The Prayers Of Two Atheists

On Good Friday today, I cannot help remembering a most remarkable experience that I had in Cambridge within a few months of my arrival here from Delhi seven years ago in the white winter of 1998. I was then, and I perhaps am even today, a 'confused believer', meaning by that phrase a person who does not, on the one hand, deny the existence of God but who, on the other hand, fails to understand why a transcendent God, perfectly blissful in God-self, should have wanted to create a precarious world of fragile beings who are forever steeped in so much abject misery. These mortal questions were put to me most pointedly one cold November evening in 1998 when I went to a graveyard situated seven miles from my college, Trinity. As I was walking through the narrow rows of speechless gravestones, trying not to step on the autumn branches that were strewn all over the moist earth, I saw a middle-aged woman wearing a shining black coat kneeling at one of the gravestones, and softly murmuring something to herself. I stopped in my steps and was trying to read the epitaph over her shoulder when she suddenly turned round, stared at me for a frozen moment and, while still kneeling, burst out crying.

Almost at once, however, she restrained herself and fell silent. With her, so did the black crows on the leafless branches above, and a most dreadful silence began to fill the cold distance between us.

'I hope you will excuse me', she said at last breaking the uneasy calm, 'For a moment I thought you were him. You do bear a striking resemblance to him, and I felt that he had come to pay me a visit today.' And that was how she started narrating to me some isolated fragments of a heart-stirring story.

She, Fiona McGrath, had been born sometime in the 1950s in the poverty-stricken highlands of Scotland, though she could remember neither of her parents. She had been adopted by a man, Mark Witherington, who had taken her under his wings from an orphanage in the outskirts of Inverness and who now lay buried in front of her. It was in his home in Cambridge that she had spent most of her childhood and teenage years, and his home was the place around which some of her fondest memories were centred. He had lived mostly by himself, devoting all his spare time away from his work to being with her. Three weeks before he died on Good Friday, 1982, he had told her that his entire life had been one relentless protest against God for having created this world, this vale of suffering, and that the true atheist was not the person who denied God's existence but the one who did not repeat God's mistake of creating this world by bringing babies into this world. It was for this reason, he explained, that he had never desired any children of his own, but had adopted her with the hope that he might be able to remove a little bit of suffering from this world.

As for Fiona herself, she was an atheist in the spirit of her father. She would come to the graveyard every year on Good Friday and pray. But pray to whom or to what? She simply did not know. She would kneel down at his gravestone, drink in the surrounding silence, and strengthen her resolve to carry on through her own life the long protest that her father had sustained against the faceless, the nameless, the heartless, and, above all, the pointless God.

Last year, I went to that graveyard again on a summer evening, and when I went to the familiar spot close to the dilapidated brick walls, I saw a new gravestone beside the old one, that of Fiona McGrath's. Beyond their gravestones, the red sun was slowly going down into the misty fields where three black cows were quietly grazing, unware of the devious ways of gods and human beings. And high above them, there were two stars shining at each other in the dusk sky, stars that were scrupulously guarding the graves of two atheists and were patiently passing on their unspeakable prayers to a speechless God.