39th Eric Symes Abbott Memorial Lecture

Transcript from the lecture

Thank you all for making this pilgrimage. Over the years, I’ve written words for short stories, novels, scripts, Thoughts [for the Day], more recently a libretto; and I once wrote copy for the back of cereal packet, including the line, ‘You are what you oat’. But this is my first lecture. 

Robots tell me that a 40-minute lecture is about 5,500 words. That’s roughly a chapter of Dickens; two short stories by Chekov. Three sermons if you’re an Anglican; half a sermon if you’re a Welsh Baptist. And it’s roughly 12 Thought for the Days - in a row! (the exits are here, here and here).

If this was on ITV there’d be an ad break at the 23-minute minute mark for you to make a cup of tea. That’s not in the programme but to honour Eric Abbot’s pastoral intent, I’ll let you know when we get there. I’ve also structured this lecture as a 6-part mini-series to help you stay awake.

I want to do a couple of things, (although in Wales a couple of things can mean anything up to 12): to talk about faith, and writing, and writing about faith, and the challenges of doing this. I’ll be drawing on my own experience and a cloud of brilliant witnesses to make me look good.

I’ve called the lecture: Writing in Good Faith: a pilgrimage in fiction, film and thought. The phrase ‘in good faith’ sounds almost quaint in a world where it is getting harder to assume it of people or institutions. But I am going to assume it from you; and I hope you will assume it from me. 

I use the word pilgrimage advisedly. Writing is a kind of faith journey, precariously balanced between success and failure; your hopes swinging between ecstasy and doubt, accolade and abyss, with a long, hard trudge in between. What the novelist Haruki Murakami calls ‘a marathon of words.’ [i]

Then, just when you feel like giving up, someone with more faith than you picks you up, encourages you to keep going, and reminds you: this is not a solo sport. Although, if any of you are thinking of embarking on a career in writing I have a pastoral care of duty to dissuade you: 'Don’t do it!' 

I sincerely hope this lecture gives you something that will have made your pilgrimage here worth it; it also gives me the chance to boost my flagging back-catalogue whilst simultaneously saying something about the God without whom I would not be standing here.

The lecture has been rated 15, containing scenes of a sexual nature, mild drug use, allusions to violence, thinly disguised proselyting, and possible heresy. It is based on a true story or, to quote Billy Pilgrim, the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five: ‘All this happened, more or less.’ [ii]

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Episode 1: Witness

‘If there is any value in hearing writers talk it will be hearing what they can witness to and not what they can theorise about.’ [iii]

So wrote the American writer Flannery O’Connor. And I agree with her. That said, sharing what you can witness to is not easy, especially in the slippery world of words and in the liminal world of faith. And the fog of fading memory! 

Faith is deeply felt, and yet hard to define. Words slip around and over the subject; it can feel more real than life itself, and yet the moment you try and pin it down and describe it, it flies away and, in your panic, you end up reducing it to an argument, a formula, or a set of rules. 

In his first letter, St Peter wrote: ‘Always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.’ [iv]

Of course, these days people give reasons for their beliefs without always waiting to be asked, and usually with little gentleness or respect. Right now, it feels there are manic street preachers standing at every corner, forcing their creeds upon us.

I once attempted to preach on the District Line. I had been angered by a preacher screaming at the commuters and thought that I could do a better job. It was an excruciating experience, both for me and for the baffled passengers. I spent so much time apologising for what I was about to do, I left myself 30 seconds (of the 90 between stops) to deliver the Good News.  

I learned a couple of things that day: firstly: the tube train is not my medium; secondly: get your story straight. If you are going to deliver Good News, make sure you know what the news is. The gospel – literally Good News from the Greek – so often sounds like terrible news. Or 5 parts bad, 4 parts confusing and 1 part quite good. How to change this ratio? 

The third thing I learned was that you cannot and, of course, never should coerce anyone into faith. Delivering a message is pointless unless people are able to hear it. I would not be standing in this esteemed pulpit had I not myself once been able to hear it. 

