Call the Midlife (13 page)

To believe or not to believe? That is the question.

I’ve often wondered – and when I say often, I mean several times a day for as long as I can remember – whether I’m a man of faith or not.

I never feel alone, so that’s one thing. I never feel scared, so that’s another. But more than anything, for the last twelve months especially, I’ve felt a seismic change deep within my very being. I’m far less anxious about things than I can ever remember being. I’m far more honest with myself when it comes to people and situations. My whole attitude to material wealth and possessions has come full circle. I’m more accepting of any situation I find myself in. I’ve stopped chasing the game. In fact I’ve stopped playing the game and chasing anything, altogether. It’s as if I’ve been given sharper ears and sharper eyes to help improve my ability to differentiate between what’s good for me and what’s not, a sixth sense if you like.

So what I’m wondering is how has this come about? Why has it
happened now? And all the time I keep coming back to a distant awareness that it’s probably because I feel like I’m not alone. I want to call it some kind of force but that’s not quite what I mean. It’s more like I have access to extra capacity permanently available to draw upon, seek counsel from, gain strength and patience from. I’d say it was more of a new conscience. Like a well that has everything I might need, whenever I might need it. Sure, I still encounter problems and sleepless nights, but even they feel like the beginning of the end of a process of cleansing, renewal and starting again.

The Archbishop

I decided to ask my friend John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, for his insight on the matter. We’ve been pals now for five years or so, ever since he invited me to present a Christmas show from his official residence, Bishopthorpe Palace. Inviting us to broadcast a show was one thing, inviting us to have dinner and stay the night with him and his wife Margaret was entirely another.

‘Meet me at the Athenaeum at 3.15 p.m.,’ read his text.

I arrived ten minutes early.

‘I’m here to see John Sentamu.’

‘I’m sorry, we have no one of that name staying here,’ replied the hotel receptionist after checking her computer screen once, twice and then a third time. ‘Might he be under another name?’

‘Er, the Archbishop of York,’ I muttered sheepishly.

It was clear from the young lady’s expression she had no idea who I was talking about. Surely, a man as renowned and charismatic as John would be known to even the most unaware of hotel staff, were he staying with them. There was clearly something not right with our arrangement.

‘Are you sure it’s not the Athenaeum Club? We get quite a lot of confusion between us and them.’

God bless this woman, she was of course absolutely bang-on. I’d never heard of the Athenaeum Club and it turned out John had
never heard of the Athenaeum Hotel. Fortunately John’s location in Pall Mall was only minutes away from my location on Piccadilly, just opposite Green Park.

Problem number two: John was also entirely unaware that there was no way his club was going to allow me entry wearing jeans and my leather motorsport jacket.

‘Oh dear, do you know anywhere we could go for “our chat”, young Christopher?’

As it happened, I did. Sort of. Christie’s auction house was equidistant between our first two unsuccessful venues. Seeing as, over the years, I’ve spent a good few quid there and got to know a few of the faces quite well, I decided to take a chance. I bundled J.S. into the back of a cab in the hope that the world-famous auction house would take pity on us both, us refuge and perhaps even throw in a cup of coffee and a biccie.

‘Wow, this is fantastic, Chris, but how might we find somewhere to talk here?’ asked John.

Right on cue, my main contact at Christie’s, Will Porter, arrived with his customary smiling zeal.

‘Hey, Chris, I’m sure we can get you and the Right Reverend Bishop Sentamu into a private client room for an hour or so.’

A cappuccino, a pot of tea and a few swipes of several security passes later and finally John and I had the sanctuary we’d been seeking.

What a man this was I had sitting in front of me, gifting a couple of hours of his precious time with little or no idea precisely what it was I wanted to talk about.

One of thirteen children, J.S. was born in the tiny village of Masooli, ten miles from Kampala in Uganda. Masooli means maize, which is what the village was famous for growing. He arrived premature at just four and a half pounds and as a result was constantly in and out of hospital up until the age of five.

