For want of better words... the impact of the indescribable

Confronted with a question about belief, Henna Cundill found herself stumbling for words. She contemplates the link between our self-identity and what we can communicate.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

A woman stops in her stride down a street and pensively runs her hand through her hair as she looks to the side.

Joseph Frank on Unsplash.

I recently got into conversation with a young man who asked me, “Do you believe in God?” When I replied, “Yes,” I almost regretted it, because his next move was to ask, “Why?” and I found this question troublingly difficult to answer.

Of course, I could have dredged up the old philosophical arguments for the logical existence of God – but none of that would have really captured the thing I have no words for. Belief is like… Oh, what is it like? A glitch… no, a glimmer… no, like a glimpse of… No. Goodness. What is it? I’m lost for a word or even a metaphor that will somehow express what it feels to say “yes” and “I believe in God” and in that moment, even if only for a moment, to feel oneself transported or transposed out of this tiresome, human existence and into something that is... well, it’s something…

I think it's fair to say that conversations about believing in God are unusual these days, especially when the circumstance is an 18-year-old lad talking with a woman in her late 30s – albeit the lad in question was a philosophy undergraduate and we were at Cumberland Lodge, where such conversations are welcomed amongst those of all faiths and none. Even so, it still felt rather unusual to be asked a question like that, not out of hostility but just casually over dinner, and to see him genuinely and respectfully interested to hear what I might have to say in response.

Eventually I did come up with some kind of an answer; I can’t remember what. And naturally, I turned the question back on him. Turns out he did believe in God, in fact he was Jewish, so he stumbled out some kind of answer too, but I think it's fair to say that he was hardly more erudite than I was. Eventually, we both agreed that it was rather difficult to describe the indescribable, and our conversation turned to rather easier topics - the food, the weather, geopolitics...

There is a loneliness to the feeling that there is a bit of ourselves that cannot be valued because it cannot be shared, and it is hard to recognise a part of our inner world as ‘real’ and valid if it cannot be communicated and affirmed.

The question of believing in God was done with. Yet here I am weeks later, still pondering why it was so hard for me to articulate what it means to live with that belief, and why that part of the conversation ended, but still felt so unfinished.

Has faith always been so indescribable? I suspect it rather has not. These dark evenings always tend to lure me to my bookshelves, seeking out my “comfort books” that I read and reread year after year. Mostly cosy fiction of course, but alongside those, a non-fiction favourite is Sheila Fletcher's, Victorian Girls: Lord Lyttleton’s Daughters. The book is a fascinating study of a family of young women in the Victorian era, faithfully compiled from their own real letters and diaries, so that the voices of Meriel, Lucy, Lavinia and May Lyttleton themselves can all be heard clearly on every page. I just love to read this book over and over again, entering into the hopes, sorrows, loves and ambitions of these young women – so similar and yet so different to my own.

One thing that stands out particularly is how clearly and easily they each articulate their sense of faith. They were, of course, heavily schooled in Victorian public piety, but there is most certainly a real faith there too. A favourite passage of mine is an excerpt from the teenage diary of Lucy Lyttleton, recounting the day of her Confirmation. She speaks of a ‘nice and stilling’ drive to church, with her parents either side in the carriage, and then:

I seem to remember nothing very distinctly till I went up and knelt on that altar step, feeling the strangest thrill as I did so… and I know how I waited breathlessly for my turn, with the longing for it to be safe done, half feeling that something might yet prevent it.

Oh, to be so thrilled by a religious ritual, and to have both the words and the courage to write about it. After all Lucy, what if someone might be reading your diary 150 years later?

In mainstream society nowadays, most of us simply don't talk about faith, religion, and what it all means to us personally in that way. It’s not the done thing in a (presumed) secular society. Consequently, it is now very hard to write about it too. Yet, many philosophers in the past century have observed a link between our self-identity and what we can communicate. For example, philosopher Charles Taylor describes how our sense of ‘self’ is formed in “webs of interlocution” wherein what we take to be “good” relies on what we can effectively talk about, and thus have affirmed by those we talk to. If we turn Taylor’s idea around, might we say that when there are parts of ourselves that we cannot talk about, parts for which we cannot find social recognition and affirmation, then we cease to value those parts of ourselves as good, or may cease to recognise them at all?

