take comfort in rituals

I see that the good folks at Starbucks have a new advertising campaign: beneath a steaming cup of joe, they’re inviting us, “take comfort in rituals”.  It’s a characteristically clever idea.  My early weekday starts are certainly made less dreadful by the presence of fresh coffee, luring me from a warm bed when, frankly, not much else does at that precise moment.

My pre-6am coffee has the added bonus of building into my routine a space – albeit brief and sleepy – for reflection before the day begins.  I value that too, in my new, and already favorite, armchair.  Yes, I take comfort in rituals.  Indeed, it seems to me that that’s partly their point.

In that respect, I wonder whether the Starbucks people are reminding us of an important religious principle too.  Our religious rituals ought to offer us comfort: places in which we feel connection, enjoy reflective space, encounter divine grace and peace, re-order and recalibrate ourselves and our lives, and maybe even allow ourselves to be opened up to a wider world and bigger truths than we’ve so far encountered.  Of course, spiritual practices are a discipline – whether going to the synagogue, dragging ourselves to church, praying five times daily, fasting, meditation or whatever – but a discipline with a comforting, purposeful end in view.  Parting with our five bucks at the coffee shop is worth the pay-off, right?

John Betjeman wrote a deeply-felt and deeply moving poem about an old nun in the British port of Felixstowe, the last surviving member of a religious order.  As she reflects on her utter loneliness, left abandoned by her dead sisters and now a sad relic of a vanished world and a faded zeal, she makes her solitary way to evensong at the parish church, while the seaside town closes down for the night.  It is the most profound reflection on taking comfort in rituals that I know:

“Thou knowest my down sitting and mine uprising”

Here where the white light burns with steady glow

Safe from the vain world’s silly sympathizing,

Safe with the Love that I was born to know,

Safe from the surging of the lonely sea

My heart finds rest, my heart finds rest in Thee.

church going

One of my summer reading projects was Andew Motion’s absorbing biography of his colleague and fellow poet Philip Larkin.  The book was written a few years after Larkin’s early death in 1985, a while before Motion himself accepted the Poet Laureateship which Larkin himself had declined, sensing that his life was soon to be cut short, and terrified that the very public role of being Laureate would curtail his coveted privacy.

Larkin’s was a decidedly unremarkable life for such a literary figure.  He chose librarianship as his career after graduation, spending several decades as Librarian of the University of Hull, a rather unglamorous and remote location (it was thought) for an increasingly famous writer.  In fact, he always appreciated Hull for those very reasons, built the library up as the new university grew, and is buried unostentatiously in his adopted city.

I first remember mention of Larkin in High School, when my English teacher made a very funny and insightful comment about her picture of Larkin, morosely sat in the stacks at Hull, brooding drearily on life.  It is true that he seems to have been a man more than normally beset with depression and pessimism, prone to an incurable melancholy which permeates so much of his poetry.  He treated the women in his life with astonishing carelessness and even cruelty, eschewing formal commitment while simultaneously demanding their continued companionship.  He had few friends, and his politics too were sometimes tinged with rather unpleasant elements.

And yet there are moments in Larkin’s poetry suffused with the most extraordinary hope and insight.  They typically arise from exposure to ancient places of worship.  His own relationship with faith was almost non-existent (he once ‘tried’ Anglicanism by going to evensong, but it didn’t take), and yet something about a place of prayer always stirred him beyond his cynicism.  Where that happens, his poetry expresses some of the most utterly profound and optimistic thoughts, as in the visit to Chichester Cathedral that produced his famous line “what will survive of us is love”.  His reflection in ‘Church Going’, articulating the experience of a ‘thin’ place where human desire meets unearthly mystery, is another case in point, a wonderful evocation of the search for meaning that permeates the human condition:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognized, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.