My loss of faith in a transcendent God was a gradual process. There was no sudden enlightenment for me, just growing up, growing older, and finally realising that I didn’t have to be bound by a belief imposed from above. My first experience of religion was through Sunday School, but I only remember a party in a church hall where to my great delight there was an indoor slide. After my mother died when I was eight, my Aunty Elsie sometimes took me to her local Congregational Church where I was impressed by the kindness and interest of the people there. This was a great contrast to the formal services of the Church of England in Torquay, where we went in crocodile every Sunday. The most exciting thing that happened there was when the teacher who was escorting us fell out of the pew in a dead faint. Then I became a teenager and began studying the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles for the School Certificate exam. The personality, life and death of Jesus brought religion alive for me. This was something to aim for – perfection! At my confirmation service, the Bishop of Truro spoke about a book that was very popular at the time. I can’t remember the title, but it was about a man who tried to live his life as Jesus did, and failed. I was completely disillusioned. It must be possible or it’s not worth trying, I thought, with all the naivety and inexperience of adolescence. So I forgot about religion for a while and got on with starting work, getting married, and having children. But all the time some belief remained. We took our children to church on Sunday, telling them that they could make up their own minds about religion when they were grown up. Later, I did further academic study of the bible, ethics, and theology and became more and more doubtful about the truth claims of religion. I read books
like The Imitation of Christ and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which increased my appreciation of the importance of the good human qualities of love, loyalty, friendship, and unselfishness. The most significant book for me was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. Here was a man who tried to live what he preached, who didn’t pretend that joining in the plot to kill Hitler was anything but the lesser of two evils. He wrote that we should frankly recognise that the world has come of age and: ‘This is what I mean by worldliness – taking life in its stride, with all its duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experiences and helplessness.’ I often wonder how Bonhoeffer’s thinking and old-fashioned attitude to women would have developed had he survived. I joined the North London SOF Group in the hope that it would clarify my thinking. It didn’t, of course, and sometimes I found the philosophical discourse too esoteric for my understanding. But we search for meaning in our lives in different ways and I value what I am still gaining from membership of SOF. Recently, I saw a modern version of Everyman at the National Theatre. This 15th century morality play has been brought up to date by the words of the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. The question the play asks is whether it is only in death that we understand our lives. Everyman is a rich 21st century hedonist brought face to face with death. God is portrayed by a cleaning woman who says, ‘The angels weep to see the death of the Earth’. It is not only human beings who matter, but all living things and the whole natural world. Any future understanding of religion has to take this into account. Like Everyman we need to learn humility.