"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
-- Last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby
Just prior to that last line, Fitzgerald mentions a "future that year by year recedes before us." The consensus of those who taught me the American novel was that the image reflects the novelist's supposed cynicism.
All these years later, though, I find the idea of "a future that recedes before us" to be a canny kind of "I told you so." As such, it can be applied to the process of trying to understand a particular past or present, as well as to discern something of a potential future. In recent research, I have used the idea in an analysis of what has occurred in the institutions of Western religion over the last six decades and what, for better or worse, it set in motion.
With the impetus of more sophisticated biblical interpretation that led to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the parallel push for renewal and reform, which so possessed a number of mainstream Protestant denominations, parts of Christianity have tried to reinvent themselves in line with the perceived demands of modernity.
The renewal efforts began as amateur readers of the Bible begin -- at the beginning, i.e. with Genesis and plowing right straight through to Revelation, as if the Bible were a step-by-step instruction manual. It was a mistake, though a well-intentioned one. My mother would have said that they had it "bass-ackward."
The fathers of Vatican II wanted, among other things, to give a healthy shot of aggiornamento to the language and theology of the liturgy, to have it available for use in the hundreds of vernaculars common to worldwide Catholicism, as well as to bleed some of the impossible Tridentine defensiveness out of the canon of the mass.
As well-intentioned as the bishops were, the end product was handed down from on high so that, in many places, the largely theologically and biblically illiterate laity went, on one Sunday, from the Latin majesty of Hoc est corpus meum, quod pro vobis datur to "this is my body which is given for you" on the next. That and from the Kyries and Benedicites of Palestrina and Mozart to folk versions, often badly done, of those honored texts and tunes.
Then, when it came time for women religious to shed the habit and get involved in more than teaching the catechism, and priests began to let their hair grow long and approached the holy mysteries with blue jeans under their chasubles, all hell broke loose.
By the time Paul VI in his papal majesty, prodded by the Curia, fired off Humanae Vitae, the cat was out of the bag in the shape and substance of the Pill. Catholic women were already emancipated and their sexual lives freed from the stress of the ever-present possibility of unwanted pregnancies.
Priests were bailing by the dozens, in some places by the hundreds. The magic was gone, and the battles for justice and right seemed more appealing and were certainly more necessary if the church was to become the personification of the gospel.
In both America and Great Britain, the Anglican expression of Catholicism set about to revise the Book of Common Prayer, again bowing to the perceived necessities of modernity in the earnest attempt to make liturgy more relevant to their congregations. So, for example, Psalm 150:3 Praise him with the sound of the trumpet became Praise him with a blast of the ram's horn. A truer rendition of the Hebrew, to be sure, but in contemporary English grating on the ears of even the most disinterested church-goer.
Then came the long-overdue push for the ordination of women, the embrace of the LGBT community and so on and so on.
Had Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism skipped Genesis and gone directly to the gospel -- if I may put it that way -- each would first have begun the groundwork for social and political reforms, all the while keeping the traditional form of the mass together with its ornate possibilities in vesture, drama and song. Thus would the laity have feasted on the bounty of their tradition while perhaps not working up so much resentment at their church being turned upside down all at once.
Striking that balance between the past and a hoped-for future is more or less what I was about from 1969 to 1979 when rector of a small, beaten-up Detroit inner-city parish -- though I was too young and too dumb at the time to understand that it was the right thing to be doing. I had inherited what was known as "the little English church" from a series of Anglo-Catholic priests who prized exquisite liturgy exquisitely done.
A couple of them in that context had not been hesitant to advocate racial and economic justice in their sermons while arrayed in the colorful vestments of our order and as the invisible smoke from votive lights mingled with the occasional aroma of incense. Who was I to change any of that?
The people there had been taught that the word "liturgy" comes from the Greek leitourgia, meaning "work done for the public good without charge." So they celebrated their communal life in traditional liturgical forms and saw them as the raison d'etre for the founding of what over the years turned out to be an enormously effective outreach program. That effort got stopped in its tracks when the current bishop closed and sold the church a year ago.
Jack Kevorkian was imprisoned for assisted suicide. But as far as I know, each of those he assisted in that passage had begged him for help. No one at Emmanuel Church, Detroit attached to traditional high church liturgy -- and at the same time and for the same reason eager to deliver high-class social and economic justice -- begged for anything except to be left alone to keep on doing what for 40 years the parish had done so well.
Thus do I see now at this remove that, without knowing then why it worked, it worked. We were in those days boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. In just that way a future was achieved by brave and committed people, which now, of course, is receding forever before them.
They were expelled from the essential base of their operation. Why? Because they forgot to send a couple of annual reports to diocesan headquarters. That became an excuse for the bishop to reap a harvest, the seeds of which had been sown by others long before his day. It was a harvest of easy cash for the funding of his regime's disappointing present that, sad to say, seems not to have much of a future.