True Stories

by Francis Spufford

  Indeed, a surprising proportion of the latter part of the book consists of fire-fighting, as he endeavours to deal with the frequently erratic and unsavoury and downright unappealing behaviour of some gurus, who palpably know the way to the sea of inner peace, and yet spend their time drunk, or philandering, or collecting Rolls-Royces with their disciples’ money. Worriedly reporting a Zen parable in which the master makes a point by lopping off a child’s finger with a knife, he trembles on the brink of a whole new way of reading. New to him, anyway: ‘Ancient tales of liberating violence . . . seem like literary teaching devices, not accurate accounts of how wisdom has been reliably transmitted from master to disciple.’ Hey hey hey: could it be that other ones of these old religious-type documents might be full of complicated non-literal meanings? Metaphors and other verbal gizmos that might stop them just being failures as meditation manuals?

  But it’s an implication too far for him. He is too wedded to a flat, one-ply account of religion – the monotheisms especially – as a set of falsifiable propositions. And when he tries to summarise what he takes to be theism’s essential proposition, you begin to see why faith is emotionally as well as conceptually impossible for him. It’s all about coercion, about a scary form of Otherness:

  In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the human soul is conceived as genuinely separate from the divine reality of God. The appropriate attitude for a creature that finds itself in this circumstance is some combination of terror, shame, and awe. In the best case, notions of God’s love and grace provide some relief – but the central message of these faiths is that each of us is separate from, and in relationship to, a divine authority who will punish anyone who harbors the slightest doubt about His supremacy.20

  He calls this ‘dualism’, using the term in a distinctly non-standard way to mean not the Cartesian or Platonic soul/body distinction, but the violation of the peaceful ocean by the suggestion that there is another something out there to be discovered. Terror, shame, awe: if these emotions are theism’s fundamentals, if being crushed and humiliated is its ‘central’ offering, then any theistic interpretation of what Sam Harris experiences when he dissolves into trans-personal peace and love and freedom must be threatening. For him, axiomatically, God does not equal peace, or love, or freedom. If He existed at all, God would be a force engaged in a zero-sum dominance game. He’d be a mugger, a pirate on the sea of consciousness. Or, worse yet, he’d make the sea itself angry, and terrifying: not a place where a self-respecting atheist could go to melt away, to lose the illusion of self safely.

  There is no safety at all in what Barbara Ehrenreich has to report. Her first visions or revelations of the world’s pre-verbal grid, its bare chassis of being beneath all the domesticating specifics of California and Massachusetts, came at a point in her adolescence when she had worked herself into a kind of solipsistic terror over mortality. Stoicism and intellectual honour seemed to require that she dispense with more and more sources of possible consolation for her impending personal extinction, up to and very much including the unprovable reality of other people. On the outside, she might have looked like an averagely gloomy teenager in a plaid dress with lace cuffs, reading Nietzsche in a coffee house and resisting her high-school class in Life Adjustment.

  Inside, she was clinging to minute crannies in the walls of a one-person abyss. She wrote in her journal, ‘I am Nietzsche’s rope dancer and the rope is imaginary. If I look down for an instant and see that there is nothing there, I’m lost.’ Not much assistance was to be expected from her parents. ‘I understood the family, my family at least, to be a temporary and unstable unit like one of those clumsily named elements down at the bottom of the periodic table, Berkelium or Rutherfordium, for example.’ Her father was a clever, angry former copper miner from Butte, Montana, clawing his way up the corporate ladder in a haze of martinis and self-disgust; her mother was a clever, angry reader of every book she could get her hands on, and another heroic drinker, experiencing the duties of 1950s femininity as a personal damnation. Fission loomed.

  Ehrenreich renders their portraits with powerful adult understanding, but (again a point of honour) with no more charity than she actually feels. She denies several times that Living with a Wild God is anything resembling an autobiography, but of course it is, and a very fine one; a spiritual autobiography, with narrow, sometimes needle-fine focus, recording the isolation and the concentration and the invisible desperation of a mind turning in on itself, and seeming to lose its grip on the world.

  Then, aged seventeen, she went on a road trip north from LA – the car driven by a sort-of boyfriend who, somehow inevitably, later turned out to have been transporting ancient, dangerous nitroglycerine in the trunk – and slept the night parked up in a side street in the town of Lone Pine. Walking out the stiffness in the grey early light, she began to have another of her familiar episodes of dissociation. But it turned without warning into something else:

  At some point in my predawn walk – not at the top of hill, or at the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time – the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with ‘the All’, as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.21

  Whatever this was, it was not a gentle experience. Indeed in some respects it resembled the encounter with an irresistible cosmic bully that seems to be what Sam Harris least wants. As Ehrenreich observes now, ‘“Ecstasy” would be the word . . . but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.’ Back then, though, not knowing what to say, she immediately took her own advice and said nothing. She walked the rest of the way up the street to a diner and ate some toast with the sort-of boyfriend, never mentioning that the world had just briefly metamorphosed into immanent fire; and she went on not mentioning it over the decades that followed. She wrote down an account, and then confined the journal pages in question to a folder she never revisited, yet never parted with either, aware that there was something in there that awaited an accounting, that existed in troubling discord with her stated principles. ‘The impasse was this: if I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?’

