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II

LOSING IT

In his most famous poem, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas advised his dying father not to give up without a fight:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.¹¹

It is the rage of the old that I want to think about now. And not just the kind Dylan Thomas was talking about. That was rage at dying, at being dragged away from the party before you were ready to leave. There can be something heroic about that kind of resistance, and it is why some people, almost without being aware of it, fight hard against their own death. I have sat by the beds of many who were dying and marvelled at how long it was taking them to leave. Their relatives would be worn out sitting beside them day after day as they battled the inevitable. But the nurse in attendance always knew what was going on. He’s a fighter, she would say. He won’t let go till the last minute. It won’t be long now. Then the moment of surrender would come: a last sigh and it was over.

This defiant resistance of death seems to be stronger in some people than in others, part of their character. And the will to live can persist in them long after they’ve lapsed into a coma. I’m always moved when I see this happening. It suggests to me an event in the boyhood of the writer Leonard Woolf when he was told to drown five new-born puppies:

When he plunged the first tiny blind creature into the bucket of water, it began ‘to fight desperately for its life, struggling, beating the water with its paws.’ He suddenly realised that it was an individual, an ‘I’, and that it was fighting for its life just as he would, were he drowning.¹²

Like those blind puppies, death’s resisters struggle against the forces that are shutting them down. It’s hard not to be moved by this. It is probably the energy that kept them going as long as they did. But they all have to give in at some point. Death gets everyone in the end. If it didn’t, life would soon become unsustainable on our little planet. And there are worrying trends already pointing in that direction.

One of them is the way the medical profession has wheeled formidable new artillery onto the battlefield and spends vast amounts of money and effort delaying death’s victory. I don’t apologise for the military metaphor because it is the one favoured by doctors themselves. With the best of intentions, they have taken control of the lives of old people today, and they fight hard to keep them in the field as long as possible. The result for many of them is a medicalised existence whose sole purpose is staying alive long after any joy in doing so has fled.

Keeping most of us alive well into our eighties is one of the successes of modern medicine, but there are signs it is having a profoundly distorting effect on the balance of society as a whole. In Britain, the care of the elderly is close to swamping the resources of the National Health Service, turning it into an agency for the postponement of death rather than the enhancement of life. We don’t have to go back to the fifteenth century to find a more balanced approach. Not that long ago, before they had this colossal armoury at their disposal, most doctors were willing to acknowledge death’s approach. They saw their role as helping death in with the minimum of distress to everyone. Nowadays they are more likely to call in the medical engineers to dig a moat and fortify the door against death’s entrance. But there are signs that the more thoughtful among them are beginning to challenge this siege mentality. The American physician Atul Gawande has recently suggested that while medicine exists to fight death and disease, it should learn how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t. And doctors need to understand that the damage is greatest if they insist on battling on to the bitter end.¹³

Old age can be bitter if it is experienced not as a period of calm preparation for death but as a grim battle to keep it at bay. It can even breed resentment in the old against the very doctors who are working hard to keep them going. Visiting the elderly can be a dispiriting experience if they spend the time rehearsing their ailments and complaining about the inattention of the local health professionals who are run off their feet trying to care for them. The reality is that death has rung their bell, and peace will come only when they open the door and say you got here sooner than I expected, but come in and sit down while I get my coat on.

***

If the refusal to accept the imperative of death is a relatively new phenomenon, an older affliction is the anger of the old at the young for being young. At its root this is one of the many forms of the sin of envy. Envy has been defined as sorrow at another’s good. Sometimes it is confused with jealousy, but there’s a world of difference between them. The jealous want what other people have, and it may provoke them to work hard to achieve it, which is why ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ is a proverb. Jealousy may drive us to action, but envy only makes us depressed. Rather than rejoicing in the happiness of others – their youth and vitality and beauty – it makes us sad. It can prompt bitterness towards the young for being young, revealed in the snort of contempt at how they colour their hair or tattoo their bodies or collide with you in the street because they’re always on their bloody phones. It’s an ugly picture, the face of angry, envious old age. We often see it on television during interviews with the public on the issues of the day; and it can have a solid impact on government.

Elderly voters are a powerfully reactionary force in politics both in the United Kingdom and in the United States. They are more disciplined and consistent than the young in voting, so as they increase in size as a cohort of the population their envies and resentments are bound to have an increasingly distorting effect on political processes. There is already a lot of evidence that they have had a profound effect on recent elections and referenda in these two countries. If these trends continue, in a few years a number of western democracies will have transformed themselves into gerontocracies – governments of the old, by the old, for the old. Geriatric resentment is a dangerous disease to catch, so it’s worth examining ourselves to see if it has infected us.

