The Churches
Not Smug Any More
By MONICA FURLONG
WAITING for a tram in the Underground one morning I found myself humming an en- chanting tune, and executing a few tentative dance-steps. A moment or two later 1 was some- what surprised to noticc the words I was singing to it. It was Geoffrey Beaumont's Folk Mass, (The day I find myself dancing Mcrbecke on Piccadilly Circus Station 1 shall be very sur- prised indeed.) A couple of days previously I had
gone to see Beaumont at Camberwell, and we had Spent a congenial morning strumming out bits of the Mass on the piano and listening to it done rather better by the Peter Knight Singers on the gramophone. Later we wandered round the cor- ner for what Beaumont calls 'a drop of the cordial, and he began to explain what his work was about.
'I take a couple for marriage instruction, or I get talking to people in the local—none of them been inside a church for years—and they say 'I'd like to come to your church next Sunday." I MY heart sinks. Sixteenth-century music . . . the organ dominating everything . . . the congrega- tion mumbling along. How can they possibly feel at home in it? What's it got to do with the "Housewives' Choice" kind of music which Makes up the background of most people's live5? I know I shall see these people once and never again and I don't blame them.' This reaction is touchingly typical of much Christian thinking since the war, whether of koman priests saying Mass in the vernacular or Anglican ordinands trying to do factory work. 'Whatever we are, we're not smug any more,' another priest said to me recently, and knowing that he was referring noi to the senior reaches but the stratum of priests around and under the t°rtY mark, I was inclined to agree. More and fibre, Christians seem to be engaged in a per- petual interior dialogue, trying to discover by slow and critical thought who they are and what they are doing. If the Incarnation means anything,' we seem to be saying, 'then it means the Church identifying Itself completely with everyday life. We've heard 100 much about the superiority of the cloister, about withdrawal from the world, about atSkibacy be,Mg the ideal state. For too marry have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's s_ake- We want something different. We think k-t hristianity has too often encouraged a dicho- °mY between the life of the spirit and every- (IntaaYrrlii i.e. We want holiness through love, through
age, through family life, through work,
;to thrcmgh politics, through social life, or we don't he Want it at all. Our God is an engage God, and bletrich Bonhoeffer is our prophet. ("To be with- out desire is a mark of poverty. . . . The Christ- ian is not a homo religiosus, but a man, pure and simple, just as Jesus was a man. . . . To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a par- ticular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism—as a sinner, a penitent or a saint—but to be a man. . . . It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participa- tion in the suffering of God in the life of the world. . . . Man is challenged to participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world.")' This is interesting to say, but abominably difficult to do. So difficult, in fact, that we spend an interminable time discussing minor aspects of the situation hoping (I speak only for myself) to postpone the painful moment of practice. The subject has endless ramifications of which even the most remote have a certain importance. What about abolishing the parson's freehold? What about running parishes in groups under the senior Vicar? What about retiring senile Vicars? What about evening courses for would-be priests? What about ordaining the workers? What about part- time priests? What, for goodness' sake, about ordaining women'? And beneath our compulsive arguments lies the real issue which illumines nearly every page of Letters from Prison. What is the Church now, in the twentieth century, and what's it for? For skilful as we may be at spin- ning phrases, it is in our actions that the Church is defined. We can chatter about ideas till we become as great a bore as the Buchmanites, but it is only in so far as we practise the love of God that there is any point in our existence at all. So huge are our pretensions that when we fail
we are, to adapt St. Paul, of all men the most laughable—pomposity losing its trousers has nothing on us. If the Church is to behave as feebly as she has done at Notting Hill (leaving one or two priests to face alone a rising barrage of intimidation from racialist thugs), or as she used often to do over social injustice (`The people round here,' a Franciscan told me in Plaistow, 'say that the Church has always been on the side of the guv'nor'), or as she did until recently on the official level over South Africa, then we might just as well spend our Sunday mornings in bed.
But then no sooner have we said, `So this is the Church—this worst of cards in the Establish- ment pack,' than we catch a glimpse of her so wildly original, so brave and so breathtakingly .beautiful, that we fall in love with her all over again. Dietrich 13onhoeffer died at the hands of the SS at Flossenburg, but there are numbers of others who have caught his extraordinary secret. The new Bishop of Masasi has been letting it out for years, with and without official encourage- ment. Father Groser, of Stepney, has been demonstrating it ever since the 1914-18 War. Father Joseph Williamson illustrates it superbly among the vice rings of Cable Street. Archbishop de Blank, leading his accusing procession through the streets of Capetown, seems to have some of the clues, as have numerous humbler Christians less exposed to the public eye. In the end, indeed, it may be not so much the way Christians behave in extraordinary situations which matters, as the way dozens of them manage to make goodness work in ordinary everyday existence. The lay- men at Taize who try to live out the liturgy in their daily lives, the lona Community, the house- churches at Halton, the two Greenhills, and num- berless other parishes, groups and individuals all over the place are the real glory of the Church.
These people have imitated Christ to the point of identification with the world, and the question is how the rest of us w ho happen to be impaled on the sharp end of Christian belief learn how to do it too. Is it prayer, is it fasting, is it the sacraments, is it faith, is it obedience'? No doubt it is all of these things, and much more besides. It is certainly putting down our hypocrisy long enough to admit that we don't love other people, but that, fools as we shall undoubtedly look, sooner or later we shall have to try.
'Step forward the clowns wh,7 found the tr way into Canton last Saturday nightt
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