Sermon Archive
In search of lost time
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 17 April 2005
The classic serial on BBC Radio 4 just before Easter was an adaptation of Marcel Proust's great novel In Search of Lost Time. A new English translation of the novel was recently published by Penguin Books, and prompted by the radio version, I've begun reading it. When, or whether, I'll ever get through the thousands of pages of its six volumes, only time will tell. But so far -? I'm now half-way through volume two -? it has been a much more absorbing and rewarding experience than my earlier attempts.
One of Proust's themes is how much we are influenced by the habits and opinions of others whom we admire. His narrator describes, for example, how as a young boy, he finds himself imitating the way of speaking of a fashionable family he visits, which is quite unlike that of his own family, who are not too amused by this. That sort of thing is probably familiar enough to parents who know only all-too-well the complaint, "but Johnny's parents let him do that!" On a different literary level altogether, David and Ruth of The Archers were recently nonplussed when their daughter asked them why she couldn't call them by their first names as her best friend's mother let her do. "Because you can't!" It's the kind of experience that the parents of young Jamie, baptised here this morning, no doubt have to look forward to.
It's not just a question of adolescence however. From our earliest years, as Jamie no doubt already demonstrates, we learn what to think, say and do largely by imitation. Each of us bears the traces, not only of our own family's inherited physical characteristics, but also of the character and opinions of others who have played a significant part in our life, and whom we have consciously or unconsciously imitated. Nor are these always people we have known personally. Our character and opinions bear the traces also of real or fictional people we have only read about, or seen in plays or on film, the heroes, heroines, and role-models who have attracted and inspired us.
Rene Girard, a controversial cultural critic who has written much about Proust, goes so far as to claim that 'all learning is based on imitation. If human beings ceased imitating, all forms of culture would vanish'. That may seem a little exaggerated. But once you begin to think about the role that fashions of one sort or another play, not just in clothes or interior decoration, but also in politics, the arts, sport, and culture generally, it becomes more difficult to dispute. Humans often look down on animals who 'ape' one another, or 'parrot' what they hear. But humans themselves, it seems, are also great imitators.
Now there may, of course, seem no harm in that, except to our personal vanity when we imagine we are being original. But Girard, the controversial cultural critic I've just mentioned, suggests that matters are more serious. Imitation, he argues, is involved not only with harmless fashions such as those in clothes or interior decoration, but also in the much more troubling question of human violence. Think of all the examples of inter-communal violence and genocide which have taken place in the last half-century ? in Nazi Germany, at the partition of India, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Yugoslavia, or in the Sudan for example. Or nearer home, think of the sectarian violence that can erupt at football matches. Part of this, no doubt, can be explained in historical, political, and economic terms. But what drives violence to such a pitch that ordinary people see their sometime neighbours as bitter enemies, and at worst descend to mass murder and genocide, calls for a deeper explanation in human nature. Animal species rarely if ever lose their heads in this way: individual animals may fight for a place in the pecking order, but few if any other animals descend into a vortex of mutual mass destruction as humans can do: their instincts usually protect them from that. Humans, however, lack this instinctual protection. Once violent thoughts and words arise, fuelled by blinkered imagination, humans begin to imitate and outdo one another in rage - until those who stand on the sidelines observing, can no longer see any difference between these warring tribes who think they are so different from one another.
Being also rational creatures, of course, humans want to explain such violent behaviour. They have often done this by projecting their own violent thoughts onto the gods or God of their imagination, claiming divine sanction for violence against peoples or individuals they see as different to themselves. Many religious myths and sacrificial rituals illustrate this, Girard points out. But at least one religious tradition, he argues, has gradually learned to resist this tendency to sanctify violence. As the Judaeo-Christian tradition developed, it achieved slowly, although never completely, the insight that there is no divine justification, and ultimately no human reason, for the imitative violence that at worst ends in genocide. The other people, races or individuals singled out as enemies or scapegoats, are essentially no different from those who wage war on or persecute them.
This is illustrated in the Old Testament, for example, when Job maintains his innocence before God: the evils that have overtaken him have not done so because he is any different or more sinful in God's sight than others are. In the New Testament, Jesus echoes this, when he denies that the victims of human or natural disasters are any different or more sinful than others. And Jesus makes the point again when, with mob violence about to be turned against himself, he declares: "They hated me without a cause." [John 15, 25] Jesus, the innocent victim, makes clear that violent thoughts and actions, which humans have so often tried to justify in religious terms, are literally senseless.
At the heart of the Christian good news then, is the insight that every other person is essentially just like you. The gospel warns us not to believe the caricatures of others that our inflamed imagination works up. It tells us to resist the seduction of imitating one another's violent thoughts and words. That message, of course, was often not heard, even by many who claimed to be Christian, in the centuries since the innocent victim said "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Yet Christ's teaching was not without effect. Nor is it without effect even in today's secular society. The fact that our political parties are currently hurling words, and not weapons, against one another, that our society prefers the ballot to the bullet, and that, at last, it has become virtually impossible for many of us to claim that God is on our side and not on their side ? all this reflects the extent, however limited, to which the teaching of Christ has influenced our culture; and it reminds us that we forget this influence on our culture at our peril.
Clearly we have far to go until Christ's message is fully appreciated by humanity. The aim and aspiration of Jesus' teaching, as he himself puts it in today's gospel, is that all of us 'may have life, and have it abundantly'. That goal is still far from being realised. But the way to travel hopefully toward it, is also suggested in today's gospel, when Jesus describes himself as 'the door', and says that 'if anyone enters by me, he will be saved and go in and out and find pasture'. If human beings really are such highly imitative creatures, these words of Jesus can be heard as an invitation not to imitate one another's suspicions and violence, but to imitate him.
What does it mean to imitate Christ? Above all, it is to learn, as he did, that we are loved with an everlasting love, and so lack nothing that is essential for abundant life. To imitate Christ truly, is to be set free from the need to feel superior or inferior to others, and thereby discover what it means to love our neighbours as ourselves. That we all fall short of this, is all-too-obvious. But the door remains open, and those who go in and out through it, repeatedly glimpse, and momentarily already enjoy, the pastures of eternity. The baptism of Jamie, which we celebrate here this morning, is the Church's way of welcoming another human across that threshold, with the prayer that his and our imitative nature may be inspired to imitate the one who came that we might have life and have it abundantly.
Let me end as I began with Proust's great novel. 'We commonly live', he writes, 'with a self reduced to its bare minimum; most of our faculties lie dormant, relying on habit; and habit knows how to manage without them.' Proust then describes how, on a long train journey, arriving at dawn at a country station in a romantic landscape, the dullness of his habits were shaken, and all his faculties came 'flooding back', heightening his perception of everything around him. This heightened awareness is something we too may have experienced on journeys to new and as yet undiscovered places. But the dullness of habit may be shaken, and our faculties may come 'flooding back' nearer home also. Describing a church familiar to him in childhood, Proust writes that for him, it was 'something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions ? the fourth being Time.' The living Church, to which we and now Jamie belong, also has these four dimensions, for it is not just 'an edifice occupying a space', but a countless company of people, past, present and future, who travel hopefully through time to the open door of eternal and abundant life.
Worship >> Sermons >> Sermons