"God is an Englishman. (He lives upstairs---but we don't mention him)."

  (published on August 12, 2005 in "The Flatland Oracles")

With one or two exceptions, all of the English people I’ve personally encountered seem to regard God as if he were a slightly senile Uncle who lives in the attic and whom you must keep around out of common decency until he’s gone but whom you never to mention, also out of common decency.

             “Why not?” I asked.

              “I just can’t,” said my husband. “I don't.  I’m not comfortable talking about these things. I find it tasteless.”

             “Tasteless or distasteful?” I asked sullenly.

            “Both, actually, now that you mention it,” he said. “When people bring up God in the middle of a conversation, I’m embarrassed for them.  I don't know where to look.”

            “As if they were dropping names,” I said, thinking of a line from one of Salinger’s novels (Franny and Zooey? Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters? One of those two.)

            “In a way,” said Nicholas. “But more as if the name they were dropping was ‘Father Christmas’ and they were doing it sort as if they’d have you know that he was a close personal acquaintance. As if they are hoping to impress you---and over here, especially, you can see that they're watching to see if it will. It seems quite looney to an English person.”

 

          We’ve been having this discussion at fairly long intervals throughout our marriage. At a certain point in my life, I had a sudden injection of God-consciousness under circumstances I won’t go into now. The injection ‘took’ and now I’m stuck with it. I’d rather I weren’t, but there it is. It’s not something you can just ignore after it’s happened. While the experience was entirely subjective, as my husband has pointed out, it was subjective in the way falling in or out of love is subjective: it happens, it changes you, and you can’t make things go back to the way they were before, however inconvenient the feeling may be and however much you may long to do so.

I was never not religious, but it was a sort of centerless, all-embracing, passive religion derived from Lao Tsu and the Tao te Ching. It wasn’t personal, in other words. It didn’t ask anything of me. When things changed for me, they really changed. It was a big thing for me, it is a big thing, certainly the most absorbing thing in my life. I’m conscious of it all the time.

But my husband doesn’t want to know. Neither does Rumcove.

“Only 6% of English people attend church,” my husband said.

 

“Elderly people might go and people with nothing else in their lives,” said Rumcove. “People who live alone. Sad gits,” He thought for a moment, then laughed sourly. “Perhaps I’ll take it up.”  After thinking about it further, he added, "It might be different in the country, more of a social thing."

 

Nicholas’s parents regularly attend Evensong in their little Cotswold village. “My father goes, but he doesn’t exactly believe,” he said to me. “It’s a social thing in the village. I think my mother may believe something, but I’ve no idea what---we don't discuss it. She used to make my sister and me go with her---until we were old enough to decide that we didn’t want to.”

 

Both Rumcove and Nicholas attended (in different years) midnight mass at a church I used to attend. It was an Episcopal Church---the American version of C of E---but like many (though by no means all) Episcopal Churches its tendencies are very ‘high.’ Rumcove was mildly interested; Nicholas, slightly affronted.

 

"Nothing like the C of E,’ said Nicholas, who has never read Barchester Towers, Adam Bede, or Barbara Pym. “I’m not calling that vicar ‘Father.’ He’s younger than I am. And what was all that business halfway through about ‘passing the peace’ and stopping everything so people could shake hands? I didn’t like that at all. It was embarrassing. What was the point of it?”

 

Later, when I tried to get him to go with me to church, he as usual conceded, but sat there looking so long-suffering that I gave it up. It wasn’t just the Episcopal Church. He was equally uninspired by the Unitarian Church or the extremely intelligent congregation at the United Church of Christ, which seems to be all University profs. “I’m not interested,” he said. “It’s a waste of a Sunday. I want to sleep in and go out for brunch.”

When he was younger, his mother made him go to church. At Westminster he had to attend morning prayers. He also had courses in Bible study. “I’ve had enough of it,” he said. “I had to do it then, I don’t have to now, and please, I’d really rather not.”

 

No one ever made Rumcove go to church. But he is a teacher and in the course of his teaching has had (for reasons he probably explained but that I've now forgotten) to teach religion to some of the troubled teenagers under his tutelage. His only religious story involves a lesson he gave one day in class. At the end of it, one of the boys remarked, “That Jesus was a nice bloke, wasn’t he?” So apparently Rumcove did a fairly good job of transmitting something of the message or at least the message as I understand it. Christ was a nice bloke, after all.

“But it’s never going to happen for me,” he said, when I was discussing my own religious experience with him. He’s not embarrassed by it, but he finds it baffling.

