Thought Paper, 1st Draft (2007)

John and I have visited the Lake District so often that the visits blur together in my memory: sunny, rainy, cold, humid, dry; youth hostels or B&Bs in Ambleside, Keswick, Wastwater, Grasmere; Dove Cottage was open but they were refurbishing the museum; Rydal Mount was closed, we missed the bus, we had to walk back to the hotel beneath the trees. The years flow past like ripples in a river. The forest birds sing, the geese honk, the sheep bleat in the meadows.

One horrible year the sheep were missing; acrid smoke rose from the death pyres in fields across the valleys and hillsides; we tramped over bleach-soaked straw mats to get to historical houses; footpaths were blocked by signs saying "no access due to foot-and-mouth." Worst of all were the farmers' faces: the ongoing catastrophe had stunned them into stone and engraven them with grief.

I had a grief once, as small as one tiny girl, "and oh, the difference to me." Another thing that died in June 18 years ago--

Here I'm brought to a standstill. I was going to write... "my unquestioning faith," but it's not entirely true. What is faith? Something died in me that June with my dear Lucy, but I'm not sure it was my faith. "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will." That river, which I think must be faith, glides on, deep and glad and life-affirming.

What I lost was the comfort of confidence in my own understanding. My intellect, my rationality, stands since then on shaky ground. All the universe I believed so closely knit fades and frays to transparency. The abyss opens beneath my feet and I stand upon a floor of stars.

And I don't want certitude! I don't want to believe. If I believed again I could lose again--I won't allow it. But I'm uneasy with this impasse (although why should I in particular be at ease?)

Next in my quest/journey: the connected issues of refusing to understand, and the matter of God. I refuse to accept the goodness of a God who includes the suffering of innocents in his plan. Is that blunt enough? I'm not angry at him, I just don't believe in him. My definition of "goodness" not not include causing such harm or allowing such harm to occur when you have the power to stop it.

But I begin to have the terrible fear that maybe my faith in my understanding of "goodness" is as misplaced as faith in my understanding of God. Maybe I don't even know what causing harm is, in the long run--the eternal long-run, when all the consequences have been felt and the rewards and punishments given out. Not that I believe in a God who doles out rewards and punishments either, like brownie points and demerits. So who or what deals out the consequences (what eternal blackjack dealer, in what eternal Vegas, dressed in black vest, green eye shade, striped garter on his sleeve)? Is it God?

What or who is the impetus for my river of faith? Not the blackjack dealer. But maybe the river is merely the fortuitous balance of neurotransmitters or the effects of a happy childhood. (So my discontented intellect protests the contentment of my soul). Why am I happy, when elsewhere childish warriors fight, loved ones vanish and reappear as tortured corpses, men whose greatest good is money sit in paneled rooms and plan where next to drop the bombs that kill another mother's child?

Why isn't it fair! The child's cry. I will not be put off by easy answers, or hard answers either, to the problem of suffering. No articulated argument is worth one hour of suffering--not the arguments of philosophers, of churchmen, of patriots, of saints. I will not accept a rationale for it. I don't know and you don't know and they don't know and they are deceiving you and possible themselves if they say they do understand. God may understand, but at the death of his friend Lazarus even Jesus wept.

But--the God I know, the God of my experience (and even as I write, the little niggling doubt of intellect insists "neurotransmitters! endorphins! self-hypnosis!"), is very large. Perhaps he can encompasses sorrow and suffering. It is frightening. I don't know what I want to be true.