A Faith Let Go

“Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” — Matthew 6:8 (KJV)

Wynyard closed in 1910 for lack of pupils. After one term at a school in Belfast, Jack was sent in 1911 to Cherbourg House, a much better school in the English spa town of Malvern. He worked hard there and in 1913 won a scholarship. But it was at Cherbourg, between the ages of twelve and fourteen, that he quietly stopped being a Christian. Looking back, he gave several reasons, and none of them was dramatic.

One was a kind school matron who had drifted from ordinary Christianity into a vague mix of spiritualism and theosophy, and who talked about it to the boys. She wasn't trying to unsettle anyone. But to a clever, lonely boy, her talk made the plain faith he had grown up with seem less solid.

A second reason was the way he had been trying to pray. At Wynyard he had decided that a prayer didn't count unless he felt the right things while saying it. So he would lie awake night after night, saying his prayers over and over, trying to produce the proper feelings and never succeeding. It became a torment. Later he thought this kind of religion, which put all the weight on his own feelings instead of on God, made faith a burden he was glad to drop. When he dropped it, the relief was enormous.

A third reason went deeper. He noticed the waste and cruelty of the world. He saw that modern scholars treated the old gods of Greece and Rome as fables, and he couldn't see why the Christian God should be treated any differently. Nobody gave him an answer that satisfied him, and he didn't much want one. So, without telling anyone, he stopped believing. He kept going to chapel because it was expected. Inside, he was done with it.

In 1913 he followed Warnie to Malvern College. Warnie had loved it. Jack hated it from the first week. The school was run by the senior boys, and the younger boys were their servants, cleaning shoes and running errands at all hours. Everything revolved around sport, which he was useless at, and around popularity and power. He also hated the school's moral life: the snobbery, the social climbing, and a culture of favouritism among the boys, some of it sexual, which he wrote about frankly forty years later. Warnie thought Jack's account was too bitter, and the truth probably lies somewhere between them. But Jack was miserable, and his lifelong distrust of the desire to belong to the inner ring, the in-crowd, started there.

There were bright spots: a good library, a teacher who loved poetry, and the old Norse myths, which he devoured. And in the Easter holidays of 1914, back in Belfast, he visited a boy across the road who was ill in bed. His name was Arthur Greeves. On the bed lay a book of Norse mythology. Arthur asked whether Jack liked it, and Jack said he did. In a moment, each discovered that the other loved exactly the same things. They wrote to each other for nearly fifty years, and Jack told Arthur things he told nobody else, including, one day, the story of how he came back to God.

Jesus told his followers not to pray like people who think they will be heard for their many words, because “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.” Jack's problem wasn't that he prayed too little. It was that he made prayer about his own feelings instead of about God. Plenty of people do the same, and when the feelings don't come, they decide God isn't there. Feelings come and go. God doesn't depend on them.

One thing to do this week: pray once a day without checking how it feels. Say something honest and short, then stop. At the end of the week, notice whether it was harder or easier than you expected.