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The Grounds For Belief

Low Sunday, Year B : 15 April 2012

The poet W H Auden rejected as a young man the Anglican faith he had been brought up in, and spouted a fashionable melange of Freudianism and Marxism that was the common coinage of intellectuals in the inter war period. Then in 1933 he was sitting with some teaching colleagues on a lawn one fine summer’s night when, in his own words: "I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what it means to love one’s neighbour as oneself…my personal feelings towards them were unchanged - they were still colleagues, not intimate friends - but I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it."

This experience wasn’t enough to make him a believer, but it did have an immediate effect on his moral reasoning. As he wrote: "The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others…but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do."

Then, four years later, he travelled to Spain to check out the Civil War, as did many fashionable left wing intellectuals. On arriving in Barcelona he found that all the churches were closed, and that there wasn’t a priest to be seen anywhere. This shocked and disturbed him. As he wrote: "I could not escape acknowledging that, however I had consciously ignored and rejected the Church for 16 years, the existence of churches and what went on in them had all the time been very important to me."

Next, a few months later, he met someone whose very presence made a profound impression. This purely business meeting with the writer and publisher Charles Williams brought him for the first time in his life into the presence of personal sanctity. Underneath the surface level of an operational conversation he felt, "transformed into a person who was incapable of doing or thinking anything base or unloving."

One final experience would crack open his secular optimism, and would drive him back to the source of all hope. He was still clinging to the illusion that a just and loving society was not far around the corner, and that what was happening in nazi Germany was only a temporary aberration. Living now in New York he went to a German language cinema where a newsreel was being shown of the invasion of Poland. Spontaneous shouts of "kill the Poles," from an audience of immigrant Germans who were under no compulsion to think or feel that way, showed that there was something very dark going on in the heart of man. What was most disturbing of all was that it was originating from one of the most civilized countries in the world by people who, in his words, "attacked Christianity on the grounds that to love one’s neighbour as oneself was a command fit only for effeminate weaklings." From this marker point on Auden quietly resumed attending Anglican Services.

Is it a religious experience that brings people to belief and faith? No, that is not enough. We know from research that lots of people are having religious experiences on a reasonably regular basis, but that they simply write it off as something weird that they don’t care to talk about because they have got no way of making sense of it, or of fitting it in to their way of thinking about reality.

How do I know what I know, and what do I believe about the way the reality I live in is put together? Most people never get around to asking these questions. But they are crucial to explaining why all the religious experience in the world might never convince a hardened sceptic or an indifferent agnostic.

Notice the way God subjected Auden’s skewed picture of reality to a series of crumbling attacks. The closed churches, and the priest less city, that showed how bleak life could be without organised religion - the shouting bigots praising cruelty in a movie theatre that showed how secular idealism and simple human goodness wouldn’t be enough to bring about the New Jerusalem. Making sense of the self imposed mess that humankind had got itself into, and finding a ground to stand on as the world went into darkness, madness and violence would require resources from outside the shallow wells he had been drinking at.

What also helps in the journey to faith is some kind of personal example, personal invitation, and personal encounter - a sense of the life of God lived out in human terms right in front of one’s eyes. That is what happened when Auden met Charles Williams. These three elements taken together, a religious experience, a changed framework of interpretive meaning, an authentic example of a holy life, were enough to bring Auden to faith in God.

We first met Thomas before the raising of Lazarus; when on hearing that Jesus was heading off into danger to be with Martha and Mary, he responded, "let us go with him that we may die with him." Well, he missed out on that opportunity. He also missed out on the encounter with Jesus the door who came through locked doors to be with the frightened disciples, when he shared the peace and the joy that accompanied his risen presence. Thomas is angry that he missed out, and he has set a test that Jesus will have to meet if he is to be convinced. His is a conditional faith that is more than met by the intimate sense of touch offered by Jesus.

It is unfair on Thomas that he is singled out by preachers as the archetypal doubter. Think back to the other resurrection appearances. Frequently it says of the disciples, "but some doubted." He in a sense articulates and throws into high relief what was on others minds, what held them back from belief. And he is useful because he gets us thinking about what it was that that brought us to faith, and about what made the difference with others we know well in their journey to faith.

And that is helpful for us when an opportunity arises to talk seriously with those who at present do not have the good fortune to have faith in the risen Christ at the centre of their lives. As we enter those sorts of conversations we could bear in mind the three ingredients that made all the difference to W H Auden - an inner experience that awakened him to the possibility of living a different way - jarring experiences in the world of outer reality that shook his pre-conceived notion of reality - contact with someone in whom the life of God was self-evident.

These three marker points can help us to get our bearings as we enquire about what has been going on for those folk in their previous life experience. And we can hope that we can become the sort of person who reflects, even if it is only faintly, something of the reality of the God who has called us into his service, and who has shared his Easter joy with us.