The chances are that we’ve caught it, if only a mild version, because it is hard to avoid. Each generation has to learn how to take a bow and leave the stage. And we have to do it at the time in our lives when we are least resilient. Old age is a poignant business, a continuous series of losses, which is why Bette Davis said it wasn’t for sissies. One of its saddest moments is when we realise we are no longer at home in the world and are baffled at how it operates. When we were young and the future was filled with promise, it was thrilling to celebrate the constant shift and change of history and embrace every fad that came off the assembly line, as well as being impatient with those who resisted the new and clung desperately to the old and outworn. It is a different matter when you realise that, almost without noticing it, you have joined the ranks not only of the old but of the old fashioned; and that the crazy shifts of change you embraced so eagerly when you were young are the very energies that are now carrying you into the past, along with steam trains and quiet Sundays. So it is hardly surprising that the old can begin to feel like strangers in their own land.

But it’s a mistake to think it’s a modern disease. The bitter old person is a constant in history. It seems to be age that corrodes the spirit, not change as such, which is why growing old can be spiritually dangerous. Go back as far as you can and you’ll hear the old grumbling about the young. In the century before the birth of Christ, the Roman poet Horace heard an elderly man at it:

Tiresome, complaining, a praiser of the times that were when he was a boy, a castigator and censor of the young generation . . .¹⁴

The tone of these attacks on the younger generation is not always as angry as Horace’s old man. Sometimes it is reproachful and weary, a wry shaking of the head at the excesses of the young. This is the spirit of Alec Guinness’s memoir, A Positively Final Appearance. The famous film star even complains about the length of movies nowadays:

What good stories were told in the cinema in those days, swiftly, directly and without affectation. And how blessedly short they were when compared to the three-hour marathons that we are now expected to sit through, with aching bums, fatigued eyes and numbed ears.¹⁵

Behind these complaints and reproaches there is hurt and sadness at the way time sweeps each generation aside, famously expressed by Isaac Watts in his hymn, ‘O God, our help in ages past’:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.¹⁶

That it is a Christian hymn that best describes the rush of remorseless time is no accident. Religion is one of the few institutions that keeps the thought and fact of death steadily before us. It is what intrigued the poet Philip Larkin about churches. That so many dead lay round them, he thought, made them ‘proper to grow wise in’.¹⁷ But you don’t need a burial ground round a church to be reminded of death. There are reminders inside as well. Being a member of a congregation is to watch chairs emptying, as death accomplishes its work. In John Meade Falkner’s poem, ‘Christmas Day: The Family Sitting’, an old man in church meditates on Christmases past:

There are passed one after the other

Christmases fifty-three,

Since I sat here with my mother

And heard the great decree:

How they went up to Jerusalem

Out of Galilee.

They have passed one after the other;

Father and mother died,

Brother and sister and brother

Taken and sanctified.

I am left alone in the sitting,

With none to sit beside . . .

The pillars are twisted with holly,

And the font is wreathed with yew

Christ forgive me for folly,

Youth’s lapses – not a few,

For the hardness of my middle life,

For age’s fretful view.¹⁸

Nowadays, sitting in church, I am often more aware of the presence of the dead than of the living. I remember where they sat, a hymn they loved – sung again this morning – and maybe the bitterness of their passing. But it is a fortifying not a depressing experience, a reminder that this is how it goes, and that I must be reconciled to it. One day my seat will be empty, and my name will be written among the dead. Going to church is one of the ways I gather the past round me as I prepare to go up to Jerusalem out of Galilee. But it has become a more complicated business than it used to be. For many old people today, going to church can be an alienating rather than a consoling experience. To understand why will take a bit of thinking about religion itself.

***

The best way to see religion is as humanity’s response to the puzzle of its own existence. Unlike the other animals on earth, we have never felt entirely at home here. Our big brains prompt us not only to wonder about our own existence but about the existence of existence itself. Is there a reality behind it that created it, and can we relate to it in any way? Some of us think compulsively about these questions and come up with a stream of never-very-certain answers. The instrument we use for wrestling with them is the human mind. Our difficulty is that we can’t really be certain anything exists outside the mind, because the mind is the main agent we have for examining the question. The Cambridge theologian Don Cupitt tells us there is a German word that captures the difficulty, unhintergehbarkeit, ‘ungetbehindability’.¹⁹ Our knowledge of the universe comes to us through the mind. And we can’t get out of it or off it to prove anything’s behind it – or nothing’s behind it – except through the mind itself! We are stuck in and with our minds. And even if we want to resist that claim, it is only our minds that can challenge it thereby proving the point.

