In the Dark

Jump to Comments

Below is the text of a sermon a delivered at the First United Church of Christ, Northfield, Minnesota, on Sunday, September 30, 2007. Read it below or, if you prefer, download the sermon here: In the Dark (84K pdf).

In the Dark

I spent the past year—from August 2006 through August 2007—in England. We lived in Kenilworth, in Warwickshire, about five miles from Coventry and twelve miles from Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. Kenilworth is home to England’s most famous ruined castle, the mostly-underground ruins of one of England’s largest medieval abbeys, and a medieval church where in the year 1575 Queen Elizabeth I listened to a most edifying sermon. It’s also home to dozens of pubs, with names like the Green Man, the Royal Oak, the Bear and Ragged Staff, and—my personal favorite—the Virgins and Castle. On one quarter-mile stretch of Albion Street there are five different pubs—so many that, a century ago, the local Anglican parish planted a missionary church in the neighborhood, hoping to head off some of the men making their way to the pubs on Sunday morning.

But the pubs are still better-attended than the churches. England is a secular society. The two largest religions are football and cricket. The Church of England is the official church, but for most people it’s an institution—like the Queen or marmite—that sits on the shelf exuding Britishness without entering much into people’s actual lives. The rituals of the church are like knowing which fork to use first at a formal dinner party.

The playwright Alan Bennett has observed that, in England, “whether or not one believes in God tends to be sidestepped. It’s not quite in good taste… [T]he Church of England is so constituted that its members can really believe anything at all, but of course almost none of them do.” The British anthropologist Kate Fox recalls observing a mother and daughter filling out a form in a doctor’s waiting room. One of the blanks to fill in was Religion.

The daughter asked, “Religion? What religion am I? We’re not any religion, are we?” “No, we’re not,” replied her mother. “Just put C of E.” “What’s C of E?” asked the daughter. “Church of England.” “Is that a religion?” “Yes, sort of. Well, no, not really—it’s just what you put.”

Even the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. George Carey, once described his church as “an elderly lady, who mutters away to herself in a corner, ignored most of the time.”

In England, the Congregationalists and Presbyterians came together in 1972 to form a new denomination called the United Reformed Church. At the time, there was much discussion about what the new church should be called. As one member of the clergy involved in the process wrote: “[One] name suggested was United Church of Christ, as in the United States of America, but that was felt to be perhaps a little too arrogant, making too strong a claim.” This modest attitude toward the church is typically British. I suppose we should just call ourselves A Large Room Full of People Who Believe Different Things.

The history of Christianity in Britain goes back fourteen hundred years, to the arrival of the missionary St. Augustine of Canterbury at the beginning of the seventh century. There are glorious churches everywhere in England. During our year there, we visited Salisbury Cathedral, Winchester Cathedral, Lichfield Cathedral, Coventry Cathedral, Chichester Cathedral, Lincoln Cathedral, York Minster, and Westminster Abbey. We visited dozens of beautiful and inspiring English parish churches—from magnificent collegiate churches like St. Mary’s in Warwick and Holy Trinity in Stratford (where Shakespeare is buried) to small hidden treasures like the stunning Anglo-Saxon church of St. Mary in Deerhurst, Gloucestershire, parts of which are over a thousand years old.

Being in England made me realize how much of my spiritual life has been based on expectation. I’ve heard ministers talk about Christians being an Easter people, but I think I’ve always been an Advent person or a Lent person. I suppose it has something to do with the childhood expectation of a visit from Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, that business of leaving out the stockings and the plate of cookies, the Easter basket and the carrot, and being rewarded with an epiphany of chocolate and toys. So much of my spiritual life seems to have been conditioned by that childhood experience. I go to church, I light a candle, I bow my head, and I expect God to come—almost as if I’m setting a trap for God and baiting it with an act of worship. For me, religion has been less a system of belief than a behavior, subject to conditioning like any behavior. I enter a church, or watch a beautiful sunset, and I connect it with a spiritual reward.

In England, I was flooded with experiences and impressions so overwhelming and new that this God reflex was somehow short-circuited. During Lent, I sat amidst the splendor of Tewkesbury Abbey while a choir singing Allegri and Palestrina seemed to give voices to the gilded Gothic angels in the ceiling. On the morning of Palm Sunday, I stood outside the magnificent west front of Lincoln Cathedral and listened to the cathedral bells ringing changes that seemed to hold out the promise of eternity. In April, I stood among the extraordinary monastic ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in the picturebook valley of the River Rye. In June, I attended choral evensong in Magdalen College Chapel in Oxford and heard English boy choristers sing Sir Michael Tippett’s arrangement of an African-American spiritual. Imagine a fidgetting little white-surpliced chorister, nine or ten years old, singing “nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.” Each of these experiences was so extraordinary, so unexpected and so overpowering, that I forgot to set my little trap for God. The little voice of religious habit inside me was silenced.

The problem with setting traps for God is that I tend to fall into the trap myself. What I catch is not God, but my ideas about God. My God-trap turns out to have been a human-trap all along. I think this is what I realized in England. The magnificent churches and cathedrals I visited were all inspired attempts to build a better God-trap. But what those God-traps caught were human history, and human art, and the intense striving of human beings to express their ideas of God—and sometimes, unfortunately, to force their ideas of God on other human beings.