For the truth is, dear listeners, I had been one of those passengers, head down in my book, trying to get home, as the screamed word of God flew over my head.  So how did I get to hear it? And what was it that I heard?  To answer this, I need to tell you a short story: 

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Episode 2: Conversion

There was once a Young Man who, at the age of 25, had not settled upon a particular creed or conviction, or what some people back then, in the late 80s, were calling a world view. If he had a creed it would have been: ‘If it feels good, do it.’ 

And in 1989 there was plenty to feel good about: The Berlin Wall had just fallen. Democracy had won. This was the end of history. Who needs God when humanity is doing so well? Life was full of beautiful distraction: He had a fun, decently paid job in advertising. Soul II Soul were soundtracking the Second Summer of Love; there was a new TV show called The Simpsons, and Die Hard was available on VHS. 
Someone had once told him that the world was his oyster and he tucked in. It hadn’t yet occurred to him that there might be a pearl.  

As a boy, he’d heard stories in A Place Called Church, about a God who came in person, died and rose again. He’d seen the face of this God on the telly in a series called Jesus of Nazareth. He looked nice. It was a compelling tale, but just one of many in a world full of stories.  

There was certainly no connection he could see between this story and those questions that sometimes kept him awake at night: Why is there something not nothing? Why am I here? Where will I be when I am not me?

By the time he was a student, those questions had been settled by science, psychology and philosophy. The explanations offered by religion were just so much magical thinking. He hardly knew anyone who believed in God. Except his girlfriend. Who even described herself as Christian. Why would anyone admit such a thing? Anyway, it didn’t put him off. He was in love and, apart from Jesus (her Real Guy) he loved the things she loved. 

But those questions about existence – the First Order Questions, he’d later learn to call them – did not go away. No amount of trying to have a good time could mask an underlying anxiety. A restless neediness created a feeling there must be greener grass somewhere and he went looking for it. 

He found himself in the West Indies. But even in paradise he couldn’t escape his own unsatisfactoriness. The words of the prophet Bob Marley chimed: ‘You think you’re in heaven when you’re living in hell.’ [v] 

As a lucky talisman he’d taken the as-yet-unread Bible the now ex-girlfriend had given him. One night he read the Gospels of Mark and John. Stories – half-familiar, half-heard in a dim place called Church - came at him fully lit and clearly amplified. And as he read, he thought: why has no one told me about this? (They actually had; he just hadn’t been able to hear it). This God had something to say about his deepest fears and his highest hopes. It sounded like Good News.

That week he was hospitalised after a drug-induced panic attack. He woke to find the owner of his guest house checking that he was OK. When the owner offered to pray for him, the Young Man accepted, not expecting the man to pray right there, as though his God was in the room. What should have felt awkward felt right; what was supernatural was somehow natural. The Young Man felt the dead weight of fear lift, replaced by a peace he couldn’t explain, a peace the drugs, sunshine and sea had failed to deliver. 

Whilst recovering, The Young Man was invited to A Place Called Church. There he met a handful of people in a tin shack. They were not rich or sophisticated, but they were kind. They seemed to believe the words being read by the old lady at the front: words that spoke of an that outrageous hope; that there is a God who is with us and who loves us with a love we can’t earn and knows us with a depth we can’t fathom. The words seemed to be asking: do you believe me? And without really knowing what he was doing, the Young Man said ‘Yes.’  

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Episode 3: Writer

When I returned from that trip, (for yes, Dear Attentive Listeners, you will have surmised that Young Man was I) , I felt a bit like Rutger Hauer [as the character Roy Batty] in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, when he says, ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.’ [vi] I had not seen ‘attack ships on fire over the shoulder of Orion’, but I believed I had glimpsed another world, encountered something beautiful, and been changed in some profound way.  

The bad news – initially for friends and family – was that I quickly drew a universal conclusion from my personal experience. What was Good News for me surely had to be Good News for everyone. I was like an annoying lover: earnest, deaf to how others might perceive my enthusiasm. I became a little Godbotherer. 

Although St Frances instructs believers to ‘preach the gospel at all times and use words as a last resort’; this faith seemed to be all about words – written, spoken and thought, and it compelled a seeking to understand itself, its object, its place in the world. 

