The Future of the Church or Choruses from the ‘Rock’ Part III: Whitterings, December 2006

Choruses from the ‘Rock’ Part III

In my last article we examined what we as a church have to offer the modern world. We have already seen that we offer a life lived with meaning and we offer loving communities as a home and a family. We have not yet explored our greatest gift.

I believe our chief ‘product’, to use business language, is not meaning or community but holiness. We offer a path towards truth. We offer houses placed apart for the beauty of holiness and the stillness of the Presence of God. We offer liturgies that seek to approach the unapproachable.

“The higher Christian churches – where, if anything, I belong – come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.” Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

We offer a place outside of the chronos of time that echoes with eternity. We offer houses and communities of prayer and transcendence. A way to hear, a space in which God can do ‘more than we can ask or imagine’. We offer the continuation of thousands of years of patience and perseverance in prayer. We offer hope.

“We thank Thee for the lights we have kindled,
The light of altar and of sanctuary;
Small lights of those who meditate at midnight
And lights directed through the coloured panes of win-
dows
And light reflected from the polished stone,
The gilded carven wood, the coloured frescoes.
Are gaze is submarine, our eyes look upwards
And see the lights that fracture through unquiet water.
We see the light but see not whence it comes
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

We are children quickly tired: children that are up in the night
And fall asleep as the rocket is fired; and the day is long
For work or play.
We tire of distraction or concentration, we sleep and are glad
To sleep,
Controlled by the rhythm of blood and the day and the night
And the seasons.
And we must extinguish the candle, put out the light
And relight it;
Forever must quench, forever relight the flame.

And when we have built an altar to the Invisible Light, we
May set thereon the little lights for which our bodily vision
Is made.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza X

Eliot makes clear that if there is no such place and family of holiness there will be no real community. In his view true community is made up of those who are committed to something greater than themselves and not those drawn together for mutual gain or support. For example, a true Christian marriage is not a relationship in which each focuses on the other. Rather it is a relationship in which both focus on God and vow to walk the path towards Him together. So it is with a true Christian community. We await the coming of Christ in our midst, revealing Himself in one another and in the Sacraments. Often he will come, as Albert Schweitzer puts it “as one unknown’. If we are not looking for Him we will not see Him when he comes amongst us.

“I have loved the beauty of thy house, the peace of thy sanctuary,
I have swept the floors and garnished the alters.
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,
Though you have shelters and institutions,
Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid,
Subsiding basements where the rat breeds
Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors
Or a house a little better than your neighbours;
When the Stranger says: “what is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “this is a community”?
And the Stranger will depart and return to the desert.
O my soul, be prepared for the coming of the stranger,
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

Though you forget the way of the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door;
Life you may evade but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza III

So who are we, we who seek a way to witness to a darkening world? What do we have to offer? How are we to begin to rebuild His church?

“Why should men love the Church? Why should they love
Her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard and hard where
They like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be
Good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.
And the Son of Man was not crucified once for all,
The blood of the martyrs not shed once for all,
The lives of the Saints not given once for all:
But the Son of Man is crucified always
And there shall be Martyrs and Saints.
And if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps
We must first build the steps;
And if the Temple is to be cast down
We must first build the Temple.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza VI

I do not know the answers to the problems facing the church in today’s society. I do not know how to proceed. And that is perhaps as it should be. As Archbishop Oscar Romero said “we may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”

What I do feel is that we must return to our primary purpose: to worship God in the beauty of holiness and to become communities of loving disciples witnessing in our own generation to a life lived with meaning and the hope of transfiguration. We need to first of all return to the work and remember the holiness of our calling and pray continually that the lord may send ‘workers into the vineyard’ to continue our work in their several generations. If we do this first and in faith I believe a path will become known. The Spirit can enter into us and guide us when we remember Her presence and ‘wait upon the Lord’. It is also time to “lay aside all anxious thought and imagining”. The church is journeying through the desert at the moment and our own international community is threatened. There is panic and anxiety everywhere. Now is the time to be quiet, to trust, to relax. The church will not fail, of that we have been promised: “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”. She will survive and rebuild. So with patience and perseverance we must begin the work of discipleship again. We must attempt yet again to hear the word of God and become Holy.