‘Rejoice in your weakness for it is that which makes you strong,’ was one of the many pearls of wisdom he would lay at my feet in the next couple of hours.

Can you believe he was only ten years old when he sensed his calling to his Lord Jesus Christ?

‘That’s incredible,’ I exclaimed, finding this quite difficult to believe. Whereupon he recalled the exact moment his vocational light-bulb came on:

‘I had done a deal with four boys who had offered me some of their banana pancake if I gave them each a replacement exercise book for the ones they’d lost, for which they would undoubtedly receive the cane. After I had carried out the dirty deed I had a profound sensation that what I had done was wrong but that I would be forgiven if I asked forgiveness. Which I did. Jesus then told me I must tell my parents immediately. The next day I said a prayer offering the rest of my life over to God’s work.’

With, however the razor-smart marks of several whips of the cane on his own pre-pubescent behind. The twist in the tail being the fact that the cane-wielding headmaster was his very own father.

‘“We have a thief amongst us,” Dad declared to the whole school in an afternoon assembly following my confession.’

‘That was a bit raw,’ I suggested, expecting John to defend his dad to the hilt as the responsible moral barometer, forced to make an example of his own son rather than show any favouritism. But no.

‘I thought exactly the same!’ he guffawed. ‘I couldn’t believe he was punishing me for coming clean and telling the truth. However, this only helped me with my relationship with Jesus. The next day when I pledged my allegiance to him, I discovered there is only ever forgiveness where he is concerned, never any retribution. Jesus will never cane you.’

From that moment on John went about preaching the Word of the Lord. ‘I’m sure I got on everyone’s nerves most of the time,’ he chuckled. ‘In fact, I remember my classmates declaring, “Here comes the Pope!” in the playground at break times. The biggest insult one could hurl in a Christian’s direction, such was the divide between the Anglican and Catholic churches during that period.’

What I most wanted to hear was how John could be so certain, when it came to his unshakeable faith in the Bible and its teachings.

‘Chris,’ he began, giggling again, ‘the thing with you is, you are a man who deals in words every day and so here you are asking me to explain what I believe and why I believe it, which of course I understand. But let me ask you this: how do you know for sure you love your sons?’

It was a simple but profound question.

‘Well, I just do, overwhelmingly. I actually don’t know specifically how.’

‘Of course you don’t. And why do you need to? As long as you know you love them, that’s all that matters. That’s what sets you free. The overwhelming certainty that comes from being a human being and opening yourself up to something so great and so powerful that we will never be able to comprehend exactly what it is and why it makes us feel how it does. Love can never and will never be able to be reduced to formulae. And so it is when it comes to faith. Hope, despair, sadness, joy – they all fall into the same category. No scientist, no physicist, will ever be able to explain them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And yet when it comes to people’s belief in a higher power, suddenly it’s OK to begin to cast aspersions on such notions. I’m sorry, but you can’t have it both ways.’

Wow. This was the closest I’d ever come to getting an answer to my ‘How do you know you know?’ question. And yes, suddenly I felt like one of the hypocrites J.S. was talking about. How come I was happy to accept love and joy and sadness and guilt, and all those other gut-feeling emotions, yet I had a problem when it came to faith?

‘People have always tended to reduce the Christian faith to a series of propositions, when actually it’s about trust. Although that trust doesn’t have to be about belief. In fact, for me, the whole thing is more about what I encounter than what I believe. We all encounter hundreds of people and situations in our lives where trust is of the utmost relevance. You could say to me, how come we know to trust people? But I haven’t heard that question forthcoming.

‘Think also, for example, how shocked we are when we hear of
some terrible murder on the news. Why are we shocked? We are shocked because it’s not “human nature” to do such a thing. So again you could ask me to explain “human nature”, but you don’t because you know about human and nature and you know what it is, yet you have no idea how you know. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

I did indeed.