The theologian Austen Farrer puts it this way: ‘If God is in your life, he is in all things. You must be able to spread the area of your recognition for him, and the basis of your conviction about him, as widely as your thought and imagination will range.’ [vii]

My imagination took me to St Paul who, on his way to Damascus, was royally ambushed, blinded and unhorsed. Curiously, in his own writings, Paul says very little about this famous encounter; instead he spent the rest of his life trying to interpret what it might mean for others. It would turn out that his revelation was not a one-off event or even the most important thing about his faith. 

I hadn’t lost my vision, but I was blind-sided for I immediately became ill with a viral condition that would lay me low for nearly two years – long enough to think about who it was that had knocked my off my high horse. And to read anything that might help me understand my situation. This forced interiority at least gave me opportunity to look for some internal coherence.

In The Confessions of St Augustine I read the story of a good time boy who ate too many oysters, discovered the pearl, and was then able to describe the essence of this pearl. He synthesised his personal story with that of his new-found faith in the most daring and intimate way. He also wrote something that became the first yellow Post-it note on my Amstrad when I started writing: ‘Seek not to understand what you may believe; but believe that you might understand.’ [viii]

It was an idea that ran counter to everything I had been taught, but it made, and continues to make, perfect sense. I was about to discover what John Newman called the grammar of assent. [ix] This idea that your ‘yes’ gives you the language to understand, speak and write about faith, and helps you see things in unexpected ways.

The Bible was one of these unexpected things. They say never judge a book by its cover and it’s true: behind the dead black leather, I discovered a living text: whole worlds of existential complaint, philosophic argument, stories within stories. Poetry. Satire. Prophecy. It was both a meditation on the problem of evil; and threaded through with a radical narrative of Love. And it continued to speak directly to my situation. ‘Even young men who grow faint will be restored,’ [x] it said to me as I lay on my sick bed. Naturally I grabbed at that promise and held it tightly.  

By now I was reading anything that spoke of meaning – or its opposite. I started with the Big Russians who, I discovered, weren’t afraid to put faith and doubt at the heart of their storytelling. 

In the introduction to Crime and Punishment I came across the words of Dostoevsky after his last-minute reprieve before a firing squad, and later put into the mouth of that novel’s hero, Raskolnikov: ‘Now my life will change. I shall be born again in a new form.’ [xi]  As Dostoevsky boarded the convict train to Siberia a woman handed him a New Testament. He would come to see its central figure as central, not just to his life, but to everyone’s. This faith seemed to give him new artistic propulsion.

Then there was his more elegant compatriot, Tolstoy, with his effortless prose and ability to capture the outer and inner lives of his characters with equal clarity and describe the grace moments that broke into their lives, no matter how tragic their circumstances. Not luck, or coincidence, but grace as it appears in nature – unexpected, unexplained, undeserved.

Then came the bleak French atheists, particularly Camus and Sartre. At least they took God seriously enough to dismiss him properly. And how stylishly they did it! Especially Camus, who as well as having the courage of his convictions, smoked Gitanes. He seemed able to describe the reality of his existence and say, ‘Life is merciless and cruel, and whilst it is punctuated by beauty and wonder, let us not attribute that to God, let alone a God who comes to us in person!’ It was a staring contest with God and God blinked first. And all this achieved not so much by philosophical argument as through story, written in tight, crystal prose! Here was a writer ready to give reasons for his utter lack of hope – and do it gently and respectfully!  

I wanted to write fiction of my own; the trouble was I wasn’t a genius Russian or cool Frenchman. And I hadn’t picked a deist god of philosophy. Or one of those sexy Greek gods of fate. Or the absent god of Beckett. While Sartre could, in good faith, write ‘God might as well not exist for all he shows of himself,’ [xii] I believed in the God who had shown up. How do you write about the God who shows up in a world that has assumed he either died a long time ago or has grown largely indifferent to Him? And what publisher would be interested? 

