My trusty old Volvo about to incur a parking fine in the charming Norfolk town of Fakenham

 

 

 

 

MYSTERIES AND MIRACLES

 

 

 

This post was inspired by two recent events in my life. The first was the unlocking of my ageing Volvo from a distance of almost thirty yards away using the remote control button on the key. The second was a funeral.

First the unlocking thing. Nothing remarkable about that, you might think – you, I, everybody does it dozens of times a day, every day, without a second thought. Yet if I were to travel back sixty years in time (taking my Volvo and its key with me) and demonstrate that feat to my five-year-old self, that scruffy little self would be agog with wonder and admiration. It would seem like a miracle – a real miracle – not just some trick which is baffling until you’re shown how it’s done, like when my great-uncle Lorny placed his hand over his mouth and made his teeth disappear, horrifying and alarming us children until we discovered, long afterwards, that he had simply removed his dentures. It would seem like a real miracle because it employed forces which I – and most other people at the time – didn’t understand. Yet remotely unlocking a car, using a mobile phone, making this blog post simultaneously available to millions of people all over the planet actually employs forces as natural and logical as that which makes an apple fall from a tree and which we are now as familiar with as the falling of said apple. It’s not really a miracle at all.

As to the funeral, it took place in the swish, very tasteful chapel of a crematorium but was a first for me as it turned out to be a ‘humanist’ funeral. The charming old lady in the coffin – my uncle-in-law’s wife – was not a Christian and nor were her family, so it seemed inappropriate to give her a Christian send-off. Nonetheless, I found it all rather disconcerting at first, as I leafed through the order of service wondering which hymns they’d chosen and finding, of course, that there weren’t any. Now, to me a funeral just isn’t a funeral without a few of those delightful dirges delivered in that agonised, tuneless warble of which we English are such masters before being informed  by a beaming vicar that the deceased is being embraced into the love of Christ. For someone raised and educated in the Christian tradition there’s something familiar and reassuring about it even if, like me, you’re a bit lapsed in the old Christianity department. The proceedings were conducted by a very energetic gentleman who described himself as a ‘humanist minister’ and, though he fulfilled his role with warmth, dignity and feeling, he seemed a little vague as to the destination (spirit-wise) to which we were dispatching the deceased – not surprisingly, since it’s a subject which inspires vagueness in most of us.

It seemed to me, thinking about it afterwards, that my Christian education and upbringing had presented me with a view of life and death in which our time on earth in human form – subject as we are to the laws of nature – is somehow very material, very pot-bound, very limited and limiting and, of course, all tied up with the idea that we are born essentially sinful. I’ve noticed that original sin is a bit out of fashion with the clergy these days as it’s not a very good selling angle for Christianity, but nonetheless it’s always there, lurking in the background. Images like dust and ashes, common clay and mortal coils abound in Christian scripture, and the spirit – which is capable of eternal life – is seen as separate, and separable, from the body which ages, dies and decays. The true life of the spirit which awaits us is something we can only glimpse occasionally beyond our corporeal confinement, through little gaps and apertures – ‘We see through a glass darkly… etc. etc.’ as Jesus’ brilliant PR man St Paul wrote to the Corinthians. We achieve eternal life by having faith in the miracle of divine grace. I believe that – particularly with my generation – this is a perception which is deeply embedded in the psyche even of those who claim to have intellectually outgrown religion.

Yet it seems to me that this life, this earth, this universe, is the miracle. The evidence of that is all around us, from the bursting of a seed in spring to the remote unlocking of my ancient Volvo. If an apple detached itself from a tree and went upwards instead of downwards, it might be seen as a miracle, but the fact that it falls to the ground is the real miracle, the fact that the earth and moon and stars and galaxies are bound together in an eternal dance by a force called gravity which is turning out to be stranger than anyone could have imagined.

The earth, the universe and all other universes beyond it and within it and parallel to it, were, I believe, created by something, or – as I cosily like to think – someone. I’ve no idea who that someone is but I believe that, as well as being an unimaginably brilliant engineer, they are also an artist because of the aesthetic coherence of all creation and, of course, its breath-taking beauty. Somewhere in all this cosmic coherence, this artist saw fit to create a tiny planet revolving around a minor star in a trailing arm of a rather insignificant galaxy on which conditions just happened to be favourable for life. The vital and multi-coloured explosion which resulted included a rather repulsive – but nonetheless extraordinary – little naked ape which is capable of standing outside its environment and questioning it and – in a crude, bearded form – writing this blog post. But what we see, of course, though beautiful, seems far from benign. No one needs reminding that pain, suffering and death are inextricably woven into the fabric of human and animal life to which we humans have added our own little refinement of unimaginable cruelty – usually due to arrogance, greed, racial and religious hatred or the lust for power. And then there’s that perennial thorny question: if this brilliant artistic engineer who created the universe also has a hand in our fate, why is he, she or it administering it with such grotesque unfairness – seeming so often to favour the undeserving and penalise the most innocent and vulnerable? Yet, to me, these horrors do not make the universe any less of a miracle – just, from the human perspective, a far from perfect one.

Human beings will always explore, research and endeavour to explain the unexplainable then harness some of those explanations to practical uses. If one of my grandchildren or greatgrandchildren (not that I have any yet, I hasten to add) could travel back from fifty or a hundred years in the future, the tricks they could show me would undoubtedly seem mind-bogglingly miraculous to me. Teleporting? Taking a three-hour Ryanair flight to Mars using a wormhole while one’s luggage lands up on Venus? Who knows? Yet mysteries will still remain, even for them. No discovery will ever provide the final answer, only lead on to new mysteries. Every child who has looked up at the stars has tried to get their head around what ultimately happens ‘out there’. How can the universe simply go on and on forever – billion upon billion light years of it? Yet there cannot be some sort of boundary, some perimeter fence around the universe or, if there is, what lies beyond that? No one – child or adult – can get their head around it, yet it now seems to me, at the ripe old age of 65, that it’s fitting that we can’t. It is a mystery and that is how it should remain because mysteries are good.

So what about the destination of the dear old lady disappearing behind the tastefully closing curtains in the crematorium? On the drive home from the funeral, my wife said, ‘I do hope I don’t go to Heaven because I can’t face spending all eternity being criticised by your mother.’ I suggested that things probably didn’t work like that but I wasn’t speaking with any authority. The truth is I have no idea what happens after we die and, to me, anyone who claims to know – and to force that knowledge on others – is not only crassly stupid but guilty of the most dangerous and despicable form of religious dogmatism. Then again, if this earth, and this life, is miraculous, maybe we don’t simply return to dust. Maybe something else – something quite unexpected and even rather amazing happens – like my being able to unlock my Volvo from thirty yards away. Who knows? We just have to have faith in miracles – which should not be difficult as they’re all around us.