Daily Mail 2004

HOW A CHINESE STATUE  WILL HELP ME ON THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY

I’d been looking at the nineteenth century statue in a sumptuous oriental antique shop in Bath for about three years. It is Kuan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of mercy and compassion with a miniature human baby on her knee - but she also reminds me of Renaissance images of the Madonna and Child, that universal symbol of pure, self-sacrificing love.  I’m not ashamed to admit I regard motherhood as my most important role in life to date...and so I reasoned that was why this statue ‘spoke’ to me. Each month or so I would find myself sidling into the gallery to look at the beautiful stone carving, admiring that face: gentle, patient, wise. Each time I saw something new in it.

Maybe I was too contented to buy her then. But a couple of weeks ago, after difficult times, I realised that if one day I walked into the ‘Lopburi’ gallery and found an empty space where my Kuan Yin had been displayed, I would feel truly bereft. So, although I don’t yet have a place for her, although I need many more practical things for my new home,  although I could have boughtt a couple of designer outfits instead of a chunk of stone - I wrote out a cheque. You see,  I had a deep need for this spiritual object to be in my life, which went far beyond mere possession.There is a cavity in her back where the devout chinese would place offerings and prayers - and I know I shall too. I’ve even decided  already what they will be, when I finally bring her home........

But why?  That’s what I have to unpick.

The truth is, I know that - like so many people - I am on a spiritual journey, but have no means of knowing how far along the road I have come or how far there is to travel.  But I know Kuan Yin will help me. For over ten years I have been recording occasional series of conversations about faith and doubt for BBC Radio 4, under the general title ‘Devout Sceptics’, and the programme concept came directly out of my own questions. Ten years before the first one was broadcast in 1993, I wrote a big piece for one of the Sunday papers which I called ‘The Longing for God.’ It doesn’t take genius to guess that  this lady’s full of yearning. But for what? Ah, that  question takes me back to the beginning again, in an endless circle of seeking. 

The mailbag from that article, and the letters to ‘Devout Sceptics’ over the years suggest that lots of people in this secular land still long for God or Good or the Spirit - as I do. Do you ever say a silent prayer when somebody you love is ill? Or just before an important interview....words like, ‘Oh, please let it go well’?  If you are feeling very low, do you ever murmur, ‘Help me?’ You may not know who you’re talking to - or perhaps you do.But in that moment when the pleading words form in your mind you are obeying one of the oldest impulses known to human kind. In the words of the poet Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself.’

It fascinates me that in this godless age so many people are still drawn to religion.  I don’t mean ‘drawn’ as in shouting ‘Hallelujah’ each week in an evangelical church, or even joining a cult. I mean refusing to listen to the cool, rational objections of committed athiests like Richard Dawkins. We live in a richly diverse country in which Moslems, Hindus, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Methodists, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Rastafarians, Buddhists  still worship the God(s) of their choice - even if C of E attendance is on the decline. As far as I’m concerned that’s all to the good - as long as tolerance of other faith reigns supreme.

But save us all from fundmentalism. Too much conviction stunts the imagination and makes a stone of the heart. On the other side of the fence, the atheist is lucky in being equally convinced.  When he or she pronounces ‘There is no God’, surely that’s as big a statement of ‘faith’ as the born-again Christian who says ‘Jesus is all’?  How can you know  you are right?

Let them keep their convictions. I’m proud to sit on the fence as a ‘devout sceptic’ and my suspicion is that this is almost the new religion of our time.  It means - to put it simply - that although you may feel unsure if there is a a God, or maybe you don’t buy into any conventional religion - you still have a strong feeling that there is something more to this life than the mundane business of ‘getting and spending’. Devout sceptics doubt,  but we also believe too - in the infinite possibility of the human spirit. We like talking about serious issues of duty and believe we are on this earth for a purpose - the big quest being to discover what it is. We may cry at the words of a hymn remembered from childhood then be roused to fury at the ranting of religious fanaticism. Above all, we keep an open mind.

Since I’m always asking people (and we’ve talked to some famous devout sceptics like John Cleese, Meera Syal,  Lord Owen, Joanna Trollope, Kate Adie, Lord Healey, and many. many more)   about their background in belief, maybe it’s time I described my own. I wasn’t brought up in a religious household, but my grandmother Ann Mooney had a straighforward belief in God and would often take me to a small Congregational Church on Edge Lane, Liverpool, where we vied with one another trying to hit high notes in the hymns. By the age of eleven I had developed a taste for candles and gilt, as well as for walking in churchyards, brooding about death, wondering where we all go. 

