It is perhaps W. H. Vanstone, an Anglican clergyman, who has produced the most interesting idea – expressed via his classic and famous notion of dignified waiting – of the human relationship with God arriving not so much directly as surreptitiously and through concealment. For Vanstone, ‘Waiting can be the most intense and poignant of all human experiences – the experience which, above all others, strips us of affectation and self-deception and reveals to us the reality of our needs, our values and ourselves’. The whole point of such waiting is that something, usually something or someone that we earnestly desire – whether a lover, a wife, a new job, a salary rise or a foreign holiday – won’t be given to us straightaway: or even in fact at all. This means that that something is, even if only temporarily, concealed from us. We can’t access it. We can’t hold it. It is absent. We have to come to terms with that fact – that we can’t always get, or have, what we want; moreover, in that very interim, liminal process of waiting we are revealed in our full tragic dignity as mature human beings. Vanstone’s perspective is a Christian one, directly related to Christ’s waiting in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to the Passion. But it is an idea taken up by others with different beliefs and perspectives; for instance by Ursula Le Guin (a Taoist), in her splendid novel The Left Hand of Darkness, when she writes: ‘It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end’. The process of getting somewhere may thus be more significant than reaching a final destination, even if the eventual safety or satisfaction of entering harbour is to be postponed.
One
of the most interesting ideas given voice to in Le Guin’s 1969 novel by the
character Faxe (a ‘chief diviner’) is that the unforetold, the unproven, that
is the foundation of all life:
‘Ignorance is the ground of thought.
Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there is no God there
would be no religion … There’s really only one question that can be answered …
and we already know the answer … The only thing that makes life possible is permanent,
intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next’.
In
this novel, perhaps the most brilliant and artistically realised expression of
the author’s own Taoist philosophy, Le Guin expresses the important idea not
only that the mysteries of the universe are best discussed in terms of
opposites – light, darkness; female, male; fear, courage – but also that the
richness of life, in all its possibility, is absolutely dependent not on
certainty, but on doubt. It is our encounter with the unknown that shapes us
into the people we are.
Before
my marriage ruptured I thought my own journey was complete, at least in its
fundamentals. My wife and I settled in Norfolk in order to remain there. There
was no thought on my part of starting over. But when our relationship collapsed
all sense of meaning and purpose for a while went with it. What I have come to
realise, in the years that have passed since, is that my sea-crossing, my
voyage to new shores, was only just beginning. God can seem utterly remote,
when we are suddenly hit by affliction. The devastating departure of a spouse;
the parent who is struck down by illness; the sense of being suffocated by a
life that no longer seems your own, or over which you feel you have no control
– these are things that many of us have experienced, or may well experience in
the future. But the accompanying alienation from any sense of transcendent
presence, the doubt that may flood all available horizons, is not necessarily
the end. It is a fair walk from Holkham village, along Lady Anne’s Drive, down
to the shore. Sometimes the scudding waves seem so distant that they appear a
mere sliver: flatline of flickering blue or grey on an ever-receding skyline.
It is possible to wonder, then, given the quixotic nature of the sands, and the
serpentine runnels of water as they cascade treacherously down to the beach, if
it is possible to reach the sea at all. But it is there. You just have to walk
towards it to find it. And then keep
walking, because it is the journey – of doubt, of disappointment, of deep
uncertainty of what is at the end of it – that matters, in the end.
This is an edited
extract from Exploring Doubt: Landscapes of Loss and Longing by Alex Wright, available now in paperback, priced
£12.99.
No comments:
Post a Comment