In today’s Guardian “Comment is Free Belief” there is an article by David Bryant, a retired Anglican vicar. It’s title is “Heavyweight ethics are no way to help the newly bereaved face up to their grief,” and it is summarised with the words: “The only way I could help a girl whose boyfriend had just killed himself was to listen.” And as I read the article I began to feel that I had passed through the looking-glass. It should have been an article about sorrow and comfort, but it is really an article about being right and wrong.
Bryant was on a train for a five-hour journey. A young woman (he calls her a girl) came up to him — he was wearing a ‘dog-collar’ — and asked if she could speak with him.
It had all the hallmarks of the ‘chat up the vicar’ joke and I was tired. But no. Three hours earlier her boyfriend, a long-term depressive, had intentionally taken a large dose of tablets and she discovered him dead in their flat. He could no longer face the pain of his existence and she was travelling to her parents for comfort.
Here’s where we begin our passage through the mirror. Speaking in terms of ’a long-term depressive’ is callous and thoughtless, without compassion. Perhaps the young man suffered from clinical depression or some other form of chronic depression. But then we move further, and left is almost changed to right, up to down. Clergy dressed in clerical garb are often approached by people who want to talk. Why should he have thought it a ”chat-up line,” in a vicar joke, and why would he tell us? If you advertise yourself by your dress as someone who supposedly deals with people’s highs and lows you can scarcely duck out just because you’re tired. Nor should you complain if people take you at your clothes.
All he could do was listen. And, of course, what else could he have done but listen? There’s nothing that is really going to explain the long, weary road that life sometimes seems to those who suffer from acute forms of depression. You have to have been there to understand. There’s no answer to the question: ”Why am I suffering?”, even though it is almost impossible not to ask the question and try to answer it. But the good vicar might have tried to listen actively, and might have explained that often there simply is no reason. Shit happens, as they say. One day someone is there; the next they are gone forever. It happens by accident, through sickness, and sometimes, as in this case, because life itself seemed empty, pointless and forbidding (but because he was depressed, not because he was ungrateful or wicked — see below). Sometimes and to some people, just to survive one more day may seem an obstacle as great as Everest to someone in a wheelchair.
In the end, says the vicar, she came round, as expected, to point the accusing finger at herself. She had failed, had not been sympathetic enough, had let him down, and felt guilty. Well, yes, it is hard not to feel guilty when someone close has, in desperation, taken their life, and nothing that we could do could heal the pain or bind up the wounds. But not only in such desperate circumstances; it’s hard not to feel guilty when someone has died. There are always so many unresolved issues, unspoken words, unhealed hurt and pain, hopelessness, uncertainty. But the vicar, it seems, remained silent. No comfort, just the comfort of being listened to, perhaps, but this man of God had no comfort to offer, no words, no wisdom. His silence was, he says, practical.
There were practical reasons for my silence. It was hardly the time to point out that her conception of God was questionable. A deity such as she imagined, who dished out punishments, rewards, death, life and tragedy with tyrannical arbitrariness, was in dire need of theological reshaping.
Well, was it? And is that all that he could think to say to someone in pain? But to anyone who had read the Bible is it so very clear what the Christian God is like? To anyone who has heard about sin and redemption, is it so obvious that God does not punish or reward? No, of course not. The God of the Bible often dishes out punishments and rewards, and almost always with tyrannical arbitrariness. If the vicar had another concept of God, it doesn’t obviously answer to the brutal unpredictability of life, or to its suffering, its desperation, its loneliness, or its despair, otherwise he’d have had something to say, wouldn’t he? Or was chastising her for her theological naïveté the only thing that came to mind?!
And had he forgotten, already, those reassuring words:
Can a woman forget her baby, or show not compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. [Isaiah 49.15]
Had he forgotten the Christian promise, that “God proves his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ die for us”? (Romans 5.8) Why was it that all he could think of to say was: “You’ve got a really lousy conception of God”? Perhaps because the same God who is supposed to have said these things, also speaks of judgement and the fire that is never quenched, promises misery for millions and salvation only for a few, excludes those who do not believe that Jesus was the Christ, or that God is one, and harbours nothing but bitter hatred for those who do not believe at all.
