The Security of faith

I was chatting to my mum the other day about religion. In fact it has become an increasing interest of hers since the Alzheimer's kicked in, though whether those two things are directly related is hard to say. I simply make the observation. She will usually ask (presumably because she has no memory of previous conversations on the subject) if I believe in God. In the past I would have claimed to be agnostic, but of late, partly in order to give her a little comfort, I have professed, like her, to be a good Christian.

But just to have a bit of a dialogue, this time I asked her the hoary old chestnut of "Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?" Surprisingly, she had her answer ready straight away:
"That's easy. When good things happen, it's God's doing; when bad things happen it's the work of Satan"

How delightfully simple! I thought to myself, while keeping my own counsel..My mum then painted a picture of an eternal struggle between the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, with the 2 main players locked in a kind of perpetual derby match with the stakes being the very souls of the Human Race. My mum has never been a deep religious thinker, and now her severe memory loss has further curtailed her debating powers. But hers are not just the rantings of a sweet, but demented old lady. As I understand it, her views are shared by millions of Christians around the world. Indeed, I think Islam and other religions have this battle against good and evil as a central plank of their faith. How convenient! How neatly this sorts out all the doubt and uncertainty- which I suppose is the definition of faith itself. However, I suspect that as in all things, temporal or spiritual, the truth is far more complex and ambiguous.

For at least the last 30 years I have been learning to make friends with death, because as my Cherokee medicine man teacher explained to me back in 1979, death is always at our shoulder. That is to say, rather than developing a faith that gives me comfort against the fear of death, I have been trying to accept its finality, while acknowledging that that ain't such a bad thing. I have enjoyed the immeasurably great gift of life, and must accept that one of the pre-conditions of life of every kind is that it has a brief span, otherwise the Earth would fall apart and evolution would never have happened. Or to quote Damien Hurst:
"We're not here for a long time, we're here for a good time"
And, I might respectfully add, to know ourselves and the Universe we have been fortunate enough to experience. Go to it, and forget good and evil- it's a copout, man!