“Much to cast down,
Much to build,
Much to restore;
Let the work not delay,
Time and the arm not waste;
Let the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone,
Let the fire not be quenched in the forge.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza II

Running to Stand Still or Choruses from the ‘Rock’ Part II: Whitterings, November 2006

Choruses from the ‘Rock’ Part II

“Thus your fathers were made
Fellow citizens of the Saints,
Of the household of God,
Built upon the foundation
Of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself the chief corner- Stone.
But you, have you built well, that you now sit helpless in a
Ruined house?
Where many are born to idleness, to frittered lives and squalid
Deaths, embittered scorn in honeyless hives,
And those who would build and restore turn out the palms of
Their hands, or look in vain towards foreign lands for alms
To be more or the urn to be filled.
Your building not fitly framed together, you sit ashamed and
Wonder whether and how you may be builded together for
A habitation of God in the Spirit, the Spirit which moved
On the face of the waters like a lantern set on the back of a Tortoise.
And some say: “how can we love our neighbour? For love must
Be made real in act, as desire unites with desired; we have
Only our labour to give and our labour is not required.
We wait on corners, with nothing to bring but the songs we can
Sing which nobody wants to hear sung;
Waiting to be flung in the end on a heap less useful than dung”.
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza II

In my last article I explored the sense of directionlessness of modern society and often the church. There is a strong reaction against being too negative when discussing the modern church. It is often seen as defeatist and counter productive. However, I do not see how we can truly take stock of ourselves if we do not honestly look at ourselves in the mirror. This was my attempt in the June article on Kierkegaard.

“To see yourself is to die, to die to all illusions and all hypocrisy. It takes great courage to dare look at yourself – something which can take place only in the mirror of the world. You must want only the truth, neither vainly wish to be flattered nor self-tormentingly want to made a pure devil.” Soren Kierkegaard

Many in the church are simply in denial. This is partially a defence mechanism to protect us from a feeling that we are witnessing the work of our hands and that of our forbearers disintegrate before our eyes. We have lost the passion for true rebuilding because we do not know how to begin. Neither do I.

“you sit ashamed and
Wonder whether and how you may be builded together for
A habitation of God in the Spirit”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza II

Neither do I wish to continue to belabour the issue. Those of us who face aging congregations with limited young families and youth are well acquainted with the rising panic that we try and elevate through rationalisation and an emphasis on social action. We get excited over ten youth in a group or twenty children in Sunday school and choose not to focus on how sad is our excitement over such small numbers. We often despair because we see a world without meaning and purpose that has no interest in the only thing we really have to offer, the Gospel of Life and the community of the Baptised called to a life of Holiness.

“we have only our labour to give and our labour is not required.
We wait on corners, with nothing to bring but the songs we can
Sing which nobody wants to hear sung;”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza II

“The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned,
What have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face
Of the deep.
Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?
When the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and
Men have forgotten All gods except Usury, Lust and Power.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza VII

What I discern from the poem “Choruses from the ‘Rock’”, as well as from the letter of Evelyn Underhill to Archbishop Lang printed in the May column, is that we have a desperate need to return to the primary purpose of worshipping God and stopping to listen and discern His will. The Summary of the Law commands that we love God first and then with the grace that flows from this to then love our neighbours as ourselves. It often seems as if we have over emphasised the second part of the commandment without having addressed the first.

“You, have you built well, have you forgotten the cornerstone?
Talking of right relations of men, but not of relations of men
To God. “Our citizenship is in heaven”; yes, but that is the model and
type for your citizenship upon earth.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza II

The Gospel that we proclaim is the way of life and freedom. We witness to lives lived with beauty, compassion, mercy, sacrifice, community and, most of all, meaning. We believe that we offer a world ‘running to stand still’ as U2 puts it, an oasis of peace and depth where one can connect once again with the purpose of the universe and ones place in it. If anything, the modern Western world needs to Gospel more than ever before to remind the world that the pursuit of money, fame, power and the elevation of the self all lead to darkness.

“A cry from the North, from the West and from the South
Whence thousands travel daily to the time kept city;
Where My Word is unspoken,
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say; “Here were decent godless people:
There only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls”.
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza III

We as a church also have to offer society a real home, a real family. As catholics we witness that meaning is constructed as part of a community not on one’s own. We offer a family that will never die, that will never desert us and that is marked by true respect and love. Or at least that is what our parish communities are called to be. We also know that many communities are not safe, nurturing, meaning making communities but are rather insular and destructive. Most of us will have experienced such a church community at one point or another. So here is another obvious starting point for our church: strive to become caring, witnessing communities of disciples. I do not believe that the Mormons or the Jehovah witnesses are flourishing in our society because of their beliefs but because they offer true community. So many of us lack a true home or a true family, a place and a people to whom we belong and are loved. This we can seek to offer.

“What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praises of God,
Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash too and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
Nor does the family even move about together,
But ever son would have his motorcycle,
And daughters ride away on casual pillions.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stanza II

Dover Beach or Choruses from the ‘Rock’ Part I: Whitterings, October 2006

Choruses from the ‘Rock’ Part I

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Mathew Arnold, 1867

Mathew Arnold’s famous poem ‘Dover Beach’ describes the withdrawing from Western society the sense of meaning and cohersion and purpose. His words still cause a shiver to run down my spine as they evoke the shadow that grows from the East over the modern world. I use it to introduce articles based on T.S. Eliot’s poem Choruses from the ‘Rock’ that wrestles with the Church’s struggle to rekindle the flame of the Gospel in a darkening world.

