I left my last blog with an unanswered question about unanswered prayer: what can be said about those who pray for a loved one, or for the cause of justice, and experience no answer – the person dies, the cause fails? I used the example of Jesus himself, praying to be spared torture and death. His prayer is depicted as agonised, but God’s lack of response is made respectable by the Jesus’ submissive words, “Nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.” Clearly if submission to God’s will were the whole of faithfulness, asking God for anything would be a waste of time. Instead Jesus represented his own cause with words and tears.

Let’s take a look at what’s going on here.

Believers talk about the presence of God, but of course they do not mean that God is available like some kind of supernatural gloop. Better theologies say he/ she is present as person to person. But how is this divine other experienced? Again not as a a divine spook, but rather without material presence. The usual way of describing this is to use the word spiritual. But where does a spiritual presence happen? Surely in the mind, or better, the imagination, of the believer. We imagine God. That does not mean that God is unreal, just that we contribute, through what we have learned, to the image of God that we recognise when we speak of God’s presence.

When we pray, ths imagined image is very important. For example, is the presence male or female or somehow both or neither? That will depend on what we have learned about God from our sources and our religious community. When we say our prayer was unanswered, we mean first of all that what we asked for did not happen. But secondly we may mean that we did not even experience a negative response, some sense of God saying “no.” There are people who have reported to me their sense of God’s refusal of their petition, sometimes accompanied by comfort and  encouragement to wait. In most cases, these refusals were seen as espressions of God’s love.

It may well be the case that some experiences of God’s silence come from an inadequate imagination of God which cannot see “no” as a possible answer. If so, richer learning may help the believer to a richer prayer life. Biblical and other resources can help people see prayer as a more varied drama than they had previously imagined. (Caution: the training of the imagination for prayer is not a confession that “it’s only a pious game.” God uses our imagination as well as our other mental processes.)

But there are occasions where experience of the silence of God is final. The ears of our best imagination can detect nothing. We may like Jesus, feel that God has abandoned us in the time of our greatest need. Like most of humanity we are left to face whatever suffering comes with whatever resources we can muster.

At such a time I would encourage people to imagine that God has fallen silent a)because there nothing that God, who never intervenes by force in the world, can do about the suffering; b) out of respect for the human person who is suffering; c) because there is no suffering which is not also suffered by God. This may not be at all comforting to the suffering person, but it may give courage to bear what even God cannot change.

Did I just write “God CANNOT change”?

I mean God cannot change it without ceasing to be the God he/she is, one who gives total freedom to creation, from particles to human beings, to develop towards perfection. Whatever mistakes are made, whatever evils are committed, God will not impose his/her will, but will only work by persuasion. To do otherwise would be foreign to God’s nature. If climate change leads towards the extinction of life on earth, God will not intervene to stop it.

So when we bear the destructiveness of nature or the malice of humanity, we share the pain of God as God shares ours, in the partnership of suffering love, of which the brutal death of Jesus is the historical sign. If in faith we can imagine this, then in spite of God’s silence, we can still pray and maintain that partnership, even saying to God as the poet Paul Celan did in the name of persecuted Jews, “Pray to us, Lord, we are here.” The weakness of God makes this strange equality possible.

Paul says that those who share the labour pains of God in Christ will also share the glorious freedom of the children of God. In the world of time, this is promised in the future, but those who move out of time, dying as partners of the suffering God, may experience this victory “now.” This of course is still a product of my imagination schooled by the church and its bible. But if my imagination of this victory is mistaken, then I would regard the whole of my faith as nonsense. So beyond all other prayers I pray for this victory, for the creation and for myself, trusting that neither I nor the Bible are mistaken, and that the One whose suffering I have shared will let me share his/her splendour.

Maybe this is not what has been traditionally taught about prayer, nor does it meet the requirements of fervent souls whose hands are ever in the air, but it is all the better for that.

The Lectionary, a prescribed list of Bible readings for every day of a three year period, used by many Christian denominations, tells me that this coming Sunday I should provide some kind of meditation on the story of Hannah from the first book of Samuel in the Bible. Samuel was a prophet and leader of Israel during the reign of  its first king, Saul, and Hannah was his mother.

