Empty Churches (Asher Gelzer-Govatos)

Asher_image.jpg

Four years ago, my wife, children, and I were received into the Roman Catholic Church during the Easter Vigil, the mass held on Holy Saturday in anticipation of Christ’s resurrection. Few masses feel as mysterious and holy as this one: processing in with candles lit from a bonfire, the congregation sits in darkness for much of the liturgy, only to be flooded with light and the vigorous ringing of bells on reaching the Gloria.

Since that first Easter Vigil, we have made a point of attending this mass, both because of its great beauty and because of the personal meaning it holds for us. This year, however, instead of filling the pews of our local parish – kids in tow with pillows, since the service starts late and lasts a long time – we watched from our living room as our Archbishop celebrated the Vigil in an almost deserted church, the already-alien mosaic aesthetic of the Cathedral Basilica made stranger still by the absence of the faithful. 

Like many who grew up in church, this Easter was my first not attending a service in person. Beyond the private disappointments – the inability to receive the Eucharist, the loss of a sense of shared celebration with friends – I have seen many Christians express a public apprehensiveness about what the COVID-19 pandemic might mean for the future of the church. How long will pews remain empty? Will they ever refill, or will the pandemic mark another permanent downward turn in American church attendance?

Reading recent sobering statistics regarding the decline of church attendance and, more broadly, feelings of religiosity among Americans, I am reminded of concerns over a similar trend that took place in Britain a half-century ago. After World War II, many young Britons sensed the impending end of Christianity’s place in British life, a feeling most famously crystallized in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going.” The poem’s narrator wanders through an empty church:

Wondering what to look for; wondering too
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into…

But superstition like belief must die
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass weedy pavement brambles buttress sky…

“Church Going” has often been taken as the literary representation of religion in post-war Britain, and Larkin’s striking depiction of “a tense musty unignorable silence” within the building seems to confirm the worst fears of Christian Britons: their way of life ending not with the bang of apocalypse, but the whimper of irrelevance.

There is of course a large dose of truth in Larkin’s lines, considering the precipitous decline of Christianity in Britain over the last 50 years. In present day Britain, average weekly church attendance barely breaks three quarters of a million people out of a population of 66 million. Such a drop off has impacted the physical geography of the country: in the year 1976, the Church of England averaged a church demolition every nine days.

Even if we in the United States have not seen quite the same cratering of Christian practice as the United Kingdom, it’s easy to imagine a future where the number of abandoned church buildings grows rapidly. Metrics like church attendance, membership, and even religious self-identification have been pointing to a future where many more churches close their doors or hover on the edge of death. But the inability to gather at the present moment may also have the opposite effect: it may reveal just how much we miss—and need—the physical presence of others, the congregation of the faithful.

In the meantime, churches stand empty. Our response, however, need not be one of despair. Another poet of the same period as Larkin, the Welsh priest-poet R.S. Thomas, frequently wrote about the experience of sitting alone in a church. Thomas spent most of his pastoral career serving churches in rural Wales, and he frequently wrote about struggles of faith. The empty church becomes for Thomas a symbol of that inner wrestling, of the fierce activity of the soul necessary for maintaining faith in God. In his poem “In a Country Church,” he contrasts the physical aridity of the empty building with the fecundity of spiritual contemplation:

To one kneeling down no word came,
Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips
Of the grave saints, rigid in glass;
Or the dry whisper of unseen wings,
Bats not angels, in the high roof.

Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long,
And saw love in a dark crown
Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree
Golden with fruit of a man’s body

The “dry whisper” of bats’ wings call to mind T.S. Eliot’s “dried voices” from “The Hollow Men,” but unlike that despairing poem, Thomas’ lines hint at the fruitfulness of remaining in a seemingly hopeless place: our patience is rewarded with the harvest of a “winter tree/Golden with fruit of a man’s body.” We most easily recognize Christ’s presence with us when we are stripped of those things which distract us and chew away at our time, when we imitate to some small degree Christ’s own emptiness on the cross. This might be true at the corporate, as well as the individual, level: what is lost when our vision of Christian practice cannot be separated from an attachment to surplus, plenty, and cultural influence?

As of now, the Catholic churches in St. Louis remain open. Though public masses cannot be held, individuals can come into the buildings for prayer and devotion. I do not know if the same is true of Protestant churches in town – it may vary from denomination to denomination, or even church to church. But if you are able and can stay safe, I would encourage you to find an open, empty church. Sit and pray. Look around you more carefully than you otherwise would. Pray for an end to the death, to the breaking of the bonds that make us human, to the horrible isolation from other believers. Dare to pray even that churches might be filled once again. But as you pray, kneel long, till you see “love in a dark crown/Of thorns blazing,” and taste the hidden sweetness in the bitter fruit of emptiness.

Asher Gelzer-Govatos is part of The Carver Project’s reading group for graduate students in the humanities and will graduate in May with a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

 

Further Reading:

 

Return to The Carver Connections main page. 

John Inazu