A Taste of the Journey
Three passages from The Ocean of Everything
These three extracts offer a glimpse of the journey at the heart of the book: from the questions we think we understand, through the experiences that challenge us, to the uncertainty into which life eventually asks all of us to step.
I. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GOD?
Before we decide whether God exists or not, perhaps we should decide what we mean by the word. To believe that something exists, or to believe that it does not, we need at least some conceptual grasp of what it is we are accepting or dismissing. Yet in debates about God, that essential first step is often missing on both sides. Believer and sceptic may use the same word while holding entirely different ideas of what that word means. One may defend a God the other does not recognise. The other may reject a God the first does not believe in either. Before asking whether God exists, then, there is a more fundamental question:
What do we actually mean by God?
From Chapter 1: The God Who Causes Arguments
In my experience the debate about the existence of God can become toxic and polarising because, at the extremes, both sides are often arguing from their own ideas about what the word God might mean. Note that word, might. No one possesses complete certainty, we all live partly by trust, by faith, as much as by proof, something I’ll return to later in the book.
I had a moment in the first school I ever taught at, during my teacher training, that really put the spotlight on a major part of the problem for me. During a discussion a young lad asked me if I believed in God. I had by this time become convinced that there was something behind everything, and was happy to recognise that concept as God, so I replied in the affirmative.
He didn’t ask me to justify that in any sense, he just responded that he didn’t believe and couldn’t imagine ever doing so. I asked him to describe the God he didn’t believe in. I wasn’t trying to be clever or condescending, I had this same question thrown at me when I too was young and far too confidently dismissed the whole notion of God, assuming that science had done away with the need for such superstition.
Like me, he was a bit flummoxed and couldn’t answer, grasping at the usual dismissive caricatures, sky fairy, imaginary friend and so forth, which of course was not what I and other reasonably intelligent thinkers had in mind at all. In fact it couldn’t be more wrong.
There’s the problem in a nutshell, do we really understand what we are talking about when we say the word ‘God’? Later, reflecting upon a conversation with my grandfather that had challenged my own youthful certainty, I realised that I hadn't really been rejecting God at all, I was rejecting a caricature of God. My idea of God was still little more than the image many of us inherit as children, an old man in the sky, sky fairy, imaginary friend, a supernatural being sitting somewhere above the clouds. I dismissed that idea easily enough, but my grandfather gently exposed a problem. How could I confidently reject something when I’d never seriously considered what it might actually be?
I realised that God might not be a being within the universe at all, but something far deeper. God was not something that could be pointed to and measured, but perhaps the source of existence itself.
The upshot of all of this is that people are often arguing either for or against a parody. Over the years I’ve noticed that religious fundamentalists and hardened sceptics are both using the same word, God, while never really stopping to ask whether they actually mean the same thing by it.
So, while no one can know for certain if there is a God or not, it is vital, if the debate is to be meaningful, to at least come to some agreement as to what we mean by the term ‘God’.
II. THE SHADOW CAST BY LOVE
What does grief tell us about love, suffering and what ultimately matters?
The book eventually moves from questions that can be discussed in classrooms and books to questions that become painfully personal. If love gives life some of its deepest meaning, what are we to make of the suffering that accompanies its loss? Is grief a price worth paying?
From Chapter 6: Love, Loss and the Problem of Suffering
As I reflected on this, I came to realise that the experience of love is central to why we suffer at all. One way God could create a world without suffering would be to remove the capacity for love altogether, but then we would just be robots. A machine can break down but it doesn’t suffer, a robot doesn’t mourn the loss of another robot. The pain of loss exists exactly because relationships matter, we suffer because we love.
Perhaps the spiritual journey is partly about learning to love more deeply, until love becomes so natural that suffering no longer casts its shadow over it. I accept that at first that sounds almost too simple, yet the more I sat with it the deeper it became. If we were nothing more than biological machines responding automatically to stimuli, then what we call suffering should not exist in the way we experience it. Events would merely occur. A system would shut down, a body would cease to function. There’d be no grief or sense that something precious had been lost, because there would be no inner life to experience it, but that’s not how we are.
