Looking In the Distance. Richard Holloway
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The interesting thing to notice here is that the great champions of those who are reduced to slaves or instruments of the strong are probably more motivated by anger than by pity. This is a mysterious phenomenon: a universe born in violence and driven by remorseless power gives birth to beings who are made angry by the very law of life, by the structure of the universe that gave them life. That’s why my next mood, my noonday mood, is best described as ‘anger at the cruelty of it all’. For me, the best model of this anger is Jesus; not the divinised Christ who was coopted by the powerful to sit in distant splendour above the chancel arch in vast cathedrals, but the human Jesus, the angry prophet of Nazareth. Over the years I have been as guilty as any preacher of making him in my own image or of doctoring him to suit my own needs. But once we abandon the salvation scheme that sees him as a divine figure sent to rescue us from God’s wrath at our God-inflicted sinfulness, we get him back in a way we may not really want. He becomes the fiercest exemplar of the Hebrew tradition of the prophets, that group of men who were angered by the way the powerful drove their chariot wheels over the wretched of the earth. This is high anger at the very order of things, but it is particularly aimed at those upon whom the arbitrary indifference of the universe may be said to have smiled, yet who take their good fortune as evidence of their own virtue or rightful place in the scheme of things:
Woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation. Woe unto ye that are full! For ye shall hunger. Woe unto ye that laugh now! For ye shall mourn and weep.15
These words were uttered by Jesus at a time when the distance between the rich man and the destitute peasant was no vaster than the gulf which now exists between a Californian billionaire and the child of a crack addict in one of the LA ghettoes. Jesus knew that the poor were always going to be with us, but he despised the religious theorists who offered divine justification for the insensate cruelty of it all. He seems to have had some respect for the Romans who governed his country, probably because they did not try to offer any kind of theological justification for their imperial ascendancy. Their confidence lay in their own power, which they delighted in exercising. The powerful of our era lack the blunt honesty of the Nietzschean warrior who roared like a lion and rejoiced in his strength for its own sake. The powerful today try to make a virtue of their arbitrary good fortune, justify it by theory, explain it. And religion has consistently offered its services as the Great Explainer in Chief. This accounts for Jesus’ anger at religion, seen at its most torrential when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple, because they were symbols of the way religion was used to deepen the misery of the poor by exploiting their piety for gain:
And Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves; and would not suffer that any man should carry any vessel through the temple. And he taught them saying, Is it not written, My house shall be called the house of prayer? But ye have made it a den of thieves.16
Jesus belonged to that tiny group of men and women in history who instinctively ally themselves with the victims of power. Their spiritual psychology is explained very simply in a novel about one of the worst political crimes of the twentieth century, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Gil Courtemanche, in A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, puts these words into the mouth of Gentille about her lover Bernard Valcourt, a Canadian journalist:
I know exactly why I love you. You live like an animal guided by instinct. As if your eyes are closed and your ears are blocked, but there’s a secret compass inside you that always directs you to the small and forgotten, or impossible loves, like ours. You know you can’t do anything, that your being here won’t change a thing, but you keep going anyway.17
People like Bernard are not able to do much about the way the small and forgotten are constantly crushed by the powerful, apart from occasionally snatching a victim from the advance of the juggernaut. But they are able to bear witness against the ugly cruelty of power and the people it corrupts. They become recording angels whose words stand defiantly against the evils they protest. In the dangerous work of being the voices of the universe’s victims they frequently end up as victims themselves, but their death then becomes part of their testimony and it is remembered long after their persecutors are forgotten.
While it is true that many of these prophetic figures emerge from religion, the defiant side of religion is invariably compromised by its own collusion with power and its compulsive need to explain why things are the way they are. Institutional religion has not only developed theories to justify political power and social privilege as specifically ordained by God, it has even sought to justify the pain of non-human creation, usually along the lines that God knows best how to run a universe and who are we to challenge his methods? It is precisely at this point that many people hand back the ticket, leap overboard from religion and take to the empty sea. This was what Darwin did, oppressed by what he called the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature. In a frequently quoted letter to Asa Gray, written in 1860, Darwin says:
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living body of caterpillars.18
He was referring to the fact that these enterprising wasps sting their prey not to kill but to paralyse them, so their larvae can feed on fresh (live) meat.
But theoretical religion is probably at its most repellent when it tries to explain the arbitrary suffering that suffuses human history, particularly when it justifies God’s role in it all, usually as the helpless architect of human freedom. This is why some of the most principled and compassionate people in history have proclaimed that if there is behind the universe that which we call God, an almighty originating authority, then no human being should attempt to justify its ways or have anything to do with it. Instead, like Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s great novel, they should simply return the entrance ticket and try to dissociate themselves from such a cosmic abuser of power:
Tell me honestly, I challenge you – answer me: imagine that you are charged with building the edifice of human destiny, whose ultimate aim is to bring people happiness, to give them peace and contentment at last, but that in order to achieve this it is essential and unavoidable to torture just one little speck of creation, that same little child beating her breasts with her little fists, and imagine that this edifice has to be erected on her unexpiated tears. Would you agree to be the architect under these conditions?19
Ivan Karamazov’s anger was provoked by the torture of a single child, yet what is that compared with the monumental sorrow of all the lost and blighted children of history, not to mention the humdrum miseries of ordinary mildly afflicted humans? Alas, rather than remain silent in the face of such overwhelming sorrow, the Church has blitzed humanity with explanations for suffering. I was inoculated against them as a young curate when, for the first time, I conducted a child’s funeral. It was a bleak day in early February and we buried him in a cemetery streaked with dirty snow on a hillside in Lanarkshire. The father, wearing his Sunday suit, carried the little white coffin in his arms, and we threw earth on to it and I spoke words into the wind. Afterwards I tried to comfort the young mother, who was tight with grief and anger, by attempting a consoling explanation of her loss. She turned on me fiercely and thrust me away from her. She did not want her honest anger polluted by my religious explanations. How could she not be consumed with raging grief at the death of her only son?
That kind of anger is still the most honest response to the victims of the indifferent power of the universe. And yet the emergence of that anger is itself a mystery. How did a universe, born of explosive power, give birth to this angry pity for the victims of that same power? There is no answer to the question. It is part of the mystery of unknowing that wounds us. But, though there is no answer, we should not leave the matter there: we should let our anger beget a compassion that goes against the cruel grain of the universe. It is well expressed in a poem by Sylvia Townsend Warner called ‘Road, 1940’:
Why do I carry, she said,
This child that is no child of mine?
Through the heat of the day it did nothing but fidget and whine.
Now it snuffles under the dew and the cold star-shine,
And