Why Me? Lenten Talk by Richard Davenport-Hines, Sunday 19th March 2017 at St John the Baptist Church, Holland Road
Why Me?
Lenten Talk by Richard Davenport-Hines, Sunday 19th March 2017 at St
John the Baptist Church, Holland Road
I was
brought up in the most Godless of households. My father disliked to think that
anyone or anything might be more omnipotent, more all-seeing or more eternal
than he was. He was capable of idolatry – Field Marshal Montgomery and Enoch
Powell were among his totems – but not of worship. Although I attended services
at an Anglican school, they left no spiritual traces on me: partly because
children are terrific snobs, and all the smart boys at my school were godless
and sneered that only drips were religious; chiefly because as an adolescent I
was irredeemably self-absorbed, and could think of nothing much outside myself.
I am
going to talk tonight about the process that led me to seek baptism and
confirmation, and to attend services in this church with a grateful heart. I
speak from the perspective of someone who has spent forty years writing history
books, and will sketch how Christianity and my working-life have interwoven
themselves together. And I am going to mention that strand of Anglican
behaviour that shames me, and sometimes creates in me regrettable awkwardness
in professing in public, to friends or colleagues, the Christian faith.
I know
exactly the origin of my Christian interest. It began when I was an
undergraduate reading the poetry of W. H. Auden. The decisive moment came when
I was reading Auden’s sequence of eight poems about the Crucifixion, each of
the poems marking the canonical hours. I reached lines in which Auden describes
Christ’s substitution for the thief on the Cross. Christ, Auden says, ‘on whose
immolation … arcadias, utopias, our old bag of a democracy, are alike founded:
│For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no
secular wall will safely stand.’ At the age of twenty I was unbelievably
shocked, and uncomprehending, that a great Christian poet could write such
lines, could say that the shedding of innocent, human blood was what held
secular societies together; but in deliberating those lines I was set on new
courses. Certainly, forty years later, I have no difficulty in believing that
the suffering of innocent humankind is what binds secular society and makes the
Christian message so urgent.
In the
early 1990s I wrote a biography of Auden. It was influenced by the preaching
and ritualism of Father George Bright, who was then the incumbent of this
church, which I began attending, I think, in 1986. George Bright is a
wonderfully inspiring man, who exemplified the importance of playfulness in
sacred matters, who taught that one should be happy about pleasure, that joy is
not shameful, that frivolity must be part of the most solemn ritual. His
message distinguished between a Godly sense of our fallen nature, and merely
social, reductive senses of secular shame.
Auden had
two visionary experiences which were central to his life and to his poetry. The
first, in 1933, occurred on a summer’s evening, when he was sitting on a lawn
with friends. Suddenly and unexpectedly, he felt invaded by supreme joy, by
what he called agape, by what psychologists call oceanic feelings, which made
him feel in total unity with the universe and for the first time in his life
know what was meant by loving one’s neighbour. Although I am shy of calling any
experience of mine ‘visionary’, I used when younger – without benefit of drink
or drugs or sex – to feel this same exultant unity with landscape and natural
elements: it leaves a glorious, abiding memory of loving peace.
As to
Auden’s second vision, it occurred in 1936, at a whaling station in Iceland,
where he saw a seventy ton whale, alive and gentle, being torn apart by
winches, cranes and bellowing labourers. This cruel horror gave him, Auden
said, ‘an extraordinary vision of the cold, controlled ferocity of the human
species.’ It sent him as an appalled spectator to the atrocities of
Sino-Japanese war and to the Spanish Civil War.
Auden
wrote, as I believe, that unless you love someone, nothing makes any sense. In
one’s personal life, one can be redeemed from utter rottenness and futility, as
I have been, by the reciprocated love of a good person. Still, there is no
heroic effort or trial to be undergone in loving someone who provides emotional
succour, sexual joy, laughs at one’s jokes, forgives one’s irritability: that’s
a complacent, easy form of love. One must try to practise a higher Christian
expression of love, extending to people are unruly, disobedient, unfamiliar, discordant
and disruptive – just utter pests. We are enjoined as Christians not only to
love our neighbours, but to welcome, respect and understand those who are far
from our own social set, remote from our own experiences or opposed perhaps to
our interests.
