Friday
Today in my on-going memoir I examine how a staunch secular humanist could, upon reaching his forties, become an Episcopalian. Prior to conversion, it was not unusual for me to ask, “Who needs religion when one has literature?” After all, both are symbol systems that we use to understand the world, and I considered literature’s system to be richer and more complex.
I was raised in the heart of the Baptist Bible belt thinking that everyone in the world was Episcopalian. That’s what it was like to grow up in Sewanee, Tennessee, home to a college and a seminary owned by 28 southern Episcopal dioceses. But my Congregationalist father lost his faith after witnessing Dachau during the war while my mother, whose family was Episcopalian, had a bad back that couldn’t handle the hard pews. Consequently we didn’t attend church.
Nevertheless I ended up singing in the church choir after my sixth-grade teacher, a grim woman who used to complain about the Supreme Court outlawing the Lord’s Prayer in public schools, marched the class across the street to audition and I was in. After that my father started attending church, although I learned later that it was to support the desegregation efforts of the rector, not my singing.
From those two years in church, I carried away the impression that God is angry all the time. To this day I can recite the grim 1928 confessional, since replaced: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.”
Years later, in Donald Schier’s “20th Century French Novels” class at Carleton, I read Roger Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois, which follows a character’s trajectory from “The Faith” through “The Doubt” and “The Struggle” to “The Faith Again” (to cite the four section headings). I remember thinking that Jean Barois felt more like real life than a novel and also that there was something wrong with how the protagonist comes to his beliefs. Barois starts off as a member of a pious family, splits with religion and his devout wife over science, becomes a political radical during the Dreyfus affair, and eventually finds his way back to religion when he is dying of tuberculosis.
Barois throughout is contrasted with his mentor Marc-Elie Luce, a noted philosopher and member of the Senate, who warns him against going too far, whether in politics or religion. I remember thinking that Barois lacks Luce’s moderation as he swings between one extreme and the other.
While I wasn’t raised religious like Barois, I do remember the moment in adolescence that I learned about Darwinian evolution and dismissed religion. I think I got this from reading Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s play Inherit the Wind, about the Scopes trial, along with Irving Stone’s biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense, who defended the Dayton, Tennessee science teacher. I rooted for science, booed fundamentalist religion, and figured I didn’t have to take religion seriously.
On the other hand Julia, whom I met in college, was the descendant of Moravian missionaries and grew up in the Iowa church founded by her great-great-great grandfather. For her, church and community were one and the same and part of her fundamental identity. When we moved to Atlanta for graduate school, she switched to the Episcopal church since Moravians were hard to find, and when we moved to Maryland, she took our children to the Episcopal church that sat next to the college where I was teaching. Unlike intolerant Barois with his wife, I took her faith seriously, even if I didn’t share it.
I was also impressed with the existential questions that church attendance sparked in my three young sons. I didn’t see such conversations happening anywhere else in their world. I was also impressed with the rector, who had been dean and president of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific before ending his career at St. Mary’s Parish and so had an academic mindset I could relate to. We met to converse every one or two weeks and, while he never pressured me to join the church (which I appreciated), I began earnestly exploring religious issues.
Of course, as one who taught early British literature, I was well acquainted with what Christianity and Anglicanism meant to the authors. A couple of years ago C.S. Lewis scholar Rob MacSwain, who teaches at the Sewanee seminary, gave a talk in which he contended that Anglicans/ Episcopalians don’t do systematic theology the way that, say, Catholics, Lutherans, Moravians, and Baptists do. Rather, they conduct their theology through literature.
MacSwain’s talk was about how Lewis explores questions of faith through his fantasy and science fiction, and I immediately applied the idea to other authors. Among British Anglicans who use their art to explore spiritual issues are Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spencer, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Lancelot Andrewes, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keble, W.H. Auden, R. S. Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, Lewis, Malcolm Guite, Rowan Williams, and Philip Pullman.
The tradition goes so deep in the English tradition that even authors who are not Anglican can be seen as using literature in this way, such as John Milton, John Bunyan, and J.R.R. Tolkien. And to these can be added American Episcopalian authors, such as John Steinbeck, James Agee, Tennessee Williams, Madeleine L’Engle, Margaret Wise Brown, and Mary Oliver. So I suppose I was being given a religious education without knowing it.
