CHAPTER 7
Rediscovering Faith
“If we have forgotten the Name of our God, and holden up our hands to any strange god, shall not God search it out?”
(THE 44TH PSALM)
Until I lived in Moscow and visited Mogadishu, my rediscovery of faith was mainly a matter of small things. How did it begin? I am not absolutely sure. By the time I was thirty years old, in 1981, I had achieved some material success. I was doing well in my chosen trade, journalism. That is to say, I was on the staff of a national daily newspaper, engaged in writing about a subject that interested me. I met famous and interesting people as a matter of course. I lived in a beautiful and convenient part of London, I was well paid by anyone’s standards. I could afford pleasant holidays with my girlfriend—whom I should nowadays call my “partner,” since we were not then married—on the European continent, roaming round France on trains and bicycles, exploring Germany and Italy, even venturing to Prague.
Some of these journeys, along with my daily task of writing about the inner workings of Britain’s socialist Labour movement and the increasingly unhinged strikes it kept calling, combined to destroy what remained of my teenage socialism, though I was slow to admit this to myself. I had replaced Christianity, and the Churchill cult, with an elaborate socialist worldview—because I had decided that I did not wish to believe in God or in patriotism.
The Loss of Secular Faith
Everyone I knew then seemed to have the same view. I do not think I had daily contact with any religious person—apart from the secretary on my first small-town paper—for about twenty years. I was shocked and (like Virginia Woolf) almost physically disgusted if any acquaintance turned out to believe in God. Now I was discovering that the secular faiths I held were false. I knew, rather too well, that what one believes—and does not believe—is important. I cannot imagine living without any belief of any kind. I was not capable of existing without a coherent view of the universe. But I was suppressing my loss of faith in a Godless universe, and my loss of faith in humanity’s ability to achieve justice. My life was devoted largely to pleasure and ambition.
But what were those pleasures? Two of the arts—architecture and music—move me more than any others, not because I know a great deal about them, but because I can feel their influence upon me, almost as if they were speaking to me. I am particularly fond of Philip Larkin’s line about “The trees are coming into leaf, like something almost being said,”1 because this feeling that something is almost but not quite being said seizes me when I encounter certain passages of music and certain buildings.
In my thirties I found that what was almost being said seemed to be the thing I had sought to avoid so hard a few years earlier. But I still did not know what it was. I no longer avoided churches. I recognized in the great English cathedrals and in many small parish churches the old unsettling messages. One was the inevitability and certainty of my own death, the other the undoubted fact that my despised forebears were neither crude nor ignorant, but men and women of great skill and engineering genius—a genius not contradicted or blocked by faith, but enhanced by it. The simple beauty of a hammer beam roof or a Norman chancel arch, let alone of the pillars in Durham nave, seems to be quite beyond the architects and builders of our enlightened age.
I simply cannot remember most of this process, though I can work out quite easily how long it was going on. I think my first acquaintance with York Minster, while I was still a student Trotskyist, probably began the process. But I was still noisily, arrogantly atheist and can remember prosing, during a visit to the old Papal Palace in Avignon, about how annoyingly hard it was to find medieval buildings that were not churches or castles. I would guess I was by then at least twenty-eight or twenty-nine.
Fear and the Last Judgment
What I can recall, very sharply indeed, is a visit to the Hotel-Dieu in Beaune, a town my girlfriend and I had gone to mainly in search of the fine food and wines of Burgundy. But we were educated travelers and strayed, guidebook in hand, into the ancient hospital. And there, worth the journey according to the Green Michelin guide, was Rogier van der Weyden’s fifteenth-century polyptych The Last Judgment.
I scoffed. Another religious painting! Couldn’t these people think of anything else to depict? Still scoffing, I peered at the naked figures fleeing toward the pit of hell, out of my usual faintly morbid interest in the alleged terrors of damnation. But this time I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open. These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions. On the contrary, their hair and, in an odd way, the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me and the people I knew. One of them—and I have always wondered how the painter thought of it—is actually vomiting with shock and fear at the sound of the Last Trump.
Portions of The Last Judgment by Rogier van der Weyden/Musée de I’Hôtel-Dieu, Beaune, France.
