On the books: Helen Buckroyd says fiction can evoke the religious experience

‘I believe that fiction gets to the truth of matters.’

‘Religion’ is such a big word that I am almost scared to approach it. But I should. For a year now I have been attending Quaker Meetings – Meetings of the Religious Society of Friends. So, like it or not, I can’t escape the noun ‘religion’ or its adjective, ‘religious’.

What frightens me about the word ‘religion’ is that it feels very cerebral. It stands besides philosophy and science as a means of understanding and explaining this world, and possibly beyond.

Quaker writings in the Friend or the Friends Quarterly generally also have a cerebral feel. What I mean by that is that my brain does most of the work when reading these publications. They are intelligent and intellectual. I am not using these words with a disparaging intent, but I do feel that one can get lost in one’s head. For me, overly-intellectual articles and explanations can lead to brain fog.

I love Advices & queries for its simplicity and directness. Take the following, for example: ‘Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts.’ Here is a different organ, the heart, which is vital to my religion.

So what is my religion? I can say what religion is not, for me. David Baddiel, who has written a book called The God Desire, has recently asserted that one of the prime motivations for God/religion is fear of death.

In a YouTube interview with Times Radio he says, ‘We created God because we are scared to die’ (see https://youtu.be/JPZlKs3Zig8). That is not my motivation; I have no certainty in my mind as to what happens after death. If I were asked to nail my colours to the mast, I would say life after death is unlikely, and that I believe I will simply return to dust.

Baddiel also says that religion is about finding meaning and purpose in life. I would say, yes, that is in part what I am searching for. But there’s something else too. It is hard to find the right words to say just what. I believe, like TS Eliot in ‘Burnt Norton’, from Four Quartets, that:

          Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

And, like Prufrock in Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, often ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean!’ Trying to set out what I think my religion is, is a tall order.

I believe that fiction gets to the truth of matters much more than writing on religion, philosophy or science. Fiction moves from the head into the heart and soul of imagined people. We live with them. We feel with them, and also think with them. It’s the closest we can get to a precision of feeling and understanding while using those most imprecise of tools – words.

I feel that this is the same with religion. We can approach it with words, but it is the feelings behind these words that really matter.

In a novel, we have to sit next to a person, and see the world through their eyes, to understand them. That is why the experience of silence is so powerful – it is beyond words. It can create a profound understanding and union between very different people. This depth of understanding, and union, is what I call the divine. It is what is bigger than me. I can experience it in fiction when I enter a character’s inner life. I can experience it when I am alone standing on a mountain top. I can experience it when I stop in the middle of a city and look around me at the bustling and moving crowds. At the moment of being stationary and observant, I can become one of the moving multitude. I have certainly experienced this feeling in the silence of Meeting for Worship. The experience I have on each of those occasions is a sense of being part of something, a communion with the other – be it of the natural world or the animal kingdom – and a sense of wholeness.

Answers, if and when they arise for me, come through experience.

Shi Heng Yi, who runs the Shaolin Temple Europe in Germany, describes the Buddhist view of life’s journey with a metaphor of climbing a mountain. Each person must make their own way to the top of the mountain, and the experience for each person will be different. We may ask lots of questions about which is the best route, and how to get there, but we have to set off on the journey ourselves. The view from the top will be very different for each of us (see https://youtu.be/4-079YIasck).

So the only way to get any closer to an understanding of the meaning of life is through experience, lived or imagined. It is from this feeling of the divine that I can find meaning and purpose in life. I feel part of something more than myself. With this feeling inside me, I am able to live out my hope of building a better world for all. That gives me meaning and purpose.

I can use Advices & queries and Quaker faith & practice not as guides that give me all the answers, but as signposts on my journey to the top of the mountain. Some signposts are more helpful than others.

I believe that experience can come from literature too. In literature, the power of the imagined experience comes by being in someone else’s shoes. Thereby we develop compassion and empathy.

As with the parables of Jesus, some stories speak to us, while others may be mystifying. For me, the parables, too, are stories that help me enter into the worlds of others. It is only through this compassion and empathy that we can build a better world – here, now, today.

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