Small candle flames - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Marion Halligan
IN THE END I LEFT, BUT NOT UNTIL I WAS AT UNIVERSITY. I left because of the extempore prayers. I could find God in the words of the Bible, and in the music of the hymns, but not in the meandering half-literate prayers that offended my love of language. I knew that this was the sin of pride; that the humblest and clumsiest of words were welcome in God's sight. For some time I fought against it, but finally admitted that the beauty of the language was more important to me. I'd read Donne and Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. I couldn't bear to listen to men who couldn't shape a sentence to save their lives.
Of course, the thing about Methodists is that they are democratic – I should say were, now they no longer exist under that name but as part of the Uniting Church – anybody can speak to God. More hierarchical religions, the Catholics and the Anglicans, control the words; they are set down in prayer books and missals and only the priest is allowed his moment to speak extempore. And some are against even that; Joseph Addison, in one of his essays, argued that clergymen should not be allowed to write their own sermons but be obliged to get them out of a book of good ones. A lot of people, sitting through a droning tirade, have thought the same.
I have had great pleasure from God as concert, God as towering work of art. I have seen the choir of King's College Cambridge, sitting in the choir stalls of the ancient chapel, turning over the pages of the seventeenth-century prayer books (not just the old versions, the actual old books). I have listened to the heart-stopping voices of those boys singing evensong. I have heard massed choirs performing Mozart's Requiem. Fauré's. Recordings of the Messiah. Bach. Such vile things have been done in the name of God, and at the same time such wonders created.
I haven't thought of religion for a while. I think about the great stories of Christianity quite often, the idea of the Garden of Eden, of Adam and Eve and the fortunate fall, especially in Miltonic cadences. They are such powerful narratives; they keep turning up, I find them inescapable; their mythic resonances make such sense of the mess we are in. I have a lot of words from the Bible in my head. There's one verse I pull out and shout whenever I see the Labor Party being feeble on television: Where there is no vision the people perish. That is what is happening under the Coalition and why can't the other lot do something about it?
BUT WHAT ABOUT GOD? SINCE NIETZSCHE, IT HAS BEEN FASHIONABLE to claim that he's dead. People keep saying that the novel is dead, too, and that very evidently isn't true, because people keep writing new ones. God isn't dead for the same reason. People keep writing new ones. Maybe they don't invent quite as many new gods as they do new novels but there are a lot.
Consider Bush's self-righteous dumbed-down ‘Christianity', leading us into another doomed crusade against the infidel; and the Hillsong Church's Christ who would have given tax concessions to the moneylenders, not cast them out of the temple; and the anti-contraceptive god of the Pope, who would rather people and their children live hideous lives and die hideous deaths from AIDS than use condoms; or the god of fundamentalist Muslims who welcomes teenage suicide bombers into his especial Paradise; or the 4am telemarketing evangelists selling miracles of health and salvation.
At Sunday School I was told that God made us in his own image. We had to remember this and try to live up to it, not do anything that would shame Him. Of course, we failed all the time. Now I think that this also is not true, it's the opposite – we make God in our own image, we always have and we keep on doing it. That's why there are so many. And every one of us claims that our God, the deity we create for ourselves, is the one true and only.
"God is dead," said Nietzsche, and finished the sentence thus: "but considering the state the species Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown."
It's not a comforting thought to realise we are inventing Gods to suit us. It can't make you feel good about human nature. Auntie Min's evangelical Christianity didn't make her kind to the one-legged woman in the neighbouring bed.
I have been thinking about God because of funerals. Funerals can come upon you unexpectedly and require quick decisions. For my mother, we had a service at St Augustine's, which she'd gone back to in her last years. We used the old prayer book, the 1626 Book of Common Prayer.
We had the same service for my husband. And when I had to choose for my daughter I copied his, since I knew she'd want to be like her beloved father. In the church where we were married, the nineteenth-century church of St John Baptist, a small stone edifice built for the Campbell family of Duntroon long before Canberra was thought of. With the same hymns, and leaving the church to the organ playing Purcell's Trumpet Tune and Ayre, which we had had for our wedding. My daughter had been christened from that church, in hospital, newborn; the doctor had said, if you believe in having babies christened I would suggest that you christen this one, and we did, not because we thought she might end up in limbo, which is the first circle of hell, and I don't believe in a god who damns babies, but because so small a life ought to have some ceremony. And now that it had ended, not so soon but far too soon, in her 39th year, a further proper ceremony was needed.
And again we had the Book of Common Prayer. This not so much for Christian belief as a belief in our own culture, the time-hallowed ritual, the traditional words that people like me have found comfort in over centuries and centuries. The poignant and powerful cadences that our hearts recognise. Language. Not extempore, but an ancient and beautiful work of art and so of humanity. The world is a cruel and dark and difficult place and it is words that light small candle flames to keep the dark at bay.
People were surprised at how comforting and noble and familiar the old words were. Underneath are the everlasting arms. I fear they aren't. My daughter didn't believe they were. But for the moment of the saying of them, yes, there they were, as they had been in people's minds and voices for hundreds of years. With tears in our eyes, for a moment we could believe in immortal safety. The words created it for us. ♦