Her striking remark-And I can’t help wondering what will happen if we edit out all notion of a higher power. Do we all become our own little gods? Will we end up in TS Eliot’s Waste Land of vanity and indifference?. Food for thought. COLUMNS / CAMILLA CAVENDISH Columns I can’t see God but since my mother’s death I can see the value of his house CAMILLA CAVENDISH Published: 13 July 2014 Comment (38) Print I’ve lost my sense of time since my mother died. The diary says it was three weeks ago. But the internal clock of the soul does not seem to measure things out in weeks or minutes. “The time is out of joint,” she might have said, having read English at university. Everyday events still go on — the end-of-term concerts, the football — but in sepia. Never again will I say to people who have been bereaved: “It must have been a blessing: she was not well and it would only have got worse.” The fact that this is true is of little comfort. The loss of someone who has been present your whole life long cannot be condensed into their final moments. At times like these we seek solace in things we often ignore in the daily rush: music, poetry, religion. These run on a different cycle and they address the big emotional questions. The first Sunday after she went I felt an overwhelming urge to go and light a candle in church. This surprised me. But it seemed immeasurably powerful compared with anything else I had done. That flicker of the eternal, of hope, of recognition, was important to me. On the second Sunday I took my children to the local church that we frequent like itinerant travellers, but where we are always greeted without a hint of umbrage. The familiar words and music, the time to reflect, somehow anchored the grief. We were always a King James family, if we were anything. Four hundred years later that Bible continues to shape our language and our culture. Growing up as an only child of parents who were authors, in a house where the dictionary was on the dining table as often as the salt, I regarded attempts to modernise the old resonant texts as vandalism. But it would never have occurred to me, or my atheist parents, to object to Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I am a pitiful agnostic, really. I have been an aid worker, taking food to the starving in destitute lands, and wondered where God could be. I have railed against Catholicism for depriving women of contraception and helping to unleash a population boom. I have despaired as different religions slug at each other in the Middle East. Yet ever since I became a mother I have become aware of what the atheist philosopher AC Grayling once called “the lingering splinter in the mind . . . a sense of yearning for the absolute”. I take my children to church, from time to time, to give them a foundation that might later fill a void. It is undeniable that the yawning gap I feel has been partly assuaged by the church; I cannot quite say by God. My mother couldn’t have said that either, although she was heading that way. This was remarkable for a militant rationalist, a woman who powered her way into Oxford University from America in the 1950s, on whose bookshelves Dawkins and Nietzsche are prominent. But they also contain a Bible, with pages marked. She had become a churchgoer. She, like me, found comfort in the rituals. And perhaps something more. It was not fear; she was not afraid of dying. Earlier this year I stood in an English country churchyard while a stone was laid in memory of another relative. A vicar we had never met before turned what could have been an awkward occasion into an awesome process of healing and acceptance. Mankind has not yet devised anything better. So what should we do, we fair-weather Christians who lean on the church during difficult times and otherwise act as if it isn’t there? Will it still be there for us when we need it most? Last week the Bishop of Oxford, the Church of England’s head of education, said the “sharp decline in Christianity” meant that schools should no longer be legally required to include Christian worship in assemblies. I don’t doubt that multifaith assemblies are often more appropriate. But I do wonder where we go with “sharp decline”. Churchgoing has plummeted. But in 2011, 60% of the UK population still defined themselves as “Christian” (5% said they were “Muslim”, 25% said “no religion”). We are still a Christian culture. This concept is notoriously hard to define. CS Lewis once said that each of us would like some bits of the society that the New Testament implies, but that few of us would swallow the whole thing. That is true. But we could probably agree that a Christian culture promotes gratitude, empathy, responsibility, humility and compassion. All of which are increasingly devalued in our hyperactive society. None of these values needs a religious justification, of course. I wouldn’t dream of saying that you have to be religious to do good. Yet the architecture of religion can provide a space to reflect on what is right. And it is intriguing that religion remains a powerful vehicle for doing good. In their book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, the Harvard professors Robert Putnam and David Campbell find that Americans who attend a church, synagogue, temple or mosque and make “church friends” are far more involved in both religious and non-religious charities than Americans who don’t. This seems to have less to do with faith than with feeling part of a community, a congregation. The authors find that nonbelievers who have friends in a congregation are also more likely to volunteer and to give. In the complacent West, we also forget the power of the Christian belief that all human beings are equal in the sight of God. This is a deeply liberating concept that is threatening to tyrants. It is one of the reasons for the current persecution of Christians in China and of Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman who had been put on death row for marrying a Christian. It may also have played a role in the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram. The majority of the girls are thought to be Christian and are being forced to convert. But that is not a fact that has been highlighted in the godless West, where we are embarrassed to defend people who are attacked for their faith. Militant atheists, I think, miss this point about human rights. I find myself rather tired of their contempt. I don’t think anyone should proselytise, whether they are believers or sceptics. And I can’t help wondering what will happen if we edit out all notion of a higher power. Do we all become our own little gods? Will we end up in TS Eliot’s Waste Land of vanity and indifference? When I was 18 my favourite poem was Philip Larkin’s Church Going. Its most famous line is “When churches fall completely out of use /What we shall turn them into . . . ” Then, I had read it as a triumphant description of the church’s slide into obsolescence. Now I realise that it is full of regret for an institution built for “marriage, and birth, and death, and thoughts of these”. An institution “in whose blent air all our compulsions meet, are recognised, and robed as destinies”. In a few months’ time, when I am back to my usual sceptical self, I will remind myself to be more humble about my own capacity to cope and less passive when the church is under attack. Right now I am thankful it is there. [email protected]
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 04:49:14 +0000
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