I’m not sure Matthew, Mark, Luke or John would get a book deal now. Imagine:  

‘Dear John, (apologies but your manuscript did not come with any other name), Thank you for sending us ‘The Gospel of John.’ It is certainly a bold book and caused a bit of a stir here at High & Mighty. There is real poetry in it and no little incident. But the stumbling block for us is your main character. Whilst compelling, and brilliant, he never really feels quite human enough. And, ultimately, it is asking a lot of a reader to accept the central premise that he is, in fact, God. After no little debate, we have decided to pass. Inevitably someone will snap it up and make mugs of us all when it becomes a massive world-wide hit! We are open to seeing anything else you might write in future. The apocalyptic story you mentioned in your covering letter sounds promising. We wish you well in your writing.’

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When I started to write what would become The Testimony of Taliesin Jones [published 1996], I had no expectation of it being a book people might read. Just a feeling of having nothing to lose and wanting to leave some kind of mark. I wasn’t sure how I was going to describe the ineffable, or make the supernatural, natural? But as in faith, so with writing: you work out how to do it as you do it; and some understanding comes in the telling. 

I found that story was, for me, faith’s best language. We take leaps of faith and we make leaps of imagination. What was hard to convey in argument, was better expressed in story. You could smuggle deep truths into people’s souls via the Trojan Horse of the imagination. 

Perhaps inevitably, I started writing about a boy who experiences a physical healing as the result of prayer, feels compelled to tell the world about it, and has his fledgling faith tested in the face of indifference and then hostility. 

The writer Anaïs Nin said: ‘We write to taste life twice – in the moment and in retrospect.’ [xiii]

In creating a version of my present self who had come to faith as a boy, I had the mysterious sensation of wondering, in retrospect, if the God I’d come to believe in had been there all along. That my childhood had been Christ-haunted. The physical healing in the story, was a kind of parable of the spiritual healing my younger self was looking for. And writing the story became an imaginative redeeming of this past. An experience I would have again, years later, in writing The Killing of Butterfly Joe [published 2018] and remembering my pre-faith self, selling butterflies in glass cases in America. 

After Taliesin, I wrote a second novel called Jesus and the Adman [published 1999], with Christ as a perhaps too obvious haunting presence. The truth is, I was still trying to work out how to write. I was no longer using words to sell products, but to try and get beneath the surface of things 

I was also working out what I believed. It turns out that faith is not about a single, decisive event, but what one theologian describes as ‘an ongoing response to the creativity of God’s action and love in the world.’ [xiv] 

But there was still a long way to go on this pilgrimage.    

(In fact, we’re about half-way! The ad break would be here. Please take a sip of that imaginary tea.) 

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Episode 4: ‘We like it dark’

It is 2010. And I’m 46. The years are whizzing by with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve. I am married to the girl who gave me that Bible. We have two kids and a green VW Golf 1.6 with seat warmers. And I’ve written a couple of novels and several scripts for TV and film and been doing Thought for the Day for 10 years.  

People are still reading novels; cinema has not been killed by DVD; and we are living in a golden age of television drama. There is demand for content and, writers are now content providers. Badda-bing! 

The world is in worse shape than predicted. September 11th 2001 unleashed forces that were still playing out. Extreme forms of religion with their ‘us- and-them’ theologies are on the rise; the banking collapse suggests that – for 99% of us – unchecked market forces are not good news.

I still believe in the reconciliation plan, and that I am being asked to play some part in it. That, for all its awkwardness, A Place Called Church carries the vital message. And is not so much a building, as a body of people. I am also realising that while faith may be personal, it is not private. An internal coherence of faith can’t hold without an external coherence. It has to make sense in the world as is. 

In 2005, we made a nine-month journey, as a family, to places affected by the HIV/Aids Pandemic, having been asked by the Salvation Army to bear witness to their work in Africa, India and China. As well as the horror of a cruel pandemic, we saw a level of poverty from which we had been sheltered. The question, ‘where is God in all this?’  had to be asked again and again and there were no easy answers.  

In all this A Place Called Church had to work as hospital and rehab rather than courtroom. People were treated as patients in need of healing, rather than convicts waiting to be condemned. And we began to see that while the world was in very bad shape, it was somehow being held together by small acts of kindness. 

