So ended a global empire which dispatched fleets of giant gray warships round the world to secure its wealth and which needed to be underpinned by serious ideas, nobly phrased and spoken by serious people. A post-imperial country increasingly famous for the Beatles (for heaven’s sake) and the miniskirt did not need such things. Although the deep old sources of our wealth were drying up, we were for a time affluent. No other power could so effectively have dispelled the austere, hollow-cheeked stoicism, the tolerance of bad food in inadequate amounts, the thin sour beer, watered to help the war effort, the national motto of “mustn’t grumble.”
English Protestantism, with its secret enjoyment of the chilly, the grim, and the frugal, was killed in fifteen years by supermarkets and TV commercials, fake Italian restaurants, cheap holidays in Spain. The Church’s loveliest and most accessible service, Evensong, was killed off in many parishes because, in the days before VCRs, worshippers preferred to watch a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga on TV. Thus do great traditions end, and a culture that in living memory still read The Pilgrim’s Progress and readily recognized quotations from Isaiah now watches Sex in the City and thinks Vanity Fair is a magazine. I have learned, in a time of loss where anything good and beloved fights to survive, to mourn such departures but not to imagine that, in this life, what is lost will ever return. It will not. But anyone who is pleased that it is gone for good is a fool.
Hmm, at our small group Bible study at lunch today, for fun our group leader and I were both reciting together from memory the General Confession, which we remembered from going to church as children. “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.” He’s in his mid-seventies, and I am in my sixties. Amazing how those things stick, even though we both have been gone from the Episcopal Church for many, many years.