Stories We Tell Ourselves , livre ebook

Richard Holloway was Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church. A former Gresham Professor of Divinity and Chairman of the Joint Board of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Leaving Alexandria won the PEN/Ackerley Prize and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Waiting for the Last Bus was a Sunday Times bestseller.
Also by Richard Holloway
Let God Arise (1972)
New Vision of Glory (1974)
A New Heaven (1979)
Beyond Belief (1981)
Signs of Glory (1982)
The Killing (1984)
The Anglican Tradition (ed.) (1984)
Paradoxes of Christian Faith and Life (1984)
The Sidelong Glance (1985)
The Way of the Cross (1986)
Seven to Flee, Seven to Follow (1986)
Crossfire: Faith and Doubt in an Age of Certainty (1988)
The Divine Risk (ed.) (1990)
Another Country, Another King (1991)
Who Needs Feminism? (ed.) (1991)
Anger, Sex, Doubt and Death (1992)
The Stranger in the Wings (1994)
Churches and How to Survive Them (1994)
Behold Your King (1995)
Limping Towards the Sunrise (1996)
Dancing on the Edge (1997)
Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics (1999)
Doubts and Loves: What Is Left of Christianity (2001)
On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgiveable? (2002)
Looking in the Distance: The Human Search for Meaning (2004)
How to Read the Bible (2006)
Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition (2008)
Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (2012)
A Little History of Religion (2016)
Waiting for the Last Bus (2018)
 
 
The paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2021 by Canongate Books First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH 1 1 TE
Published in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Richard Holloway, 2020
The right of Richard Holloway to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
For permission credits please see p. 239
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 996 5 eISBN 978 1 78689 994 1
For Jim and Helen Mein
CONTENTS
Prologue
PART I : IT OR THE UNIVERSE OR EVERYTHING THAT IS
     I Stories About the Universe
    II Where We Came From
PART II : STORIES WE TOLD OURSELVES BEFORE WE KNEW THE STORIES SCIENCE TOLD US ABOUT OURSELVES
   III Why We Are a Problem
   IV The Creation
    V The Fall
PART III : STORIES THE MYSTICS TELL
   VI Apollo and Dionysus
  VII Mysticism Without Mushrooms
PART IV : SUFFERING : WHY IT ’ S A PROBLEM FOR SOME BUT NOT FOR OTHERS
VIII Joan’s Problem
   IX More Reasons Religion Makes Joan’s Problem Worse
    X The Story I Tell Myself
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Permission Credits
Index
PROLOGUE
W hether or not we acknowledge it, we all live by the stories we tell ourselves to explain the mystery of our existence, the suffering that accompanies it, and the certain death that concludes it. But our stories do more than offer us explanations for the mystery of existence. They also supply us with rules for living the lives we have been thrust into. The difficulty is in identifying the story we are actually living by. That has certainly been my problem, and I am writing this book to try to resolve it. What story am I trying to live by, and what are its consequences? In a collection of essays published in 1979 called The White Album , Joan Didion captured the main issue:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . We live entirely . . . by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.
Here Didion expresses the human dilemma: our need for stories to live by, while acknowledging how precarious and uncertain they are. She then describes the incident that prompted this beginning of doubt in the stories she had told herself.

I . . . read, in the papers . . . the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. The child, whose fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for ‘a long time.’ Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew. 1
I know that feeling of uncertainty and discomfort. The Christian religion has been one of the most prolific tellers of the stories by which many of us have tried to live. But what story can it possibly tell that will account for the ancient and abiding sorrows of children? That is the great stumbling block many of us can’t climb over in our search for the meaning or purpose of the universe. I have to confess that my discomfort is no longer that of the confident believer who has to fit that incident into the story of how a good God could have come up with a universe in which that kind of thing happens every day. Even when I was telling myself that story, I was never persuaded by the explanations offered by theologians. They demonstrated what to me has always been a weakness in most theological systems: a discomfort with uncertainty that impels a compulsion to explain or account for every mystery under the sun.
I wonder now if this is not a consequence of the male dominance of religious and political systems down the ages. The feminist writer Rebecca Solnit coined the term ‘mansplaining’ to describe the experience of listening to a man condescendingly explaining something to her he thinks she cannot possibly understand. It’s a well-known phenomenon. Solnit attributes it to a combination of overconfidence and cluelessness, a not infrequent combination in the male of the human species. It is rife in Christianity, which has a passion for proclaiming its confident solutions to all the existential puzzles that beset us. I wonder also if male impatience hasn’t a lot to do with this rush to judgement and decision. Is it a frustration with the silence of God? An embarrassment? Like those silences that sometimes fall between two people on a long journey which one of them is compelled to fill with nervous chatter? There is certainly a lot of chatter in Christianity. It suggests an unease somewhere, a fear of the void that lies beneath us.
I have always thought believing Jews were more honest about the problem of suffering than believing Christians. There is a scene in Elie Wiesel’s holocaust novel Night that casts a dark light on the problem. He tells us that one day in Auschwitz they saw three prisoners in chains, one of them a child. He writes:

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more worried, than usual. To hang a child in front of thousands of onlookers was not a small matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was pale, almost calm, but he was biting his lip as he stood in the shadow of the gallows . . .
The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks . . .
At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over . . .
Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing . . .
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard . . . ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
‘Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows . . .’ 2
This could mean that in Auschwitz God died, and we are alone in a pitiless universe. Or that in the sorrows of children, God – supposing there is a God – is on the gallows with them, twisting on the rope. It has to be one or the other. God is either dead or in some sense helpless. I just can’t make up my mind which. And that’s why I’m with the rabbis in Auschwitz who put God on trial, found him guilty and then said the evening prayer. Here’s a prayer they might have used, translated from the Yiddish of Kadya Molodowsky:

O God of mercy
For the time being
Choose another people.
We are tired of death, tired of corpses,
We have no more prayers.
For the time being
Choose another people.
We have run out of blood
For victims,
Our houses have been turned into desert,
The earth lacks space for tombstones,
There are no more lamentations
Nor songs of woe
In the ancient texts.
. . . God of Mercy
Grant us one more blessing –
Take back the divine glory of our genius. 3
I am moved by those who believe in God like that, but reject the divine justification story. Its best expression in literature was given by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s great novel. Ivan has collected an unbearable anthology of the sufferings of Russian children. He tells his devout brother Alyosha that he positively maintains ‘that this qual