The third weekly reflection based on our Lent course “The Mystery of Everything” 

In 2009 a group of atheists, including Richard Dawkins, backed by the British Humanist Association, started what was called the Atheist Bus Campaign. Several London buses could be seen with the slogan ‘There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ The writer Francis Spufford termed the slogan an absurdity, pronouncing that whilst enjoyment is good, it is just one emotion and that the implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be humanity’s natural state if it wasn’t for worries and concerns about God and sin. Also, such a slogan fails to take into account the desperate situations we can find ourselves facing and offers no hope or solace in our suffering. 

Spufford states “Let’s be clear about the emotional logic of the bus’s message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation of any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human condition. St Augustine called this kind of thing ‘cruel optimism’ fifteen hundred years ago and it’s still cruel.” 

It is clearly the case that life is not totally about enjoyment and that we, at times, can suffer its darkest moments through grief, loss, illness, addiction or other devastating experience. As finite creatures, bounded by time and limited by finite understanding, we may not understand why suffering comes to us but, unlike the atheist slogan, the Christian message is one which acknowledges those situations and offers hope and consolation to us in these times. It tells the extraordinary story of a God who suffers with us and for us. Because of this we know we can trust that God will lighten our darkness and that that we are not alone as we journey through those times of suffering. 

Dn Jill Scott