‘Do you believe in a God
who can change the course of events
on earth?’
‘No, just
the ordinary one.’

A laugh,
but not so stupid: events
He does not, it seems, determine
for the most part. Whether He could
is not the point: it is not
stupid to believe in
a God who mostly abjures.

The ordinary kind
of God is what one believes in
so implicitly that
it is only with blushes or
bravado one can declare,
‘I believe’, caught as one is
in the ambush of personal history, so
harried, so distraught.

The ordinary kind
of undeceived believer
expects no prompt reward
from an ultimately faithful
but meanwhile preoccupied landlord

Donald Davie, Ordinary God

If an evangelical Christian or charismatic read this anthology they would be shocked. They would not be able to understand how a person who calls herself a Christian could have such a ‘pessimistic’ world view. But the majority of the writers who feature in this anthology are Christians, and of the many impassioned and angry remonstrations against God, the most impassioned and angry are those which come from the Bible. Personally, I do not see how any reflective person can face this world in honesty and not be impassioned and angry, particularly if they themselves have been sorely afflicted.

This would offend evangelical Christians and charismatics, but then truth always offends those who bury their heads in deserts of lies. Over the past few years I have read numerous books written from a fundamentalist evangelical viewpoint, and I cannot help but feel that these people do more harm than good to the truth of the Christian gospel. They suggest that an acceptance of Christ as ‘Saviour and Lord’ (leading to one being ‘born again’ and ‘saved’), will immediately open the door to heaven on earth, in the way of answered prayer, healing of sickness, and a solving of all problems, even financial ones.

This simplistic and utterly false doctrine is dangerous and leads millions of people away from truth into a world where manufactured ‘spiritual’ experiences and trying to get whatever one wants from God replaces faith in a Creator who made the world, loves us and asks for obedience to his laws, but who will not reward us in this life, and does not promise any extra ‘perks’ at all.

As I have just said, most of the writers who feature in my anthology are Christians, only unlike the televangelists they are real ones. And real ones invariably suffer. This book is full of the pain, anguish and heartache of devout and sincere believers such as T.S. Eliot, Christina Rossetti and William Cowper, who could not (as I cannot) square the problem of how a so-called loving, merciful AND all-powerful God could so afflict his creatures. This problem is unanswerable, and in itself the cause of much of the suffering of genuine Christians. If God can hurt his children as much as he does, how dare we commit ourselves and our loved ones to his care? As C.S. Lewis said when well-meaning friends tried to comfort him after his wife's death by saying she was now in God's hands, ‘But if so she had been in them all the time. And I saw what they did to her here...’

The evangelical Christian cannot face up to this dilemma, particularly as so many biblical passages seem to say the exact opposite of what experience shows to be the case. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, ‘Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!’

But God does give stones and snakes. He gives very hard stones and very poisonous snakes, and I cannot turn to him and thank him for them. If we accept - as surely we must - that disease is as much of an evil as is sin, how can we then be expected to thank God for it? That would be like thanking him for giving us murderous tendencies, or a vicious temper. We are expected - rightly so - to thank God for his blessing of good health; what therefore are we meant to do when he does not bless us with good health? Still thank him? I cannot. There are times when I feel I am going crazy, trapped within this hideous, decaying, diseased body of mine, with which I am now able to do less than is the average 90-year-old. And so I scream at God for what he has inflicted on me; what he has deprived me of; what he has taken from me. I lash out with half-hour diatribes of anguished despair against him and tell him to get out of my life altogether. And then, with the inconsistency of a child who runs to the parent who is beating her for comfort, I shed hours of tears before him, as I can do in front of nobody else, for nobody else understands as he does; nobody else wants to listen as he will.

Despite the fact that I often feel battered to shreds by God's treatment of me, deep down I know that somehow, horrible though it is, I am nevertheless on the right track. Frail, sinful, weak, empty, hollow, frightened, angry and ignored as I am, I would prefer by far the God I believe in than the charismatic one - a God whose ‘holy spirit’ makes his followers speak in tongues, bark like dogs, go into trances and leap up and down like pogo-ing teenagers at a rock concert; a God who is obliging enough to turn off a dripping tap in the bathroom that was stopping a young, healthy woman from getting to sleep but who will not intervene to prevent plane crashes, earthquakes or terrorist attacks; a God who heals people of bad backs, bunions and tennis elbow, whilst allowing thousands of children to die every year of starvation and disease. The charismatics can keep their God of magic and ‘miracles’.

