Whitsuntide and Sanity

Happy Whitsun!  This is the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit burst into the Upper Room, ambushing the disciples cowering there with tongues of fire and a rushing wind — and set the Church off on its great adventure.  We in Britain celebrate it rather feebly these days.  Eleanor Parker, author of one of the best blogs on the Internet, 'A Clerk of Oxford', has an article on the 'lost holiday' of Whitsuntide.  It was, as she puts it, 'the time for fairs, Morris dancing, games, ale-drinking, school and church processions, weddings, wandering into the countryside, and generally having a good time'.  It is only very recently that this has faded away.  The Clerk gives a link to a newsreel film of Manchester's grand Whit Monday procession in 1927.  It is almost unbearably evocative of that vanished solemn world of cast-iron, and trams, and Corporations.  The white clothes of thousands of children are startling amid the huge soot-blackened hulks of mighty civic buildings — a sight that is now impossible and even unthinkable, though, thankfully, the Mancunian Whit Walks continue to this day.   Even in the early 1950s, Philip Larkin could still observe, in one of his finest and best-known poems, the tradition of Whitsun weddings.  Did he guess how completely the sight he was recording was about to fade away?  Was it he, as much as anyone, who was 'out on the end of an event / Waving goodbye / To something that survived it?'  For look at what has happened to Whitsun since then.  The holiday has had all its character and flavour rationalised and secularised out of it.  Where once, seven weeks after the moveable feast of Easter, we had Whitsuntide, with its fire and wind and its brass bands and ale, we now have merely a bureaucratically static day off, the 'Late May Bank Holiday' — yawn.  It is better than no holiday at all, I hasten to stress — but it seems so dull and flat, and it has lost us our bearings, the flavour of our season and our bond with the past.

It has occurred to me recently that the Thing, whatever it is we should call it — hardly a Spirit — the materialistic, individualistic, over-liberal, progressive secularism of our day, will founder in the end mainly because of its own sheer dullness.  We have done a pretty good job of disenchanting life.  What now?  The exhilaration of life lived only for the moment and for the self, day after day, with only earth-bound hopes and the vaguest beacons of transcendent meaning, can only last so long.  We cannot distract ourselves for ever from the question that never goes away: what will fill the chasm of longing within us?  We know that the world of the performance appraisal, and the retail park, and the ready meal, is ultimately an insult to the dignity and depth of the human being, a dignity and a depth which cannot be ignored or privatised without consequence.  We have lost the words and the gestures by which we once articulated the magnitude of birth or marriage or death, and compassed moments of particular joy or suffering.  Where are our feasts and seasons to illuminate the year, the occasions for majesty or solemnity, our resonant poetry and song, or a deep spirit of togetherness that does not rely on an opponent or scapegoat for its strength?  Where is our hope for eternal life?  We will soon recognise, with alarm, how truncated is our sense of history, how disenchanted our sense of place, how stifled our hunger after wonder, and how hollow the inheritance bequeathed to us by the spirit of secularism: boring art, boring ideas, bored lives.  Secularism will fail because it is boring.

And secularism will run out of steam, too, because of its fundamental pessimism about the human person.  This may seem a strange thing to say about a tide of thought with so much to say about self-esteem and self-fulfilment.  But I am sure it is true.  For instance, the idea that our lives can mean whatever we decide, though it sounds good at first, conceals a cold indifference, for it leaves us perfectly free to decide that it means little or nothing at all, and, since many of us sometimes need encouragement to find and pursue real meaning, it leaves huge numbers of people open to the clutches of nihilism.  And, more broadly, many currents of thought that have become prominent in Britain, especially since the 1960s, have relied on pessimistic, often cynical arguments.  We all know how they run: the answer to difficulties in marriage is divorce; the answer to crisis pregnancies is abortion; the answer to terminal illness is euthanasia.  The idea of quality of life is turned to ill-use, to the evaluation that some lives are not worth living.  St. John Paul II's phrase 'culture of death' was not too strong an expression.  It can't last for ever, and indeed it isn't lasting.

