ONE of the guests on Radio 4’s Start the Week, on Easter Monday, was the writer Lamorna Ash, whose book Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever reports her encounters with young people exploring Christianity. This has been a personal quest for her, and she would now regard herself as a Christian.
One significant discovery for her occurred when she joined a Bible-study group that had been set up to meet young people’s enquiries and was aimed at bringing about conversion. What gripped her was not the conversion message, but the Bible text itself, and particularly the story of Jacob wrestling with God. It was in the struggle, as the text asserts, that he saw God “face to face”.
If I understood her correctly, what she found was not a faith that answered life’s dilemmas, but a very different kind of engagement: one that gave space for doubt, rebellion, and ambiguity. The biblical text is full of opportunities for wrestling with God, from Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, a terrible story, to the Psalms and the book of Job, the paradoxes of the Easter story and the nature of Christ’s risen body: here, there, physical or spiritual, or all at once? It seems in the Gospel texts that Christ gives his risen presence in the struggle to understand what has happened rather than in any final resolution.
On Maundy Thursday, I found myself reading Geoffrey Hill’s Tenebrae poems, and, in particular, “The Pentecost Castle”, which is an extraordinary amalgam of doubt, faith, and earthly and spiritual passion:
Christ the deceiver
took all I had
his darkness ever
my fair reward.
This is, to say the least, shocking language. Yet many long-term Christians and perhaps especially those in ministry will recognise it. Drawn into a faith that once seemed life-giving and full of promise, they find themselves ground down, burnt out, and spiritually empty. For some, having to be relentlessly cheerful through the Easter season is the last straw.
Yet the Christian spiritual tradition suggests that it is normal for individuals to experience a succession of “dark nights”, which echo the struggles expressed in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. Secular responsibilities, private passions, depression, trauma, and woundedness are part of any authentic relationship with God. Faith is not a flight from our true nature. We are all, after all, rebels at heart.
As Lamorna Ash points out, young people are drawn to various expressions of Christianity, from Quakerism to Pentecostalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism. The Church of England has so far been less successful. Note to bishops at confirmations and ordinations: relentless upbeat cheerfulness is not the only message drawing people to faith. Easter remains an enigma. There is a reason that the best church music is written for Advent, Lent, and Passiontide.