Rachels' books

To Pete, Jane & Evelyn

I've recently had a birthday, and among the very lovely presents I was given were two books by authors whose Christian names (or forenames, as we're meant to call them now) are both Rachel. They both, for different reasons, captivated me - which you can tell because I who these days am a slow reader read them quickly.

The first is The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce, whose other novels (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and The Love Song of Queenie Hennessy) I also recommend. It is primarily set in 1988, with the final chapters 20 years later. The story revolves around the single-minded, arguably obsessive, Frank for whom the only worthwhile form of recorded music is vinyl and his shop in a run-down cul-de-sac in a cathedral city which is itself depressed and still bears the scars of wartime bombing. The remaining shops in the street are a florist, a Polish baker, an undertakers', a tattooist, a Catholic souvenir shop, and Frank's music shop. On the other side of the street are terraced houses in various states of disrepair.

All the while there are threats from a development company and racist gangs. It is a picture of a community under pressure from progressive and reactionary forces.

Frank is no musician, but he has inherited from his Bohemian mother both a love of music and a fear of relationship. However he has a unique gift - the ability to hear instantly what music every person needs. His world and the life of the street is profoundly changed when a woman in a green coat collapses unconscious outside the music shop. All the characters in the book have their own back-stories and carry their own scars. I won't spoil the plot, but content myself with saying that, as with Rachel Joyce's other books, it is ultimately hopeful and carries a message that redemption is possible though hard won.

At the moment Jane is reading it. I shall be interested to hear whether she was as captivated as I was.

The other book, which arrived out of the blue from my least "respectable" cousin, is Evolving in Monkey Town (now retitled Faith Unravelled). What a gift! It's by Rachel Held Evans (from whose blog I've previously quoted : Pain in the Offering). It's not a new book, published in 2010. It recounts her growing up in the southern states of America, and in particular Dayton, Tennessee, where her father went to teach theology in the conservative Bryan College. For one thing, she is an excellent writer. Dayton was the site of the famous 'Scopes Monkey Trial', staged to draw publicity to the small town. In 1925 John T Scopes, a secondary teacher, was prosecuted by the state for teaching evolution in a state school. The whole thing turned into a debate between 'Modernism' and 'Fundamentalism', between creationism and evolution, and gained worldwide notoriety.

This Rachel tells how she developed from knowing all the right Christian answers to sceptics' and seekers' questions to being open to accept the mystery of faith. She ends, "If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that serious doubt - the kind that leads to despair - begins not when we start asking God questions but when, out of fear, we stop. In our darkest hours of confusion and in our most glorious moments of clarity, we remain curious but dependent little children, tugging frantically at God's outstretched hands and pleading with every question and every prayer and every tantrum we can muster, 'We want to have a conversation with you!'

"God must really love us, because he always answers with such long stories."

I found the book invigorating and liberating. It helped me to understand my own journey and myself. As I commented to a friend who asked me how my summer had been: I suppose what reading Rachel’s book helped me see was, a. that I wasn’t a freak and b. that I do still have faith - which has been a considerable relief and a sort of liberation. My doubts and questions are by no means fatal. Phew!

Hope or nothing?

On Wednesday evening, when Sir Terry Pratchett was yet again "Facing extinction" on the BBC, I chose to read a remarkable book we'd been lent by a medical student (via her mother), called Proof of Heaven. It's written by Dr Eben Alexander, an eminent American neurosurgeon. He inexplicably contracted the vanishingly rare e coli meningitis, which rendered his neocortex effectively "dead" and sent him into deep coma from which his colleagues expected him never to emerge. Clearly he did emerge and live to tell the tale, and his story is remarkable. As a neurosurgeon he knows what he is talking about when it comes to brain function and he has seen patients in all states of consciousness. He describes himself as having been a convinced scientific sceptic about all things spiritual. However what he experienced in his coma and what he describes with as much scientific objectivity as possible completely changed his mind.

I have certainly read accounts before of near death events (NDEs), which frankly I found anecdotal and somewhat fanciful. I have heard one person talking about experiencing heaven, to whom I was inclined to give some credence in the light of the impact it made on her life, though I suppose some people might describe her as "flakey". However, I basically held the sort of view that this man of science had before his coma: "I doubted their veracity, mainly because I had not experienced them at a deep level, and because they could not be readily explained by my simplistic scientific view of the world.
"Like many other scientific skeptics, I refused to even review the data relevant to the questions concerning these phenomena. I prejudged the data, and those providing it, because my limited perspective failed to provide the foggiest notion of how such things might actually happen. Those who assert that there is no evidence for phenomena of extended consciousness in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are wilfully ignorant. They believe they know the truth without needing to look at the facts" (p.153).

Well, in his fairly unique sort of coma (with the entire neocortex not functioning) he experienced what he could only afterwards conclude was an experience of consciousness completely independent of the brain. What's more, this experience was extremely vivid and detailed, but has none of the naïveté and self-referential aspects of other NDE survivors' accounts whose comas have been less complete. He gives an astonishingly objective account of the experience, in terms which make sense to the modern mindset, for example about the huge number of dimensions and the ability to comprehend without words. It does of course present him with a problem when he tries to describe the indescribable in language! However having made it his first priority after his medically improbable recovery to note down his memories as fully as possible, he gave himself the data to provide a coherent account. He experiences three regions or states, the muddy darkness of "the Realm of the Earthworm's View", the green brilliance of "the Gateway" and the black but holy darkness of "the Core".

At one point, he concludes, "love is, without doubt, the basis of everything. Not some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows - the kind of love we feel when we look at our spouse and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.

"Not much of a scientific insight? Well, I beg to differ. I'm back from that place, and nothing could convince me (otherwise than) that this is not only the single most important emotional truth in the universe, but also the single most important scientific truth as well....

"It is my belief that we are now facing a crucial time in our existence. We need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth, while our brains (including the left-side analytical parts) are fully functioning. Science - the science to which I've devoted so much of my life - doesn't contradict what I learned up there. But far, far too many people believe it does, because certain members of the scientific community, who are pledged to the materialist worldview, have insisted again and again that science and spirituality cannot coexist.

"They are mistaken...." (pp. 71-73).

I can't help being struck by the contrast of the different views of reality and, therefore, meaning presented by Eben Alexander and Terry Pratchett. Strangely Alexander's seems to me to invest the present with the greater significance - it is part of a greater reality. What you see is not all you get. And the certainty that "love, unconditional love, is the basis of everything" invests existence with an unparalleled luminosity.

At this point this week it is good to have a scientist's testimony that we do not all face extinction when our brains finally pack up, but that our souls, our essential selves, will survive. As St Paul said, "If in Christ we have hope for this life only, we are of all people to be pitied. But in fact...."

PS Dear BBC, How about giving some air time to Dr Alexander's hope, instead of the diet of gloom you seem so fond of? And before you dismiss the idea, do you dare read the book with an open mind, right to the end, where the final evidential proof comes? It's available on Amazon and Kindle.

PPS Eben Alexander's version of what he experienced will not please a lot of Christians or people of other faiths, as he is not propagating a party line. He is simply trying to describe his experience and understand it in his terms. I think it's worth reading because of who he is and the profound impact his experience made on him - and because it brings the possibility of hope nearer. For me, nonetheless, the final and best proof of life after death remains what we celebrate tonight and tomorrow. "But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep."