Hildegarde

Oh, ack.  I’m having one of those days when I wonder if I shouldn’t be in some other business, because I don’t seem to be having such a good time getting my point across.

To answer Robert–I said nothing at all about whether or not Christianity was “dying,” although, given other comments here, it might be.  What I was talking about was the public face of Christianity, which is not just a matter of who makes the evening news.  Back there somewhere or the other in this blog, I pointed out that one of the traditional functions of imaginative literature in the post-Enlightenment world was to provide us views of ways of living with which we otherwise do not have contact of knowledge–to show the way we live n ow, yes, but also to show us that there are other was to live than the way we live now.

Donne was nowhere near the minor figure that you make him out to be, even in his own time.   He was married to Lord Egerton’s daughter, and he was a celebrated poet in a time when poets comanded the kind of esteem we now give only to movie stars. 

But what’s more important than that is that he was only one of a numbe of writers who wrote about the lived experience of Christianity in a way that was pitched not to the emotions but to the mind. 

When I was growing up, there was on offer a fair number of examples of the lived experience of Christianity pitched to the mind, and those examples were not generally news reports.   Consider Thomas Merton, a student at Columbia who had already built up a considerable reputation in literary circles as a new and promising young poet, who converted to Catholicism, left his university, and entered the Trappist monastary at Gethsemane, Kentucky.   He then produced a book about his religious journey, The Seven Storey Mountain, that became a significant best seller.   It’s not an easy book..  It’s not pitched to the lowest common denominator of anything.  It’s not an attempt to kick the reader in the solar plexus.  And it’s long. 

Or consider what I think of as near the end of the period when the public face of Christianity still offered an intellectual option–the Audrey  Hepburn film of The Nun’s Story.  I say the film and not the book because, although the book was also a signivicant seller, it is very simply written and it was aimed at the infrequent reader.  The movie, on the other hand, was distinctly pitched up–it’s a long movie, it has a distinct and yet complex narrative arc, and it takes religion seriously as something thinking people do.

One of the things that I am constantly struck with in my students is the way in which they are isolated, culturally and intellectually.   For all the sources of information available to them, they seem to know absolutely nothing about the way other people lived in other times, or that other people live in this time.  They seem to have no idea that there is in fact any significantly different way to live.  To the extent that they’ve been made aware of the “multicultural,” it’s been limited to pictures of native islanders somewhere wandering around beaches with flowers around their necks, usually accompanied by captions explaining how these islanders are much more matter of fact and sensible about sex than we are.

At one point this past term, I had to explain to a class that there was a time right here in Connecticut when having sex with somebody not your spouse was against the law, and when children born out of wedlock suffered significant legal disadvantages in regard to things like inheriting money from their biological father’s estate.   These laws were in effect when I was a child, and although I’m rapidly approacing the geriatric, I’m not there yet.  In other words, all this was less than fifty years ago, and they’d never heard about any of it.

What’s more, they have been presented with a world in which sex is about as morally important as defecating.  The only moral issues they recognize in sexual matters concern telling one’s partner about STDs and following the standard rules of ‘relationships” (including no cheating while still formally in it). 

The idea that there might be something else going on in a reationship than the ephemeral, the idea that men and women might look for something else in each other (and themselves) than being “hot,” the idea that there might be some point to life that isn’t having as much sex and getting as much “stuff” as possible, is entirely foreign to them.

When I say that it was a destructive thing to make the churches of the “religious right” the only public face of  Christianity, it’s this I’m thinking of–that without people like Thomas Merton and Sister Luke, we have lost an important counterexample to current assumptions about what it means to be a human being alive today.  We’ve especially lost an important counterexample to current trends in what it means to be female.  Too often, the only examples my students have of what it means to be female are  Paris Hilton and the sort of self-proclaimed feminist who seems to be angry and judgmental all the tiem, about everything.

Yes, there are and always were other kinds of feminists, but they don’t seem to have much of a public face these days either.  Maybe I’ll get back to them at some point.

Lately I’ve been considering giving my students a poem by Henry  King, Bishop of Chichester, called “Exequy.”   I’m not going to post the whole thing here, since it’s very long, but this is the web address where you can find it

http://www.bartleby.com/101/280.html

and I’ll just warn you to watch out for the pop ups. 

That said, King wrote this poem to his wife after her death, in the 17th century, and it, too, like the Donne I posted yesterday, is an example of poetry presenting Christianity as a lived experience:

But woe is me! the longest date   35
Too narrow is to calculate  
These empty hopes: never shall I  
Be so much blest as to descry  
A glimpse of thee, till that day come  
Which shall the earth to cinders doom,   40
And a fierce fever must calcine  
The body of this world—like thine,  
My little world! That fit of fire  
Once off, our bodies shall aspire  
To our souls’ bliss: then we shall rise   45
And view ourselves with clearer eyes  
In that calm region where no night  
Can hide us from each other’s sight.  
  Meantime thou hast her, earth: much good  
May my harm do thee! Since it stood   50
With Heaven’s will I might not call  
Her longer mine, I give thee all  
My short-lived right and interest  
In her whom living I loved best.  
Be kind to her, and prithee look   55
Thou write into thy Doomsday book  
Each parcel of this rarity  
Which in thy casket shrined doth lie,  
As thou wilt answer Him that lent—  
Not gave—thee my dear monument.   60
So close the ground, and ’bout her shade  
Black curtains draw: my bride is laid.  
  Sleep on, my Love, in thy cold bed  
Never to be disquieted!  
My last good-night! Thou wilt not wake   65
Till I thy fate shall overtake:  
Till age, or grief, or sickness must  
Marry my body to that dust  
It so much loves; and fill the room  
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.   70
Stay for me there: I will not fail  
To meet thee in that hollow vale.  
And think not much of my delay:  
I am already on the way,  

Okay, I have no idea why the font size changed or what it is I’m supposed to do to fix it.  I’m sorry if I’ve caused any problems for any of you reading.

My point is just that that above also represented part of the public face of Christianity of its time, and an expression of the lived experience of that Christianity.  It’s not a lecture on dogma or morality.   It’s not didactic at all.  I have no idea where Bishop King stood on the issue of the Real  Presence or the nature of the Trinity.

And I don’t have to.  I don’t even have to believe in life after death to understand what is going on in the Bishop’s emotional commitment to his wife, because I have such a commitment, and it perserveres in spite of the fact that I do not believe there is anything at the end of this waiting but the dark.

Bishop King and I still have more in common than either of us do with most of my students, who increasingly see themselves as one more commodity and the only point to anything as feeling good right here right now.  

My students need alternatives, not only religious ones but secular ones.  They need to be presented with other kinds of models for other kinds of living. 

Christianity used to provide one of those models.  Today, I get megachurches and Help, Lord!  The Devil Wants Me Fat!

And I’m not making that last one up.