But it’s a mistake to think it’s a modern disease. The bitter old person is a constant in history. It seems to be age that corrodes the spirit, not change as such, which is why growing old can be spiritually dangerous. Go back as far as you can and you’ll hear the old grumbling about the young. In the century before the birth of Christ, the Roman poet Horace heard an elderly man at it:
Tiresome, complaining, a praiser of the times that were when he was a boy, a castigator and censor of the young generation . . .14
The tone of these attacks on the younger generation is not always as angry as Horace’s old man. Sometimes it is reproachful and weary, a wry shaking of the head at the excesses of the young. This is the spirit of Alec Guinness’s memoir, A Positively Final Appearance. The famous film star even complains about the length of movies nowadays:
What good stories were told in the cinema in those days, swiftly, directly and without affectation. And how blessedly short they were when compared to the three-hour marathons that we are now expected to sit through, with aching bums, fatigued eyes and numbed ears.15
Behind these complaints and reproaches there is hurt and sadness at the way time sweeps each generation aside, famously expressed by Isaac Watts in his hymn, ‘O God, our help in ages past’:
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.16
That it is a Christian hymn that best describes the rush of remorseless time is no accident. Religion is one of the few institutions that keeps the thought and fact of death steadily before us. It is what intrigued the poet Philip Larkin about churches. That so many dead lay round them, he thought, made them ‘proper to grow wise in’.17 But you don’t need a burial ground round a church to be reminded of death. There are reminders inside as well. Being a member of a congregation is to watch chairs emptying, as death accomplishes its work. In John Meade Falkner’s poem, ‘Christmas Day: The Family Sitting’, an old man in church meditates on Christmases past:
There are passed one after the other
Christmases fifty-three,
Since I sat here with my mother
And heard the great decree:
How they went up to Jerusalem
Out of Galilee.
They have passed one after the other;
Father and mother died,
Brother and sister and brother
Taken and sanctified.
I am left alone in the sitting,
With none to sit beside . . .
The pillars are twisted with holly,
And the font is wreathed with yew
Christ forgive me for folly,
Youth’s lapses – not a few,
For the hardness of my middle life,
For age’s fretful view.18
Nowadays, sitting in church, I am often more aware of the presence of the dead than of the living. I remember where they sat, a hymn they loved – sung again this morning – and maybe the bitterness of their passing. But it is a fortifying not a depressing experience, a reminder that this is how it goes, and that I must be reconciled to it. One day my seat will be empty, and my name will be written among the dead. Going to church is one of the ways I gather the past round me as I prepare to go up to Jerusalem out of Galilee. But it has become a more complicated business than it used to be. For many old people today, going to church can be an alienating rather than a consoling experience. To understand why will take a bit of thinking about religion itself.
***
The best way to see religion is as humanity’s response to the puzzle of its own existence. Unlike the other animals on earth, we have never felt entirely at home here. Our big brains prompt us not only to wonder about our own existence but about the existence of existence itself. Is there a reality behind it that created it, and can we relate to it in any way? Some of us think compulsively about these questions and come up with a stream of never-very-certain answers. The instrument we use for wrestling with them is the human mind. Our difficulty is that we can’t really be certain anything exists outside the mind, because the mind is the main agent we have for examining the question. The Cambridge theologian Don Cupitt tells us there is a German word that captures the difficulty, unhintergehbarkeit, ‘ungetbehindability’.19 Our knowledge of the universe comes to us through the mind. And we can’t get out of it or off it to prove anything’s behind it – or nothing’s behind it – except through the mind itself! We are stuck in and with our minds. And even if we want to resist that claim, it is only our minds that can challenge it thereby proving the point.
