April 2, 2021 - 8:00am
A year of Covid has crushed the texture from our lives. For the millions of working-from-home-workers, life is especially flat. One day is much like the next — the same surroundings, the same people, the same routine.
I’m not sure that we’re quite prepared for the shock of the great unlocking. If all goes well, then by the summer we’ll be back to the way things were before the pandemic. Whereupon, a painful discovery awaits us: which is that our pre-Covid lives were pretty humdrum too.
However, there is one institution that could and should re-texture the passage of time: The Church. The great Christian festivals of Christmas and Easter still provide annual landmarks for believers and non-believers alike; but there’s so much more that our churches could do to re-infuse the calendar with shared variation.
The Church has an immense wealth of liturgical seasons, saints’ days and solemnities to draw upon, with all the tradition and colour that goes with it. And yet it’s been cleared away like so much clutter. For a Catholic like me, it’s easy to blame the Reformation — which stripped the calendar along with the altars. But that’s by no means the whole story. With honourable exceptions, Catholic parishes in this country are as bland and same-y in their practices as their Anglican counterparts — if not more so.
For instance, there’s nothing to stop our churches from making a big thing of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day — but instead Hallowtide has been abandoned to the plastic occultism of trick-or-treat. On the opposite side of the year, is Whitsun or Pentecost Sunday. The associated parades and ‘Whit walks’ were, within living memory, annual features of British life — and yet are all but forgotten in the 21st century. Corpus Christi is another moveable feast and opportunity to bring traffic to a halt with a procession, but these days you’d be lucky to see one on our streets (though a few still happen).
Why is the Church so reluctant to dress up in public? Perhaps, because it has confused its search for relevance in the modern world with merely fitting in with it. This couldn’t be more misconceived. A Church that tries to copy the fleeting fashions of modernity will a) do it badly and b) lose its soul.
Of course, what ultimately gives the Church its purpose is who it believes in. But outside the embrace of faith, the Church’s role is to be a place apart — a sanctuary of unmodernity that anyone can experience as soon as they step within a church or when the Church steps out of its buildings to re-enchant our daily lives.
On Good Friday — that weirdest of our bank holidays — I hope that the Church understands that weirdness is nothing to be afraid of.
Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.
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SubscribeSpeak for yourself. In our parish (in normal times) we process with a donkey to church on Palm Sunday. We also hold a street nativity play, with the donkey again, in which everyone dresses up and we go from house to house looking for ‘room at the inn’, ending up at dusk in a real stable surrounded by horses, where a young mother cradles her (usually) real baby. Then there is a flaming torchlight procession on Christmas Eve, ending with carols and prayers around a massive bonfire in the churchyard.
I think these sort of things definitely have their place. ‘Weird’ is not really the right word. For me, and I suspect for many, ritual and enactment can, at their most effective, create a sense of heightened reality into which maybe, just maybe, we can catch a glimpse of a mystery beyond.
Of course the alternative is to actually attend church regularly, and see what happens within. Maundy Thursday supper, when we eat a simple meal of lamb and unleavened bread, strip the church of all decoration, then flee silently into the night as the disciples did. Good Friday vigil before the miracle of Easter Sunday. The All Souls service, with candles and prayers for the dead…I could go on.
Our increasingly secular Western world does indeed need re-enchantment, through which some healing may take place as we acknowledge something greater than ourselves as mere units of consumption. Douglas Murray and others speak of a God-shaped hole in our society, into which is rushing all manner of disastrous substitutes, and I agree.
When I was parish priest of a large mining community in Yorkshire all the churches joined together in an Act of Witness for Good Friday. We gathered in a church for prayer and then processed, in silence, through the town, sometimes 200/300 of us, to another church for worship. The atmosphere was electric. People came out of the shops to watch. Sometimes I saw people in tears, and some joined the procession. The clergy would take it in turns to drag a large heavy cross. I shall never forget the personal impact it had on me one year. As I increasingly felt the weight of the cross I remembered how He had dragged His Cross up a steep hill, half beaten to death, and also submitted to the agony and humiliation of crucifixion – and He did it for me. Of course He did it for the world (John’s Gospel 3.16), but I don’t think believing that will necessarily get you on a Good Friday procession, or any other act of public witness. The thing is there is no hiding place on a procession. The whole community amongst whom you live will see you getting behind the Cross and witnessing to your faith in and love for the Lord Jesus Christ. To do that your faith needs to be personal – He did it for me.
