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 time’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