I did not have a “religious experience.” Nothing mystical or inexplicable took place—no trance, no swoon, no vision, no voices, no blaze of light. But I had a sudden, strong sense of religion being a thing of the present day, not imprisoned under thick layers of time. A large catalogue of misdeeds, ranging from the embarrassing to the appalling, replayed themselves rapidly in my head. I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned, if there were any damned.
And what if there were? How did I know there were not? I did not know. I could not know. Van der Weyden was still earning his fee, nearly 500 years after his death. I had simply no idea that an adult could be frightened, in broad daylight and after a good lunch, by such things. I have always enjoyed scaring myself mildly with the ghost stories of M. R. James, mainly because of the cozy, safe feeling that follows a good fictional fright. You turn the page and close the book, and the horror is safely contained. This epiphany was not like that at all.
No doubt I should be ashamed to confess that fear played a part in my return to religion. I could easily make up some other, more creditable story. But I should be even more ashamed to pretend that fear did not. I have felt proper fear, not very often but enough to know that it is an important gift that helps us to think clearly at moments of danger. I have felt it in peril on the road, when it slowed down my perception of the bucking, tearing, screaming collision into which I had hurled myself, thus enabling me to retain enough presence of mind to shut down the engine of my wrecked motorcycle and turn off the fuel tap in case it caught fire, and then to stumble, badly injured, to the relative safety of the roadside. I have felt it outside a copper mine in Africa, when the car I was in was surrounded by a crowd of enraged, impoverished people who had decided, with some justification, that I was their enemy. There, fear enabled me to stay silent and still until the danger was over, when I very much wanted to cry out in panic or do something desperate (both of which, I am sure, would have led to my death). I have felt it when Soviet soldiers fired on a crowd rather near me, and so I lay flat on my back in the filthy snow, quite untroubled by my ridiculous position because I had concluded, wisely, that being wounded would be much worse than being embarrassed.
But the most important time was when I stood in front of Rogier van der Weyden’s great altarpiece and trembled for the things of which my conscience was afraid (and is afraid). Fear is good for us and helps us to escape from great dangers. Those who do not feel it are in permanent peril because they cannot see the risks that lie at their feet.
I went away chastened, and the effect has not worn off in nearly three decades. I have been back to look at the painting since then, and it remains a great and powerful work. But it cannot do the same thing to me twice. I am no longer shocked by the realization that I may be judged, because it has ever after been obvious to me. And once again I have concluded that embarrassment was much the lesser of the two evils I faced.
I do not think I acted immediately on this discovery. But a year or so later I faced a private moral dilemma in which fear of doing an evil thing held me back from doing it, for which I remain immeasurably glad. Without Rogier van der Weyden, I might have done that thing.
Rediscovering Christmas and Swearing Great Oaths
At about the same time, I rediscovered Christmas, which I had pretended to dislike for many years. I slipped into a carol service on a winter evening, diffident and anxious not to be seen. I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, though I was unwilling to admit it. A few days later, I went to another service, this time with more confidence, and actually sang. I also knew perfectly well that I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.
I am not exactly clear now how this led in a few months to my strong desire—unexpected by me or by my friends, encouraged by my then unbelieving wife-to-be—to be married in church. I genuinely cannot remember. But I can certainly recall the way the words of the Church of England’s marriage service awakened thoughts in me that I had long suppressed. I was entering into my inheritance, as a Christian Englishman, as a man, and as a human being. It was the first properly grown-up thing that I had ever done. My adolescence, if not actually over, was at least coming to an end.
The Rector of St. Brides seemed to put some special force into his recital of the 128th Psalm, which promises, “Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house; thy children like the olive-branches round about thy table. Lo, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord.” I noticed (as I always do) the mention of fear and nodded to myself.
The swearing of great oaths concentrates the mind. So did the baptisms first of my daughter and then of my wife—who, raised as a Marxist atheist, trod another rather different path to the same place. Her christening followed a particularly lovely and robust form, devised in seventeenth-century England for the many who had been denied infant baptism under the rule of Oliver Cromwell and now wanted to enter the church of their fathers. I remember the rather reasonable answer the candidate is asked to give in reply to the enormous question, “Wilt thou then obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of thy life?”
The required response is, “I will endeavour so to do, God being my helper”—which seems to me to be a realistic promise. And the next thing in the back of the Prayer Book is the old Catechism, which I had dreaded so much as a refractory child but now read with limitless regret and deepening interest. My own confirmation, by contrast, was a miserable modern-language affair with all the poetic force of a driving test, and endured by me in much the same spirit.
