Time and Eternity

by Malcom Muggeridge

  Some mothers, it is true, have found a special joy in caring for their mongol children. I am thinking, for instance, of Mary Craig who, in her splendidly honest book Blessings, describes how spiritually rewarding had been looking after her appallingly disturbed and distorted second child, Paul. ’The fear of Paul’s being dragged off to an institution was the blackest one of all, however agonising it might be to look after him, I could not face the prospect of letting him go.’ Then there is Fr Bidone, a priest of rare quality who looks after several institutions for mongol children. Occasionally, I have visited him, and always come away feeling happy and uplifted. Once he brought some of his boys to see me off at Heathrow Airport. At first, to my shame, I was a little embarrassed and then, looking around, I noticed that everyone, staff and passengers alike, was smiling. It seems as though God has put in these boys some special lovingness and joy in life to compensate for their deformity.

  Nevertheless, in terms of the quality of life there would seem to be little reason for keeping such boys alive. If they are disposed of before or just after birth, those responsible for looking after them would be relieved of what can be a burdensome duty, and the boys themselves, of an existence that, in worldly terms, could never be other than unsatisfactory. The same reasoning applies to the infirm and senile old. Caring for them is expensive and exhausting; they themselves, as one sees them in old people’s homes sitting around with nothing to do, would seem to be just waiting to die. In terms, however, of the sanctity of life the situation is quite different. Sanctity of life is a religious or transcendental concept, not a materialistic one, and presupposes the existence of a God, and a destiny for his creation reaching beyond the confines of time and mortality. All of us, the most learned, the ablest, the most charismatic, are equally infinitesimal in relation to our creator, and, seen across eternity, can scarcely be distinguished one from another.

  How, then, can any decision be made that such a person should not be allowed to be born, and such another person not be allowed to go on living? That a mongol child has no right to be born or to live? Or that some mumbling old gaffer would be better dead? If life is sacred, it can only be wholly so; it cannot be sacred in parts; just as, if life is worth living at all, it can only be in all-conceivable and inconceivable circumstances. Its sacredness extends to every aspect of our existence, to whoever and whatever participates in the amazing creativity responsible for a measureless universe and a grain of sand, for elephants and fleas, for joy and woe.

  It would seem to be a choice between these two - the quality of life and the sanctity of life. Which side are we on? On the one hand, keeping down our numbers so that we get ever more affluent - 2.5 kids at the most, controlling the new arrivals to ensure that they are top grade in mind and body, and the departures to ensure that they are eased out of this world as they begin to show signs of decrepitude. On the other hand, the sanctity of life, with mankind as a family whose father is God in whose image they are made; not equal but brothers, our families the microcosm of our creator’s macrocosm. It would seem that the tide is flowing fast and furiously towards the former of these alternatives; I am for the latter, and confident that its ultimate triumph is certain.

  22

  ‘Feed My Sheep’

  An advantage of being, as I am, only a belated reader of the New Testament, is that one often finds a freshness of enchantment in sentences and phrases which, I imagine, come to seem commonplace to more erudite and systematic readers. This is what happened with the three words, ‘Feed my sheep’. I found myself saying them over and over with a sense of great joyfulness, as though they were the key to some special revelation. One of those crystallizations of meaning which mystics and poets fashion for us. They occur, of course, in a rather curious thrice-repeated exchange between Peter and the risen Christ, in which, having asked Peter three times if he loved him, and being assured each time that he did, Jesus added, first, ‘Feed my lambs,’ and then, the other two times, ‘Feed my sheep.’ It irresistibly recalls that three-fold denial of his Master of which poor Peter has been guilty shortly before - something I can never recall without an agonizing pang at having likewise offended, not just once on a dramatic occasion, but again and again.

  A shepherd and his flock provided Jesus with one of his favourite images. Even today in the Holy Land one can easily see why. The shepherd tending his sheep, finding them shade and water, seeing that none stray too far away, picking up in his arms one who may be lame or too small to keep up with the others, is still a familiar sight. It perfectly demonstrates in simply earthly terms Jesus’ purpose in coming among us; he was the Good Shepherd, and so he has been known through the centuries. I find it rather sad to reflect that this imagery is soon to become obsolete and incomprehensible in our technological world, if it hasn’t become so already.

  One can scarcely look for the Good Shepherd in factory farms, where animals are accorded just enough statutory room to stand up in; where they never see the light of the sun, or the green of the grass, or the blue of the sky. Still less in the manufacture of our food requirements from petroleum products and other such unappetizing substances. Who, I wonder, will be able to detect the image of a Saviour in the man with the hormone-injector, whose ministrations are liable to transform our domestic animals into weird, unseemly, top-heavy creatures, mercifully hidden from view?

  Surely, the first necessity we are under is to respect life; every aspect of it. Not just those of our fellow men who are dear and familiar to us, our families and friends. Nor even just our fellow humans who share the same essential experience of living. All and every manifestation of life; the croak of a frog, the contour of a hill, even the very particles of desert dust and the obscure flowering of hidden verges. All that lives and is on our small earth and in the illimitable universe. So ‘Feed my sheep’ applies to the whole flock, black, white and piebald. There are no exceptions. If we fail in according this respect to life as such, if in our insensate greed we wreck and impoverish and poison our human habitation, then we may be sure that in the long run we shall wreck and impoverish and poison ourselves.

