Anne Frank, Nelson Mandela, Rachel Carson, Harvey Milk and Malala Yousafzai envisioned a different, better world. Unless we can imagine that there is more than this, we’re stuck in despair.
Is there more to life? Faith and belief are rarely built on certainties. They’re based on imagination. For instance, thinking that there might be a God (or not), and trying to work out what that God might be like. That’s why believers and doubters use metaphors for the divine: a parent, a despot, a shepherd, a friend. God is by definition beyond definition, so even in our understanding of the sacred, there’s an element of invention.
What would happen if? Imagination opens us up to infinite possibilities, and leads to action.
Imagine it...
What would happen if you asked?
What would happen if you kissed him?
What would happen if you stopped it?
What would happen if you said goodbye?
What would happen if you... added some anchovy?
6
Ride your Luck
You’ve got to be in it to win it.
It could be you.
The chances are you’ll play it this week. Or someone in your family will. Seventy per cent of people in the UK play the National Lottery regularly. They’re betting that their number will come up. That luck will be on their side.
It’s not logical. It’s faith. Or maybe just fun.
The odds of winning the jackpot are 1 in 45 million. You are more likely to be crushed by a meteor (1 in 700,000), die from flesh-eating bacteria (1 in 1 million) or be hit by part of a plane falling from the sky (1 in 10 million).1
We can’t prove luck exists but we often behave as if it does. ‘Good luck,’ we say, as if it will make some kind of difference. ‘Bad luck!’ we commiserate – as if some unseen force explains why your horse fell at the last, or you unexpectedly lost your job.
Why do we think it could be us? Perhaps it’s evolutionary. Perhaps it’s because the odds of just being alive on this good earth, in this strange universe, are so much longer.
Jim Al-Khalili, a theoretical physicist and former president of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK), writes: ‘For me nothing makes life more worth living than the knowledge that my very existence is thanks to a colossal sequence of events since the beginning of the universe. Whether or not I was inevitable, how can I not be grateful for this privilege of being? And why would I not make the most of it?’2
Someone with a lot of time on their hands calculated the odds of any of us being born at one in ten... followed by two and three-quarter million zeroes. In other words, the odds of being alive are so improbable that winning the lottery looks quite plausible. Just by being here all our numbers came up.
And we’re luckier still.
We can send our children to school, call on a doctor when we’re sick, vote out politicians we don’t like.
Most of this good fortune was made by people who came before us, people who got lucky with their own health or education, and decided to share their winnings by working for the rights we take for granted.
Religions find luck hard to explain. Faith and fate, divinity and destiny are not always good company. But whether we believe in God or don’t, we lucked out just by being alive. Right here, right now.
7
Use the F Word
In March 1986, a gang armed with knives broke into a vicarage in Ealing, West London. During the assault Jill Saward, aged twenty-one, was raped; her boyfriend and father were beaten so violently that both were left with fractured skulls. But Jill’s response was unexpected. ‘I do not now, nor have I ever, hated the men who attacked me,’ she said later. ‘While I hated what they did to me, I was always able to distinguish between the act of aggression and the aggressors.’1
Jill Saward would dedicate the rest of her life to campaigning for the rights of survivors of sexual assault. As a Christian she was familiar with the words of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ She said that there was never any question about forgiving her attackers, that was what her faith asked of her.
However, not everyone shares that faith. And not everyone who shares it, could make such a decision to forgive.
Forgiveness divides people. When the journalist Marina Cantacuzino, founder of the Forgiveness Project, was collecting stories of forgiveness and reconciliation for an exhibition called The F Word, she noticed that some people see forgiveness as a noble response to atrocity – and others see it as ridiculous. Even for those who believe in forgiveness, for most it will be a journey, not just in the face of the kind of brutal violation experienced by Jill Saward, but in the ordinary humdrum of our everyday relationships. Forgiveness is the WD-40 that smooths the creaking hinges of our relationships – and sometimes keeps the doors from falling off altogether.
‘All friendships of any length,’ says the poet David Whyte, ‘are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness.’2 Or as Martin Luther King Jr said: ‘Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.’3
Touring with The F Word exhibition, highlighting people whose lives have been shattered by tragedy and violence, Marina Cantacuzino discovered that the process of being able to forgive has no set rules or time limits; it is not dependent on faith and it is often ‘as mysterious as love’.4
She wanted to know if it can ease what George Eliot in Middlemarch called ‘the hideous fettering of domestic hate’. It can, she concluded, but not in an instant. To forgive is both a choice and a process. ‘I have come to see it as an intention,’ writes Cantacuzino: ‘a change of perspective, a direction to line yourself up for rather than a final and fixed destination. When it comes to considering forgiveness everyone has their limits, especially in the case of murder, genocide, rape, or violent extremism. However, within normal, everyday relationships forgiveness begins to feel more like a necessity than a choice.’5
And forgiveness does not always mean reconciliation. If someone is routinely abusing you, says Archbishop Desmond Tutu, you may be better off getting out of the relationship rather than seeking to fix it. Forgiveness brings reconciliation – if not with the person who has hurt you then with the lingering resentment they create.
The anger, bitterness, resentment and guilt that pursue violation can be potent. Hindsight will suggest alternative routes we might have taken and we may end up blaming ourselves, and also hating others. Sometimes the route to reconciliation is reconciliation with ourselves. This is succinctly expressed in a prayer of absolution found in the Prayer Book of the Anglican Church in New Zealand: ‘God forgives you. Forgive others. Forgive yourself.’
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