The Prodigal Son Returns Too Late
I quickly found that I was going to have to pay immediately (as well as in other, slower ways) for my long rebellion. The church that I remembered had been a dignified body of sonorous prayers, cool and ancient music, and poetic services and ceremonies that would have been recognizable to the first Queen Elizabeth and to William Shakespeare. During the years I had been away—and not only away but actively hostile—the Bishops had felt the waves of hatred—from people like me—beating against their ancient walls. And they had responded by trying to make their activities more accessible to the worldly.
The services of the Book of Common Prayer along with the King James Bible, on which I had been raised and which still pervade the language and literature of the English-speaking world, were written to be spoken aloud, by countrymen to whom poetry was constantly present and normal in every action, from sowing and reaping to the cutting of hedges and the planing of wood. Because of this, they stand more or less outside ordinary time, as I think they were designed to do.
Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book has many virtues, one being that it is largely the work of a man who did not have a very high opinion of himself and who filled its pages with pleas for help in the impossible task of being good. He was also a dramatist of some skill. The service of Holy Communion, for instance, is a perpetual reenactment of the night of the Last Supper. This is why—on those rare occasions when it is celebrated on Maundy Thursday—it chills the church building with fear and trembling and, in parts, seems to be written in letters of fire. Outside, not far away, are the Garden of Gethsemane, the chilly night of loss and betrayal, the rooster preparing to crow three times, and the mob already stirring in its sleep for the show trial, the grotesque procession to the gibbet, and the judicial murder.
The services of Morning and Evening Prayer are the last traces of the unceasing monastic cycle of prayer, which once absorbed thousands of monks, day and night, throughout the Christian world. Evensong in particular has a dreamlike quality, at the edge of both sleep and death. As soon as the opening words are spoken, the mind is drawn away from the daily and the ordinary and toward the eternal.
The Prayer Book has another striking feature. It demands penitence as the price of entry to all its ceremonies. The hard passage from the First Epistle of John—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”—is often the first thing spoken. Soon afterward, the general confession requires a public declaration that “We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” There is “no health in us.” We are “miserable offenders.” These are not easy words to say, if you mean them. This is not because they are archaic or difficult. Most of them are plain English words of one or two syllables, in beautifully crafted sentences with a memorable rhythm. The fact is, many people prefer not to say them, because they do not like to admit that this is so. The church’s solution to this unpopularity was to abandon the requirement, replacing it with vague, half-hearted mumblings or—more often—with nothing at all.
Claiming that their proposed new services were an “alternative,” waves of newly ordained liberal clergy fanned out from the theological colleges (where liberal teachers had been working away for years) and in a swift and ruthless revolution drove the old Prayer Book from church after church. Anglicans are very accommodating, deferential, generous, and kindly people. Although most of them probably preferred the old to the new, many thought it would be bad manners, or uncharitable, to resist the urgent demands for novelty issued by their vicars. It was quickly clear that there was in truth no alternative. First, there would be an “experiment” with new forms, which was always deemed a success. Then there would perhaps be a period when old and new alternated. Then the old would be relegated to early morning (a concession to the aged) and perhaps the evening. In a few years, 400 years of almost unbroken tradition had been wiped out. What resistance there was had been patronized or ignored, even if it came in the shape of great figures of literature and poetry such as W. H. Auden, who memorably asked “Why spit on your luck?” This was how it was when I returned.
I had asked for this myself, and I accept it as the consequence of my own rebellion. But it does not make the loss any less painful.
A few years ago I was in Dallas, Texas, in some turmoil after having witnessed the execution of a murderer by lethal injection at the prison in Huntsville. With time to spend before catching my plane back to Washington, D.C., I visited the city’s Museum of Art and there found myself standing speechless in front of a painting about as different from Rogier van der Weyden’s Last Judgment as it is possible to imagine. It was a startlingly pessimistic version of The Prodigal Son by Thomas Hart Benton. Now, of all the parables, this one had been the most disturbing for me from the moment I encountered it, which I did—as few do now—in the ringing, unforgettable poetry of the King James Version, which fills the mind with vivid pictures. I could not have known, when I first heard that parable, how much it would eventually apply to me with direct personal force, and in how many ways. But it went home, deep and hard, all the same. I almost know it by heart, and cannot pass a beech tree in autumn, with a litter of nuts about it, without the words, “He would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat,” coming to mind. It is a bitter story, and we are left at the end wondering how the two brothers dealt with each other in the years to come, even though this is not the point of it.
