Sermon Archive
Knowing what sort of creatures we really are
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 30 October 2005
Revelation 7:9-17 ; 1 John 3:1-3 ; Matthew 5:1-12
Why do people read novels? There are many different reasons, I suppose. When Winston Churchill, for example, was in one of his notorious low moods - his 'black dog' as he called it - he once found some relief by absorbing himself in the novels of Anthony Trollope, although after reading three or four of them at stretch, he complained that he was beginning to suffer from 'a surfeit of Trollope'. Another British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, apparently never suffered from that: he repeatedly turned to Trollope, perhaps in smaller doses, as an ideal recreation amid the heavy responsibilities of political decision-making. And you don't need to be a Prime Minister, of course, to enjoy reading novels. 'A novel or two' are among the things many people pack for a holiday or a long journey. “I always take a Trollope on holiday with me”, a second-hand bookseller informed me gleefully the other day as I bought one from him: “Those old Oxford Classics editions slip so easily into a jacket pocket.”
The same could not be said for the novel I took with me the last time I went on holiday. It was a bulky volume of 615 pages called Human Traces, the latest book by the British writer Sebastian Faulks, best known for his novel Birdsong, about the First World War. Human Traces begins earlier than that, in the 1870s, and it ends in the 1920s. It is the story of two doctors, friends who become partners in an endeavour to find the causes and a cure for mental illness. At first their hopes are high: the medical science of the late 19th century seems on the verge of understanding how the human mind works. But the scientific certainty they are searching for is elusive, and one of the thoughts woven through the novel is that mental illness may just be part of the price humans pay for being human. To say more about the novel now, however, might be to spoil it for anyone who has not yet read it, so let me just quote a few words from it which relate to the question I've raised about why people read novels.
Near the end of the novel, the now elderly wife of one of the doctors has a mystical or paranormal experience of great comfort to her - again I shouldn't say more without spoiling the story - and reflecting on her inability to understand this experience rationally, she thinks: 'perhaps for quite simple reasons connected to the limits of their ability to reason, human beings could live out their whole long life without ever knowing what sort of creatures they really were. Perhaps it did not matter; perhaps what was important was to find serenity in not knowing.'
'Perhaps it did not matter… that human beings could live out their whole long life without ever knowing what sort of creatures they really were…' Yet as the doctor's wife acknowledges, that was what her husband and his partner had spent their whole long lives trying to find out. Their failures moreover were not going to prevent those who were now young and enthusiastic from renewing the quest. The fact is that whatever else we human beings are, we are creatures in continual pursuit of understanding - understanding the world around us, understanding other people, understanding ourselves - and this quest for understanding is not just scientific, as the two doctors in the novel pursued it. It is also what every one of us is engaged in from the moment our infant eyes begin to focus on this and not that, and our tiny hands stretch out to explore the world. As humans, we want, we need, to make sense of things - to find, or give, meaning to our lives.
Now that is, I think, at least part of the reason why people read novels. From the dawn of time, one of the main ways in which human beings have tried to understand the world is by telling and listening to stories - every culture has its myths, every family its familiar anecdotes, every individual their own stories about what they have done and what has happened to them. When we read a novel, we are also listening to a story, by someone else, about other people - a story which, if it is a good one, well-told, adds to our understanding of the world, and at best may help us find or give more meaning to our lives.
