Douglas Knight

I have been dismissed from every teaching job I have ever done. I arrive wanting to give my students something of what I have received. But I find the whole college is giant conspiracy not to deliver what is promised, and to squeeze out anyone who points this out. I find greatest difficulty in raising their expectations enough that students become capable of receiving even a first instalment, or of realising what it is, or of picking up the attitude and practices of knowledge-seeking, or of coming to understand that there is more, much more, all available to them. Our ancestors in the Church have kept for us, and are anxious to supply to us, a mountain of life experience. They can set off an avalanche for anyone ready to jump into it. I don’t see why in this short time in this college dedicated to learning, we should hold one another back from this vast accumulation of experience, any part of which will make you very much happier, stronger and more resilient. You have a long life ahead of you which is very likely to go much better if you do in these short years of study, what we all say we want to do – learn, by making our forebears’experience our own.

I want these students, and expect my colleagues, to load their pockets with the wisdom of ages. By the way, if your colleagues do not read and debate papers with each other in a senior seminar it is a sure sign that they have stopped learning and the place is dead. I want to see the young ambitious and greedy. But they arrive at college bored and listless, made old and dependent by years of Powerpoint and handouts.

My colleagues, however, want to be like their students, and to be liked by their students, so staff and students enter a covenant of demanding nothing, of mutual holding back. That way no one is left behind, and no one, by walking on ahead, is allowed to hint that the whole crowd are being robbed and are robbing one another.

In my own school and university years I never managed to find respect for any teacher who wanted to make friends with me. I wanted to look up to them. I considered a pedestal to be the proper place for them. They were not my equals, but my superiors. Their first job was to show just by their demeanour what a lot I had to learn, by which I mean, what a huge amount there is to learn. Then I would know that I was at the foot of the mountain, in the right place to learn it.

I don’t expect you to want less than I did. In any college I am paid to raise your expectations. If I can’t, I am not earning my money. I expect you to want what I wanted or more. You think that you can keep your expectations modest, but learning is a semi-communal activity, so you can’t keep your expectations low without pulling ours down too. The Lord is calling us. You stay here if you want to, but we are off, for we want to catch up with him. Where is the Lord? He is in conversation with Irenaeus and Athanasius. If you go into the library and start with these two saints, you can listen in. You can’t stay here anyway. Satan is coming with his bulldozer and every place vacated by the Lord’s people he will raze. Satan always leaves rubble and ugliness as his monument to those who dawdled and got caught.

Similarly, ministers who want to attract the young and who want to be liked play amplified worship music played by a band. They believe that this is ‘contemporary music, ‘modern’ music. Modern – is there any concept more old-fashioned, quainter, than ‘modern’? Modern – it sounds so tired. It seems such a long time ago now. Modern – it means nostalgia for people with paunches. The young are through all that and out the other side. Play your modern music if you want them to get up and leave the room.

But if you are hoping they will stay, ignore them. That’s right. Ignore them. Get down on your knees as though they weren’t there. Say Evensong. Sing the responses. Apart from the psalms, you can do it without the book. When Evensong does its work the congregations and choirs of saints of all ages will sing to them. You won’t need to worry about the young people after that. Desire will awake and curiosity will lead them on. Stop reading the bible, and start singing it. Once they have got used to hearing Scripture and singing the service, they will want to know what they are hearing and singing. Then they will want someone to open Scripture for them. They will want to know what the teaching of the Church and is and has always been. They will be at the foot of the mountain. Maybe they’ll come to you. You ready?

The clergy have created over these last decades a ‘gospel’ which is both unattractive and inaudible. The British people long since decided that the clergy are saying nothing of any consequence. And they are right.

For the clergy are saying nothing that is in any way different from the offering of the media, corporations and governments, with their long determination to remove decisions from us. The corporations know how to delight and entertain, while the government knows how to buy loyalty with jobs and incomes. Only the Church knows that humans must not sell themselves or give up responsibility for themselves and their neighbours. The clergy have not challenged any of the abandonment of responsibility through centralisation or the growth of regulation, or challenged the distractions and compensations offered for them. The have given into to the temptation to commit our all health, education and welfare to the all-centralising powers, and been part of the prejudice against actual people making decisions in their own towns and villages.

