It seems only right to tune in to programmes about Belief in the week leading up to Easter Day, the holiest day in the Christian calendar. Whether or not you have faith, there’s some point in reflecting on matters of conscience once a year, if only to give your inner self an annual spiritual check-up. It’s a chance to pause and reflect on matters other than the bank balance, the state of the garden, or that irritating person who’s blighting your life at work. For her late-night Radio 3 series this week, Joan Bakewell has been talking to a Catholic, a Muslim, a Druid, an atheist and an Anglican Bishop. The Catholic, Sara Maitland, who has written a book about living in silence, or rather absence, removing herself to a remote cottage on the island of Skye, was robust in her defence of God. ‘Are you going to be judged?’ asks Bakewell, fearlessly. ‘I don’t know,’ says Maitland, adding, ‘I’m really not trying to evade the question…I just trust God to sort it out.’
Her ‘I don’t know’ — from someone who has not wavered from her belief in God since she was a young woman — was so refreshing, and somehow so much more believable and inspirational than any forced attempt at explanation. The Bishop gave us no such consolation. After admitting to Bakewell that, yes, he had at some point questioned the existence of God, he responded to the challenge posed by God’s inability to deal with the suffering of the world by saying, ‘There are no pat answers…but what following Jesus enables you to do is to ask these questions in a pool of light.’
Troubled by that pool of light, Bakewell persisted with her line of questioning, like a terrier gnawing at a bone.
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