That is also, of course, part of the reason why people read biographies or history, for example, or for that matter science or poetry or philosophy: these and other media, film, theatre, the fine arts, all can contribute in their different ways not only to our entertainment, recreation and instruction, but also to the understanding we seek. But how far do we find it? In novels, the understanding we gain is often clouded. Fictional lives, like many real ones, are often episodic, ambivalent or self-contradictory, making it difficult for us to grasp an unambiguous meaning in the story. The best understanding we may be able to achieve from many novels may be like that of the doctor's wife in Human Traces: 'perhaps for quite simple reasons connected to the limits of their ability to reason, human beings could live out their whole long life without ever knowing what sort of creatures they really were. Perhaps it did not matter; perhaps what was important was to find serenity in not knowing.' What I have been referring to so far however, are not the only stories by which people seek or have sought to understand the world around them, other people, and themselves. This morning we heard others: the story of St John's vision in Revelation, the hope of that vision in the Epistle, St Matthew's story of Jesus' Beatitudes. These stories, coming to us from the distant past, have helped countless people gain understanding which has given meaning to their lives. But can they still do so for us? Our culture understands the world in ways that are very different from those of the first Christian centuries; and at least in Britain and other European countries, I suspect, the highest aspiration of many people, may be like that of the doctor's wife in the novel: 'to find serenity in not knowing… what sort of creatures they really are'. Is that aspiration at odds with the Christian vision of our readings this morning - or is it a step towards it? Perhaps seeking 'serenity in not knowing what sort of creatures we really are' is nearer to Christian faith than it may appear. Let me try to explain why I say that.
'Knowing what sort of creatures we really are' is not something we can discover by looking in a mirror for example, or even by scientific experiment. The mirror can show us what we outwardly look like, and science can provide a vast amount of useful information about our bodies and brains and how they work. But they cannot answer the basic question of 'what sort of creatures we really are'. That question is like another basic question 'What sort of person am I really?' and this is a question we can answer, ultimately, only by how other people respond to us - only, that is, from the 'feedback' about ourselves that we get from other people, not just in the present, of course, but also since our infancy, when most of us fortunately got off to a good start with very positive feedback from our loving parents. Even then, of course, we cannot really be sure that the feedback about ourselves we get from other people tells us what sort of person we really are. Other people might have all sorts of reasons for concealing from us their real views of what sort of person we are, and perhaps those views may tell us more about them than about us. So in fact there is no objective or even impartial answer to the question 'What sort of person am I really?' - and if I seriously ask myself the question, for example, 'Am I really a kind person?', the only meaningful way to answer it is in practice - by being kind.
It's similar with the question about what sort of creatures humans really are. That can be answered only with reference to what is not human. One of the ways humans have tried to do this is by contrasting themselves with other animals - very much to the poor animals' disadvantage. “Don't be beastly/ behave like an animal/be bovine/sheepish”, and so on. But that negative approach does not in the end tell us what sort of creatures we really are. So humans generally are in a similar position to the individual asking 'What sort of person am I really?' We have no way of knowing.
But, as the doctor's wife in the novel wondered, does that really matter? In one sense I think it does, because if we do not know what we really are, all we are left with are scientific explanations, which are not wrong, of course, but also on their own not sufficient. It is not impossible, but it takes a unnatural intellectual and emotional effort, to convince yourself that the lives of real people, especially those we know and love, have no meaning other than as chance by-products of evolution, or at best just whatever meaning others or they themselves happen to give to their lives. To accept that, would be to accept, for example, that a concentration camp victim, broken in spirit, despised by his guards, and forgotten by history, has no value in himself. Not only Christians, but also Humanists, would revolt at that thought.
Now I cannot speak for Humanists, but the Christian response to this question, it seems to me, is like that of the individual who finds that the only meaningful way to answer the question 'Am I really a kind person?' is in practice - by being kind. We do not know who we are, and darkness regarding that question surrounds us. But we move on into the darkness, trusting that the reasons of the heart, which persuade us that every human life matters in itself, reflect the Reason at the heart of everything. In Christian faith, we move on in trust, not just that doing so will give us serenity psychologically, but that the degree of serenity we find will be God's amen to our prayers.
We do not know what we are, and as St John's Epistle says, nor do we know what we shall be. But the words we heard from Revelation, so often read at Christian funerals, and today at All Saint's tide, have a deep musical truth to them. Even today they sustain the mysterious hope of John's words, 'when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.' For us to inwardly digest this mysterious meaning however, we need not only to move on into the darkness in trust. We also need to turn to one another in love, and in the spirit of the Beatitudes we heard read earlier. The ways of God which the Beatitudes illustrate are not the ways of the world, but what the world needs to learn and become if our human nature is to achieve its full flowering. It is by doing the truth, that we shall become what God has made us to be, and becoming like him, shall see him as he is.
Worship >> Sermons >> Sermons