XXV - The God of Small Things
2025 has been a good year for reading so far. I’m currently turning between Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, Sarah Coakley’s The Broken Body and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (obviously alongside the Famous Five, for which I’ve now settled quite definitely on voices for all the main characters. George has ended up with an irritating nasal voice which I regret, but now the die is cast). All the books are good in different ways but I’m quite caught up (especially since being forced to read through the ‘night of snoring’ with gritted teeth) with The God of Small Things. Rhiannon and I have both been trying to make our reading related to India; I’m very open to suggestions but am concerned that all Indian novels revolve around the death of children, normally by drowning, which is not comforting when Obi is learning to surf. Reading The God of Small Things is like watching the circling of a shark, knowing the inevitable result, but with each gyration anticipating a greater and more awful tragedy.
The paragraph that has most struck me follows the implied disaster, of which you gain details (little by little with each gyration) but not the narrative:
At the time, there would only be incoherence. As though meaning had slunk out of things and left them fragmented. Disconnected. The glint of Ammu’s needle. The colour of a ribbon. The weave of the cross-stitch counterpane. A door slowly breaking. Isolated things that didn’t mean anything. As though the intelligence that decodes life’s hidden patterns – that connects reflections to images, glints to light, weaves to fabric, needles to thread, walls to rooms, love to fear to anger to remorse – was suddenly lost.
A long time ago my research was on narrative. What particularly interested me was how stories work in helping us make sense of the world: how there are deep stories in our culture and individually which provide a framework by which we make sense of the world. So our idea of what a relationship looks like, what are its constraints, what is its purpose and value; our idea of what a good life looks like, how a career should be chosen and developed; the value of money, friendship, education are all changed and re-interpreted by our stories. And when we’ve settled on our story – which very often chooses us – we seek out stories that confirm it. A really good story has the power to change this; to make us aware of our assumptions. A really good story exposes us to a new way of seeing the world.
Christians have to be alert to the power of stories. The fact that we have Scripture – a fixed set of stories which are held to be somehow regulatory in God’s dealings with creation requires us to embrace stories. No one who is serious about their faith could say that they had not been changed by reading the stories of Christ in the Gospels. Sermons, in their way, are usually about trying to dig out the details of these stories, capture what has been lost over time and translation; re-set the story to see it from a different angle. It’s central to faith that the stories in the Gospels – both those Jesus tells and the story of his life, death and resurrection – determine the way we approach life. To live as a Christian requires us to seek our neighbour as the Good Samaritan did, to return as did the prodigal son and receive the outcast like his father; it requires us to take up our cross, to speak the truth, to face death with courage and hope.
But what is more gripping, more testing, is how we face the threat when a gap appears between the stories we keep telling ourselves and our lived experience. How the incurable romantic deals with the deadening and alienating drift of a marriage collapsing; how our suffering, or that of those we love, corrodes the stories we tell ourselves of a God who loves us; how political drift and corruption erodes our national myth. Certain stories have an openness to alternative tellings, to criticism, to the correctives of truth and honesty – parables being a rich example, through inversion, inconclusiveness, parody, humour and surprise. There’s a reason our best spiritual teachers have taught in parables not doctrines.
But what happens when the stories break down – when we can no longer tell, no longer believe the narratives we have been taught, have discovered, had thought so unchallengable? When those stories are unproven? Those moments are epiphanies, though they might be dark ones. They may well result in real psychological harm and trauma. At the very least there is wound made in the soul as our stories unravel. It's a familiar experience as even children in their naïve trust in parental accounts of wobbly teeth, magical beasts and schools, late night visits in December, are disappointed by gradual disenchantment. I think parenthood is equally illuminating. I’m not as good a parent as I thought I would be, I have less patience, less time, less sympathy than I ought; just more to confess as I realise I am also not as good a person as I had the temerity to pretend, under conditions of pre-children ease. I feel like the Rich Young Man of the Gospels who seeking eternal life says to Jesus "I have kept the commandments since my youth." Jesus famously replies that he lacks one thing and should give away all that he has, which sadly he is unable to do. Perhaps a modern contextualisation would be: "One thing thou lackest: go thy way, have two pre-school children, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven:" Children, like the kingdom of God, are all about poverty and riches.
