Transcripts

Episode 1: Epistle to the Faithful

On the day that the continents began to sink, I lost my faith in God.

It wasn't a crisis of faith, brought on by the terrible news. I did not raise my fist to the sky and curse God for abandoning mankind. It was simply an absence; the sudden realization that something wasn't there. Where faith had been in my heart, there was nothing - and I couldn't tell whether that was good or bad. It just... was.

I'm sure you came to the church, looking for answers - or rather, looking for reassurance. You needed me to be there, to tell you the sinking would stop; that God would command the waters, as he once did for the Israelites. And I would have told you to pray, because prayer looks and feels like you're doing something... even when you're doing nothing.

But when you came to the church, I wasn't there. There were no comforting words, no rituals to ease the mind. There was just silence.

I would like to tell you that I'm sorry, but I don't know if that's true.

My grandmother used to say that the worst of all sins is hypocrisy; better the sinner who believes his sin a virtue than the saint who has no faith. That was me, although perhaps by accident. Still... didn't I know? Didn't I know all along?

You came to me with your problems, with your doubts, and I gave you answers. Answers that were supposed to be more than just my opinion, more than just pretty words. They were supposed to be a direct line of communication to the man upstairs - to whom, after all, I had dedicated my life.

I was... an authority. Like those men who confidently assure us that the sinking will stop, that the economy will recover, that our enemies will be defeated... that our enemies deserve to be defeated. Matters of faith.

Do those people believe all the things they say? Do they need to tell themselves it's all true, to embrace the lie, so they can look themselves in the mirror? Or is it just a job and the words mean nothing? I think... I think I lied to myself as much as I lied to you. Whenever doubts started to creep in, I told myself I was merely exhausted, depressed, or overwhelmed.

The truth is that my faith had become a routine, a set of stock phrases repeated not to heal, but to numb the pain. I had no answers, but I always had a convenient quote. And if nothing else fitted... well, God works in mysterious ways.

Should faith be self-evident? Isn't that what faith is - when you just know? If you're beset by doubts, if you have to convince yourself, trick yourself with words and images... that's not faith, is it? That's desperation.

I remember how once, years ago, I was watching the news, and a report came on about a wedding somewhere in the Middle East, which had been hit by a missile launched from a drone. I saw the face of the bride, who had lost her family, lost the man she loved... and without thinking, I reached out in my mind to God and prayed. 

Prayed for the woman to find peace, prayed for the soul of the one who pushed the button.

But now, as I sat there watching the news, seeing projection after projection of how quickly the waves would claim the land, that impulse to reach out... was gone. There was no resentment, not even disappointment. There was just nothing.

All of it - the books, the symbols, all the physical trappings of my faith... they were just objects. The church was not a holy place; it was just a building. It wasn't even my building, or some kind of home. It was just a collection of bricks. If some kind of truth existed, if I belonged somewhere... it wasn't here.

So I got up and started walking.

I walked out of the church, down the road, past the tanks and the police vans, past the beggars and the protestors,  and just kept going until I reached the sea. 

People had assembled to watch the harbour sink. The waves were enormous, terrifying, incomprehensible in their sheer power. The cliffs on the eastern side of the harbour looked like they might collapse, and the buildings had been evacuated... but someone was standing at the top of the lighthouse.

When I arrived, one of the onlookers recognized me, and a police officer spoke to me. He said the man in the lighthouse was someone I knew; a fellow priest called Thomas. Would I be willing to try and convince him to come down before the whole thing fell into the sea?

I agreed to do it. Losing my faith had not changed my moral principles, although it had robbed me of the words to properly express them.

The policeman gave me a megaphone, but shouting at Thomas wasn't going to help. So I went up to the lighthouse myself. 

I thought about Thomas as I walked up the empty road, covering my face to avoid being blinded by the constant spray from the waves.

Thomas had a different kind of faith than mine, one that I both admired and felt unsettled by. He'd grown up in a deeply religious environment, one in which the existence of God was taken as a given; more than that, one in which faith was part of every common activity, discussed and celebrated openly and socially. This gave him a lightness, a levity almost, born of absolute certainty. Sometimes I envied how simple and clear the world felt to him, how easy that made it for him to be kind, to be selfless.

But then, sometimes I thought that if you are born into the faith, you never really come to God, do you? You're just told all the answers without having to look for them yourself, and... is that still faith? Or is it just... culture?

I reached the lighthouse. I was numb, but I did feel a dull, insistent fear, a sort of primal response to the sound of the crashing waves. My body was a machine built by millions of years of evolution, and it instinctively knew that the sea was life and death incarnate.

Thomas was looking out at the horizon. He greeted me absently and in that moment I knew that there was very little I could do. Then he surprised me by asking me whether I remembered a plane crash.

It had happened several years ago. A plane had been struck by lightning and disintegrated over the ocean; 312 people were killed. But then the news reported that one family - two parents and two children - were saved from the disaster. They started feeling sick at the airport and decided to postpone their flight.

People came to him, Thomas said, and they told him: it's a miracle! God intervened. God wanted them to live. And Thomas asked himself: why didn't God want all those other people to live, too? But he nodded, and said: yes, the Lord works in mysterious ways. After all, it did feel so... specific. Intentional. Like a hand had reached out and stopped them just in time.

Then, a week later, that entire family was killed in a car crash. 

Thomas couldn't stop thinking about the moment of the crash, he said. Metal pressing into flesh until it ripped. The childrens' bones breaking. How much did they suffer? When the car came to a halt, when they were lying there, bleeding out, did they think "but God saved me! why is this happening to me?" Or was it all too fast, just an explosion of agony and fear followed by darkness?

This time, no-one came to tell him it was a miracle.

But if it was easy to believe that the hand of God had protected those people, then what now? This second event was even more unlikely, even more specific. The intent was clear: God had wanted them to die.

He'd just missed the first time.

In fact, Thomas said, getting up on the railing, why do we keep talking about God saving people? The one thing we share with every living being is death. The whole world is designed to give birth to creature after creature, billions and trillions of us, and the only thing that's certain is that we're all going to die.

Maybe, he said, God just really likes to kill.

—

Narrated by Peter Wingfield

Written & Directed by Jonas Kyratzes

Music & Sound by Chris Christodoulou

Peter Baker as the Voice of the Whirlwind

Violin - Kalliopi Mitropoulou

Violoncello - Zoé Saubat

Cover art - Daniele Giardini