15 Hours to Think About Tigers

We had a 15 hour bus journey into Zambia on Tuesday, during which I finished Life of Pi. And it’s a brilliant book and I would recommend it highly. I won’t ruin it for you but it’s beautiful because it ends with a huge question mark, and that’s always better than simply a full stop.  Although it’s somehow unsatisfying at the same time. Anyway, I had a long time to think about it and it really did get me thinking. The book says a lot of interesting stuff about tigers, but I was most interested in what it says about doubt and faith. There’s a beautiful quote near the end – when Pi tells some officials his story and they tell him it’s not really believable – he says this:

“If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? ... Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

They reply, “We’re just being reasonable.”

“So am I! Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit, Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”

I love that line. Which is funny because I’m a huge fan of reason, and I’m constantly attempting to explain to people how reasonable faith is - how much evidence there is for Jesus, how much God makes sense. But if I’m honest, that line about the bathwater has really got a point. When you get to the really big things, the glorious things – the existence of life, the experience of love, a relationship with God – reason is just not a big enough tool box. Maybe God created life and love and beauty and cares about us creatures; maybe we are an utterly marvellous cosmic accident, a one in a million – who knows maybe there are a million other universes out there failing to contain such glorious flukes; or maybe we do have a creator, we do have a purpose, but no one bothered to tell us who or what that is. Reason charges boldly towards the canyon and then skids desperately to a halt, scrambling backwards and gasping for breath as rocks and earth tumble into the profound abyss of maybe.

And so each of us has a life. And we have a choice between staying in doubt, or moving from doubt to faith. Of course if we choose the leap of faith there are many places we may try to leap to – including atheism – but the first choice is whether we are going to leap anywhere at all. The book has another awesome bit about doubt:

“Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the Garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Corss, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

Agnosticism, doubt, uncertainty, is a kind of paralysis. Deciding that we’ll never know what the purpose of life is, is like building a house at a fork in the road. People pass by on their way and ask why you have built a house in the middle of nothingness – and you tell them that you couldn’t decide which road to take – “So you decided to stay here at the fork, forever?” – “It seemed the only reasonable solution.”

On a deeper level than just quotes (which I won’t explain because it would be boring and would completely ruin the book for you), Life of Pi is all about the choice between imagination and “dry, yeastless factuality”, that refuses to see higher, further, differently. I’m not an expert on literature (yet) but I think basically the message is that it’s better to imagine a life worth living than settle for one that isn’t. But on this one, I’ve got a better idea. I would recommend to you not imagination, but hope.

There’s a difference. Someone once said that, “Faith can move mountains. Even if sometimes God hands you a shovel.” Imagination is the gift of seeing the world differently to how it really is. And hope does that too – it has a vision of a different world. But hope picks up a shovel. Hope does not ignore the real world, it changes the real world. Faith does not leap out into nothingness and enjoy the fall into oblivion. Faith jumps for the other side, and discovers a whole new land. A question mark is a beautiful thing, but it doesn’t have to be the end because this life turns out to be a dialogue. God speaks. I’m not saying we should pretend that life has a purpose, that love and beauty and peace are more than illusions or animal instincts, I’m saying we can believe that it really is true. There’s a a bit in the Bible that says, “I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air”. I love that. Me and my family, Rachael, my church, my mate risking his life in China - we are not shadow boxing. We’re not wasting our lives on a pleasant, admirable fantasy. We’ve made the leap, and we’ve landed on solid ground, and I just want to tell you that it’s beautiful over here.