Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making meaning in a meaningless universe, by Richard Holloway

Author: Richard Holloway. Review by Nick Wilde.

In A Little History of Religion, Richard Holloway, a retired bishop of Edinburgh, devoted a whole chapter to Quakerism. Much of what he writes here will also be welcome to Friends, especially those of us who are more non-theist than theist. The author calls himself a Christian even though he might not believe in God. Nonetheless he is a follower of Jesus Christ.

The idea of stories reminded me of The New Atheists by the Catholic theologian Tina Beattie. ‘To be human is to live an interpretive life’, she says. ‘It is to inhabit an imagined world which enables us to make sense of our experiences and to lend coherence and meaning to our lives.’

In the four parts of Stories We Tell Ourselves, Holloway deals with the origin of the universe. Billions of years, and billions of stars, suggest that the stories we tell ourselves, mainly from the Bible, are misguided and wrong.

Using these stories, the author shows where humankind has gone wrong in its interpretation of evolution. Holloway quotes extensively from Genesis, reflecting on how much it differs from Big Bang theory. In a chapter on ‘The Fall’, he shows where we have gone wrong in our linking of sin with sex. ‘Death can be raged against’, he writes, ‘but sex is made sinful by the story of the garden of Eden’.

The most painful parts of the book are the sections on suffering, punishment and forgiveness. Holloway’s description of the tragedy of war is poignant, as it is when he describes animals caught up in our industrial farming methods. I found it difficult to read the contents of these later chapters.

In the last chapter he writes about forgiveness, a subject he covered in On Forgiveness: How can we forgive the unforgivable?. Here he writes of ‘the two marks of the Jesus revolution. The interruptive power of forgiveness to reverse the world’s chronic addiction to revenge. And a refusal to let the world’s domination systems go on flattening those at the bottom of their pyramids of power. What Jesus called the “kingdom” is already at work on the earth as a non-violent resistance movement, and we can join it anytime, anywhere. We join it not by reciting a creed, but by doing something. By reconciling with those who have hurt us. By challenging cruelty in all its forms, religious as well as political. By committing random acts of subversive kindness. Above all, by challenging how the system goes on enriching the already-too-rich and impoverishing the already-too-poor. There are always some who devote their whole lives to the work of this downside-up, other kingdom. Then there are people like me who dip in and out of it as courage and occasion allow.’

This seems very Quakerly to me.

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