Living with the ‘ungetbehindability’ of the universe is frustrating, which is why we search for ways to resolve our predicament, either by convincing ourselves there is definitely nothing behind it, or there’s definitely something and we’ve met it. Since it is impossible to prove the truth of a negative factual statement – there’s no one there – absolute atheism only ever appeals to a passionate minority. But those who insist that there is someone there can’t prove it either. What they offer is testimony or witness. Religion’s most interesting characters are those who claim to have encountered the mystery behind the universe directly. They claim to have seen or heard it. It revealed itself to them. An example from within the Christian tradition is the French religious and mathematical genius, Blaise Pascal. After his death, a paper was found stitched into the lining of his coat that recounted a mystical experience he’d had on 23 November 1654. This is what was written on the scrap of paper:
FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.20
The fact that he told no one about the encounter was unusual, because religious witnesses usually want to share what they have seen or heard. Sometimes they attract followers, and another religion is born from their revelations. Pascal kept to himself what had happened, but it changed his life. It took him from thinking about God – not of the philosophers and scholars – to an encounter with God.
For those like Pascal, who claim to have been taken behind the veil of the universe, the experience is self-authenticating. Doubt is eradicated. Certainty. Certainty. That’s why they are so persuasive. There is nothing like absolute conviction to persuade others to go along with you. But for those who go along – unless they are mystics themselves doubts about the meaning of the original encounter always remain. To use one of Pascal’s own descriptions, their faith is a gamble. The followers of a revelation are called ‘believers’ or ‘people of faith’. And doubt is part of the deal. That’s why faith is often characterised as a struggle. The faithful are told to pray to have their faith strengthened, a form of words that gives the show away. We don’t pray to have our grasp of facts strengthened. We don’t pray to believe more firmly in the two times table. We know it’s true. We can do it on our fingers. Faith is different. By definition, it is tinged with uncertainty. This is fine for individuals, but it doesn’t work for religious organisations, especially if they are keen on marketing themselves to unbelievers. Doubt doesn’t sell; certainty does. The organisers who systematise a religion based on the experience of a prophet have a product to sell, and they know diffidence won’t move the goods. That is why as religions develop they shift from exhortations to faith to proclamations of fact, including confident descriptions of the world or worlds behind the one that is available to our senses, the one our minds connect us to.
That is how the big theistic religions started, and by the time they reach us hundreds of years later, their original claims are beyond any definitive investigation or interrogation. That is why they become the source of endless, irresolvable disagreements about their truth. Rival schools of interpretation battle each other over the meaning of the original revelation. And because of the ‘ungetbehindability’ factor, there is no arbiter on earth who can resolve their disagreements. So they jostle and collide with each other like logs of timber on ti
me’s ever-rolling stream as it carries them through history.
But while this is going on, something else is happening at the same time. To capture it, I’ll have to shift from a fluvial to an arboreal metaphor. Religions gradually thrust themselves above their mystical origins into real history, where they stand like huge trees able to shelter many different forms of attachment and meaning in their branches. Though they still claim to be rooted in the eternal world, in this world they represent values that are helpful to many who have little interest in the supernatural claims they make about their origins. For faith systems to let themselves be used in this way requires a tolerant generosity that appears to be under threat today.
I am writing this a few days before Christmas. For weeks the shops have been jingling with carols, and the streets have been decked with lights. And I enjoy it. Scotland is a cold dark place in the middle of winter. So I can understand why the ancient pagans cheered themselves up with a winter festival that reminded them the days would lengthen soon and spring would start its slow trail north. I can also understand why the Christian Church decided the pagan festival was a great idea and called it Christmas, a theft that would be dismissed today as cultural appropriation, forgetting that we’ve always borrowed from each other to help us through life’s dark nights. Christmas is the one time of the year when churches will be packed. Almost in spite of themselves, people are drawn to sing carols and hear the story of a baby laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. This is how C. Day Lewis described it in a poem:
It is Christmastide. Does the festival promise as fairly
As ever to you? ‘I feel
The numbness of one whose drifted years conceal
His original landmarks of good and ill.
For a heart weighed down by its own and the world’s folly
This season has little appeal.’
But tomorrow is Christmas Day. Can it really mean
Nothing to you? ‘It is hard
To see it as more than a time-worn, tinsel routine,
Or else a 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 smal
l 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.
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