It’s not
just about love, though. Auden believed, as I do, that unless one acknowledges
the living, palpable existence of Original Sin – of Adam’s fall from grace and
of humankind’s innate impulse to do evil – nothing makes any sense. I come to
this church each week to strengthen my love, and in communal unity to wrestle
with Original Sin, and the badness that one sees everywhere. If it is
impossible to match the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, one can try to,
consciously and daily, to be part of the never-ending skirmishes against
Original Sin.
When
Christ speaks of mercy, of giving comfort to the grieving, of peace-making, of
brotherliness, or when he denounces ill-will, group persecution or individual
vendettas, he is giving, I feel, the paramount Christian message. ‘Better to be
a broken man than in the full tide of your well-being to find yourself in
hell,’ says Christ; better to be submissive and unwanted than proud and
assertive.
And now I
turnto my experiences as a historian. In book after book, I have studied and
analysed the decline of faith in the twentieth-century, and recounted some of
the dismal consequences.
English
Christianity after 1918 had the spiritual equivalent of a vitamin deficiency: after
the Great War parishioners were numbed in their reflexes, and enfeebled in
belief. In the 1920s 90,000 people panting for the kick-off at the Wembley cup
final might sing ‘I need Thy presence every passing hour’, but they did not
mean it. Church-going declined. There were 28 million baptised, 8 million
confirmed and 2.75 million communicant members of the Church of England in
1927. Fewer people found the Incarnation and the Resurrection credible. Polite
agnosticism characterised the decade as much as muscular Christianity or
evangelicalism had been the previous generation’s orthodoxy. ‘Sin’ became a
joke-word for many. Hell and theories of eternal punishment were dismissed as
inventions to frighten people into behaving well. Prophesies and miracles were
treated as if they were fungoid hallucinations. ‘Our Lord Jesus Christ’ became
merely the supreme example of a good man. This change in attitude was as
momentous as any event in English history since the conversion of the
Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. It resulted from the convergence of several
influences: eighteenth-century scepticism; nineteenth-century Darwinism;
disbelief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible; a new materialism which discredited
ideals of personal service; and the bellicosity of many clerics during the
1914-18 War – their collusion with unethical, corrupting political leadership –
which seemed to deny the gospel of the Prince of Peace.
But the turning point, I suggest, came in 1921 – and came
as a revolt against the blatancy of Christian sexual hypocrisy and bogus moral
scolding. How else can one explain the success of the two bestsellers of 1921,
Robert Keable’s novel Simon called Peter
and Somerset Maugham’s story ‘Rain’? Keable was a Cambridge graduate who had
resigned holy orders to write his autobiographical novel. It describes a
prudish army chaplain who loses his faith in the carnage of trench warfare,
visits a brothel, and eventually goes to bed with a nurse who gives renewed
meaning to his life. The book sold 600,000 copies during the 1920s, and had
over sixty reprints. Comparably, Maugham’s ‘Rain’ gives an unforgiving picture
of what was to become a stock type, a sexually repressed, punitive Protestant
clergyman. In this case, a self-deluding vicar cuts his throat after raping the
prostitute whom he has been persecuting with callous moralising. The story
resonated with readers, for it was inspired three Hollywood film version
between 1928 and 1953, with Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Rita Hayworth
cast as the persecuted harlot.
Few clergy, it seemed, preached against national pride,
social injustice, economic disparity and backward thinking. They fussed about
‘necking’ in shadowy ‘cinema palaces’ or fulminated over mixed swimming in the
Serpentine, but from the great issues of the time they fled.
In the 1980s I worked as a volunteer in a Notting Hill
hospice called the London Lighthouse for people with AIDS. This was one of the
great formative experiences of my life. I decided to write a history of
sexually transmitted diseases, focussing on religious and social attitudes to
syphilis and HIV, after reading an editorial in the Daily Express of 1986 which began: ‘Yesterday an 89 year old
grandmother from Solihull rang us. She said: “The homosexuals who brought this
plague upon us should be locked up. Burning is too good for them. Bury them in
a pit and pour on quick-lime.’ And then the Daily
Express editorial writer added: ‘The majority of Britons would appear to be
in agreement.’
