The nature of faith
Wrestling with the 'the mighty force' or 'the beast'
[apologies it’s been so long between posts! I’ve been mad busy — writing, reading, working. All good and lucky things. I’ve been composing the below for ages — small words at a time — but felt suddenly ready to belt it out, so here ‘tis!]
Halfway through reading the new love of my life — Helen Garner’s — first volume of diaries I had a huge realisation. It had been creeping up upon me for some time but Helen made me look over my shoulder and glimpse it.
“Clear statement: I have very strong urges (irresistible urges) towards some kind of religious or, rather, spiritual experience. This frightens me, not because the spirituality in things is so inscrutable but because I don’t know what it will do to my ordinary life arrangements, my friendships, my attitude towards my work, if I turn around and acknowledge something I privately refer to as “The mighty force”. (p 150, Yellow Notebook, Diaries Volume I 1978–1987).
For the longest time I called myself an atheist. Even thought it’s not been true for the most part. It’s true I’ve never been interested in joining a church. But I have lived with nuns. I have more than a mild interest in intentional communities.
When I read that entry in Garner’s diary and the subsequent entries in which she has an ongoing battle with “the mighty force” I had an instant flash of recognition. The force is around me, too. Like a wind has picked up and is whistling through the god-sized hole inside me.
Maybe it was the Pope dying. Maybe it’s nature dying. Maybe it’s all the dolphins that keep visiting the bays down the road from where I live — like a 90s dreamscape of stars and moons and sea mammals. Maybe it’s turning 40. Maybe it was watching Cowspiracy. But something in me is yearning for a big, bold, spiritual anchor. The question is: what shape is that spiritual anchor? Is it human? What is its ambition, its texts, its foundations?
As is the way of these things, since I read Garner, I’ve encountered the mighty force in several other books and articles since. Irish writer John Connell’s Twelve Sheep did some of this work for me. It’s a beautiful series of essays reflecting on Connell’s life as a small-holdings farmer in Ireland. On how he sees the animals in his care, the land, and his relationship to labour, to himself as an Irishman who has lived other lives on other lands. As a son and grandson. Faith is there all along. Connell talks about the importance of walking the El Camino to find his way. That there is, sometimes, a long road to finding a calling.
I suspect my god-hole has been growing for years. Since I was a child, perhaps. My Nana was unwaveringly faithful — or at least that’s how she appeared. Jesus and Mary were always with her, Jospeh too, and all the other Saints. Helping her through unimaginable pains. I’ve seen how the others, the ones without the faith, struggled. And it has always made me wonder.
Even so, there was a long time that I thought faith was ludicrous. That God was a way of getting out of pain, of foisting it off onto some story that men liked to inflate because it suited them. Thought it must be a sign of intellectual weakness to rely on magical ghosts to find things for you, clear the weather for a wake, appear when you can’t bear it any longer. Teenage me — arrogant. Or fearful? I have been terrified of ghosts for a long time mostly because I believe in them. Or in the ghosts of ghosts.
Why now? Why is the hole causing an ache, now? The mighty force, as Garner describes, is peeping at me like a beast from behind trees, waiting for me to turn and face it head on, bravely. Like a knight.
Martin Shaw discusses his return to Christ on the podcast Re-Enchanting. I find his conversation compelling. Tempting. The idea of searching — of going out to the woods and making space for the beast to show itself — appeals to me; not quite now, but soon. To wander in the desert for days and nights. I do not like cold, or damp or discomfort. I would make a terrible Saint.
But that’s what Shaw thinks we need to be. He thinks we all have to try and be Saints again. He talks about that good Jesus — the one who preached kindness, and giving away worldly goods, and loving enemies and neighbours, and trusting in the wild ways of that big beast — that force. I like that Jesus. I love that radical, caring man and do think if religions could only stick to those simple values we’d be good. We’d be grand. Like St Francis and St Clare. They did those radical things — turned away from lives of comfort to notice the animals and those in need and those with god-holes.
I always think of the nuns. I’ve written about them before but that blip in my life haunts me with unspecified unfinished business. How they lived. So far away from how I live now. A dream. Each nun was puzzle piece that fitted: a completeness flowed between them. Animals, plants, the needy, hole-ridden strays, faith — they had it all and they had nothing (none of the clothes that I love, no children that I love, no selfish acts and plastic rubbish). But there was that lightning storm that caught me at the top of their mountain, just up from their founding father’s hermitage. Biblical, it felt, at the time. Perhaps more so, now.
I have shovelled books at the hole and they help keep it patched. The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy — one of the best novels written by a New Zealander. The way she evokes the storms — the potential violence — of sisterhood, desire, how families churn around ruptures and grow scars and secrets and stories. The magic of the Banks Peninsula — Mahy makes that place so alive, so magical and full of dark and light.
Nature is, I think, at the heart of the beast’s urgency, for me. And babies. The babies trapped in war zones being murdered by regimes. There’s so much violence it feels ridiculous to type it out loud. Premature deaths we are all witnessing but can’t talk about loudly enough because it’s happening amid all this other noise and tasks that now seem so unfathomably lucky: waking up, eating breakfast, going to work.
Books help. I wrote about Catherine Chidgey’s new novel, The Book of Guilt; as well as Sally Carson’s 1934 novel, Crooked Cross. I can’t tell if those novels worried the beast, the mighty force, or appeased it. But these novels that deal with such sinister human evil feel like signs — it is possible to create hell on this Earth. How do you fight it? What mighty forces do you have at your disposal to ward it off, prevent it from spreading?
See, I’ve gotten myself choked up. Part of “the mighty force” is joy. Beauty. I do, wholeheartedly believe in beauty. And Garner doesn’t dwell on the force. She just lets it visit, linger: she asks questions, isn’t afraid of Christian friends. She nods at it between other lines and paragraphs of her life.
Much of this put me in mind of C. S. Lewis' writings on faith - from memory he also discusses that sense of spirituality creeping up on him, & looking over his shoulder at it rather reluctantly as a professed atheist, when writing about his conversion/adulthood-return to the church. I believe Tolkien was annoyed that Lewis eventually went and became a Protestant rather than a Catholic! Certainly personally relate to that sense of the 'hole' - think our current moment in history really lends itself to that. Thanks for sharing. Much to think about!
Oh this was lovely! Big questions indeed. I like how Garner leaves it there. Can a question about the force be enough? Or does it need an answer and a name? I love Ecclesiastes but that about does it for me. Good novels, yes. Hmm. Good luck in the search, thanks for sharing this!