So long, and thanks for all the Turtles

I started to plan this service before I heard of the death of Terry Pratchett and this sermon is both my thoughts – eulogy perhaps – about the impact Terry has had on my religious and spiritual life, someone who, via their writing, I have had a relationship with for over twenty years.

Terry Pratchett was a humanist. He said his idea of heaven was Thomas Tallis, a good brandy and cats. Why Tallis? ‘because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven.’ Rather like the late Douglas Adams, he was an atheist who was fascinated by belief, by the power of story and myth. And he explored these to the fullest extent in his Discworld series of books. Unlike Adams, however, he never felt the need to dismiss religion and myth as the product of an earlier pre-scientific age. Despite – because of? - being an atheist, Terry’s books were full of religion; full of theology… they have a spiritual dimension. He filled the Discworld with lots of Gods:  Bileous, the “oh God” of hangovers? Why the “oh God”? Well if you’ve ever had a hangover, you’ll know why. Anoia the Goddess of things stuck in kitchen drawers, whose offerings are potato peelers and egg whisks. She is praised by rattling a drawer and crying "How can it close on the damned thing but not open with it? Who bought this? Do we ever use it?" As she says, sooner or later every curse is a prayer. She also eats corkscrews and is responsible for Things Down The Backs of Sofas, and is considering moving into stuck zips. These deities are there not only for comedic effect – they remind us how the divine, how spiritual matters and rituals permeate human life: the Divine is not shut out from any aspect of human life.

Pratchett muses that God’s are created by their believers and that we get the God (s) that not necessarily we want, but deserve... Gods are created and fuelled by belief, and Gods can whither and die from lack of belief. On the Discworld the Gods are real. To quote Granny Weatherwax

‘When you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you’re believing in gods. And then you’re in trouble.’
Nanny Ogg: ‘But all them things exist.’
Granny ‘It only encourages ’em… That’s no call to go around believing in them.’

The pagan Graphic Novel writer Alan Moore speculates in his graphic novel ‘Promethea’ that without langauge there could be no God (or at least, no idea of God, yet alone religion) because there would be no way of expression an experience of the Divine to others, no means of communicating that relationship.

 ‘Promethea’ explores various faith traditions, including Paganism and Jewish mysticism, especially the Qaballah. He has this to say on the monotheism of the Abrahamic religions:

’Monotheism is, to me, a great simplification. I mean the Qabalah has a great multiplicity of gods, but at the very top of the Qabalic Tree of Life, you have this one sphere that is absolute God, the Monad, something which is indivisible. All of the other gods, and indeed everything else in the universe, is a kind of emanation of that God. Now, that’s fine, but it's when you suggest that there is only that one God, at this kind of unreachable height above humanity, and there is nothing in between, you’re limiting and simplifying the thing. I tend to think of paganism as a kind of alphabet, as a language, it's like all of the gods are letters in that language. They express nuances, shades of meaning or certain subtleties of ideas, whereas monotheism tends to just be one vowel and it's just something like 'oooooooo'. It's a monkey sound.’

Like Pratchett, he argues that God(s) are the product of the human mind, human imagination and language, from a time when human societies didn’t know how wind or thunder worked. Moore again, ‘We don't live in that world anymore. We need to leave that old creator god behind with all the other myths of those times and envision a new reality that is the connection of all Life, its value and importance, and the connection of Life Itself in all things, that is the true reality of our Universe, of which we are only one tiny part. The story is much bigger than what is told in the Bible, or even what Jesus knew and talked about with his limited understanding.’

And to an extent he is right: all the images and ideas we have of God are man-made as are the structures we have to explore God. Yet God cannot be defined within the boundaries of human language but can, in a broader sense, be identified, pointed to, alluded to through the medium of language. Language reflects the ‘ideas’ so language can have a providential role as a vehicle. Language, and story, are the tools to talk about, describe, define, relate to God. But yet we can never truly "see" God.  We can, to a certain degree, speak of God, but language often falls far short of being able to describe God in a comprehensive manner, because God is a spiritual experience rather than something, an object, a definite article to be described.


Which is why we usually contemplate the attributes of this Divine Reality. That there is something timeless, Eternal, without beginning or end, it is infinite, encompassing, Unity, Sacred, Holy, Transcendent, Immanent, Everlasting, Intelligence, Loving, Compassionate, Merciful, Consciousness, Bliss, Supreme Good, Formless Spirit, Origin and Essence of all existence, etc, etc, etc... These attributes merely serve as pointers in guiding and helping us orient our own being in the direction toward the Reality that is all those attributes and much much more as well.

And yet language to describe God remains elusive, even when our understandings of God are most real. Spiritual experiences, as well as language to describe the world in which we live, are difficult to find words for. This lack of language for the Sacred is like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of my religious practice: I cannot both fully experience the Sacred and fully describe that experience at the same time.

 At points this is cause for frustration, while at others it merely affirms the extent to which I was truly present for a sacred moment.

We are often left searching, searching for words about what we believe, yet finding it easier to articulate what we do not believe (how very Unitarian). Struggling to speak in positive terms about our experience and what we do believe. Which is why we need language, story, myth even to be able to express these ideas and these experiences. And thus we return to Pratchett: God, fundamentally, is the creation of story, of myth, of language as they are the only means we have to describe an experience. Without the means to articulate that experience we can have no shared expression of that experience. Which is what religion is fundamentally about; a shared experience of the Divine.

 Story and myth are powerful because they are vehicles to express ideas, to express experiences. They tell us about our human condition. They tell us who we are; where we have come from; where we are going. The story doesn’t have to be true, the myth doesn’t have to be really real to have meaning and be life-changing. The reason C S Lewis abandoned his faith was because he could not believe the religious myths of his own religion. He said ‘myths are lies breathed through with silver.’  It took J R R Tolkein no less, that great lover of story, to help him find it again: ‘We have come from and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light…It is only through myth-making… and inventing stories… can Man aspire to the state of perfection.’  Stories tell us who we are and why we are.To quote Death in ‘Hogfather’:

HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”