But Benton had made the tale even more sour. His prodigal son is a figure a little like Tom Joad back from prison in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and from the same era. He has come home too late. Nobody has seen him from afar off and run joyfully to meet him. There will be no forgiveness, no best robe, no ring, no “music and dancing.” He stands in his shabby clothes with his poor, roped suitcase. A beaten-up car—the last trace of his squandered wealth—is parked in the background. He is gaping, with his hand to his mouth, at the ruin of the family homestead, ruin caused by his own greed and wastefulness. He looks as if it is just dawning on him that he is stupid and cruel and without hope. The light is failing in a chilly sky beneath wind-ripped, twisted clouds. Instead of a fatted calf, there is a stark, white animal skeleton, the skull horned, lying in the untended grass. We can guess at the grief, resignation, and failure that have overtaken the family and its home during his heedless absence. Who can he blame for it but himself? The desolation is infinite. And as I surveyed the melancholy remnants of my own church, out of which I had petulantly stomped, I felt the same. It was terrible and wrong, but what was I to say? Where had I been when I was needed?
I threw myself, even so, into an effort to halt or reverse the destruction. I think I knew that this was futile, many years too late. But it allowed me to be both in the church and out of it, which at the time was where I needed to be. I bicycled from place to place in search of citadels of the old worship. In one particularly lovely Oxfordshire church, I enquired of a priest—a cozy-looking, well-padded old gentleman—if they ever used the Prayer Book. He stared at me, his eyes hot with dislike. “Never!” he pronounced, and then almost spat out the words “I hate Cranmer’s theology of penitence.”
This was one of those moments of abrupt realization—rather like the day when a British railway employee responded to a complaint about an especially late train by saying sarcastically, “You think the railways are run for your benefit, don’t you?”—when the truth suddenly became clear to me. It was not the language they disliked (though they probably did dislike it too). It was what the words meant. The new, denatured, committee-designed prayers and services were not just ugly, but contained a different message, which was not strong enough or hard enough to satisfy my need to atone.
Word spread around my trade that I was somehow mixed up in church matters. It was embarrassing. I remember one acquaintance, a distinguished foreign correspondent, turning to me in the press room of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington, D.C., and remarking that he had heard I was going to church. With a look of mingled pity and horror on his face, he asked, “How can you do that?” He plainly felt much as Virginia Woolf had felt toward T. S. Eliot.2
I talked to very few people about this and was diffident about mentioning it in anything I wrote. I think it true to say that for many years I was more or less ashamed of confessing to any religious faith at all, except when I felt safe to do so. It is a strange and welcome side-effect of the growing attack on Christianity in British society that I have now completely overcome this. Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, much easier to acknowledge.
And so I find myself, skulking behind the pillar at the back, attending a small village church some distance from my home, so small that the authorities have not—yet—put pressure on it to abandon Cranmer’s prayers and the King James Bible. We all know we are refugees, awaiting the moment when some ecclesiastical bureaucrat discovers that we are not in step with the times and takes measures to make us conform.
I have seen elsewhere how they proceed: sometimes by salami-slicing the ancient traditions—one vanishing one year, another the next, until all are gone; sometimes by brutal, abrupt decree; sometimes by dividing and ruling congregations. I have more or less accepted that only God knows whether I will die before the old books are finally stamped out, or the other way around. It will be a near-run thing. But I know that, finally released from any regular use, they will continue to live, perhaps more widely than they ever did before, in the minds of men and women. Nobody can stop me from reciting these texts in private, and I believe that they are so enduring and so filled with truth that they will survive as long as any human work.
This small, private battle for poetry and beauty—to which I am still committed—is as nothing compared to the greater conflict that we now face. No doubt it would be easier to fight if we were better armed. But in recent times it has grown clear that in my own country the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat, by secular forces that have never been so confident. In the United States, where Christianity appears stronger, it is by no means as powerful and secure as it imagines. Why is there such a fury against religion now? Why is it more advanced in Britain than in the USA? I have had good reason to seek the answer to this question, and I have found it where I might have expected to have done if only I had grasped from the start how large are the issues at stake. Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.