Ineffable Love eBook
Club
Thursday 16th
April 2020
Welcome to Day Four of our
Good Omens themed week, with Alex Booer and Emma Hinds – authors of ‘Ineffable
Love: exploring Christian themes in Good Omens’! We’re assuming our readers
will have watched the TV show, but there’s probably something in here for those
of your who haven’t. Join us this week as we share some extracts from the book
and invite you to bring your own thoughts and creative ideas on social media!
Our book, ‘Ineffable Love’
– out now on Kindle and eBook from DLT! - is an individual study guide that
explores life and the Christian faith through the lens of the hit TV show, Good
Omens. We explore themes of Justice, Bodies, Power, Belief, Hope, and Love
& Renewal in six chapters, through commentary on the show, Bible studies, creative
suggestions for our readers and our own creative reflections. It’s full of
questions to invite thought and discussion, as well as ideas for further study.
Today’s book club showcases part of Chapter Five!
Chapter Five of Ineffable
Love is all about Hope. No, we don’t know why that would be remotely
relevant right now either!
A question to our
readers: What does hope mean to you – either in general, or in the context of
the current crisis?
It can be really difficult
to hope, particularly in the face of either uncertainty or in the face of
certainty, where that certainty brings grief and disaster. The scene from Good
Omens we’re discussing today involves Crowley mourning his best friend.
If you’ve got access to Episode
Five of Good Omens, have a watch from around 11 minutes 15 seconds to 13
minutes 40 seconds. We’ve summarised the scene here:
Crowley is in a pub,
already two bottles of spirits down, and ordering another. He’s absolutely trolleyed.
He believes Aziraphale to be not just discorporated but permanently destroyed.
Crowley laments his Fall, blaming his decision to side with Lucifer on boredom
and mild discontent. His grief is interrupted when Aziraphale appears in front
of him, fuzzy around the edges. Crowley’s so drunk he’s not sure if he’s seeing
things: no, he didn’t go to Alpha Centauri alone, he lost his best friend and
he’s abandoned running away in favour of getting drunk and waiting for the
world to end. He even took a souvenir from the bookshop, a reminder that he
could hold at the last. Happily, he picked a good book.
Crowley’s last words to
Aziraphale’s face end up being, ‘when I’m off in the stars I won’t even
think about you!’ Talk about regrets!
Crowley believes
Aziraphale to be gone forever, and with him has gone Crowley’s hope for the
future. Of course we know Aziraphale is fine. Hang on in there, Crowley! He’ll
be along in a minute! Lo and behold, this scene ends with Aziraphale on Earth,
indisposed but alive, and with Crowley restored to purpose, direction, sarcasm
and – maybe – hope.
Well, lucky them.
Most of us who suffer loss
don’t get our people back.
The book of Ruth tells the
story of Naomi, whose husband and sons have died. She will never see them again
and she has no means to support herself or her daughters-in-law. Like Crowley,
her hope for the future is gone and she sees herself as rejected by God.
‘Even if I thought
there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth
to sons— would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for
them? No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the
Lord’s hand has turned against me!’
(Ruth 1:12–13).
Having lost everything,
Naomi has decided to return to the town she was born and to die there. Naomi
means ‘pleasant,’ but when she arrives back in Bethlehem she can’t bear to be
confronted with even her own name.
‘Don’t call me Naomi,’
she told them. ‘Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very
bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me
Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.’
(Ruth 1:20–21).
How do we even start to
talk about hope in the presence of grief? What do we know of hope when grief
grips us and thrusts us, naked, every nerve fully exposed, to the chilling and
inescapable reality of loss? Grief can’t be controlled. To be in its grip is to
stand constantly on a precipice that at any moment may choose to collapse and
swallow us whole. Hope?
That’s not just rude, it’s
painful.
For those with faith in an
afterlife, it’s perhaps tempting to fast-forward to hope when we lose people.
We can offer encouragement that we’ll see our loved ones again in Heaven, and
reassure ourselves that this isn’t the end of our relationships. It’s okay!
They’re happy and with God! It might be easy to convince ourselves we don’t
need to grieve and can go straight to rejoicing. But if, like Naomi, we have
lost someone we’ll never see again in this life, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
be sad. Confronted with the reality of Lazarus’ death, even Jesus wept (John
11:35). Lazarus is raised by Jesus’ own command, mere moments later, yet Jesus was moved to tears. Hope isn't a reason not to mourn.
‘Blessed are those who
mourn, for they will be comforted,’
says Jesus in Matthew 5:4. Grief happens to us. We may defer it, or ignore it,
or repress it, but it will find its way out somehow. Mourning is a doing word.
Mourning demands that we stop, and feel, and surrender to the process of grief.
Perhaps it is how we take up our lives again; to accept that we are here, and
they are not, and there’s nothing we can do about it. This is heart-breaking
and hard.
Naomi doesn’t get her sons
or her husband back. Her future isn’t without hope, though – it just takes a
form she’d never anticipated. Ruth has a son, and ‘Then Naomi took the child
in her arms and cared for him. The women living there said, ‘Naomi has a son!’
And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.’ (Ruth
4:16–17) Naomi, in her grief and the circumstances of her loss, becomes part of
Jesus’ family tree.
Crowley does get his
friend back, but he can never undo his fall from grace. Crowley’s reality is
that he has been irrevocably changed. He’s no longer an angel but because he’s
not an angel, he has a role in the world that still needs saving.
We’ve all lost things we
had to leave in the past. Whether we are mourning people, pets, possibilities,
relationships, old hopes, beliefs, or abilities we had in our youth, we have no
choice but to move on without them. Crowley’s hope interrupts him when he least
expects it. Perhaps we can hope for the divine to interrupt us too.
A follow up question to
our readers:
Think about the stories of
the saints, lives of historical figures, stories of people in the Bible, or
people in your own life. How has God used the constraints of irreversible
circumstances to bring hope and possibility? Does that change how you feel
about your own circumstances?
Get Creative!
Throughout Ineffable
Love, we invite you to explore the show using your own imagination and
creativity.
What do you hope for? Are
you waiting to act on that hope? Is there anything that you’re hoping someone
else will do that perhaps you’re in a position to do yourself? Perhaps you are
where you are precisely for such a time as this (Esther 4:14). Perhaps you
could use your creativity (poetry, mind-mapping techniques, graphs, project
management, art, song) to explore the possibility.
If you want to share your
thoughts, tweet us! @ineffablylovely on Twitter.
You can find Alex
@alexbooer on Twitter and Instagram, and Emma @emmalouisePH on Twitter and
@elphreads on Instagram.
***
You can buy the full
version of Ineffable Love by Alex Booer and Emma Hinds as an eBook here.
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