The story of his birth goes like this. Hannah was one of the wives of Elkanah, who loved her in spite of the fact that she remained childless while his other wife had many children. At times Hannah was mocked by the other, making her bitter and determined that she would conceive. She went to the sanctuary and prayed that Yahweh God would give her a child. In fact she promised that if she gave birth to a son she would dedicate him to God, that is to the work of the sanctuary. The presiding Priest Eli seeing her mouth moving with no sound, accused her of being drunk, but when she responded with her story, blessed her and her prayer. She went home, lay with her husband and conceived, giving birth to a son whom she named, Shemuel, or Samuel in English, which she thought was connected with the verb “Sha’al” to ask, as she said, “I asked him from the Lord.”

Subsequently, she takes the weaned child and offers him to the Priest for the service of God. The story also gives her a song of thanksgiving to God which emphasises that God has no respect for human status and often raises up the downtrodden and despised. It was used by the Gospel writer, Luke, as a model for Mary’s song, the Magnificat.

What has this story to say about prayer?

It looks as though Hannah’s prayer is a success. God pays attention to the childless and humiliated wife by giving her the child who is destined to be a leader of Israel. She has gone public with her humiliation by going to the sanctuary to confront God  with it. She does not shout aloud, but she prays in the “presence” and tells the Priest what she is doing, so that he adds his weight to her petition.

But she has of course altered her own desire for a child to include her vow that he will be dedicated to God. The reader is meant to feel the weight of this vow and to imagine the wrench of giving over her toddler into the care of the sanctuary. She does not know in advance that the child will be a great leader and that she will be honoured as his mother. She simply offers back to God the child whom God has given to her.

So, good result? Prayer works, especially if what we want can include some kind of bonus for God? But if we believe that God intervenes in worldly events then we might also say that God intervened to make her childless, SO that she would pray to him/ her, and humiliated SO that she might promise her child to the sanctuary, BECAUSE from the start God had destined the child of Elkanah and Hannah to be his/her servant. Behind the dreams and desires of human beings is the dream by which God channels his/her goodness into the world. Something like this view of the overarching imagination of God may have been in the mind of the author of the books of Samuel, who was one of the greatest storytellers ever.

But can I share his sense of God, and in particular should I encourage people with urgent concerns to pray as Hannah did, in the expectation of a positive outcome? Indeed should I myself pray expecting a positive answer, and if I don’t have that expectation, why should I pray at all? The playwrite John Osborne once compared the God of prayers to a hoover “that not only doesn’t beat as it sweeps as it cleans, but actually blows the bloody dust all over the house.” In my work as a clergyman I have known so many situations where people prayed in faith and agony for some good to happen, and it did not. It did not happen. One can say, God has his better purpose. One can ask why mere humans should expect God to arange the universe to suit them. But the truth is it did not happen. It did not happen and the child died. It did not happen and dementia got worse. It did not happen and he did not come back alive from Iraq. It did not happen and they were in Japan when the Tsunami arrived. The good did not happen, but the bad thing did.

And of course, if people have been told to pray, then when it doesn’t work, they sometimes blame themselves. If they had lived better, or had more faith, it would surely have worked. To the shame of the church, sometimes its representatives have defended God by blaming humanity.

An omnipotent God who controls worldly events, sometimes intervening in response to prayer and sometimes refusing to do so, is a powerful but not very likeable invention. Hannah might ultimately disown a God who made her childless so that she would promise her child to his service, just as I would disown a God who allowed Jean Andrew’s girl to die of cancer, but found a parking space for the Baptist minister because he prayed.

I believe in a God in whom we live and move and have our being, who never intervenes, even when Jesus prays for his life to be spared. My invention is of a God who clears a space within the divine being for creation, which continuously takes place through the divine energies, just as a foetus in the womb grows through the energy of the mother. All of creation is continually nourished by God’s creative wisdom. But human beings are given a choice whether to recognise themselves as God’s children, consciously accepting God’s wisdom, or not. When human beings decide to be God’s children, divine goodness flows into the world through them.

