church. what is it good for?

During my stay at Stobb House Farm, my great-aunt Sarah asked me several times if I went to church. I told her that I didn't anymore. 

"Oh, aye," she'd say. "You should always go to church because if you pray for something and you really mean it then God will always help you."

***

Her favourite stories to me these past five days included how, as her mother was dying at the age of 33, when Sarah was just a "bairn," her mother made her father (my great-grandfather) promise to keep Sarah and her siblings in the Catholic Church. Which he did, despite not being a Catholic himself.

As she was growing up, the Catholics weren't allowed into the Church of England but, one day as Sarah was walking past the chapel someone recognized her as a Bolam. "The Bolams," she told me, "were well known for being Church of England. 'You can come in,' the lass said to me. Even though I was a Catholic."

"Did you go in," I asked her.

"Oh, aye," she said as she shook her head.

***

When my great-grandfather died he was given a Catholic funeral because he'd kept his promise to my great-grandmother.

***

Sarah married Ted Wilson who was of the Church of England. They got married at St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church in Dipton. But because Ted wasn't a Catholic they weren't allowed to have music at the wedding.

***

When Ted died a few years ago, he too was given a Catholic funeral because of Sarah's faithfulness to the church.

***

These stories took on a poignancy beyond what they might normally have had when I read Colby Cosh's column on the Occupy Whatever movement. Of the make up of the crowd at the recent Calgary occupation he wrote:

…people who don’t go to church no longer have much opportunity for face-to-face intergenerational amity.

This reminded me of a passage from Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon which has always stood out for me:

Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigour, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.

 ***

So, churches. What are they good for?

I'm not sure. But the Church sure seemed to have brought a lot of joy and comfort to my great-aunt Sarah's life.