Great Sighs of Today

John Osborne

When I mention religion, I mean the Christ- ian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion but the Church of England. Tom Jones

About ten years ago, I resumed regular church-going after a long lapse. It was doubtless feeble of me not to have done so before but, although I was aware that I had never properly abandoned my faith, I did not want to subject it to the derision of a couple of frivolously rabid churchless wives. There are times when I feel God needs protecting from the likes of me. He doesn't deserve it, nor bringing Him into the house on the wintry boots of a lone visit to Evensong. Even now, my present, devout Geordie companion snaps at me each Sunday around noon: 'Are you talk- ing to God this evening or not?' If I am locked in the passages of some hardy gloom, I say no.

It's a good question. If I have nothing jolly or interesting to offer, I don't see why I should waste His time. Or mine. One can anticipate the smarmy sky-pilot's objec- tions to this. 'God doesn't mind you boring Him. You see, God loves bores like everyone else.' Just so.

Apart from my own doctrinally invalid sensibilities, there was a much more pre- posterous block to Evensong. In three openly dishonest words: the Alternative Service Book. When I moved away from London and, I hoped, its picket Evangelic- als, its mob of reverse-collared social work- ers, all in an aggressive funk about the fiction of living in a multi-racial society and other loving Christian cant I looked for the rigour and spirit I had resisted so fiercely as a Bradlaugh-like Victorian atheist teenager.

I had urgently read The Freethinker. I had refused confirmation at my rather cranky boarding school, and was subjected to weekly grillings by the chaplain, as nasty and bullying a clergyman as you'd meet in a dozen General Synods. Why is it that so many clergymen seem unfeeling for others, unlike, say, professional soldiers who are often such Christian gents? They grind on about absurd, insoluble abstractions like the Third World and put up prayers for them, while ignoring their own parish loners, who may be suffering spiritual murder without complaint or comfort.

I have never myself sought comfort, except in its strictest theological sense, and I don't expect to be treated like some punk on probation. It is tricky to talk of faith or God to an unbeliever. So it is with your ASB clergyman. Bishops find it an embar- rassment. It is like talking to a homosexual about sex, or love, even. No one asked us if we wanted to live in Humberside, Avon or Tyne and Wear. We were told. As we were with ASB and NEB. Legislation by contemptuous stealth. Only bureaucrats or loons can be vigilant all the time. Not human beings, who get drunk, forget the day of the week or fail to recognise their ex-wife.

When the Marquess of Hartington was asked what was the proudest day of his life, he replied that it was when his finest pig won first prize at Skipton Fair. My only similar success is that, after ten glum years, I was instrumental in restoring the Book of Common Prayer to Evensong in my parish church. As the local paper put it: 'The decision was taken because some church members have expressed reservations in recent months about the use of the yellow booklet for all services.'

It's a puny achievement and is advertised as being celebrated at 18.30 hours. The hi-de-hi of the squalling Family Service at 9.30 hours is as unassailable as pub lager. Matins is no more. Yet it is still an amazing reward from the time when I found myself facing three guitar-playing Polyslobs after the Second Collect and hearing, even more painfully, 'When I was a child, I spake as a child . . .' translated into: 'When I grew

up, I had finished with childish things. Now we see only puzzling reflections in a mir- ror, but then we shall see face to face.'

Many of us have made our Great Bores lists of vindictive and provocative clerical vandalism, some even more offensive be- cause of their very slightness. This, for Ash Wednesday: 'Jesus told a parable which aimed at those who were sure of their own goodness and looked down on everyone.' The language of housemaids and Open University. (`And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others.' Original.) I have been to Evensong in about a dozen cathedrals during the past three years. With their glass front doors, their dinky shops, cafeterias, blackmailing notices, they all seem to use the RSV, boomed over in microphones to careless strangers. Worcester, York (one of the worst super-church-markets), Durham (and what to come?), Exeter, Salisbury, Chichester (very Habitat), Belfast and even Canterbury had all blandly suc- cumbed to this born-again philistinism against which there seems no appeal.

The Turks of the ASB and RSV — such Nalgo names — have been politic and crafty, implying that it is all a matter of secularist aesthetics, irrelevant to the card- carrying worshipper. They are threatened by what is both inaccessible and open to mystery and enduring contemplation. Their committee-style graffiti give them licence to bluster and overbear. Most ordinary parishioners are intimidated by their unfeeling priests. They seem unem- powered to argue with their titanic prog- noses, just as they would feel with their GPs, and the Revd Rons and Teds inside their authoritative frocks know it all too well. Their flock is frightened almost unto death of being accused of the unchristian sin of dowdyism..

When I complained about Corinthians i.2. to the incumbent of the time, he looked astonished. 'Nobody's ever coin' plained before,' he said. They didn't know how to, being used to harangues and harassment from these ungodly social workers with their collars turned the same way as their trousers should be. Many of them — like this one — are ex-airline pilots or car salesmen and computermen, rather like the new Tory MPs. Well, I did, for once in my faint-hearted life, persevere, and last summer the vicar promised ole, that those scraps of Series 3 booklets wool°, be forever dumped. Thanks be to God and amen.

How did I win my equivalent of the Pi.g at Skipton Fair? The answer, crudely, Is blackmail, the one consummate gift stil! pursued and respected by the Church or England. The church needed a new roof. After the unease of years, plus a few stickers on cars and the feigned threat ° unrenewed covenants, the murmurers found the tongues that had been taken from them.

It's only a begining and it's not first Prize. Doubtless I shall have to take my own King James Bible if I am again asked to read the lesson. The local newspaper notes that: 'The vicar hopes that church- goers will revive the practice of taking their own prayer books to service in case there are not enough to .go around.' But it's reassuring that with so little political re- solve, skill or experience, so few can achieve as much.

One of my favourite passages in the Litany began: '0 God, Merciful Father, that despiseth not the sighs of a contrite heart, nor the desire of such as be sorrow- ful . . . I think I was truly born with a contrite heart, an impatient though not a guilty one. So there, for the moment it is: Great Sighs of Today.