When we express our profound desires in prayer to God, we first of all test our wisdom against God’s, our version of what is good against what we know of God’s goodness. This is what Hannah does: she expresses to God the bitterness of her heart. She who has been created by the God of life to bear life has been left barren. He has humiliated and disregarded her. Her prayer has no false piety, but she speaks with passsionate honesty before God. Somewhere in her prayer she meets the divine wisdom, which gives life to all things; and mysteriously her own womanly creativity aligns itself with God’s and she no longer demands but offers herself as God’s partner in goodness, and her child as God’s servant. By expressing her passion to God, she has opened herself to the passion of God.

Now she can go back home with a smile to lie with her husband and conceive. Yes, like many Bible stories, it makes good sense even to readers who have no faith in God. Surely her anxiety and shame about not conceiving are psychological and physiological barriers to conception, and once she has got them out of her heart before God, she is ready to conceive.

The author of Samuel would not have expressed his theology as I have. His way was to work through a succession of subtle stories, involving passionate and sometimes ruthless human beings, to express his profound sense of the involvement of God with his people, God’s desire that they should share divine goodness. These are not simple stories, but had been told and retold by his people over years, gathering new insights, and incorporating new truths. Clumsy, doctrinal interpretations of his work have turned them into mere historical accounts or moral lessons, sapping their energy and hiding their humour.

We can begin to recapture his vision by seeing Hannah as she is: a feisty, angry and passionate woman who tells her soul’s truth to God, and finds herself seduced by God’s desire, to give life to her people through her child.

Yes, yes, you may say, prayer is OK when it does what it did for Hannah, but about Jesus and Jean Andrews? That requires another blog.

I love poetry, but find that the public poems associated with Armistice Day, are the sort that cause the hearers no trouble, leaving them with a vague sense of heroism and sacrifice, rather than anything that might give awkward glimpses of the reality of war. The poets of the 2nd World War are less celebrated than those of the 1st War, perhaps because their response to its horrors is less horrified and more experienced than their predecessors’. There is nothing in their works like the astonished anger of Wilfrid Owen but sometimes their laconic acceptance of the nature of war is itself their most powerful protest against it.

Here is a poem by Keith Douglas who fought in the North African desert battles and was killed in Normandy.

Wilfrid Owen began the war as a modestly privileged, educated, sensitive young man with a genius for words. The experience of war, and perhaps especially of his recuperation in Craiglochart Hospital in the company of the poet Siegfried Sassoon, led him to dissmiss all the windy glorification of war in favour of representing the the fate of real soldiers, the ones he commanded as an officer. As he said himself, “My subject is war and the pity of war….”

Sassoon, a more worldly man than Owen, wrote some of the most incisive criticism of the massacres of the first world war:

“Good morning, Good morning, the general said

as we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of them dead

and we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

He’s a cheery old card, grunted Harry to Jack

as they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack:

but he did for them both with his plan of attack.”

Owen took his time to absorb the sufferings of his men, and his greatest poems are celebrations of their human greatness, a greatness blighted by their deaths and travestied by official acts of mourning.

”What passing bells for those who die as cattle?”

is his question placed at the beginning of one of his best-known poems. The poem focuses on the normal ceremonies of burial and grieving, contrasting them with the actualities of his comrades’ deaths: “No mockeries for them from prayers or bells.” But then marvellously he hints that the real mourning, which includes the earth itself, is greater than the conventions:

“What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

shall shine the holy glimmer of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

their flowers the tenderness of silent minds;

and each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.”

We keep faith with Owen and his soldiers when we remember the dead with truth and sorrow, and perhaps with something of his anger.

I’ve noticed it over the last few years, but not stopped to think about it: the over-the-topness of our armistice remembrances. We used to wear poppies for a few days; now you proclaim yourself a pacifist traitor, if you don’t display one for at least a few weeks. And that’s not enough! No, there have to be poppy rivers, poppy mountains, poppy lakes, each one more artistic than the next. The popular media are full of sentimental stories of sacrifice, heroism, and gallantry, always British of course, in two world wars and since, forgetting that for hundreds of years and half of the 20th century Britain was a colonial power which had stolen land and wealth around the globe, killing and enslaving as it went.

