SEX, TERSE, AND NONES

The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof published a column on Sept. 4 titled "What Religion Would Jesus Belong To?" After noting that great religions often migrate far from the idea(l)s of their founders, and pointing out the staggering religious illiteracy among Americans who call themselves Christians, the column unsurprisingly moved to defending action above doctrine.

And in the age of Pope Francis -- who nevertheless, at the beginning of his pontificate, stressed that the Church's mission is not to become a religiously-tinted NGO -- this seems to be the way even the Catholic Church is tending. The Anglican church, of course, has been churning steadily in this direction for decades. Meanwhile, not only is church attendance falling but, as Kristof notes, the percentage of "nones", those who when asked their religion answer "none", is growing by leaps and bounds. In the very religious USA, it is now at 25% and among millennials at one-third; in Once-Catholic France it is not far from 50%.

Some clergy insist that this is not a problem. What is falling away, they say, is merely the churchgoing, and the adherence, out of habit; what is left is the core of true believers, real disciples, who are the essence of the church (and who, some though not many still claim, will some day change and convince the world by their faith and action). Others do see it as a crisis but persist in believing that the solution lies in "reaching out" ever more to the young and the unbelievers by "updating" the church, its doctrines and practices, and putting it "in tune" with contemporary life. Their explanation for the emptying of pews and the growth of the "nones" is that the church is old-fashioned, bourgeois, stick-in-the-mud, reactionary and unable to cope with the issues that really concern thinking people in our time.

As an Anglo-Catholic living in ever-more-aggressively-secularist France among Vatican-II-raised Roman Catholics, I have ample time, occasion and reason to ponder these issues. And over the years (because I am now numbered definitively among the Elderly if not the Elders) I have come to a few conclusions which contradict both the positions described above.

To the "thank goodness we are now left just with the core of true disciples" clergy I say the following: if bad habits can eventually ruin us, as we all know, why may good habits not eventually save us? I am convinced that those who went habitually to church every Sunday morning, slept through mediocre sermons delivered without microphones, were rarely offered, and rarely took, Communion, but knew the texts of Matins, Evensong and a number of Psalms by heart, were extremely fortunate. Because when a crisis struck their mind, body or estate, they were surrounded and held up, if not by a small group of active well-wishers, certainly by a deeply-integrated body of words and doctrine become habit, by a parish that still observed feasts and fasts, and suprisingly often by a good and compassionate vicar or Rector. What, now, in like situations sustains the 3/4 of  their children become Nones? The 1/4 who have become True Disciples have prayer, fasting, and helping Syrian refugees to sustain them, as well as the knowledge that their church approves; but the others are foolish virgins at best, no oil in their lamps, no wedding-garment on a Monday. Who, moreover, are made to feel that the church doesn't really want them, not as they are anyway. In any case, the new/alternative/common-worship services they might go to are all geared to touch them to the heart and call them to action in everyday language, not recognising the fact that they might prefer to be left in peace in their pews with the comfort of age-old glorious English and their own quietly but urgently recited prayers.

Which leads me to the second class of clerical opinion: that the church must be in tune with the times, holding (as the current Archbishop of Canterbury put it) "the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other". Each church service must be attuned to the casual None passer-by, to draw her in with instantly-comprehensible language and gestures, with clearly-expressed involvement in current public issues, with catchy music, and with well-organised child-care. In the first place, this ignores the fact that a congregation, a parish, is a group of baptised and confirmed adults (with their families, if any) that meets as a body to meet its Maker and Saviour, and that its "family" meetings are not necessarily Mission services. No family organises its every family birthday, Christmas or Sunday dinner in view of the first casual passer-by. Secondly, this view ignores, and so by implication contemns, those whose ecclesiastical needs are expressed in a mood of collective reverence and awe that best incarnates itself in great ancient music and texts, in visual beauty and in much stillness. At best such people, in the Anglican Church, are given the sop of a spare and minimal 8 a.m. BCP service; in the RC church they are mostly given nothing at all.

Beer comes to mind. Many years ago Carlsberg, with Tuborg a fine Danish lager much prized by connoisseurs, proudly announced to Canadian beer-lovers that it would henceforth be brewed under licence in Canada and thus be much more, and more cheaply, available. We then found that Canadian-brewed Carlsberg had a quite different taste and had become simply another Canadian beer, like Molson's. When I mentioned this to a brewery executive, he smiled and said: "The original Carlsberg had maybe 25,000 customers in Canada. The new Carlsberg has a million and a half. Why should they care about the original 25,000?" Why should the modern Church care about what they think is the minority to whom faith is expressed in awe and reverence and ancient beauty?

