The Damaged Past or Sixpence House Remembered

Recently I finished reading Paul Collins' SixPence House: Lost in a Town of Books. It is an amusing memoir of the author's experience living in Hay-on-Wye, a small village in the Welsh countryside known for its disproportionate number of rare and antiquarian bookstores. Collins had me chuckling on every other page, and smiling in between.

This quote from page 132 of the book seems representative of a major theme: "The damaged past, artfully reused, is all most of us ever have to work with anyway." (p. 132)

Collins resurrects numerous quotes from some of the many artifacts of the damaged past, books and magazines long forgotten and left to rest (or rot) in Hay-on-Wye, and uses them artfully to decorate his reflections. While Paul and I probably wouldn't agree on a lot of points regarding religion, I found his cynical commentary on the damaged past of England's religious sensibility interestingly stated on page 171-172:

"There has been, for some time now, a billboard visible from the Amtrak line as it enters New Jersey. It reads: 'Jesus Christ: The Lord of Newark' To which the only appropriate response, really, is: 'Yeah, well, he can have it.' But he cannot, I think, have Britain any more. It is not so much that the forces of atheism have triumphed in the land of Darwin, it is just that theologians have withered away in public irrelevance. Great Britain has one of the lowest rates of church attendance in the world, and every year more churches are shut down. The monks working here at our hotel have become the exception rather than the rule. You cannot find a town here that hasn't either a ruined church, an abandoned priory, or a vicarage long gone to seed or converted into a condo, a bed-and-breakfast, or an art gallery. Such conversions are so common that they hardly elicit notice."

Oh, Darwin had something to do with it, and a few more of Europe's afflictions. Insofar as atheism proposes fewer answers to fewer questions than theism, its triumph will be short-lived among inquiring minds, but the damage is long-lasting and not easily repaired. Atheism had its day in Europe. But soon, if not already, those ruined churches may more likely be converted into Islamic mosques than art galleries or bed-and-breakfasts, a development that I hope will elicit more notice than the decline of English Christianity.

Further along on page 172, Collins contrasts such a decline in America with that of Great Britain, and here I take great pleasure in contemplating his point:

"There is something more shocking about the death of a religious space in America, more haunting. Britain, by all rights, should be the more haunted place; religion is ancient here, and old Christian churches squat on the sites of even older chapels, which were themselves built over druid ruins and the like. And yet, when you see an aged and crumpled chapel here - the roof caved in, the windows empty, the graves long overgrown and the memorial slabs worn away by wind and water - you are moved by the aesthetic sublimity of it all. Wordsworth might have been made wistful and mournful by many things at Tintern Abbey, but the death of a religious order wasn't one of them. But a religious space in the United States, once abandoned, has the acrid whiff of blasted hope, the pathos of ardent belief destroyed."

Unlike Collins, I haven't been to England, let alone taken up residence there. If I'm ever there, I might have a different take on it. Perhaps the death of a religious space in the midst of so many "living" religious spaces makes all the difference? What is an abandoned church in a land of abandoned churches? When I contemplate, however, the true loss that is the decline of Christianity in England, I cannot help but sense that "acrid whiff of blasted hope, the pathos of ardent belief destroyed." All this in the land of Newman, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Thomas More, Chesterton, Belloc, and a host of others through whom the light of Christ still shines on the west.

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