The clergy themselves are centralisers. They are here to take decisions away from us. They seem ready to amalgamate parishes into oblivion, replace the wide-spectrum gifts and ministries of congregations, parcelling up the various aspects of Christian witness into jobs and careers reserved for a few in a central office.

Lucky for them, we are here to oppose them. We insist that all life and wellbeing begins at the altar in the worship of God, and that our refreshment and restoration depends on our manning our station at the altar at every parish church in every place, small as well as large. Only the prayer of Christians can prevent man from surrendering himself to, and being swallowed up by, the overweening Leviathan.

We are in the grip of a vast cultural pessimism. All diagnosis of this pessimism merely adds to it, unless it is preceded by the original and optimism that bubbles out of Christian worship. This cultural pessimism has been taught in schools from the moment that schools ceased to be witnesses of the gospel, and gave up schooling generations in hope that comes from the gospel. The bible that was once the one and only book of our studies, and then the first step for all other studies has been made the one book that may never be opened again. As long as the bible is shut, and Christian worship not sung, these are schools in name only. The literature and thought that once formed our culture, believed to be too difficult for our children has been withheld from them. Our new leaders believe that they are not worthy of it. In schools, the very place where children should be introduced to the writers and thinkers of our culture, they are given only what is easy and undemanding, and encouraged to dismiss whatever is not contemporary and immediate. They are not introduced to this literature, but they do pick the sense that it is too difficult for them or that is to be sneered at. They are introduced to ‘critical’ thought that despises this great tradition.

So get that bible open. It is your only way out of the cult that is driving this pessimism

There is a divine character to West society which comes from its aspiration to freedom. Freedom is a characteristic of God and is the gift of God to man. Where that gift is given, there the Church appears. The Church is the community of those who meet in freedom, in which every person is willing to associate themselves with all these others and to be counted as one of them, and is available to called upon by them and put themselves at the disposal of these others. In the Christian conception freedom is unthinkable without love. And love is unthinkable without freedom. You may love, but whoever you love is not bound to return that love, or to return in the way you give it. Your love cannot bind them, and certainly cannot confine them. It can only wait for them. The Lord waits at the door. He does not come and pull us out. He waits, for days, years, lifetimes and periods of time beyond definition. The Lord waits, for us. We make him wait, and yet he waits only because he wants to. This waiting is the passion of God. Christians are enabled to share in the divine patience.

God lives where men live because men live where God has set us. He is the space in which we live. Creation exists before him, where he has placed it. Creation exists in the space given to into within heaven. Heaven gives creation a place. We live where God places us. We live here in this material creation. We live in one another’s proximity, able to see and hear and touch one another through the materiality of our bodies. We are not ethereal. And if we were, how would any disembodied being be able to meet any other disembodied being? You perceive me because you see my body. Even when you write to me, you send your message to any of the various addresses from which I, through my body, will eventually hear or read it. Our body is our ultimate address. Wherever my body is, there you will find me. This will continue to be true until the day I die, after which it will no longer be possible to say anything about me with certainty.

The created and material world does not hold God in or hold God out. God may be distant or he may be close – we cannot say. We can say only what scripture says: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.’ The Lord may be right here where we are. The space we live in is our place; it confines us and it enables us to find one another. The space we live in does not confine God, either to keep him away or to fix him here where we are so that we may draw him into the field of our perception. He may come and go without our ever being aware of it. We live in the place he has made available to us. Perhaps he is present here first, and we are only present here because of his hospitality.

We may be at once mortal-and-immortal. We do not jettison our biology with its limits, but by the grace of God its Creator, our biology may become the idiom of our ongoing, unlimited life in communion with God and with all creatures.