When I was visiting his parents in the Cotswolds just before Christmas a couple of years back, we went to a fete---what I’d call a ‘bazaar’---at the charming village church in Hempton. It was a tiny place and there were wall-to-wall people. “At Christmas, people go,” Nick said. “In a small village they go to fetes. It’s what you do.” I’d have liked to go to Evensong with his parents, but was too shy to go without him.

At St. Mary’s Church in Banbury we went to hear a beautiful rendition of Mendelsohn’s Elijah. While the soloists were apparently students imported from London (?), I believe that the chorus were mainly local people (they seem to have an impressive Arts program). For me, it was a magnificent experience---I mean the experience of sitting in a beautiful church that was ‘erected in the last decade of the 18^th Century and consecrated in September 1797.’ There are older buildings than that in the U.S., but not many, and certainly not in Florida (unless you count the old Spanish fort in St. Augustine). Most churches I’ve ever attended, here or at home, were built in my lifetime; the oldest goes back a century or so. I somehow locked myself in the lavatory during the intermission and Nicholas had to use his police training to open the lock and release me while a long line---sorry, ‘queue’---of baffled English people waited patiently. I think they knew I wasn’t from around.

Anyway, the church was old and very beautiful to my eyes.  It was very chilly but in a way I found exhilarating.  The acoustics were magnificant and the music richly inspiring.  It was one of the most memorable experiences of my life---not in the religious sense; I have little use for the Old Testament as I've said before---but in making me understand how the atmosphere of a church might enhance one's private religious experience.  Is it all wasted nowadays?

The great English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote in Religion in the Making:

The great religious conceptions which haunt the imaginations of civilized mankind are scenes of solitariness: Prometheus chained to his rock, Mahomet brooding in the desert, the meditations of the Buddha, the solitary Man on the Cross. It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God. Whitehead, Religion in the Making at 19 (Meridian 1960).

 

With one or two exceptions, all of the English people I’ve personally encountered seem to regard God as if he were a slightly senile Uncle who lives in the attic and whom you must keep around out of common decency until he’s gone but whom you never to mention, also out of common decency. Perhaps they are more fortunate than we are----perhaps they have somehow lost that sense of solitariness that Whitehead refers to and no longer need the feeling that there is someone there to reach out to.

Does that make the English more fortunate or less fortunate than Americans who still cry out to God or to whatever they hope is there to hear them, hoping to be heard? I truly don't know the answer.

"Most English people wouldn't be caught dead in church," Nicholas concluded. Then he laughed.  "Well---actually they would.  But that's the only time they'd be caught in church."

COPYRIGHT DAMOZEL 2005.

Comments

[Jonathan]

What a BORING article. I am an Englishman and come from a long line of English people. I don't think that the English find God an embarrassing subject, I just think that they are mostly disinterested in going to church or being spoonfed dogma and values that they don't buy into or agree with. This does not make them atheists or God-haters, it just means that they have other things in their lives that they pay more attention to or they follow their own brand of spirituality.

You don't have to go to church every Sunday and tithe your earnings to be a SPIRITUAL person. The problem is that Americans seem to come from a very God-fearing and preachy sort of culture, whereas the English (like a lot of European peoples) don't feel the need to shout their religious or spiritual affiliations from the rooftops and shove it down people's throats.

If anyone is Christian, Jewish or Muslim then that is fine, good luck to you. But that does not mean that others have to follow suit or turn to religious zealotry in a vain quest to convert the world to the bible. The monotheistic religions are all great world religions, but I mostly see them as a set of spiritual paths that people MAY choose to undertake or not.

Whatever your religion, whatever your belief-system or lack of, more power to you.

[Damozel]

Thanks for 'reading'!

[chris h]

"A slightly senile uncle,who lives in the attic"
Possibly the most perfect description of the english attitude toward church and religion i have come across,bearing in mind i am one of the ninety four percent of the non-godbothering and didn`t find your article boring in the least,quite the contrary.
I think our ambivalent attitude to religion derives from "god" given plagues, religious wars that made merrie england resemble the modern day middle east and a not unreasonable belief that someone who tells you they know what god thinks is probably lying, and trousering what lands on the collection plate.
God has been used against the british,papal control from rome,monarchs after that professing god-given authority and then Cromwells insane religious dictatorship,the equal of anything that might happen in Iran or Saudi.
We have even used god to beat ourselves up in modern times,the secular battles that have scarred northern ireland are only now abating and much work still needs to be done.
I deplore the fact that Tyndall was burnt for printing the bible in english,but at least that allows it to be read at home, in private, out of harms way, where it should be.
Charles Darwin was voted in 4th place in a top 100 britons poll,creationism will have an uphill struggle in britain.