True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  But I could feel something else in my response to the soldier’s photograph: an uneasy sense that my liberal insistence that it was very hard to identify God’s will was dry, and sad, compared to the soldier’s vivid feeling that holiness was alive and available in the world, and could easily flow into a snap of an old man and a little girl on a sofa. His tenderness towards his relic demanded respect. This became one of the constant motifs of my visit: the discovery of familiar spiritual substance in a different spiritual form, followed by a disquieting reflection on the greater passion of Iranian Islam compared to my own half-in, half-out Christianity, and perhaps to too much of Christendom in general.

  The place wouldn’t have touched me in the same way if it had seemed wholly alien, but I kept finding strangeness and familiarity layered inside each other, like the skins of an onion. Khomeini’s shrine, for example, is unbeautiful inside. The roof is held up by metal trusses like the roof of an airport or an industrial estate. The ring of stained-glass tulips around the dome – they are the martyrs’ flower – was crudely executed. Everywhere, in fact, the construction shows signs of the zealous haste with which the volunteer builders had worked. This was the place where that terrifying film was shot showing the helicopter trying to deliver the ayatollah’s body while a hysterical crowd surged to and fro. When I left my shoes at the men’s entrance, passed through the security search, and stepped out onto the marble floor, I was at first mostly aware of a lingering sense of threat, and of a need to be very cautious. (It was not a place where anyone with a sense of self-preservation would have shouted ‘Salman Rushdie lives!’) Then, gradually, without my sense of caution, and even fear, entirely fading away, I began to recognise the atmosphere. Pilgrims who had travelled from far away were sleeping on the Persian carpets provided for them, under the flags and the streamers and the placards wishing ‘our dear Ruhollah’ a happy birthday. Young men were softly saying their prayers, together but not synchronised with one another, so that the act was both corporate (in the same sense in which Christians say that the Church is ‘one body’) and, for each, an individual approach to God. Over in the women’s section, one supplicant was lying on the floor beside the tomb itself, not in an attitude of abasement or prostration but one of intense yearning, her hand pressed hard against the glass wall enclosing it as if she were completing a circuit. The shrine was quiet exactly as a cathedral is: a quietness without passivity, an intent and directed quietness. In fact, it seemed to me that it was a cathedral, functionally speaking, for I found myself completely and instinctually certain that I was in a house of the God who exceeds all descriptions, but whom all three monotheisms know to be the merciful, the compassionate. It was transparently a place where prayer has been valid. If a Christian can be reverent in a shrine dedicated to a strong-arm medieval saint like Olaf, you can certainly be reverent in the shrine of Ruhollah Khomeini: and still more so, I discovered later, in the ancient mosques of Iran, where beauty supplements faith.

  The theology of Shi’ite Islam, too, seemed to return somewhere very familiar, after starting from a point of alienating difference. The problem a Christian has with Khomeini as a model of sanctity is repeated with every one of the great figures of the Shi’ite tradition, because, believing in the necessity of the just state here on earth, they took up the sword to create it. Before I came to Iran I saw a nineteenth-century devotional painting showing the Imam Husayn, with halo, splitting an adversary’s skull in battle. You could not have a more complete contrast with Jesus’ decision in Gethsemane. And yet history’s foundational event for Shi’ites, after the revelation of the Quran to Muhammad, is one of profound and tragic failure: Husayn, who should as the grandson of the Prophet have been the guide and guardian of Islam, came to his own, and his own received him not. Every year, Iranians re-enact the death of Husayn in passion plays. Husayn was a holy warrior, not an incarnate God taking on the suffering of the world. But the bowl of water brought to the dying man by his brother Abbas parallels the sponge and the reed, and the onlookers weep with a familiar sense of culpable helplessness, and the result is that Shi’ites, like Christians, have a theology with grief at its centre. When they ask God for comfort in sorrow, they let their individual sorrows flow into the great river of the original grief: only for Shi’ites it carries their grief to God through the battlefield at Karbala, not through Golgotha. Karbala is in modern Iraq, but Karbala soil is available in Iran in compressed tablets, which the devout rub on their foreheads when they pray.

  Out of the corner of my eye, as I walked through Iranian bazaars, I kept glimpsing what looked like icons of the Madonna and Child. When I turned round, of course, they never were. The haloed child was Husayn, sitting on the knee of Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter. Just as an Orthodox Jew must think of Christianity as a rather bizarre and distorted cult version of Judaism, so any kind of Christian, looking at this Islamic version of one of our most utterly familiar images, has to feel that this is a picture of the wrong people, that an approach is being made to the right God by the wrong means. And yet it clearly is the right God, which puts you in the strange position of disagreeing with Shi’ism over who is holy, and even over what holiness is, but still, simultaneously, agreeing about holiness’s object: what it points to, where it wants to take us. At the heart of Islam, where the individual soul travels towards the plenitude and absoluteness of God, there is a huge area of feeling and experience that Muslims and Christians possess in common. The journey is the same, its surprises and difficulties and moments of grace are the same. Here, whether or not the law was necessary to get you here, the law falls away. George Herbert’s poems charting the travails of the soul with its divine lover parallel those of Hafez the Sufi, writing three centuries earlier in Shiraz. The woman I saw pressing the glass of Khomeini’s tomb so eagerly would surely have recognised herself in the psalm: Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks, so hath my soul desired the living God. First the thirst was Judaic, then it was Christian too, and now it is also Muslim; and always the same thirst.