Even in the last century, C.S. Lewis observed the difficulty that our culture has in aspiring to high ideals.  He lamented that people seem unable to recognise that 'when B is better than C, A may be even better than B', or that people prefer 'thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better and best, or bad, worse and worst' ('Mere Christianity', Collins, 2012, p.108).  So many people think that the Church, if it speaks against B, is condemning people to C, whereas it is really hoping for A for us all.  It is an irony that, even as it aspires to utopia, and even as it criticises the Christian doctrine of original sin, the secular world nevertheless seems to have resigned itself to the inevitability of certain evils.  The recent introduction of so-called 'no-fault divorce' into law has given us yet another chance to see this habit of thought at work.  The advocates of that idea argue that what they called 'amicable divorce' is preferable to an 'acrimonious divorce', as if anybody would suggest that conflict should be aggravated where it could be lessened.  But they take it entirely for granted that divorce is simply a fact of life, like illness or bad weather.  But what if — one might ask — what if we tried to avoid divorce as much as possible; indeed, altogether?  We have free will, and we can use it to keep promises just as much as to break them.  What if we encouraged husbands and wives to stick together in moments of difficulty?  Is this not why they once made their vows?  Should we not help them towards heroic reconciliation, with the help of family, friends or counsellors, anything that it takes?  Those in favour of the new law might scoff that this assertion is simply childish naïvety.  But is it rather childlike innocence, which is something quite different — and, what is more, since it is children who tend to suffer most from divorce, is it so misplaced?  Contrary to the egregious posters that appeared all over railway stations a few months ago, advertising a divorce app — with a phonily jolly message from a fictional Mr. and Mrs. Foster who have decided that 'things really haven't worked out and we're calling it quits' — 'amicable divorce' is a contradiction in terms.  The sundering of vows causes great suffering to all concerned; nobody arrives at that point unscathed by grief, and divorce carries no promise that things will not worsen (it is divorce, not marriage, that weaponises children).  By asserting that such things are commonplace, and should be the foundation of rights and laws, secularism belies its fundamental pessimism and hopelessness.  Meanwhile, though, the Church asks, quietly, and with that ingenuousness that will save the world: what if a vow actually means a vow?  What if chaos need not necessarily have the final word?

I say all this not to pass judgement on those who go through divorce, especially in today's climate, but to give an example of the ways in which secularism abandons people in difficulty.  The Thing seems very adept at working out the lesser of evils, but pretty hopeless at aspiring to the greatest good.  It has worsened that startling lack of moral verticality that C. S. Lewis observed; a kind of Brutalist shoulder-shrugging style of ethics which lowers the ceiling of human love and self-giving, and which often assumes that heroism is unrealistic, that sainthood is fantastical, and that we can afford simply to give up too easily.  The result of all this is that we all settle for too little from ourselves and from each other.  So, one implication is that men don't hold themselves to high enough standards of manners and speech; women therefore don't believe men are capable of high standards and so don't dare to expect them; and so both settle for less and less, and end up demoralised.  (Meanwhile, in the spheres of education or career, people often expect far too much of themselves, making all kinds of sacrifices for things which do not, in the end, determine their dignity).  And is there another reason why we settle for too little: that we do not believe in mercy?  Do we fear that to aspire to high standards in our lives is to set ourselves up for a fall from which we will never recover? How swiftly this idea leads to cynicism and nihilism — and again it is because there are questions which secularism doesn't know how to begin to answer.

The Thing seems all-powerful just at the moment.  It has claimed the media, the mainstream and the momentum.  Worse, it holds considerable sway over the language, manners and customs of ordinary people.  But it will have to last another nineteen centuries if it is to outlast the Church and since, in the end, it is reductive, and boring, and it sells us short, and tells us that we are less than we are, that we are merely granules of egos, zooming about directionlessly until we are extinguished, I would not bet on its staying the course.  It is too cynical to understand heroism; too superficial to comprehend beauty; to shallow to nourish friendship.  Birth is beyond its understanding; death defeats it.  Our dignity cannot stand this for ever.  Ultimately, too, the culture of death must die.   

Secularism may not necessarily fail violently or dramatically, but when it does fail, as fail it will, the Church will still be there, with hope and pageantry intact, along with the year's colourful wheel of feasts and seasons, the tongues of fire and the rushing wind.  We know that life matters beyond what we see, however hard we try to deny it; we know it has a meaning too deep for words and thought, and we sense the immortality of our souls.  Religion, properly practised, lends life the dignity that befits it, and the paradox is that this makes us joyful and light-hearted in spite of our suffering.  We will keep the feast of Whitsun as of old, and sanity will prevail.