fatal
stabbing
gang
warfare
global
terror
gun
crime
suicide
bombings
movie
violence
internet
seduction
campus
massacres
black
rain
black
rain
THE REPORTER'S TALE - EXCERPTS
Now,
whatever doubts I
may harbour about what did happen to me in Alor Star, I have no doubt
at all that this vision in Penang was from God and I described it exactly
as it happened. What’s more, I have come to admire and even worship
that single vision since it seems to me such an exact and brilliant
metaphor for a world in violent change; a vision which even manages
to subvert all our conventional understanding of why the world is in
such a mess. That vision of the black rain says very clearly, to me
at least, that we live in a world where most of our artists, writers
and communicators are obsessed with perversion, crime and violence
and this obsession is, in itself, leading the world into a growing
disorder. Once we have grasped the simple insight, enshrined in the black
rain, we do indeed start seeing the world anew, seeing
the world perhaps as God sees it.
I believed the
media were busy inciting the world to violence and, perhaps my main worry
was that I might even be a prophet who, like many other prophets, didn’t
want to get involved and just wished that God would pick on someone else.
I didn’t want to be a damned prophet. The very last thing I wanted
to be was a damned prophet. I knew about the Biblical prophets, strange,
mad people who lived with prostitutes or in caves; who suffered much
because people never listened to them, but laughed at them and even threw
rocks at them when they tried to explain the devious and often wild words
of God. No one took any notice of a prophet.
For
most of my adult life I had been haunted by these
visions, I told evangelist David Watson, and the worst feature was
that they seemed to be true. They made sense of a world struggling
with ever-greater terror, riot and crime because we didn’t
understand where it was all coming from. Did he think God wanted
me to do something? " If there is a purpose it will be revealed
in time,” he said. “But you should just live your life
and take it as it comes. God is real and you should trust him. That’s
what it means to have an honest, loving relationship with him. Nothing
else matters.
David
Watson didn't convert
me in York but he thoroughly discomfited me. His words kept rattling
around inside me like the ball in a pinball machine: his personality
set off chain reactions deep within me and, when I sat down to write
my Easter column, I poured my heart and soul into it under the simple
headline REVIVAL.
About two thirds of my way into it, which I wrote in longhand, I took a deep breath and fiddled with my pen for a bit. Evan Roberts was staring at me from a distant Welsh valley, the words of David Watson were alive inside me from York. These might be the last words I ever wrote for a newspaper, but it had to be done; I might even have been preparing all my life to write just this one column. If I was mad, I was mad; if I was fired I was fired. I went on to write about my visions in Malaya and how my understanding of what these visions represented had become better and clearer over the years, particularly during my journey through the media and doing this column. I now knew, as an absolute article of faith, that the modern media has become the mother and father of all terrorism everywhere. It was also clear to me that a media in love with violence was responsible for most major crimes in our modern world from the assassinations of our leading figures, particularly in America, to the alarming spread of violence on our housing estates and soccer hooliganism in our stadiums. This is the meaning and mystery of the black rain.
About two thirds of my way into it, which I wrote in longhand, I took a deep breath and fiddled with my pen for a bit. Evan Roberts was staring at me from a distant Welsh valley, the words of David Watson were alive inside me from York. These might be the last words I ever wrote for a newspaper, but it had to be done; I might even have been preparing all my life to write just this one column. If I was mad, I was mad; if I was fired I was fired. I went on to write about my visions in Malaya and how my understanding of what these visions represented had become better and clearer over the years, particularly during my journey through the media and doing this column. I now knew, as an absolute article of faith, that the modern media has become the mother and father of all terrorism everywhere. It was also clear to me that a media in love with violence was responsible for most major crimes in our modern world from the assassinations of our leading figures, particularly in America, to the alarming spread of violence on our housing estates and soccer hooliganism in our stadiums. This is the meaning and mystery of the black rain.
Even
as we crossed the causeway into Lindisfarne I lost
my heart to the place, enchanted not just by the spectacular view
but by the island’s promise of holiness. Islands mediate the
concept of holiness to us. They are places of pure solitude where
man, alone, may seek out and attempt to understand the nature of
the mystery. The surrounding sea is the very material of God – the
way of baptism, regeneration and faith; the waters in which we must
be born again. To such islands the soul might return after death.
If you listened very closely you might hear something of the breaking
heart of God. “I bring you his love. I bring you his tenderness.
I bring you his wild word but, most of all, I bring you his most
urgent warning that, unless this season of black
rain comes to an end, the harvest will be dead.”
When Christ steps back on the stage of the world it will surely be somewhere like this; not to a fanfare of trumpets in a decorated coronation coach but on his own, with a staff and barefoot, following the Pilgrim’s Way, a line of rough wooden poles, and to the welcoming fanfare of a couple of stray sandpipers.
When Christ steps back on the stage of the world it will surely be somewhere like this; not to a fanfare of trumpets in a decorated coronation coach but on his own, with a staff and barefoot, following the Pilgrim’s Way, a line of rough wooden poles, and to the welcoming fanfare of a couple of stray sandpipers.
The
Garden of Eden was modelled on California, they like
to say, and it was easy to see why. But a tempest had been blowing
through California for years and had met with so little resistance
it had undermined the whole basis of the family, weakened all in
its love of thrills; animalised all in its insistence on the worship
of sex in the zinc shrine of the perfect orgasm; debased all in its
wallowing in morbidity and incest, been so utterly remorseless in
its attack that it had turned this – a Garden of Eden – into
a valley of Valium and vibrators, an arena of divorce and leather
queens, home to those who abandon their families in the name of better
sex – this was the most venal and self-indulgent society on
the face of the earth.
