Me, God and the Siskin

They’re not much to look at, really, unless you love that sort of thing, a tiny yellow-green finch with a black crown and bib.

And yet, more than almost any other bird, they give me an almost inexpressible pleasure when they arrive back at our bird table. They are resident all year, and yet for some reason they always take till March to make it as far as this village. Or at least our bit of it.

So when one arrived out of nowhere yesterday morning, I found myself stopped in my tracks. I started texting Caroline and staring out of the kitchen window for ten minutes, clutching a rapidly cooling mug of tea, just marvelling in the fact of it being here. Above all, I found myself wondering, as I always do, who or what to be grateful to.

And there, in a line, you can summarise my spiritual life, and why I still believe in something or someone ‘out there’.

Over the last five or six years, I must have interviewed 60 or 70 scientists who, with wonderful generosity, have helped me to start to understand the incredible complexity and connectivity of the world around me, and of the life that world contains. You might think that this would have cured me of the need for there to be something else, but actually it has done the precise opposite, because the one thing that they have never been able to intellectualise for me is my sense of awe and wonder. And that’s good enough for me. No matter how much I know about, there is always more that I don’t, including my capacity to be moved to tears by nature. To me that is quite a precious thing.

Once, I was vaguely religious, although this was less about conquering my doubts than it was in adverse reaction to the determined cockiness and arrogance of the extreme secular brigade that has trotted alongside my generation like an annoying dog. Like a teenager who smokes because he has been told not to, I believed in God because people like Richard Dawkins implied that I was gullible and stupid if I did.

I have as good reasons as most people might have not to like the system of individual organised religions (and I don’t), but I stick with the Church of England because, well, because it’s where fate put me, and to move to another religion would put a tiresome constraint on me to do what they told me to on the basis that I chose it. In the Church of England, I can do as much as I please (which, sadly, is very little), and I can be cross and critical when they do daft, discriminatory things themselves, or when they virtue signal with vacuous job descriptions like ‘deconstructing whiteness officer’ (£36,000 a year, if you’re interested). But it’s kind of home, and I like it for that.

I plod on, and I generally plod on alone. I know that we are supposed to share whatever faith we have, but mine happens to be happiest finding expression in silence. Besides, if it’s just me, I don’t have to explain it. My faith is limited to lighting candles in cathedrals and churches that I happen to be passing, and which happen to be open, and dedicating each guttering flame to someone who I think needs it. Last year, in St David’s Cathedral in Wales, I went rogue, and lit one for me.

My one concession to teamwork is to do part of the Good Friday pilgrimage between Selham, Lodsworth and Easebourne churches, which I have just done, and which was lovely.

I hope you have a lovely Easter weekend, whatever your faith is or isn’t, and whatever your own siskin happens to be.