WHY I AM STILL A CHRISTIAN

8^th July 

Many years ago my father contributed a chapter, intellectually rigorous but lucid, to a book entitled ‘Why I am Still a Catholic’.  Nowadays I would broaden this to all denominations. For me the answer to the question lies in the bleakness of death. Death makes a nonsense of all our love-based edifices of family and blood. Eventually all those bonds will be dissolved, and that is inescapable. For many of us death softens itself in the padding of ‘a good innings’ and ‘a full life’. But sometimes it flaunts its cruelty, reducing small children to tears as they walk behind a coffin. Today I was a mourner at such a funeral; a family where a mother and father had lost a child, their little grandchildren had lost a loving parent.

Everything we try and achieve through the people we befriend and mate with, and the children we engender - their vulnerability freighted with the intensity of our love - can seem a completely empty ritual in the face of death’s power. Today, the question loomed in my mind - what is family love, ultimately, but passengers trying to provide comfort to one another on a ship that has already struck the iceberg, and is heading for the bottom?

This bleakness is unsustainable without hope. This may be just a case of wishful thinking, of wilfully holding onto something that exists beyond proof. But we all know that we all feel, we don’t only think: our intellects are often little help to us. As I sit in my garden this evening with vivid colours from the flowers receding away to the lawn and orange sun in my face and a soundtrack of birds and distant sheep bleating, I can feel, just fleetingly, a certainty (not a conclusion, nothing that cerebral) that the loveliness of the scene is not all there is, that our minds and emotions are, in a way we can’t yet articulate, copies and hints of something greater outside and beyond, something of infinite duration beyond the transience of these earthly bonds and loves. Coupled with this conviction that we are made in the image of God, we also have the solid scriptural record of a poor carpenter’s son who defeated death several times and finally rose from his own tomb. In the bleakness of this life’s struggle, these are the reasons why I cling to the word ‘this’. And why I am certain that another life extends beyond.