Religion for Atheists Read online

  Locked away in our private cocoons, our chief way of imagining what other people are like has become the media, and as a consequence, we naturally expect that all strangers will be murderers, swindlers or paedophiles — which reinforces our impulse to trust only those few individuals who have been vetted for us by pre-existing family and class networks. On those rare occasions when circumstances (snowstorms, lightning strikes) succeed in rupturing our hermetic bubbles and throw us in with people we don’t know, we tend to marvel that our fellow citizens have shown surprisingly little interest in slicing us in half or molesting our children and may even be surprisingly good-natured and ready to help.

  Solitary though we may have become, we haven’t of course given up all hope of forming relationships. In the lonely canyons of the modern city, there is no more honoured emotion than love. However, this is not the love of which religions speak, not the expansive, universal brotherhood of mankind; it is a more jealous, restricted and ultimately meaner variety. It is a romantic love which sends us on a maniacal quest for a single person with whom we hope to achieve a life-long and complete communion, one person in particular who will spare us any need for people in general.

  Dreams of meeting one person who will spare us any need for other people. (illustration credit 2.3)

  Insofar as modern society ever promises us access to a community, it is one centred around the worship of professional success. We sense that we are brushing up against its gates when the first question we are asked at a party is ‘What do you do?’, our answer to which will determine whether we are warmly welcomed or conclusively abandoned by the peanuts. In these competitive, pseudo-communal gatherings, only a few of our attributes count as currency with which to buy the goodwill of strangers. What matters above all is what is on our business cards, and those who have opted to spend their lives looking after children, writing poetry or nurturing orchards will be left in no doubt that they have run contrary to the dominant mores of the powerful and deserve to be marginalized accordingly.

  Given this level of discrimination, it is no surprise that many of us choose to throw ourselves with a vengeance into our careers. Focusing on work to the exclusion of almost everything else is a plausible enough strategy in a world which accepts workplace achievements as the main tokens with which we can secure not just the financial means to survive physically, but also the attention that we require to thrive psychologically.

  3.

  Religions seem to know a great deal about our loneliness. Even if we believe very little of what they tell us about the afterlife or the supernatural origins of their doctrines, we can nevertheless admire their understanding of what separates us from strangers and their attempts to melt away one or two of the prejudices that normally prevent us from building connections with others.

  A Catholic Mass is not, to be sure, the ideal habitat for an atheist. Much of the dialogue is either offensive to reason or simply incomprehensible. It goes on for a long time and rarely overrides a temptation to fall asleep. Nevertheless, the ceremony is replete with elements which subtly strengthen congregants’ bonds of affection, and which atheists would do well to study and on occasion learn to appropriate for reuse in the secular realm.

  Catholicism starts to create a sense of community with a setting. It marks off a piece of the earth, puts walls up around it and declares that within their parameters there will reign values utterly unlike those which hold sway in the world beyond, in the offices, gyms and living rooms of the city. All buildings give their owners opportunities to recondition visitors’ expectations and to lay down rules of conduct specific to them. The art gallery legitimates the practice of peering silently at a canvas, the nightclub of swaying one’s hands to a musical score. And a church, with its massive timber doors and 300 stone angels carved around its porch, gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane. We are promised that here (in the words of the Mass’s initial greeting) ‘the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ belong to all who have assembled. The Church lends its enormous prestige, accrued through age, learning and architectural grandeur, to our shy desire to open ourselves to someone new.

  (illustration credit 2.4)

  The composition of the congregation feels significant. Those in attendance tend not to be uniformly of the same age, race, profession or educational or income level; they are a random sampling of souls united only by their shared commitment to certain values. The Mass actively breaks down the economic and status subgroups within which we normally operate, casting us into a wider sea of humanity.

  In this secular age, we often assume that a love of family and a sense of community must be synonymous. When modern politicians speak of their wish to repair society, it is the family they hail as the quintessential symbol of community. But Christianity is wiser and less sentimental in this regard, for it acknowledges that an attachment to family may in fact narrow the circle of our affections, distracting us from the greater challenge of apprehending our connection with all of mankind; of learning to love kith as well as kin.