With that comes a sense of isolation. There is a loneliness to the feeling that there is a bit of ourselves that cannot be valued because it cannot be shared, and it is hard to recognise a part of our inner world as ‘real’ and valid if it cannot be communicated and affirmed.

To me it feels that, as we talk about faith less and less, and as the language of faith becomes ever more confined, not even just to private conversations but to our own inner worlds, our “webs of interlocution” are beginning to shrink and disintegrate – until believing in God can feel more like dangling on a loose and solitary strand than being part of any kind of web. It’s a lonely place to be – there is a part of me that feels important, but no one can affirm it.

And yet, by simply asking the question of each other, and being ready to listen respectfully to whatever answer was forthcoming, it seems that me and a teenage lad managed to connect two lonely strands together. It was of no consequence that we worship in different faith traditions, or that neither of us really found the words to say what we wanted to say – a conversation took place, and a certain web of interlocution started to form. For some, reading this, there may be a feeling of resonance, or a moment of understanding, and perhaps that too adds a little to the web, as different people’s words and thoughts and experiences begin to connect across different times and places.

Webs do more than just create connection; webs capture things too. Perhaps, as this web spreads between different readers and thinkers and speakers, that’s what will happen to this question of believing in God. After a certain point, such a web may even become large enough and robust enough to finally start to capture some useful words, or an apt metaphor, that will really help me to say something about what it means to have faith. To be able to say it is to be able to share it, and in these lonely times, being able to say something is really not nothing.

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War & peace

25 September 2024

6 min read

How Ukraine reckons with its reality

From Kyiv's coffee shops to the front line.

Mark Meynell

Mark Meynell is the author and minister.

A woman squats and touches a war memorial

War memorial in Bucha.

How on earth it came up I have no idea, but I vividly remember chatting with my grandmother about the ‘Phoney War’ of 1939. I can’t have been much older than 10. It’s not that I was especially inquisitive about history, nor that I had the presence of mind to ask for stories from her extraordinary life. How I wish I’d done that with all four of my grandparents. But my hunch is that it was prompted by sitting in the garden on a glorious summer’s day. We were probably shelling peas or peeling potatoes or something—she always got people staying to do jobs.

She was reminiscing about how weird those months in mid-1939 were, in particular remembering how lovely the summer had been, far brighter and drier than normal. Even after the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1st September (thus triggering Britain and France to declare war two days later), the weather remained good. A sense of war’s inevitability had hovered throughout 1939, so even after Chamberlain’s famous ‘final note’ was rejected, nothing much changed. At least, not for ordinary Britons. Life went on. It would take many months before the conflict came all too close to home.

I couldn’t help but think about this during my visit to Kyiv and Lviv earlier this month. The difference, of course, is that there was nothing phoney about Russia’s 2022 invasion or the horrors inflicted on eastern Ukraine since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. But for the majority, routines continued uninterrupted. As they must.

For example, assuming the worst, I had contacted several Ukrainian friends offering to bring any scarce or unavailable items from Britain. No one took me up on it; it was unnecessary, they all said. After wandering through both cities, it was obvious why. Although trade will undoubtedly have been slower than before the war, shops seemed well stocked with all the necessities and not a few luxuries.

Then on my final morning, I was quietly sipping a cappuccino in Lviv’s historic Rynok Square when the air-raid sirens suddenly cranked up into their now familiar whine. Being kept awake by Kyiv’s sirens had been a new experience for me (a mark of our Western privilege that we have avoided all-out war on our soil for decades). But this was my first daytime alert. It was even accompanied by booming Ukrainian announcements, although the advice was inevitably lost on me. As it was on all around me, who seemed assiduously to ignore it. The few mid-morning pedestrians—few tourists come here— maintained their ambling pace unchanged; the taciturn waiter patiently took orders at the next table; a middle-aged businessman on the square continued his negotiations on the phone while gesticulating with his briefcase. So naturally, I kept sipping.

