Cut Flowers and Mighty Oaks

For decades I’ve listened to well-meaning people in the church (mostly pastors) tell me we need to change. Change, change, change. It’s all the rage, I tell you. And it’s presented as if it’s pretty much the solution to all that ails us.

And what is it that ails us? The implosion of the Protestant mainline church, for one. As these churches have struggled for decades with diminished numbers, stressed budgets, and an increasing loss of public relevance, the default solution is…change.

Often such change is foisted on long-standing church members who aren’t quite sure what all this change-talk is really about.

Years ago, I served as interim pastor at a historic downtown church. As the fortunes of the city declined over the years, as people fled in great numbers to the suburbs, and as the weed of secularism spread its tentacles over ever-larger swathes of America, the church was struggling.

Founded in 1639, construction of its current building began during the War of 1812 and was completed two years later. It’s a magnificent structure. Modeled after London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields, it can easily accommodate 700 worshipers or more.

Inside it features a stunning Tiffany stained glass window in the chancel, a large, elegant Waterford crystal and pewter chandelier overhead, and a massive Fisk Organ with a full compliment of ornate pipes. Over the years its worshipers have included a number of luminaries of early America, some whose names are etched on bronze plaques in the pews where they once sat.

But that was well before a later crop of “change” pastors got a hold of it. Their message, as far as I can gather, was that the congregation was stuck in outdated traditionalism, and that its members were responsible, at least in part, for all the injustices then being protested against out in the streets. The church was made to feel that its Christian witness had failed.

When I arrived in the early 2000s, there were only about 40-50 people left, scattered about the cavernous sanctuary. Next door, a church of the same size might see 60 or 70 worshipers on a given Sunday. The congregation there, too, had been duly admonished over the years for their perceived failings. They just weren’t keeping up! As a result, these spiritually indigent souls left in droves.

And yet, in my years of ministry, I’ve witnessed a remarkably healthy dose of wisdom emanating from the pews, the very opposite of what many of my colleagues tell me.

In fact, what I discovered was that if you are honest with people, and give them all the facts, if you trust their native intelligence, they usually will make the right decision. There’s no need to badger them or circumvent their long-held beliefs. Most church people I’ve met are honest, goodhearted, and, yes, innately wise – and truly do seek to be Christ’s heart and hands.

It was the great 18^th century Irish-born statesman and political theorist, Edmund Burke, who once said: “The individual is foolish…but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.” 

What one senses in most of our church pews is precisely this rightness of the human species. Rather than dismissing such wisdom, we would do well to take it to heart.

Coleridge once said that there are two great strains in any society, what he called “Permanence” and “Progression.” Permanence reflects the culled wisdom of the ages, preserved from generation to generation. Such permanence “conserves” what is right, faithfully transmitting lived human experience through time.

Then again, as Russell Kirk points out, there are those ages when “intelligent people would do well to ally themselves with the Progression of their nation, to contend against stagnation; for a society without the means of renewal is not long for this world.”

“But,” he then hastens to add, “our time is not such an age.”

For the change agent, the “action pastor,” as I’ve called him or her, the purveyor of heedless novelty and innovation, and the worshiper of utopian Progress devoid of history, “respect for norms and conventions is the mark of the beast.”

I once heard a joke told by a denominational leader. “What do you call a non-Christian?” he asked. “Normal.” Knowing giggles could be heard around the room.

Yet “lacking an apprehension of norms,” Kirk continues, “there is no living in society or out of it. Lacking sound conventions, the civil social order dissolves. And lacking variety of life and diversity of institutions, normality succumbs to the tyranny of standardization without standards.”

So where do these “norms” come from? Kirk identifies them as rooted in what the ancient Romans called piety: “reverence for our nation, our family in the larger sense, our ancestors, in a spirit of religious veneration.”

“In our modern age,” however, “many people live for themselves, ignoring the debt they owe to the past and responsibility they owe to the future. They are ungrateful; and ingratitude brings on its own punishment.”

What gets lost is what Burke called “the contract of eternal society.”

Kirk says that, for us, the American social order comes from three separate, abiding streams: the Christian faith (with its Judaic roots), the Roman and medieval heritage of ordered liberty (as preserved and refined by English common law and tradition), and, eschewing the “dead white male” mantra of Continental nihilism and fashionable neo-Marxist American professors, the continuity and value of great Western literature, of its prophets, poets, artists, philosophers, and authors of humane letters.

Western Civilization’s legacy, he asserts, is one of “belief, not of blood.” An important distinction, that.

In a practical sense, we can’t escape this legacy no matter how much we try to change or reject it. It constitutes what is called common sense or custom or, as Kirk helpfully phrases it, “general agreement on first principles.”

Yet in our brutally secular age, we’ve certainly done damage. To paraphrase Voltaire, common sense isn’t necessarily all that common these days.

Last night my wife and I attended a concert in an old 1836 Cape Cod church/meetinghouse. As a sign of the times, it had fallen into disuse but was brought back to life through the combined efforts of the town and the support of concerned citizens.   

It was faithfully and lovingly restored to its original condition, down to the smallest detail. It’s now used as a center for cultural arts. (As I said, it’s a sign of the times!)

In any event, there was a performance of Irish music (presumably in honor of St. Patrick’s Day) with instrumentalists, singers, step dancers, and even a story-teller.

We were asked to imagine we were in a pub somewhere in rural Ireland. The performers played the role of various local characters. The entire event was emceed by a wise and wisecracking old villager and teller of tales.

He wove fanciful stories of the eccentric townsfolk, touching on their religion, superstitions, customs, as well as their intimate bond of communal affection. There were tales of the land, the sea, of history, each interspersed with spirited performances featuring dance. vocals, guitars, fiddles, a mandolin, bagpipes, a banjo, piano, and a mouth harp, to name but a few.

What was most evident during the evening was its nod to tradition and custom, and as witnessed by the heartwarming wit and wisdom of the common folk. It was, in short, a celebration of the peculiarities, and the eternal truths they implicitly reveal, found within this unique, tradition-bound culture.

The “audience” consisted of people from all walks of life. Yet each of us participated in a common experience that spoke of the things of the spirit, of age-old wisdom, and the genuine commonalities of human experience. In a world increasingly defined by the drab rationalities and uniformities of Modernism, each of us was transported, if but for a moment, into the timeless wisdom of custom, and those truths which unfailingly nurture and sustain both heart and soul.

Jacques Maritain, the French Thomist, referencing the Modernist impulse within church circles, likened it to a “cut-flower theology.” A beautiful flower, once cut off from its roots, withers and dies. The thin layer of reality we who are alive inhabit, in other words, cut off from the deep well of tradition, custom, and history, is ephemeral at best.

A much more apt symbol of genuine change is the mighty oak. Its roots sunk deeply into the soil, it grows and expands and adapts, as the exigencies of time demand.