  We live in a society which can produce in more or less unlimited quantities everything, and more than everything, we can possibly want to feed and clothe and divert ourselves. From turbines to potato crisps, from giant airliners to birth pills - everything. The problem with us is not food supplies, but appetite. How to induce us to eat when we’re not hungry, to discard what is not worn out, to indulge every whim and fancy that vanity and the senses can be lured into entertaining. So appeals to cupidity, appeals to sensuality, appeals to morbidity, all on behalf of the great Moloch - Consumption. The same message spelt out in neon lights, printed in words, embellished in colour, yelled in discotheques, whispered by crooners, related to the built-in urges of our way of life -money, sex and violence. An enormous flourishing industry, designed to ensure that greed never flags, sensuality never abates; that our heart’s desire is caught for ever in traps that are fastened to the earth and baited with flesh.

  Then the other side of the picture. Calcutta in the early morning; the streets strewn with the sleeping destitute and homeless, the garbage piled high and a few early risers poking about in it for something edible. A macabre fantasy, a tiny corner of a vast and mounting tragedy involving the greater part of the human race.

  Confronted with this crazy contradiction between, on the one hand, so many hungry sheep, and, on the other, so many over-indulged ones under constant pressure and persuasion to indulge themselves further, what is to be done? There are those who very properly attempt to rectify the balance by charitable endeavour or political agitation. Others, particularly among the young, consider that the only valid answer is yet another revolution whereby, as is promised in the ‘Magnificat’, the hungry will be filled with good things and the rich sent empty away. A more self-righteous approach to the problem lies in attributing the trouble to there being too many people in the world. When I was youn
g the same sort of attitude was taken by the middle and upper classes towards the poor. They had selfishly become too numerous, they were told. So today, when the so-called developing nations ask for bread, we give them birth pills. Has there ever, I wonder, been a stranger evangel than this -missionaries of sterility, colporteurs of contraceptives; bearers, as though it were our civilisation’s proudest product, of ingeniously devised means to make procreation unprocreative? ‘Feed my sheep,’ yes, but not, surely, with birth pills!

  Jesus himself well understood what poverty is from firsthand experience. He lived for the most part among the poor, and, as the Gospels tell us, unlike foxes which have holes and the birds of the air which have nests, often had nowhere to lay his head. Through the centuries that followed some of the most attractive and effective of his followers, from St Francis to Mother Teresa, have sought and loved poverty for his sake. Jesus also knew what riches were and what they do to people. In the Roman cities of Tiberias and Capernaum, whose ruins one may see today by the Lake of Galilee, he could observe a way of life uncommonly like ours, an affluent, permissive society dedicated to growing ever more affluent and permissive, with the games providing, like our media, the vicarious and morally debilitating excitement of violence and eroticism.

  When Jesus said ‘Feed my sheep’ he was not, then, launching a charitable appeal, or proclaiming a revolution, or even preparing the way for a family-planning service. He himself, he said, was the bread of life, and no one partaking of it would ever again hunger or thirst. In 20th-century terms this seems like expressing indifference to actual physical hunger and deprivation, but quite the opposite was the case. Through the life and teaching of Jesus we may know how the suffering of every living creature, even of a sparrow falling to the ground, is part of the suffering of God, and that his purpose for us comprises seeking in all circumstances to relieve suffering and to help and support the weak and the oppressed. How to put into words this innermost mystery of the Christian Faith? That it is only in being indifferent to our bodily needs that we can truly care about them in others. That it is only in seeing beyond this world that we can truly see into its troubles and its beauties, and only in being a stranger here on earth and among our fellow men that the earth can be so dear a home and mankind so dear a family. That to live we must die.

  It was accompanying Mother Teresa in Calcutta to the scene of the various activities of her Missionaries of Charity, to the house of the dying where derelicts from the streets are brought in so that at least in their last moments they may see a loving face and hear a word of love, to the homes for unwanted children sometimes pulled out of dustbins, and to the leper settlements, that I came nearest to understanding for a moment what Jesus meant by feeding his sheep. For I had reached beyond horror and beyond compassion, into an awareness never before experienced that somehow these dying and derelict human beings, these abandoned children and lepers with stumps instead of arms, were not repulsive or pitiable, but brothers and sisters upon whom, through the agency of Mother Teresa’s perfect dedication, the bright radiance of God’s universal love shone, as it does on all creation.

  23

  Finding Faith

  A year has gone by since my wife Kitty and I were received into the Catholic Church. It has been, for us, a year of happiness and inner serenity. Something of great importance has been finally settled for us; like Pascal we might have cried out: ’Certainty, Certainty, Certainty, joy, peace, God of Jesus Christ, Thy God should be my God, oblivion of the world and of everything except God’ .Thus the doubts that we have entertained and even cherished during the years of my life, all melt away or change their tenor, like reinforced concrete, strengthening rather than weakening the faith they seemed to jeopardise.

