A Sense of Purpose

Delving back into the history of the Church of England reminds me how we have always, it seems, believed that British society wanted less to do with us than we might wish, and how sour we felt about it. A little while ago I described poor Fr Francis Wheeler of Wheatley & Farnborough and his Primer of Pastoral Theology which assumed, even back in the 1940s, that the flock assigned to him by Our Holy Mother the Church would be mainly unresponsive, tempted by the fleshly pleasures of modernity to spend their Sunday mornings doing other things than following Mattins in their copies of the Prayer Book. Then, last week, I came across a small card given to new godparents, shoved into the pages of an old service register book from the 1920s. Hectoring and miserable, its tiny type demanded of its readers, ‘Do YOU mean the promises you have made? Or will you forget them like so many?’; it clearly assumed that most people would not want to observe their obligations, and would not in fact do so, that they would prove false and feckless. To encounter this kind of Church was to be plunged into the dank, chilly air of depression and condemnation, to be told right from the off that you had no right to be there and should be grateful for the opportunity. It was a form of religion that only stood a real chance of sweeping up the self-righteous and the neurotic.

And curiously I find few expressions of this discouraging outlook which really seem very spiritual. Instead the concerns of the clergy who voice it, like Francis Wheeler, seem more to do with moral decadence and the refusal of so many people around him to conform to his idea of what good citizenship should look like, rather than, for instance, the fate of their eternal souls. It seems to be very secular worries that really animate them. I remember speaking to Dr Bones’s father about his own dad, a priest in rural Devon in the 1950s, who, he said, ‘saw his role as making people good and useful members of society’ (Bones père became a fundamentalist Evangelical in contrast). No wonder the Church of England’s experience of the last century has been so disappointing, as it’s watched most people find perfectly serviceable ways of being good citizens without any reference to what it might do or say.

The myths Christians tell themselves are legion, if I may put it in those terms. One of my favourites is that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’, a line which goes back to Tertullian. I am rather fond of quoting Tertullian’s credo quod absurdum est, but semen est sanguis Christianorum ignored the truth both in the third century and ever since. Christians were a tiny, disregarded minority until Constantine converted; and, across the centuries, from Roman North Africa overrun by the Umayyads to Moorish Spain to 17^th-century Japan, to crush Christianity out of existence by either bloody persecution or social pressure short of it has proved a matter of relative ease. Again, modern Christians tell themselves that the Church flourishes most when it is at its most counter-cultural, but Dame History tells us something different: that Christianity is at its most popular when it reflects, by and large, the values of the culture it inhabits, and especially those of the class in charge; if ‘popular’ is what we want to be, of course. We might well wonder what difference we really, truly make to the society around us.

If most of us have abandoned the belief that the people around us (in any uncomplicated or predictable way) are going to Hell unless they’re in our churches; and the lesser, etiolated idea that Britain (in any uncomplicated or predictable way) will go to Hell in a handcart unless people are in our churches; what, then, brethren, is left? Where can contemporary Anglicans find the impetus to get out of bed and go down to the steeple house to say Mattins in the morning?

I recall Dr Bones’s statement, when I was approaching my ordination, that ‘You’ll be spending your time helping people enjoy their lives’ which, considering her background, was a remarkable thing to say. It’s always remained with me: because a life lived in alignment with the cosmic truth must be more capable of enjoyment than the alternative – not in a superficial, consumerist way, but in the sense of deep fulfilment and peace. Sometimes as I prepare myself for the Eucharist I look out of the vestry windows on the souls going past on the path that runs alongside the churchyard, and think how sad it is that they aren’t hearing the words that tell them they are flawed but loved, that their joys and sorrows are heard, that they are capable of glory, and that glory wants to welcome them.

Is that enough? Is it too close to self-centredness and self-help? What else might there be, once threats, guilt, and utility are sent away?