  With similarly communal ends in mind, the Church asks us to leave behind all attachments to earthly status. It is the inner values of love and charity rather than the outer attributes of power and money that are now venerated. Among Christianity’s greatest achievements has been its capacity, without the use of any coercion beyond the gentlest of theological arguments, to persuade monarchs and magnates to kneel down and abase themselves before the statue of a carpenter, and to wash the feet of peasants, street sweepers and dispatch drivers.

  The Church does more, however, than merely declare that worldly success doesn’t matter: in a variety of ways, it enables us to imagine that we could be happy without it. Appreciating the reasons why we try to acquire status in the first place, the Church establishes conditions under which we can willingly surrender our attachment to class and titles. It seems to know that we strive to be powerful chiefly because we are afraid of what will happen to us without high rank: we risk being stripped of dignity, being patronized, lacking friends and having to spend our days in coarse and dispiriting surroundings.

  It is the genius of the Mass to correct each of these fears in turn. The building in which it is performed is almost always sumptuous. Though it is technically devoted to celebrating the equality of man, it generally surpasses palaces in its beauty. The company is also enticing. We develop a desire to be famous and powerful when being ‘like everyone else’ seems a distressing fate, when the norm is mediocre and depressing. High status then becomes a tool to separate us from a group we resent and are scared of. However, as the congregants in a cathedral start to sing Gloria in Excelsis, we tend to feel that the crowd is nothing like the one we encountered in the shopping malls or the degraded transport hubs outside. Strangers gaze up at the vaulted, star-studded ceiling, rehearse in unison the words

  ‘Lord,

  come, live in your people

  and strengthen them by your grace’

  and leave us thinking that humanity may not be such a wretched thing after all.

  (illustration credit 2.5)

  As a result, we may start to feel that we could work a little less feverishly, because we see that the respect and security we hope to gain through our careers is already available to us in a warm and impressive community which imposes no worldly requirements on us for its welcome.

  If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another.

  In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride — or superbia, in Augustine’s Latin formulation — takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well
things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we dare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The Mass encourages this sloughing off of pride. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert — all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome’s army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings.

  (illustration credit 2.6)

  4.

  If we have managed to remain awake to (and for) the lessons of the Mass, it should by its close have succeeded in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes. It should also have given us a few ideas which we could use to mend some of the endemic fractures of the modern world.

  One of the first of these ideas relates to the benefit of taking people into a distinct venue which ought itself to be attractive enough to evoke enthusiasm for the notion of a group. It should inspire visitors to suspend their customary frightened egoism in favour of a joyful immersion in a collective spirit — an unlikely scenario in the majority of modern community centres, whose appearance paradoxically serves to confirm the inadvisability of joining anything communal.

  Secondly, the Mass embodies a lesson about the importance of putting forward rules to direct people in their interactions with one another. The liturgical complexity of a missal — the directive way in which this book of instructions for the celebration of a Mass compels the congregants to look up, stand, kneel, sing, pray, drink and eat at given points — speaks to an essential aspect of human nature which benefits from being guided in how to behave with others. To ensure that profound and dignified personal bonds can be forged, a tightly choreographed agenda of activities may be more effective than leaving a group to mingle aimlessly on its own.

  An artificial construct can nevertheless open the door to sincere feelings: rules for how to conduct a Mass, Latin and English instructions from the Roman Missal, 1962. (illustration credit 2.7)

  A final lesson to be taken away from the Mass is closely connected with its history. Before it was a service, before the congregants sat in seats facing an altar behind which a priest held up a wafer and a cup of wine, the Mass was a meal. What we now know as the Eucharist began as an occasion when early Christian communities put aside their work and domestic obligations and gathered together around a table (usually laden with wine, lamb and loaves of unleavened bread) in order to commemorate the Last Supper. There they would talk, pray and renew their commitments to Christ and to one another. Like the Jews with their Sabbath meal, Christians understood that it is when we satiate our bodily hunger that we are often readiest to direct our minds to the needs of others. In honour of the most important Christian virtue, these gatherings hence became known as agape (meaning ‘love’ in Greek) feasts and were regularly held by Christian communities in the period between Jesus’s death and the Council of Laodicea in AD 364. It was only complaints about the excessive exuberance of some of these meals that eventually led the early Church to the regrettable decision to ban agape feasts and suggest that the faithful should eat at home with their families instead — and only thereafter gather for the spiritual banquet that we know today as the Eucharist.

  Before it was a service, the Mass was a meal. (illustration credit 2.8)

  5.