The first war was a vicious disaster whereby the great competing powers of the world sacrificed their young men out of nationalist pride and desire for economic dominance. The second, created by the humiliating treaty that ended the first, saw Britain make a belated defence of democracy against German and later Japanese fascism. My father fought with the Chindits in Burma. Why were we fighting in Burma, when we needed soldiers for the war in Europe? Because we were defending our Indian colony of which Burma was a part. Even in a war which was a brave struggle against fascism, we still threw lives away for the cause of empire. Without doubt in both wars, as in conflicts since, there was genuine sacrifice and courage, for a more or less just cause in the the 2nd, but for the preservation of  British dominance in the first.

Of course we should remember, but we should do so accurately, so that we can protect the future from the hypocrisies of the past.

And we should not remember so partially. We tend to celebrate the sacrifices of armed forces, rather than civilians; of men rather that women; of British rather than  other nationalities, especially our enemies. Peter Swan, one of the last survivors of the 1st War, who joined up when he was sixteen and fought throughout Ypres and other terrible battles, told me once, “Son, they didnae train us tae go oot an’ lay doon wur lives; they trained us tae kill, an’ we did it well.” We forget this because we don’t like to think of fathers, brothers, sons and pals as trained killers, but our hypocrisy means that veterans are only ever considered as victims and not as perpetrators of terrible violence, and who can say how much this denial contributes to their depressions and suicides?

Indeed the excessive / aggressive remembrance seasons which have become the norm don’t care too much about the dead and the maimed, otherwise our veterans would have better pensions, housing and care. No, it’s about the big battalions of rich people and institutions who know that patriotism helps cover up the appalling injustices of our society, and keeps armed forces in readiness to support their economic requirements as in Iraq, or in our alliance with Saudi Arabia. Such people have always existed, but the sinister thing at the moment is the way in which large sections of the working citizens of the country, well, certainly of England, find this type of patriotisn congenial, just as they support Brexit, dislike immigrants, and detest bleeding hearts who want social and international justice.

It has been called populism, as manifest also in Trump’s USA, Salvini’s Italy, Erdogan’s Turkey, Netanyahu’s Israel, Putin’s Russia. I’m not sure what it should be called but I am sure that this mixture of ignorance, prejudice, self- assertion and brutality, uses a twisted patriotism as one of its most powerful weapons. It may not be too late for people who truly care for our nations, to oppose it, but we need to expose its lies wherever they appear. Otherwise we may find ourselves assisting the birth of something monstrous.

W. B. Yates saw it coming:

I think I mentioned that words from a friend had sent me browsing through some old prayers amd hymns. Some of them are embarrassingly bad, and I wondered how I had ever thought otherwise, except that one always has a graciousness towards one’s own creations which one may not show towards the work of others.

One or two seemed decently done, and another few invited the kind of revision that they ought to have been given years back. Here’s one of the latter:

YOU ARE MY DEAR SON (Tune: Firmament CH4:148)

“Stay clear, stay clear” the voices said
When Christ came down by Jordan bank
“Stay clear of this baptismal rite
Devised for those whose lives are rank.”
But when he took the sinners’ place
And shared their joy in granted grace
He heard your voice, as soft wings spread,
“You are my dear son, my delight.”

“Stay clear, stay clear,” the voices say
When we are faced with human sin,
“Stay clear of those who do no right
For they will surely drag you in.”
But when we stand with them in blame
And seek your freedom from our shame,
We hear your voice as clear as day,
“You are my children, my delight.”

“Stay clear, stay clear,” the voices say
When we are faced with human need,
“Stay clear of those who suffer night
For in their darkness you may bleed.”
But when we make their need our own
And fight for justice to be shown,
We hear your voice approve our way,
“You are my children, my delight.”

“Stay clear, stay clear,” the voices said
When Christ came through the city gate
“Stay clear of those who have the might
To fashion failure into fate.”
But when he’d hung upon the cross
And let his life go into loss
He heard your voice that wakes the dead,
“You are my dear son, my delight.”

This enshrines an interpretation of Jesus’ baptism as recounted in Mark’s gospel which starts by creating apocalyptic expectation and then tells us simply that Jesus arrived to be baptised alongside an average bunch of sinners looking for a new start.  God’s paternal voice here links this story to the transfiguration, and of course to the crucifixion where the centurion declares Jesus to be a son of God. The gospel becomes at one level therefore, an extended definition of what it means to be a child of God. Or perhaps I should say, redefinition, as the definition of the Messiah as triumphant national ruler was part of Jewish tradition.

