Rector's letter for April Fowey News
Dear Friends
“As the vicar… invited me to remember that I am dust and will return to dust, I knew immediately what I was giving up for Lent this year. Atheism.” That’s the Times columnist and food critic Giles Coren. "It won’t be hard because my atheism has waned in recent years anyway. I gave up not going to church some time ago. Most Sundays I am there, praying and singing - another lapsed atheist hoping that the non-existent God he was brought up not to believe in doesn’t see.”
How many public figures, especially of literary and intellectual ilk, are doing that these days?
I’m intrigued by Giles’ announcement and the reasons behind it. “Atheism is the assumed default position of every modern urban adult… My childhood was godless, and there was room for improvement.” And so when his son, whom he says was likewise brought up with no tradition, wanted to go to church, Coren went with him and they’ve been going ever since.
The Christian author Glen Scrivener observes that historic, orthodox, biblical, confessional Christianity and its framework is ‘the air we breathe’ in the West. And Coren is no exception. It turns out, despite his Jewish roots, that the faith he didn’t believe in and that he didn’t practice was the Anglican faith. Coren says, “That’s my language in that prayer book, my tradition, my education, my country, my poetry.”
So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that, around the country, younger generations, and particularly younger generations of men with zero Christian background, are finding themselves turning up at church, possibly after six months of YouTubing it. And more often than not they are turning up at churches that aren’t all hip and urban and cool, but to ancient forms of the faith, expressions that take the Bible seriously and delight to use well worn patterns of prayer that are beautifully saturated with those scriptures.
It could be an outcome of lockdown which revealed what we are truly like and where we are putting our hopes and a lot of people did not like what it revealed about them and about the culture we inhabit. It could be the self-evident bankruptcy of expressive individualism. But I keep meeting younger guys searching for meaning and purpose and who reckon Jesus might just be the answer.
Now, to be honest, I do not think that Giles is quite there yet, but he’s certainly like the blind man that Jesus healed slowly rather than in an instant. For a while he saw men like trees walking. I think Giles currently sees Christianity like that. So far: "I do not not believe. I am not without faith. It’s weird, because Judaism does not require faith, only observance. Christianity is the other way round (right?) So I observe, like a Jew, the Christian service. And I have a sense that God is there - in the tradition, the words, the 2,000 years of conviction, the imagination of all the people who came before me.”
He’s finding his way around this thing. Groping as sight returns. Well, maybe by Easter Sunday Coren might be another person of Jewish heritage who rushes home from a resurrection encounter with the risen Lord? And you could too!
With every blessing