PIHW 6 Good Friday in Holy Week - Church visiting

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me as an atheist, I make a real effort to visit a church on Good Friday.  I do not stay for a service and sometimes my visit is fleeting, but I feel a need to visit a church on Good Friday. 

     This year because of Covid-19 and the lockdown visiting a church was impossible.  And I surprised myself by how much I felt the loss. 

     As I always describe myself as an Anglican Atheist it is easy to suppose that my desire is a nagging fag-end of the faith that I once had trying to get me back.  But I truly do not think that this is so.  I am comfortable with my atheism, but I am equally comfortable with accommodating my knowledge of the Bible and the liturgy of the Anglican Church together with Hymns Ancient and Modern, a smattering of Christian theology and the history of religion, knowledge of the Lives of the Saints and their depiction in art, and a working knowledge of Church Architecture!  A chunk of my cultural background in grounded in Christianity and is an essential part of who I am, but I simply do not have the Christian Faith.

     I am also aware of the “methinks he doth protest too much” argument which avers that my very avowal of atheism masks my essential faith in Christianity.  I think not, but I have friends who are totally convinced by such an assessment.

     I feel comfortable in churches, but especially in smaller, older, more restrained Anglican churches like Saint Augustine’s in Rumney, which is a solid barn-like building with fewer of the gory Baroque excesses of Roman Catholic decoration.  But I do get some satisfaction from churches that are far from my parochial ideal.

     So, in the following poem I have tried to express what I feel about the fact that I have broken the tradition of visiting a church on Good Friday and I also try to address a part of what I feel that I do when I write.

Church visiting

Dexterity for me is

jabbing, interrupted glide

across and up and down

well-polished keys.

My fingers feel for words,

they know where letters are

without my thought,

and thus I draw my pictures

without pen,

my comfortable places:                               

book-lined walls,

a well-placed lamp,

a polished-sturdy desk,

a back-supporting chair,

a white-clear screen.

Is all.  I tell myself.  I need.

And yet.  Today I am denied.

Today I go to church.

To any church.

Only for moments.

For one day in the year.

Today’s the day.  Today.

It’s what I do.

But I’m to house confined.

And now I find

that all my fingers can

in conjuring a place, the sounds,

the smells, the feel of pews,

the gleam of glass, the statues’

glassy stares, the shuffles of

the Others there, are not enough.

I am not there.  Enough.

My words are not enough.

I need a ‘there’.

Because I want to take

and not to give.  Today.

One day to take.

And I have been denied,

more than a day.