South Downs, East Sussex
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James Bateman (1893 – 1959)
[and this church bell by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1917]
Church Going
Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
"Here endeth" much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for whom was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
Philip Larkin (1922 - 1985)
[See also: KL & FN]
Larkin's poem is mentioned in the wikipedia entry of novelist Malcolm Bradbury (1932 - 2000): "Though Bradbury was not an orthodox religious believer, he respected the traditions and socio-cultural role of the Church of England and enjoyed visiting churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin's poem, 'Church Going.' "
"And what remains when disbelief has gone?"
A: From Theodore Hesburgh's (1917 - 2015) essay:
"A Plea for Excellence in Higher Education"
The first fruit of a liberal education is to free a person from ignorance, which fundamentally means freedom to think, clearly and logically. Moreover, allied with this release from stupidity — nonthinking or poor thinking — is the freedom to communicate one's thoughts, hopefully with clarity, style, and grace . . .
A liberal education should also enable a person to judge, which in itself presupposes the ability to evaluate: to prefer this to that, to say this is good and that bad, or at least this is better than that. To evaluate is to prefer, to discriminate, to choose, and each of these actions presupposes a sense of values. . . . This, too, is a value judgment and a liberation from valuelessness, insecurity and despair, at times.
Liberal education, by all of these value‐laden processes, should confer a sense of peace, confidence and assurance on the person thus educated and liberate him or her from the adriftness that characterizes so many in an age of anomie [valuelessness].
Lastly, a liberal education should enable a person to humanize everything that he or she touches in life, which is to say that one is enabled not only to evaluate what one is or does, but that, in addition, one adds value consciously to relationships that might otherwise be banal or superficial or meaningless: relations to God, to one's fellow men, to one's wife or husband or children, to one's associates, one's neighborhood, one's country and world. In this way, the list of what one expects of liberal education is really a list of the very real values that alone can liberate a person from very real evils or nonvalues — stupidity, meaninglessness, inhumanity.
Hesburgh's essay is dense, but I always included it on my syllabus to give students a definition of anomie and liberal. A truly liberal (as in “freeing”) education can help you rise above conditioning and the centuries of superstition that has does nothing but damage to human culture and intellect. That’s what post-modern deconstructionism is all about — peeling down to the “first principal.”
Beyond belief, superstition, and disbelief -- what remains?
"And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.
It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints,
and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.
from De Profundis
