God & Me, Lucretia Stewart

GRANTA 93

Three years ago I was raped. A man broke into my flat in Camden in the middle of the night, woke me up by punching me in the face, menaced me with my own carving knife, tied me up, raped me and then threatened to burn me alive. Against overwhelming odds, I escaped. Afterwards I found myself saying over and over again, 'Thank you, God, for saving me.' I never once thought, 'Why did You let this happen to me?'

I realize how lucky I was to have that response, not to be bitter, but to be grateful. Bizarrely, I am even grateful that I was raped because it forced me to deal with reality, to evaluate my life and to realize what was important and what was not. If I hadn't been raped and if I hadn't believed in God and therefore reacted to the rape as I did, I wouldn't have the life I now have. I probably wouldn't have had the courage to leave London, even though I had been unhappy and dissatisfied there for a long time. Sometimes it takes something terrible to make you act. God does move in mysterious ways and it takes time to make sense of His plan.

It's almost impossible to describe how it feels to believe in God. There really aren't words elevated enough to explain it. You don't want to say that it's a safety net, though this is part of it. But to be a good Christian demands a very difficult response to life—forgiveness, magnanimity, humility, generosity, tolerance. I don't possess all those virtues by any means. I am aware that I am very intolerant and I pray for greater patience. I believe that, to avoid total selfishness and self-centeredness, particularly if you live alone, it is important to have a spiritual dimension to one's life and a belief in the Christian God is mine.

As I get older, I find myself more prone to despair. It becomes more and more difficult to be optimistic (though in the year after I was raped, I felt more hopeful than for many years, because I was alive). I have always tried to be a realist. I don't want to base my happiness on something false, yet I hate feeling hopeless. God, believing in God, helps. I sometimes think that I believe in God because life would be just too terrifying if I didn't. A priest once suggested that I use the mantra, 'Christ, walk with me,' as an antidote to despair. That usually works. And one day on the radio I heard someone quote these lines, 'My ending is despair/Unless I be relieved by prayer,' and they resonated.

I have believed in God all my life and I go to church regularly. This, I am convinced, is a direct consequence of the way that I was educated, which gave me a certain oudook on life, which enabled me to put what happened to me into perspective. Two weeks after the rape, I rang the Margaret Pyke Centre in Goodge Street to make an appointment for Aids and other tests. I was told that that there were no appointments for a month. 'But I've been raped,' I said. The woman on the phone told me that she had been raped, too—as an eight-year-old girl in Sri Lanka. My ordeal seemed insignificant by comparison.

The rapist stole the crucifix that I always wore round my neck and the first thing I did when I got to Naxos, where I now live, was to buy another one. I never take it off. I don't exactly believe that it protects me, but I do believe that it is a symbol of God's love and protection.

I don't know how people who are brought up in a secular environment ever decide to believe in God. If religion hadn't played such a large part in my childhood, I doubt that I would have been able to turn to God as an adult. Rationally the whole thing is so improbable that you need to accept it as a child to believe it as an adult. There was never a moment when God suddenly spoke to me and I believed. If that had happened, it might have had the opposite effect, given that I tend to be cynical and sceptical. But I seem always to have believed. It's a part of me. I don't have a mental picture of God—either as an old man with a long beard or as anything else—and it doesn't seem to matter, though trying to articulate what I mean by God is the most difficult thing that I have ever done. Christ is different. Because of the Gospels, it is easy to form a picture of Him. Yet it tends to be to God the Father that I turn in times of trouble.

I have also never distinguished between God and religion, that is between the Christian God and Christianity. The two have always been indivisible—you can't have God without His Church. The one is the visible manifestation of the other. It's lucky for me that I like church; it's no hardship to go every Sunday. In Naxos where mass is celebrated in a mixture of Greek and Latin in the small, white marble, twelfth-century cathedral, I rarely understand more than a few words of the sermon. Usually part of the pleasure of organized religion is familiarity with the ritual; the beloved hymns and so on. Here everything is totally unfamiliar, particularly because the Catholic Church follows the same calendar as the Orthodox Church, celebrating Easter later than the rest of Christian Europe. This forces me, perhaps, to think about what it actually means, even on the most basic level. After two years of going every Sunday, I still have to concentrate to understand the language of the liturgy and only recently can I read it in Greek without difficulty. I enjoy it all the same, perhaps all the more, though I know that religion is not supposed to be about pleasure.

A year after I was raped, I was asked to appear on a daytime television chat show about rape. It soon became clear that I was coping better than the other 'victims'. 'But you must think about it all the time,' insisted the presenter. 'No, I don't,' I said truthfully, 'I have other things to think about.' I like to think that my education, specifically my religious education, played a part in my ability to put what had happened to me into perspective. Being raped didn't make me religious, it didn't make me believe in God, but it had the effect of bringing home to me that I do believe and that fundamental belief, which underscores everything in my life, made it possible for me to cope.