My home town had a second rate college, which brought a lot of folks who might otherwise never show up in such a place but who couldn't quite manage a job in the ivy leagues. Such folks often seemed like 'characters' to us 'normal' folk. They tended to do things like drive Volvos and entertain strangers, and the town's gossip was juiced with stories of their activities. One of the characters was the wife of a professor from Louisiana, up from the shores of Lake Ponchetrain to the hills of Crowley's Ridge. I remember her name as having been Mylie, but that might be wrong.
One day Mylie heard a knock at her door and opened it to find two nicely dressed women whom she had never seen befoe. 'Oh', she said. 'Do come in. I've just baked some cookies and made a pot of coffee, and I'd love to share them'. The women came in, and it is reported that the conversation centered at first around cookie recipes and then wandered to other topics, before Mylie remembered her manners. 'Oh my', she said. 'I've quite forgotten to ask you why you're here'. 'Well, we've come to ask if you're a Christian.' 'Oh my. Of course not. That would be much too hard, but I'd love to meet a Christian. I've never known one. Have you?'
Or, as Chesterton said, 'Christianity has not been tried and found lacking. It has been tried and found difficult'. I'm writing on the First Sunday in Advent, when the traditional epistle reading admonishes us to 'walk honestly, as in the dyay, . . . not in chambering and wantonness, . . . But put . . . on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provisions for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.' I am enjoying a cup of coffee and listening to gentle Icelandic piano music as I write, fulfilling some of my minor lusts of the flesh. I'd best not recount my stories of chambering mentioned earlier in the epistle.
Now, most of the time I make no claims to be a Christian nor do I aspire to be one. I have had episodes of such desires and claims, but they seem much too pretentious in the long run. I have spent some time as a fairly serious hermit, and it was actually a very pleasant life, but one that got swallowed up somehow in my desire to understand the world around me. I was distracted not by drunkenness or chambering but by quantum physics and Google. Nor do I find what calls itself 'the church' to be much help. I mean, these days putting up a sign seems to make people a church, with all the attendant tax adantages thereof. Only the strictest orthodox Christians seem to have a real claim on having 'out on Christ'.
And yet, each Advent I back slide. It's the music, mostly. Each Advent I think I won't but I do listen to the music of English choirs singing the antiphons and hymns of the season, and I listen to English voices reading the ringing passages of Isaiah, which were I to quote on Facebook might get me banned for not following community standards, and I am a kid again, coming out of the west front of the church on Christmas Eve, having heard the song of the angels and now finding tthe deep mid-winter. I want to move to Durham and live in a cave and visit the shrine of St. Cuthbert.
Do I 'believe in one God, the father, the almighty, &tc.'? Well, of course not. I mean, why would the creator of the stars of night bother with one specific tribe of wandering Aramaens and one maiden in a small town on the edge of the empire. Why did some other gods reveal themselves to the wanderers of Australia? It makes no sense.
And, of course I do. Because it's a good story, because one needs a context from which to consider events, because even though I was raised in a very watered-down part of the tradition of the western church, those bits of tradition would serve me as herms on a path to try to find the older and deeper traditions of the church, leading me (finally?--I'm not dead yet) to orthodoxy as much as one can find it these days.
Because the image of the king, the sovereign, in today's Gospel is much more appealing than czars and presidents or congressses, all of whom seem to want to fleece their flock rather than to abide with them in the fields. Because in today's gospel 'thy King cometh unto thee, meek' but then 'went into the temple of God, and cast out all of them that sold and bought in the temple'.
Because I love the story of St. Seraphim and the bear, and living out here in the pretend woods I like to think I might have a similar life.
Because I like to think that if the cousins George and Nicholas had been kings of the sort in today's Gospel, they would not have sent their soldiers into the fields of Flanders to slay one another, although of course I don't know of any king except in today's story who wouldn't act like those most christian cousins.
Of course I will get over it. I will make the mistake of hearing some contemporary sermon in which the highly-paid priest tries to remake Christianity in the image of his own political party. I will see how much more excited good christians are by the Super Bowl than by the Incarnation. I will then spend the next eleven months again as a cynic. Cynicism is after all easily confirmed by the data. But for a month, it will once again be my 'care and delight to prepare [myself] tp hear again the message of the angesls; in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger.'