This was not because the sirens cried wolf. Just 10 days before my visit, Lviv had suffered one of the worst air attacks of the war, with 7 killed, over 60 injured, as well as the destruction of schools and historic buildings. Moreover, I met a friend for lunch an hour later who told me that some man-sized drones had attacked his side of Lviv and he saw one or two shot down. So it was all real enough. What was everyone thinking?

Those who keep going amid a siren’s whine are not perhaps ignoring it but taking calculated risks in their perseverance.

Ignoring reality

T. S. Eliot famously observed that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." So perhaps that was what was going on here. After two and a half years of war, I can quite imagine exhaustion and resignation to what was going on. So it just gets ignored. Ordinary life must go on. After all, only a small proportion of the population is actively engaged in the war; the rest, if they haven’t already left, must try to keep calm and carry on. In fact, men aged between 18-60 are unable to leave at all without the necessary papers and these are hard to come by. Perhaps the only way, then, is to avoid thinking altogether. On a beautiful day, once autumn has begun to temper Ukraine’s oppressive summer heat, sustaining the illusion is simple. Life carries on.

Of course, it can’t last. Every single person I spoke to had family or friends at the front; some had already been killed. The destruction caused by air raids brought a distant conflict onto people’s doorsteps. However, it was driving through the pleasant Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, both of which I had previously visited several times, that reinforced the impossibility of ignoring reality. Bucha is now emblematic of the invasions very worst atrocities, from when Russian forces had Kyiv almost entirely surrounded before being pushed east. Locals were rounded up and slaughtered, with the bodies of several hundred civilians later found to have died from bullet wounds rather than shrapnel. But as we drove through, it was impossible to conceive of those horrors. Apart from anything, the weather was so lovely. Atrocities don’t occur on beautiful days… or in lovely places… surely?

Persevering amid reality

What impressed me most in those areas was the speed of the rebuilding work. Entire shopping malls and neighbourhoods had been razed. But after only twelve months or so, a memorial to Bucha’s 500 dead had already been erected. As we drove through, major construction projects were underway, with multiple cranes towering over rapidly rising apartment blocks and retail parks.

These are not signs of reality ignored but faced. These are signs of gritted hope. So it struck me that those who keep going amid a siren’s whine are not perhaps ignoring it but taking calculated risks in their perseverance. Just as it is unwise, if not impossible, to live on a permanent adrenaline rush, so one cannot always exist in flight or fight mode indefinitely. It is simply that in wartime, risk thresholds change. Human beings are resilient and adaptable. They endure the most extraordinary setbacks and conditions.

So, to be with Ukrainian friends in my limited, deficient expression of solidarity, has been inspiring. No one I met had any illusions about the realities of Ukraine’s current plight (especially with a harsh winter looming as Russia systematically destroys power stations). But still they persevere.

Seeking deeper perspectives of reality

However, Eliot did not primarily refer to bearing the reality of the mundane. As the novelist Jeanette Winterson explained, Eliot was identifying how little twentieth century society (that of his Waste Land in particular) could bear of spiritual reality. He meant the phenomenon of resistance to a journey towards God or of facing themselves as they stand before God.

However, the horrors of invasion and the nightly anxieties of air raids have put paid to all that. One friend I was glad to see again is Andriy, previously a fairly well-known Ukrainian journalist and now a church pastor. He regularly goes to the frontline as an unofficial chaplain, visiting troops in their camps and the injured in hospital. He was unequivocal. Before the war they would undoubtedly have been shrugged off. But now, he has not met a single soldier who is uninterested in the things of God and eternity. War has forced them to face their mortality and Andriy has found that most are desperate to talk about little else. These things matter. Even on a beautiful, bright, early autumnal day.