Celebrating Easter 2020

Just before Easter I had a zoom conversation with a Muslim professional. He said that he had read that I was a man of faith and therefore asked how I was going to celebrate Easter. I replied that Easter was the highlight of the Christian year, more so than Christmas, and that it was a season that I had always enjoyed. Not least, it was the arc of the liturgy, over four days, taking us through the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus, that I found most inspiring. I wished him well for Ramadan and Eid and we both agreed that it was a change to have the opportunity to talk of faith in today’s world.

Now, on the Tuesday after Easter, I realise just how privileged and honoured I am to have been able to celebrate Easter at a church that continues to use the extraordinary form, the unrevised Latin rite from 1962. Unlike many in the congregation I do not believe for one moment that this is the only form that should be used. I am not particularly committed to it theologically or ecclesiologically. I just find it so much more satisfying, ritually and liturgically, than any of the modern alternatives. And, as with any liturgy or worship, from whatever tradition, when it is undertaken with commitment and enthusiasm, in the best possible way that it can be celebrated (with full complement of clergy and servers, with a professional choir, and with all the relevant beauty and dignity that could be employed) then it creates an experience of holiness and worship that, for me, is beyond compare. While the Easter vigil, for example, took two and three-quarter hours, it was, in my view, perfect and a fitting celebration of the depth and complexity, emotionally and spiritually, of the feast.

I don’t share what I assume to be the very conservative moral and social values of many of the congregation at the church I attend, but I would not expect to differ on any of the essentials theologically. The sermon on Easter morning, drawing out the biblical allusions to bread, wine and the lamb from the first Passover meals, through the Last Supper, to Jesus’ words on the Cross was a wonderful expression of core of the Catholic faith. I think it is sad that the Pope has chosen to conduct a campaign against the conservative wing of the Church through their commitment to a particular form of liturgy. I am sure there is nothing in the rite itself that the Pope can find objectionable, it is those who choose to use it as a badge if identity, and opposition to current trends in the Vatican, that he appears to have difficulties with. As I say, I think this is sad, but I am still grateful for the opportunity to worship using that rite in a church that does it so well.

On Easter morning I also listened to the liturgy from Canterbury Cathedral as broadcast on Radio 4. It was the Archbishop’s sermon that has caught the headlines and created controversy, asking once again whether church and politics meet. I have no objection to that sermon and support much of what the Archbishop was saying. A very different sermon to that in my own church, but equally profound and theologically appropriate. My difficulty was with much of the rest of the service. It appeared to seek ‘relevance’ in a way that led it to be almost humanist in tone. There is, of course, a place for humanism in the church, and perhaps in the liturgy. However, in my view not at Easter, when we celebrate what God has done for us, not what we have done for God, or for each other.

Where I and many Muslims would probably be in agreement is that the worship of God is not about ‘relevance’. Whether that worship is in Latin or Arabic is not important. It is an attitude of devotion and subservience to the power that created us, loves us, and brought about our salvation, that is pre-eminent. That demands a certain detachment from the things of this world, a glimpse of heaven, as the Anglo-Catholic slum priests of the early twentieth century East End churches would stress. It is the ability to take us out of ourselves and present us with something totally other, utterly divine, that worship comes into its own.

And I am clearly not the only one who thinks like this. At a time when church attendance continues to decline across all the denominations, the church I attended over Easter was full every day, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, congregations of two to three hundred, and much to my surprise, different on each day. There are, of course, some regulars, and the weekly Sunday liturgy has itself maintained a full church every week since the end of lock down, but over the feast there were clearly people who had travelled in from miles around to share the experience, to worship in the traditional ways, and probably some new people, returnees who remembered something of this in their childhood, whether in the UK, or in Poland or other European, Asian and African nations, but also young families who believe this is the right environment to bring up a new generation of Christian youth. There is something here that is clearly attractive, and clearly not only to me.

Happy Easter, and may the peace of the risen Lord be with us all…

Once Upon a Time

As I begin this blog, I have just finished reading Tomoko Masuzawa’s In Search of Dreamtime, The Quest for the Origin of Religion. So, what better place to begin than on origins.

