Doubt

One of the more enjoyable facets of my work as a parish priest is to become involved with local schools. I chair the governing body of two local schools, one is a Church of England primary and the other is a community primary. This work is a great privilege.

I conduct two assemblies a week in both schools and the pupils are frequently visiting the Church in search of various aspects of the primary curriculum, including religious education, local history, art topics and environmental studies. This work has been a major theme of my ministry for the past 34 years, a constant factor, a constant challenge to be aware, present with freshness and to help young people make their own assessments of what is available for them in our tradition of faith and community life.

A few weeks ago, having just celebrated Mass in the church school, I was standing at the entrance to the school hall saying goodbye to parents and visitors as the children and their teachers went back to their classrooms to continue their work.

Without warning, one of the mums approached me. She came up very close indeed, invading my personal space too much, and said to me baldly, “You lack conviction!” I was somewhat taken aback by this and my first thought was that she was referring to my lack of a criminal record, but clearly that was not the case. What she was saying to me was that she had observed me during the school Mass and deduced from my demeanour that something was wrong with me – or, as she put it, I appeared to her to lack conviction – or didn’t really believe what I was saying.

It was one of those moments when you think up the neat and witty reply only some days after the event! All I managed to reply was a mumbled phrase like, “I’ve been coming to this school now for 26 years and couldn’t keep doing it if I had no conviction.” Thankfully, she backed away and I was left feeling puzzled.

Had I been more awake that morning and more together, I would have turned upon this woman and with a poetic flourish, quoted W B Yeats’s sensational lines:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

(from “The Second Coming”)

This poem is regarded by some as being a prophetic vision of the decline of Christianity that we now see all around us, but the poem ends with a question mark, an unanswered question that may give grave concern to us in the light of recent events:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

However, to have replied, “The best lack all conviction” would probably have gone right over her head, and it would also have been to lay a claim that I am among “the best” – and that is a claim I would definitely not make of my own meagre skills and patchy performance. I am deeply aware of my failures and regret many things I have said and done.

William Butler Yeats
as painted by
Augustus John,
1907.

That said, I have to admit that, while initially taking slight offence at the parent’s accusation of my lacking conviction, I have now to admit that at some level I know she was right. The history of the Christian Church is so fraught with corruption and violence that it is impossible other than to have somewhere, at some level, a lack of conviction. As my humanist friends would say, I belong to an organisation that has damaged so many people over 2,000 years, one that has provided a platform and power base for so many dangerous egomaniacs. With a history like that, there must always be an element of doubt and scepticism mingling with the faith.

In two minds

For me, this is nothing new. I know that I have felt like this – being in two minds – from being very young. My formation as a child led me to experience the negative side of Christianity as seen in its evangelical wing, and I have felt deeply uncomfortable with them ever since.

As a small child I was sent away from my home in smoky Manchester to an Open Air School. My time away lasted from the age of five to ten. The medical reason for this was to help me with persistent asthma. In effect, I was removed from the familial home at the age of five and suffered emotional damage that I live with to this day.

One of the characters who were there to care for me was a nurse with a very evangelical Christian agenda, which was for her far more important than the caring job she was paid to do. This nurse systematically attempted to browbeat me into making a strong commitment as a Christian, at the age of seven or eight. I remember the anxiety I felt as she pushed me harder and harder to say things that I was far too young to understand, let alone believe.

“Evangellybabies”

I managed to give her enough back to make her stop the heavier pressure, but the experience scarred me, and I still feel that same anxiety when I hear evangelical Christians banging on in their silly childish language. An old friend once referred to them as “Evangellybabies” – a coined word of graphic power!

Such religious figures have been often portrayed in literature and on television and are a huge and constant source of comedy. From the curate in All Gas and Gaiters to Father Ted, we all love a good laugh at the expense of stupid clerics. Even Shakespeare got in on this act. In The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano expresses what a “religious” person should be like:

Signior Bassanio, hear me:

If I do not put on a sober habit,

Talk with respect and swear but, now and then,

Wear prayer-books in my pocket, look demurely,

Nay more, while grace is saying, hood mine eyes

Thus with my hat, and sigh and say “amen”,

Use all the observance of civility,

Like one well studied in a sad ostent

To please his grandam, never trust me more.

(Merchant of Venice, Act II, Scene 2)

I have to admit that, although I remain a priest and find satisfaction in my faith, I do understand where humanists and secularists are coming from and I agree with a lot of the things they say. The journalist Polly Toynbee, who is president of the British Humanist Association and an honorary associate of the National Secular Society, was writing in the Guardian on 23 December, 2008, and produced an excoriating attack on religions, not just Christianity, and I found myself ticking some of her boxes in agreement, although not all of them. To excoriate means to remove the skin, and when you remove the skin of religions you may find things covered up, but find things both good and bad.

Polly Toynbee:

“impossible beliefs”

She wrote, “There is no emotional or spiritual deficiency in rejecting religions that infantilise the imagination with impossible beliefs.”

As one who experienced an attempt to infantilise my mind as a child, I agree with Toynbee on this matter. For me, being keen on the faith is expressed in being keen on people, trying to meet their needs and making life a good experience when it is down to me to make a difference. This is what faith in God is all about, not pushing tenets or dogmas on uninterested or vulnerable people.

Just like a humanist!

Readers of a humanist magazine may smile at another experience I had recently. I was saying farewell to the mourners after a funeral at my local crematorium when one of them shook my hand warmly and said, “That was very good. Just like a humanist funeral!”

Once again, I was taken aback by the remark of someone who had observed my work as a priest. The remark was clearly meant as a compliment (and accepted as such, gratefully), but was it not rather an odd thing to say to a bloke togged up in a cassock and cotta? I reminded him that I had mentioned God a few times during the service, and he just smiled at me.

To some of those observing my work, I am apparently hovering somewhere between lacking conviction and being a humanist! I feel quite comfortable at the moment, enjoying aspects of both positions.

I don’t understand those who have all faith and no doubt.

I don’t understand those who have all doubt and no faith.

I certainly don’t understand those who live with certainty about the mysteries of life and death, whether religious or scientific.

In my mind, there is room for both doubt and faith and always room for respect for people whose opinions you disagree with totally, as this is the pathway to rapprochement and an openness of mind and heart.

Neil Richardson has been the rector of the Parish of Greenford Magna in Middlesex since 1982. He is also a Prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral and an Honorary Alderman of the London Borough of Ealing. He has been a member of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement (LGCM) since the 1970s.

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