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fifty-three,

      Since I sat here with my mother

      And heard the great decree:

      How they went up to Jerusalem

      Out of Galilee.

      They have passed one after the other;

      Father and mother died,

      Brother and sister and brother

      Taken and sanctified.

      I am left alone in the sitting,

      With none to sit beside . . .

      The pillars are twisted with holly,

      And the font is wreathed with yew

      Christ forgive me for folly,

      Youth’s lapses – not a few,

      For the hardness of my middle life,

      For age’s fretful view.¹⁸

      Nowadays, sitting in church, I am often more aware of the presence of the dead than of the living. I remember where they sat, a hymn they loved – sung again this morning – and maybe the bitterness of their passing. But it is a fortifying not a depressing experience, a reminder that this is how it goes, and that I must be reconciled to it. One day my seat will be empty, and my name will be written among the dead. Going to church is one of the ways I gather the past round me as I prepare to go up to Jerusalem out of Galilee. But it has become a more complicated business than it used to be. For many old people today, going to church can be an alienating rather than a consoling experience. To understand why will take a bit of thinking about religion itself.

      ***

      The best way to see religion is as humanity’s response to the puzzle of its own existence. Unlike the other animals on earth, we have never felt entirely at home here. Our big brains prompt us not only to wonder about our own existence but about the existence of existence itself. Is there a reality behind it that created it, and can we relate to it in any way? Some of us think compulsively about these questions and come up with a stream of never-very-certain answers. The instrument we use for wrestling with them is the human mind. Our difficulty is that we can’t really be certain anything exists outside the mind, because the mind is the main agent we have for examining the question. The Cambridge theologian Don Cupitt tells us there is a German word that captures the difficulty, unhintergehbarkeit, ‘ungetbehindability’.¹⁹ Our knowledge of the universe comes to us through the mind. And we can’t get out of it or off it to prove anything’s behind it – or nothing’s behind it – except through the mind itself! We are stuck in and with our minds. And even if we want to resist that claim, it is only our minds that can challenge it thereby proving the point.

      Living with the ‘ungetbehindability’ of the universe is frustrating, which is why we search for ways to resolve our predicament, either by convincing ourselves there is definitely nothing behind it, or there’s definitely something and we’ve met it. Since it is impossible to prove the truth of a negative factual statement – there’s no one there – absolute atheism only ever appeals to a passionate minority. But those who insist that there is someone there can’t prove it either. What they offer is testimony or witness. Religion’s most interesting characters are those who claim to have encountered the mystery behind the universe directly. They claim to have seen or heard it. It revealed itself to them. An example from within the Christian tradition is the French religious and mathematical genius, Blaise Pascal. After his death, a paper was found stitched into the lining of his coat that recounted a mystical experience he’d had on 23 November 1654. This is what was written on the scrap of paper:

      FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.²⁰

      The fact that he told no one about the encounter was unusual, because religious witnesses usually want to share what they have seen or heard. Sometimes they attract followers, and another religion is born from their revelations. Pascal kept to himself what had happened, but it changed his life. It took him from thinking about God – not of the philosophers and scholars – to an encounter with God.

      For those like Pascal, who claim to have been taken behind the veil of the universe, the experience is self-authenticating. Doubt is eradicated. Certainty. Certainty. That’s why they are so persuasive. There is nothing like absolute conviction to persuade others to go along with you. But for those who go along – unless they are mystics themselves doubts about the meaning of the original encounter always remain. To use one of Pascal’s own descriptions, their faith is a gamble. The followers of a revelation are called ‘believers’ or ‘people of faith’. And doubt is part of the deal. That’s why faith is often characterised as a struggle. The faithful are told to pray to have their faith strengthened, a form of words that gives the show away. We don’t pray to have our grasp of facts strengthened. We don’t pray to believe more firmly in the two times table. We know it’s true. We can do it on our fingers. Faith is different. By definition, it is tinged with uncertainty. This is fine for individuals, but it doesn’t work for religious organisations, especially if they are keen on marketing themselves to unbelievers. Doubt doesn’t sell; certainty does. The organisers who systematise a religion based on the experience of a prophet have a product to sell, and they know diffidence won’t move the goods. That is why as religions develop they shift from exhortations to faith to proclamations of fact, including confident descriptions of the world or worlds behind the one that is available to our senses, the one our minds connect us to.

      That is how the big theistic religions started, and by the time they reach us hundreds of years later, their original claims are beyond any definitive investigation or interrogation. That is why they become the source of endless, irresolvable disagreements about their truth. Rival schools of interpretation battle each other over the meaning of the original revelation. And because of the ‘ungetbehindability’ factor, there is no arbiter on earth who can resolve their disagreements. So they jostle and collide with each other like logs of timber on time’s ever-rolling stream as it carries them through history.

      But while this is going on, something else is happening at the same time. To capture it, I’ll have to shift from a fluvial to an arboreal metaphor. Religions gradually thrust themselves above their mystical origins into real history, where they stand like huge trees able to shelter many different forms of attachment and meaning in their branches. Though they still claim to be rooted in the eternal world, in this world they represent values that are helpful to many who have little interest in the supernatural claims they make about their origins. For faith systems to let themselves be used in this way requires a tolerant generosity that appears to be under threat today.

      I am writing this a few days before Christmas. For weeks the shops have been jingling with carols, and the streets have been decked with lights. And I enjoy it. Scotland is a cold dark place in the middle of winter. So I can understand why the ancient pagans cheered themselves up with a winter festival that reminded them the days would lengthen soon and spring would start its slow trail north. I can also understand why the Christian Church decided the pagan festival was a great idea and called it Christmas, a theft that would be dismissed today as cultural appropriation, forgetting that we’ve always borrowed from each other to help us through life’s dark nights. Christmas is the one time of the year when churches will be packed. Almost in spite of themselves, people are drawn to sing carols and hear the story of a baby laid in a manger because there was no room in the inn. This is how C. Day Lewis described it in a poem:

      It is Christmastide. Does the festival promise as fairly

      As ever to you? ‘I feel

      The numbness of one whose drifted years conceal

      His original landmarks of good and ill.

      For a heart weighed down by its own and the world’s folly

      This season has little appeal.’

      But tomorrow is Christmas Day. Can it really mean

      Nothing to you? ‘It is hard

      To see it as more than a time-worn,

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