A Test At a kitchen table S I have been tested, sorely tested. In fact, this discussion seems wholly irrelevant to me, to my life. Six months ago I could not contemplate joining you, that's why I cancelled.
T I’m so sorry.
S And now, six months later, I can rationalise, and separate my thoughts from the images that will, I know, reduce me to tears. Can I remove myself from the anger? Probably not. But I don’t think that should invalidate my thoughts. Our experiences, my wife’s and mine, have taken us down into the extremes of existence on this earth, so I should be allowed to judge. The unbiased are either uninvolved or unemotional, and God, I am sure, did not put us to here to watch, but to live.
T The uninvolved are protected from pain, I think. I am.
S You’ll get involved. You’ve been in love, I know you have. You know pain, but yes, loss of a child is the worst imaginable pain. And it has taught me something.
T So what happened? Can I ask that of you, to look back and recall your thoughts? Did you think about God during those hours.
S I did, because I was powerless, and could do nothing else. I thought of more earthbound matters of course, of my wife, of the guilt I knew she would suffer because she was not there…she was working abroad for a month…of our decision to have only one child, of our prospects…for how many marriages survive such a shock…and then, of the meaning, the lack of meaning.
And it was at this point that I recognised the redundancy of faith.
T You woke up that morning, before he was taken ill, with faith?
S Yes I did. I was never religious, you know that, but after he was born, during the first few years, as we saw him through the normal dangers of infancy, I had come to rely on something, some overseeing power…and I may have called that power God. Fatherhood changed me. I feared the world, not for my sake but his. I watched bombs tear the roofs off the very buses I had carried him on a week previously, soft and vulnerable in his papoose. I listened to the radio and watched the news, heard of children engulfed in tsunamis or atomised by booby traps in the markets of Baghdad, and I feared for the world that he was going to inherit. I had to believe that there was a long-term plan, devised by someone or something. I could not trust a planet in which the leading powers, from my western perspective, appeared to have no regard for the environment, and in which religious fundamentalism was growing rather than diminishing. So yes, I woke up with faith, not at the front of my mind, but there, bolstering me against the constant anxieties. I entered the bedroom to get the boy up. He was five. He was sleeping, for which I had felt grateful an hour earlier, it being a Saturday morning. I stroked his head, and he smiled, but did not open his eyes. So I covered him up with the duvet and let him sleep another hour. When I went back I knew he really had to get up, and pulled the duvet away. He did not respond, merely groaned. I shook him, and noticed how cold his forearm was. Then I saw a mark, a crop of tiny purple dots. I knew what they were, and within five minutes I had bundled him, still uncomplaining, into the back of the car, duvet wrapped around him. He never spoke again. The meningitis had already swollen his brain, and was now out of control, in his blood stream, bruising his skin. And all I could do was stand by his bed, watch his chest rise and fall with the ventilator, and leave every so often to try and contact his mother in the States. I could not get through.
Something wrong with her phone, or mine…she felt guilty for that, along with everything else. She had no idea it was happening, I had to wait for her regular call at lunchtime, in the American evening. His blood pressure fell, despite the drugs, his kidneys stopped, they started dialysis, but the septicaemia raged through him, and all I could do was think. Grief, emotion, the most intense emotion of course, the desire to swap my body with his, and the anger, already growing, at the arbitrariness. It was a natural death, a vindictive but random quirk of nature, like the tsunami, like an earthquake, like an influenza epidemic, but taking only the one child. But arbitrary things should not happen in the presence of an overseer. All things must be designed, done for a reason. These are old ideas Thomas. But if they are done to a plan, it is a plan that does not need me or my progeny. If it is part of a plan, there must be a greater benefit. What benefit? Does another death from meningitis help ensure that in the long run a cure is sought and found, thereby improving humanity and aiding its mission, to exist, to spread.
Was he a small sacrifice, a rebalancing of power between bacteria and humans, both organisms having a right to exist on earth? I could think of no reason, no justification, nothing within my understanding. And so, my faith diminished. Perhaps it was always fragile, coming to late in life as I did. But it was not strong enough to withstand that challenge, that insult. Of course these were not the preoccupations that I took to bed that night, having kissed his forehead one last time…but they came to me, in the weeks that followed.
The Struggle Shared A Dialogue between Atheist Friends II The concluding two episodes of Philip Berry’s dialogue between the atheist friends Thomas and Simon.
T Our preoccupations seem so meaningless. All our discussions, all our philosophy… S No. That is too easy. We must still try. It’s vital. A test of my faith, surely, but a test of our willingness to think, to discuss. We will talk again Thomas, have no doubt. But not for a while.
