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62 CONVERSATION

we need to cling on to certain private certainties, and ... certainties that are shared by a group thal we wish to associate with ... whenever that happens there’s always going to be the tension because ... by reinforcing the beliefs within that group, you're distancing yourself [from all other groups].

Later he said heatedly,

... why do we have to be so bloody petty, and squabble about stupid, fantastic, supernatural nonsense? And you know, whilst I say that, I still have this belief in something ... I dont believe hes this shape, and he wears robes, and he’s got a beard ... I’ve seen the way the Church of Latter Day Saints depicts Jesus ... and he’s this square-jawed Aryan, you know, fantastically hand-some ... Ido find it amusing, but it’s morę than that, in fact its pernicious ... What about the hunch-back, mixed-coloured guy, you know, and he sees this? And it’s elitist, its sentimental, youre just excluding people ... I realise we are probably required, we have to put a shape and face to him, I suppose ... it’s not on to just be happy with something amorphous ...

Behind these vivid and contradictory feelings, Matthew men-tioned three distinct influences on his life, two of which told him that life is chaotic and meaningless and one that left open the possibility of meaning. The first influence was his personal history. Two critical incidents had impacted on him profoundly; the death of a school friend from leukaemia when he was eighteen, and his recent marriage break-up. These events madę him realise that, as he says,

... this isn’t adding up to going any place, it’s just, again its such arbitrary, chaotic tragedy and nonsense. Yeh, I think that’s when the whole, you know, meaninglessness of things, urn, really started taking some sort of definite shape.

Matthew had looked to the Christian tradition for some explana-tion of these tragedies, but founcl no solące; for him there is no supernatural person caring for us: ‘No, it doesnt work like that, we dont get looked after on that individual level.’ As far as he could see, the church still portrays God as the old man in the sky, an idea that to him is ‘self-indulgent’, ‘awfully sentimental’, and ‘just wildly wrong’. God does not intervene in his life, or anyone else’s; he is at best an ‘absentee landlord’. This is not the kind of God that Matthew can believe in.

The second influence on Matthew’s life was the World of science. If Christianity, or any formal religion for that matter, could not offer him an explanation for life, then perhaps science could come to the rescue. He found some comfort in the idea of evolution and of human progress. But even that did not ultimately help him, as he knew only too well that so-called ‘progress’ can he used for evil purposes as well as good. Science could tell Matthew the awe-inspiring fact that the atoms in his body were once part of a star, but it did not answer his deepest questions of meaning.

The third influence was the ‘nagging instinct’ that told Matthew thafthere must be morę to life than mere existence:

... it’s probably just a nagging instinct, that while all the materiał evidence is telling me, this is ludicrous, you know, this is all complete chaos, nonsense, its arbitrary, you know, we’re a rock in a vacuum just spinning through nothingness and, you know, the conseąuence of impersonal cosmic forces, nothing beyond it. Whilst my sort of intellectual faculty can tell me that, there is this other, and I’m not going to use the word ‘soul’, but there’s this other bit of me which is just sort of going, ‘hang on’, you know, ‘What if, pal?’

It is the ‘what if?’ that keeps Matthew on his spiritual search.

In our culture, the obvious place to start this kind of search has traditionally been the Christian church, and that is where Matthew started, but the institution had been a big disappointment. It is important to notę that his view of the church was not based only on a dislike of popular images of God. He also felt very strongly that religious people in generał are arrogant in their assumption that they are the bearers of the truth:

... it seems so very often that yę>u ... people that are believers, they’ve got it, they know. The fact that you don’t know means that you, yes, you don’t know, you’re stupid. It’s the arrogance, um, it’s a very well-dressed-up humble-looking arrogance, but it’s arrogance nonetheless, however. Thats what annoys me. You know, you’re not with us, therefore you’re against us. No, I’m with you, but Fm not surę. I’m not against you, and I just