And if this is true — and the doctrine of univeralism, the belief that all will be saved is a Christian heresy — then is Bryant’s God not one who rewards and punishes? The story of Job makes it clear that the idea of divine punishment or reward is not straightforward, since the good often suffer and the evil prosper. Indeed, I think that Job shows that the life is essentially meaningless (this doesn’t mean that we can’t find meaning in life, for obviously we can, but this meaning is ours and not ultimate), and weal or woe come, not because we have sinned or lived uprightly, but simply because people are in the right or the wrong place at the time. They get caught in storms, earthquakes, landslides, fires, they catch diseases, or starve, or are involved in accidents. Just as Job said. He had done nothing to deserve the suffering he was enduring, suffering that led him to curse the day that he was born. There was no reason, and God was not just. That’s the point of the story, even though this point is often subverted by the great theophany when God challenges Job to explain how all this came to be. If Job wasn’t there when God created all these wondrous things, then how dare he presume?! If there is a reason, that is, it must be hidden in the mind of God, and may never be vouchsafed to us. But, we are assured, God knows, if we don’t. It all happens for a reason.
And yet sickness and disaster often seem arbitrary and unjust. Why else does Bryant think that people thought of God in terms of reward and punishment, and why else should they have concluded that God’s reasons are hidden from us? God’s ways are not our ways, after all.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. [Isaiah 55.9]
So, how would the vicar have reshaped God for this despairing young woman, who had just lost her love, and could not understand? Was there any concept of God that would have provided comfort for her in the midst of her anger, confusion and grief? What? That God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God and God in them? (see 1 John 4.16) Would that resolve the anger and the confusion or allay the grief? Not likely.
And what is it with heavyweight ethics? This was not the time says the vicar,
… to plunge headlong into heavyweight ethics. To inform her that life is a gift of God and that her man was ingrate and wicked to spurn it would bring no comfort.
Come again? Is that what he really thinks? That life is a gift from God? Even that desperate, despairing life, in which tomorrows simply retreated into a black future, full of inescapable torment? Even such life? A gift? And that her young man was ungrateful and wicked to spurn so great a gift? No, of course it would not be appropriate to have said such monstrous things to this grieving young woman. But was it appropriate to think them? to believe them? to hold them true?! All the words he had were words of judgement. So he had nothing to say, and, saying nothing, he let the young woman talk, talk about her love, and about the joyful memories of the young, doomed man who had been her love. And so “she talked and wept and wove her tale till journey’s end.”
Being a listening presence was no doubt a strength and comfort to someone who so badly needed to talk, needed someone to listen to her grief, to hear the memories which made that grief so intense and unyielding. But what thoughts lay behind that listening visage! Not, apparently, kindly thoughts, thoughts about a shared humanity, a shared questioning of life’s enigma, its arbitrary and casual brutalities, its unpredictability, and of the sometimes unforgiving distance between persons, who may love, but may not really know each other.
Notice how David Bryant says that the young woman’s concept of God was questionable and in need of theological reshaping, and yet how he goes on almost immediately to say how ungrateful her young man was to have turned his back on God’s gift, and spurned his love so wickedly. We can reshape the concept of God all we like, but we are still left with life as it is lived. It was, I believe, in response to life as lived that the concept of God took shape in the first place. The biblical concept of God is of a being – you have to read straight through the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) to get a real sense of this – arbitrary and unpredictable, always threatening to break out randomly in anger and destruction, yet at the same time comforting and strengthening and providing too, just as capriciously. The biblical God is like life, unpredictable, sometimes unintelligible. Trying to understand life’s unpredictability — the sudden death, by suicide, of someone greatly loved, the accident that leaves one bedridden for life, the cancer that strikes just when life seems happy and full, the unsought and unexpected good fortune, the coup de foudre of an unbidden love in which life is transfigured — is to understand something of where ideas of God come from. As Isaiah says (in the prophetic voice of God): “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.” (Isaiah 45.7)
In other words, there is no answer. That’s why the vicar had nothing to say, because he thought that only an answer would do. There is nothing to say in face of the brutal arbitrariness and casual brutality of life that will make it seem reasonable or just — aside, of course, from saying that life just is like that, and by saying that, sharing one’s humanity for the comfort it can bring. Talking about God wouldn’t have helped, because talk of God is really a way of hiding life’s ultimate meaninglessness from oneself, and pretending that such talk is meaningful. David Bryant had nothing to say, because he thought in terms of answers, and to his way of thinking the young woman had the answers all wrong. What Bryant’s religion would have urged him to say would have been judgemental and cruel.