Both Arnold and Eliot descibe the wasteland of menainglessness and inwardness that has overtkaen us. We know it has come and have seen it in a million little ways since those photographs first apeared of the liberation of Auchwitz. We see the rise of violence, lack of community, lack of decency, lack of commitment to the wider society, the erosion of the family. Yet we still find ourselves shocked and bewildred by the events at Dawson College last week. We find ourselves at sea when confronted with the darkness of a young man who believes nothing more than that “The world sucks, people suck, school sucks, work sucks.” We are horrified by the news that there even exists an online game in which you play one of the shooters at Columbine. We struggle to connect to a society in which the average age of first sexual activity is 13 and the same for drug and alchohol experimentation. We are even more confused when we realise that this is often done with parental knowledge and consent. The only reaction to this and, or at least my reaction, as you hear the confusion and chaos over the radio as youth flee a college through a pool of blood, is tears.

But Surprised? No. It is one of my hopes in humanity that this type of occurance is not more common given the state of things. Surprised? No. Not when I see that even those youth who have been brought up in our Sunday School and youth grouups, been Confirmed, and served at the Altar of our Church drift away into amphetamine addiction, dehumanising escaptist sexual exploits, violence, and self destructive or suicidal illusions. Those who have been exposed to the the path of life, those who have been shown the way, are still being lost.

The shadow of purposlesness has even drifted across the threshhold of God’s House. Instead of providing meaning and purpose we reduce the Gosepl to personal Ego needs and ‘pop’ psychology. A good working definition of heresy is to elevate one aspect of the truth as the whole truth. Many of our church communities are such examples.

“What we call "church" is too often a gathering of strangers who see the church as yet another "helping institution" to gratify further their individual desires. One of the reasons some church members are so mean-spirited with their pastor, particularly when the pastor urges them to look at God, is that they feel deceived by such pastoral invitations to look beyond themselves. They have come to church for "strokes," to have their personal needs met. What we call church is often a conspiracy of cordiality. Pastors learn to pacify rather than preach to their Ananiases and Sapphiras. We say we do it out of "love." Usually, we do it as a means of keeping everyone as distant from everyone else as possible. You don't get into my life and I will not get into yours.”

Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens

The ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ has become deafening. We speed up and get nowhere. We cosume more and are not satisfied. The world gets ‘better’ and our youth drown. This is not better! I grow tired of those who dismiss the decay of modern society by pointing out the good while ignoring the horror and say complacently that all generations think the previous one superior. The decline of civilisations is real and has occurred consistenlty in human history. St Augustine really lived through the collapse of a once great civilisation and his reaction was not naïve. Those generations that live through decay are right when they look to the past! This postmodern philosophical world in which we live is not an ordered philisophical response to the world it is the shattered fragments and shards of the collapse of modernity. This is not a way towards meaning, it is just the broken remnants of a past world. We scramble thorugh a philosophical rubbish heap searching for a way out. But the human predicament is still the same and the answers are already known. The dead ends that our society recklesslly persues are the same dead ends that religions have warned of since the dawn of man.

“O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!The endless cycle of idea and action,Endless invention, endless experiment,Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,But nearness to death no nearer to God.Where is the Life we have lost in living?Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuriesBrings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.”
T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock Stansa II

How many of us instill in our children and grandchildren the firm foundations that life lived for itself is a dead end? How many of us show with our lives that only a life lived for something greater than ourselves is freedom?

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” Mark 8.

We are the disciples of Christ, Baptised into his death and Resurrection, we are the ones chosen to witness to the world the Glory of the Cross and the liberty of those who follow The Way. We believe that we have a purpose, that our lives have meaning. We witness with our lives to a Holy Hope. The Church has a mission now which is as crucial now as it has ever been. Yet how are we to witness to beauty, love, justice, compassion, mercy and hope to such a society? I shall explore a few ideas in my next columns which I hope may further this dialogue. I finsih with an example of what we as a community of faith has to offer to those around us struggling in the shadows.

“Hoopla! All that I see arches, and light arches around it. The air churns out forces and lashes the marveling land. A hundred times through the fields and along the deep roads I’ve cried Holy. I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing and gone? Ladies and gentlemen! You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds. The air is buoyant and wholly transparent, scoured by grasses. The earth stuck through it is noisome, lighted and salt. Who shalll ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? “Whom shalll I send,” heard the first Isaiah, “and who will go for us?” And poor Isaiah, who happened to be standing there – and there was no one else – burst out, “Here am I; send me.”
Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard

Still there is the need. Still he calls. Still there is only us. How shall we answer?