loading . . . Stations on the road to a non-liturgical time From time to time churches decide that their liturgies need to be revised. Such revisions are rarely easy, since the religious life for many people depends on familiarity: on having access to a kind of meditation that repetition over a long period of time can fund. It is possible to live with, in, and through familiar words. So, not only are these revisions not easy to execute on the page: they can take place in an atmosphere too pressurised to allow the kind of space needed for fresh deliberation and creation.
I wonder, however, whether this will be the case for much longer, if indeed it still is. Do worshippers still feel quite as strongly about their words as they once did? An unremarked, yet profound change in our collective aesthetic in the last half-century or so is the almost complete loss of the sense of the liturgical. This applies in churches, certainly, but not only there. The flattening of political oratory; the struggles of contemporary poets to find a readership; the thinning of the language that clothes all manner of collective occasions: the rites of passage, even university graduation ceremonies. All these, I think, point to a loss of access to the idea that language, in certain times and places, might somehow be different: that it might reach for a resonance beyond the everyday; might direct a gathering of minds at a time and place to some truth greater than the context immediately evokes; might (in some non-normative sense) be _elevated_.
I don’t want to suggest that such a sense is lost entirely. Nor was it really universal at any point in the past. But that something has changed is (I think) hard to dispute. What happened, then – and when – is an historical problem, and one that has not been examined to any great extent. One of the criticisms levelled at the liturgical revisers of the 1960s was that the new texts were inferior to the old. This was not so much that they were poorly executed, but that they had lost a range, the ambition to reach across time and space: to become resonant. Many worshippers were (in a sense) wedded to the prose of the Book of Common Prayer. But was it perhaps already too late for any new liturgy to take hold? Was there already a cultural change under way that meant that no new text, even the work of a genius, stood a chance of being taken to heart in the same way, as the generations rolled over?
As I’ve written elsewhere, the poet and critic C.H. Sisson thought so. Part of his opposition to the revision of the Book of Common Prayer in the 1970s was the unlikelihood of anyone being able to produce anything adequate to put in its place. But Sisson, born in 1914, is not of the generation in which I’m most interested. There is, rather, a short passage in the novel _Jerusalem the Golden_ by Margaret Drabble (born in 1939) that I think is revealing.
One has to be careful about reading too much into characters in fiction, and particularly cautious about reading contemporary reality from the novel as if from a mirror. But if _Jerusalem the Golden_ (1967) is at all representative of any real people of the late 1960s, two passages in particular go to my point. They suggest that there was a kind of person, a post-war child, who had no religious faith, but who did have the kind of sense of language which I think has since been lost.
Clara Maugham is a grammar school girl, now at university in London. Home is the northern city of Northam, which bears resemblances to Drabble’s own home town of Sheffield. Though there is Wesleyan Methodism in the family background, only a mean and censorious vestige of it survives in Clara’s monstrous mother. For Clara herself there is no sense of belief, and faith features in the novel hardly at all. But its title, derived from an English hymn, is not accidental.
In a bleak and pinched childhood and youth, ‘the world of the figurative was Clara’s world of refuge.’ Words and music ‘could unfailingly elevate her to a state of rapt and ferocious ambition and desire’. The novel centres around Clara’s escape from the hostile bareness of Northam to the shining lights of London and Paris. ‘I know not, oh, I know not / What social joys are there’ runs the line of J.M Neale’s hymn, but to Clara the city ‘with milk and honey blest’ is not heavenly, but some ‘truly terrestrial paradise, where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things.’ Pulling out of Northam station on her way to Paris, ‘it occurred to her to wonder why she should so suddenly feel herself to be peculiarly blessed, and a dreadful grief for all those without blessings took hold of her, and a terror at the singular nature of her escape. Out of so many thousands, one. Narrow was the gate, and the hillsides were crowded with the serried dwellings of the cramped and groaning multitudes, the ranks of the Unelect, and she the one white soul flew forth into some glorious and exclusive shining heaven.’ This string of metaphors – the stuff of traditional metaphysics, emptied out and their shells transposed into the secular – are not those of the narrator, but the free indirect discourse of Clara herself.
My point about language is most clearly shown in Clara’s reaction to the kind of public display of passages of Scripture on posters and hoardings, which were once more commonplace but are now confined to church noticeboards: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’, or ‘Straight is the Gate and narrow the way’. Clara was comforted by these, not because of any faith in the message, but ‘because they were phrased with some beauty; they were made up of words that seemed to apply to some large and other world of other realities’. She could not hope that the traditional belief was true, but heightened language still seemed to refer beyond itself, even if the reality to which it seemed to point was now hard for Clara to discern in terms other than the speech itself.
These brief passages, apparently incidental in the novel but important in understanding Clara’s adventures, are evidence of the persistence, in the late 1960s, of what once was a religious sense of language, but without the doctrinal assent that supported it. The traditional Christian understanding of beauty, whether in words or in paint or stone, was as a fine but imperfect human echo of the reality of a creative God. In Clara’s case, the imaginative grasp of that necessary yet invisible reality has faded, yet her desire must still go somewhere. As Clara’s desire, her elevated attention, seeks an object, it becomes more stayed in the created object itself, rather than on the reality beyond. If my broader thesis is correct, this detaching is the prelude to both a sacralisation of the artistic object (in a minority), and a flattening of language for the majority.
Drabble’s imagining of her character also chimes with a trend in historians’ understanding of the recent history of the churches themselves. I’ve written about Iris Murdoch, and the sense in which both for Murdoch herself and her characters, the church must continue to exist, even if belief in its doctrine has become impossible. Grace Davie has pointed to the phenomenon of ‘vicarious religion’, when people without a faith of their own value the idea that others do still believe, and that the churches somehow perform a function on behalf of a wider community, however defined. In Clara, Drabble strikingly anticipated Davie’s formulation. Even though Clara could not hope that the words on the posters and hoardings might be true, it was important somehow that someone else did, and sufficiently so to pay good money to have these words placed there. ‘Christianity meant nothing to her, but she was glad that in despite of her mothers’ defection, it existed.’ Here is Davie’s vicarious religion in fictional form.
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### _Related_ https://peterwebster.me/2025/03/02/stations-on-the-road-to-a-non-liturgical-time/