But ask yourself this. If the woman’s concept of God needed refashioning, and if that concept would have helped, why wouldn’t the vicar have helped her do it? Bryant doesn’t say what this reconfigured God would have looked like, but if he had a better concept, that would have made her grief more bearable or the act of her lover more intelligible, why wouldn’t he have provided it? The truth is, I think, that the loving God that he had in mind — and this can only be a suspicion, because he doesn’t tell us – the God who doesn’t mete out punishments and rewards, does not bring weal or woe, is one that can have nothing to do with real life, which just is often cruel and capricious, and provides no sign at all that it is governed by a being who loves us and cares for us. If there were some sign of this, wouldn’t this have comforted that young woman in her grief?
A very thought-provoking post Eric, thank you. I am always astonished at the lack of compassion in evidence when blame and guilt are piled on to the desperation of someone who thinks that ending their life is their only option. The “life is a gift” argument also leaves me cold. Once a gift is given, it is no longer the property of the giver; it belongs entirely to the recipient and is theirs to do with what they will, whether the giver likes it or not. A gift given and then controlled by the giver is not a gift, it’s an imposition.
Thanks so much Eric, that you’ve now found the freedom and the forum to teach us on days other than Sunday!
Whoever Bryant’s god is, s/he wasn’t on that train with him. What can you say of a god that couldn’t or wouldn’t sustain Bryant through his tiredness so that Bryant could help the young woman through her grief?
And I am incensed that he would even dare to think about, let alone remark on, his own tiredness in the face of her need! Truly, I believe, David Bryant has no god, only the grotesque distortion of “self” he must see when he looks into his Carollian mirror.
I await the day when a young woman suffering from a devastating loss looks across a train at a man wearing a clerical collar and realizes “that primitive shaman has absolutely nothing of value to offer me” and leaves him all alone.
Maybe Bryant’s point is to reveal how theology can provide us with a more sophisticated way to blame the victim.
Bryant:
Quite.
/@
I long ago concluded that the purpose of religion was to insulate you from other people’s pain. It does a notoriously bad job of protecting you from your own; but as Byrant shows, a good theology can completely block out the noise from the suffering of others.
Thank you Eric. I was profoundly disturbed by the original article but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why.
I realise now that the vicar was (however well intentioned) writing from an ‘elite’ viewpoint. An unjustified one. A passive-aggressive form of bullying.
Thanks for skewering this nauseating article, Eric. If there was a loving god, how could humans have evolved in such a way that many of them become agonizingly depressed? Is there anything that Bryant’s god accepts responsibility for? ‘You are in despair? All Your Fault. Or, if it manifestly isn’t, Not Mine.’
Correct. This is not about compassion. It’s something else. The myths Of the new testament have an underlying suggestion : illness is the result of sin. The mythical person Jesus start healing AFTER he forgive the valetudinarian his sins. There is never a biological reason. We have two important things here : ignorance and haughtiness. I remember the first thoughts of my sister in law the moment she get the information she had bone cancer. She talked about her sins first and then she hoped that Jesus “don’t leave her”. All the time of her 5 year struggle she need a priest to cancel her fear. And that makes me angry because the organization called church act as a biological parasite. The believers need them. And believers are cultivated. I don’t say that every priest is a hypocrite but I know several who used their position to get the kick of power over the deluded, especially if you looking in the hierarchy of Rome. That remembers me of a sentence in “ideas” (the formidable work of Peter Watson) where he stated that afterlife is a more important idea than god. And that’s exactly what it is. The hope for afterlife is strong. A comment (treerooster,article of sean caroll on jerry coyne’s website) stated : ”any hopes for an afterlife must be based on compassion and lead to more compassion”. The author suggest here that believing in an afterlive is the only source of compassion, so you see the indoctrination is well done. The church know exactly that science cannot proof there is no afterlife like they cannot proof there is. So we arrived at a situation worldwide that a hole population must wake up out of their dream. Also Dawkins call our life a gift but in another light than religion, and you must be a courageous man to call this vision “grandeur”. If you have read the comments after it was public that Hitchens has throat cancer some hateful believers write that is was a punishment from the allmighty because he has used his voice for blasphemy. There is a long way to go.
