As late as the twilight twenties, it would be hard to overstate how ignorant I was of Christianity. I had been brought up in a secular household, and had done little more than pick up scraps here and there. At school we sang hymns and were expected to mumble the Lord’s Prayer at assemblies, and I had of course attended various nativity plays and carol concerts. I have some vague memory of a vicar talking to me and my class when I was at primary school: he seemed well-meaning but dim and even at that tender age I could detect the vague whiff of earnest desperation and bland liberal platitudes.
The nuggets that one could pick up from such sources — some vague idea of God being a benevolent celestial paterfamilias who had sent a chap called Jesus, his son, to save us by the apparently inexplicable means of getting crucified; the odd parable from the gospels; a handful of Old Testament stories; and a hazy notion that a bloke called Paul had been through some miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus — were the limits of my knowledge of the religion by law established in my own country.
Generally thereafter I didn’t think much about religion at all except to be casually hostile. I had regular twinges of adolescent sub-New Atheist outrage about “fairy stories” and “superstitious gobbledegook” in reaction to my occasional oblique interactions with Christianity — outrage based on almost total ignorance of what I was sneering at — and that was the limit of my engagement. Christianity to me seemed to be either slightly sinister and obscure, or in its Anglican guise too often nice but beige and a bit stupid, purveyed by terrifyingly dull, suburban simpletons who sang embarrassing songs about how God had put the “cold in the snowflake” and “the hump upon the camel”. It stank of unappealing school dinners and undermanned tombola stalls.
I was put off further by the gauche ministrations of a few evangelical students at university, who showered me with invitations to eat cake, drink orange squash and hear talks with vague titles like “Why are we here?”. They managed to be both absolutely cringe-inducing in their artlessly direct style, but also suspiciously furtive and coy: they would try to disguise the fact that their talks were run by CICCU (Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union). Maybe they would be able to turn people to Christianity by stuffing them with chocolate brownies and glasses of Orangina and then ambushing them with a talk about penal substitutionary atonement! Or maybe not.
By the point some years later when my wife (then my girlfriend) began to go to an Anglo-Catholic church in Cambridge, I don’t think that I had ever been to a Christian church service in my life other than one or two weddings and funerals and some carol concerts. I had only the haziest notion of what Christians actually did on a Sunday morning (something to do with bread and wine? Or was it just naff hymns and cake?). She barely mentioned her attendance at Church, thinking that I would scoff. I can see why she thought that, but actually, by that point, something had changed.
It was slow and barely perceptible at first. I volunteered at the time in a second-hand bookshop, and often idly rifled through the surplus stock in the back. One day I found a copy of something called The Book of Common Prayer, which I had barely heard of at all. Out of sheer bemused curiosity, I flicked through it.
It was quite different to anything I had ever experienced before when I had had glancing contact with Christianity. I found myself recognising, perhaps through familiarity with an English literary canon profoundly influenced by it or the mysterious transmission of some cross-generational English collective unconscious, some of its phrases and rhythms. I was particularly struck by the general confession said at something called “morning” and “evening prayer”, with its talk of how we had “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” and “left undone those things which we ought to have done” and “done those things which ought not to have done”. I suppose I had become unsatisfied with the emptiness of many aspects of my life and unable to account for or give voice to a deep, visceral sorrow at my own unworthiness and the sinful actions that I was acutely conscious of having committed. It moved me: I was embarrassed at how much, but felt obscurely that it was important. I started carrying around a copy of this curious little book — the bookshop didn’t want it and would have chucked it out otherwise. I did it furtively.
The truth was that I was beginning to realise that I was profoundly dissatisfied at a liberal humanist orthodoxy which had been the very air in which I had breathed hitherto (I was at that point a postgraduate student at Cambridge University who slogged his guts out in local elections for the Labour Party). It was all too airy, unreal and silly, I suddenly felt. I was a sinner, I just felt it in my guts. There was something deeply crooked in my nature, and when I did things that I knew were selfish or stupid or greedy I didn’t want to be told that I was fretting over nothing and should just get on with “living my best life” and enjoying being “who I was”. I didn’t much like “who I was”. Suddenly, liberal secular bromides about how humans were really good and could all be nice to each other if they dropped silly superstitions like belief in God seemed ridiculous to me, profoundly unrealistic. I began to have, in short, a crisis of faith, but it was a crisis of a previously completely unexamined faith that I had swallowed as unthinkingly as any medieval peasant might have taken for granted the dominance of the Catholic Church: secular humanist materialism.
