One of the rules I set myself when I started this blog was to keep discovering new places. I had a rule against going back to the same place twice or more. It’s not a law of course, just something I think I’d like to stick to. But there have been exceptions. St Barnabas where it all began will probably remain my Christmas tradition, and I know I’ve featured Coventry Cathedral three times at least, reflecting perhaps the wide range of experiences you can have there.
I’ve been to both of these churches before. A fine sunny morning at St James in Old Milverton and a dark Sunday evening at St Mary Magdalene in Lillington. They were both very pleasant visits and reason enough to return but that’s impossible at the moment so their joint online service is the closest I’ll get for a while.
Today is Ascension Day, a feast to celebrate not only the ascent into heaven but the promise of a swift and glorious return. It’s a communion service with readings and prayers from people at home and a sermon filmed in the deserted grounds of the church. It’s been very entertaining to watch these online streamings develop from people staring blankly at their own laptop to more thoughtful, managed contributions. Apparently Ascension Day involves a need to replicate the mountain-top setting of the story by getting as high up as possible. Sadly an attempt to record prayers at the lofty summit of Chesterton Windmill was thwarted by strong winds and instead we get prayers from the attic. Nobody can say these churches aren’t resourceful.
For me Ascension Day is a key part of understanding the whole Christian religion. I know that’s a bold statement, and probably over-simplistic, but it has a basis of sorts. The traditional biggies in the calendar - Christmas and Easter - are in many ways all about belief. The stories provide the claims and the evidence and we have the choice of believing it happened or it didn’t. It’s the debate that’s kept people going for thousands of years.
With the story of Ascension Day it’s slightly different. There’s plenty to judge when it comes to believing what did or didn’t happen, but there’s also the case of the promise made that the second coming was both imminent and certain. And because that was about something in the future it requires not belief that it happened but faith that it will. Faith in this context becomes almost the belief that something will in time come along that you can fully believe in, if that doesn’t sound too confused.
Faith is what sustains the faithful against arguments of lack of proof - when we can’t empirically know something, but still have an unshakable conviction that it’s true. It’s no different in my mind from putting one’s faith in science to one day come up with the things we can’t even begin to understand or master now.
And our faith has probably never been tested in our collective lifetime like it is at the moment. The facts that surround us are frightening - from the death toll to the job losses, financial hardship and turmoil. Everything looks bad, but there’s still faith. Few of us can make any claims to having expertise in theoretical economics but, while we have absolutely no idea how it will happen, we’re happy to put our faith in things somehow getting better. Faith, for whatever reason, is something we as people really need to cling on to.