  It feels relevant to talk of meals because our modern lack of a proper sense of community is importantly reflected in the way we eat. The contemporary world is not, of course, lacking in places where we can dine well in company — cities typically pride themselves on the sheer number and quality of their restaurants — but what is significant is the almost universal lack of venues that help us to transform strangers into friends.

  While contemporary restaurants pay lip service to the notion of companionability, they provide us with only its most inadequate simulacrum. The number of people who nightly patronize restaurants implies that these places must be refuges from anonymity and coldness, but in fact they have no systematic mechanisms by which to introduce patrons to one another, to dispel their mutual suspicions, to break up the clans into which people chronically segregate themselves or to get them to open up their hearts and share their vulnerabilities with others. The focus is on the food and the decor, never on opportunities for extending and deepening affections. In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself — the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes — has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.

  Patrons will tend to leave restaurants much as they entered them, the experience having merely reaffirmed existing tribal divisions. Like so many institutions in the modern city, restaurants are adept at gathering people into the same space and yet lack any means of encouraging them to make meaningful contact with one another once they are there.

  The food was not the most important thing: Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Last Supper, 1311. (illustration credit 2.9)

  6.

  With the benefits of the Mass and the drawbacks of contemporary dining in mind, we can imagine an ideal restaurant of the future, an Agape Restaurant, true to the most profound insights of the Eucharist.

  Such a restaurant would have an open door, a modest entrance fee and an attractively designed interior. In its seating arrangements, the groups and ethnicities into which we commonly segregate ourselves would be broken up; family members and couples would be spaced apart, and kith favoured over kin. Everyone would be safe to approach and address, without fear of rebuff or reproach. By simple virtue of occupying the same space, guests would — as in a church — be signalling their allegiance to a spirit of community and friendship.

  Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal — something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at the same moment, even asking a stranger to pass the salt — disrupts our ability to cling to the belief that the outsiders who wear unusual clothes and speak in distinctive accents deserve to be sent home or assaulted. For all the large-scale political solutions which have been proposed to salve ethnic conflict, there are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.

  Many religions are aware that the moments around the ingestion of food are propitious to moral education. It is as if the imminent prospect of something to eat seduces our normally resistant selves into showing some of the same generosity to others as the table has shown to us. These religions also know enough about our sensory, non-intellectual dimensions to be aware that we cannot be kept on a virtuous track simply through the medium of words. They know that at a meal they will have a captive audience who are likely to accept a trade-off between ideas and nourishment — and so they turn meals into disguised ethical lessons. They stop us just before we have a first sip of wine and offer us a thought that can be swilled down with the liquid like a tablet. They make us listen to a homily in the gratified interval between two courses. And they use specific types of food and drink to represent abstract concepts, telling Christians, for example, that bread stands for the sacred body of Christ, informing Jews that the Passover dish of crushed apples and nuts is the mortar used by their enslaved predecessors to build the warehouses of Egypt and teaching Zen Buddhists that their cups of slowly brewing tea are tokens of the transitory nature of happiness in a floating world.

  Taking their seats at an Agape Restaurant, guests would find in front of them guidebooks somewhat reminiscent of the Jewish Haggadah or the Catholic missal, laying out the rules for how to behav
e at the meal. No one would be left alone to find their way to an interesting conversation with another, any more than it would be expected of participants at a Jewish Passover meal or in the Christian Eucharist that they might manage independently to alight on the salient aspects of the history of the tribes of Israel or achieve a sense of communion with God.

  An Agape Restaurant, a secular descendant of the Eucharist and of the tradition of Christian communal dining. (illustration credit 2.10)

  The Book of Agape would direct diners to speak to one another for prescribed lengths of time on predefined topics. Like the famous questions which the youngest child present is assigned by the Haggadah to ask during the Passover ceremony (‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’, ‘Why do we eat unleavened bread and bitter herbs?’ and so on), these talking points would be carefully crafted for a specific purpose, to coax guests away from customary expressions of superbia (‘What do you do?’, ‘Where do your children go to school?’) and towards a more sincere revelation of themselves (‘What do you regret?’, ‘Whom can you not forgive?’, ‘What do you fear?’). The liturgy would, as in the Mass, inspire charity in the deepest sense, a capacity to respond with complexity and compassion to the existence of our fellow creatures.