  St. Paul’s famous definition of faith: -’the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’, seems to me perfect. Surely it is the gift most to be desired on earth. The greatest minds have realised all too clearly the limitations of the intellect as a means of exploring what life is about, just because they have marched so far and so audaciously along that particular road.

  The situation is well expressed in one of my favourite books - ’The Cloud of Unknowing’, supposedly written by a monk in the 14th century. ’For one thing I tell thee, ’he writes, ’that there was never yet pure creatures in this life, nor yet shall be, so high ravished in contemplation of the Godhead that there is not evermore a wonderful Cloud of Unknowing twixt him and his God’ .Of God himself, he goes on, ’Can no man think.....He may be loved but not thought. By love he may be gotten and holden, but by thought never’. It is a beautiful image and we of the 20th century have every reason to be well aware of the appalling consequences of its obverse, a Cloud of Knowing which generates pride and fantasy to the point of bringing into range the possibility of blowing ourselves and our little earth to smithereens.

  ‘If the sun and moon should doubt,’ Blake wrote, ‘they’d immediately go out.’ Without faith, that is to say, there is only night, however brightly the neon lights may shine, however fast the jet planes fly, and however glamorous the coloured pictures glow. There is, it seems to me, no substitute for faith. Without it, life is unliveable. It is the sense that faith gives of a universal spiritual order that alone makes it possible to establish some sort of temporal, moral, social or political order. Without the one, as we are now dramatically seeing, the other breaks down. As faith disappears chaos becomes inevitable; as its light goes out darkness must fall.

  It has been a great comfort to know that one is a member of a Church whose leadership at any rate is unequivocally opposed to legalised abortion and other aspects of the appalling, ostensibly humane, holocaust which turns hospitals into abattoirs wherein unborn children and the ailing old are systematically murdered. For myself the great boon and blessing of the Church is that it enshrines not a panacea for contemporary ills, or the promise of future happiness, but a mystery - that all creation, its totality, is one; the manifestation of a loving creator whose reach is between the furthermost limits of the universe and the counted hairs of each individual human head - who, as George Herbert so exquisitely puts it, ‘dost stretch a crumme of dust from heaven to hell.’

  Faith tells me it is possible to establish with this loving creator a living and loving relationship which makes all things joyously comprehensible and acceptable. It also tells me that through the Christian revelation our relationship with our creator is translated into human terms. God became a man, a man became God, in order that we might know God, not just as a notion, but as a father in heaven whose family we all are.

  Christ’s death on the Cross, and His subsequent living presence in the world, provides the bridge between mortality and immortality, between man and his creator and between time and eternity.

  24

  Time And Eternity

  People speak of wasting time, but in fact it’s the other way round. Time wastes us. I always seem to hear clocks ticking, even when there are no clocks -as in the middle of Australia, or in Berlin’s liberated rubble which looked as timeless as the mountains of the Moon. We are born into time, and, living, it enfolds us inescapably. Time is, for us, a prison, and eternity the light we peer at through the bars. Time is something which inexorably ends, as today does, and tomorrow, and this year, and this century, and the earth itself, and the universe. Everything ends except eternity, which cannot end because it never began.

  Time ticks on from minute to minute and hour to hour, without ever adding up to eternity. Ah! sunflower! weary of time who countest the steps of the sun. I, too, have counted them, to the point of weariness, and then lost count. The steps of the sun go up to eternity, but we who climb them so assiduously and eagerly never get any nearer to the top. I saw eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light, all calm as it was bright; and round beneath it, time in hours, days, years, driven by the spheres like a vast shadow moved. Eternity can be thus seen, but we live in time
. It is our habitat; as fishes live in water and birds in air, we live in time.

  Yet we carefully detach from time everything we admire or want to be. Heaven, we say, lies beyond time; love is not just for today or tomorrow, but for eternity; great works of art and great truths are eternal, as are all deities, whether anthropomorphic or transcendental. Time is as paltry as Time magazine. Even contemporary advocates of drugs like mescaline and LSD claim for them that they take their users out of time, thereby recognising that this is a desirable situation. Though time governs us we look askance at it; though eternity is outside our experience and beyond our comprehension, we pine for it with sick longing. We vote for eternity in our dreams even though we draw our cheques on time when we are awake. Killing time! - what a marvellous expression! It’s precisely what we do all the while - getting rid of it like garden rubbish by slow or quick combustion.

  But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near, and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity. It’s on these deserts that our eyes are irretrievably fixed. How strange, I often reflect, that the bodies we nurture so zealously, the appetites we cultivate so assiduously, the wealth or fame or power we seek so ardently, all belong to time which we despise, and their negation to eternity, the focus of all our hopes and desires.

  Whatever we do is temporal, whatever we aspire after is eternal. Deeds belong to time, ideas to eternity. The hand which writes these words belongs to a body soon to expire; the mind which thinks them will likewise in a decade or so at most function no more. Both belong to time, and like all time’s creatures are mortal. Yet the words themselves, however banal, inadequate and inconsequential, however transient their impact on other minds, are projected like satellites into the empty space of eternity, there to orbit.