In this hymn I wanted to emphasise God’s delight in Jesus. The translation, ‘in you I am well pleased’ doesn’t sound like a very powerful statement of approval, more like a decent rating on a school report. Mark’s language derives from Isaiah 42, “Behold my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom my soul delights.” Now that’s more like divine approval! God is not marking our card, but when we dare to act like his children, he is delighted.

I also wanted to emphasise that acting like a child of God is rarely the obvious or popular thing to do, because it involves declaring others to be children of God also, which is bound to get up somebody’s nose. Whatever the authorities thought about those who responded to John’s ministry, they certainly didn’t give them the status of God’s children –  but Jesus did, by sharing their new beginning.

But how could the Son of God need a new beginning? The very idea is heretical! That’s why Mark put it at the begining of his gospel: with Jesus, we can all start again, in humility, as children of God.

The tune has been long associated with Addison’s hymn of creation, “ The glorious firmament on high” which relates to Pslam 19, “the heavens declare the glory of God” and is wonderful in its way. Unfortunately that way also includes phrases like “dark terrestrial ball” which seem strange or incomprehensible to modern ears. So perhaps I may be forgiven for nicking the tune for a composition which will certainly be forgotten long before Mr. Addison’s.

While checking some facts for my last blog about the writings of José Saramago, I came across one of his short parables which was new to me. It is entitled, “The Unknown Island.”

In a certain country the king is accustomed to receive petitions from his subjects who must come to an obscure door in the palace to deliver them. Mostly such requests are in fact received and answered by the cleaning lady. A man appears who demands to see the king himself, and when the king answers him in person, he demands a boat in which he can sail to an ”unknown island”. After it becomes clear that the man will not take no for an answer, the king makes arrangements for him to be given a boat, although he is warned that there are no unknown islands any more.

When the man receives his boat he is joined by the cleaning lady who wants to share his voyage, and while the man goes off to recruit a crew, she cleans the boat and repairs its sails. Sadly the man returns alone because no sailors want to sign up with such a madman, and are not interested in non-existent unknown islands. Puzzled as to their next step, the man and the cleaning lady decide to spend the night on the boat. During the night, the man dreams of the boat itself putting forth shoots and trees.

In the morning they declare their love for each other, paint a new name on the prow of the ship, hoist the sails and depart. The ship called THE UNKNOWN ISLAND goes off on its maiden voyage “to discover itself.”

The true adventure of humanity is to discover itself, and no human being should take no for a answer, or be prevented by ridicule from those who have lost the desire to explore. But for Saramago the adventurer is no solitary. It is only in partnership, here the partnership of man and woman, that the courage for the adventure can be maintained.

Something like this seems to be the author’s meaning. But lurking behind this humanistic parable is a more fugitive meaning which may be my own invention rather than Saramago’s:

There is a king who gives me a vessel in which to venture over the deep to an unknown island. In partnership with the lowliest ( and therefore wisest) servant of the king, I am encouraged to set off into mystery to find ourselves.

Amen.

The other day, challenged by a friend, I looked through a file of prayers and hymns which I had written years back and forgotten to throw out. Amongst much dross, I found a few items that said things I still wanted to say, and that were therefore worth revising.

One of the repeated experiences of my minstries has been the way people treasure the presence of Jesus in their darkest, weakest, most doubtful and most sinful times. This seems to me a treasure specific to faith in Jesus who left a record of his friendship with sick people and sinners and never pretended he could face suffering with a smile. The hymn which I revised and presented here arose from these experiences.

LORD OF THE SICK AND BROKEN (Tune Moville, CH4: 450)

Lord of the sick and broken
Who shared disabling pain,
Your suffering has spoken:
No cross is borne in vain.
For every wasted body
And every tossed and scattered self
Is planted in your Passion
And harvested for health.

Lord of the dead and dying
Who prayed that you might live
You show us by your crying
What God’s love cannot give.
But those who on their journey
In faith and fear walk into night
Are partnered by your passing
And lifted into light.

