To be serious for five minutes

To write a series piece, as one must do every now and then, is in fact quite difficult, not necessarily the topic, but finding the subject on which to write the thoughts of one who is so young, feeble, distant from reality, perhaps pathetic! So I leave it up to a marvellous young man of seventeen to ask the question, and so this next entry, I dedicate to him.
Here is his question.

Foster wrote in Howards End that "truth, being alive, was not halfway between anything; it was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to insure sterility."
It strikes me one of the problems secular society has had is with a failure of imagination. (their own) When it threw out the liturgy and poetry of the Bible it didn’t replace it with anything else, and we are left with a Dawkinesk atomistic reductivist society. If we are intent in being anti theistic, in creating a society where we don’t bow to the theism of the external God and we care about the internal humanity, how can we infuse secular society with the poetry and the liturgy to make people care about each other in an almost religious notion?

Dear Kyle,

I have to write neutrally here, and perhaps write against you, not always an easy thing for me (especially) to do, in order for you to find the right answer and maybe challenge you as well.
I think it is fair to say that any failure in society is a failure of imagination to some extent, a failure to penetrate the minds of others. G.K Chesterton, whilst he came under a lot of criticism for not always being a particularly pleasant religious man, he did say some good things, and of atheism he wrote:
“The trouble when you stop believing in God is that you don’t believe in nothing you believe in anything.”
Perhaps we do live in a culture where reason and so on are not glorified and deified, as they should be. The criticism you (and I) face is from those who would say we shouldn’t always allow religion the trick of maintaining that the spiritual and the beautiful and the noble and the altruistic and the morally strong are in anyway inventions of religion or are particular or peculiar to religion.
Christ, said ‘let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.’(Jn8:7) Anybody who said that would have won a great deal of respect and interest, it is one of the greatest and most beautiful phrases ever uttered, BUT there is absolutely no monopoly on beauty and truth in religion.
I am going to borrow the idea of the Greek radical poet Shelly (Prometheus unbound), who wrote if you were to compare the Genesis myth, which had bedevilled our culture, the Western culture for an age, it was essentially a myth where we should be ashamed of ourselves. God said: ‘Why are you naked?’ (Gen 3:11)
Who told you were naked? What possible reason have we to believe that we are naked or that if we are naked there is something to be ashamed of? That what we are and what we do is something for which we should apologise. Our dreams, our impulses, our desires our drives our appetites, they are not things we should apologise for. Our actions sometimes we do apologise for and we excoriate ourselves for them rightly. But that is the Genesis myth.
The Greek myth of Prometheus who stole fire from heaven and gave it to his favourite mortal – man, left the Greeks running around saying we have divine fire, we have it within us, we are as good as the Gods, whatever they have, we also have. So whatever the Gods were, capricious and mean, jealous, stupid rapine and so on – all the things which Greek Mythology shows us that they were, and for that the Gods punished Prometheus, and chained to the corpuses and the vulchers ate away at his liver every day and it grew back because he was immortal of course. Shelly wrote that he understood that the mythological idea that championed a real humanity, a real ‘humanism’ as we now call it, is that we are captains of our own soul and masters of our own destiny, and that we contain any ‘divine fire’ that there is.
Perhaps Kyle, there is some relation of this idea of ‘divine fire’ to the God that we both know and understand to be the God of classical theism. We are told we can move mountains apparently, so perhaps we have simply gone astray with our thoughts and ideas through a great lack of nearly every necessary human quality and instinct. My personal opinion (as I think I have been neutral long enough) is as follows
The sheer lack of intelligence and insight and ability to express themselves and to enthuse others of the priesthood, the clericy here in this country and indeed in Europe, is nothing short of shocking. God once had Michelangelo, Bach and Motzart on his side, and now he gets someone with ginger whiskers and tinted spectacles who reduce the glories of theology to a kind of ‘sharing’ Some would say the fault is in our stars but the glory is in our stars. We take credit for what is great about man and we take blame for what is dreadful about man as well. We have a Father as human beings, and we have a divine one too. We have to grow up, and realise that to grovel or beg at the feet of God is not weakness but strength, is not to bring further shame to oneself but to raise oneself up to the feet of one whose feet it is an honour to kiss.
Does that answer your question? No, Ok, well I will try again soon!