Such a Solid Religion

The Christian religion is a warm and lively home for those who love ideas, for ideas both wonderful and beautiful it has in plenty; the greatest, the key that turns in the lock of life, being the idea that it is true.  Among the glades of its implications the mind can wander to its content, forever happening upon new avenues of sanity in which the human spirit is uplifted, dignified and redeemed where it might otherwise be diminished or discarded.  Yet it is not by ideas only that we believe.  It makes sense, if Christianity is the truth about the whole world and all reality, that it should express itself materially, as well as intellectually.  Lest we are ever tempted to distil it into a hygienic system of abstract thought, an ingenious or esoteric theory, or a cultural pose aloof from the world, then its solidity — its sheer physicality, both startling and reassuring — is there to bring us back down to earth with a bump.  For although it came from heaven, and back to heaven it beckons, it has put its roots deep down into earth.

This is a religion of fire and of water, of wheat and of wine; of olives and oil and ointment; of flesh and of blood.  It washes, it anoints; it smudges foreheads with ashes, it rings fingers in gold.  It smoulders, it sprinkles, it jingles; it paints, it carves, it casts in metal.  It touches, it kisses, it lays on hands.  It quickens the senses with sights and sounds, with touch and taste, with smells and bells.  Unabashedly it holds that Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, first drew a baby’s earthly breath in an abject outhouse round the back of a provincial inn; that his craftsman’s hands were ‘skilled at the plane and the lathe’, and that he was not above getting down on his knees to scribble in the dust or to wash a fisherman’s feet.  Always he is touching and embracing those he meets, and telling parables of plain familiar things, salt and sheep and pigswill and mustard-seeds.  Then there is his Crucifixion, whose grisliness appals polite society to this day — and his Resurrection, whose earthiness Scripture positively revels in.  It was no mere wraith or ghost that sank teeth into grilled fish for breakfast on Lake Galilee’s shore, or into whose wounds doubting Thomas pressed his fingers to feel, in shock and wonder beyond reason or hope, life coursing through a body that had lain cold for three days in the grave.

This is a geographical religion, too, for it transfigures the earth it touches, moulding the shape and feel of nations and households and everything in between.  The spiritual journey of a pilgrimage is lent its structure by topographical realities, and by earthly distances over land and sea.  Christianity’s celebration of particularity and distinctiveness has given us the proliferation of saints or devotions to which our churches are dedicated: ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ find their home here.  This, too, goes right back to the beginning of it all.  Do we realise, for instance, how extraordinary it is that such a cosmic event as the Ascension should have occurred ‘on the outskirts of Bethany’?  This is like saying it happened just outside Swindon.  Anyone making this up would surely have arranged things so that the great dénouement would occur somewhere prominent or fitting, in Jerusalem or atop the Mount of Olives, but no: God chooses the fringes of a plain provincial town for His purposes (and yet often fulfils a prophecy in doing so).

And the Eucharist at the heart of the faith is as down-to-earth as it is heavenly.  It elevates and sanctifies an action so instinctive, so reflexive and so vital as swallowing.  We gulp down our very salvation.  And for many of us, knowing all too well that the Eucharist defies the senses and demands faith — a very high degree of faith — it is easy to miss the solidity, the trustworthiness that it has about it.  It is not arbitrary or coincidental or artistically neat: it is what was given to us.  That Host on the altar was consecrated by a priest who was ordained by a bishop who can trace Apostolic Succession all the way back to the twelve apostles who were called by Jesus Christ who took bread and said ‘This is my body’ and took wine and said ‘This is my blood’.  The staunchest atheist could not deny the historical reality of the Church’s faithfulness to the words ‘Do this in memory of me’.

This is the Incarnation at work, and it is quite a startling thing.  ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’… we hear it said so often that we tend to forget how odd a thought it is.  Bishop Barron’s suggested synonym ‘enfleshment’ gives a sense of the disconcerting viscerality of God’s dealings with man.  Yet there really is not so great a cleft as we imagine between the material and the spiritual.  For minor incarnations are commonplace: words swiftly become flesh when it comes to keeping promises, for instance.  In fact, we spend much of our waking lives rushing about in order to fulfil vows and contracts, many perfectly mundane, but many, too, founded truly and purely on invisible love.

Christianity’s rootedness in earth helps us to trust its more abstract, less tangible aspects, the high doctrines and divine paradoxes.  The firmness of the masonry at the foot of the faith leads us to put trust in the high vaults that leap so dizzyingly beyond our reach.  And so we come to realise that those doctrines are not simply abstract assertions or formulae, but firm banisters helping us Heavenwards.  As Bishop Barron says, there are laws of ‘spiritual physics’ just as there are laws of material physics: both have their origin in the same law-giver.  We say that God is Love not merely because it is a nice idea, the conclusion that we would like to be true, but because we believe it is true, whether we like it or not.  That this truth is also glorious and wondrous is, to put it mildly, a bonus.  In the first place, God is Love in the same way that fire scorches and light dazzles, with the unwrestlable strength of the tides and a thunderstorm’s might.  Like a prevailing wind or a magnetic field, the divine essence defies isolation or capture, but we can run our fingers over the effects it has in time and space.  The same force that raised the spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram in the fourteenth century now draws seven hundred thousand people to a worship concert at Lagos.  Faith moves mountains not least by its sublimation into visible and measurable phenomena, by its expression in solid earth.

And just as its solidity helps us to apprehend intangible things, it helps us to come to terms with our own incarnated nature, for I wonder if we are not as accustomed as we think to this muddy vesture of decay.  Having to eat, having to drink, having to sleep… do we ever get used to it?  Part of the mystery of incarnation is that we have to learn how to inhabit our own mortal clay.  Babies are bewildered by their own bodiliness, and not until after our teenage years do we shed our awkwardness and clumsiness — and sometimes not even then!  Yet in the sacraments and gestures of this religion in particular, it is precisely the ordinary necessary things in life that are chosen to give the spiritual realm outward form.  So it is that our bodies and the gritty realities of birth, death and sickness are comprehended and sanctified.

We can afford not to be shy about the solidity of our faith, and the handholds of the incarnational, sacramental religion by which the details and particularities of the world are made precious and holy, and by which God places himself within our grasp.  Heaven does not repudiate earth, but redeems it: Deo gratias.