In my book I investigated how the Christian churches
reacted to such unchristian ideas. I found that decade after decade Anglican clerics
had prevented the provision of medical information on how to avoid venereal
diseases, because they feared without the fear of retributive venereal
infections, fornication would flourish. I found endless examples of an
unchristian desire to punish rather than of a Christian desire to save. I found
the Church of England making itself absurd, as when Winnington-Ingram, Bishop
of London, told the House of Lords in 1934 that he wanted to make a bonfire of
all the condoms in England and dance in jubilation around it.
We are no better now. Sexual policing is so little a part
of the Christian message, and yet it is the only one that is heard in the
nation. A month ago the Church of England Synod was dominated by the dispute
about the status and value of same-sex relationships. This embittering
controversy is increasingly all that non-Christians know of Anglicanism. And
yet, at this time more than ever in my lifetime, more than at any time since
the saturation bombing of Germany and the nuclear bombing of Japan, we need the
Church of England to be giving ethical and spiritual guidance to our national
leaders. Spiv politicians and editorial writers sneer against the Church
playing politics, when it is not politics but Christian ethics, Christian
decency, Christian decisions that we crave clerics to promote.
The Church of England has never been needed more in our
national life. At the very time of the Synod, The Times reported that David Davies and Boris Johnson were mooting
to the governments of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Hungary that large
chunks of the British government’s aid budget to Asia and Africa would be
diverted to those central and eastern countries if they were amenable to
British interests in the Brexit negotiations. I have hitherto voted
Conservative, so I am not making a party point, when I say that this is the
most unchristian, the most unconscionable proposal – that Original Sin rampages
like a murderous ogre in the Cabinet – and that every Christian voice should be
raised against such wickedness – against the xenophobia, the aggressive
nationalism, the rejection of Syrian children – against the absolutely
unchristian temper that denies mercy, or the possibility of sincere repentance,
and scoffs at loving one’s neighbour.
At the time of the Synod, too, the Home Office announced
that it would not give asylum to gay men who had fled for their lives from
Afghanistan. These men were told to return to Afghanistan, and given the
unforgivable danger that they were not be in danger ‘if they were not too
obvious.’ The Anglican leadership stands complicit in such attitudes. The story
made me think of a slender, delicate, effeminate Iranian, aged about twenty,
who some years ago was welcomed to our services in his church. He was lonely,
scared, depressed; told me that he was in England because the religious leaders
of his district in Iran had told his father that unless the boy left at 24
hours’ notice & never returned, he would be tortured and put to death. This
is a case where Christians should side with the persecuted, but instead seems
with genteel casuistry to side with the persecutors.
I come to this church not to worry about how other men and
women are messing about with their private parts, but because James Heard, with
clarity, decency and resolve, gives Christian leadership, and represents
Christian truth and not heathen post-truth. I pray that the Church of England,
and our united benefice, can muster the power to resist the harsh and indeed
infidel temper that has overtaken our world.
I end with a passage from Auden’s Christmas oratorio ‘For
the Time Being’. It contains many glorious things, including a speech by Herod,
in the smooth, cultivated phrases of a liberal rationalist, regretting the
necessity of the massacre of innocents. The Narrator then intones, ‘To choose
what is difficult all one’s day │As if it were easy, that is faith.’ And in the
Chorale addressed to God, Auden describes the flawed ways that Christians use
God’s teachings and reaffirms the supremacy of the Divine Purpose.
Though
written by Thy children with
A
smudged and crooked line
The
Word is ever legible
Thy
meaning unequivocal
And
for Thy goodness even sin
Is
valid for a sign.
Inflict
thy promises with each
Occasion
of distress
That
from our innocence we
May
learn to put our trust in Thee
And
brutal fact persuade us
To
Adventure Art and Peace.