A while back Giles Frasier, host of Beyond Belief, a Radio 4 podcast featuring ecumenical reflections on Faith, interviewed Giles Coren who, according to the episode blurb 'was raised in the Jewish tradition, became an atheist and who now feels at home in a Christian Church'.
This isn't quite accurate. Coren was not raised in any religious tradition. His parents, ethnically Jewish, were secular and had no connection to any religious tradition. He 'married out', began going to church with his son who attended a CofE school, and found the church appealing and comfortable. Would he join, Frasier asked? Probably eventually, Coren said, but certainly not as late as on his deathbed.
Coren was coming from much the same place as I was—brought up without any religious connection and living in a very secular world. I was amazed that Coren was so calm about his quasi-conversion. My journey was vexed.
I
I discovered the Church at Beaverbrook Music Camp and may be unique in that my three summers there determined both my profession and my religion. It was there I read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and decided I would go to college—something I hadn't earlier planned—to begin training for a philosophy professor job. And it was there that I got religion.
We sang sacred music in Latin: the Schubert Mass in G, which got me hooked, Mozart's 'Regina Coeli' and Haydn's 'Te Deum'. We were given translations of the texts and, in musicianship class when we were working on the Schubert, a lecture on the mass as a musical form and its theology. Every composer worth their salt, the choir director told us, had written one – including our very own composer-in-residence, Bob Morris who, sitting at the piano, blushed.
I was taken by the theology—and the vision: 'tibi, omnes angeli, tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabile voce proclamant sanctus, sanctus, sanctus'. That was the vision of Dante's mystic rose—of a multitude in the light. I loved it, wanted to be part of it—it was 'my soul in paraphrase'.
When I got back home from camp, I started investigating whether it was possible to join the Church. I'd never heard of anyone joining a religion on their own. I thought you had to be born into it or, at a stretch, married into it. I read what I could find at the mall bookstore and local branch library and discovered that it was possible. When I got to college, I discovered that it was not normal: religion was neurotic. My cohort were reading The Future of an Illusion in Western Civ. I'd tested out of the class but it was a popular topic in dorm bull sessions.
Like my cohort I was intimidated by psychology: it was the ultimate authority. We regularly discussed being neurotic and our hope that one day we would be unneurotic. We had no idea what 'neurotic' meant, and I suspect that no one else did either—starting with Freud himself. I thought neurosis was a matter of being socially inept and worried about various protocols—like how to deal with hair salons where there were unwritten rules, where conversation had to be made, and tipping was involved. Being unneurotic, the state we all hoped to achieve was, I thought, having friends, having sex and, more broadly, getting around the world smoothly and not being peculiar.
An interest in religion was, I knew, peculiar. Margaret Mead, whose parents were secular, agnostic academics, described joining the Episcopal Church at the age of 11 in her memoir, A Blackberry Winter, and how even then she knew it was peculiar: you weren't supposed to join a church voluntarily, to be interested in religion, or to like it. The message I got about religion was the message Victorian women got about sex: you might have to do it, but you weren't supposed to like it.
II
After singing Haydn's Te Deum I knew there was no going back: I would join the Church. But it wasn't as easy for me as it was for Coren, drifting into the Church, or for Margaret Mead. Maybe it was the difference in time and place. I lived in a secular world where Christianity was simply not done and, to the extent that anyone noticed it at all, they were dismissive or hostile. The literature I read repeated the message. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, in The Death of God, announced that God had died 'in our time and in our Existenz' (whatever that was) and made the cover of Time Magazine. There was even a TV spot showing Altizer's students in a dorm room discussing whether various experiences they'd had were 'epiphanies'. This was a whiff of college and I watched eagerly, looking forward to intellectual discussions in dorm rooms when I got to college that fall.
Once I got to college, I loaded up on religious studies courses. The religious studies faculty seemed to assume that students had been raised as fundamentalists and were determined to wake us from our dogmatic slumbers. In the intro religion course, most of the readings featured Modern Secular Man, a logical construction like Russell's Average Plumber, for whom religious belief was untenable. The end of religion as we knew it, they said, was imminent and inevitable, and that was good: religion was 'escapist'. Once Christianity had become 'religionless' churches would be vehicles for social service and political action; God was, as Harvey Cox said, a 'work partner' in the secular city. In Biblical studies classes the heroes were the Hebrew Prophets because, we were told, they were champions of social justice; in contemporary theology class the hero was Tillich. I thought the prophets were boring, crazy ranters and couldn't make any sense of Tillich. I got the clear sense that the religious studies faculty didn't like religion at all.
The Church on the ground was no help. Instead of telling me that religion was ok and that joining the Church was a normal, reasonable thing to do, it sent the message that it was peculiar and certainly not expected of 'young people' as I was then. By the time I got to college most campus ministries had shut down. My college had a nominal Presbyterian affiliation and a concrete semi-Gothic chapel but there were no religious services of any kind on campus, and the chapel was always locked. The church in town had nothing for me. I went to a rehearsal for a folk mass to which 'young people' were invited to bring their instruments, thinking I would get out my violin and have a go. The 'young people' at the rehearsal, I discovered, were middle school children brought by their mothers: it was clear that I wasn't expected to be there.
III
By the time I came of age it was clear that the church membership was in decline. That was hardly surprising. I saw the Church, led by self-hating Christians who proclaimed the Death of God to ingratiate themselves with Modern Secular Man, doing nothing to promote the Church's survival. I saw churches boarded up or repurposed as restaurants and condos.
I wanted to see churches stay open as churches: buildings matter. In Baltimore, years ago, I biked past a little brownstone church with doors facing the street and open. I was sweating: the temperature was perhaps 100 degrees with humidity to match. But for half a second as I passed, I could feel the cool air coming out of the dark church. I thought of a book by Charles Williams in which the Forms come down from Plato's heaven. A unicorn comes down, lands on the altar of a church with the click of a silver hoof and a flash of blue light. I imagined the unicorn coming down to the altar at the far end of the church, the click of his hoof and the flash of light.
I didn't want to see the Church shut down but discovered the years that as a layperson I couldn't do anything about it. I tried to get ordained so that I could just do a little bit to get people in, to keep the buildings open, to keep the Church alive.
There were probably a variety of reasons why I was turned down for ordination. In some large part I think it was that the decision-makers didn't understand my motives—and may have thought that I had ulterior motives. Most people joined churches because they were looking for something else: for 'community', for activities and opportunities for volunteer work, for wisdom and advice about how to live, or simply because it was expected of them. Those applied for ordination wanted to do pastoral work—to work with people and help—or to turn their church volunteer work into a job. My motives were peculiar.
For me, the Church was not a means to something else. Like Giles Coren and Margaret Mead, I got involved in the Church because I liked church—not only, or primarily, church services, but the whole package. I liked theology, I liked church history, I liked the literature, music, and art, the stories and customs. I liked church buildings. I joined the Church because I wanted to be entitled to all that, to own it, and to be part of it.
A little while after I'd joined the Church I visited St. John the Divine in NYC. I stood halfway down the center aisle of the building, the size of two and a half football fields, looked around and thought, 'This is mine! This is all mine!' I didn't want churches to be boarded up or repurposed; I didn't want the stories to be forgotten, or the Church's things to become curiosities, like the artifacts of ancient Egyptian religion, or no more than art objects for museums and concert halls.
I didn't want the music to die.