"When I was seventeen years old I lost my religious faith."
I read on because that was the same age I was when I felt my own religious faith start to slip away. This short story by V.S. Pritchett was quite fascinating and a great read. It takes place in the past as the narrator tells his story. The premise is that there is an unnamed narrator who lived with his family out in the country. His family decided to convert their religious ties to be part of the "Church of the Last Purification" from Toronto, Canada, which basically tells its followers to never think anything negative because there is no such thing as a negative thing; God would not have created something if it was made to hurt us. Obviously, this is completely ludicrous, but the story went on to make a better point.
A man by the name of Mr. Timberlake comes along as a leader of the Church of the Last Purification. When he arrives at the family's home, the entire family is in awe. They think he must be the best thing since sliced bread if he is a leader of this church. The narrator tells Mr. Timberlake that they should go punting, also known as boating in America (punting in England), and go off to a nice meadow. While they are punting Mr. Timberlake shows himself to be the most stubborn, ignorant fool in the world. The man starts hanging on to a tree because he refuses to move away from the tree when he sees it coming because he doesn't believe that anything bad would happen because God wouldn't have put the tree there to harm them. The tree pushes him and he has to hang on to it and eventually the water rises up to his neck and he has to be rescued by the narrator. Even though he already did this one stupid thing, he refuses to let the narrator take him home so he can change out of his wet clothes because he refuses to see the negative side of this venture. The sun starts beaming down on him and his clothes start steaming and things just continue to go wrong until the narrator just says he wants to go home when really he just wants to get away from this fool. Plus, he was no longer going to believe in anything that guy would've said, religious or not. When the story comes to a conclusion, the narrator explains that Mr. Timberlake died the day before (which would be the present time, not the past anymore), and he died of heart failure. He found out that any sort of excitement between the present date and the entire span of time going 20 years back would've killed Timberlake. So, the narrator realizes that Timberlake's phony smile and his way of thinking and all of his many flaws that he had shown on that trip they took punting 15 years ago was because he was protecting himself from dying.
Obviously, the narrator's family didn't know about any heart condition, but they believed in Timberlake's cause with the Canadian church. The story was written in this way to make people take a step back and think about how they construct their understanding of God, religion, and why things happen. They had no mind of their own. They were easily persuaded, manipulated and strung along without much effort. I have written articles and made many exclamations about the manipulation of religion. I see what it has done to people and I see what it can become. It's easy to make someone believe in something when they are already searching for something to believe in. When a person finds out that they are sick, or when they feel depressed, or when they feel like there is nowhere else to turn...I know a good majority of people who would turn to an imaginary being to fulfill that void. A void that they do not realize was put there by themselves and can be removed by themselves, but it would take effort. People are just lazy.
It's scary to think that some people would believe that there is no such thing as a negative occurence. There are a lot of negative things in this world that can't be avoided. If the narrator of the story wouldn't have turned around to help Timberlake, he may have drowned. He may have drowned thinking that he couldn't possibly drown because God did not create water to kill people. But the only reason Timberlake believed in that is because he was sick and couldn't take the risk of having any sort of anxiety attack, or getting angry, or doing anything that would cause him to possibly have a heart attack. He turned to that church and made it his safety blanket. And so did all of their followers. This story was an outsider looking in on the perceptions of theology and picking it apart. It was masterful.
I will end with a favorite quote from V.S. Pritchett:
"In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth." - V.S. Pritchett
Thanks for your commentary, and for allowing others to comment on this story. I too recently read "The Saint", but I felt that it displayed a high degree of religious ignorance and intolerance; specifically the implication that this narrative applies to all religious beliefs. Just because one religious tenet a certain group espouses is false and naïve, does not by extension apply to all religious beliefs and organizations. You say "People are just lazy." I wholeheartedly agree with you in that people are too lazy to seek the truth in religion and use stories like this to justify their laziness in this worthwhile endeavor.
ReplyDeleteCertainly the world is full of misplaced faith. But we all have different perspectives, based on our experiences, and what we CHOOSE to believe in. Many people today choose to believe in technology and science instead of God (versus in addition to God). Make no mistake; their belief in science is faith-based because someone they trusted told them it was true and they accepted it without question. But we frequently "discover" that some scientific "fact" we were taught has been disproved by a new "discovery". (The accelerating expansion of the universe is a great example here, as well as the constantly changing nutritional guidelines.)
My point here is to hopefully open people's eyes to the reality that truth is truth, whether it is found through scientific or religious channels. If we knew everything that is true about science and everything that is true about religion, we would then, and only then, have the complete picture of what is real. In the meantime, we live by faith in what we choose to believe, with an eye, and a heart, open to new discoveries of truth in the world around us.
By the way, "punting" is boating in shallow waters, propelling the boat with a pole pushed against the bottom.