‘Let me give you another example of how frustrated I could get if I really wanted to when it comes to the kind of conflicting points of view we are discussing. When society accepts a whole host of potentially scientifically questionable doctrines yet stops short of doing anything when it comes to faith. I have come across people who claim to
hate
the church, but if you then threaten to close down the very church in their own village, they go crazy. I have even known the same people to hastily write out a cheque for thousands of pounds to prevent any such travesty happening.’

‘So what’s that mentality about?’ I ask the great man.

‘It’s simple. It’s about exactly what’s bothering you. Deep down inside, they suspect something is going on which they can’t explain, but because they haven’t given themselves time to address whatever that might be, it’s easier for them to brush it under the carpet than admit it exists. Or at least, that’s what they think. The truth of the matter is we can’t brush it under the carpet; once we’ve sensed it, it’s always going to be there. It quietly drives some people insane, or to seek fame and fortune, or turn to drink and drugs, or sex and adrenaline sports. It can become the hugest of deals, if we choose not to cope with it.’

This all made perfect sense to me. So how come I was thinking about it now?

‘You are thinking about it because I suspect you have been resistant to the idea up until now, but suddenly it’s started bothering you on a completely different level. In the past you may have thought you might lose something of yourself by opening up to the idea that faith might be for you. When actually what will happen is the exact reverse. You cannot be truly free unless you choose to allow
yourself to wake up. That’s what we say: realizing you have faith is recognizing there is an awakening available to you. Actually, more than that: there is an awakening
already going on inside you
. It can be as soft as a whisper or as deafening as thunder, but either way it is equally loud. And once you’ve heard it, there is no going back. Sure, you can anaesthetize yourself to it, or insulate yourself against it, but what you might want to do is simply open the door and invite it in. You can always ask it to leave if you don’t get on. In short, you have everything to gain and absolutely nothing to lose.’

What John was talking about, I concluded, was ‘peace of mind’.

I’ve had fleeting moments of peace of mind more than usual recently, or perhaps I’ve just begun to recognize it more of late – and I like it. Thanks to this inner consciousness or awareness, my life has somehow become more what I want it to be without my having to really analyze what that is. I’ve stopped trying as much, yet more of my life seems to be falling into place.

‘Jesus, however, does not call us to religion or theology, they are not what I’m about. He invites us to live our lives to the full with God’s life, without fear of being judged, without fear of asking for forgiveness, without fear of being chastised for the things we have done wrong, either intentionally or unintentionally. But that does not mean this forgiveness comes without consequences. The mere fact we recognize we are making mistakes on a daily basis is burden enough.

At first, that is.

It is also the beginning of a process of us mending and bettering our ways. Why else would we bother pointing them out to ourselves, articulating them into unignorable notes to self of “must do better”?’

Maybe I am more aware of these things than ever before because I have given myself this time and space in my midlife to really think about what it is that I want, need and enjoy. And now, having realized how short and simple that list is, there is a long-lost voice emerging to help guide me to where my destiny and happiness lies.

‘I think the Church should target you guys. You forty-, fifty- and
sixty-year-olds. We need lots of you and lots of you need us. It’s the perfect inter-departmental fit, don’t you think?’

I wonder if John is where he thought he would be as that little ten-year-old lay preacher getting on everyone’s nerves.

‘I had not the faintest idea. I have never had a plan. I have only ever tried to do my absolute best. That is it. Since I arrived here in the UK in 1974, right up to today sitting here with you, and for every minute of every day in between. I now chair the world committee campaigning for a global living wage. I sat on the Stephen Lawrence Judicial Inquiry for the retrial of his murderers, where we secured an end to the double jeopardy rule after pioneering forensic new evidence was deemed permissible, resulting in his killers finally being sent to jail. And I oversaw the ordaining of the first of Church of England female bishop. Not bad for a little sick boy from an African village most of the world has never heard of.’

He laughs again. John laughs all the time. Thank God for Sentamu. And thank God for sparing him time and time again, even in the last ten years. He has had to survive prostate cancer, a burst appendix and a particularly nasty, almost fatal run-in with salmonella.