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Good morning. I’ve been welcoming new students to University in the past few days. At the same time I’ve also been listening on Radio 4 to Beautiful World Where Are You by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney. Most students belong to the generation which Rooney portrays and I’ve found it fascinating. The relationships of the two key characters, Alice and Eileen are characterised by love and friendship, guilt and forgiveness, hope and uncertainty. As writers they are preoccupied with the question of why - in a world of injustice, poverty, and environmental catastrophe - we give so much time in the contemporary novel to what could be seen as the trivial narratives of friendship and falling in love. Do these stories simply suppress or distract us from the harsh truth of the world?

Some have accused Rooney’s characters of being typical of today’s under 30s - overly sentimental and politically naïve. Yet in her writing she reflects that this generation has considerable depth. For example, Rooney and her characters make intriguing references to the problem of evil, sin and St Augustine and to why Christian liturgy might invite you to lift up your heart.

The book’s title Beautiful World Where Are You comes from a 1788 poem by the German poet Friedrich Schiller. In it, Schiller draws a contrast between a pre-Christian age of happiness, harmony and sense of the divine at every turn and the Christian age which he sees as joyless, broken and where God is distant and abstract. Schiller cries out against the disenchantment of nature and the boring mechanistic world of a God who kick starts the universe but then goes missing.

While Schiller’s critique of Christianity reflects the angst of his age, it is not the Christian faith that I see and have experienced in Jesus. Indeed, in someone whose parables could also been criticised as sentimental and politically naïve, Jesus points to the presence of God in acts of love, justice, forgiveness and grace. Such small acts like planting a mustard seed can lead to something unimaginably greater.

I see a resonance of this in Rooney’s character Eileen who longs ‘to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care’. In a world which is broken, from violence against women to lack of responsible care for the environment, I need to see glimpses of a beautiful world which give me hope and energy to work for change. And while I may have things to share with this student generation, they have much to share with me - leading me to lift up my heart.

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