St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
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If you look in the Kentish Gazette this week, you will see good coverage of the Easter Monday Youth Pilgrimage - with a very good picture of our group of pilgrims too. But turn a few pages more and you will find equally good coverage of the celebrations of the Pagans in Canterbury over Easter weekend, with Paganism described as the seventh largest religion in the UK. The coverage was a reminder and an indication of where we in the established Christian Church stand today - the National church, maybe, but for many people just another religious group among many religious groups, our claims no more or less valid than theirs, in a free and open society. The times are perplexing: after all, why should people who live in a civilised, knowledgeable, and technologically advanced society revert to Paganism? On the one hand, we have to engage with that fact while, on the other, we have to engage with the aggressive scientific atheism which says that any sort of religious belief in an age in which we know and understand so much about the evolution of the world is irrational.
Recently I visited Down House, the home of Charles Darwin (and a very busy place in this 150th anniversary year of the publication of The Origin of Species). I was glad to see that the information boards in the museum part made it very clear that, for many Christians, evolutionary theory is not a problem; some of the coverage on TV has also made that point. But our society is not all that good about subtlety: it takes time to explain that fact, and it is so much easier to say that if you are a Christian than you can't be a scientist or be scientifically minded, and that science has ruled out the existence of God. It is not scientific truth that is the problem, but a distortion and a simplification of that truth that is somehow easier to grasp in an age contemptuous of anything that hints at an assumption of spiritual authority other than personal preference.
It was interesting to learn that Darwin stopped going into church - he would go to church and leave his family at the door - after the death of his beloved daughter Annie in 1851 aged 10. Although The Origin of Species was yet to be published, his notebooks were full of information and the theories based on the voyage of discovery that had ended in 1836 were all well established in his mind. It was not therefore Darwin's scientific discoveries that stopped him entering the church door, but the pain and sorrow of loss that finally ended belief in a God of love. Standing in front of the panel explaining that, I overheard a woman commenting that to have six surviving children out of nine was, in Victorian times, a pretty good result in scientific terms. But then we don't think scientifically about the people we love and the pain of losing them. In a strange way, Darwin's reaction to Annie's death points to the question that science has yet to answer - at what point and why did our species come into being, and is it possible to explain such a radical departure from other creatures, however intelligent, as we are and always have been, in terms of evolutionary theory alone?
We who believe that therein lies the truth of a God of love bringing into being a new creation, one that is able to reason and judge and develop insight and experience as we do, face a challenge to uphold that faith today. It is possible to raise the drawbridge and argue for a literal, narrow Christianity ignoring all questions; or it is possible to admit, as we do in our Parish Vision, that we don't have all the answers but that we are on a journey and we turn to scripture, tradition, and reason to help us on our way. I believe that the vision that was hammered out in an otherwise routine Parochial Church Council meeting sometime in the past year will prove to be for us the right way and a safe path in these perplexing times.
Amen