  Living with a Wild God is that long-delayed reckoning, disinterring the encounter in Lone Pine, adding to it later brushes at Key West with a ‘face I could almost begin to make out in the foam’, and trying her best to follow out the implications wherever they led, no matter the embarrassment. (She has indeed been pilloried for her apostasy.) It is an exhilarating book to read, for ‘vague gurgles of surrender’ still never satisfy her, and in her search for exactitude she constantly resharpens the expressive edge of her prose. Where she is headed seems genuinely up for grabs. She is reasoning herself along without a set destination, without the safety net of church or party, and she is as unsparing of herself as she is of her parents. Naught for our comfort, and naught for hers.

  One thing she is sure of, though: whatever it is that lobbies for her attention in thunderheads and thrift-store windows, whatever it was that set the world on fire in Lone Pine, it cannot be the God of Christianity and Judaism and Islam. Partly, this is a matter of continuing family loyalty. Whatever her parents’ drawbacks, they raised her in a tradition of defiant working-class unbelief which represents to her a precious co
mmitment to this-worldly good. Partly, on the other hand, it’s that her experience decisively fails to match what she understands of monotheism. For her, in absolute contradistinction to Sam Harris, ought and is are entirely separate categories. Religion is pre-eminently the domain of ought, of do’s and don’ts which her sceptical eye very readily interprets as convenient cover stories for power. Meanwhile she believes that her Other, burning away, is not moral at all. ‘My own “epiphanies”, to overglorify them, had nothing to do with right or wrong, good or evil, kindness or cruelty, or any other abstractions arising from the human tribal life that I had only recently entered into.’ A couple of traditional anti-religious themes play a supporting role, too – an argument from theodicy, a repulsion at the prospect of eternal life – but this is the core of her refusal. ‘Whatever I had seen was what it was, with no moral valence or reference to human concerns.’ With a God of ethics or creed or scripture consequently ruled out, what she is left with is therefore a kind of freelance or zoological theism. The world may be infested with one or many amoral spirit-beasts, bulging under the ontological skin of things. ‘Wild’ in her title turns out to mean not just unconditioned but actually feral. At this conclusion, of course, monotheists and atheists will swivel round together in rare unanimity to glare at her. Neither side wants this picture she arrives at, by being too honest to deny her experience, and too stubborn to accept any organised, existing description of it.

  For a Christian, reading Living with a Wild God is frequently frustrating. Despite her brilliance, Ehrenreich makes slow, heavy weather of ideas which for a believer flow together in swift fluent cascades. When she quotes Meister Eckhart saying that God must be born in every soul in ‘a sort of nest, or as Eckhart sometimes puts it, a “manger”’ – and calls the result ‘shockingly zoomorphic’, as if he were proposing that a spiritual parasite will lay eggs in us – can she really not have noticed that he has something Bethlehem-related in mind? A bit of Thomism would help with her firmly post-Protestant sense that a creator would have to be transcendently remote from creation. A familiarity with the Psalms would correlate her startled reflection that ‘I was not afraid of dying, because it was obvious that the Other . . . would continue just fine without me’, with the stern comfort of ‘As for man, his days are as grass . . . but the mercy of Lord is from everlasting unto everlasting.’ The presence that only ‘was what it was’ could be linked with the Presence that announces itself, in a circular affirmation of bare being, as ‘I am that I am’. And above all, her insistence on the amorality of the Lone Pine vision, its ethical non-productiveness, seems to rest on a very literal and limited demarcation of what it might mean for an experience to have an effect in a life. Before it, she was a desperate solipsist. After it, she was set on a course that would lead back towards her fellow humans, and eventually, in the second half of the 1960s, into anti-war activism. That sequence again: the bush burns, and some time later you find yourself trying to guide an unruly crowd towards the promised land. This is not exactly unheard-of as a pattern of events. Oh, come on, thinks the believing reader. No need to reinvent the wheel. You would save yourself so much time if you knew how everything was supposed to join up. Quick, someone air-freight this woman a Jesuit!

