On leave, continued

  On leave, continued 

So many writers and so few readers. - André Gide, The Vatican Cellars

I tried to write this, about the Western Christian Church, in capital letters, but they were too big for me. When you are ill — then continue to be ill after everyone thinks you should be better (because the doctor assures them you are; she assures them that she has assured you that you are) —  it is a time to think about matters of religion. But not in caps. You are not a bishop, a doctor of theology, or a popular philosopher or historian; you don’t belong to any of the public intellectual or opinion-making classes.
     You can think that the church is in its last days, even here in one of its last strongholds. But it’s hardly an original thought, it’s not your thought, you know that. But, you can see with your own eyes that if it is declining, it is still a place for funerals, actually more and more of them as those that came of age or into their thirties in the church’s 1950s heyday succumb. Its bells are tolling, you can hear with your own ears.
     It is decreasingly a place for baptisms, even with grandparents wanting to insist — they find they cannot. Then, do they look into their hearts and ask themselves how important it is, baptism, and do they ask themselves then, “What do I believe finally?”

One of the bells tolling

To that question, my friend, John Woodstain, says that he doesn’t know anymore. There was a time he could say; but that time has passed: he’s become both more addled and less certain. Still, he’s in his damn (his word) — his damn — Presbyterian church practically every Sunday.
     He says “damn,” but he doesn’t regret going — or if he sometimes regrets the going, he doesn’t, he insists, regret the having gone. He leaves with a “satisfied” sense of having been part of the church in its last days, part of a story that, after a long and adventurous life, is coming to a relatively peaceable end. Someone has to enjoy, even treasure, the old as it’s being run over by the new. At least, the old knows what it is, John believes,  even if he can no longer say. The new, whatever it believes, is only becoming.

                                                                          10.29.23