Lord of the poor and powerless
Who loved the little ones,
You still defy the sourness
Of arrogance and guns.
And all who trust the Servant
Whose wealth was poured put for the least
Are paradised through patience
And share the Father’s feast.

Lord of the strong and the evil
Who loved in spite of hate,
You struggled with the Devil
And plundered his estate.
So even Satan’s legions
May hide their steel within your side
And pierced by your perfection
Desire what they denied.

Lord of the daft disciples
Who found his friends untrue
Forgive our weak denials
Of comradeship with you.
May all whose trust has faltered
And let your life be sacrificed
Be repossessed by pardon
And recognise the Christ.

If anyone reading this wants to use it for public worship, please do so, simply noting its authorship.l

José Saramago who died a few years back, was one of the great modern masters of the parable. Both parables and allegories are stories designed to be recognised as fictional pointers to some greater story, such as the story of a whole society, or the story of God; but whereas an allegory provides a very complete mapping of the greater story – think of Pilgrim’s Progress or Animal Farm- a parable only connects with its counterpart as whole story to whole story – think of the Prodigal Son, where Jesus sugggests only the most general likeness to the story of God and humanity (God and the father in the story are both embarrassingly fond of children who mess up). The details of the parable do not need to map on to the details of the bigger story, so Jesus can have fun with a broke Jewish boy surviving by feeding pigs. This freedom to invent novelistic detail does not detract from the parable’s function of making at least one bold point about the greater story.

Most of Saramago’s novels are parables although they are much longer than any told by Jesus. He uses the freedom of this form to create characters that arouse and retain  his readers’ sympathy, and plots which are complex enough to keep them turning the pages, while suggesting by means of his narrator’s ironic voice, that they should recognise similarities with the story of their own lives in society; for he is above all a social critic, exposing the follies and brutalities of capitalist society.

Take for example “Blindness” his most famous and probably most violent story, which starts off from the absurd premise that everyone in a given society goes blind successively, except one woman. Almost immediately, blind citizens are herded into concentration camps by those who have not yet gone blind. Once all but one are blind, the stronger prey on the weaker as they have learned to do. Those who cannot defend themselves, especially women, are treated with sickening cruelty. The single person with sight finds that her only “benefit” is being able to see what’s happening, as she continues to be in a minority of, well, one. Eventually some victims begin to show solidarity with each other,  and to think of opposition.  Through equally violent actions, rebellion takes place, after which people begin to regain their sight. It is a parable about the blindness of capitalist societies to humanity and justice, and about the necessity of rebellion.

An equally dissident partner parable called “Seeing” explores the chaos which results from all election papers in a General Election being returned blank. It does not present an optimistic picture of democracy.

I have just finished reading his final parable, called The Cave, which of course rests on the famous parable by Plato, according to which prisoners bound in a cave, and unable to turn their heads, can see, on the cave wall, shadows cast by puppet showmen, lit by the flames of a fire, which they accept as reality. Someone escapes amd returns to tell the others that what they think is reality is only shadows, and that real life requires them to throw off their bonds and go up to the real world. His fellow prisoners treat him as an idiot, and it is said, would kill him if they could. In this way Plato describes the plight of most of humanity, who cannot rise to the philosophic vision of goodness, and mistake deceptive shadows for reality.

Saramago’s story involves a potter who works in a desolate rural region near The  Centre, a huge industrial/ commercial/ social complex which offers accomodation, work and leisure to its inhabitants, while controlling most aspects of their lives, and isolating them from nature, even to the extent of providing artificial nature parks within the complex. The potter, who has been dependent on the Centre which buys his crockery, is told that his produce is not needed any more.  He tries along with his daughter to diversify into art, by  making figurines, but finds that Centre dwelllers have no interest in them. He and his daughter, who is pregnant, prepare to move into the Centre with his son-in-law  who is a security guard there and has been allocated a flat. This involves leaving behind a rescued dog which they have befriended, with a widow woman nearby, for whom the widowed potter has an affection. One night the potter investigates a very secret archeological dig underneath the Centre and comes upon a cave where dead human beings, bound head and foot are placed in front of a wall. Behind them is a walkway, and behind it, the marks of a fire. When he asks himself who they are, he answers, “they are us.” He decides to leave, and returns to his pottery, his dog and it turns out, the widow who loves him. Shortly they are joined by his daughter and son-in-law who do not want their child born in the Centre. Together they pack their stuff on the potter’s aged van, and set off into the unknown.

