seems 90% likely, there is no telos, if our planetary system will simply burn out and erase all memory, then we have the most appalling tragedy of pointlessness imaginable, without even a spectator to weep. Was it not the cruellest trick of the gods, or chance, to give us minds and words to think with?
My own death troubles me not at all. If it were tomorrow, I would meet it with equanimity, saddened only for the one person who would be affected by it.
If I have nothing more to say, and have no further biological or social function, I am expendable. I have no wish to wither slowly into old age. But I do not long for death: life is still sweet and rich. Nor does the universal fact of death worry me. I rejoice in the cycle of life, the amazing re-use of molecules. Yet the prospect of the eventual death of humanity paralyses me. Is this ridiculous? Apparently so.
To return to the question of simplification. It would be good to talk with George Herbert, that lover of English words, that freshest of poets, who so well understood the matter. He was forever refining his poetry in the direction of simplicity precisely in order to cope with the ineffable. And I have known, as he, the stab of pain, the surge of joy which no biology, psychology or sociology can explain away. It seems that only for myself, or very occasionally for a few others, my poetry has been a vehicle for that Otherness. Certainly my lack of recognition as a poet argues that I have failed to convey its suchness – or that editors are not listening for such things. Either way, it is unwanted. So why add to it, now that the fires are dying down and my waning energies are unlikely to make a better job of it? Especially now that I feel I have no more statements to make. Statements falsify. What an absurdly paradoxical enterprise, to try to explain in words why words are deserting me!
March 1992 With pain and many a backward look, I have slowly detached myself from most of my church commitments. It eventually became necessary, quite recently, to write to my Lay Preachers’ Commissioner and indicate briefly my a-theological position. It was almost a relief to do it. It was also a surprise to receive a warm and almost understanding reply, actually supporting me in the need to follow my own personal integrity. And I have become, it seems, some sort of adviser to others sucked out on the receding tide of the Sea of Faith. Do the blind lead the blind – or is the one-eyed woman queen?
Ahead: the void. For one who loved God with heart and mind and soul and strength, the most devastating of bereavements. And that it more or less entails the loss of the human support of the church community (and this when on the verge of retirement I contemplate another void) compounds the desolation. It is an irony that for long I suffered the church as a duty laid upon me by my love for God.
Latterly, I have seen and experienced the solid worth of that human community, but now cannot bear to be part of it because its language is false for me.
But if I was indeed for so much of my life an ardent lover of God, what was I in love with? That awareness of the divine presence: what was I then experiencing? Primitive peoples, as anthropologists have observed them, believe that at night, in dreams, they move in other realms. They project outside themselves their own internal processes. Similarly, they reify their fears and guilts; projected outward, these become external demons to be propitiated. Very well, then – how do such mechanisms differ from godconsciousness? We revere, we aspire, and we project outward that which we revere and aspire to, calling it god or gods. And we dress our projection in the cultural clothing we have to hand.
Having finally, without evasion or pleading, faced the apparent fact, I find I can no longer make the magic work. This is not the classic sense of God’s withdrawal, God’s absence, hard to bear but carrying the hope of God’s return. This time, it is as though I had struggled through a thorn hedge and have no way back. I am out of the thicket, like it or not, and out upon a dusty plain in the full glare of the sun.
Yet I am what I was, a lover of God. What can that mean now? It seems that at least I must reverse Simone Weil’s instruction. What she called ‘the forms of the implicit love of God’ – love of nature, art, science, other humans – should never, she said, be loved for themselves until after the direct experience of God: then only might they be loved for God’s sake, as God could be encountered within them. Now, rather, I am forced to turn all my love directly upon the ‘implicit forms’ and love them not for God’s sake but their own. Shall I find the strength for that? This must be a task for my retirement. To look, to listen, to read; to paint, to write, to respond; to take time to appreciate; and to be glad and thankful at the last for the privilege of having lived in this wonderful world.
Thankful? Oh! to whom?