*
‘We were made for each other.’
The young couple gazed into each other’s eyes as they sat on the sofa in my study. They had come to arrange their wedding: full of dreams and wonder at discovering such perfection in another person, someone so exactly what they were looking and hoping for.
And yet, as we all know, marriages apparently made in heaven sometimes end not far from hell. Although at the moment the very thought of each other adds a whole glorious new dimension to their lives, statistics suggest that, unless they know how to navigate the road that lies ahead, they may soon be yelling and sobbing and calling the divorce lawyers.
Isn’t there something odd about this? How is it that we ache for each other and yet find relationships so difficult?
My proposal is that the whole area of human relationships forms another ‘echo of a voice’ – an echo we can ignore if we choose to do so, but one which is loud enough to get through the defences of a good many people within the supposedly modern secular world. Or, if you prefer, human relationships are another signpost pointing away into a mist, telling us that there is a road ahead which leads to … well, which leads somewhere we might want to go.
I begin with the romantic relationship because, despite all the debunking of marriage in Western culture over the last generation, despite the desire for independence, the pressures on double-career couples, the soaring divorce rates and a world full of new temptations, marriage is still remarkably popular. Millions, perhaps billions, of pounds are spent on weddings every year in Britain alone. And yet every other play, film and novel, and perhaps one in four newspaper reports, involves domestic tragedy – which is a fancy way of saying that something went dramatically wrong with a central relationship, probably the one between a married couple.
We are made for each other. Yet making relationships work, let alone making them flourish, is sometimes, perhaps often, remarkably difficult. That is the same paradox that we uncovered in the previous two chapters. We all know that justice matters, yet it slips through our fingers. We mostly know there is such a thing as spirituality, and that it’s important, yet it’s hard to refute the charge that it’s all wishful thinking. In the same way, we all know that we belong in communities, that we were made to be social creatures. Yet there are many times when we are tempted to slam the door and stomp off into the night by ourselves, simultaneously making the statement that we don’t belong any more and that we want someone to take pity on us, to come to the rescue and comfort us. We all know we belong in relationships, but we can’t quite work out how to get them right. The voice we hear echoing in our heads and our hearts keeps reminding us of both parts of this paradox, and it’s worth pondering why.
* *
Of course, being by yourself is often very desirable. If you work in a noisy factory, or even if you live in a crowded home, getting away, perhaps out into the countryside, can be a blessed relief. Even those of us who like being with lots of other people can sometimes have enough of it and enjoy curling up with a book, or going for a long walk and thinking about things without other voices intruding. Differences of temperament, upbringing, and other circumstances have a large part to play in this.
But most people do not want complete, long-term solitariness. In fact, most people, even those who are naturally shy and introverted, do not normally choose to be alone all the time. Some do so for religious reasons, becoming hermits. Others do so to escape danger, as when a convicted criminal chooses solitary confinement rather than face prison violence. But even those who make such choices are usually conscious that this is abnormal. Sometimes when people are locked up by themselves they quite literally go mad. Without human society, they don’t know who they are any more. It seems that we humans were designed to find our purpose and meaning not simply in ourselves and our own inner lives, but in one another and in the shared meanings and purposes of a family, a street, a workplace, a community, a town, a nation. When we describe someone as ‘a loner’, we are not necessarily saying the person is bad, simply that they are unusual.
Relationships come in different shapes. One of the oddities about the modern Western world is the remoulding (and shrinking) of relationships that we have come to take for granted. Anyone growing up in an average African town has dozens of friends up and down the street; indeed, many children live within what, to Western eyes, would look like a massive and confusing extended family, with virtually every adult within walking distance being treated as an honorary aunt or uncle in a way that is now unimaginable in the modern West. In such a community, there exist multiple networks of support, encouragement, rebuke and warning, a corporate repository of folk wisdom (or, as it might be, folk folly) which keeps everyone together and gives them a shared sense of direction – or at least, when things are bad, a shared sense of misfortune. Those who live in today’s Western world mostly don’t even realize what they are missing. In fact, they might be alarmed at the thought of it. In such a community, everyone is in it together, for good or ill.
And sometimes, of course, it is indeed for ill. A strong sense of corporate solidarity can condition an entire community to go rushing off in the wrong direction. Times when communities have been most united, when people have pulled most solidly together, have included times when, for instance, the population of ancient Athens voted arrogantly for wars they could not win. More recently, they included the time when the great majority of the German people voted to give Adolf Hitler an absolute power which changed the course of history. Even when communities are functioning well in terms of their own inner dynamics, there is no guarantee that the results are healthy.
