A blazing beacon OF HOPE
Veteran broadcaster MARK TULLY’s had his spiritual programme axed by the BBC (they told him they’ve run out of money). But in this heart-lifting Easter message, he tells why the Notre Dame inferno can teach us all that every setback is simply a new, glorious beginning
THE poem East Coker by T. S. Eliot includes the phrase ‘In my end is my beginning’. He published those words in 1940, after a period during which he feared he might never write poetry again and that his art had come to an end. But there was a new beginning. I have long believed that life is a series of endings that can lead to new beginnings, and that it’s important to recognise the endings and embrace the beginnings.
Tomorrow, Easter Sunday, I face a particularly poignant ending of my own.
How apt that this day should represent the most important Christian festival and the one celebrated with the greatest joy. For Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is life born again: an end and a beginning.
The end is the crucifixion, the beginning the resurrection. If Jesus had not been prepared to suffer the ending, there would have been no beginning. Where would that have left Christianity?
Tomorrow, I will be presenting my last episode of Something Understood on Radio 4. BBC bosses say they don’t have enough money to record new programmes, so production of the series, which has run since 1995, ends. (I gather that considerable sums of licencepayers’ money have been diverted from Radio 4 to podcasts.)
The BBC has billed Something Understood as an ‘ ethical and religious discussion that examines some of the larger questions of life, taking a spiritual theme and exploring it through music, prose and poetry’.
But there will be a new beginning: one might even call it a resurrection. Programmes from the series’ archives will be ‘resurrected’ every Sunday, early morning and late at night.
Something Understood has been a programme about human uncertainty. It has always stressed the limits of mankind’s knowledge of the great questions of life: moral issues, behaviour and the ways we relate to each other and to nature.
The name Something Understood was taken from Prayer, a great poem by George Herbert. Its lines trace images or representations of prayer as the English writer tries to capture it in words:
‘A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss.’
Prayer is described, not defined, its purpose is merely suggested because we can only understand something about it.
ANOTHER symbol of renewal has been seen this week. Holy Week has been overshadowed by the awful fire which nearly destroyed Notre Dame in Paris.
Despite the devastation, France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, has vowed that the 850-yearold Gothic cathedral will be rebuilt ‘even more beautifully’. More than £700 million has already been pledged by businesses and tycoons to help.
There could be no better illustration of the power of the human spirit for renewal — and it offers a lesson to us all on how to lead our lives.
When we started Something Understood, I insisted that we interview the priest and spiritual teacher Harry Williams, who had taught me at Cambridge. Harry had become a monk by then and his monastery insisted he no longer gave interviews.
But when I wrote to him, he sent back an old-fashioned brown postcard with the words, ‘ Oh, OK, for you’ scrawled on it. Our interview revealed the doubts and difficulties of a devoutly religious man, and how he overcame them.
As the years went on, we interviewed a wide variety of people of different faiths and none, including Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and atheist, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, two Archbishops of Canterbury and the current Archbishop of York, the yoga guru B.K.S. Iyengar, the Sufi Sadia Dehlvi and Mahatma Gandhi’s granddaughter, Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee.
Dawkins was the only person ever to walk out of a Something Understood interview. He was unable, or unwilling, to answer when I suggested to him that the wonder and awe that the beauty and complexity of life aroused in him could be described as a religious experience.
Over the years, despite those rare moments of awkwardness, I have been touched by the many listeners I have met. For example, after attending an early morning service in Edinburgh, a woman told me that an edition of Something Understood she had just heard had given her the strength to come to Church for the first time since her husband died.
Then there was the bishop who, after a meeting where I spoke about my belief in the importance of recognising uncertainty in faith, said: ‘I find nothing wrong with your views on certainty, but if I express them I would be dismissed as a lily-livered Anglican.’
In one of our last episodes, there was a discussion of the often fraught relationship between religion and science. I interviewed the physicist Professor Andrew Briggs, a
Christian who has co-authored with another Christian physicist and a philosopher a book titled It Keeps Me Seeking: The Invitation From Science, Philosophy And Religion. It argues that science, far from being hostile to Christianity, enriches — and is enriched by — the Christian faith.
He calls for humility, which he describes as ‘ learning to rest content with the idea that we can’t know everything. In particular, we cannot thoroughly know the nature of physical existence’.