George Eliot puts it this way: ‘…that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.’ [xv] 

The first commandment in scriptwriting is show don’t tell. Perhaps it is the same with faith and St Francis was right: Sometimes praxis is better than exegesis.
Saying yes to that journey opened the door to another and the writing of a script called ‘Africa United’, an against-the-odds story of five kids who walk 2000 miles from Rwanda to get to the first African World Cup [in South Africa], led by an HIV positive orphan called Dudu. And, against-the-odds, Pathé made the film [released in 2010]. 

‘The world was my ostrich’, as Dudu says in that film, but by now I was negotiating the practicalities of writing being my day job. And discovering that there are all kinds of pressures on a writer to write other words, other scripts, other books. The pressures are financial, artistic, sometimes ideological. They can come from your publisher, or your agent. Or even your kids.

Such as my then 14-year-old daughter Agnes who asked: ‘Dad, why don’t you write a film like Die Hard?’ To which I said, ‘Darling I’d love to write a film that good. But writing Die Hard is harder than it looks.’ 

A friend once put it more bluntly: ‘Rhid, just park the God stuff, and you might have a few hit records.’  

But you can’t just write what you think other people want. Listening to that chorus can bend you out of shape. You must write what you can and what you can get away with. And I was beginning to believe that seeing the world with faith’s eyes should be a liberation for a writer, rather than a restriction. 

One day, I was asked to pitch ideas to a television production company. Before I began, the producer said, with great portent: ‘We’re really looking for something ‘dark. Can you do dark?’ I said I could do dark. After all, a person of faith has to take the problem of evil seriously.  

Evil usually has something to say about God. Like the chatty demons who recognise and react to Jesus, quicker than his own disciples. And the demon possessed girl in the Exorcist. In Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, the knight says to the witch, who is about to be burned at the stake, ‘I want to meet your master.’ When she asks why, he replies, ‘because I want to ask him about God. He, if anyone, must know.’ [xvi] 

I had a good go at ‘dark’ working on the TV series Silent Witness. Enough for a friend to ask my wife if she was worried about sharing a house with me. My first episodes involved a motiveless murder spree, with a Die Hard-level body count. I even snuck Jesus in as a clue to the crime. But in the end, I could only think of so many ways to kill people. And after two seasons I was beginning to wonder if I was just part of a machine designed to keep people, in TS Eliot’s words, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. [xvii]  Crime pays, though: I still get royalties from that series!

In the end, the real question is: what are you going to say about the problem of evil in the world; and does your faith-story have anything so say about it. Of course, it’s not all spinning heads, serial killers and violent crime. There are many things to write about. The messy, fallen glory of humanity was enough to be getting on with. 

Again, I didn’t have to look far from home to find it. 

When my father told me the story of his family sharing a house with a German family in the aftermath of the Second World War, I couldn’t ignore the obvious dramatic potential. A situation where former enemies live together and try to rebuild their lives in the rubble of a true evil. I wrote an outline and stuck it in a drawer where it stayed for a few years until my agent – one of those people a writer needs: someone who has more faith in you than you do – suggested I write it as a novel. 

Writing The Aftermath [published 2013] was itself a kind of double redemption, returning to the house in Hamburg with my father, revisiting the German family he’d shared the house with. A good story retrieved from history and the bottom drawer, given another life, both in the moment and in retrospect.  

A proof that on this pilgrimage nothing is wasted. And a truism that became another Post-it on my computer. 

If faith is hoping for things you cannot see, there are few creative endeavours that illustrate this better than film-making. It is a kind of miracle any film – good, bad or ugly – gets made. So many things have to come right. How does a one-line premise get from your head to screen, and appear fully formed, as though ex nihilo? Perhaps the greatest satisfaction of having a book made into a film is seeing it give gainful employ to so many. I’ve never felt so useful as when I saw the canteens feeding the 400 on the set of The Aftermath.[xviii] Another reminder that, as with faith, creating something is not a solo sport. 

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Episode 5: Godbothering

We flash back to 2000. A letter comes from the BBC, asking me to try a run on Thought For The Day, or ‘the God slot’ as it was affectionally known back then.  

The letter came with some guidelines: write about 450 words on something in the news, through the prism of your faith. Don’t preach or say anything that might offend; give enough theology to satisfy the remit. Be true to your faith while remembering most people listening don’t share it. There is no ‘we’ on Thought for the Day. Write as though addressing one person, even though it’s going out to up to five million. Be ready for feedback. Expect criticism, maybe even hostility. Don’t give up the day job.

