From seeing to hearing: a different kind of knowing

During the last year at St Andrew’s Subiaco we have turned the church around in order to accommodate a new organ that now sits in the old chancel arch. This means that the congregation is now oriented towards the West instead of the East and faces a new, and quite lovely, stained glass window which bathes the communion table in light.

One of the consequences of this reorientation is that the clergy now face a round window above the new organ that depicts the enthroned Christ surrounded by the symbols of the four gospels. It has become my habit to raise my eyes to this window during the Agnes Dei.

I find this moment in the Eucharist particularly affecting and in doing so join Christians in all ages and almost all denominations in the nexus between the eye and the ear, between the icon and the Word.

On a recent visit to Cambridge a scientific colleague drove us out to visit Ely Cathedral that towers above the flat fenland of Cambridgeshire. The Cathedral has a Lady Chapel a common pre-reformation addition dedicated to the Virgin Mary. It was originally lit with stained glass and contained painted statues illustrating aspects of the Virgin’s life. Alas the stained glass and the statues were destroyed during the English Reformation, whether during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries or during Cromwell’s reign as Protector I cannot discover. But it is interesting that Ely was Cromwell’s home as you can see if you walk through the village. Cromwell closed the cathedral for 10 years and used it to house his horses.

The visit brought several things together for me. First, the scientific colleague had previously told me that it was impossible to be both a Christian and a scientist. While he was scornful of Christianity he was glad to see the cathedral in good repair. This is faith reduced to heritage. Let’s keep the old buildings but not what they represent.

Second, seeing the blank windows and the empty niches of the Lady Chapel and then walking through the town to see Cromwell’s house reminded me of a deep schism in the church between the inward and the external expression of faith.

The Puritans would have it that all outward expression was empty show and tempted idolatry - what counted was the religion of the heart. Inward here stands for the private and the personal but also for the cerebral.

The move between Medieval English Christianity and the Puritan expression of the reformation was a move from the instinctual involvement in processions, mystery plays, and often pagan festivals converted by the church, to the intentional and the cerebral. It was a transition from the visual to the printed and spoken word, from seeing to hearing and hence to a different kind of knowing.

Not that this was not a good thing, the reformed English church rediscovered the Bible but it also threw out much of the aesthetic apparatus of devotion that had been so important for the nurture of the faith.

Worship was rationalised. Anything that was seen to encourage superstition or the worship of idols was stripped from churches. The extreme of this movement is the bare preaching hall and the displacement or reduction of sacrament. The Puritan emphasis on the Bible displaced high culture. The only songs were to be settings of the psalms the only literature that of the Bible. Art, if there was any, was employed not to lighten the heart but to better it. The sensual was seen as temptation, a danger to the soul.

While admitting the many positive outcomes of the Reformation, its extreme form of Puritanism (Luther was certainly not one) is a truncation of the fullness of humanity and the Christian worship that it engenders is also. I find it an awkward moment when, after preaching, a parishioner thanks me for “my message”. If the faith was really a message then we could replace churches with theological colleges from which Christians could graduate as fully fledged members of the faith. The repetition of Sunday worship would be unnecessary once we had come to understanding, one might even say enlightenment.

But we know that this is not how it is. Christ calls us to be disciples, to be disciplined in the faith. We need to practice and to draw ever nearer. Being as we are forgetful, we need to be reminded not only intellectually, which we hope happens in preaching, but in Eucharist. We need to “taste and see that the Lord is good” we need to eat and drink of Him so that He is in us, literally.

Why should this be a poor thing? The answer usually given is that Jesus did not know about liturgy or vestments or incense or stained glass or beautiful organs. Israel had no art but the psalms. But Israel also built the temple and restored it after it was destroyed. It also had elaborate instructions that described the proper worship of God. Primitive Christianity was primitive originally because it was alienated from the culture of Greece and Rome but it did not remain primitive for long. The history of high art in Europe is inextricably intertwined with the Church.

The centre of Christian worship is celebration. Of course we expect to learn something but it is not a learning that easily belongs to the world. It is a learning that is aided by art. When we describe art in terms of our response to it we determine and restrict it making it dependent upon human subjectivity. But when the purpose of art is to glorify God we escape that determination that has become so suffocating for us.

Art is the celebration of the useless as befits God’s useless servants. In an age of outcomes and responsibility and accountability art is an antidote to our seriousness, perhaps that is why it found no place in the Puritan, mind which was above all, serious.

The use of high art in Christian worship does not mean that it is entertainment. When the Mass became a musical piece a line was crossed, we could now have religion as edifying art in a similar way that we can have Ely cathedral as heritage. Christian worship is serious business, to quote that theological bomb thrower, Stanley Hauerwas:

One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.

Liturgy is important because it forms us. When we cheapen church music to the level of a failed Eurovision Song contest entrant we do real damage to our sensibilities. When we tailor make worship to what we think the congregation can cope with, or what the “man in the street” will find acceptable, it becomes platitudinous and boring and loses its ability to strike at our lives.

Atheism is a continuing problem for the church. Not the self-professed kind that has recently become so prominent. Arguments about the existence of God as supernatural being are largely irrelevant to what the church proclaims. No, it is the atheism that hides in the souls of sincere and dedicated church men and women (myself included) who go about the business of the church as if it is their creature.

There are some pointers to this reality. Whenever you see a church toiling to produce a mission statement or conceive of a new strategic plan or wondering if pastoral care is adequately given, there you see a church that has ceased to act out of its formation in Word and Sacrament. Here we find the intentionally cerebral of the Puritan mind, an attempt to become something other than what the Holy Spirit can produce in us. We attempt to manage the church in the same way that business manages it enterprises, for growth and success. We have yet to realise that the church growth movement has failed.

Christian worship is profoundly subversive of the present age because it de-centres the human person. It demands that our attention be drawn away from ourselves (after the prayers of confession are done) and focused on the glory of God.

Worship is an antidote to our self obsession that prioritises our wellbeing over everything else and turns us into resentful children. There is a direct correlation between the weakness of worship or its absence and the superficiality of contemporary culture. Would a people formed by authentic Christian worship be at all interested in Big Brother?

The challenge to the church is of course to be faithful to its Lord but it is also to stand in the tradition of how that faithfulness has been best expressed in the past. The church, like Israel, lives with the forefathers before them; it lives out of its history and finds its future in that history.

This is a history with many twists and turns, Puritanism being one of them. While we have learnt from it, we also acknowledge that it fails to be a total expression of the faith, what is missing is sensual delight as an expression of the worship of God.