Except that there is no million of new customers, and the Nones flourish. So my conclusion is this: is the thought not at least envisageable to those in charge of Church doctrine, education and worship that the Church has been driving away as many people as, if not more people than, it attracts? I personally know a number of Roman Catholics who have been alienated from their Church, and consequently from their faith, by an unfortunate remark by a trusted priest. I also know a number of both Roman and Anglican Catholics who no longer feel at home in modern liturgies and resent being pushed into early-morning corners. And I know several of both kinds who need their faith, and who need their church, without necessarily wanting to be lectured to, at every turn, on the absolute cost of, yet the imperative need for, True Discipleship.

Christ had twelve disciples. But He touched and healed many -- dozens, hundreds, thousands. What happened to them? They saw and treated, I'm sure, their troublesome neighbour a different way. They prayed with more thanksgiving when they woke up and went to bed. It was perhaps for them that St Bernard wrote, "Whoever loves God even a little, and loves his neighbour even a little, is united to God." It seems a shame to let them drift off into Nonehood.

Finally, the answer to doctrinal illiteracy is not, surely, to ignore it as long as there is enough admirable social action. Christ spent much of His time teaching. He taught in synagogues, He taught on beaches, He taught on the slopes of green hills. He taught over lunch with tax-collectors and over dinner with Pharisees. Should the Church now renounce its teaching function because doctrine is difficult and sometimes breeds discomfort? No, an epistle is not a female apostle. No, Joan of Arc was not Adam's wife. Yes, the Eucharist is a stupendous mystery but not therefore impossible to comprehend. Not all teaching is or should be about sex. If there have been different theologies of the Holy Spirit, that does not mean it's better not to bother with Him at all. And as for Good Works, let us remember the title, as well as the content, of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical: Caritas in Veritate -- Charity, in Truth.

THE TEST OF HOPE

In The Wound of Love, the admirable collection of Carthusian writings, one author describes what happens to a new monk. “In the first days of the monastic life, heaven is very near, and the road that leads there seems short.” Then, as time goes by, the way becomes longer and more sinuous, and the goal further and further away. Gradually, “God withdraws the sensible consolations of the first days and hides himself the mystery of absence.”

This happens, I think, not only to monks: it seems true of almost all believers who take their faith seriously. Most people who would not call themselves atheists or retreat into the often mendacious cover of “agnosticism” spend years being what Matthew Arnold memorably called “light half-believers of our casual creeds”. Then something happens that changes them and makes them decide to take their faith seriously. At first, this turns out to be brilliant and exciting. One wonders where it has been all one’s life. It seems as if each day is a conversation with God: one asks questions, and receives answers.

Then, gradually, this too becomes a routine. Prayer is more frequent and more intensive, but there is less and less sense of being answered. The “sensible consolations” seem to have disappeared except on rare occasions. One is increasingly aware of the total indifference to faith of the world around one, and even one’s own mind begins to ask awkward questions. Death is less and less distant: what does happen afterwards? “I have a sin of fear,” wrote John Donne, “that when I have spun my last thread, I shall perish on the shore.” Has it not all been an illusion, a centuries-old structure of wishful thinking?

If we can allow ourselves a metaphor, this state is like the increasing dark of the year as it moves into winter. Days get shorter; and while there is a certain comfort “when melancholy autumn comes to Wembley,/And electric trains are lighted after tea” (Betjeman) the air is cold and dank, clothes seem heavier and comfort harder to find. In other words, we are moving into Advent.

Today is Advent II, and it teaches us a hard lesson with which the Carthusians can help us. When God hides, as the sun seems to hide, in the mystery of absence, it is to us a lesson that we must rely solely upon Hope. Hope instructed by Faith; Hope fed by the Word of God – a daily diet of “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest”; Hope that continues to bear the fruit of Charity, nevertheless. Never the less.

Hope, the second great theological virtue. Not blind hope; not Micawberish trusting that “something will turn up”; not betting on an outsider to win at 20 to 1. Informed Hope, instructed Hope, intelligent Hope. Hope as trust, Hope as the Force that is with us, that allows us to get up the twenty-seventh time after we have fallen twenty-six; Hope that keeps us hanging in there when all seems lost; Hope that sees beyond foolishness, beyond crime, beyond sin. Hope that lights two candles as the world goes dark and very, very cold.

SQUEEZED BETWEEN TALIBAN AND NIHILISTS

Seeing General Disarray's thoughtful reply to several of my LJ posts, including one from July of last year, it occurred to me that anyone stumbling upon this conversation may be wondering what the hell it is about. So I'm taking the liberty of reprinting that earlier post, while fully aware that my thinking on the subject is frequently illogical and permanently unfinished.


'Hanging Horse', a work of art by Maurizio Cattelan - respectfully exhibited also at the Guggenheim, NYC. 


