Waiting for the Last Bus. Richard Holloway
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night incredibly starred,
Angels, oxen, a Babe – the recurrent dream
Of a Christmas card.’
You must try again. Say ‘Christmas Eve’. Now quick,
What do you see?
‘I see in the firelit room a child is awake,
Mute with expectancy
For the berried day, the presents, the Christmas cake.
Is he mine? or me?’
He is you and yours. Desiring for him tomorrow’s
Feast – the crackers, the Tree, the piled
Presents – you lose yourself in his yearning, and borrow
His eyes to behold
Your own young world again. Love’s mystery is revealed
When the father becomes the child.
‘Yet would it not make those carolling angels weep
To think how incarnate Love
Means such trivial joys to us children of unbelief ?’
No. It’s a miracle great enough
If through centuries, clouded and dingy, this Day can keep
Expectation alive.21
It is poetry that draws people into church at the end of December to gaze again at ‘the recurrent dream of a Christmas card’. The paradox is that it is the people who think religion is prose who keep it alive for the people who can only use it as poetry. When a religion is in decline, its prose becomes more defensive and assertive. But if it is not careful it loses the capacity for what the poet John Keats called ‘Negative Capability’:
. . . that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.22
Its very existence now threatened, the Church is in danger of becoming a club for strict believers who have little tolerance for religious versions of Negative Capability. And it can be devastating for elderly parishioners, whose practice of faith always owed more to John Keats than to Billy Graham. One of the features of my latter years is to be invited to speak to groups of people who think of themselves as the Church in Exile. Most of those who turn up are about my own age or only slightly younger. They are all people who have stopped attending church because they find the new, assertive tone impossible to bear. The growing congregations, the versions that attract the young, have learnt the old lesson that certainty sells and conviction satisfies. They have the vibrancy of student societies – high on their own virtue – who have gathered together to fortify themselves against their enemies. It can be devastating for the mildly religious, for whom religion was once a source of spiritual comfort and moral challenge, to be told there is now no room in the inn for doubt and uncertainty. I know a woman who was told by her new minister that her late father, an old-fashioned Presbyterian of the post-war liberal variety, was now in hell, and he would remain there for ever because he had not been born again into the version of Christianity that was now in the ascendant.
So added to the losses that accumulate in old age can be sorrow at the loss of the Church itself. And it’s a double sorrow. There is the private sorrow of being exiled from the Christian community because it has no room for the wistful children of unbelief. There is the larger sorrow of seeing the presence of the Church slowly fade from the national landscape and become just another sect among many, all marketing themselves as the only true route to eternal salvation. The symbol of this larger sorrow is the sight of old churches that survive only as monuments to loss.
Our landscape is dotted with them, mute reminders of a time when the Christian faith was practised with generous confidence throughout the land. Seeing them closed and shuttered can prompt sombre reflection even in those who had little use for them in their glory. This is the mood of the poem ‘Church Going’ by Philip Larkin, from which I have already quoted. Larkin is out cycling in the country-side when he comes across an old church and goes in. He notices the ‘little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut / For Sunday, brownish now . . . and a tense, musty, unignorable silence’. And he wonders what will happen to what he calls these serious houses on serious earth when they have all fallen out of use. He writes:
I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was . . . 23
Before churches close their doors for the last time, they undergo a rite called de-consecration. It’s a kind of funeral in which the sacredness is removed and the church becomes just another building. I know a handsome church that went through this process. It was one of the biggest churches in Gorbals in Glasgow when I lived there in the 1960s, sitting proudly in the midst of a teeming neighbourhood of grey tenements. I went in search of it not long ago, wondering if I’d be able to find it among the new streets and houses that have replaced the district I knew fifty years ago. I needn’t have worried. Its new setting makes it more dominant than ever. Still a thrilling building, it is now way out of proportion to its new surroundings. And it is no longer a church.
St Francis Catholic Church and Friary, built by Pugin and Pugin in 1870, was dramatically decorated in the high Gothic style, and the enormous congregation was served by a team of Franciscan Friars. I remember hundreds of parishioners thronging into it for the Stations of the Cross in Holy Week. The vividly painted Stations are just about all you can see of the interior now. The church was sold in 1996 and converted to a conference and community centre by the insertion of a three-storey suite of rooms into the interior. It was disconcerting to stand in the church knowing that behind the screens the original arrangements were all as they had been in the past, as if waiting for the day when they would be unveiled and restored to their former glory.
The superintendent took me behind the elegant timber frame of the insertion to show me the high altar. He told me they still had a mass there once a year. He asked if I’d like to see the little chapel the Friars once used for their community worship. We went up a short flight of stairs, and he opened a little door. I stepped into a perfectly preserved small chapel. Next to the altar, a little window opened above the nave of the church. I looked down into the great space, imagining multitudes praying, lighting candles, whispering their sins into the ears of priests in brown habits, kindling faith into flame. I was hit by a sorrow that stayed with me long after I had thanked my guide and left the church. It was partly remembrance of my own young manhood in this place fifty years before, partly dismay at the way time hurtles so many good things into the past without a backward look. So I had to remind myself that the story of religion, like everything else in life, is one of constant change and loss.
The Pagans were heartbroken when Catholic Christianity arrived in Britain in the sixth century, and banished their gods and took over their temples. At the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church that had supplanted Paganism was pushed out of Britain. Protestantism took over, and a way of life that had its own beauty and romance was destroyed. In our day, it seems to be Christianity itself that is fading away. I can understand why, but it still hurts me. That’s why, like Larkin, I derive a melancholy pleasure from visiting these old shrines and imagining their glory days.
***
What I can’t mourn is ‘the moral decay of Britain’ that faith leaders tell us is an inevitable consequence of the decline of religion. Moral change isn’t always decay. Sometimes it’s an improvement. I can look back with sadness on the vanished churches of my youth. I don’t mourn the passing of some of the moral attitudes they represented. The big moral shifts during my lifetime have all been improvements. I am thinking about the place and status of women and sexual minorities today, compared to how they were when I was young. If I were a woman or gay, I’d rather be alive in Britain now than in the Britain of my boyhood. Religious communities did little or nothing to bring about these improvements, because their sacred texts opposed them. It’s hard to change an ancient prejudice if you have been taught that God commanded it.
One of the useful purposes of religion in the past was the way it reinforced society’s moral order by hallowing it with divine authority.