work of being the voices of the universe’s victims they frequently end up as victims themselves, but their death then becomes part of their testimony and it is remembered long after their persecutors are forgotten.
While it is true that many of these prophetic figures emerge from religion, the defiant side of religion is invariably compromised by its own collusion with power and its compulsive need to explain why things are the way they are. Institutional religion has not only developed theories to justify political power and social privilege as specifically ordained by God, it has even sought to justify the pain of non-human creation, usually along the lines that God knows best how to run a universe and who are we to challenge his methods? It is precisely at this point that many people hand back the ticket, leap overboard from religion and take to the empty sea. This was what Darwin did, oppressed by what he called the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature. In a frequently quoted letter to Asa Gray, written in 1860, Darwin says:
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living body of caterpillars.18
He was referring to the fact that these enterprising wasps sting their prey not to kill but to paralyse them, so their larvae can feed on fresh (live) meat.
But theoretical religion is probably at its most repellent when it tries to explain the arbitrary suffering that suffuses human history, particularly when it justifies God’s role in it all, usually as the helpless architect of human freedom. This is why some of the most principled and compassionate people in history have proclaimed that if there is behind the universe that which we call God, an almighty originating authority, then no human being should attempt to justify its ways or have anything to do with it. Instead, like Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s great novel, they should simply return the entrance ticket and try to dissociate themselves from such a cosmic abuser of power:
Tell me honestly, I challenge you – answer me: imagine that you are charged with building the edifice of human destiny, whose ultimate aim is to bring people happiness, to give them peace and contentment at last, but that in order to achieve this it is essential and unavoidable to torture just one little speck of creation, that same little child beating her breasts with her little fists, and imagine that this edifice has to be erected on her unexpiated tears. Would you agree to be the architect under these conditions?19
Ivan Karamazov’s anger was provoked by the torture of a single child, yet what is that compared with the monumental sorrow of all the lost and blighted children of history, not to mention the humdrum miseries of ordinary mildly afflicted humans? Alas, rather than remain silent in the face of such overwhelming sorrow, the Church has blitzed humanity with explanations for suffering. I was inoculated against them as a young curate when, for the first time, I conducted a child’s funeral. It was a bleak day in early February and we buried him in a cemetery streaked with dirty snow on a hillside in Lanarkshire. The father, wearing his Sunday suit, carried the little white coffin in his arms, and we threw earth on to it and I spoke words into the wind. Afterwards I tried to comfort the young mother, who was tight with grief and anger, by attempting a consoling explanation of her loss. She turned on me fiercely and thrust me away from her. She did not want her honest anger polluted by my religious explanations. How could she not be consumed with raging grief at the death of her only son?
That kind of anger is still the most honest response to the victims of the indifferent power of the universe. And yet the emergence of that anger is itself a mystery. How did a universe, born of explosive power, give birth to this angry pity for the victims of that same power? There is no answer to the question. It is part of the mystery of unknowing that wounds us. But, though there is no answer, we should not leave the matter there: we should let our anger beget a compassion that goes against the cruel grain of the universe. It is well expressed in a poem by Sylvia Townsend Warner called ‘Road, 1940’:
Why do I carry, she said,
This child that is no child of mine?
Through the heat of the day it did nothing but fidget and whine.
Now it snuffles under the dew and the cold star-shine,
And lies across my heart heavy as lead,
Heavy as the dead.
Why did I lift it, she said,
Out of its cradle in the wheel-tracks?
On the dusty road burdens have melted like wax,
Soldiers have thrown down their rifles, misers slipped their packs;
Yes, and the woman who left it there has sped
With a lighter tread?
Though I should save it, she said,
What have I saved for the world’s use?
If it grow to hero it will die or let loose
Death, or to hireling, nature already is too profuse
Of such, who hope and are disinherited,
Plough, and are not fed.
But since I’ve carried it, she said,
So far I might as well carry it still.
If we ever should come to kindness someone will
Pity me perhaps as the mother of a child so ill,
Grant me even to lie down on a bed;
Give me at least bread.20
The sudden, inexplicable kindness of strangers is the best thing in the universe and it is uniquely human. It is a break in the order of nature that tells us, with cold ruthlessness, that in times of terror and calamity each of us is bound to save ourselves and leave the world’s wounded to perish. Yet, throughout our history, there have always been those who have made these defiant challenges against the pitiless order of things. Never many, of course, but enough to disturb and influence the rest of us and rouse us occasionally to action. The French novelist Albert Camus understood our reluctance to get involved, but he also knew that, in the end, some people do act. At the end of his novel The Plague, we hear him meditating:
Dr Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favour of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaught, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.21
Camus’ Dr Rieux was not motivated by religion in his work of healing. But to be fair to Christianity, the religion I know best, down the ages it has produced countless people who have followed the way of Jesus in serving the poor and trying to heal the world. Christians are still to be found in the worst places on earth, trying to make a difference to the lives of the wretched. It is in its work of organised care for others, whatever its theological basis, that Christianity is at its most compelling. Secular spirituality is at a disadvantage here. Because it is diffused throughout society rather than separately organised within it, it is more difficult to get it engaged in systematic and coordinated methods to change society. The problem is
