Waiting for the Last Bus. Richard Holloway

and its constant search not only for new ways of making things but for new ways of ordering its moral economy. Ethics, like everything else, is subject to change. That’s why we should hold our values and moral norms with a sense of their provisional nature. We never know when we’ll want to change them because we have been persuaded there is a better way to organise society:

      For every static world that you or I impose

      Upon the real one must crack at times and new

      Patterns from new disorders open like a rose

      And old assumptions yield to new sensation . . . ²⁴

      Revealed religions find this hard to deal with. Their authors have persuaded them that they are in possession of a divine instruction that, unlike everything else in human history, isn’t subject to change and decay. It’s a mountain not a river. It stays put and never moves. That’s why the biggest junk yard in history is the one marked Abandoned Religions, abandoned because they were incapable of adapting to the flowing currents of human history.

      To be fair to them, some Christian groups have tried to keep abreast of the currents of human history, but they have always been double-minded about it: one of their minds telling them to rope themselves to the mountain of eternal truth, the other telling them to throw themselves into the river of time and enjoy the swim. That’s why they were late in joining the campaign to emancipate women and sexual minorities, two of the great moral causes of my lifetime. That resistance to change is one reason for their decline amongst many young people today. The so-called millennial generation, both in the UK and in the USA, is the least religiously committed cohort of the population there has been in the last sixty years, so the future for organised religion does not look promising. There is still a spiritual hunger and interest among the young, but they show a marked contempt for institutions which claim that they alone can perfectly satisfy it.

      It’s tough for believers to know how to respond to this situation, and I have sympathy for their predicament. They are fighting to stay afloat in the rushing flood of time. And the myth of the golden and untroubled past is always a potent attraction to those who have lost their moorings. Hence the busy reactionary churches many of us no longer feel at home in. As a tactic, it’ll probably work for a while. It just doesn’t work for me. But that doesn’t matter. I won’t be around to see how it plays out in the long run. I feel sad about that, but only a little. There are places where I can still find some spiritual comfort.

      If, like me, you cannot halt the search for meaning in a universe that does not explain itself; but if, also like me, you can no longer cope with the compulsive chatter of what E.M. Forster called ‘poor little talkative Christianity’; then find a place where they don’t talk, they sing – and leave your soul unmolested for an hour. Slip into choral evensong somewhere to experience the music and touch the longing it carries for the human soul. For that, you may have to find a cathedral, which brings us to a significant fact. In Britain today, cathedrals are among the places of worship that continue to thrive in an era of religious decline. There are doubtless a number of reasons for this, but I am sure that one of them is the fact that cathedrals are spiritually and theologically more spacious and welcoming than most parish churches. And as well as music, they have more quiet corners to sit in where you can avoid recruiters out to press-gang your mind. Cathedrals are perfectly apt for the complicated times we live in. I am fully aware of the paradox here. I have mentioned it already. It is those who believe in the prose of religion who keep it alive for those of us who can now only survive on its poetry. I just hope they’ll go on saving that space for me a little longer. I am weary of the argument I’ve been engaged in all my life with religion and its volatile certainties.