We Christians are like the troops of a faraway, forgotten garrison. We do not train or appear on parade or carry out the exercises that would keep us fit and prepared to meet the trouble which will inevitably come one day. It is a long since we have taken their weapons out of the armoury and spent time on the range, squinting down sights at distant targets. Do we check their stores? Do we man the walls? Do we scan the horizon? Do we go out and patrol the neighbourhood? Do we listen for the rumours? And why? Because we Christians believe we have no enemies. Perhaps we think that the world has grown up, left strife behind, reached a kind of worldwide consensus called ‘modern world’ or ‘globalism’ and there is therefore nothing to defend, because everybody already subscribes to all this. No one wants to destroy this society, because it includes everyone, no one is excluded or feels so. Everyone feels included, we believe. Perhaps.

Not every is as confident as we. Some are panicked. Some are ready enough to lash out and destroy whatever they can because they fear that our culture has no place for them. Some are discovering that the modern world, that promised increasing prosperity and opportunity for everyone, isn’t going to deliver on that promise. The global economy has no place for them. Some see the door closing, and realise that they are shut out. Western infrastructure and technical and medical advances have for a few decades encouraged and supported such vast populations that there is no going back to a peasant economy. These populations are trapped in vast urban proletarian cauldrons. Hard to find your dignity amid such rapid dissolution of familial and cultural bonds. Who can imagine their desperation? Much though our broadcasters would like to conceal it, we have seen the destruction of Christianity in the Middle East in our time. Our brothers and sisters in Christ have been butchered, burned and driven out with all cameras running. We don’t have to imagine the future. We can see it approaching, if we look.

We may not like to believe we have enemies, but we have enemies nonetheless. But the greatest mischief comes from those who are in denial about these threats, and are in power and are using their power to prevent us from protecting ourselves. So how shall we become an effective garrison of troops prepared to defend what needs to be defended?

What shall we do? We must do what Christians did in the first centuries, by which so impressed our pagan ancestors that they converted and adopted this faith, and so commenced the great political development take-off. We must take Christian worship out, wherever our people can see it, so it becomes public again. We must take it out through our streets, on our feast and festivals and get used to the weight of public hostility and learn to control our own fear. We drill, we train and we patrol. We occupy the territory and fill it with our song and thanksgiving. That’s how the blessing comes.

Our rulers tell us that they are not religious. They may believe this to be true because in their self-justifications they make no use of the word ‘God’. Because they believe that we should do as they do, and be like them, our managerial classes believe that we should not be religious. Each of us is working with a slightly different definition of ‘religion’. Implicitly our leaders mean that we wrongly hold on to a tradition which they regard as old and mistaken, and which wrongly encourages us to hold out against the wave of the future, and to make trouble for those charged with leading us into future.

Christians use the word ‘religion’ to refer to whoever or whatever people acknowledge as source of their identity. We always use the word in awareness that our leaders wrongly consider it our religious duty to worship what they worship and obey them who intend to lead us towards greater conformity with it. They want our acknowledgement and obedience. Though they don’t put it these terms, they want our worship. Christians live with this awareness that something is demanded of them that they cannot give. We know that it is our religious duty not to give them the worship that, whether explicitly or not, they seek from us. We consider it our religious duty to worship only the God of Jesus Christ and so continually to question and turn away from every other power-claim. Ceaselessly questioning – that is the habit we gain through obedience to the God of Jesus Christ. When we question God himself, and ask questions about his motives and intentions and we call this lament or petition or prayer, all of which are intrinsic to our worship and our religion.

When our leaders demand that we should do as they do and believe what they believe, and give us no reasons that are sufficient, they are being religious. More than a simply political loyalty, they are demanding an absolute and religious obedience from us. Though they may never put it in these terms, they are insisting that we convert and become members of the cult of which they are the priests. When they say that they are not religious, they mean only that, though they are making divine claims for themselves, they do not wish to admit it. Perhaps they have never been presented with this description of their claims. We have not confronted them with the absurdity of the claims they make. Much of the time, of course, they succeed in keeping their claims implicit. But if we do not make explicit what they wish only to imply, we become complicit with them. We give our assent to entitlements that are taken without being made public. If we give assent or otherwise surrender power to political entities that demand obedience yet refuse to be accountable, not only do we become the victims of these ‘gods’, but we become their votaries and collaborators. Whatever political cult we do not describe and identify, and then reject and publicly separate ourselves from, continues to exert a power over us. Continue reading “Religion and defiance of the cults of power”