Peter Franklin is wide of the mark in giving the impression that the Church has officially swept public processions aside. These things are organised at the local level and people stopped turning up – it’s as simple as that. Processions have gone out of favour for the time being. They will be seen again when God has mercy on this nation and blesses us with a season of spiritual refreshing, repentance and revival. So Peter when your local church next does a bit of “re-texturing the passage of time” you’ll be there to take part will you?
The other thing that makes public processions tricky is the health and safety culture that is designed to bring everything to a halt…
Christianity is a desert weed — it does not flourish among the comfortable, much less the respectable.
Well the police seem to think another desert religion is Britain’s official religion-witness their actions in shutting down both Good Friday and Easter Sunday services and their inaction against the Batley lot-apparently we now live under Sharia Law.
The silence from church leaders on the Good Friday shutdown has been absolute. Apparently a policewoman saw fit to stand on the alter -they don’t recruit the brightest do they?
Archbishop Wellness (sic) and his predecessor with the beard weren’t weird enough for you?
There is just something Biden like in Welby, if only a Trump could have been found to be Archbishop, the Cathedrals would be packed. And the writer would get his wish for the Church to be weird again; If Trump loses in 2024 (or voter irregularity takes it again) I think he should be head hunted for the job. Welby shows a religion belief is not required, just a political one, time for a pendulum swing, may save the Church. (make Anglicanism Great again)
I found that idea that the Archbishop of Canterbury would conduct the service from his kitchen last year fairly bizarre-I wonder what he has in mind this year, wearing speedos and flipflops, as he talks to the nation from his garden barbecue?
I noticed Welby finally had to respond to ‘that’ interview when he realised he was being accused of doing something illegal. At first his ‘people’ said she doesn’t understand she’s American, thereby accusing over 300 million people of ignorance . Then finally the comment the Archbishop doesn’t do private weddings-as in Justin Welby (not) available for weddings ,barmizvahs and private parties
I disagree, while humanists and other secular beings [such as myself] may be basically “Christians who don’t believe in God”, I believe that the Church at its best is as much about community as about religion and in this modern age we seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. We have abandoned many of the customary rituals of the year, some of which I can remember as a child, forgotten the mystical within our own culture and instead have engrossed ourselves in that fed to us by the media and commercialism – largely American driven.
Leave them, they’re pageantry. That isn’t the churches task.
It all falls apart when it’s left to be spectacle for the kids with kameras. May I take this opportunity to tell the ejits not to wander through cathedrals so thoughtlessly and gormlessly on their next travels? It is firstly a place for the worshippers. (If need be, pretend that you need to respect a black sanctuary, if you only think to respect POC, because that is all you have been taught at school recently.)
So all you spectacle collectors should remember that something IMPORTANT is happening for the participant worshippers. Be respectful, and not gormless, ejit photographers walking and talking all over. Also at cathedrals. Watching the “Christians at worship” is no less offensive than looking at the “pygmies” as spectacle. Thank you.
Please don’t be too dismissive of the Bible. It is ‘the mirror on the world that doesn’t lie’ in that it shows us as we really are. The difficulty is that the language is very compressed so we have to work at understanding it. For example, ‘Jesus wept.’. ‘And it was night.’ from John. Or as Dave Smith points out in his excellent ‘Wellbeing Journey’, the description of Elijah’s nervous breakdown at the end of 1 Kings. For me, ‘Bible Study’ just opens up a whole new world. And who knows, if Jordan Petersen actually gets people to change their mindsets, he will have worked a miracle and may yet be canonised!
We need to be less ashamed of being Christian and more apologetic about our faith and the article and your comments make a useful start.
Excellent.
I’m looking to buy some really good Christian artworks for the home. Just looking through some of what’s available inspires a sense of the divine – something above and beyond our material realm. Perhaps that’s the value of “weird” , yes, the unexpected, the beautiful and sublime that take us beyond our mortal selves.
And a suggestion in the spirit of the article: that picture above, how about replacing the donkey with a bike?
This is a joke, downvoters, if you got how Clergy 2.0 think.
Really? This is simply trying to get people to do ritualistic and extrovert practices. Nothing to do with sharing Christ. Too much of the church has failed to preach the Gospel of salvation in Christ, and Hi alone. That’s where you need to concentrate your mind.
Instead of elaborate cosplaying, the Church might stop being so repulsive to the younger generation if it would bring its teachings on human sexuality into line with the modern scientific understanding. Its continued irrational persecution of gays and delegitimization of their families are real turn-offs.