I said yes, taking the view that it was not so different to writing stories: you have to win your audience over, make them care. Render faith imaginatively and truly whilst dealing with people’s innate resistance to it. The main difference being that you have 2 minutes 45 seconds to do it. (Or about two tube-stops on the District Line). And despite a nervous start, I passed the audition, including a Thought about the conflict erupting in Bethlehem. 

25 years on and Thought remains a constant in my life. And I am grateful for it. Certainly not for the money, but for the opportunity to remind myself every time, what it is I believe and to test it out in the world as is. 

They’re still a challenge to write. It is its own form: part mini-meditation, part mini-essay. It is written to be read out loud (so it’s good to choose words for sound as well as meaning); sentences have to roll, syntax has to sooth but then snap; paragraphs have to fit together. It’s a tough little construction.
And if the form is tricky, the greater challenge is the content. How to
see God in the unfolding news stories of the day and make these connections for people half listening, half caring, or fully annoyed! I try to put myself in the shoes or slippers of a morning listener who has other things on their mind and whose tolerance levels go off like a Geiger counter upon hearing the name of Jesus. 

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Plenty of people complain: it’s too religious; it’s not religious enough. And they write: ‘Dear Mr Brook, Please stop ruining my mornings banging on about your special friend.’ ‘Dear Mr Brook, I have worked out that your thoughts are all basically: Me, Me, Me, Jesus.’ They had a point! At least that’s funny. The more hostile responses come from the religious, who tend not to be funny. They often quote scripture at me, against me, and sometimes over me. Many of their letters are written in green ink. 

If anything, the pushback makes you work a little harder at the words. 

‘Godbotherer’ is a derogatory term, but it contains another meaning. Namely, that there is a God worth bothering about; a God who is – whether we are bothered about Him or not – bothered about us. And that is still a piece of Good News worth sharing, with one person or five million.

I would often run my Thoughts by my former script editor on Silent Witness. Silent Steve was (still is!) an atheist and was my imaginary tough crowd. He once gave me some advice which became another yellow Post-it note on my desk: ‘Just make sure you keep talking about the shit in the manger, Rhid.’ 

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Episode 6: Slouching to Bethlehem; stumbling to Jerusalem 

It’s 2022. I’m nearly 60. History feels like it might actually be coming to an end. A pandemic that usually happens to other people happened to all of us.  We are not becoming less violent. Truth is what you want it to be. The world is hotting up. The ratio of bad news to good is still at 9 to 1 and our story seems to be accelerating to its bloody and brutal season finale. 

A friend asked me: ‘Still have hope for the world, Rhid?’ Despite the state of things, damn it, I do. I still believe that a Great Redeemer is guiding us pilgrims through this increasingly barren land; but it is getting harder to give reason for your hope in all the heat and noise.  Especially in Jerusalem where I was now living.

I had been given a writing residency at St George’s College, a centre for pilgrims coming to the Holy Land. One day, I was sitting at a café in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City trying to write a novel. My favourite Muezzin is giving the call to prayer and putting his voice through what sounds like a reverb pedal. Pilgrims carry a cross up the Dolorosa and step aside for the river of Jewish ultraorthodox coming the other way. After all, it is their town, too. 

For Christians, this is ‘the room where it happened’. It is where you might come if you want to confirm your faith in the particular God who had friends, a mother, a first name – and a postcode. You can see the places where He spoke. The pool where he healed the paralytic. The tomb where He was buried. (Still empty, by the way). You can argue (and people do) about exactly where X marks the spot, but something significant happened here and you can feel it.  

You can also feel the forces that would kill this God of yours: in the tensions of an occupation, the animus, the clash of believers and the sectarian squabbles, claims and counterclaims. This is the Prophet-Killing-City. Terrible things have happened here, and on the ground, people are saying terrible things are going to happen again.  

Meanwhile, I am hearing other versions of a gospel being peddled by people with loud amplifiers. And their gospel is not for everyone. It divides people into the good (them) and the bad (not us). Where the bad need to be punished by The Jack Reacher God or a Judge Dredd Jesus. 

