I continue to be moved by those who believe in God like that, but refuse to play the divine explanation game. That’s why I always thought believing Jews were more honest about the problem of suffering than believing Christians, like the rabbis in Auschwitz who put God on trial, found him guilty and then fell to prayer. It is rife in both Christianity and Islam, both religions with a passion for over-confident explanations. She attributes this well-known phenomenon to a combination of over-confidence and cluelessness, a not infrequent combination in the male of the human species. The feminist writer Rebecca Solnit coined the term ‘mansplaining’ to capture the experience of listening to a man condescendingly explain something to her. I wonder now if this is not a consequence of the male dominance of religious systems down the ages not that it is confined to religion. They demonstrated what to me has always been a weakness in most theological systems: the compulsion to explain the inexplicable, allied to an inability to live with uncertainty. Even when I did try to tell myself that story, I was never persuaded by the excuses theologians offered to get God off the hook.

But my discomfort is no longer that of the believer who has to fit that incident into the story of how a good God could have come up with a universe in which that kind of thing happens every second of every day. I know that feeling of uncertainty and discomfort.

Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew. The child, whose fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for “a long time”. I…read in the papers…the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year old woman with faded blonde hair who put her five-year old daughter out to die on the centre divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. She then describes the incident that prompted this beginning of doubt in the stories she had told herself. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. In a collection of essays published in 1979 called ‘The White Album’, Joan Didion wrote these words: Text of an address given by Richard Holloway at the 2019 PCN conference by way of introduction to his book Stories we Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe.