I’ve almost finished a novel by an author I have come to enjoy reading. M. R. Carey first came to my attention with his 2014 novel, “The Girl with All the Gifts” (which is now a movie). It’s a dystopian future story set in England (Carey is British) that describes the world after a fungal infection turns most of the population into what we might broadly call zombies. I found it to be a thoughtful story and not so horror-driven as many in the broader genre (generally, I’m not too fond of that kind of dystopian fiction). His follow-up prequel, “The Boy on the Bridge”, which I discovered last year, was also an enjoyable read, or should I say listen? It was one of the books I listened to during my hundreds of hours behind the wheel last summer.

Because I read two books that I liked, I decided to see if he had others I might like, which led me to “The Book of Koli”, the first in a trilogy Carey has published since 2020. It’s another dystopian future in England, but further in the future, and without zombies. Something went wrong in the world, and trees are now the predators, somehow evolving to seek out and destroy humans. There are also hints about genetic mutations and technology gone wrong, but by and large, in the story, at least, life in the future is primitive.  

Koli is the main character, a young man who describes this world in such a way that I found it a slow start to the book. The strangeness of the flora and fauna and the customs of his village are so strange, but described so matter-of-factly; it just took me a while to get into that world. I almost thought about stopping and getting a refund on that download, but I hung in there with it, and now I’m hooked. I won’t give away any plot points, but I want to reference a bit of the storytelling that I found interesting from a vocational standpoint. There are remnants of Christianity in the same way there are remnants of technology. References to some religious figure named Dandrake remind us that religion also mutates.

At one point, Koli explains that there is the God that is turned away. God is not “watching the world” and won’t turn back to the world until everyone has conformed to the law.  One of the tenants of the faith is that until that time, the people will have to “suffer under pain and preaching.” I confess I laughed out loud at that. Preaching has been known to cause pain and suffering! Are preachers God’s punishment in a world that just won’t conform to God’s law? (That is a rhetorical question, by the way – no follow-up emails necessary!) More interesting to consider is how one develops the sense that God is turned away from the world?

There have been those who have posited that God turned away from the world at Christ’s crucifixion, although it is not a mainstream bit of theology. By and large, we understand that God is always turned toward the world. It can be hard to imagine that to be true when terrible things are happening, which presents other theological problems. 

If you’ve ever read Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, you know the wrestling that people of faith can go through when it seems God stands by idly in the face of incredible tragedy or evil. Ironically, one of the ways to preserve faith is to take God out of the equation. God would never stand by idly; therefore, God must not have been there at all. Right? God must be turned away?

A world in which trees attack and most knowledge has been lost seems like an incredible tragedy, or worse. I suppose it’s possible to see how theology could evolve to posit that God was turned away under those circumstances. It might be easier to handle than the truth. That truth is what we still wrestle with regularly; how it is that God reigns over a world so full of darkness, destruction, and death?  

I don’t know, but I hope that the preaching we hear today is essentially that of Good News. I want to think the message is hopeful – a message of “God with us” amid pain, loss, and tragedy. God bears such things alongside and with us even as they continue. It’s not a cause-and-effect relationship; God doesn’t cause all these terrible things to happen or cause them by default by allowing them to occur in service to a grand design already predestined to play out. Of course, we Anglicans have never subscribed to such predeterminism or predestination, although that is a common theological coping mechanism for this conundrum.  

I find Carey’s fictional evolutionary theology both interesting and sad, though. I can see how it could become a reality in some distant future, and I also grieve that I can see that potential. Here and now, the pain and suffering around such things are supposed to be alleviated by the preaching of the Church. At least in theory. If it’s not, something isn’t going according to the Gospel. If we are suffering under the pain of preaching, something has gone wrong. Maybe it won’t be that God turned away from the world, but that the world turned away from God.

Tom+

Almighty God our heavenly Father, guide the nations of the world into the way of justice and truth, and establish among them that peace which is the fruit of righteousness, that they may become the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.