It feels like the screaming preacher is driving the train, yelling words like, reckoning and apocalypse.  

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The Israeli satirical novelist Etgar Keret said: ‘A word is a lot.’ [xix]  And he should know. In this place words kill and words get you killed. In Hebrew the word for ‘word’ is the same as the word for deed.  One word can cause a lot of good; another can level a city.  

As I write, I feel I need to choose my words carefully. This place doesn’t need my anger, and I don’t want to add fuel to this fire. But the words I’m writing feel a bit incendiary, a bit close to the edge. Some of the chapter titles – ‘Apocalypse Wow’, ‘CSI Galilee’, ‘Jimmy Hendrix Muezzin’, ‘Holy Sepulchre Queue Barge’ – are not going to get past the sensitivity readers. Perhaps I might be going crazy, like those crazy prophets of old. I wonder if I have Jerusalem Syndrome.  

Then again, as another Edgar says, at the end of King Lear: ‘The weight of these sad times we must obey / say what we feel not what we ought to say.’ [xx] 

Again, I take heart from that prophet, Kurt Vonnegut, who when asked how he approached his writing said: ‘I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.’ [xxi]

Perhaps the best response to all the madness is to hold up a crazy mirror at an angle to it, in the hope that you catch enough light to glimpse something true. As I sit there, filtering the noise, I think I get the title for the book.

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A year later, back in London, I have had to set the novel aside. Those prophecies predicting something bad was going to happen have come true. And everyone is reeling from what has unfolded since October 7th 2023. 

I’ve been asked to write the sermons for Holy Week at York Minster and am wondering what the last days of Jesus have to say about where the world is heading? Does this story still bear the weight of these sad times? 

And how do you re-tell a story that has been re-told a million times in fiction, film and thought?  How to picture Him when your mind is filled with Zeffirelli’s blue eyed messiah, Pasolini’s grumpy, Marxist Jesus, or the greatest satire on religion ever written, The Life of Brian (which I like to imagine as God’s favourite film)? 

Am I just adding more words to the great Golgotha of words buried outside the city walls?

Looking for inspiration, I went back to Mark, the first Gospel I ever read. And it was as fresh and startling as it was when I first read it. There is no fat on this prose. He could have filed this copy to Reuters. He really sounds as though he was there, bearing witness, holding a steady-cam just a few yards away from his subject. And so, I follow in Mark’s footsteps which follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and try to imagine being there in the moment, without knowing what happens next.

This close up, I see that this faith is built on a very precarious endeavour indeed. It teeters between triumph or tragedy. It runs the risk of no-one ever knowing about it. No-one ever reading about it. Of being a total failure. This is a God who simply won’t force Himself on us, even if it kills him.  

When I had finished writing the sermons, I stole a title from Marquez and called them ‘Notes on an Execution.’ [xxii] But I realise that, in a way, I had written Die Hard. 

And I am still on this stumbling pilgrimage, following the author and perfector of my faith, with my notebook, and shaky camera, trying to catch a glimpse of the Good News and share it with whoever might be listening. 

*

I should say that I have come to the end of the lecture, but the Good News, Dear Listeners, is that this story doesn’t end here. 

The End is to be continued … 

Thank you.

*

References:

i Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008).
ii Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). 
iii Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners (1969).
iv 1 Peter 3.15b
v Bob Marley, ‘Time Will Tell’ (1978)
vi Blade Runner (1982), directed  by Ridley Scott, screenplay by  Hampton Fancher and David Peoples.
vii Austin Farrer, A Celebration of Faith (1970)
viii St Augustine (attributed).
ix John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870).
x See Isaiah 40.30-31
xi Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866).
xii Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism (1946).
xiii Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume V 1947-1955 (1974).
xiv WH Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour; Love’s Expense (1977).
xv George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-2).
xvi The Seventh Seal (1957), written and directed by Ingmar Bergman.
xvii TS Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936).
xviii The Aftermath (2019), directed by James Kent, screenplay by Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse.
xix Etgar Keret, Pipelines (1992).
xx William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 5, scene 3, lines 392-3.
xxi Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (1952)
xxii To be published by SPCK, November 2025.