For us, someone living had died, though in each case the babies were less than three months. I support women’s right to abortion as a very poor second to contraception, but I cannot accept that no one is killed. I don’t buy the claim that the child in the womb is any less alive than the child outside. It would simply be more convenient for us if we didn’t have to think of what we kill as living.
I have friends, atheist scientist friends, who stop still and physically stiffen if I inadvertently, in their presence, say something about the soul or the spirit. There’s a war on, at present, between science and religion, only partly because of the advance of creationists. My generation took it for granted that the theory of evolution was true: who could really believe that, as the Bible says, the earth was made in only six days?
Yet can’t scientists make a distinction between private and public kinds of knowledge? Do they feel, when someone near to them dies, that only something material is lost? Is one beloved dog the same as another?
I don’t find it easy to define a soul, which is why I have left it till nearly last. In a way my own formal beliefs are not useful, because they exist in a different space. I was confirmed into the Church of England. What do I cling on to, of those beliefs? I think Jesus Christ is a perfect model: of kindness, empathy, lack of pride. His parables speak to the artist in me, as do the beauty of the hymns and the psalms. My father’s love for ‘Morning has broken/Like the first morning,’ is everyone’s love of, and longing for, renewal; his desire for a new self is my own. I am moved by Matthew Fox’s version of the faith, where the anawim, the humble and excluded, are always at the core of it. The first shall be last. Be as little children. A mirror reversal of the world we know, quietly radical, the gentlest miracle. An image, an otherworld that hangs there, beckoning, beyond the hills of hurt and worry. I take communion , though rarely; I kneel with others to say we are linked, this is the face of the faith I grew up in. I sit, grateful to be welcomed.
Catching the light
But since I was sixteen, and ‘lost my faith’, I cannot literally believe in a paradise with God and Jesus and the saints: where would it be? is my problem. Where am I to imagine them? It falls apart, it turns to cardboard. More seriously, for this means that most Christians might see me as inimical, I cannot believe that there is only one God who happens to focus on our planet, our species, one species among so many species, one tiny planet in this vast universe of galaxies and stars and countless planets which surely, certainly harbour other life-forms. Why would that wide glory of light, space, matter, have a God centred on our little earth? Our Christian God looks suspiciously like us. If God exists, he must have many faces, so everyone can find their own face. Besides, as I learn about other faiths, I see they have aspects of the same beauty, speak to the same needs and longings. It isn’t only Christians who value compassion, love, forgiveness, charity. Who speak to the best in us, and face the worst.
I think of the Thai pendant I wore on the night when I felt I was saved by an answer to prayer, when the conscript threatened to rape and kill me. At the time, I had no idea what it meant, whose image it was. I bought it as fashion. Only writing this book have I realised that I wore on my breast that fateful night the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion, Kuan Yin, who is described as ‘an incarnation of Mary’, whose person embodies loving kindness. Kuan Yin hears the cries of the suffering; her name means ‘she who hears the sounds of the world’. She is said to have refused to enter heaven when the cries of the living came to her ears. Which compassion saved me? Kuan Yin’s, or Jesus’s? I would say, compassion in the universe; though in another universe, perhaps I was killed, in the universe I live in now, I was saved. But behind that larger claim there are real, small facts: compassion from the French boys who worried about me, who came and interrupted what was happening; my own compassion for myself, which made me hold on and hold off my attacker; even some buried restraint or pity in him which stopped him raping me straightaway. (But think also of those who are not saved, who are cruelly killed, tortured, murdered, who suffer for years, with no remission, who pray in terror and are not answered.)
I would say that life split in two that night, is always splitting, an infinite regression, and that often I have been in the luckier half, often my need has called forth an answer—when the young Frenchmen arrived to save me, when my rejected novels were finally accepted. Because of the images I grew up knowing, the face of compassion for me is Jesus, but who is the god of birds and insects, or of the life-forms who were once on Mars? I believe that God is in all of them. I feel God is in each living instance. And so I return to my quest for the soul.