What Is The Point Of Being A Christian?
| Timothy Radcliffe What Is The Point Of Being A Christian? London: Burns & Oates, 2005. |
This argument for Christian belief is profoundly human, profoundly Catholic, and is intellectually rigorous without being stifling. There is a lightness of style that’s engaging, coupled with conviction that’s arresting, drawn upon real experience of pastoral work involved with ministry to people with Aids and a deep understanding of human nature and modern fragility and anxiety in a runaway world.
Beverly Beckham wrote on March 19, 2006 in the Boston Globe: “I am as Catholic as the moon is round. It’s not visible, sometimes, the moon, my Catholicism, but it’s there, pulling the tides, shaping the earth, pulling and shaping me.” It was always there, but I didn’t want to think about it, not after I went through that angry raging phase, it was safer to never look at it and not examine it and not go through that excruciating process of thinking and doubting all over again; I find it very hard to have faith, and it is impossible to be glib on this subject. I can’t figure out where the centre is, where the circumference lies, and though I want to believe in a God whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere it’s hard to do so.
I came across this work as I was feeling restless after reading my Howatch Starbridge novels and my Graham Greenes. I’d come to think of Christianity as a beautiful dream. But what it points us to is ultimate reality. Love and forgiveness, truth and beauty, courage and compassion – still, I can’t believe if it’s not true. If it’s not true there is no point.
Still I was there, standing hesitant and thinking fitfully with increasing discomfort and increasing irritation, and I need a guide, and I need intellectual rigour complete with footnotes and copious references and a sizeable bibliography, I don’t accept a fluffy feel-good religion, I don’t want the chatter. (Of course there’s religion as insight, as joy and transformation, as rapture, as mysticism and communion. But there’s also the crucified God, the folly of the cross, that terrible beauty of grace in a dying and deserted man crucified.)
What was I to do? I fled to a bookstore, where I was safe and surrounded by things I understood, I knew. I furiously browsed through the religious section, and I found that I’m in good hands with Fr. Radcliffe. There is not one false note in his writing; it rings like a well-made bell.
One year I drove from one side of Nigeria to the other. We sometimes went through areas where thousands of people are suffering from leprosy. They live in lepers’ colonies, but receive no food in them. So they build small huts of palm leaves and camp by the sides of the road. They wear strange straw hats which are signs of their identity as lepers. One passes through crowds of them for hours. Because of the potholes in the road, cars can only drive very slowly and so the crowds press against the windows begging for something, showing you their wounds. The worst thing is to see the eyes of the children, filled with hope and pain. Their whole lives will be spent by the roadside, begging. They have no other future. Does one dare to look into their eyes? Does one dare to let oneself be touched by their hope and their pain? I found myself having to resist asking the driver to drive more quickly, because of the intolerable sorrow of their eyes. But any happiness which is built on being insensitive, in the retreat from compassion, is ultimately unsustainable because it is a refusal of the happiness of those who are indeed part of my own being. It would be like a determined attempt to be jolly while one is suffering from toothache.
The opposite of joy is not sorrow but the numbness of heart that makes us incapable of any feeling...But sorrow can also sometimes hollow us out so that we are capable of a deeper joy. It can break our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. When you wish to make meat tender, then sometimes you must hammer out the knots in it. This is what God seems to do to our hearts.
The most joyful saints are therefore also the most sorrowful. St Dominic laughed in the day with his brethren, but he wept at night with God. St Francis of Assisi was a man of exuberant joy, but he also bore the stigmata...If we would share God’s joy then we must share his sorrow at the suffering of the world. If one insulates oneself against the pain of the world, then one can never be deeply joyful...Often in Africa I saw how suffering demolishes superficial optimism and uncovers a profound and exuberant joyfulness. One must either hope strongly or despair.