Rogation, Realism, Faith

Rogation is the ancient season for beating the bounds and sowing in hope.

Celebrating in Little Kemble with the Book of Common Prayer this morning meant using traditional readings that have marked this day since the early middle ages.

In St John 16, Jesus encourages his disciples to ask for anything in his name, but points out to them that they don’t believe in him anything like as much as they think they do. St James speaks of the Bible as a mirror to reflect our motives, acts and intentions. Where the three are integrated, there is true religion; where they are not our most earnest concept of faith is moonshine. Both readings make it plain that true faith is not a higher form of self-deception, but a diagnostic weapon against self-deception. We deceive ourselves with any idea that prayer is therapy, religion a feelgood game, or faith a confirming mechanism and delivery vehicle for our own prejudices.

Wondering what faith has to do with prayer, I turned to Woodbine Willie.
In 1917 he had an embarrassing experience in a trench, helpless under heavy bombardment. On one side was a sergeant cursing and swearing with jokes, in the best traditions of the British Army. On the other was the Company Christian, pouring out pitiful requests to God to save his skin, in a way which everyone else found disconcerting. “I wish,” says Studdert-Kennedy,

“that the praying man would shut up. He isn’t fooling anyone but himself. The whole idea of prayer as a cheque drawn on the bank of heaven, the religion of the last resort, where what drives it is selfishness, is very much less than real prayer...
The first prayer I want my son to learn to say for me isn’t ‘God keep Daddy safe’ but ‘God make Daddy brave, and if he has hard things to do, make him strong to do them.’ Life and death don’t matter. Right and wrong do. Daddy dead is Daddy still, but Daddy dishonoured before God is something awful, too bad for words. Put in the bit about safety too, if you must, but afterwards, always afterwards, because it doesn’t matter nearly so much. Every man, woman and child should be taught to put first things first, in peace and in war, and that I believe is where we have failed.
We have taught our people to use prayer too much as a means of comfort. Not in the original and heroic sense of uplifting, inspiring, strengthening, but in a more modern and baser sense of soothing sorrow, dulling pain, and drying tears. The comfort of the cushion not the comfort of the cross. Because we have failed in prayer to bear the cross, we have also failed to win the crown…”

This may seem a rather dated perspective from the age of chivalry, King and country. It is, but perhaps it holds up an interesting mirror for our use. In our age of anxiety everyone has something to feed a vague sense of thwarted entitlement. This begets designer victimhood and whining. There is another way. It’s called faith, and perhaps more of us should give it more of a go more of the time. Pray for faith and you might just get it. Pray for anything less and you are wasting your time.

Wodbine Willie says...

Before leaving this season of Remembrance, a passage from the writings of G. A. Studdert-Kennedy, World War I Uberchaplain and evangelist, caught my eye. Democracy and the Dog-Collar (1921) is about the organisation of working life, reacting to the claim that the First World War was a failure of Christianity, but this says something powerful about ecclesiology, too...

TRUE PERPETUITY IS ONLY OBTAINED BY PERPETUAL READINESS TO CHANGE
ORGANISED Christianity is a failure, but then organised anything is a failure. Christianity is a life, and you cannot really organise life in its fulness. It always tends to break its body and reform it into a more perfect expression of its real soul. It is not only organised religious life that fails and is always crying out for reformation; organised political life fails, and is always crying out for reformation. That is the necessity that lies behind political change. An organisation that was not a failure could never hope ultimately to succeed — it would be dead. Christ has always been greater than His Church, and always must be, until His Church becomes the new Jerusalem and the Kingdom of God.

Remembrance, progress and hope

Remembrance this year included dedicating a new school war memorial at Wargrave Piggott School, and a village service at Worminghall. Lists of names make the point that wars involve particular human beings, not just walk-on parts in war movies or computer games. With a small amount of imagination you can spot the family connections, even in small village communities.
Here are some postwar musings of Woodbine Willie, about winning the peace:

Trying to cure Europe of its present miseries by mere information and intellectual education is like trying to cure a man suffering from peritonitis by giving him a new pair of pyjamas. The only hope is in something that goes deeper than reason, and purges and purifies the underworld of man’s irrational self. The primitive passion must be opposed by, and overcome by, a purer passion of greater power — a passion for God and his humanity, which is true religion...
...It is easy to get out of trouble by sweeping generalisations which enable you to take sides, and shift the blame to someone else. It is easy to say that the workers are work-shy, and the employers greedy, and to turn the problem into a battle. It is always easy to get out of thinking and praying by fighting, always easy, and always useless and mean. But with that sort of nonsense Christianity can have nothing to do.