Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Sunday
I came across this thoughtful Phil Larkin poem on Dan Clendenin’s Journey to Jesus blog about a quiet visit to an old country church. Although the poet doesn’t appear particularly religious—he says he wouldn’t enter if there was a service underway—nevertheless he finds something of significance in the place. While he is at a loss as to why he stops in at such churches, nevertheless he does, observing that “it pleases me to stand in silence here.”
At least part of the reason, he comes to realize, is that people have used such places of worship to grapple with their compulsions, which is to say, the forces that drive us. Religion, furthermore, provides us a narrative through which to frame those compulsions (“recognized and robed as destinies”). Thus, even though belief may fade, with churches being either turned into museums or allowed to fall apart (given over “rent-free to rain and sheep”), still people will find an undefinable something in the structures.
When Larkin talks about how we are ever being surprised by serious hungers within ourselves, and how we are forever gravitating with those hungers “to this ground,” he is not only referring to the superstitious folk who visit these sites but also to himself. After all, if the dead in the adjacent cemetery once journeyed here, maybe they knew something.
We know this to be true from the way that churches fill up when tragedies happen. Even non-believers turn out.
Church Going
By Phil LarkinOnce I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,A shape less recognizable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation—marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these—for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
