“Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn."
From " Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” by Matthew Arnold
“Hi Maureen, sorry to disturb your Sunday.”
“That’s alright Peter, I had no major plans for today.”
“Yeah thanks, all that bad weather last week meant I basically lost a day, but if I can spend half of today on your kitchen it’ll catch up and it’ll all be ok.”
“Yes I normally go to church but missing a day isn’t going to kill me, and anyway ‘Hymns of Praise’ is on TV this morning, so I can watch that while you work. Would you like a coffee?”
“Yes, thanks, that would be great.”
As Peter sets up his tools he settles into his usual workaday mind set, it all seems ok. Even though it’s the weekend. All the cuts are going right. All the holes are in the right place. Every joint looks perfect.
“Click!”
“Today on ‘Songs of Praise’ Patricia Howson introduces a feast of selected sacred music from Cambridge to assist in the celebration of the university’s 800th anniversary.”
The sound of the TV gently permeates the surrounds in an unusually inoffensive and calming way.
“Ah hymns.”
“Hang on, I know this one, ‘Blessed assurance Jesus is mine, oh what a foretaste of heaven divine.’ Fanny Crosby, I think she was blind wasn’t she?
“That music is very calming Maureen.”
“Yes it’s not a complete substitute for church, but it’ll do very nicely for today.”
‘It is well, it is well with my soul.’
“That was Phillip Bliss I think, wasn’t it?
“Wow! ‘Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand. The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.’ Hymn No 3 hundred and something in the hymnal. This was one of my favorites, very evocative of something, oh boy!”
“You seem to know your hymns Peter.”
“Sign of a misspent youth I think Maureen.”
The complexity of the installation distracted Peter for a while and the evocative sounds of ‘Hymns of Praise’ hovered in the air providing a subliminal provocation to Peter’s thought processes for most of that morning.
“All right Maureen, that’s it for today. I’m elsewhere tomorrow so I’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Good Peter, see you then.”
As Peter’s Ute parks at the highest point of Green Bay he puts on the adagio from Mahler’s Fifth, and stops for a while.
“Man I love this movement. I wonder if those cliffs down there are anything like the ones at Dover Beach that inspired Matthew Arnold? ‘Listen! You hear the grating roar.’
And that ‘grating roar’ I now hear.
‘With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.’
Wow, how ironic!
“Those Hymns, yeah those Hymns.
“I remember sitting alongside my mum colouring in. It was special then, I was part of God’s true church. We were different from all the rest. We were special. I was special because there was one truth, it was knowable, and my church had it. Well at least my mum’s church had it. And the hymns were the only part I’d take notice of. Most of it was over my head.
“It was so secure sitting in the same pew every week. My best friends were two pews behind, in their same spot every week as well. We were all dreaming of what it will be like when we were old enough to take up the offering, sit up the front, and take the Bible reading. All these lofty heights we could aspire to.
“’Would the young men appointed please come forward and collect today’s Mission Offering. Today it is for the school roof in that Solomon Island’s primary school.’ That was the cue. We’d shuffle about and work out the symmetry of all the rows. And do God’s work.”
“What a magnificent church; so generous, so kind and true, and so right. I squeeze my mum’s hand and she’d tap my knee. The pictures of heaven on the Sunday school walls remain vivid and real. A young boy with perfect features, standing next to, and cuddling a gorgeous lion, while his equally Aryan sister chases several butterflies - so much curly, blond, flowing hair. Standing nearby an immaculately presented Jesus also with flowing locks and perfectly manicured beard shares an amazingly earnest moment with the parents of these two examples of western, middle class 1950’s perfection (they weren’t allowed to have long hair).
“Heaven’s only for the perfect I think to myself, but dare not express. Who am I to question God’s absolute truth? Dad was never there and that confused me a bit. I’d better preach to him a little harder this week. And be a good boy as a true representative of Jesus.
“Man! I don’t want any of that any more. It really makes me groan. And yet the alternative makes me ask just as many other questions.
“What about Arnold - that ‘Sea of faith’, those ‘Naked shingles of the world.’
‘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….’
“Where did it go, that strength, that truth, that assurance? ‘Blessed assurance Jesus was mine!’”
“My sister has lived a life similar to mine, and she remains married to a Pastor in that very church I grew up in. She’s been exposed to the same life forces and the same intellectual enquiries but she’s made a choice and ignored alternative opinions. What has happened to me that has lead me to here, it used to be so safe and so simple. I remember once thanking God for giving me the wisdom to see the absolute truth. I was so much better than everybody else, and so lucky to have received such wisdom. And now the “Sea of Faith” is ebbing and ebbing with no returning flow.
“One person is confronted with a new idea and says, ‘That’s interesting. I wonder if it’s true. What are the implications of what all this might mean? They then work their way through different thoughts, testing and discussing each step as best they can. Their only consistency is a desire to be intellectually honest with what may, or may not, be true.
“Someone else, not all that different, hears the same alternative idea and nips it in the bud. ‘That calls into question some of my essential presuppositions,’ they consider. ‘I’m not ready for that. I don’t want to disrupt the emotional support of my current social and religious framework.’ They remain where they are. All new ideas are hit with the same mixture of emotional dishonesty combined with some higher concern of unwanted implications.
“Who’s correct? She reckons I go looking for it. But if the first Adam wasn’t real why the need for the second one?
“For ***k’s sake, hymns of praise in the background on a Sunday morning and I’m a spiritual mess. But doesn’t fundamentalism of any kind screw up the child, then the man, or what? That’s one thing I agree with the evangelical athiests about, the mind conditioning of children.”
“But do the alternatives stack up? ‘Ah, love let’s be true,’ asks Arnold.
‘..….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…..’
He offers in ‘Dover Beach’ as a potential to replace the disappearing, but centuries old, assurance of divine faith, the dubious reliability of human relationships - or our capacity to truly love and be loved. I mean, really? In my experience, and in a lot of what I’ve seen in others, that’s a pretty fraught substitute. Putting so much weight on the shoulders of that hit and miss affair is just looking for trouble. If for some the logical conclusions of atheism is a kind of nihilism, then the logical conclusions of relationships can be both ecstasy or agony – and sometimes simultaneously. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of predictability for the outcomes of romantic love being one or the other. I would confidently assert that there’s shit-loads more pain caused by rejection and loss of trust between humans than by the ebbing away of faith. I find very little of 1st Corinthians 13 within the daily grind of life - nor in the fellowship of the believers for that matter.
“Perhaps there’s a correlation between existential angst and relational despair. Aaah, there’s one for the shrinks!
“Ah well, at least that’s got me away from ‘Hymns of Praise’ and memories of religious fundamentalism and on to arguing with Matthew Arnold about ‘Dover Beach’. And all that debating can’t be bad.”
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