“Far back through creeks and inlets making, comes silent, flooding in, the main” — are we seeing the return of the Sea of Faith?

The incoming tide on the River Stour at the Wrabness Nature Reserve

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.

(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)

—o0o—

Prologue 

To help give the necessary historical perspective to the subject I’m talking about today, I need to start with Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem of 1849, “Say not the Struggle nought Availeth.” This was written at more or less the same time as his friend and fellow poet Matthew Arnold’s poem, “Dover Beach.” Both poems use a sea, or rather tide-related image that bears upon the same phenomenon that Arnold memorably describes as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith”, i.e. he is talking about our European culture’s slow but steady loss of faith in the truth of Christian doctrines and beliefs. This phenomenon has, of course, continued unabated until today and has helped to create the extremely secular society in which we now live. But, whereas Arnold speaks in his poem only of the Sea of Faith’s withdrawal, Clough’s lines reveal he was already imagining a time when, as you will hear, the tide of faith has turned and is slowly and silently returning. I’ve often wondered whether this prophetic insight — if, that is, he turns out to be right — is related to the fact that in 1848, the year before he wrote his poem, he got to know well one of the great Unitarians and advocates of free religion, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The story of their farewell encounter may well be telling. Clough accompanied Emerson to Liverpool to catch the ship that was to return him to the United States, and it is recounted by Edward Everett Hale that Clough asked Emerson, “What shall we do without you? Think where we are. Carlyle has led us all out into the desert and he has left us there.” In reply, Emerson apparently put his hand on Clough’s head and said, “Clough, I consecrate you Bishop of All England. It shall be your part to go up and down through the desert to find out these wanderers and to lead them into the promised land.”

Did this quasi, free religious “ordination” by Emerson help generate Clough’s prophecy? Of course, I cannot know. But what is clear from the poem you are about to hear, is that Clough did intuit that the Sea of Faith would, one day, return:

Say not the struggle nought availeth,
     The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
     And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
     It may be, in yon smoke concealed,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
     And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking
     Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making,
     Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
     When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
     But westward, look, the land is bright.

—o0o—

“Far back through creeks and inlets making, comes silent, flooding in, the main” — are we seeing the return of the Sea of Faith?

In last week’s Guardian newspaper the British journalist, writer and critic, John Harris published an opinion piece called, “I’m a devout agnostic. But, like Nick Cave, I hunger for meaning in our chaotic world”, the standfirst of which reads: “The spiritual aridity of modern life can be tough to handle. Maybe that’s why the singer, and his new album Wild God, have struck a chord.”

Now Harris is, more or less, the same age as me, and we also happen to share similar political views and a love of the same kinds of music. So, it should come as no surprise that I find a lot of what he writes about interesting and amenable. However, I can’t recall him ever having spoken so explicitly about spiritual or religious matters before and so, as as minister to a very small community pursuing the development of a creative, enquiring, free and liberative spirituality, that is designed to help people move beyond the traditional ways of doing church and religion, I was doubly interested to read what he had to say.

Harris begins by asking where, in our hyper-connected online world, “do we go and who can we find to meaningfully share our thoughts about life’s inescapable fundamentals: love, loss, death, fear, bereavement, regret?” And, as he immediately points out, properly to do this “require[s] real-world company” which, for many people, can be “a big ask.”

Twenty-five years of experience as a minister of religion has taught me just how big an ask it is for many, many people today even vaguely to consider regularly returning to an actual, real-world religious or spiritual community. But, despite this difficulty, every year I’m approached many times by people who have suddenly experienced something — usually a death and/or some kind of serious illness — which, universally, brings about what Nick Cave calls “a deconstruction of the known self.” But as Cave, Harris and those who seek me out have also discovered, there are today fewer and fewer places where one can go in the real-world (i.e. not solely online) to complete the inevitable process of deconstruction, and then begin the vital process of creative reconstruction. And here we run into one of the major catastrophic consequences of the withdrawal of the Sea of Faith I mentioned earlier in which, as Harris puts it, “the long and steady secularisation of life in the west” has left “vast social holes” that once upon a time, “for all their in-built hypocrisies – and worse – churches at least offered somewhere to ritualistically consider all of life’s most elemental aspects.”

And that is, of course, what I, and a community such as this, is here to offer people as they struggle to deal with life’s inescapable fundamentals: love, loss, death, fear, bereavement, regret — namely, somewhere to ritualistically consider all of life’s most elemental aspects.

Inevitably, both Harris and Cave find themselves tentatively re-engaging, or simply dropping into, the kind of churches that are best known by, and/or most visible to them in their respective cultures, and in both cases these turn out to be Anglican churches. But I think this is going to store up some serious problems for them, and I’ll return to this thought in a moment. But first, let’s hear how Harris wraps-up his piece.

He begins by noting that, although he’s “a devout agnostic” as he gets older he finds that “there are experiences and aspects of living that often open the way to a sense of the ineffable and mystical, and the need for something that may help [him] make sense of an increasingly chaotic world, and life’s ruptures and crises that seem to arrive with alarming regularity.” Harris also tells us that when he’s out on one of his regular Sunday walks with his two kids they often end up in one of the village churches that pepper their routes where they’ll spend a quiet and reflective quarter of an hour. It was in just such a church last week that Harris recalled one of Nick Cave’s replies to one of his fans, who had expressed bafflement that Cave “has found at least some solace in Christianity.” Now, Cave wrote in response, “To my considerable surprise, I have found some of my truths in that wholly fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird and thoroughly human institution of the Church” and “at times, this is as bewildering to me as it may be to you.”

Harris then concludes by saying it is here he thinks

“. . . lies the faint outline of a journey that more people may sooner or later take, and something I can just about imagine: slowly increasing numbers of people being pulled away from their screens, towards something much more human and nourishing. Those [empty] pews, in other words, may not stay vacant for ever.”

I think Harris is right, and his piece about Nick Cave’s new album is yet another indication to me that Clough’s prophecy may well be coming true and that the Sea of Faith is silently and slowly flooding in through creeks and inlets all over the place.

But, if this is correct and the Sea of Faith is returning, then as a minister to an independent, dissenting, liberal religious community, I  need confidently to wake up to the fact that we are able to do something it is clear the majority of Christian churches, including the Anglican Church, are finding almost impossible to do. Namely, we are able to begin to articulate and explore a contemporary creative, inquiring, free and liberative spirituality — in our case centred on the twin practices of quiet and mindful meditation and conversation — that, even as it continues to honour and affirm the life and example of the human Jesus, has been able explicitly to leave behind the kinds of conservative beliefs and social practices still found in many forms of Christianity that people like Nick Cave and John Harris, for all their deep need to reconnect with religion are finding — as you have just heard from their own words — “fallible, often disappointing, deeply weird” and full of “in-built hypocrisies.”

so, if the Sea of Faith is returning, then what a tragedy it will be if those currently being lifted up by it are then only washed into the kind of religious communities that remain stuck in deeply weird, regressive, reactionary and closed in ways of being in what is clearly a richly cosmopolitan and pluralistic world.

It seems to me that the free religious project underway in Cambridge is not only both the right thing for the local community to be doing, to be attempting, but it is also extremely timely in a wider, societal sense.And I hope that those listening to this to press on with me confidently, in making the kind of changes we are.