Living with the ‘ungetbehindability’ of the universe is frustrating, which is why we search for ways to resolve our predicament, either by convincing ourselves there is definitely nothing behind it, or there’s definitely something and we’ve met it. Since it is impossible to prove the truth of a negative factual statement – there’s no one there – absolute atheism only ever appeals to a passionate minority. But those who insist that there is someone there can’t prove it either. What they offer is testimony or witness. Religion’s most interesting characters are those who claim to have encountered the mystery behind the universe directly. They claim to have seen or heard it. It revealed itself to them. An example from within the Christian tradition is the French religious and mathematical genius, Blaise Pascal. After his death, a paper was found stitched into the lining of his coat that recounted a mystical experience he’d had on 23 November 1654. This is what was written on the scrap of paper:

FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.²⁰

The fact that he told no one about the encounter was unusual, because religious witnesses usually want to share what they have seen or heard. Sometimes they attract followers, and another religion is born from their revelations. Pascal kept to himself what had happened, but it changed his life. It took him from thinking about God – not of the philosophers and scholars – to an encounter with God.

For those like Pascal, who claim to have been taken behind the veil of the universe, the experience is self-authenticating. Doubt is eradicated. Certainty. Certainty. That’s why they are so persuasive. There is nothing like absolute conviction to persuade others to go along with you. But for those who go along – unless they are mystics themselves doubts about the meaning of the original encounter always remain. To use one of Pascal’s own descriptions, their faith is a gamble. The followers of a revelation are called ‘believers’ or ‘people of faith’. And doubt is part of the deal. That’s why faith is often characterised as a struggle. The faithful are told to pray to have their faith strengthened, a form of words that gives the show away. We don’t pray to have our grasp of facts strengthened. We don’t pray to believe more firmly in the two times table. We know it’s true. We can do it on our fingers. Faith is different. By definition, it is tinged with uncertainty. This is fine for individuals, but it doesn’t work for religious organisations, especially if they are keen on marketing themselves to unbelievers. Doubt doesn’t sell; certainty does. The organisers who systematise a religion based on the experience of a prophet have a product to sell, and they know diffidence won’t move the goods. That is why as religions develop they shift from exhortations to faith to proclamations of fact, including confident descriptions of the world or worlds behind the one that is available to our senses, the one our minds connect us to.

That is how the big theistic religions started, and by the time they reach us hundreds of years later, their original claims are beyond any definitive investigation or interrogation. That is why they become the source of endless, irresolvable disagreements about their truth. Rival schools of interpretation battle each other over the meaning of the original revelation. And because of the ‘ungetbehindability’ factor, there is no arbiter on earth who can resolve their disagreements. So they jostle and collide with each other like logs of timber on time’s ever-rolling stream as it carries them through history.

But while this is going on, something else is happening at the same time. To capture it, I’ll have to shift from a fluvial to an arboreal metaphor. Religions gradually thrust themselves above their mystical origins into real history, where they stand like huge trees able to shelter many different forms of attachment and meaning in their branches. Though they still claim to be rooted in the eternal world, in this world they represent values that are helpful to many who have little interest in the supernatural claims they make about their origins. For faith systems to let themselves be used in this way requires a tolerant generosity that appears to be under threat today.

I am writing this a few days before Christmas. For weeks the shops have been jingling with carols, and the streets have been decked with lights. And I enjoy it. Scotland is a cold dark place in the middle of winter. So I can understand why the ancient pagans cheered themselves up with a winter festival that reminded them the days would lengthen soon and spring would start its slow trail north. I can also understand why the Christian Church decided the pagan festival was a great idea and called it Christmas, a theft that would be dismissed today as cultural appropriation, forgetting that we’ve always borrowed from each other to help us through life’s dark nights. Christmas is the one time of the year when churches will be packed. Almost in spite of themselves, people are drawn to sing carols and hear the story of a baby laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. This is how C. Day Lewis described it in a poem:

It is Christmastide. Does the festival promise as fairly

As ever to you? ‘I feel

The numbness of one whose drifted years conceal

His original landmarks of good and ill.

For a heart weighed down by its own and the world’s folly

This season has little appeal.’

But tomorrow is Christmas Day. Can it really mean

Nothing to you? ‘It is hard

To see it as more than a time-worn, tinsel routine,

Or else a night incredibly starred,

Angels, oxen, a Babe – the recurrent dream

Of a Christmas card.’

You must try again. Say ‘Christmas Eve’. Now quick,

What do you see?

‘I see in the firelit room a child is awake,

Mute with expectancy

For the berried day, the presents, the Christmas cake.

Is he mine? or me?’