  Liberals and semi-detached believers like me tend to draw an easy distinction for all three of the monotheisms, between a closed and fanatical version of faith and one which we respect because it is properly open to doubt. Perhaps it is too easy a distinction. It’s true that fundamentalist certainty runs away very easily into emotional idolatry, with subordinate points of faith, or reverence for religious leaders, or attachment to cherished customs, wishfully inheriting the surety that ought to be reserved for God alone. I certainly saw enough of that in Iran: the disquietingly sexual murals, fading now, of the martyrs of the war against Saddam, which show young men rapturously bleeding as they hold tulips in ones, in twos, in armfuls. Or take what the revolutionary guards were chanting to Ayatollah Khamenei last summer as they counter-demonstrated against the students – ‘Supreme Leader! We donate to you the blood in our bodies!’ But perhaps my tenacious uncertainty has an equally besetting flaw. Perhaps, I thought as I travelled in Iran, I use my intellectual doubt to limit the power that I let faith have in my life; to keep the thirst that is so signally alive in Khomeini’s shrine mild, and manageable, and incapable of disturbing me.

  I was often moved in Iran. After dark at a shrine in Shiraz, a boy on crutches, washing his hands in the courtyard pool, unselfconsciously joined in the lament for Husayn broadcast over the loudspeakers. Strings of fairy lights lit up the shrine’s dome like a Fabergé egg. But I was most moved by a small blue tile inset in the wall of the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque in Isfahan. This building is everything that Khomeini’s tomb is not: a masterpiece of religious architecture, an exquisite late-seventeenth-century space knitted together by ceramic traceries of vines, on a background of brown and lemon and turquoise. The blue tile said, ‘Constructed by Mohammed Reza son of Master Hoseyn Isfahani the mason, a poor small man in need of the love of God.’ Mohammed Reza must have known, as a craftsman, what he had accomplished, but it seemed only justice to him, and to his possession of a soul that (like eve
ryone’s) requires forgiveness, to hear in his words a sincere certainty that the most he could do fell short of the glory he had set out to celebrate.

  After seeing the Sheikh Lotfollah, we had lunch at an Armenian restaurant, where our guide was amused to find that his two European charges couldn’t pick out Judas in a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper. ‘Never mind’, he said reassuringly, ‘we call you Europeans “Christians”, but I know you aren’t, really.’ I came home obscurely ashamed.

  (2000)

  WILD THEISM

  To say, as people do from time to time, that science is the only source of meaning available to human beings is to consign large swathes of everyday experience to insignificance. (And to offer an open goal to any quick-footed apologist for religion who may be passing.) The implication of the maximal claim for science is that anything that can’t be brought within the reach of hypothesis–experiment–conclusion is to be ignored. I’ve heard Richard Dawkins, on a stage, respond to someone asking why people’s conviction of the presence of God doesn’t count as data: ‘Oh, all sorts of funny things happen in people’s heads. But you can’t measure them, so they don’t mean anything.’ Yet atheists, like everybody else, fall in love, read novels, hum songs, and value the unrepeatable shadings of their sensory and cognitive experiences. The subjective makes its irrefutable demand for attention as soon you quit the lectern. ‘Funny things in people’s heads’ is where we live.

  So after periods of intense polemic there often comes a point when the polemicists double back to give subjectivity its due. It happened in the nineteenth century at the historical moment after utilitarianism had made its maximal claim that we are all self-interested calculators. John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873) records his younger self’s discovery that, alongside the utilitarian reading list, he could allow himself the unrigorous beauties of Wordsworth. ‘I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it.’ And now, with the maximal claim of New Atheism just behind us, it seems to be happening again: a similar spiritual stirring, defended by a similar insistence that ‘analysis’, or its contemporary equivalent, has not been betrayed.

