I've always been interested in God, while wondering from time to time about the hard work involved in noticing all those falling sparrows.
My brother would like to be able 'to get his head round this God stuff,' as he puts it, while my middle son pondered these weighty matters at an early age. He was four when, drying dishes for me one night, he asked, 'Why did God make the world and us?' I nearly broke a plate while searching for an answer; in the event, he beat me to it. 'I think he did it because he was lonely.'
A priest of my acquaintance admiringly announced later that this was a very theologically sound statement, while I wondered about God's regrets. Perhaps creation in the form of Fair Isle knitting or some such might have been more satisfactory, when you consider the problems that the exercise of free will has caused throughout the ages. And we can never satisfactorily answer the thorny question as to why suffering exists. I, at least, have never been able to.
When it came to imagining or envisaging God, I was guided by the nonconformist hymn's notion of:
Immortal, invisible ...In light inaccessible, hid from our eyes.
This idea seemed to be later confirmed during conversation with a devout member of the Greek Orthodox church: 'In trying to understand God, we are trying to comprehend the Incomprehensible.' And I'm not sure I've moved far from that position, despite the passage of time.
My grandmothers, however, fortunate creatures, did not worry at all about invisibility, and were always sure that God and they understood each other. They prayed as a matter of course, and were certain they received answers.
English poet John Betjeman wrote of the 'faint conviction' of Anglicans, and there has been discussion in the British press lately of the fact that western culture does not engage in religious fervour any more, and that this may be one more reason for general misunderstanding of Islam.
Many of us take the bits we want from our individual religions, and leave the rest, but obviously there are still some people in Western culture who have deep convictions. I've always thought that such individuals must occasionally experience dark nights of the soul, and now it appears that even the Archbishop of Canterbury admits to moments of doubt.
The latest apparently came while he was out walking his dog, when he said, 'Look, this is all