My father, who art in hospital

I was on a train yesterday morning when one of those public transport preachers you encounter from time to time got on. "Just five minutes of your time," he assured the carriage, before starting his efforts to save our souls with the words "The world is around 6,000 years old now." This piece of folly so startled me that I genuinely didn't take in much of the rest of what he said because I was going over in my mind ways to politely suggest to him that he may waste less of his time and better engage more of us non-believers if he didn't start with such a bizarre statement of 'fact'.

I did no such thing, of course. I did what everybody else did, what everybody else always does - I waited him out in silence before he finished up and moved to the next carriage. I do remember some of what he spouted over the next few minutes - stuff about babies not needing to be taught to lie, that we're all born into sin, that the world is full of murder, paedophiles etc. The usual mix of preaching and Daily Mail style hysteria.

Why have I brought this up now, after months without a blog entry? It's not as if there's been nothing to write about - take your pick from corruption in sport, the Russian jet, Paris, Kenya etc. There's been plenty of stuff worthy of saying at least something here. So I don't know. But this is nothing if not a personal blog, and it's personal stuff that's brought me back here. Standing on the train listening to this fellow, I wasn't doing the usual commute into work. I was actually heading south, to meet my brother and my mother, in turn to head off to Eastbourne to see my father, who's in Intensive Care in the hospital there.

My dad has just had a major operation - they've taken out a major organ, a bit of something else and the cancerous tumour that put him in there in the first place. That's why I was heading down there and not into work. What has this got to do with the preacher?

Well the surgeon who assisted the op spoke to us before we went in to see Dad, to tell us what to expect when we saw him, what had gone on in theatre etc. He was honest with us, as both Dad and we had asked him to be, and one of his questions was whether we're religious. None of my family are - my parents left my brother and me to decide these things for ourselves, neither stopping us attending church nor suggesting we should. It simply didn't come up during our youth. The surgeon, learning this, said that he wasn't either, he merely 'didn't want to close off that source of support'.

There is, on the same floor as the ICU at Eastbourne, and at the Royal Sussex County where both my parents have spent time recently, a chapel and a chaplain for people who do take comfort from their faith at times like this. Part of me envies the succour they must get from it, but this wouldn't be my blog without the words 'wind me up' in it, and the greater part of me is indeed wound up by this juxtaposition of church and medicine.

Where was God last Thursday week in Paris, when innocent people were being slaughtered in his name? Where is he for my mother who, having suffered a stroke which almost killed her in November 2013, now has to hobble to the hospital to see the very man who's cared for her at home during her own rehabilitation? This woman, so full of compassion and love for others, so completely selfless, who better exemplifies the qualities to which we're all urged to aspire in various holy texts than anybody else I know, would certainly deserve better in any world in which people get what they deserve.

They don't, though, do they? Much of the stuff I could have written about these past few months serves only to illustrate that fact all too clearly. So she sits watching over a husband she's doted on for the best part of fifty years while I contemplate if the always-empty chapel next door couldn't better be used as a bar, frankly. Watching and hearing the reactions of the other loved ones sharing both a waiting room and a waiting game with us, each with their own stories, their own hopes and tragedies unfolding in front of us, I don't think I was alone in feeling more like a pint than a prayer.

The sins of our fathers

In the news in the States at the moment, the horrible, if not entirely unpredictable demise of one Mark Wolford, a preacher who took the word of the Bible rather more literally than proved good for him. Full story here, but the short version is that he handled extremely dangerous snakes as part of his services, in an effort I suppose to test both his own faith and the veracity of Mark 16: 17-18, which is quoted in the article I've linked to.

I don't even really know where to begin with the folly of this, with the inevitability of it. I realise that this is, of course, not the fault of religion per se, and entirely down to the stupidity and hubris of the individual involved, but what the fuck? Watching his own father die in exactly the same circumstances didn't teach this man anything? And who took their moral and spiritual guidance from such an individual? If they saw his ongoing preaching as evidence of his divine protection, what do they think caused his death?

The late Mr Wolford did not seem unduly troubled by doubt, notwithstanding his father's fate. "If I didn't do it, if I'd never gotten back involved, it'd be the same as denying the power and saying it was not real," he is reported as having said. Well, needless to say, I don't see it like that. The only thing he was denying is the plain fact that, if you're to accept his world view as a truth, either his father's faith was insufficient to save him, or there is no such God-given protection. Such post-rationalisation is typical of blind faith, though, if understandable in a preacher. You'd have to find some reason for seeing your father die in a test of faith which was neither of those realities, or you'd chuck it all in.

So, of course, this is his fault, not religion's. But take away the blind, stupid certainty of his faith, and he might at least have sought medical treatment, had he been messing with venomous serpents in the bloody first place. If there were any such entity, I'd be asking God to ensure that nobody else died in such a fashion in His name, and that Mr Wolford's children, if he had any, learn the lesson which eluded their father.

A sense of loss

It's a good thing I don't believe in God, because if I did, on days like yesterday, I'd absolutely hate Him. Seeing pictures of that Belgian coach destroyed in the accident in Switzerland, killing 22 children and 6 adults, you can only see such an occurrence as an accident, entirely without design or will behind it. Anything else is so horrible as to be beyond reason – it would be the most vicious, cruel and wanton evil imaginable if it were any kind of act behind it, or any kind of act of omission of act by something or someone, that could stop it. Surely, surely no supposedly benevolent deity would do such a thing, or allow it to happen?

I cannot begin to imagine the suffering of the parents of those kids, perhaps especially those travelling to Switzerland who still don't know the fate of their own child(ren). Seeing the face of the pastor of one of the schools were two of the dead adults and several of the children worked or attended, he looked like a man who had no idea how or why this could happen, a man struggling to reconcile his own beliefs with the reality of the event which confronted him and the others it had affected so horribly.

Friends and relatives gathered at a church, I guess as a point of shared contact for the human comfort it affords, being with others who truly understand and share your suffering, because I cannot imagine there can be any comfort drawn from the belief that those kids now sit with a God who chose to take them. It's an awful contradiction and one of the reasons I can never understand faith. Indeed, even the priest conducting the ceremony was forced to face a question which must have been in every one of those suffering minds – has God abandoned us, he asked, presumably rhetorically.

No, of course not. What I suspect is abandoning some of them, entirely reasonably given the circumstances, must be their sense of trust in God, their certainty of His existence. It's easy to say this of course, sitting here miles away, not knowing any of the victims, but the only way to rationalise this awful tragedy is as a horrible accident, the cause of which, doubtless eventually to be ascertained by investigation, had nothing to do with anyone or anything's design, celestial or otherwise. That will not, of course, help the parents with their grief, but may help them feel less angry about it later, if they're able to come to see it like that. Like I said at the start, if I thought somebody were behind this, or could have stopped it and did nothing, I'd absolutely hate them.