I also began to perceive the fundamental mystery lurking under everything that no atheist or agnostic can wish away
Other strong intuitions began to crowd in on me. I could not shake the idea that morality could not just be some human contrivance that we went along with for utilitarian reasons, or because it had turned out to be evolutionarily convenient. If morality did not have some deep, transcendental root; if it were not encoded in some stronger way into the very fabric of reality by a higher force; if evil things were not contrary to the very essence of a nature higher than simply our whims — well, then it was only by saying so, by the sheer force of humanist wishful-thinking, that the Holocaust or Stalin’s gulags could be said to be truly or meaningfully wicked. If a majority decided tomorrow to treat such things as morally pleasing or neutral, then that would not make them so. This I knew. But without God, why?
I also began to perceive the fundamental mystery lurking under everything that no atheist or agnostic can wish away. Why should there be something rather than nothing? Why are we here anyway? Didn’t other people suddenly, at the most quotidian times — going down stairs or while brushing their teeth — get this sudden sense of how extraordinary and odd and inexplicable that I was here at all. A sense that something — something I could not systematise or see or dissect, but which shimmered there, just out of sight but not out of sense — was underneath it all, sustaining it all, labouring to prevent the forces of entropy and decay from returning us to our original state of non-being.
All of these sentiments were only confirmed and drawn out when I decided — under the guise of an apparently magnanimous desire to support my wife as she prepared for confirmation — to suggest that I’d come to church with her. I wanted to come to church but felt too embarrassed to admit the fact, but supporting her gave me the pretext I needed. Unfortunately, they didn’t use the funny book I had found in the musty back-room of the Mill Road charity shop, but nonetheless even what I know now to be Common Worship touched me with a sense of my own unworthiness, a desperate yearning to throw myself into arms of whatever could offer me mercy, and healing, and eventually the grace to live a cleaner, better life. Luckily the church in question used traditional language for things like the Nicene Creed and the Gloria, and the beautiful obscurity of these things set me off on a massive course of reading on the basis for Christian belief and theology.
Firstly, I actually read the New Testament, which I’d never bothered to do before. I found it incredibly moving: it felt like reading something dimly forgotten but curiously familiar, a great inheritance that had been hidden away from me because of some awful mistake in a family will generations ago. I found it hard to believe that a carpenter from Galilee, or even his poor fisherman Apostles, could have made up something so profound, so ethically convincing, so spiritually convincing, without something rather special going on in 1st century Judea. It got under my skin and I have not extracted it. I have never been able to.
Then I moved onto a wider course of reading. What I found there was not the idiotic or simplistic set of childish superstitions that I had previously assumed constituted Christian belief. I suddenly realised that thousands of highly intelligent people hadn’t been Christians for thousands of years without giving some quite profound thought to many of the obvious issues raised by their own doctrines. I discovered an awesome edifice of theological, apologetic, devotional and ecclesiological thought, from Cyprian to Eric Mascall, Augustine to Michael Ramsey, via the awesome holiness and intellectual brilliance of Donne, Andrewes, Taylor, Hooker and other divines of the Anglican tradition. The curate at the church in question with whom I discussed these issues was a thoughtful and erudite man, not a childish simpleton mewling on about cold in snowflakes or humps on camels.
I felt like a man in the desert craving a cup of water
It was, in short, by exposure to the liturgy and the beauty of traditional Anglican worship, and the brilliance of the Anglican intellectual heritage, that I was brought to Christ. It wasn’t long before I felt this desperate yearning to be brought to Christ’s presence and grace through the sacraments: I felt like a man in the desert craving a cup of water. I was baptised and shortly after confirmed.
My wife, who could have been forgiven for being incredulous at how this cynical caviller, this scoffing atheist, could possibly have altered his attitude so quickly, told me that she had prayed for my conversion. Without her support and kindness the whole process would have been a lot more awkward than it otherwise was: indeed in some sense her own conversion, not long before mine, seemed providentially sent. We talked things through together and supported each other. It was well-needed — becoming a Christian in the sorts of circles we moved in was not easy. If we had announced that we had become Wiccan Pagans or Taoists it would have been accepted far more readily.
I am not the sort of person to commit myself to something casually. Before long I found myself being persuaded to sit on the local PCC and various other committees. I soon realised that the modern Church of England was not quite as I had fondly imagined it, more about parish accounts, leaky roofs and trying to avoid trendy semi-heretical sermons by guest preachers than Andrewes, Hooker and Keble. I soon also realised that the struggle inside the individual Christian, even with the help of God’s grace, is no simple battle or easy victory.
But I thank God that I picked up that musty BCP, and that I went to church with my wife, that I found my way to where I am. Perhaps if we gave more people access to our devotional riches and liturgical heritage, if we were more our historical selves and did not hide these things away such that one has a hard struggle to ever discover them, the Church of England would be in a better place.
It might be worth a try.