For my part, I am committed to Anglicanism and respect it for its tolerance of difference.
I was born in Calcutta in 1935 and educated at British boarding schools (including Marlborough, where I developed a love of Anglican language and liturgy) from the age of five. My parents were churchgoers and I attended daily services at school.
When I was 30, I returned to India and have lived here almost ever since. Those years have deeply enriched my understanding of other religions. ONE Hindu tradition divides men of the ‘upper caste’ into four stages of life. In the first stage, a boy should be a celibate student.
When that period ends, he becomes a man and a householder. He marries, has a family and provides for them.
When he has brought up his children, he meditates in the forest and becomes a wandering ascetic or Sannyasi. He has no material possessions, is utterly detached from his family and begs for his food.
When the end comes, he either achieves immortality or starts the cycle of birth, death and rebirth all over again.
The basic fact of life is that no one can live fully without recognising the beginning and endings in their existence when they reach them.
Childhood should be enjoyed, but soon enough ‘childish things’, as St Paul called them, must be put away.
It is often hard to accept that you are no longer young.
I remember feeling deeply uncomfortable when, once, I listened to my former college chaplain preaching on the stages of life. I did not want to accept that my student days were over; that I was self-indulgently enjoying my freedom after boarding schools and National Service. The preacher was telling me to settle down and live a responsible life.
Harry Williams had been ordained as an Anglo-Catholic priest, but while teaching he had a severe nervous breakdown after falling in love with another man, a fellow of his college. The love was unrequited.
In his autobiography, Some Day I’ll Find You, Harry related with searing honesty how his homosexuality, which he had long suppressed, ‘exploded’ when he fell in love.
This aroused within him a profound sense of guilt stemming from the inner conflict he felt between being gay and the moralistic God in whom he believed, and who looked on those feelings as a grave sin. After a long period when he was overcome by bouts of terror, Harry was able to cast off what he called ‘his former persecuting moralism’.
He also rejected the God he called his ‘persecuting idol’. His Christianity became ‘part of what he was’. That allowed him to form gay relationships.
Harry talked of his illness — and his eventual recovery — as a death and resurrection.
His struggle with faith deeply inspired me, just as it has inspired many others who have read his books, to hold on to the hope of a new beginning when faith seems to have come to an end.
Ultimately, all our new beginnings come from surrendering.
For example, parents must eventually accept that their children need to leave them and go out into the world.
Sadly, marriages and partnerships can also reach the point when it is wise to part. Elderly parents, too, should sometimes give up their freedom and go into a care home, because preserving their independence is putting too much strain on their children. VITALLY, if we accept that there must be many beginnings and endings in our lives, we will be better able to accept our mistakes. One reason that so many people get things wrong is that we don’t admit that there are limits to our knowledge and understanding.
This is particularly true when we come to great questions such as the meaning of life or the existence, or non-existence, of God.
Some clergy, in particular, are guilty of talking as if they know the answers to all these questions.
Harry Williams made the point very well by saying that ‘complete and permanent certainty belongs only to the insane’.
This Easter weekend, there is a need in Britain for humility — for acknowledging the limits of our understanding, for getting together to find the new beginning to the end of our membership of the EU.
In India, home to all the great religions of the world, Hindu traditions have brought me the humility to recognise that there are many ways to God and to change my belief that Christianity holds a monopoly on truth.
I am deeply saddened that in India’s current general election campaign Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, isn’t hesitating to turn Hindus against Muslims.
This week, watching the flames lick up the spire of Notre Dame and topple it, one man said: ‘If you pray, now is time to pray.’
For centuries, Notre Dame has been a symbol of the urge to pray: of the need, felt by people of all faiths and none in every corner of the world, to experience being part of what has been called ‘one great unity’.
Seeing the charred building by the River Seine, I was reminded of an Anglican priest who once showed me round Wells Cathedral in Somerset. He asked me: ‘ Who could not be aware of the presence of God in the midst of these prayer-soaked walls?’
Prayer is the acknowledgement that we are a part of something immense: that, though small, we matter. As my radio series Something Understood comes to an end after 24 years, where am I going to look for a new beginning?
In East Coker, T. S. Eliot wrote: ‘Old men ought to be explorers.’
I’m 83 now, and take those words to heart. My exploring days — of countries and of faith — are far from over. Happy Easter.