  Waking Up16 is the recently published memoir by the least-nuanced member of the New Atheist ‘four horsemen’. Sam Harris outs himself as a surreptitious long-time practitioner of meditation, which he tries to show to be compatible in every way with a comfortable contempt for faith. Then there is Living with a Wild God,17 the altogether stranger, more wonderful and more stubbornly independent book by the activist and atheist Barbara Ehrenreich. This account of a lifelong unbeliever’s buried history of religious experience is radically open and undefended: a true seeker’s document, written with a pen rather than a rivet gun. These are the best examples of a recent spate of books, perhaps a new kind of literature, that trace in personal terms the intersection of belief and unbelief (another, lesser example is Richard Dawkins’ Appetite for Wonder). Welcome to the world of atheist spiritual memoir.

  Though Ehrenreich and Harris enter from very different directions, they agree on many things once they arrive. Both have visionary or mystical material to report that they insist is not merely a mental epiphenomenon, not just a subjective fizz in the cortex, not a delusion. What has happened to them, they say, is real. It reveals something about the nature of things. Then, too, both of them think their experiences need to be protected from the ways in which religion would describe them. Both write as if American Christianity waits hungrily by with the wrong vocabulary, the wrong frame of ideas, and must be fended off. As Harris says, ‘It is decidedly inconvenient for the forces of reason and secularism that if someone wakes up tomorrow feeling boundless love for all sentient beings, the only people likely to acknowledge the legitimacy of his experience will be representatives of one or other Iron Age religion or New Age cult.’

  They even describe their experiences in recognisably parallel terms, providing a quick and dirty empirical demonstration that it is the common ground of human perceptual life they’re talking about, not anything too bizarrely individual. Sam Harris by the Sea of Galilee, sometime in the last decade:

  In an instant, the sense of being a separate self – an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ – vanished. Everything was as it had been – the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water – but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.18

  The teenage Barbara Ehrenreich at a horse show in New England, sometime in the 1950s:

  Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that’s what I would have said I was doing, but the word ‘tree’ was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen or so years since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance – the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration?19

  Both begin with the discovery that there are human experiences that radically refresh perception by getting outside the envelope of our habitual construction of things, and both believe these must be taken seriously. But the differences follow immediately thereafter. For Harris, such alterations of perception are the tranquil, controllable results of a technique which his book helpfully undertakes to teach you, offering advice about posture, breathing and dealing with distractions. For Ehrenreich, they have been startling, unsought visitations, beginning with the vision of the tree in the watery Massachusetts light, and then accelerating when her family moved to cloudless California into unsettling states of rupture.

  Consequently, their reflections entail entirely different levels of discomfort and risk, and are written at quite different levels of literary intensity. Ehrenreich wrestles with an angel. Harris puts together some self-assembly instructions for a couch. And experiences so differently weighted, so differently grounded, unsurprisingly are taken to prove wholly different non-religious truths. If we were to emulate Sam Harris, that would be a reason to ignore both. He’s very fond of the supposedly knock-down argument that the differences between religions void the case for them all. Sauce, goose, gander, Sam; but actually the issue is too interesting to leave so swiftly alone.

  To Harris, meditation teaches happiness by teaching detachment. It shows you how to exist at a calm remove from your own frantic desires and thoughts, and thus to escape the cycles of craving and consumption in which contemporary life promises you may find fulfilment. So far, so Buddhist – in a carefully de-theologised kind of a way. He doesn’t, obviously, believe in the inspirited world of Buddhism as a folk religion, or in the Buddha himself as a propitiatory figure, or in specific Buddhist ethics except where they coincide with his preferred, vague, self-evident Golden-Rulery. But he has nicer things to say about the Buddhist tradition than about any of the monotheisms. He praises its scriptures as ‘empirical’. They offer intelligible, how-to guides to doing things with your consciousness, from which you can easily snip off the regrettable elements of ‘superstition’. He has looked at the Bible and the Quran and discovered that, stuffed as they are with narrative, poetry, biography, law-giving, metaphor and other unsystematic dreck from the Iron Age, they are hardly useful at all as ‘manuals for contemplative understanding’. Pick the right Buddhist sutra, however, and it’s almost like doing science.

  The primacy of science is the main lesson of his account of meditation. When you learn to regard your own anxious self as a fiction, a cobbled-together illusion of control which you need not scurry to maintain, and you dissolve gently into the ocean of consciousness, you are in effect doing neuroscience. Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. You are obtai
ning an experiential confirmation of the latest consciousness research, which (he says) suggests that the self as we imagine it is in truth an imperfect post hoc improvisation by our minds, retrofitted to the shoreless ocean within to give us the illusion of being coherent to ourselves. Consciousness is real; the self is not; meditation shows us so; and happiness is to be found in learning to conform to the deep peace of this discovery. Quite how he gets from here to the universal love with ‘the character of a geometric proof’, ‘deeper than any personal history could justify’, which he experiences while experimenting with MDMA, is not clear. It’s deeply important to him that the visionary should imply the ethical, easily and straightforwardly, but readers who don’t share his confidence that virtue is self-evident will tend to think that the step from is to ought is harder and more puzzling than he allows.