We do suffer, often deeply, and that suffering reveals something just as real as anything we can physically measure. It all points to love.
The very fact that loss hurts at all tells us that something or someone mattered. That means that grief is a manifestation of that shadow cast by love, the depth of one reveals the depth of the other and this begins to change how we see things, because what might otherwise appear as meaningless pain becomes a sign that something precious had value.
I have seen this play out all too often in my pastoral role, and I have never come across anyone who would willingly forego the love they felt just to be spared the grief. Would you? Would it feel right?
And so we grieve, we suffer, and in that particular situation it feels entirely natural that we do so. Anything else seems to undermine the love we felt for the individual lost.
That still doesn’t mean that suffering suddenly becomes good, nor should we seek it, but it does reveal what we cherish, what we value. The empty ache of bereavement is painful precisely because love is real.
III. LEAVING THE BOAT
Faith, doubt and the courage to step into the unknown. Towards the end of the journey, an ancient story about a frightened group of people in a boat becomes something much more than a miracle story. The boat becomes everything familiar and safe, and Peter becomes anyone who has ever had to decide whether to remain there.
From Chapter 9: Signs Along the Way
A little later we encounter another water story, found in Matthew, Mark and John, though it is Matthew's version that interests me most. In the accounts of this story in both Mark and John the disciples are once again panicking in the boat before noticing Jesus approaching them walking on the water. Then Jesus gets into the boat and either calms the storm or they are instantly at their destination, meaning Jesus saves the day for them, again!
In Matthew's account however, Peter actually leaves the boat and attempts to walk towards Jesus himself.
That detail changes everything.
For many years I used this story in a school chapel service at both the beginning and end of a pupil's journey through school. At the start, I would invite them to think about the adventure that lay ahead. At the end, I would ask a different question; are you ready to be Peter?
The question is far more challenging than it first appears. The boat is the place of safety, it is home, family, school, friendship groups, familiar routines and identities, it is everything we know. Most of us spend a large part of our lives trying to remain within it, but eventually life asks something more of us.
At some point we have to step beyond what is comfortable and familiar, venturing into uncertainty. We have to leave the harbour and eventually the boat itself. Peter is the only disciple in the story who answers the call to adventure, while the others remain safely in the boat. He is every human being who has ever sensed that growth requires courage and eventually leaves home.
For a brief moment he succeeds. His attention is fixed entirely on Jesus as he walks across the water, then the wind catches his attention, he notices the waves, doubt enters, fear follows and he begins to sink. I suspect most of us know exactly what that feels like. Like Peter, it can become overwhelming and we feel like we are starting to sink. What do we do? Return to the boat, or reach inside and discover a strength we didn’t know we possessed?
Peter reaches for Christ and finds himself lifted up. Whether we understand that spiritually, psychologically or both, the message remains powerful. The storm hasn’t disappeared, but he no longer faces it alone. Whether Jesus literally walked upon the surface of a lake is not the question that most interests me here, what fascinates me is why this story mattered so much to the people who first heard it. It speaks to something spiritual and psychological at the same time.
The call is always to leave the boat eventually, spiritual growth requires it and faith is the bedrock of the courage required to take that first step. This event, this sign, points beyond a first century fisherman to every one of us, we are all Peter at different moments in life. We all face times when we must step beyond safety and trust something deeper, experiencing doubt and sinking from time to time.
Yet the story doesn’t end with Peter drowning, but with a hand reaching out to lift him up, and that’s the essential lesson.
Faith isn’t the absence of doubt, it is remembering, trusting, that beneath the fear and uncertainty there remains something inside all of us that can carry us through.
THE JOURNEY CONTINUES…
These are only three moments from a much larger voyage through science and consciousness, faith and reason, mythology and meaning, suffering and hope, and ultimately the question of what love might tell us about the nature of existence itself.
The Ocean of Everything
The Voyage Home After Love and Loss