The Tunnel The platform T …and you survived Simon, your mind survived…the loss of your family, of everything dear to you. I’ll not even try to guess to what depths it dragged you, or how you made it through, but I can see the same keen mind at work, trying to work it out. It’s rare, and impressive.
S Whereas you my friend, are in a state. I find you on a station platform, peering into the mouth of a tunnel, waiting for the London train to take you away from your friends, family, from all that you know. You’d do just as well to step in front of it as get on it, for all the peace of mind that leaving will bring you. How can your sense of identity grow away from the people, ‘deluded’ as they are in their faith, who recognise you, value you, in whose lives and memories you exist?
T Step in front of it! Your imagination is ghoulish. I have been trying Simon, for years. I have tried to understand my peers, but I feel like a fake, mouthing platitudes but privately, silently, knowing that they are wrong, and misguided. I am too serious, I accept that. I should overlook religion, faith, and just get on with life. Yes, I should! But it’s not me. Perhaps I too needed a test…that’s a stupid thing to say, sorry...
S No, don’t tiptoe around me. I know what you are saying.
T …to throw me from my philosophical perch and drag me closer, to life. I’ve been lucky, with family, with love, I have never had to reach for spiritual assistance. But perhaps that is an advantage, in tackling these issues. It keeps my philosophies pure.
S But your detachment has disabled you, as I said it would many years ago, such that you can find no place here, on earth. You have travelled, observed, scrutinised the world, your fellow citizens of the world, and the result is alienation.
T It is frustration. Because I know why mankind believes – because it cannot understand, and it cannot accept that it cannot understand. The result of this discomfort…is faith. Blind faith, for what evidence is there? What proof? I have seen none…only stories, only ragged scrolls, dubious accounts.
S But your response to this feeling of frustration cannot be escape. There is no escape from your own mind.
T What is your answer then?
S Another sort of faith, an optimism, a confidence in our species’ ability not only to survive, but to thrive, intellectually. A compromise between spiritual independence and faith, whereby we can proceed and attempt to hurdle problems that otherwise we would assume to be insurmountable. As long as we recognise that our inability to comprehend the mysteries of existence are due to the limited (but expandable, we must believe that) capacity of our minds, then we should have no need to rely on images, icons, texts and testaments. We would evolve, and develop minds better fitted to tackling these problems.
T Faith in ourselves, followed by an inexorable advance.
But faith nevertheless.
S No. An absence of nihilism. A cause for hope. These are simple human needs.
T But precarious, vulnerable. It depends on us, on a confidence in ourselves. Effective faiths are founded on impermeable, unquestionable entities, ones that we cannot allow ourselves to doubt, ones that even if we do doubt, we cannot prove the absence of. Once an element of doubt develops in a certain faith, it is prone to disintegrate. God, even if he is no more than a reflection of our insecurities in this frighteningly large universe, is untouchable.
S All these years Thomas, we have been talking of mankind, of multitudes, enormous groups. In reality very few need to think on such ‘deep’ matters, or even to have definite ideas on religion and meaning. It has no real or drastic effect on people’s everyday lives if they feel there is a point to existence or not. It would be silly for everyone to preoccupy themselves on such subjects, while they overlooked their physical functions as citizens. Not everyone has the inclination or the ability to ponder such imponderables. The average, the normal person’s motives in life are based on immediate needs; money, comfort, friendship, pleasure…assuming of course that the basics, such as food, water and heat are in abundance. Without those the average human could not give a damn about whether their species’ continued existence mattered in the long run or not. Our survival instinct is subconscious, an instinct.
T So your self-directed faith, so useful for you, is unnecessary after all.
S Perhaps not. An underlying trend, an imperceptible ebb will steer humanity towards certain ends, perhaps away from God towards spiritual independence, and great progress. No single generation will be conscious of it, but a long-term change will occur, due to the singular achievements of spiritually emancipated individuals.
We may learn how to grasp the enormity of the physical laws that hold us together… T You believe that? That humanism, which is what you describe essentially, can provide for us?
S Maybe. I wanted to see your reaction. To see the light of inquiry in your eyes.
T Relax. You’re so melodramatic. Did you really think I would…finish it, here? But you have succeeded. I won’t be leaving today. Or any time soon. I promise.
S Did you even have a ticket Thomas? Show me.
T I had no destination.
Philip Berry is a London doctor. He has published various articles in journals, some in dialogue form.