23 sept

I would like to write about why I love relics. But I do not really comprehend it yet. Let’s tackle another important question. Why do I like believing?

Let’s be clear. This is not a great era for believing. I have copy of a book I owned. A friend gave it to me on a vist to Great Strudgates (understanding me much better than he might have expected). It’s “God is not Great” by Christopher Hitchens. I never really read it, but will do that one of these days. I also have my copy of a book by Richard Dawkins. I will also read that one day.

I am not a great believer.

I remember a conversation with my dad, a few years before he died. Did he believe in heaven? Oh yes, was his answer, that’s where I will meet my older brother (died at the age of two) my parents, and you ultimately. It is a perfect place, he said. My uncle Fried quoted him at his funeral from an earlier conversation where my father said this was the place where he would eat from golden plates with silver spoons. Obviously a quote from the bible or one of the interpreatations of the bible from the likes of Augustine and Ambrosius.

I remember being stunned. How could someone so smart have such a naive interpretation of heaven?I know a little better now, but not much.

There should be a clear distiction between knowing things and believing things. Things that one can know, one should not believe. At the same time it is possible to believe things that one cannot know. Like God, or heaven, or love, or progress or anything where knowledge itself is insufficient as an answer.

The dutch poet Gerard Reve wrot a poem called Credo. It started with the lines: Actually I do not believe anything, and I doubt about everything.

Further on he went on to write about sharing his doubts with God, and the receptive answers he would get from his prayers. But for me the real interesting part of the poem is that he realized that doubting is not part of the world of believing.

And I love doubting. That’s why I loved being a journalist, or love being it, who knows what might happen. You ask a question and somebody gives an answer. Let’s be clear, I’ve never held somebody I interviewed to a quote. If they wanted to clarify (soften) what they said, that was always fine, but I liked it when people could be confronted with claims they made in the past. It is the same thing I ask myself regularly!

Journalism is about knowing, but this trip is about believing. My main problem with today’s time is that there is not enough ‘space’ for believing. Most of the people who are quick to say they do not believe, like myself, do not really appreciate what a lack of imagination they are expressing. I mean, if there is a choice between meat and fish, it is better when you do like both.

I am sure I haven’t expressed myself well, but I do feel inspired by the words from the Russian writer Vasily Grossman, whose masterpiece Life and Fate was not allowed to be pubished in Russia in the early sixties. As a kind of compromise the Russian (Soviet) authorities send him to Georgy to explore some Medieval churches.

The atheist Grossman wrote a book about it that was recently published. I did not read it, but I remember a quote from a review where Grossman claimed he ‘almost started believing, seeing the beauty, serenity and perfection’ of those churches. ‘How would it be possible that these churches would have been uninhabited for all this time.”

Although I never could express it for myself earlier, that is exactly the feeling I have visiting the lovely abbeys and churches of France.