Pittige, I’m trying to learn a bit of German. It’s slow, since I’ve got so many things to do, but I am making a bit of headway. Anyway, as I was reading over your comment, I came upon “That remembers me of a sentence in “ideas” …” And of course I heard you saying it in German. “Dass errinert mich an einen Satz …” or “Ich errinere mich an einen Satz …” — which was so exciting — I mean, to be able to see in English what I had been learning in German. Of course, in English we say, “I remember a sentence,” or “That reminds me of a sentence …” But you do so very well communicating in English. I wish I could do the same in German, even with a bit of mixup in the grammar. But German seems to me very difficult, not only with all the cases, and agreement, but also much more idiomatic than English — viel mehr idiomatisch als Englisch. Was denken Sie? — now that you have learned English so well?
But, of course, as to the substance of your comment. The suggestion that compassion depends on an afterlife is the most awful slander against humanity. And we do have a long way to go. The hold of religion over the minds of billions is very tenacious. Religions won’t let go without a fight. It’s a money machine.
thank you for the reply but i am very sorry that i let you think i am german, i read many german books because i have learned the language while my father was in the occupation army after WWII and we lived in germany, so i often refer to german writers.
(deschner, uta-ranke heinemann, gert ludeman, mynarek, herrmann and others) But in fact i am flemish, the two languages has much in common. The name i use was my totem. I like your website because it’s riped like wine through the years. I am 70 and while i have not a academic degree (i am a retired electronic enigeer) i am a litlebit of a autodidact.
Ah, well, thank you Pittige Maki. But it is the same construction for remembering in Flemish then, as in German, isn’t it? Yes, it is because you often reference German writers that I thought you were German. But as an autodidact you have taught yourself well.
Any ordinary person might be able to listen and put aside those everyday assumptions and opinions in the face of a genuine personal emergency. The grief of even a stranger is so humbling, so immediate, that somehow one’s ordinary assumptions seem insignificant, and one becomes involved only in the immediate now of suffering and trust. Compassion seems to arise naturally in the presence of deep human suffering. But religion has rules about this sort of thing. It has an answer for everything, usually contained in a simplistic and asinine formula about the truth of God and faith and so on. And the professional believer knows all the answers — except when he finds that he isn’t so sure after all. So he egotistically treads water till he finds his depth, which will be too late for anyone hoping for understanding and empathy. I suspect that our good vicar was too cowardly to speak out about his prejudices (feeling dimly that they would seem contemptible), and too cowardly to set his beliefs aside (feeling that that would be apostacy) and respond from simple humanity. Alternatively, too arrogant to set aside his righteous bigotry and too fastidious to sully himself with talking with this imperfect young woman about her grief and regret for that contemptible young man. But I suspect that though these alternatives were surely operative, the real reason for his silence was cowardice. The arrogance and cynicism are amply confirmed by his publishing his story. Poor girl, this is a terrible story of shattering grief and of trust betrayed.
Wonderful post, Eric. And how it resonates! Our second son has spent 30 years in periodic self-recrimination and addiction because of perceived guilt in the death of his brother – they had had a fight the day before. He had no such burden to bear, of course, and in spite of our (and others) assurances to him over the years, he persists in his distress. Fortunately, he does not have any theologic baggage to bear along with it.
The ‘Great Theophany’ that you mention also resonates with me. It is one of the things, in late teen-age, that really got me questioning the nature of the god I’d been force-fed from early childhood. I read it many times, becoming more questioning with each reading – even as I admired the soaring language involved.
I agree with most of what you say, but why do you say that the young woman’s young man was contemptible? Sad, tragic, doomed, conflicted, etc. etc., come to mind, but, without the Christian gloss, why contemptible? Can we even say, without being on the inside, to say that trust was betrayed? Having counselled people in depression I have to say that these are not characterisations that come readily to mind.
Job is, perhaps, the most profound piece of literature in the biblical text. I’m told — though I am not able to judge — that the language is exalted, especially in the theophany, but as Herman Tønessen points out in a wonderful paper he wrote on Job many years ago (it’s linked under Recommended>>Articles on this blog), that the god portrayed in Job is, as Tonnessen says, “a ruler of grotesque primitivity, a cosmic cave dweller, a braggart and a rumble-dumble, almost congenial in his complete ignorance about spiritual refinement.” Reading Job should convince anyone that there is no god. I don’t know why it took me so long, since I read it as a child, but, of course, I was always instructed to remember Job, who repented in dust and ashes (‘as should you’ was always implied).
I weep for you and your son! What a terrible burden to bear! But why did the vicar not know something that even the most imperceptive fool should know and understand intuitively — in himself if not in others?
Hello Eric. I did wonder whether to use inverted commas for “imperfect” and “contemptible”: I was considering what I thought was the vicar’s attitude, as it came across to me:
Alternatively, too arrogant to set aside his righteous bigotry and too fastidious to sully himself with talking with this imperfect young woman about her grief and regret for that contemptible young man.
I am myself a victim of acute depression as a result of a particularly disastrous childhood and I would be the last person to consider another sufferer contemptible.
I’ve obviously not been at all clear here. The betrayed trust is that of the girl. I feel strongly that he could have put aside his prejudices and made some effort to respond simply as a person. Whatever happened to compassion? What about the spirit of the law over the letter? (He might even have learnt something useful himself.) And why drag it all out in print?
Ah, now what you said makes perfect sense! Thank you for clarifying. I hope I didn’t come across as the heavy in my response. In fact, this capsulates it so well:
Precisely my thought. Why drag it all out in print? Wouldn’t it be better to be human with another human. Of course, there is one good thing that came out of this. There probably wasn’t another person on the train that she’d have so willingly opened up to, so the social function of “priest” may in this case have been a useful one. What, I wonder, would fulfil that role in a completely “secular” society, in which no one had the “cure of souls” (as they put it in the church)?
No, you didn’t come across as “heavy”, far from it. As to the customary visibility of priests, I suppose it’s one of the last survivors of the mediaeval custom of dressing according to one’s social station. At least one knew where one was.
But as to your specific point, in the first place the appearance of a gentleman in priestly garb might as easily be a deterrent rather than an encouragement, and in the second place, I think it is a fairly common experience to find oneself in the company of a stranger who confides something of personal importance. Travelling seems to provide the opportunity, and perhaps the knowledge that you are unlikely to meet again provides some sort of encouragement. It has certainly happened to me, and I’m sure it’s pretty universal. So I doubt if there’s much general cause to worry.
Might I suggest that Mr. Bryant take two not-mutually exclusive courses of action.
1. Take off the collar if you don’t want to be “bothered”. Frankly, to the rest of us, it comes across as monstrous self-centered narcissism to literally wear an “I’m better than you” suit everywhere you go.
2. Resign from your parish and turn to a life of contemplation, or manual labor, if you can’t think of “I’m sorry for your loss; it wasn’t your fault” as the appropriate thing to say to someone in such a situation.
Is there some compassion test that pastors have to take and fail before they’re allowed to travel unescorted?
Yes, as to your response to my specific point, I think you are right. It was just an immediate reflection on the fact that there was someone there whom the woman felt she could trust. Little did she know, of course, that she really couldn’t trust him judging by what he had to say!
Yes, it’s sad to think that there just might not be anyone around for some person in deep need. But one can at least hope that one is not found wanting if and when one is approached in such a way. And the less luggage one carries around, in terms of preconceived ideas and status, the better, surely. Maybe if rationality and critical thinking were to spread, as we dearly wish, there will be more hope and more healing.