But just as I can derive no comfort from the manufactured healings in the charismatic church, nor am I inspired by the cases one hears of where people have overcome incredible adversities by remaining cheerful despite their lack of healing.

Some years ago, a Christian woman became famous for her courage, after being paralysed from the neck down in an accident and was quoted as saying that although God could have worked a miracle by healing her he had actually performed a greater one by enabling her to smile in her wheelchair. Now I am not deprecating this. Doubtless some people do manage, possibly because they possess a naturally relaxed and optimistic temperament, or are fortunate enough to have a demonstratively loving, understanding and supportive family, to endure tragedy with courage and even good spirits, and such people may be admired. Nevertheless, I myself gain little help from their stories, and in particular, find the use of such stories by the completely secular and materialistic institutions within our society – government, the media, the health service etc – for purposes of social engineering and indoctrination wearisomely irritating and patronising.

Personally, I do not think a cheerful and accepting reaction to extreme suffering and pain is particularly praiseworthy. Even St. Paul said he ‘groaned’ within his sick body and longed to be set free from it; and there are few passages in the Bible which speak of people accepting great tribulation with cheerfulness; the opposite is by far the most common response. So, brave though the sick people who carry on smiling may be, I am afraid they do little to help me in my struggle with illness, fear and disability. Instead, it is the writings of such Christians who feature in my anthology from whom I derive comfort and support. They do not try to placate us with weak and sanctimonious panegyrics. They do not accept evil as good; nor do they thank God for hurting them, and making them suffer. They do as the Psalmist did when he lambasted God for destroying him with his terrors and afflicting him since his youth; as Job did when he asked God bitterly why he keeps alive those who long to die, and will not even grant him a good night's sleep without torturing him with nightmares.

These are the kind of Christians who help me to cope with my increasingly heavy cross. Better the anger of a Job than the hallelujahs of a Billy Graham; more helpful by far Hopkins’ ‘Comforter, where, where is thy comforting?’ than the willing acceptance of the smiling wheelchair woman. For these are the comments of men and women who are living in a world where often the burdens placed upon us are just too much to bear. Paul pleaded for his ‘thorn in the flesh’ to be removed - and it wasn’t. Few people’s are. And yet the Fundamentalists join in with the humanistic optimists in promising a ‘this-world’ paradise - which never comes.

Not all the writers who feature in my anthology are Christians. The poets Shelley and Housman, for instance, were atheists, as was Thomas Hardy, and as far as I know, none of the modern songwriters that I include has any particular religious beliefs. But this matters not a jot as regards the message with which my anthology is concerned. For the writers are all united in one profound sense: they share an anger and dismay at the realities of life, which nothing - not even a deep Christian faith - enables them to come to terms with. They experience the ‘quiet terror’, of which Larry Crabb speaks, when they look inside themselves and outside at their world.

C.S. Lewis says these are the people who will be saved. These are the ones who, regardless of their religious persuasion, receive God’s forgiveness. He says, ‘Do not imagine that I lack sympathy with...what I would call Heroic Pessimism - I mean the kind of Pessimism you get in Swinburne, Hardy and Shelley...and which is magnificently summed up in Housman's line, ‘Whatever brute and blackguard made the world’...I cannot and never could persuade myself that [t]he defiance of the good atheist hurled at an apparently ruthless and idiotic cosmos...is displeasing to the supreme mind...That is the lesson of the Book of Job. No explanation of the problem of unjust suffering is there given: that is not the point of the poem. The point is that the man who accepts our ordinary standard of good and by it hotly criticises divine justice receives divine approval: the orthodox, pious people who palter with that standard in the attempt to justify God are condemned.’

And so it is not Job’s friends, with all their pious platitudes and ‘good’ advice who are forgiven - it is Job, with his anger and despair and lashings against God. Job's friends criticise him for his refusal to just meekly accept God’s will (much like the ‘experts’ in the NHS and Social Services who try to brainwash us into their ‘positive affirmation’ mindset) but in the end, Job is the one who is accepted – not through his own merit, but merely because he suffered – and minded that suffering.

However, despite the fact that the aim of my anthology is to present pain and grief as being the normal and correct responses to life, this does not mean that I sympathise with the kind of bleak and hopeless pessimism which is founded upon intellectual endorsement of one of the secular philosophical belief systems such as existentialism or relativism. Although it is probable that some of the writers included in my anthology hold such beliefs (if beliefs they can be called), there is a sense in which the depression to which these outlooks logically leads is the antithesis of the kind of melancholic sadness with which my anthology is concerned. For rather than being merely an emotional response to the sadness of life, such depression is a kind of complete world view of nihilistic anguish based upon the tenets of atheistic philosophies. Such philosophies are many and varied, but they all share one basic premise - that this time and this place are all there is; that there is no eternity, no transcendence and no God. Therefore, there are no moral absolutes, no truths and nothing which is good or beautiful. Life is meaningless, and man, to quote Jean-Paul Sartre, a ‘useless passion’.