The
Ghostly Glow of television sets flickered behind
almost every window. They were everywhere I looked. Hell was probably
illuminated by the same palsied sheen. I knew I was travelling across
that same silvery plain I had first seen in my Malayan visions with
bands of artists standing on a cliff and shelling the people of the
plain with their destructive romantic ideas. I caught on to something
else in that fetid dusk too. Los Angeles was the home and lair of
the fungus. I was on a bike ride into hell.
Lisa
survived four shots but others were not so lucky.
Ryan made for the rustic High Street, giving them, in Rambo’s
words, a war they couldn’t believe, and would never forget.
A twenty-year-old woman lay dead as he fired indiscriminately at
the townsfolk, none of whom he could claim as a friend. He killed
fifteen people that day and injured a further fifteen. He had let
loose a hundred and nineteen shots, according to a later report by
a ballistics expert. Eighty-four were fired from the Kalashnikov
and all but one of the remainder from a Beretta. One shot was fired
by a 30-calibre MI semi-automatic. After spending a day interviewing
as many eyewitnesses as we could find in Hungerford, we went to a
hotel and, together with the video of First Blood for which we found
a VCR, we drew clear parallels between that and what we had learned
about Ryan.
For
me it was particularly interesting and even exciting
that, in the same chapel where I had taken my first steps into faith
as a thirteen-year-old child full of fear, I was now making real
strides into it as a fifty-year-old alcoholic full of regrets. But
it wasn’t a pulpit which was telling me how to turn my life
around. It was a programme of recovery run by drunks. The testimonies
in that room had made me face myself. I had forgotten God if only
because I was sure he had forgotten me. But here he was back in my
life again, holding open the door to a new life, talking to me through
others, warm, concerned, insistent that I start doing the right things.
You can always do the right things when you get sober: it’s
one option you can always take. Drinkers seize on a dozen options,
most of them wrong. Once you’ve seen what’s wrong with
you and accept it you put things right by doing the right things.
I was
full with every species of remorse when I turned
up on the doorstep of Quarr. I had been drinking on the ferry and
fell in through the monastery front door. Dinner had begun in the
refectory, with a man in a small, brick pulpit reading from a book
as the other monks ate silently and, when someone put a plate of
beetroot and scrambled egg in front of me, I had to jump up and run
out into the cloister garden, where I was sick all over their roses.
Bells heralded the start of Compline or evening prayer and, still groggy, I sat in the rear pew watching the thirty or so robed monks take their place in the choir stalls. At the end the abbot sprinkled holy water over them as an act of purification. I wanted to purify myself. That was the door I had to get through to meet God or faith like these fine men around me. It was probably in that pew that I determined to pull my marriage together. I would never be able to live without Liz and so it was that I prayed that weeping night in Quarr that I hadn’t left it too late.
Bells heralded the start of Compline or evening prayer and, still groggy, I sat in the rear pew watching the thirty or so robed monks take their place in the choir stalls. At the end the abbot sprinkled holy water over them as an act of purification. I wanted to purify myself. That was the door I had to get through to meet God or faith like these fine men around me. It was probably in that pew that I determined to pull my marriage together. I would never be able to live without Liz and so it was that I prayed that weeping night in Quarr that I hadn’t left it too late.
I spotted
a small figure being wheeled towards me in one of
the official blue invalid carriages with a hood and big wheels. I
had seen plenty of illness since I arrived but the sight of this
small figure hit me across the face like a wet towel. The boy was
a wraith with a thin, pointed face and shrunken head, barely any
hair, cold dead eyes and blotched skin. There was a dreadful absence
of animation about every part of him to the degree that he barely
seemed alive. His lower forearms and hands were parchment skin on
bone, his fingers tiny and skeletal. Not so much a boy as a disease
in a human shape and you knew that this terrible illness, perhaps
AIDS, was going to kill him. After I had recovered from the shock
I was left with only one question: why am I feeling so sorry for
myself? This boy had never been offered anything but a handful of
spit and a bucket of broken glass. He would never know the exquisite
joys of holding a woman, never journey much beyond his sick bed.
He had no present and not much of a past. I had no right to feel
sorry for myself. I decided never again to ask God for anything,
but be content to receive whatever he might be gracious enough to
offer me in the sunset of my years. That moment in Lourdes was my
greatest breakthrough. I simply handed over my life to the care of
God and since then have never had so much as one moment of spiritual
difficulty or doubt while God also has faithfully looked after me.
I stood
in this street of death and life holding the handlebars
of my bike on the spot where Christ, exhausted by nights of examination
and scourging, fell under the weight of his Cross and Simon of Cyrene
was ordered by the Romans to help him. Somewhere on the next corner
he met his mother and all the sorrow of the world was in the rapt
and silent looks they exchanged. She knew he was about to give himself
to the world on the cross as she had given him to the world on the
floor of a stable. Later that afternoon the sun began sinking behind
the Judean desert, its rays striking directly across the Dead Sea
and lighting up the high cliff walls of the Hashemite Kingdom of
Jordan: a luminous gold at odds with the featureless darkness of
the sea. I saw it that day as God has seen it forever. As the land
looked now, so Moses and all the prophets saw it as they travelled
north looking for the land of milk and honey. Here was a landscape
steeped in its own silence and colour, a place waiting with the stoicism
of ancient rocks for the long-promised return of our Man of Sorrows.
