You Are The First Generation To Be Raised Without Religion, II
8 Comments Published January 20th, 2009 in Uncategorized.I re-read Hey Nostradmus! by Douglas Coupland last week. I am a bit of a Coupland fanboy and so I devoured this book in one evening when it was published in 2003. It tells the story of the aftermath of a high school massacre in Vancouver. Yet this is a very different treatment to something like We Need To Talk About Kevin. When I first read it, it was a great page turner but annoying in the way that Coupland books often are. Four characters speak and they all have the same voice. Four characters speak and they constantly justify why they speak.
Yet re-reading it I was struck by the point of the book. It is perhaps best understood as a sequel to Life After God, Coupland’s brief but renowned meditation on living in a world that longs for God it cannot find. It’s a core text in seminaries around the world because the Christ-famished terrain you inhabit in the book is well, the closest thing to an honest conversation us cleric types are ever likely to have with ye lost pagans since we’re too busy being self righteous and you’re too busy assuming we’re really holy.
First off, the novelist understands what Christianity says about the afterlife. For those of you who don’t, come to our chat on Thursday. And in the course of the book, the characters reveal quite artfully the distinction between religion and faith, between faith and belief and how the first leads you to being an asshole and the second gives us the air to thrive and flourish.
The father character in the tale (I don’t want to give too much away), is a spiritually dead religious man, confusing what he “thought was right with what God thought was right”. The aftermath of the massacre runs out over the course of fifteen years and what we get in the choppy diary entries that cast light on the story is the son who is tragically alienated by things that happen to him, the girl who begins the book with clarity, a grieving woman who faces mortality and loneliness and finally the father who had always been Saved but finally is converted. It ends:
And when you do find this letter, you know what? Something extraordinary will happen. It will be like a reverse solar eclipse- the sun will start shining down in the middle of the night, imagine that!- and when I see this sunlight it will be my signal to go running out into the streets, and I’ll shout over and over, “Awake! Awake! The son of mine who once was lost has now been found!” I’ll pound on every door in the city, and my cry will ring true: “Awake! Everyone listen, there has been a miracle- my son who once was dead is no alive. Rejoice! All of you! Rejoice! You must! My son is coming home!”
What’s interesting to me, and might not be at all to you, is that this 2nd reading has shown me how much I have grown and changed in the intervening four and a half years. I was then an enthusiastic and utterly convinced Christian doing a Masters degree. Today I am an enthusiastic and utterly convinced Christian doing a Masters degree. Oh. Maybe I haven’t changed that much.
Although I was born again, I have been born agained. And reading Hey Nostradamus! allowed me to reminisce with my old self and see how much more I see that there is so much more to see. I did not know and had forgotten the sense and had no language to explain what is so nasty and corrupting about faith if it turns into mere belief. The Youth Alive! group that forms the heart of the start of the book’s plot is a thinly veiled reference to Young Life!, which begins their Irish operations this month in my church. The blanket assertions of dogma made by Reg were like a mirror to me.
It is not that I now have a great vocabulary to describe how I feel so against Christianity and so for Christ but what reading this novel has shown me that least I have eyes to see and ears to hear how the magnificence of Jesus and the radicalness of Grace relativizes everything, especially our sacred possessions, practices and proclamations.
Your Correspondent, God is nowhere. God is now here.
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I read recently that “pistis”, the word translated as faith in the Bible, loses some meaning in the translation. It is also meant to convey a sense of trust and reliance on God. It made a lot more sense to me when I read that, especially the bit where Paul describes it as believing things that you can’t see. That definition sounds like trust to me, as opposed to what I have always thought of faith as: some magical power to move mountains and heal people. Well, maybe it does that to but if it does, it has to involve trusting and reliance, so it’s not actually the believer moving the mountain, more being willing to accept that it can be moved by the one you rely on, not the one you magically control.
Trust is the hard part really, isn’t it? Like being afraid to let go and embarrass yourself in front of strangers, it’s hard to let go and reach the heights of excitement in that extraordinary happening.
right on the nose jimlad. But the key is deciding to trust in the correct thing.
(btw, we’ve no idea what Paul did or did not say)
QM, life must be so impoverished to dismiss as you do out of hand without any understanding or academic backup all the ancient texts which have coloured our global, national, local and personal thinking. And I’m not even referring to biblical texts.
QM, I think it’s important to separate the issue of faith in God from atheism. Faith in God can only really be addressed once you believe in Him. God, for example, is under no obligation to fulfil any promises or claims He might make, or even consider our well being at all. Faith, as jimland implied, is about trust.
Atheism is not about a lack of faith in God. Atheism is about not believing that God exists. I suppose it could be said that we lack faith in the Bible, or the authors of the Bible, but even that is too impersonal for my taste.
Pistis takes a strange case in Greek so that the KJV renders it well when it translates “believe unto”. It’s almost like we don’t possess our beliefs but we move with them. They shift. When we are called to faith by Jesus, it is as if we are called to invest in Jesus, deposit into him.
Remember that I have only done one module of Greek so I could be talking through my behind.
So as is often the case, Morbert is spot on when tries to parse belief and faith. Faith is a far more active thing. And in Coupland novels it is not that the Canadian characters are unable to learn the doctrines of Christianity. It is more a case that their hunger is not for belief but faith- belief enfleshed.
And that drives me personally, back to understanding faith in terms of relationality. What does it mean for me to trust Claire or Keith or you? Faith in God is a very similar proposition.
As for having “idea what Paul did or did not say”; what a load of ill informed bollix!
Justified by trust alone?!
Turst involves some action sooooo
Justified by faith and works alone???
Trust is a gift of the Holy Spirit.
I loved this one the first time round. And now I’m going to read it again.