Masuzawa wonders at the way in which the modern study of religion has rejected the nineteenth century obsession with origins as an explanation of religion, often violently denying the possibility of ever grasping the ‘origin’. Alongside this rejection of intellectual, or scientific, or literal origins, however, Masuzawa notes that the thing that has no origin, religion, or more correctly, myth, is itself defined by its focus on origins (at least in Eliade’s reading of myths). So while the academic purifies themselves from the taint of origins, the people the academic is studying, the religious, or the myth makers, are seen to be obsessed by origins.

In the book Masuzawa presents a series of close readings of the work of Durkheim, Muller and in particular Freud, showing that, for each author, their particular obsession with origins is not, in fact, all that it seems. In each case the origin that is identified is not in fact the real origin of religion, it is a gap, a fiction, a dream, a transference of the sign. The book is highly theoretical and written in a very clever and sophisticated analytic language. Essentially, however, the origin of religion, in the writing of each author is itself presented as a kind of myth, the home of ‘origins’, that exists not in historical time, but in the time of once upon a time.

As I was reflecting on this work, and the ideas that were circulating throughout Masuzawa’s book, my mind kept coming back to the idea of time and of origins as a form of explanation. Post modernism, we are told, saw the death of the grand narrative, the idea of a teleological understanding of history, or progress. As such it must also have seen the death of origins, playing, as Lyotard puts it, in the ruins of history, but ruins that never were a building, and never were built, that had no origin. Without progress there is no end, and likewise, no place to start, no origin worth mentioning.

One area where this is very apparent in today’s world is in the whole field of identity politics. The emphasis on ‘identity’ sits almost at odds with the concept of ‘origins’. Identity is about the hear and now, about my feelings, my imminent response to my sense of being. It is entirely about the present, even to the point of rejecting, and wanting to overturn, history. This is glaringly obvious in terms of Trans identity, which points to a reality that is felt by the individual at a fundamental, essentialist, level, to the point that origins, sex at birth, has to be denied and even destroyed, often with a violence or vehemence that it terrifying to the observer. The same principle, however, can be seen in all identity politics, the felt reality of the now always trumps any critical view of the past, and origins become irrelevant in the play of self-construction.

The point, however, is not that there are no ‘origins’ in identity politics. It is the rejection of origins in terms of historical narrative time that is at question here, origins in terms of the structures imposed on the individual by their past, by history, by society. Identity is found in a different, much deeper, and much more personal form of ‘origin’, what it is to be fundamentally the self, the person I am today. Narrative is still essential, but the starting point is not biology, or sociology, or even history, it is not who I was, it is much more meaningful, it is who I am, in the here and now, and in my very being, a more fundamental kind of origin, the origin of my sense of self.

Of course, there is far more to identity politics than the simple denial of origins, and this is a topic that I will inevitably come back to time and time again within this blog.

In the book that I am just completing, on the academic appropriation of the Dogon from Mali in western thought, I end the final chapter by noting that my approach has been rigorously historical. I track the ‘history’ of the anthropological discourse on the Dogon, the history of the art historical discourse on the Dogon, the history of the popular appropriation of the Dogon and the history of the tourist discourse on the Dogon. In doing this, however, I have noted, throughout the text, the importance of myth, and narrative, to the Dogon themselves, or perhaps more accurately to those who write about the Dogon. I ask therefore whether even to write a history of the appropriation of the Dogon in western thought is itself an appropriation, the use of western analytic methods (history) to represent a people who do not think in those analytic frames about themselves and their world. I ask what a mythic presentation of the Dogon, as presented by the Dogon, might actually look like.

In asking this, however, I find myself back inside Masuzawa’s somewhat circular argument. Myth, in Masuzawa’s perspective, and that of Eliade before her, is all about origins. Western academic writing rejects the mythic narrative of origins, even perhaps denying the validity of such analysis in disciplines such as post-colonial studies. And yet history, which must be about origins if it is about anything, is the western analytic frame that I am seeking to reject in place of mythic reflection. Is this any more than rejecting one statement of origins, one form of myth, for another statement of origins, another form of myth? Or is it, perhaps, recognising that all forms of academic analysis, all forms of explanation, are ultimately little more than once upon a time?

And so I begin: Once upon a time…