For us, you see, the church is not just another institution. It’s a failing but never quite failed attempt, by limited people, to perpetuate the unlimited generosity of God in the world. It’s built, of all things, on a pun. I said ‘embodies’ and the word is exact. The church is a body that wants to be a body. That is, it’s a corpus, a corporation, a ‘body’ of people in the sense of being a gathered crowd of them, which aspires to be, to carry on from, to keep alive and present and breathing, the literal corporeal body of Jesus, equipped with two arms and two legs and probably the beard and quite possibly the bad teeth, in first-century Palestine. You do not need to tell us that this is impossible. We know. But we are committed to the impossible anyway, with our ideals of behaviour that only the God of everything can manage, and our efforts to possess a state of being which is only even visible in this world in glimpses, in metaphors, in temporary comparisons. We’re used to trying and failing at the impossible. And now and again gaining a piece of the possible we wouldn’t have had and wouldn’t have known was possible, if we hadn’t been trying for the impossible beyond it. So the church, we say, is the body of Christ: another comparison with a truth flickering in and out of sight in it. The church is what Christ is doing in the world, nowadays. This is not the same thing as saying that the church is magically good no matter what, or that good intentions cancel lousy results. (No balance sheet, remember?) It’s not the basis for an excuse, but if anything, for self-accusation. It’s a reason for us to be harder on ourselves rather than easier. But it’s also a reason for never quite losing hope, never letting go of the conviction that, in its stumbling way, the church faces toward grace. That it exists, like Christ, in order to be a channel by which mending enters the world; a mending which, thank God, does not depend on the success of human virtue, individual or collective, but on what breathes and shines through us if we let it.
The church is one of the answers to the question of where Christ is since he left us at the end of the story, alive but no longer committed to, limited to, the physical life of the one man Yeshua. Where is he? Here. His hands are our hands now, the only hands he’s got. My hands, typing this. Your hands, whenever you push with them at the dire engine of our history, to try to shift it, just a little bit, in the direction of kindness. His face is every face that passes in the street. He’s the junkie playing the whistle by the supermarket. He’s the tired-looking Somali woman with the pushchair. He’s everyone you care for and everyone you distrust. Unlimited love having once entered into limited us, it’s here for good, apparent to us or invisible depending on the light, depending on our willingness to see. Humanity glimmers with God’s presence.
And he is most specifically of all here, we believe, when we follow the instructions he gave at dinner the night before he died. Every Sunday morning, in all the church’s human niches, from downtown Isfahan to downtown Manhattan, in places of great wealth and comfort and in cities under bombardment, on every continent including Antarctica and once I believe on the moon, we hold again a stylised version of the original Passover meal in Jerusalem. There is bread, there is wine. We bless them using one of the Passover prayers. We break the bread, we pour the wine into a cup. We repeat Jesus’s words from the story. This is my body. This is my blood. And then for us the bread, made unmysteriously from wheat, and the wine, made unmysteriously from grapes, are different. There has been a change in their meaning. For some of us, the material bread and material wine have altered (on a tiny domestic scale, with crumbs and dregs and washing-up) in the same way that the material world was altered by having its creator within it. Right there on the table, the set of the world once more contains itself as a member; once more, a peculiar knot has been tied in the fabric of existence. For others of us, the change of meaning is made by the material world aligning itself to form a sign of what began happening once in Jerusalem long ago, and (the sign reminds us) is still happening now. Either way, the change puts the same strange burden on our imagination and our understanding when we do what we do next, and eat the bread, and drink the wine. We’re eating God. We’re eating Jesus. The body that wants to be a body is eating the body it wants to be. The pun multiplies. ‘O taste and see’, the choir may be singing, if it’s the altar of a cathedral we’re filing towards to take our bite and our swallow of the meal. The tasting is literal: tongues, teeth, gullet and intestines are all involved. The God of everything is demonstrating again his gross indifference to good taste in the other, polite, little-finger-extended sense. Because it’s inescapable: this is an act of sacred cannibalism, in symbolic form. The Romans, used to temples where the literal blood of animals flowed, passed round rumours of the vile stuff Christians got up to on a Sunday, and perhaps it’s too easy for us now to soothe away into familiarity the language we use. Perhaps there ought to be a hint of repulsion, of taboos overridden, when we sup the red stuff in the chalice, to keep us reminded of where our sign is pointing: which is towards Skull Hill, and the human body on the cross there. We aren’t just eating Jesus. We’re eating his death. We eat and we drink because we desire monstrosity’s end, but the sacrament carries us into the monstrous, through the monstrous, to get us there, just as the story we tell only arrives at hope by way of tragedy. The meanings of the bread and the wine line up along a bloody corridor, as barbarous as the barbarous world God is working on, and at the end of the corridor, once we have accepted the strange and frightening gift we are being given, there is forgiveness. We eat the bread, we drink the wine, to be joined to the act by which forgiveness came. We eat the end of cruelty and shame. We eat amnesty for whatever the particular load of the HPtFtU was that we brought to the dinner table. We eat the rejoicing that this one time, in spite of all sorrow, the world’s weight was flipped over and turned to joy. We eat grace.
And that’s what the church is for. Forget about saints, popes, bishops, monks, nuns, processions, statues, music, art, architecture, vicarage tea parties, telethons, snake-handling, speaking in tongues, special hats. All of that stuff * can be functional in its time and its place, can do things sometimes to inch forward the work of love, but it’s all secondary, it’s all flummery, it’s all essentially decorative compared to this. We eat the bread. We drink the wine. We feel ourselves forgiven. And, feeling that, we turn from the table to try to love the world, and ourselves, and each other.
* OK, I’m not sure about the snake-handling.
If you come to a parish church in England after the service, what you will see is a (small) crowd of elderly people, middle-aged people and young families, balancing biscuits and cups of coffee in one hand as we do crowd control on the children with the other, and making slightly awkward conversation about the weather, holidays, cricket scores, the news, the progress of flowers and vegetables. We don’t necessarily have very much in common with each other, by all the usual standards. We’re embarrassed, probably. (After all, this is England.) And yet that’s not all that is going on. We’re also celebrating the love-feast. Our hearts are in our eyes as we look at each other. We are engaged in the impossible experiment of trying to see each other the way God sees us. That is, as if we were all precious beyond price, for reasons quite independent of any of the usual cues for attraction we apes jump to recognise: status, charisma, beauty, confidence, wealth, wisdom, authority.
It’s an impersonal kind of loving, looked at one way, since it doesn’t ask what we ourselves want or like. Looked at another way, it’s very, very personal indeed, because its focus is all on the other, all on what they’re actually like, not as we can hope to know it, but as a loving sustainer could, who reads them illusionlessly from within, and delights in them anyway. It’s a kind of vision you fall out of again very fast, even with discipline, even with your best try at selfless attention, but something is retained, something in the trick of it is catching and gets laid down as habit. Some ground is gained, somehow. And it’s a mode of pleasure, too. There they are – there we are – to be enjoyed, in a way that overlaps with the way you can enjoy
the people in a novel, whether or not they fall comfortably within what you thought, before you started reading, were the natural bounds of your sympathies, your preferences, your interests. Grace makes us better readers of each other. We don’t know, each of us, what the others needed forgiving for, and we never will, but we know they were forgiven, as we were, and for whole moments we manage to see with calm, kind ease. Though we are many, we say, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.
And then we fail. And we try again, and fail again, and go on trying. Always failing, always hoping to fail better, because we know that it is through loving the resistant, muddled, tricky, intricate, fascinating, stained fabric of this world – this only world – that it begins to glint with the possibility of the kingdom. Or the republic! By all means, think of it as the republic of heaven. There is no king here, except the king we see in each other’s faces, and we’re all fallible; none of us is any better than the rest. What better citizens for a republic could there be?
8
Consequences
What does it feel like to feel yourself forgiven? I can only speak for myself, but, speaking for myself: surprising. Just as it comes from a direction you hadn’t considered, viewing your life from an angle you hadn’t expected, it also comes with a sensation that isn’t necessarily one of conventional release or relief. In my experience, it’s like toothache stopping because a tooth has been removed. It has the numb surprisingness of something that hurt not being there any more. You explore the space where it was, and you feel slightly changed, slightly self-alienated. Something has been reconfigured a bit. There’s some unfamiliarity close in. You’re glad, of course, that it doesn’t hurt, but you can find that you almost miss the familiar signal of your own distress, especially since the memory of how much it hurt fades fast, and it’s difficult to go on rejoicing positively over an absence. You may find, in fact, that you feel a sly temptation to restore the status quo ante, by going out and doing again the thing you needed forgiving for, whatever it was. After all, you’ve just discovered it was survivable, that there was a route out of desperation and self-reproach; and this way you won’t have to deal with the unsettling open-endedness of being changed. Is there a possibility of, as it were, moral hazard, in which the removal of negative consequences makes it perversely easier to do the thing again? Oh yes. Humans can fuck up anything. The mafioso taking himself to confession after every hit is only an extreme case of a familiar pattern. Grace is the answer to our abuses of ourselves and each other, but grace itself can be abused. It’s hard to wait and stay in the tremulous uncertain state grace puts us in, not knowing what its changes may mean, not knowing where they may take us. Forgiveness has no price we need to pay, but it exposes our illusions of control. Forgiveness is not flattering. Forgiveness reminds us that our masks are masks. Forgiveness starts something, if we let it. Forgiveness comes with an invitation to find out what else we may become that we hadn’t suspected. Forgiveness carries you into new territory. Forgiveness is disconcerting.
But then so much of the rest of faith is disconcerting too. Every step of it requires you to embrace risk in some way or other, from the risk that you’re getting the nature of the universe absurdly wrong, to the risk of putting aside your dignity and signing up to a picture of yourself as pratfall-prone and self-subverting, rather than the proud master of your destiny. Supposing you do it, though – supposing you take the risk, and it happens that you follow (of all the pathways to faith there are) the path this book has described. Supposing that in one of life’s recurrent encounters with bleakness you acknowledge the crack in everything; and supposing you find that you do feel, in the great silence that answers when you ask for help, that something is speaking; and supposing you make your way through the shoals of theodicy; and supposing the story moves you, moves you enough for you to give it your provisional assent; and supposing you nervously join the company of other assenters, and eat the bread and drink the wine; and supposing you tentatively begin to try to walk the walk of faith, pratfalls and all – what then? What follows? Where does this new experiment in indignity lead you? What does it commit you to?
Early on in this I compared beginning to believe to falling in love, and the way that faith settles down in a life is also very like the way that the first dizzy-intense phase of attraction settles (if it does) into a relationship. Rapture develops into routine, a process which keeps its customary doubleness where religion is concerned. It’s both loss and gain together, with excitement dwindling and trust growing; like all human ties, it constricts at the same time as it supports, ruling out other choices by the very act of being a choice. And so as with any commitment, there are times when you notice the limit on your theoretical freedom more than you feel what the attachment is giving you, and then it tends to be habit, or the awareness of a promise given, that keeps you trying. God makes an elusive lover. The unequivocal blaze of His presence may come rarely or not at all, for years and years – and in any case cannot be commanded, will not ever present itself tamely to order. He-doesn’t-exist-the-bastard may be much more your daily experience than anything even faintly rapturous. And yet, and yet. He may come at any moment, when and how you least expect it, and that somehow slightly colours every moment in the mass of moments when he doesn’t come. And grace, you come to recognise, never stops, whether you presently feel it or not. You never stop doubting – how could you? – but you learn to live with doubt and faith unresolved, because unresolvable. So you don’t keep digging the relationship up to see how its roots are doing. You may have crises of faith but you don’t, on the whole, ask it to account for itself philosophically from first principles every morning, any more than you subject your relations with your human significant other to daily cost–benefit analysis. You accept it as one of the givens of your life. You learn from it the slow rewards of fidelity. You watch as the repetition of Christmases and Easters, births and deaths and resurrections, scratches on the linear time of your life a rough little model of His permanence. You discover that repetition itself, curiously, is not the enemy of spontaneity, but maybe even its enabler. Saying the same prayers again and again, pacing your body again and again through the set movements of faith, somehow helps keep the door ajar through which He may come. The words may strike you as ecclesiastical blah nine times in ten, or ninety-nine times in a hundred, and then be transformed, and then have the huge fresh wind blowing through them into your little closed room. And meanwhile you make faith your vantage point, your habitual place to stand. And you get used to the way the human landscape looks from there: reoriented, reorganised, different.
It has not had meaning drained out of it, that landscape. Or variety. Or endless interesting human particularity. It has not become the mere illustration to some abstract proposition about the nature of people. If anything it has become solider and finer-grained and more intricately itself, an endless spur to further curiosity. God is not distinct from human beings for Christians, remember. We are not supposed to look away from people towards Him. In fact, we are commanded not to. We are supposed to look for Him in each other’s faces, and to love specifically, concretely, with the largest and most generous and of course most curious sense of the other we can possibly manage. God is both into exclusivity and not. There are to be no other gods but Him: no flirtations with Matching Curtains and Being Well Endowed, or their harder-to-recognise present-day counterparts, our little ad hoc modern idols of wealth and power. Nothing is to be worshipped except the God of everything, who doesn’t need worship and doesn’t require it of us (though we may offer it if we want, from the same motion of the heart that makes us stretch out our hands on mountaintops). On the other hand, everything is pretty damn plural, and neither God’s love for us nor ours for God is supposed to displace other loves. It is supposed, in fact, to encourage and even sanctify them. It is supposed to send us out, reverent and eager and crazy-curious, full of passion for each other’s minds, hearts, souls, bodies, wanting to recreate as best we can
in miniature some fraction of the absolute and inimitable love behind everything.
But that same curiosity reveals, and keeps on revealing, the crack in everything. It’s a messed-up world inhabited by messed-up people. The HPtFtU is universal. Our destructiveness is a truth about us just as basic as our capacity for love. Our loves are always going to be checked, complicated, limited, compromised, corrupted, undermined, reversed by the rest of what we are. If you accept this, the refusal to admit it in contemporary culture starts to look silly, and worse than silly. It locks us collectively into a cycle of indulgence and surprise. Most of the time, there’s the fingers-in-ears denial that anything could ever be wrong, periodically interrupted by stagy astonishment when something goes so wrong it can’t be ignored. We have to keep numbing ourselves up with nonsense. St Augustine’s ‘cruel optimism’ rules, cynically abetted by the sharp minds in the marketing department, who know that nothing stimulates anxiety and unhappiness and therefore spending like images of perfection, kept humiliatingly before us. Christianity says that human beings are neither perfect nor perfectible. The presumption of innocence is a useful rule in court cases, but not a sensible attitude for adults in general to take to adults in general. In comparison, Christianity says that both less and more is to be expected of people. Less because of our inevitably divided and thwarting selves; more because thanks to grace our identities are more provisional, more hopefully fluid, than we commonly acknowledge. If you’re a Christian, you believe that there’s room even in the darkest places, even when the weight of inevitability seems total, for the sudden and unpredictable and unpredicted leap toward the risk of love.
Unapologetic Page 17