POST TENEBRAS LUX 

BY CATRIONA MURRAY

John Gillespie Magee, a pilot with the Royal Canadian Airforce, was killed in 1941 when his Spitfire was involved in a collision with another plane. He was desperately young — only nineteen — and is remembered not for the manner of his death, but because of a short poem he wrote, called ‘High Flight’ . Its first and last lines are the most famous of the entire work, and you have almost certainly heard them before:

‘Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth... put out my hand and touched the face of God’.

He was writing about his first experience of flying, and the sense of triumph and freedom it brought with it. It gets quoted by people who wish to speak about awe and reverence.

That is not how it speaks to me. Instead it articulates a huge problem that we have brought upon ourselves. We have no right to touch the face of God in the first place, far less slap it, as we have been doing of late. Societally, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that our relationship with God is somehow one of equals.

You may be reading this and saying to yourself, ‘Societally, most people don’t believe he even exists’. True, but even they seem to be awfully mad at him. I have had more conversations with self-professed atheists about the cruelty and capriciousness of God than I will ever have with Christians. Remember the much-publicised outburst from Stephen Fry, in which he railed against God for creating a world in which, amongst other miseries, children suffer and die? He was speaking, I think, for many unbelievers, who are not quite as atheistic as they might claim ... but who have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of God.

We have, on the one hand, sceptics who think that, if he exists, he is mean-spirited and wantonly authoritarian; and on the other, we have those whose sketchy notion that he does exist veers towards the romantic and fantastical. It is this latter concept that manifests in John Gillespie Magee’s poem, where man is able, by his own ingenuity, to place himself on a par with God.

I can’t help thinking that, somewhere along the line, those of us whose job it is to represent God, have slipped up. A sizeable chunk of the country think he’s a psychopath, and quite a number think of him as a sort of cartoon character god — the kind who can be whatever you perceive him to be. He is the type of deity beloved by folk who will say that they don’t go to church, they’re not religious ... but they are ‘spiritual’.

This is why personal witness is so important and why we must not ever stop speaking about God and his role in our lives. The misunderstanding of who and what he is always seems to arise from a lack of familiarity with him. Once you have met the real God, you will accept no imitations. I know him, and so I know that the cruel, heartless God and the fluffy, boy-next-door God are imposters. They are straw men, created by people who are actually terrified that he may be real. So they recreate him in their own image and make him ridiculous, or unpalatable — or simply a bit mystical to satisfy a nebulous idea of spirituality. All these versions of him are then easy to knock down, thus proving that, of course, there is no such person, really.

Sinful human beings that we all are, we have this urge within us to BE God, and can only do that once we’ve proven that he isn’t. Every leap forward we make in our civilisation, whether its flight, or medicine, or computer simulations, we con ourselves that we are ready to take his place on the throne of heaven. Yet, we are all faced daily with the reality of our human frailty. We still sicken and die. Even astronauts, who have truly slipped the surly bonds of Earth, ultimately succumb to the same limitations we all share. Many of us, long before then, will walk the valley of the shadow of death beside our loved ones.

If we have opened our eyes to God walking alongside us, it is impossible to say that he is either cruel or insubstantial. He is God. To those who know him, the name alone embodies all that is good, all that is powerful and all that is everlasting.

We need to urgently show this God — the real and only one — to a world of unbelievers who are looking at a distorted image and perishing for want of powerful witness. •

Photo by Philip Mackie on Unsplash