He is you and yours. Desiring for him tomorrow’s

Feast – the crackers, the Tree, the piled

Presents – you lose yourself in his yearning, and borrow

His eyes to behold

Your own young world again. Love’s mystery is revealed

When the father becomes the child.

‘Yet would it not make those carolling angels weep

To think how incarnate Love

Means such trivial joys to us children of unbelief ?’

No. It’s a miracle great enough

If through centuries, clouded and dingy, this Day can keep

Expectation alive.²¹

It is poetry that draws people into church at the end of December to gaze again at ‘the recurrent dream of a Christmas card’. The paradox is that it is the people who think religion is prose who keep it alive for the people who can only use it as poetry. When a religion is in decline, its prose becomes more defensive and assertive. But if it is not careful it loses the capacity for what the poet John Keats called ‘Negative Capability’:

. . . that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.²²

Its very existence now threatened, the Church is in danger of becoming a club for strict believers who have little tolerance for religious versions of Negative Capability. And it can be devastating for elderly parishioners, whose practice of faith always owed more to John Keats than to Billy Graham. One of the features of my latter years is to be invited to speak to groups of people who think of themselves as the Church in Exile. Most of those who turn up are about my own age or only slightly younger. They are all people who have stopped attending church because they find the new, assertive tone impossible to bear. The growing congregations, the versions that attract the young, have learnt the old lesson that certainty sells and conviction satisfies. They have the vibrancy of student societies – high on their own virtue – who have gathered together to fortify themselves against their enemies. It can be devastating for the mildly religious, for whom religion was once a source of spiritual comfort and moral challenge, to be told there is now no room in the inn for doubt and uncertainty. I know a woman who was told by her new minister that her late father, an old-fashioned Presbyterian of the post-war liberal variety, was now in hell, and he would remain there for ever because he had not been born again into the version of Christianity that was now in the ascendant.

So added to the losses that accumulate in old age can be sorrow at the loss of the Church itself. And it’s a double sorrow. There is the private sorrow of being exiled from the Christian community because it has no room for the wistful children of unbelief. There is the larger sorrow of seeing the presence of the Church slowly fade from the national landscape and become just another sect among many, all marketing themselves as the only true route to eternal salvation. The symbol of this larger sorrow is the sight of old churches that survive only as monuments to loss.

Our landscape is dotted with them, mute reminders of a time when the Christian faith was practised with generous confidence throughout the land. Seeing them closed and shuttered can prompt sombre reflection even in those who had little use for them in their glory. This is the mood of the poem ‘Church Going’ by Philip Larkin, from which I have already quoted. Larkin is out cycling in the country-side when he comes across an old church and goes in. He notices the ‘little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut / For Sunday, brownish now . . . and a tense, musty, unignorable silence’. And he wonders what will happen to what he calls these serious houses on serious earth when they have all fallen out of use. He writes:

I wonder who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was . . . ²³

Before churches close their doors for the last time, they undergo a rite called de-consecration. It’s a kind of funeral in which the sacredness is removed and the church becomes just another building. I know a handsome church that went through this process. It was one of the biggest churches in Gorbals in Glasgow when I lived there in the 1960s, sitting proudly in the midst of a teeming neighbourhood of grey tenements. I went in search of it not long ago, wondering if I’d be able to find it among the new streets and houses that have replaced the district I knew fifty years ago. I needn’t have worried. Its new setting makes it more dominant than ever. Still a thrilling building, it is now way out of proportion to its new surroundings. And it is no longer a church.

St Francis Catholic Church and Friary, built by Pugin and Pugin in 1870, was dramatically decorated in the high Gothic style, and the enormous congregation was served by a team of Franciscan Friars. I remember hundreds of parishioners thronging into it for the Stations of the Cross in Holy Week. The vividly painted Stations are just about all you can see of the interior now. The church was sold in 1996 and converted to a conference and community centre by the insertion of a three-storey suite of rooms into the interior. It was disconcerting to stand in the church knowing that behind the screens the original arrangements were all as they had been in the past, as if waiting for the day when they would be unveiled and restored to their former glory.

The superintendent took me behind the elegant timber frame of the insertion to show me the high altar. He told me they still had a mass there once a year. He asked if I’d like to see the little chapel the Friars once used for their community worship. We went up a short flight of stairs, and he opened a little door. I stepped into a perfectly preserved small chapel. Next to the altar, a little window opened above the nave of the church. I looked down into the great space, imagining multitudes praying, lighting candles, whispering their sins into the ears of priests in brown habits, kindling faith into flame. I was hit by a sorrow that stayed with me long after I had thanked my guide and left the church. It was partly remembrance of my own young manhood in this place fifty years before, partly dismay at the way time hurtles so many good things into the past without a backward look. So I had to remind myself that the story of religion, like everything else in life, is one of constant change and loss.