And of course, many communities find it hard even to work together well in the first place. If the struggles of modern marriages are one obvious example, another is the fragile state of our contemporary democracies. Most people in today’s Western world cannot envisage living in any kind of state other than a democratic one, and would certainly not choose to do so. The very word ‘democracy’, carrying at least the meaning of ‘full adult voting rights’ (as against, say, systems in which women, or the poor, or slaves, are excluded – all of which have been common in the past, and have called themselves ‘democracies’), has come to carry the highest approval rating possible. If you say you don’t believe in democracy, or even that you question it, people will treat you as if you’re mad, or at least highly dangerous.
But there are signs that all is not well with democracy, at least as we have known it. We cannot get our relationships right at the large level, any more than at the small. In the United States, it is taken for granted that if you wish to run for major office, let alone for the Presidency, you need to be extremely rich, probably by raising money from very rich backers. People do not lightly part with large sums of money. Supporters will routinely look for some kind of payback, not least as the price of continuing support next time around. The more people see this going on, the more it generates cynicism; and cynicism gnaws away at the heart of our national and civic relationships. In Britain, more people now vote in ‘reality TV’ shows (voting, for instance, to eject a contestant from a Big Brother house) than vote in elections – and by that I mean general elections, choosing a government for the whole country for up to five years, not simply local government elections where the turnout is usually much lower again. And when, as has happened many times in recent decades, the party that ‘wins’ the election turns out to have polled only about one third of all the votes cast, serious questions are raised about the system as a whole. In many European countries there is similar dissatisfaction with the way things are operating. We all know we belong together in some sense or other, but it is not at all clear how that can or should work.
Thus, from the most intimate relationship (marriage) to those on the largest scale (national institutions), we find the same thing. We all know we are made to live together; but we all find that doing so is more difficult than one might imagine. And it is within these settings, large and small, but particularly at the more personal and intimate end of the scale, that we find the natural place of those characteristic signs of human life: laughter and tears. We find each other funny. We find each other tragic. We find ourselves, and our relationships, funny and tragic. This is who we are. We can’t avoid being this way, and we don’t want to, even though things often don’t work out the way we want.
* * *
At the heart of relationships we find sex. Not, of course, that all relationships are ‘sexual’ in the sense of involving erotic behaviour. Virtually all societies treat that as something to be contained in certain very specific contexts, often within marriage or close equivalents. Rather, when human beings relate to one another they relate as male and female; maleness and femaleness are not identities which we only assume when we enter into one particular kind of relationship (i.e. a romantic or erotic one). Here, too, we all know in our bones that we are a particular kind of creature, and yet that we find it difficult to handle being this kind of creature. Sex is, in other words, a particularly sharp example of the paradox I am highlighting. It may seem, in today’s world, an unlikely location to catch the echoes of a voice of the sort that I have been describing. That, however, only shows how badly we have misunderstood things.
Recent generations in the West have seen huge efforts expended on the attempt to teach boys and girls that the differences between them are simply a matter of biological function. We have been sternly warned against stereotyping people according to their gender. More and more jobs have become, at least in theory, interchangeable. And yet today’s parents, however impeccable their idealistic credentials, have discovered that most little boys like playing with toy guns and cars, and that a remarkable number of little girls like playing with dolls, dressing them up and nursing them. Nor is it only children who stubbornly resist the new rules. Those who target magazines at different groups in society have no difficulty in producing ‘men’s magazines’ which very few women would buy, and ‘women’s magazines’ which hardly any men would read. The circulation of such magazines goes from strength to strength, even in those countries where the propaganda about gender identity has been strong for decades. In most countries, of course, nobody bothers to try to pretend that men and women are identical and interchangeable. Everyone knows that they are remarkably different.
It is, however, harder than normally imagined to plot exactly what these differences are, not least because different societies have different images of what men should do and what women should do, and are then puzzled when not everyone conforms to type. I am not at all denying that there are many areas where we have got this wrong in the past. I have argued strenuously in my own sphere of work for far more interchangeability than has traditionally been the case. My point is simply this: that all human relationships involve an element of gender identity (I, as a man, relate to other men as man to man, to women as man to woman), and that though we all know this deep down, we become remarkably confused about it. At one end of the scale, some people try to pretend that for all practical purposes their gender is irrelevant, as though they were in fact neuter. At the other end, some people are always sizing others up as potential sexual partners, even if only in imagination. And, again, we know in our bones that both of these are distortions of reality.