It occurs to me that many of those who want religion today – as opposed to those who live happily without it and would just as soon it went away -- not only want to be dispensed from thinking, but want strong constraints and rigid rules. This is of course a reaction to the perceived chaos, and the perceived immorality, of modern life. If they are wrong, we should be able to formulate, in reasonably simple terms, why we consider that they are wrong. 

1)    Modern life is no more chaotic than life in any past one cares to study (as opposed to the ‘past’ of a reasonably happy childhood, which is invariably seen selectively and idealized – quite rightly so). No other period of history produced events less chaotic and less depressing. Ponder the Great Depression; ponder World Wars 1 and 2; ponder the dark satanic mills with their child labour and their tuberculosis; ponder the imprisonment without trial of  the Ancien Régime and the trials without justice and guillotines of the New; ponder the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the expulsion of thousands of families, with their children taken away and forcibly re-educated in convents; ponder the St Bartholomew’s Massacre and the slaughter of the Indians in the Americas; and keep pondering as you go back. No; what I have called the ‘perceived chaos’ is in fact the chaos of perception: caused, not by an overwhelmingly terrifying situation (though some families may have that) but by the ceaseless presence of TV, Internet, radio and newspapers, and the ceaseless barrage of information about much of the planet that it brings. Much of this, if information, is information twisted, not just by op-ed (Glenn Beck or Rachel Maddow) but by the fundamental and undiscussed bias of news media, which is their appetite for drama and conflict, and their conscienceless stimulation of generalized anger. 

2)    Modern life is indeed in some ways more immoral. And here the culprit is not so much the news media as, perhaps, the arts.[1] In the latter, what began as a reaction and a protest against a certain kind of hypocritical Victorian bourgeoisie has by now, ca. 125 years later, triumphantly outlived said bourgeoisie but still dons what is now a specious mantle of courageous rebellion.[2] The real immorality, though, often has nothing to do with sex, and goes well beyond what fundamentalists protest against. The number of modern plays, films and novels (to say nothing of video games) in which fundamental values, not only of faith but of humanity, decency, kindness and worth are ridiculed, trodden underfoot, or ignored in favour of violence, cruelty, amusing worthlessness and plain evil – in some cases covered by an ostensibly noble moral purpose -- is depressingly great; and the visual arts have in large measure followed them. So yes: here the seekers after stricter rules are more understandable. They are also, to our understanding, wrong in that a) it almost certainly won’t work except in closed communities (from which many young adults will escape); and b) if it did work, it would necessarily go against other values that we also value, e.g. freedom of expression and democratic consultation and decision-making. It would, in other words, create a Taliban society – and how little that works in a modern context can be seen in Iran. Moreover, in such a society the very values of humanity, kindness, respect and consideration for the other would once again be trodden underfoot in an orgy of punishment.

Psychologically, this need for a religion of intellectual simplicity and moral constraint may also proceed from a need and desire to see others punished; but that edges into speculation. It does, though, have another and deeply negative consequence: the sustaining and encouraging of an aggressive (and equally simplistic) atheism and spiritual (as opposed to moral) nihilism on the other side.

What are the remedies against such tendencies? They may be twofold. For the intellectually sophisticated the first thing is not to give way to the temptation of confusing fundamentalism with faith, and to believe or proclaim that Muslim Jihadism or an obscurantist and condemnatory Christianity is what all ‘religion’ really is. The next step on this road is actually to study theology, with either an open mind or one ready to explore faith for oneself. It is not enough just to have questions. If Jews can study scripture and centuries of rabbinical wisdom, we can read the odd Church Father. Moreover, it involves regarding the fundamentalist with a positive eye upon his faith, not just his rules: for his faith may be stronger than ours.

Which brings me to the second remedy: working out a solid theology of one’s own, and not fleeing conversation with the fundamentalist but being ready to counter his arguments with equally strong ones, while showing respect for those aspects of his faith one can admire. A little spiritual séduction would do no harm.

As for the spiritual nihilist – who often calls himself, not without some self-satisfaction, an agnostic – with him there seems to be little possibility of conversation, since he doesn’t want it and sees no need for it. He regards the faith of another either as idiocy (in which case he is closer to the real atheists) or as a private hobby which he may personally think ridiculous but would not openly denounce or deride, out of good manners or out of fear of giving it unwarranted importance.

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[1] I leave aside, here, the political or economic ‘immorality’ vigorously denounced by some protest movements: it is not except tangentially concerned with matters of religion.

[2] Just as the work of Lacan gave a whole new lease of life to Freudianism, so the cultural revolution of the Sixties gave a whole new lease of life to the ‘revolt against the bourgeoisie’.

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David Czerny, Permanent Installation at FUTURA Gallery, Prague
Info: you climb a ladder and stick your head in the sculpture’s arse to see a video of two Czech politicians feeding each other slop to a soundtrack of ‘We are the Champions'.
Thanks to: http://villageofjoy.com/controversial-art-by-david-cerny/