Church Going

by Professor Richard Jenkins

This is a story I have heard. Perhaps it is a parable, or perhaps it actually happened.

‘When all places of worship were ordered to close during the spring lockdown, one church remained open. I discovered it by chance, as evidently had a few others, since they had left expressions of gratitude in the visitors’ book. I went back several times, wondering why I found this unlawful place such a source of refreshment, something between a catacomb and a speakeasy. Did it make a difference that the church was old and pretty? Perhaps, but I don’t think that was the most important part. Whatever the reason, it was good to sit, pray and contemplate, and each time I was given comfort, in the old sense of the word – both solace and strengthening.’

These feelings are surely understandable. William Temple described Christianity as the most materialistic of the great religions. We were made to enjoy the visible world, and that includes stone walls, pews, and the light through windows. Temple made his observation in a book about St John’s gospel, the sacramental gospel, which begins with the Word made flesh and is saturated with eucharistic imagery. The sacramental idea finds the stuff of the world at once ordinary, solid and the expression of transcendence. And churches are both commonplace and special. ‘You are here to kneel, Where prayer has been valid,’ T. S. Eliot wrote of Little Gidding Church (a small, dull building). Surely prayer is valid, or not, anywhere, but I think I see what he meant. A church, Philip Larkin said, is ‘a serious house on serious earth’, and both those nouns matter, ‘house’ and ‘earth’. Churches are grounded buildings, practical, with a purpose.

At a time when the sacrament was denied us, I suspect that the meditator in the empty church had found a sense of the sacramental – a serious house that was also the house of God. It is an historical accident that ‘church’ has come to have two meanings, both ‘assembly’, which is what it means in the New Testament, and the name of a building constructed for worship. But the accident has a symbolic value. Missing church during the lockdowns, we have missed both the sacrament and one another, and the two things are not separate, for as the liturgy reminds us, the sacrament is a sharing. Our hope for the future must be to have church, in every sense, fully restored to us.