The sun here has been incredibly beautiful lately – a rarity for Manchester! – and it’s been a joy to be able to walk home from work late in the day and still feel the sunset shimmering around the city. From the elevated trainline I entrust my life to every morning and evening, the whole city seems bathed in yellow and crimson: it’s like the end of time, or the dying worlds of C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew – stunning and sad. “Headlights racing against inescapable dark,” I think one supremely talented man put it. Mind you, I always make it home before the sun sets, so perhaps I should consider it a gift of sorts, a fleeting glimpse of the despair I am insulated against by some measure of faith and hope.

If there are any gifts given to us by God, I think they come in this form: moments that we don’t expect, people that are here and then gone, dreams and memories that you can hardly remember. Our lives are so fragile, and so tenuously balanced between a darkness we cannot survive and a light we haven’t yet learned to live with – what the divine places directly into them cannot remain. It would undo us.

Nonetheless, we are given moments of transcendence, I think: perhaps to help us understand what we are missing? Perhaps just to keep us interested in what goes on behind Heaven’s windows when the curtains are drawn. Either way, they are illusory, they are transitory, they happen in the strangest of places and at the oddest of times, and tend to leave you blinking and surprised.

A couple of days ago, working the late shift and with the shop nearly empty, I had what could possibly be one of those moments. How to describe it? The simple fact was that, as I stood at one end of the shop, the late-evening sun reflecting off the mountain of glass outside formed a glowing, blood-red halo around the girl sitting at a table by the window, writing dreamily in her notebook. These are the facts: they could quite easily have arranged themselves without any kind of help from on high, but nonetheless. Nonetheless, I think I have rarely seen something so perfect and so beautiful, and I doubt I could ever write a description half as meaningful as the moment itself.

At some point later it occurred to be that it probably would have made a good picture, but somehow the idea just seemed subtly wrong. I wonder sometimes if we, artists and writers, photographers, filmmakers, if we aren’t the biggest heretics of all: daring to catch rainbows in our jar, put down in permanent form what is by nature transitory and illusory. But then again, it occurs also that often the heretics are the most devout of High Priests: perhaps it takes one to know one, takes an artists to grasp the work of an artist – “Fellow creators, the creator seeks,” Nietzsche writes, “those who write new values on new tablets. Companions, the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest.” God is, at some level, a personal and relational being: I can certainly attest to exactly how tailor-made, how bespoke the moment felt to me.

I’m not under the impression that this will change my life, or that I’ve been given something other people lack. But it is heartening, at the least, to be given what you need. And right then, from where I was standing, a vision of remote, untouchable, sun-washed beauty was like a gasping breath taken after a long, hard cry. “This too, shall pass,” but for now, it will suffice.

‘the theologian‘ – the weekly column from backgroundbob
20.04.08

For generations people have striven to understand what their critics considered to be an myth, a ghost in the existential machine. But ghostly or not, God casts a very long shadow over the philosophy of yesteryear, and only a fool would let one truth get in the way of another. In the minds of every country’s population, God lurks just beyond the edge of sight and speaks in whispers just below the edge of hearing, peeking over our shoulders and mumbling incoherently in our ears. The world may have lost its respect for religion, but it struggles to forget its fear of God, and there is far more than a few thousand years of superstitious conditioning behind that: humanity is beset on all sides by the night, darkness made of ignorance, helplessness and an existence that ploughs right on through without any respect for their wishes. Reminders of the demons of age, pain, and fear are everywhere, is it any wonder that in every evil we see what we long more than anything to be there for us: salvation?

There are no philosophies that can explain God for you, even among the endless philosophers who will tell you they can. The difference between them and a theologian, a true theologian is that any good student of theology will never, ever try to tell you about God. Because this isn’t about him, folks: in the words of Frank Castle, “God’s going to sit this one out.” This is about us, about me and you and every other God-fearing or God-hating person out there who’s ever looked at the inside of their eyelids of a night and said, ‘God, I don’t know what you’re doing but I sure as hell hope you do.’ Because this is it, ladies and gentlemen: this is the inside of your churches, the inside of your heads and the inside of your souls. This is where spirituality meets banality, the nitty-gritty of human fears and dependancies. This is everything you’ve ever been afraid to ask but were too afraid to ask: this is Theology.