The Centre is not shown as exercising any brutality. It provides wisely, “like God” someone says, for its inhabitants, while excluding anything natural or anybody who might have an independent mind. People are not forced to live there, but choose to do so, because it is the future. The characters of the potter, his daughter and son-in-law and the dog,  are quietly but tellingly developed, so that the readers can imagine themselves in their shoes. Equally quietly but firmly Saramago makes his point: this modern, capitalist paradise is Plato’s Cave, where willing prisoners are sheltered from reality, including the reality of their own exploitation,  and give up any desire to face it. The only hope for humanity lies with those who are unwilling.

The parable does not argue, anymore than Jesus argued with the lawyer who wanted him to define the meaning of “neighbour”. Saramago’s parable is longer than the “Good Samaritan” or “Plato’s Cave” but should not be embarrassed by their company.

As the year dips into late autumn, as the leaves fall and the early frosts nip the ungathered apples still on the tree, my mind, like that of a large proportion of my fellow citizens, turns towards the next holiday with its promise of warmth, leisure and self-indulgence. Brochures are scanned, websites inspected, and we know that even if the search is unsuccessful or simply premature because we haven’t begun to set aside the necessary moola, the act of looking is itself therapeutic: our dreams of other times and places help us deal with this time and this place. If I can imagine myself climbing through vineyards on a Spanish hillside, I can cope with Dundee on a wet Sunday.

I wonder if the thought of heaven plays a similar role in the lives of believers? Burdened with our own wrongs and those of the world at large, do we take comfort in the thought that one day we shall be elsewhere? Yes, the comfort may be diminished by the fact that we have to die first, but when we are sore and weary that may not bother us overmuch. When the earthly city is oppressive, the city of God is ever more inviting.

Indeed, it seems relevant to enquire whether heaven may not have been invented by human beings precisely for this comfort. Of course, even if we reject that specific reasoning, we have to accept, that like all religious concepts, including gods, heaven has been invented by human beings.  I mean that even if religious concepts point towards something real, they have in sober truth been invented by us: our human concerns and prejudices are all over our creations.

In the case of the Christian heaven, much of it was invented by the early and medieval churches, incorporating the Jewish inheritance of Jesus and the Pharisees (who were unique amongst Jewish believers in developing the idea of heaven) together with a pre- modern cosmology according to which heaven is above the earth and hell below. Clearly the resurrection of Jesus had a huge influence on the making of heaven, but the belief in heaven as the rescue of mortal life predates Jesus and his disciples.

In spite of modern cosmology, the popular imagination still holds on to the “Man Upstairs” and the picture of the dear departed “looking down” on the grieving family. But there is often no serious belief in the after-life or in the soul’s meeting with its maker: the scenario is pure kitsch, a lighthearted drama that evades the issue of mortality. This heaven is a shallow vision, like a week in Ibiza, that helps people endure what Shakepeare called, “the whips and  scorns of time.”

The serious believer will rightly protest that I am describing a parody of the Christian hope that trusts in God’s grace in Jesus to forgive our sins and save us from death, so that we may glorify God forever. But did serious believers not invent this serious theology in order to depict a serious salvation? It’s notable that although Jesus himself believed in resurrection, his language about the kingdom of heaven refers not to an extra- terrestrial realm but rather to the rule of God on earth. He appears, like some of his contemporaries, to have believed in a “world to come” which was a transformation of earth rather than a separate dimension. The “heaven” of Church doctrine, certainly, emerges from Christian reflection on the death and resurrection of Jesus, rather than from his teaching.

Should it therefore be dismissed as a wish- fullfilment that keeps believers walking purposefully on the pilgrimage of life, while preventing them from enjoying the goodness of earthly existence with a whole heart? Intelligent atheists like Bertrand Russell criticise faith as evading both the sorrows and the joys of  life, by not understanding how even our dearest joys are based on our mortality. The great American poet, Wallace Stevens in his poem, “Sunday Morning” ridicules the notion of a realm that has no death: