has to learn how to take a bow and leave the stage. And we have to do it at the time in our lives when we are least resilient. Old age is a poignant business, a continuous series of losses, which is why Bette Davis said it wasn’t for sissies. One of its saddest moments is when we realise we are no longer at home in the world and are baffled at how it operates. When we were young and the future was filled with promise, it was thrilling to celebrate the constant shift and change of history and embrace every fad that came off the assembly line, as well as being impatient with those who resisted the new and clung desperately to the old and outworn. It is a different matter when you realise that, almost without noticing it, you have joined the ranks not only of the old but of the old fashioned; and that the crazy shifts of change you embraced so eagerly when you were young are the very energies that are now carrying you into the past, along with steam trains and quiet Sundays. So it is hardly surprising that the old can begin to feel like strangers in their own land.
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.
