'To pray is to bring your timely, resentful self before the silent and timeless dimension...' Photo: Ricardo Gomez Angel / Unsplash
‘The religious offer is not a consolation at all, but a call to ever greater vulnerability.’
Having universal appeal: Jonathan Wooding on praying for atheists
Recently, I’ve been emailing with an old college friend. He’s an atheist. We disagree, naturally, over the future prospects for the religious person. He’s happy to describe Richard Dawkins’ arguments in The God Delusion as ‘sophisticated’, decisively the end of the religious endeavour. He feels offended if I suggest that this man, who wrote The Selfish Gene, hasn’t thought through the implications of the word ‘selfish’, or what that word says about our ordinary, everyday – our moral and mortal – instincts and needs.
I saw my friend just last year at a university reunion. He was as switched-on as he always was when, as undergraduates, we had the time to debate. We talked about whether Old Testament Job was able to remain faithful to God after he’d lost everything, and ridiculed William Blake who wrote that he could ‘see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of [his] hand / And Eternity in an hour’. Our decades-long debate continues still.
‘There’s no transcendence,’ my friend tells me confidently. And, from someone who rails against certainty, that confidence troubles me. What, just resignation and endurance and resentment? It’s a bit grim. ‘Religious faith is all fabrication,’ is essentially, and dismissively, what my friend affirms. Realism, stoicism, mortalism – these, he says, are the way of honesty, of the ‘unaccommodated’ post-religious person. Be suspicious of everything. The great poem, surely, is that one about annihilation; terminal personal vanishing – ‘Aubade’, by Philip Larkin. We read that at university too – I remember it now: ‘the total emptiness for ever, / The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.’
Well, if you say so. Personally, I think it’s missing the point. By all means come to terms with that fear of death, but are we really to conclude that all God-talk is redundant or deceiving, just because you’ve realised that death means death, and that we shan’t be able to go on forever enjoying a drink and a gossip with our friends? A ‘vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die’? I’m sorry you feel that way about religion. But are religious people really going around pretending that they’ll not die? I say some of this to my friend, as the wine glasses are refilled, and the painted benefactors of our college lean in from the refectory walls.
Those who talk in this way – of religion as being a bunch of illusions, delusions, deceivings and fabrications – make a tacit assumption that there are expressions of evaluation and belief that are not any of these things. They also make the rather immodest assumption that they themselves are in a position of no illusion or delusion. I believe that each one of us can ‘see into the life of things’ but I’m not sure that un-illusioned, plain, accurate and impersonal statements can be made about such seeing. Language is not scientific equation. It’s all expression, evaluation, midrash and interpretation – even nonfiction storytelling like, say, the crucifixion story. What would language look like, or sound like, if that wasn’t so? The suspicious mind doesn’t necessarily end up with a superior appraisal of reality when every statement of opinion, every expression of our tragic condition, is cast aside as unworthy of the truth. We know these are all approximations, but their transience, their provisionality, is half of their beauty. There’s that eternal interplay – ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’.
Trouble is, my friend and I do agree, in fact, on most of this suspicious, iconoclastic stuff, the subversive irreverence and the science. But we draw different conclusions. Where he thinks that religion has now had its self-deceiving and fabricated day, I think that fabrication can have integrity, and be properly creative, and that even an atheist can pray. Oh dear, my friend is not going to like this.
The Dawkins version of God is a bit easy to dismiss. Is it possible that something more difficult is (conveniently) being avoided there? The real, discombobulating challenge to our self-esteem and pride-of-place is that the religious offer is not actually a consolation prize – not consolation at all, but a call to ever greater vulnerability to the real world’s condition. Realism, stoicism, mortalism you say? Well, yes, actually.
When all’s said and done about metaphysics and the death of God, saying a prayer remains a valid thing to do. Hark at me, sounding like a vicar! But I don’t believe that saying a prayer is an endorsement of church doctrine. And I sometimes agree with Dawkins when he finds preposterousness and self-deception in religion. Saying a prayer is not to pretend that one is not going to die. To pray is to bring your timely, resentful self before the silent and timeless dimension, and, merely, to get a clearer perspective; to ask (with William Blake, wouldn’t you know) if ‘Eternity is in love with the creations of Time?’
Try it, my friend. Who’s going to know? (I know it’s embarrassing; it’s supposed to be embarrassing.) Job, in his dereliction, prays. And think about Iris Murdoch, surely a respectable atheistical philosopher. She asks whether there are ‘any techniques for the purification and reorientation of an energy which is naturally selfish’. That selfish gene is not the end of the religious story, just the beginning. In a world without God, she writes: ‘Is there, as it were, a substitute for prayer, that most profound and effective of religious techniques?’ And she provides a vote of confidence, in fact, for ‘something analogous to prayer’, no substitute necessary: ‘whatever one thinks of its theological context, it does seem that prayer can actually induce a better quality of consciousness and provide an energy for good action which would not otherwise be available.’ So give it a go. Not petition, mind, but ‘simply an attention to God which is a form of love’. Still embarrassing? Yes, almost certainly. It’s talking out loud to a nonrepresentable silence.
Let’s agree, anyway, that we can all aspire to a bleak kind of enlightenment, the enlightenment of Philip Larkin’s gloomy poem. But enlightenment nevertheless – openness and vulnerability and attention, not necessarily consoling. Bleak enlightenment. Is this transcendence? Since when were we so sophisticated, so evolved, that we no longer need to pray? And Phil, if you’re listening, your poem, beautifully fabricated, certainly true, is it the end of the story?
Comments
I’m not sure if we should pray for atheists or if atheists should pray (for us?) and I’m not sure if Jonathan Wooding will get an answer from Philip Larkin but, nonetheless, a very thoughtful and thought provoking reflection on the reality of life and death and the realities of religion. Thank-you!
By trevorb on 6th August 2020 - 20:55
Please login to add a comment
