How can we say that the world is good?

Meditations on a bitter-beautiful tension.

‘If God exists he isn’t just butter and good luck—
he isn’t just the summer day the red rose,
he’s the snake he’s the mouse
he’s the hole in the ground.’
—Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud

‘The Angelus’, by Jean-François Millet.

Dear reader,

I am guilty of writing about believing in this world. I do it over and over. Such belief is the beating heart of my poetry, my prose, indeed this very newsletter.

It is, in some ways, a response to the Evangelical Christian worldview that I was raised with—the one in which it is hammered into us that this world is fallen, broken, a kind of cosmic mistake, one whose destruction and/or redemption we’re urged to wait for, or escape into harp and halo.

I believed all that. It was what I had always been told, after all. And why should we think anything different from what we’ve been told?

The problem is, I fell in love.

Not with any particular person, though I’ve done that a few times and perhaps that would have been enough. No, I fell in love with here.

Aren’t I ignoring something?

I don’t know when it happened. It was slow, yet somehow always complete; it was a revelation, yet somehow also a remembering; it was a veil lifted, yet also somehow a realisation that there are no veils, except the ones that are handed to us.

It was silver birches and damp earth, and mountain crags swallowing my imagination; it was cascades of wisteria, and blackcap music warmly haunting the green shade; it was the steady companionship of my dogs, Jess and Rudi; it was the laughter and wonder of my daughter; it was the hips of a lover; it was tremblings of starlight, and quiet walks on soft lanes; it was poppy-song, lavender-song, bee-song, sun-and-rain-song wrapping themselves around me.

I found Christ, but he wasn’t sitting on a heavenly throne—he was dipping his toes in a pond; he was climbing a tree.

All very romantic and poetic. But aren’t I ignoring something?

What is over there in that other room—the place where many have no choice but to live, and most of us go at some point or another? What are those sharp red teeth lurking in the corner?

I came home one day and Rudi was dead, lying in his own vomit on the kitchen floor. Because of my divorce, I only get to see my daughter half of the time, and every day I am overwhelmed by the grief of it. Somewhere, a man with a gun is entering a home.

The world is beautiful. The world is terrible. How can I believe it is good when there is also so much suffering in it?

This was the point a commenter made following my Easter Sunday letter.

‘I can’t help but think that you have to be either extremely privileged or willingly blind to consider this world as home and a “good place”.’

Well, being on the internet, I suppose I have to accept its internetishness.

So, which am I: extremely privileged, or willingly blind?

Tremors

In a lot of ways, I am privileged. More privileged than many, though not as privileged as some. I have the privileges of safety and security, of reasonable health and relative wealth. But I am also a human being, and have had my share of sorrows. I am a descendent of refugees, from a people who have known genocide within living memory. I have watched people, even people I know, celebrate and justify the murder of my kin.

I have felt the pain of deepest loss, and felt the world collapse around me more than once. I have been bullied and abused, lost loved ones, stood among the ruins of a broken home. I have screamed into pillows and empty skies, been hospitalised by crippling anxiety, wished I was dead. I have seen things I wish I could unsee, done things I wish I could undo, been wounded in ways I know will never completely heal.

I have also had the trouble and violences of the world scrape against my eyes. Having worked in the humanitarian sector for more than a decade, I am well acquainted—albeit from a position of privilege—with some of the greatest challenges that people around the world are facing. I have interviewed people who have no hope, and I was unable to offer them any. I am far from blind.

Then there are the general tremors of our age, which all of us face. The fact that our bodies are slowly but surely filling up with plastic. The fact that our minds are slowly but surely being degraded by digital technology. The polarisation, the death of community and in-the-flesh-ness, the fading of empathy and compassion, the constant shriek of seemingly increasingly bad news.

And it is not only human nature that can sting. Nature itself is brutal, swarming with death. It relies upon it.

This is what we are presented with.

How can we still say that the world is good?

Because saying that the world is good is not the same as saying that everything within it is good.

In spite of it all

There is great horror, great terror, great tragedy. Injustice is everywhere. The world is imperfect, frayed at the seams, redolent with wounds, but does that mean there is no goodness within it?

Can there be goodness in spite of it all? Can we be witness to that goodness? Contribute towards it? Add to it? Create the space in which it can grow?

Can there be beauty in spite of it all? Is a rose in a garden of grief nonetheless a rose? Can we believe in that beauty? Can we defend it? Protect it? Declare it worthy of praise?

Is there a goodness, a sacredness, inherent in being, however sullied that being might become? Is there meaning held within it even when aspects of it snarl and tear at us?

Even if there were just a speck of goodness in this world, a mere glimmer of something lovely, the slightest fragrance of something beautiful, then it would not be so audacious to call such a world good. And that speck, that glimmer, that frail scent carried on the wind, would be worth giving ourselves to—all the more for its scarcity.

For better and for worse

As it happens, goodness and beauty are far less rare than the prevailing noise would have us believe. Certainly, there are places where they are under assault. Certainly, there are places where they lie bleeding beneath the rubble. Yet even in those places, there are good people compassionately and desperately fighting, however in vain it might seem, against whatever bleak tide it may be.

The world was here long before us. It will be here long after us. It’s goodness does not rely on us. The universe is enormous, and we are less than a memory of dust. Yet we are nonetheless invited to participate; we can nonetheless make a difference. Love makes us as large as God.

Neither blind optimism nor cynicism are a helpful response to the grimmer faces of the world. The former lacks perspective, while the latter lacks imagination. Both fail to hold both the beauty and the bitterness of existence at the same time; to accept the sharp-soft unity of things, the divine Oneness; to see God as, in Richard Rohr’s phrase, ‘The Great Allower’; to embrace and love the world as it is, teeth and all; to say both ‘It is good’ and ‘This is not good enough’; to revere the world, and so work to repair it.

I have dwelt upon the facts of this place carefully. I have had some of them thrust through the walls of my chest. Life can be awful, and wonderful. This world is painful, precious, and, for better and for worse, it is the gift we have been given, our home, and so worth believing in.

Gideon

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