The Rest Is Silence
Page 15
So it is in the spirit of the man that I pass on Columba’s writings. He has bequeathed an insight—a particular one, it has to be said—about the dying element of monasticism in our church’s life. With the latest trends, as with any such developments, new minds believe themselves neologists. Whereas it is usually a trend, a rebrand. Karl Marx seems to have more to offer to me than theology in understanding the change in church culture.
‘Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.’1
The explosion of contained middle class emotionalism, the beguilingly hip blandness of the songs/hymns, now rebranded worship, the long heaped up phrases of prayer, the extended sermons constitute much of the emerging church’s takeover. In this is expressed a naïveté bordering on egomania. Ignorance is the new knowledge. Yet old must give way to new.
Perhaps I need to let stand what I have done. Abandon that, like the life of the men who gave themselves to God in Dorset, to the judge of us all. That is, after all, the real vocation. To let the one who created us deal with his makings.
I intend to visit the cemetery in Dorset. The robed Buddhists, as the Master had told me, are enormously helpful, even to the point offering me accommodation in their guest wing if I want to make an overnight stay.
My wife has suggested we slot it into a bit of a holiday—she is always more adept in combining advantage with duty than I—as we have not spent much time in that part of the country. I can envisage cream teams, ancient sites, country walks and a visit to Columba’s grave.
At times it feels that the kind of religious practice I serve has had its day, particularly in London where a new franchise is flexing its muscles into the mainstream. To quote my first insertion, ‘Some aspects of them are possibly shocking but, as a fellow Christian (and an Australian-born one at that), I believe Columba’s disjointed narrative points to a truth about ourselves—no matter how unpleasant events, experience or thoughts are, they are facts of life. To attempt to alter them would be dishonest. I offer them because they chronicle something of the dying landscape of the Church of England in the early part of the twenty-first century.’
Like Columba, perhaps all I can do is quietly keep walking in the path I set out when I arrived in London at the end of the Australian Bicentennial Year in 1988. God knows I could learn from his example.
1. From an article in New York Daily Tribune, March 22, 1853, at least according to Wikiquote.
Acknowledgements
The bulk of Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Holy Bible, Today’s New International Version, Copyright © 2002 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Publishers, A member of the Hodder Headline Group. All rights reserved. ‘TNIV ‘is a registered trademark of International Bible Society.
Scripture quotations from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.
Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s patentee, Cambridge University Press.
The author acknowledges the use of extracts from Common Worship, © The Archbishops’ Council, 2000.