Nowhere in England was this more evident than in Westminster Abbey. I visited Westminster Abbey for the first time in early December of last year. It was about four in the afternoon, and growing dark. Most of the light had gone out of the stained glass windows, and the interior of the church was dusky and full of deeper shadows. It’s a good time to visit the abbey, when it’s dim and solemn and a little spooky. When Mark Twain first visited Westminster Abbey, he was taken there in the middle of the night, and his first impression, like mine, was not of God, but of men. “We were among the tombs,” he wrote; “on every hand dull shapes of men—sitting, standing, or stooping—inspected us curiously out of the darkness—reached out their hands toward us—some appealing, some beckoning, some warning us away. Effigies they were—statues over the graves; but they looked human and natural in the murky shadows.” For me, it was like walking backstage in a theater after the audiences had gone. I saw Shakespeare’s History Plays in Stratford-upon-Avon while I was in England, and in Westminster Abbey I found the tombs of Richard II and Henry V, like large storage boxes containing essential props. It was hard to believe I was actually there, in Westminster Abbey, inhaling the actual dust of a thousand years of English history.

That history was often brutal, bloody, and inglorious. Often, it was a history of blood spilled in the name of religious convictions. There in the abbey, sharing the same magnificent golden and alabaster tomb, were Elizabeth I, who executed her subjects for attending the Latin Mass, and Mary I, who executed her subjects for not attending the Latin Mass. There was Henry III, the builder of the abbey, who sanctioned the persecution of Jews and forced them to wear a badge of identification on their clothing. There was Edward I, who expelled the Jews from England and participated in the Ninth Crusade to eradicate Islam from the Holy Land. There, serene in alabaster and Purbeck marble, were Catholics who killed Jews, Protestants who killed Catholics, Catholics who killed Protestants, Anglicans who killed Puritans, Puritans who killed Anglicans. After all of the elaborate tombs of these bloody defenders of their particular faith, it was a relief to come to the simple slab that covers the dust and bones of Charles Darwin.

Have you ever tried to walk through a dark room with a kerosene mantle lamp? If you hold it out in front of you, it doesn’t light your way, it only blinds you. You see the brightness of the lamp and nothing else. I think our beliefs can be like that: they dazzle us and block our vision. As I stood inside one of the most famous churches in England, my own parochial concept of God—my bright armful of beliefs—seemed entirely inadequate.

On the floor of Westminster Abbey was the name CHARLES DARWIN cut into a marble slab. And CHARLES DICKENS. And GEORGE FREDERICK HANDEL. But these were only words piled on top of bones. No effort of the imagination could squeeze the living spirits of those men into those small sections of pavement. Likewise, it would have diminished the experience to attempt to force God out of those shadows, to squeeze the boundless mystery of God into a human-size belief. Words failed me. Even to call God “God” and myself “a Christian”—these felt like words piled on top of bones, like epitaphs. Mark Twain said: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” So often in England I experienced the flash of lightning, I felt its electric charge pass through my entire being; to explain it to myself in terms of a handful of insufficient beliefs was to call it the lightning bug.

Today’s psalm (I’ve managed to squeeze in the lectionary reading after all) says: “When they call to me, I will answer them.” For the longest time, I’ve been calling to God and hearing only the echo of my own voice. How was I expecting God to answer me? With chocolate and toys? With the voices of angels? Or is God the silence in which my own voice echoes, the darkness in which my own light briefly shines? I don’t know. I don’t know.

I have to admit that there came a point during my year in England when I was ready to give up on religion altogether. I was in London on the morning before Islamic extremists planted a car bomb in Oxford Circus. Sectarian hatred is still smoldering in Northern Ireland, and burning as hot as ever across the Middle East. Women and gays around the world are being denied their basic human rights, are suffering and dying under the oppression of religious belief. What I see all around me are belief-bedazzled human beings bumping into each other and setting fires with their flammable versions of truth.

I have to admit it was refreshing to turn on BBC Radio 4 and listen to comedian Marcus Brigstocke deliver a seven-minute rant against religion, asking the followers of the three Abrahamic faiths to stop blowing each other up and give the rest of us our planet back. His attitude toward religious truth was bracingly British. “Religion, by its very nature,” he said, “doesn’t tend to concern itself with truth. There simply isn’t time for truth. By the time all the singing and candle-lighting and toadying and condemning and hiding from science is done, truth’s given up and gone to the pub for a pint.” Listening to Marcus Brigstocke, I pictured Truth in one of the pubs across from St. Barnabas down on Albion Street, watching Manchester United on SkySports and buying a round for Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Maybe those guys are right. I don’t know. I’m not prepared to say, as Hitchens does, that religion poisons everything. But I can’t say that it explains everything either. A year in England, far from all of my carefully-tended traps for God, has left me in the dark. But maybe there’s more faithfulness in trusting to the dark than in setting fire to everything in sight and calling it the will of God.

When I finally came out of Westminster Abbey, after lingering for a while near the graves of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, I looked back at the sculptures in the frieze above the west door. There, to my surprise, were statues of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Archbishop Oscar Romero, like a large banner that said God is Still Speaking. I stood for a moment, looking up. The sky far above the abbey was dark, but here on earth there was a confusion of lights.

1 Comment

Filed under religion

Tags: England, religion, sermon