An internet article summed up the inevitable result of holding such convictions by saying, ‘Any thinking person who adopts a world view dependent upon secularism must ultimately embrace a philosophy of despair’, and this is the kind of despair which we see all too often in many of today's drug-addicted celebrities. A recent interview with Woody Allen revealed the bleak and wretched hopelessness of the existential atheist when Allen described how when walking through Central Park he has to stop himself running up to people to ask them why they bother to do things such as sunbathe or walk their dogs. ‘[A] hundred years from now’, he said, ‘All these people will be dead’...All gone...It’s constantly nagging at me. Our seemingly busy, busy lives mean nothing in this cruel and hostile universe.’

Such utterly hopeless despair is very different to the yearning sadness of, say, Keats, who, on looking back to a lovely time now over asks, ‘Who has not writhed at past joy; to know the change and feel it when there is none to heal it?’ This is a type of melancholy which, as I have said, I believe to be completely normal, natural and rational, and which would in fact, be the lot of every human being who faced up to reality. It is really a very religious kind of unhappiness – the kind experienced by Christ himself when he stood by Lazarus's grave and wept. He was angry and stricken with grief at what he saw, because he knew this was not what life was meant to be like. Such unhappiness is the result of living in a fallen world instead of the perfect one we were designed to enjoy, and often the closer a person is to God, the more they will experience such anguish and heartache.

There is a whole lot of difference between a person who says, ‘Life has no meaning’ and one who cries ‘Life is pain’. The latter is really saying, ‘I know life has meaning. I know much of it is achingly beautiful. I know that love and pleasure and goodness and truth exist - that is part of the trouble. But I can't get to them, and when I do, they disappear. I want more of them, more from them - and I want them to last for ever.’ When an atheist looks at a rainbow, he sees nothing but an arch of colours formed from a refraction of light on water droplets. But when a believer looks at a rainbow, he sees something so beautiful that it makes his heart ache, for it seems to promise something it will never deliver, like the road which winds on and on, but does not lead to anywhere in particular. But yet, this kind of sadness is in its very self a validation, a promise, of the hope within those who ‘mourn’, that they shall ‘be comforted’ and those who ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness' that one day ‘they will be filled.' The sadness which, although at times is all but unbearable, points to something beyond itself – says, by its very presence, ‘this is not as it should be’, indeed, ‘this is not as it is’. The sadness and yearning strengthen the conviction that reality is more than our experience, and that one day – though not in this life – that reality will be ours.

This is the message of the final book of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles, ‘The Last Battle’. This book is, on the surface, a very gloomy and depressing one, and a humanist critic recently described it as the most frightening children's book he had ever encountered. To an atheist mindset, that is true. The world with which Lewis had enchanted his readers suddenly comes to an end; the sun is put out, the stars are extinguished, and there is nothing but darkness. In our own world, the old kings and queens of Narnia (still children in our time) had been travelling on a train which threw them into Narnia, just in time to witness its cataclysmic end.

In reality, the train had crashed and the children were dead. To their surprise, they found themselves in a new land, together with the friends they had known in Narnia. And as they walked through this new land, they discovered an incredible thing. That although in many ways, it did look new, there were many other ways in which it looked the same as the old Narnia they had loved. Everyone kept spotting something they recognised, until at last they realised that in actual fact, they were back in Narnia – only a Narnia which was so much more beautiful, so much more alive, and, above all, so much more real than the one they had lost. The Unicorn sums the whole thing up when he says, ‘I have come home at last. This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.’

This is the good news – the really wonderful news with which, in an ironic way, my anthology is concerned. This is the hope of those who mourn. This is the indisputable and immutable truth which keeps them going through times of almost intolerable pain. I myself have gone through agonies of doubt, fear, self-loathing, loneliness, rejection, betrayal, terror of the future, longing for the past - and above all, anguish because of my disease and all it has done to me, all it has taken from me. But I believe – no, I know – that this is not the end of the story; not the end of the road. I know that in a very real sense, pain is the road which we must travel, the road which is leading us to our real home, through T.S. Eliot’s ‘unknown, remembered gate’ where,

‘...the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.’