Both, in fact, involve a form of denial. The former (imagining ourselves to be neuter) involves denying something deeply important about who we are and how we are made. We simply are gendered beings; and since this affects all kinds of attitudes and reactions, in numerous and subtle ways, we gain nothing by pretending that we’re not and that it doesn’t. The latter (seeing other people as potential sexual partners) involves denying something hugely important about the nature of erotic relationships, namely that there is no such thing as ‘casual sex’. Just as sexual identity, maleness and femaleness, goes near the heart of who we are as human beings, so sexual activity burns a pathway into the core of our human identity and self-awareness. To deny this, whether in theory or in action, is to collude with the dehumanization of our relationships, to embrace a living death. In short, we all know that sex and gender are hugely important to human living. But in this area we discover what we discover throughout human relationships, that things are far more complicated, and fraught with more difficulty, puzzles and paradoxes than we might have imagined.
One such complication is the fact that sex and death seem to have a lot to do with one another, and not only in second-rate novels and movies. It’s a paradox indeed, in that death seems to call into question the very notion that we are made for relationship at all.
* * * *
We search for justice, but we often find it eludes us. We hunger for spirituality, but we often live as though one-dimensional materialism was the obvious truth. In the same way, the finest and best of our relationships will end in death. The laughter will end in tears. We know it; we fear it; but there’s nothing we can do about it.
If this is paradoxical – we’re meant for relationship, but all relationships come to an end – we find in both parts an echoing voice which reminds us of the echoes we have heard in the first two chapters. Those faith systems which are rooted in the scriptures we call the Old Testament speak of human beings as made, irreducibly, for relationship: for relationship with one another within the human family (and especially within the male-female complementarity); for relationship with the rest of the created order; and for relationship, above all, with the creator. And yet, within the story of creation which remains foundational for Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all things within the present world are transient. They are not designed to be permanent.
That impermanence – the fact of death, in other words – has now attained the dark note of tragedy. It is bound up with human rebellion against the creator, with a rejection of that deepest of relationships and a consequent souring of the other two (with one another and with the created order). But the motifs of relationship and impermanence are part of the very structure of what, in the great monotheistic religions, it means to be human. We shouldn’t be surprised that, when we think of human relationships, we find ourselves hearing the echo of a voice, even if, as in Genesis, the voice is asking, ‘Where are you?’
The ancient biblical creation story offers a powerful and pregnant picture for all this: humans, it says, are made in God’s image. At first sight, that doesn’t help much, since we don’t know very much about God, so can’t deduce very much about who we are supposed to be. Nor (it seems) do we know as much as we might like about who we are, and so we can’t deduce very much about God, either. But the point being made is probably a different one. In the ancient world, as indeed in some parts of the modern one, great rulers would often set up statues of themselves in prominent places, not so much in their own home territory (where everyone knew who they were, and that they were in charge), but in their foreign or far-flung dominions. Far more statues of Roman emperors were found in Greece, Turkey and Egypt than in Italy or Rome itself. For an emperor, the point of placing an image of yourself in the subject territory was that the subjects in that country would be reminded that you were their ruler, and would conduct themselves accordingly.
That has, to us, a threatening sound. We are democrats. We don’t want far-off rulers giving us orders, still less (as we rightly suspect) demanding our money. But that only shows how much our relationships, with God, with the world, and with one another, have been flawed and corrupted. In the early stories, the point was that the creator God loved the world he had made, and wanted to look after it in the best possible way. To that end, he placed within his world a looking-after creature, a creature who would demonstrate to the creation who he, the creator, really was, and who would go to work to develop the creation and make it flourish and fulfil its purpose. This creature (or rather this family of creatures, the human race) would model and embody that interrelatedness, that mutual and fruitful knowing, trusting and loving, which was the creator’s intention. Relationship was part of the way in which we were meant to be fully human, not for our own sake, but as part of a much larger scheme of things. And our failures in human relationship are thereby woven in to our failures in the other large projects of which we know in our bones that we are part: our failure to put the world to rights in systems of justice (Chapter 1), and our failure to maintain and develop that spirituality which, at its heart, involves a relationship of trust and love with the creator (Chapter 2).
But the failures themselves, and the fact that we know of them in our bones, point to something which only the Christian tradition, out of the great monotheistic faiths, has explored in any detail: the belief that the creator himself contains, within himself, a multiple relationship. This is something we must examine later on. But it indicates well enough that if, as I have suggested here, we do indeed know that we are made for relationship and that we find relationships difficult, we can see this double knowledge as a further signpost pointing in the same direction as the two we have already examined. The call to relationship, and the sad rebuke for our failures at it, can be heard together as echoes of a voice. The voice is reminding us of who we really are. It may even be offering us some kind of rescue from our predicament.
We can already tell enough about that voice to know its owner if we met it. Its owner would be one who was totally committed to relationships of every sort – with other human beings, with the creator, with the natural world. And yet that owner would share the pain of the brokenness of each of these relationships. One of the central elements of the Christian story is the claim that the paradox of laughter and tears, woven as it is deep into the heart of all human experience, is woven also deep into the heart of God.