A reply
to my critics
RELIGION LUDOVIC KENNEDY
I am gratified at the vigorous response to my article, 'A lesson in communication' (9 May).
Some of the correspondents question my experience of Church of England services, and the short answer is ten years' hard at prep and public school, chapel once a day and twice on Sundays, Scripture or Divinity classes from about six to seventeen, and Confirmation too. I agree little of it has stuck, but perhaps I was over-exposed too early. Occasional but regular visits to Church since, and of course a good deal of viewing it on the telly.
Mr Curgenven asks what qualifications I have `for presuming to lecture parsons on the way they read the lessons'. My qualifi- cations are that I am in the communications business and have been for thirty years, as writer and broadcaster. The manner of what I write and say is to me no less important than the matter; for if how I say some- thing makes no impact on my audience/ readers, then what I am saying is unlikely to touch them at all. When I am preparing formal material, I write three or more drafts and continually polish and re-polish. So do most writers. But do parsons, and if not, why not? For when they ascend lectern, platform or pulpit they too enter the com- munications business, whether they like it or not.
I admire Dr Billy Graham as a preacher because he has bothered to learn how to communicate. His sermons carry an air of enthusiasm and conviction, not to say urgency, which in the average Church of Englzrid parson is lacking. If C of E par- sons are the great communicators some say, why was Sir Laurence Olivier rather than one of their own number, say York or Canterbury, chosen to record the album of readings from the Old Testament, The Living Bible? Because he would sell more
copies? Certainly. And also because he could give to the great passages a sense of occasion and excitement which York Tit-- Canterbury, for all their theology, couldn't.
But as Mr Angus Maude suggested last week, we should be just as concerned with what is to be communicated as how. And this leads me to risk further charges of naivety and ask what the Church is really for. Is it to teach us to lead good lives? Hardly, for there is no evidence thAt churchgoers, or even Christians, have a monopoly either of good behaviour or of contented minds. Is it to perform good works? The major good works of today-are performed by organisations like Oxfanirand Shelter, which are non-denominational. Is it to propagate the teachings of Christ? We can read these for ourselves in the Bible.
No, surely the main function of the Church, and indeed, of religion generally, is, as Marghanita Laski said in a television programme on Sunday, to give comfort to the lonely, the guilty and the afraid. But— and here's the rub for the Church—we are all a good deal less lonely, guilty and afraid than we were. Among the old and poor certainly there are big pockets of loneliness, but otherwise surely the world is too much with us? The passing of the concept of retribution and the teachings of Freud and Jung have, thank heavens, tended to dispel the miseries of guilt. As for fear, it has mainly been that of the dark, what happens to us when we reach the end of the road; but with life getting longer and longer with each decade that too has diminished, and death itself is coming to seem more of a friend than a foe. Mr Maude, like Webster, seems much possessed by death, but his phrases about the survival of the soul and spiritual immortality mean little to this generation. Indeed, there are many who would claim that the very word 'soul' begs the whole after-life question. (Q. What is a soul? A. A soul is that part of the body that survives death.) Mr Maude is also sad that faith is at a discount in the Church of England now. (He postulates rationality as a substitute, but here his reasoning eludes me.) But why be sad? Faith in the Divinity of Christ was the Church's terms for giving comfort to the lonely, guilty and afraid. Now that loneliness, guilt and fear have diminished, one no longer has to believe such a very implausible tale. And if people are less miserable than they were, that surely is something to be glad about?
According to the polls there are many non-churchgoers today who believe in some kind of god. There are others too, like myself, who believe they have much to learn from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. But what many people find impossible to stomach is a marriage of the two, Christ being uniquely the Son of God, all the mumbo-jumbo about Virgin Birth and Resurrections and Holy Spirits that reaches a climax of dottiness in the Creed. Young people today prefer to base their behaviour on mutual respect and consideration rather than because of what some self-created God or gods may have determined for them. I do not think their failure rate is any greater than that of their Christian predecessors.
So, to come full circle, it does not seem to me to matter much what parsons au or don't do, whether they communicate or not. They and the institution they so unselfishly serve are becoming increasingly irrelevant to modern life. Nor does it matter, as Mr Maude thinks it does, whether the Church is trendy or conservative, whether it joins up with the Methodists and/or Catholics or not. These are all symptoms of the same decay, dying men clutching at passing straws. The old tub of Christian Divinity has plied the oceans for many years, but now its plates are sprung and its leaks beyond repair. Soon Thor and Odin, Zeus and Aphrodite, Allah and Mahommed, Shiva and Vishnu, will be joined by the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost on the seabed of discarded gods. My initial concern was really with style. It would have been nice to see the vessel going down with colours flying and all guns firing rather than slowly drowning in a sea of yawns and snores.
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