The Pagans were heartbroken when Catholic Christianity arrived in Britain in the sixth century, and banished their gods and took over their temples. At the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church that had supplanted Paganism was pushed out of Britain. Protestantism took over, and a way of life that had its own beauty and romance was destroyed. In our day, it seems to be Christianity itself that is fading away. I can understand why, but it still hurts me. That’s why, like Larkin, I derive a melancholy pleasure from visiting these old shrines and imagining their glory days.

***

What I can’t mourn is ‘the moral decay of Britain’ that faith leaders tell us is an inevitable consequence of the decline of religion. Moral change isn’t always decay. Sometimes it’s an improvement. I can look back with sadness on the vanished churches of my youth. I don’t mourn the passing of some of the moral attitudes they represented. The big moral shifts during my lifetime have all been improvements. I am thinking about the place and status of women and sexual minorities today, compared to how they were when I was young. If I were a woman or gay, I’d rather be alive in Britain now than in the Britain of my boyhood. Religious communities did little or nothing to bring about these improvements, because their sacred texts opposed them. It’s hard to change an ancient prejudice if you have been taught that God commanded it.

One of the useful purposes of religion in the past was the way it reinforced society’s moral order by hallowing it with divine authority. Inevitably, it overdid the reinforcement. Stable societies benefit from operating a moral consensus that most of their citizens accept. But for everything to stay the same, everything has to change. For society to keep itself together and endure through time, it has to respond to the creative dynamism of the human mind and its constant search not only for new ways of making things but for new ways of ordering its moral economy. Ethics, like everything else, is subject to change. That’s why we should hold our values and moral norms with a sense of their provisional nature. We never know when we’ll want to change them because we have been persuaded there is a better way to organise society:

For every static world that you or I impose

Upon the real one must crack at times and new

Patterns from new disorders open like a rose

And old assumptions yield to new sensation . . . ²⁴

Revealed religions find this hard to deal with. Their authors have persuaded them that they are in possession of a divine instruction that, unlike everything else in human history, isn’t subject to change and decay. It’s a mountain not a river. It stays put and never moves. That’s why the biggest junk yard in history is the one marked Abandoned Religions, abandoned because they were incapable of adapting to the flowing currents of human history.

To be fair to them, some Christian groups have tried to keep abreast of the currents of human history, but they have always been double-minded about it: one of their minds telling them to rope themselves to the mountain of eternal truth, the other telling them to throw themselves into the river of time and enjoy the swim. That’s why they were late in joining the campaign to emancipate women and sexual minorities, two of the great moral causes of my lifetime. That resistance to change is one reason for their decline amongst many young people today. The so-called millennial generation, both in the UK and in the USA, is the least religiously committed cohort of the population there has been in the last sixty years, so the future for organised religion does not look promising. There is still a spiritual hunger and interest among the young, but they show a marked contempt for institutions which claim that they alone can perfectly satisfy it.

It’s tough for believers to know how to respond to this situation, and I have sympathy for their predicament. They are fighting to stay afloat in the rushing flood of time. And the myth of the golden and untroubled past is always a potent attraction to those who have lost their moorings. Hence the busy reactionary churches many of us no longer feel at home in. As a tactic, it’ll probably work for a while. It just doesn’t work for me. But that doesn’t matter. I won’t be around to see how it plays out in the long run. I feel sad about that, but only a little. There are places where I can still find some spiritual comfort.

If, like me, you cannot halt the search for meaning in a universe that does not explain itself; but if, also like me, you can no longer cope with the compulsive chatter of what E.M. Forster called ‘poor little talkative Christianity’; then find a place where they don’t talk, they sing – and leave your soul unmolested for an hour. Slip into choral evensong somewhere to experience the music and touch the longing it carries for the human soul. For that, you may have to find a cathedral, which brings us to a significant fact. In Britain today, cathedrals are among the places of worship that continue to thrive in an era of religious decline. There are doubtless a number of reasons for this, but I am sure that one of them is the fact that cathedrals are spiritually and theologically more spacious and welcoming than most parish churches. And as well as music, they have more quiet corners to sit in where you can avoid recruiters out to press-gang your mind. Cathedrals are perfectly apt for the complicated times we live in. I am fully aware of the paradox here. I have mentioned it already. It is those who believe in the prose of religion who keep it alive for those of us who can now only survive on its poetry. I just hope they’ll go on saving that space for me a little longer. I am weary of the argument I’ve been engaged in all my life with religion and its volatile certainties.