Season's Change

Here's hoping.

Am I A Christian?

Books like Resurrection or The Brothers Karamazov give me an almost overpowering sense of how uniquely marvellous a Christian way of looking at life is, and a passionate desire to share it. Likewise, listening to Bach, reading Pascal, looking at Chartres Cathedral or any of the masterpieces of Christian art and thought. As for the Gospels and Epistles, I find them(especially St John) irresistibly wonderful as they reduce the jostling egos of now - my own among them - to the feeble crackling flicker of burning sticks against a majestic noonday sun. Is it not extraordinary to the point of being a miracle, that so loose and ill-constructed a narrative in an antique translation of a dubious text should after so many centuries still have power to quell and dominate a restless, opinionated, over-exercised and under-nourished twentieth-century mind?

Learned theologians bend their powerful minds to demonstrate that God is dead and his church, therefore, become a useless excrescence.

One may marvel that, when pretty well every item of Christian belief and of Christian ethics has been thus subjected to some degree of denigration and attack by those ostensibly responsible for upholding and propagating them, congregations of sorts nonetheless continue to assemble in parish churches on Sunday mornings, and ordinands and novices, though in dwindling numbers, continue to come forward with seemingly authentic vocations. The church of Jesus Christ has to stagger on under the guidance of those who increasingly sympathize with, when they do not actually countenance, every attack on its doctrines, integrity and traditional practice. By one of our time's larger ironies, ecumenicalism is triumphant just when there is nothing to be ecumenical about; the various religious bodies are likely to find it easy to join together only because, believing little, they correspondingly differ about little.

Institutional Christianity, it seems to me, is now in total disarray, and visibly decomposing, to the point that, short of a miracle, it can never be put together again with any semblance of order or credibility. In their present state of decomposition the various Christian denominations are not even an impediment to Christian belief but just a joke.

The surrender of institutional Christianity to the promoters of a kingdom of heaven on earth has been so abject, the assumptions of scientific materialism are so widely accepted and arrogantly stated, that an aspiring Christian today is left in a kind of catacomb of his own making, utterly remote from the debates and discussions going on around him, whether about "permissive morality" or about the basic dogma of the Christian faith.

Revisiting Jesus Rediscovered

You are to be found in the lowest, darkest depths, and that all who find You are thereby transported to the loftiest, brightest heights.

The ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth. As long as we are aliens we cannot forget our true homeland, which is that other kingdom You proclaimed.

It was bad enough when the clergy identified themselves with the social and political status quo; now that they are ready to support any deviation from it, and champion anyone who can produce credentials, however dubious, of being down-trodden and oppressed, it is even worse.

I have come to regard clerical Christianity and its officers as totally farcical - as Kierkegaard puts it, a folding screen behind which the Christian evades the real seriousness of being a Christian. Momentarily, I have to admit, with Protestant romanticism I toyed with the notion that the Roman Catholic Church, with its longer tradition, tougher discipline and more rigid doctrine, would prove an exception, and manage to resist the Gadarene slide on which the other denominations had embarked so blithely and disastrously. However mistaken I was!

The tide of the twentieth century was flowing in a different direction altogether. It was the picture palaces, their fronts so brilliantly lighted, inside so mysteriously dark, that provided our true churches and chapels.

Only as children of God are we equal; all other claims to equality - social, economic, racial, intellectual, sexual - only serve in practice to intensify inequality.

In this quest for You we look without finding and find without looking.

Preoccupation with ritual has always seemed to me comparable, in matters of worship, with preoccupation with erotic techniques in matters of sex.

The imagination recoils from the prizes or toys of a materialistic society. Who but some half-witted oil sheik or popular actor can go on desiring sleek yachts or motor cars or white villas perched above yellow sand? Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society, with its own mysteries-this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me!-and its own sacred texts and scriptures-the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and the unjust alike, drenching us, blinding us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!

It was padding down the streets of Moscow that the other dream-the kingdom of heaven on earth-dissolved for me, never to be revived. Those gray anonymous figures, likewise padding about the streets, seemed infinitely remote, withdrawn, for ever strangers, yet somehow near and dear. The gray streets were paradise, the eyeless buildings the many mansions of which heaven is composed.

How infinitely preferable it is to be abhorred, rather than embraced, by those in authority. Where the distinction between God and Caesar is so abundantly clear, no one in his senses - or out of them for that matter - is likely to suggest that any good purpose would be served by arranging a dialogue between the two of them. In the Communist countries an unmistakable and unbridgable abyses divides the kingdoms of the earth and Your kingdom, with no crazed clerics gibbering and grimacing in the intervening no-man's land. It provides the perfect circumstances for the Christian faith to bloom anew. I look eastwards, not westwards, for the new Star of Bethlehem.

At the intersection of time and eternity - nailed there - You confront us; a perpetual reminder that, living, we die and, dying, we live. An incarnation wonderful to contemplate; the light of the world, indeed.

Though in terms of history the darkness falls, blacking out us and our world, You have overcome history. You came as light into the world, that whoever believed in You should not remain in darkness. The promise stands forever. Your light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Nor ever will.

A Prayer of St Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is sadness, joy; where there is darkness, light.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console; not so much to be understood, as to understand; not so much to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

"The Mystery of Things"

Been re-reading Muggeridge's Jesus Rediscovered. Inspired and inspiring writing.

In our lives we go about our daily business...our regular routines...the norm.

Like a dream that we half remember, and want to remember more, we sometimes catch a glimpse of those fleeting things, and want to capture them, but cannot fully hold on. Those heavenly visions. Those inspirations. Those touches.

Only to come back to earth and be subsumed once again into our daily bread.