The danger, however, is that our stories collapse. Spiritual mortification has an evident place in Christianity. Negative theology in the mystical tradition mortifies flesh, intellect and spirit in pursuit of a more honest, more robust, less self-centred relationship to God – more truthful, more flexible but less dogmatic, self-assured stories. But these guys were professional religious, and they had time on their hands in a world where darkness was so much more a feature of life in every way. But if our stories don’t hang together, we will end up in malaise, drifting, or faith will become a romantic area of our life disconnected from what we really believe and how we act, and so irrelevant.
The twentieth-century specialized in fragmentation. Mass society, mechanized warfare, colonial horrors, weapons of mass destruction, political extremisms, concentration camps, postmodernism, mass communication, technology – all challenge the coherence of the stories we tell. So the twentieth-century also specialized in ennui, existential crisis and the loss of meaning: “These fragments have I shored against my ruins”. The assault on our communally-held stories – which hold together our sense of what it means to be a Christian, to be British, to be male or female, make it harder to retain our sense of meaning, to have confidence in our identity and place in the world. Our present anxieties about apocalyptic war, apocalyptic climate, misinformation and polarization, historical injustices, cancel culture and the mob-mentality of social media, further undermine the possibility of shared stories, which are the only antidote to the lonely isolation of our world. Reels of lifestyle tips will only get you so far, however many views and likes.
In the passage from The God of Small Things, individual items become displaced from their narrative, much as the story itself is fragmented. A needle. A ribbon. A counter-pane. A door. Our language is so full of resonance that even individual words become resonant with meaning, with a larger narrative. A paragraph later Roy writes: “Red the colour of splintered doorwood.” For humans, who condense stories to develop a never-ending richness of language, each colour, each smell, each word is replete with meaning sifted through thousands of stories – full of warnings, memories, expectations as our minds try to establish order. But in the novel the experience has pulled apart the meaning of objects, which should be familiar and reassuring in the context of a home, unravelling and changing symbols of security to symbols of violence.
A lot of our stories do great harm; there is hidden violence in our stories, our childhoods, our lives. Our stories need mortification. They need interrogating by race, gender, sexuality and a whole lot of other things. Sometimes we have to look at our own childhood and reassess it as an adult in all its complexity. In short, we need to take into account who wrote our stories and how their prejudices, their slant has been written and repeated through our families and history. But on an individual level we need to find ways to keep telling stories that helps us to make sense and look forward with hope; that may be tested by honesty and truth, but that also gives us a framework for making choices, for deciding what’s important, for celebrating what is good and finding comfort and company when needed.
It may sound odd, but for me the number one task of the priest today is not carrying out worship, not pastoral visiting or community building; not looking after an old building or making tea and moving furniture. The priest’s task is, first of all, to mediate meaning. I don’t mean to explain stuff. It may well not require her to say anything, but her presence is a means by which in any situation ‘God’ – by which I mean first of all the possibility of meaning, of significance, of truth, judgment, forgiveness – is acknowledged. That may be uncomfortable. Every priest has been in a position where a question hangs thickly in the air – how could this happen? – which may carry with it a lot of visceral anger. But that is the job.
In the British regiments there are regular mess dinners which usually draw to a close formally around 11 but continue late in the bar. As a chaplain, regardless of how fun or dull an event I would stay on past midnight, as only after the loosening grease of alcohol, would non-commissioned officers in particular seek you out with their uncertain tales of tragedy and guilt, looking for some aspect of redemption, or at the very least testing the padre to see if he could cope. It wasn’t necessary to explain or justify, to apologies or even necessarily forgive. But as a chaplain I had to hear the story. I had to be there to allow a symbol of God – the sacrament of priesthood – to demonstrate God’s presence in all things, all situations; that those who make their bed in hell might know God with them.
So, yes, for the moment (which may be in its final throes), British culture is permeated with the persistance of priests: city livery companies, military units, public meetings up to prayers before parliament and the Lord’s spiritual; our secular culture maintains a thread of priestly presence, indirectly tying all things to the tentative, overgrown vestiges of the divine. There are those who have the wit or the spiritual presence to make the connections explicit. For the rest of us it is just the hard grist of staying in difficult spaces, enduring mockery and contempt, sharing the troubles (and joys) of the world. Austin Farrer famous called priests “walking sacraments”, which sounds grand, but, as I’m trying to say, suggests no particular qualities in the women and men themselves, just in the nature of their calling. You cannot hope that a priest could explain the death of your beloved – that in itself would make them something monstrous; but you can expect that they would stay with you, listen, and pray for you, using words, if any still remain.
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