As an emotional fourteen year old I was drawn into the warm family of the Wesley Road Methodist Church in Trowbridge, Wiltshire  and sincerely believed that God and I had found each other forever.  But by seventeen all I did was worry about politics and angst over The Bomb replaced any longing for the bread of heaven.

I rejected the idea of a God of Love, because I looked around and saw a world full of despair, where the innocent suffer through war and famine, and  religion itself is a source of hatred and cruelty - as it has been for centuries. What God could have permitted the Holocaust, I asked? But I suppose He was pretty practised, having watched the Crusaders, shouting the name of Jesus,  ride through the streets of Jerusalem running deep in Moslem blood. And as Allah he allowed himself to be prayed to by others who went on to commit equally vile atrocities. And why would the All-powerful not find a cure for cancer? No, it wouldn’t do. In my twenties I believed in lieterature, art, rock n’ roll and human love -  and they did me just fine.

They still do, actually. But maybe maturity nudges you towards God. Certainly it blunts the edges of certainty. When my husband and I brought our two young children to live in Bath in 1980, principally to be near my parents, I  started to wander down to services in the local parish church, waiting for that moment when I’d believe in God again. The roll of drums didn’t happen but I loved the sense of community within those ancient walls. In Catholic churches I would always light a candle and remember my grandparents and the baby who died.....and it seemed to me that this was worship enough.

So gradually I learnt to stop worrying and love doubt - and to dabble with other beliefs as well.  In my house I have little Buddhas and crosses from Ethiopia and Mexico, stones painted by aboriginal people who saw t belief  in every curve of the land, and images of Mary and Jesus. I made a series for Radio 4 about the way the different faith communities in this countries deal with death and the afterlife, and realised how powerful is the human need for ritual. I wrote a magazine article about the annual ‘Goddess Conference’ in Glastonbury and discovered that worship of an all-powerful female nature deity preceded the idea of a male godhead in many disparate cultures. I thought more and knew less.

Once I went (totally incognito) to a medium who made the hair on the back of my neck stand up when she told me things about my late grandfather’s character only I and my parents knew and said he was watching over me. It was then I understood the search of those who refuse to believe in the finality of death. How comforting to think there are angels in the shape of beloved relatives, guarding us on high - or in the next room. My husband smiled gently at my gullibility - but could not explain to me how that odd women in London  knew Grandad’s name, or (for that matter)  the manner of his own father’s death

About that time I also had my tarot cards read by a Welsh woman in Sydney, who proceeded to describe with astonishing accuracy my father’s character, and (more important) to warn me that our daughter would have to endure a really huge operation within the next couple of years. I had not  (I assure you) even mentioned that I had a daughter, let alone that she had been ill since birth. That was in 1990, and in 1992 the prediction came horribly true. Mind you, the Welsh witch (her own description) also told me I was to make a lot of money with a novel and that didn’t happen - but hey, there’s still time and I’m not in the mood for nitpicking. The point is, I came out of such encounters firmly believing with Hamlet that there are more things in heaven and earth than we can possibly rationalise.

Recently I enjoyed a restorative week with my daughter at a famous spa in Thailand called Chiva-Som - and once again was deeply moved by the calm on the face of the Buddha, that hint of a smile which tells you, ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t really matter, it all passes.’ And what am I to make of the fact that the gentle Thai therapist who gave me a reflexology treatment could read, not only the recurring asthma and last year’s hysterectomy, but also recent sadness and tension, on the rough old soles of my feet? ‘You must look after yourself more’ she said, laying a hand on my shin in quiet sympathy.  I wanted to cry - but it was a sort of relief, not pain. Because suddenly love and loss and suffering and forgiveness and endurance and optimism and glorious survival all seemed entwined  - offering  the profound, and humbling consolation that we are all in this together. The answer to the self-pitying question ‘Why me?’ is ‘Why not  me?’  Kitty and I got up at 5.30 to salute the sun, and I meditated on the mystery of things.

Back home, I feel changed by that experience - just as I’ve been moved to tears by a great piece of music, or a painting, or the rose window in a great cathedral. You have to allow  these experiences into your soul - otherwise, what’s the point in being alive?

My journey is still continuing, and I go on asking the questions - but I do know  that within Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount and the infinite compassion of Kuan Yin and Muhammad’s instruction ‘Aid the poor and clothe them as you would clothe yourselves’  there lies all that is best about the human spirit. And that’s worth seeking.

The new series of ‘Devout Sceptics’ starts on Radio 4 today with TV gardener Monty Don at 9am, repeated at 9.30 pm. An anthology of previous series is published by Hodder & Stoughton @ £10.99