An Agnostic's Quest
By DORIS M. HODGES IAM a woman of thirty-seven and an agnostic. My parents had me taught the basic concepts of their own Noncon- formist faith when I was a child. These (to me) narrow teachings I discarded when I became an adolescent and able to think for myself. Then I started a personal quest on my own, a quest in search of spiritual truth. I wanted to find out the meaning of life and man's place in it, of his beginnings, his relationship to the created universe and his ultimate destiny. I studied the history of the different world religions from Mithraism to modern spiritualism. All interested me; some, stemming from the Occult philosophies of the East, taught me new physical and mental truths. But from the study of each and every one I ultimately came out, like Fitzgerald's Omar " by that same door as in I went."
For the truths which I sought, what I wanted to know, were, briefly summarised, these : (a) The nature of the force that first created the universe. Was it accidental or deliberate ? Was it benevolent or malevolent ? (b) Does man—soul and spirit—survive physical death ? If he does not, what can be the purpose of his present existence ? Is he guided by blind destiny alone ? (c) An age-old question this, yet one which defeats every personal effort to embrace any one of the many faiths. Why, if there is God or benevolent creative force ruling the universe, must cruelty and pain continue ? Why, especially, should it be allowed to fall upon the innocent and the helpless ? What is the explanation for the child born to insanity or malformation of the most hideous kind ?
These are questions that need answers from the pulpit. If the answers were given in a positive, practical way that not only appealed to my own questioning mind, but answered parallel questions that exist in the minds of many people who think like me, then the preacher who gave them would render humanity, and the church he serves, magnificent tribute. Without self- pity and withotit bitterness, we of the twentieth century are entitled to say that we live in a time of spiritual travail. The old values and beliefs have gone. The bright, scientific light of our day has focused itself, with unrelenting logic and cruel clarity, upon many mysteries and wonders which our ancestors considered as coming from supernatural forces, from God; in that light we have watched' most of our dreams, nearly all our spiritual illusions, burnt to ashes. Through the air—the ether—music and the spoken word go all round man's world, carried by the miracle of wireless. The cathode-ray tube gives us television; we have, besides, the cinema, the telephone and the unpredictable terrors of atomic power. Man has almost conquered all the natural resources of this world in which lie lives; now he turns curious eyes upon the planets which swing in space about us. Soon he expects to be able to reach them, to explore and to conquer these other worlds. He has studied the mathematical laws which tell him of the marvellous order keeping our earth and these other bodies circling in space. He knows that this strange, almost uncanny order is maintained throughout all the universe, but still the force which created it remains a mystery.
Was it accidental, evolving out of elemental chaos in the dawn of the universe ? Will it return to chaos again, one day, through the upheaval of blind forces ? He wants to know whether there are purpose and plan—above all, a planner— behind it all. But he cannot find an answer that stands up to the scientific scrutiny of his twentieth-century mind. Where can he hope to find God in such a world ? And what picture of Him is he to form for himself that will satisfy his intellectual and scientific needs ?
War is a thing as old as man. We know, of course, by this time, both from the bitter lessons of our own century and the study of history, that war is always a confession of failure—of man's failure to find some common meeting-point where he can settle his religious, political and economic quarrels with his fellow human beings in peaceful and sensible arbitration. Yet the Churches of all countries, both in past centuries and now, accept the tenet that war is sometimes a necessary evil. Can evil ever be necessary or justified ? Now that we face the possibility of atomic conflict, what is the position of the Church throughout the world, that Church which, in all its branches, is the vehicle for the expression of God's word and sacraments through His ordained ministers ?
Are there truth and consolation, perhaps, in the eastern conception of reincarnation, which teaches that pain, sin and spiritual travail, as well as physical suffering, are the earned penances carried over from former lives ? For, viewed from the standpoint of human compassion and human honesty, the wholesale sufferings of humanity, whether deserved or not, make no sort of sense. To the layman, who may be blinded and blundering, perhaps not always as well-informed as he should be, but who is at least striving for complete honesty of outlook in his search for truth, these sufferings seem, for the most part, both unfair and undeserved.
There are signs that, even in this scientific century, the spiritual side of man is hungry for sustenance. He sees about him still wonders which defy the skill and the mechanical creative genius of his day, which perhaps only the artist or the painter in words can reproduce for him. He sees the exquisite and intricate fashioning of a butterfly's body, the mystical glory of sunset and dawn, the strange, fragile mould- ing of the rose, the recurring and miraculous pattern of nature, and the mystery of life itself in the body of a newly-born infant. Something in him is stirred and wants to reach out for those truths that he can feel but cannot touch.
The" oldreligions offer him. little- comfort. For him, the Church ceased long ago to be anything more than a lovely tabernacle, guarding an ideal that provides no practical foundation upon which he can build his ideal of God and man's place in a God-created universe. A sermon which offered me, and all who think like me, a vision of spiritual reality and truth, one which could be fitted without difficulty into the scientific pattern of today, would be one which I would go a long way to hear.
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