  But this is to let ourselves off the hook too easily, two ways round. If someone as open as this, with such a strong working sense of the tragic possibilities of existence, recognises nothing in the descriptions of faith she has encountered, then we are not describing it rightly. If the ‘rage of joy’ she has felt seems to have nothing to do with goodness, then we have been misrepresenting virtue. If what we have managed to extend in her direction seems to be only an offer of authoritarian parenthood, or a resistible politics, then we have made a mistake of our own about the place we allow for the wildness of God. Those of us who have a positive theology, populated with the items of the catechism, often treat negative theology – the term for what we don’t and can’t know about God – as an optional afterthought. But on the strength of this book, negative theology should be getting a much louder say in the public presentation of faith. We should be leaving a humbler, more obvious space for the terrible, the earth-shaking, the category-breaking excess of the Lord, beyond all our systems and descriptions of Him. Everyone who practises a faith, of course, embeds it in one way or another in a set of shared behaviours, in a social and often then in a political vision. Naturally: an occasional experience of ecstasy is not enough, and such embedding is what lets us build out the heart’s or the mind’s assent into something coherent. But faced with somebody like Ehrenreich, who knows she does not share the conservative politics that seem inseparable from American Christianity as she views it, and therefore is prevented from seeing what essential thing she does have in common with Christians, it behooves us to distinguish much more loudly between theism and the systems into which we build it. If God is universal (if God is God), then He is the God of liberals and radicals as much as of conservatives. Christianity is not just a religion for those temperamentally inclined to be reassured by firm systems, rigorous rules. It is also for the wild at heart. God Himself is both rule-maker and rule-breaker. He is therefore the ground on which human rule-makers and rule-breakers ought to be able to meet.

  If we want to talk to Barbara Ehrenreich, we cannot appeal to the naturalness with which, to us, our swift cascades of interpretation flow. Least of all can we appeal to the majesty of orthodoxy. (Orthodoxy! Thy very name is like a . . . not very attractive thing!) We would need to be far more cautious, far more fine-grainedly empirical. We would need to dismiss the context that presents itself so readily to us, and say: what is there, in these experiences themselves, which might point a generous-minded seeker towards the Christian understandings? What is there about this Californian flame, which turns its witnesses to flame, that might tentatively align with the strangeness of Pentecost? What is it that consoles, in the thought of this being’s permanence, when it makes our temporariness so plain? What wild quality is it, in its seemingly amoral fire, that seems to burn a path to visions of the human good?

  And, if we do this, we will also be true to the actual shock and disorientation of such encounters. Anyone who has had anything resembling Ehrenreich’s experience – and they are surprisingly common – will tell you that the presence they met did not so much contradict their religious expectations as stand in a kind of orthogonal relationship to them, so much more than and other than expectation, that expectation seemed almost beside the point. Wild justice – justice unmediated and unfiltered – is different from the thing we painstakingly try to make in courtrooms. Wild charity – love unmixed and uncompromised – is fearfully unlike the adulterated product we are used to. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. To call the presence you meet ‘amoral’ is at least to acknowledge its difference; to allow awe and bafflement and uncertainty their honest place.

  Three months ago, I was standing in a wood on a hilltop in England with two Anglican priests. The beech trees were in new, intensely green leaf, and the spring sun came through in shifting specklings of brightness; the bluebells were in full flower on the forest floor, and drifted the ground in all directions with a fine-grained blue mixed with the bright white of wild garlic. The silence between the grey uprights of the beeches was expectant, intent, more vivid and demanding than was strictly comfortable. Because we were who we were, and knew what we knew, and believed what we believed, for us it was natural to imply, from the ground we could see, a figure just out of sight: and to name the wild moment by saying, Surely the holy one of Israel is here. But if we had been standing in the same wood 2,000 years ago, we might well instead have left an offering to the genius loci. Or, like Barbara Ehrenreich, have improvised an altar to an unknown god.

  (2015)

  THE PAST AS ZOMBIE HAZARD, AND CONSOLATION

  My wife, a parish priest in Cambridgeshire, was doing a wedding rehearsal two years ago in a medieval village church when she realised
that the couple’s children were hanging about anxiously on the threshold. They had made it across the churchyard with nervous glances from side to side, but the prospect of entering the building was too much for them. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘We can’t go in’, they said. ‘The zombies will get us!’

  If one of your culture’s primary associations with old things is pop-culture menace, and its most vivid association with the places where we stow dead people is of the earth splitting, and grey-skinned revenants lumbering out to eat your brain, then it’s not surprising that, through the literal eyes of children, old should often now mean dangerous. It’s more complicated than that, of course. Contemporary Britain’s relationship with the past, in pop culture and in high culture and in culture in the anthropological sense, has several different strands, with several different moods attached to them. At least one pervasive attitude to history is wistful and fascinated. But the past’s difference is taken as a given. Discontinuity, not continuity, is the common experience, except in the narrow channel of people’s personal and genealogical connection to past time, and sometimes there too. Whether people go to the past eagerly or nostalgically, with horror or fascination, to deplore or applaud, they tend by definition to be looking for things they perceive as being absent in the present.

  The default form of our culture is a hedonistic individualism that takes the test of harm to others as the boundary for acceptable behaviour. Individual moral autonomy is taken as self-evidently right, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. (Increasingly, as the effective centre of gravity of British politics moves to the right, this is thought to entail a corollary: not hurting anyone else means you also have a moral obligation not to socialise the costs of your choices. Your drug habit, your housing needs, the welfare of the children in your serial families, are all your problem, not anyone else’s.) To criticise the way people exercise their private choices (so long as they pay their bills) comes precious close in our estimation now to criticising their selfhood, their actual free possession of an integral life to call their own, and it aligns you suspiciously with the set of restrictions from which British society is conscious of having only just freed itself, thanks to the social liberalisations of the last four decades.