Now, not all of these authors explored religion in church-approved ways—Wordsworth’s magnificent poem Intimations of Immortality was attacked for its vision of a soul existing prior to birth (“trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God who is our home”)—but that helps make MacSwain’s point: literature can explore spiritual questions in powerful ways not available to systematic theology. Hopkins, who when he converted to Catholicism, at first thought he must give up poetry to do so but (thankfully!) later concluded that the two need not conflict and wrote some of the most memorable religious poems in the language. For his part, Pullman describes himself as “a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist, because that’s the tradition I was brought up in and I cannot escape those early influences.”
So back to my own conversion. There were two key moments. One was when I realized that Jesus was not a man with all the answers but rather someone who was undergoing his own growth process. The temptation scene in the desert, for instance, I now saw as an internal struggle where Jesus—having realized from his baptism at the hands of John the Baptism that he has God within—is meditating on what this means and doesn’t mean. Once I saw Jesus as someone grappling with life’s big questions, I could relate to him more.
The other moment happened when, in one of my conversations with Pregnall, I was expressing existential frustrations about the sterility of the world. He replied, “I sense that you long for mystery.” The observation hit like a thunderbolt. I didn’t find this mystery in my early love affair with Darwinian evolution—back then I was most interested in finding solid answers and mastering the unknown—whereas I now realized that Christianity provided a framework for articulating my sense of wonder. I now thrill to the language in the Book of Common Prayer, which touches parts of me that Enlightenment science fails to reach.
Not that I see a conflict between science and religion. Scientists, to reach conclusions, must bracket off certain aspects of existence to answer their questions—for instance, the soul and art—which is where mystics and poets make their home. We need all of the above.
With my new interest in Christianity, I enrolled in the Episcopal Church’s “Education for Ministry,” which Pregnall was teaching. EFM is a four-year course that dives into Old Testament, New Testament, church history, and theology. “Ministry” refers to everyone who wants to live a Christian life, not just official ministers. The program was developed by the Charlie Winters, the father of my best friend in middle school, and features several pedagogical tools that I would incorporate into my college teaching.
The most significant of these was exploring how insights gained from a Biblical passage can be used to guide one’s daily life. As the current EFM textbook explains it, “A reflection that does not end with implications for our own lives as ministers in the world is incomplete.” Thanks to EFM, I started encouraging my college students to use their literary insights as life guidance, coming up with a three-step process of “immerse, reflect, act” or IRA: immerse yourself in the work, step back and reflect on it, and (to quote Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”) “change your life.” It was as though I was treating literature as holy scripture.
I took over teaching the EFM class after Pregnall unexpectedly retired with heart problems, which gave me the opportunity to try out the new approach. In my college classes, meanwhile, I was finally figuring out a way to make literature meaningful for my students, my lifelong goal.
As far as church attendance was concerned, I felt at first as though I had betrayed something, although I wasn’t sure whether it was the secular humanism, academe, or my secular family. Kneeling in prayer involved crossing some invisible barrier. Since I was determined to be proactive rather than rebelliously reactive, I opened my heart to the faith, which now seems to be just part of who I am.
Nor has my commitment to reason lessened. There’s a saying amongst Episcopalians—when you enter the church, you don’t check your mind at the door—which traces back to Elizabethan preacher Richard Hooker’s contention that faith rests upon the three-legged stool of scripture, tradition, and reason. Each serves to uphold and critique the other two in a dynamic way. I still believe fervently in the necessity of critical thinking, even while acknowledging that there are things like Christ’s resurrection that defy worldly logic. I don’t know at all about how this manifestation took place, but I know that it had a transformative influence on his followers.
I’m fond of quoting Hamlet’s “there is more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.” He is saying this to his philosophy student friend to explain the ghost of his father, who has shown up demanding revenge, but it can also be applied to many of life’s mysteries. I think that people who require scientific certainty in all things sometimes reduce the world, just as fundamentalists often reduce God to something that they can control. Reductive science and reductive religion are coin sides of the same impulse.
It is always good to remind ourselves that God is not only bigger than we think but bigger than we can think. The winds that began blowing through the universe with the big bang–creating along the way conscious beings capable of producing works of stunning beauty—will always stymie our encapsulation attempts. I believe these winds operate on me as a miniscule speck living upon a miniscule speck within an incomprehensibly immense universe, even as they (to shift registers) “move the sun and the other stars.” Dante calls this force Love, which isn’t a bad place upon which to rest one’s identity.
As I think of the many Christian writers that I adore, I realize they were driven by the same longing for mystery that an Episcopalian rector recognized within me. Poetry, which brings together earthly and the transcendent, is as close as language comes to articulating that mystery.
