We are so attached to life that most of us find it compulsive to believe there is an ‘afterlife’, a second shot at existence. So far so good, but then we have systems, called ‘religions’, that actually guarantee a better life than the present one if you follow their rules. So it’s not just a second shot, but a better one than the first.
We call them the major religions, but in fact all religions are based on the concept of enjoying a second –better- chance if you follow their rules or of everlasting punishment (again crudely represented by everlasting combustion) if you don’t. But at least one major religion (I can’t speak of the million others) seems to have become geriatric.
Its relationship with the younger generations is redolent of rejection. The friction created by the generation gap is seen within the relationship between the young and any imposed, or inherited, beliefs and lifestyles. In a way that is good, because religions are based on sincere, heartfelt and unsupported belief, called ‘faith’, and any impositions merely produce grudges, not saints.
You simply cannot force anyone to believe what you believe in the religious sense, unless you are an organisation called Isis, which manages to convert people in the space of three days, apparently, which is something I find absolutely enthralling and inexplicable. If only, as a teacher or a parent, I could have had such power.
This overtly-manifested rejection and reluctance, this potent reaction to imposed beliefs and lifestyles, has been a long time in coming. In the days of my callow youth, everybody knew that the reluctant young people were pushed out of the house on Sunday mornings to go to Mass, but the young people stayed either at the very door of the Church, one foot on the doorstep, or else with both on the parvis.
There were even interrogations about the Gospel reading by the parents to check attendance, and I know of cases where the absentee would ask more pious friends about it before returning home, just in case. In the 1960s and 1970s transgression was the byword. It was visible in literature, speech, music and fashion. People were rebelling against imposed patterns of behaviour.
They can’t believe it can get any better. This is heaven, and there can be no other. The result is a form of atheism
There is friction between the past and the future, and friction generates heat. The young people of today’s world (most of them, anyway) don’t see any relevance in their forefathers’ belief and behaviour systems. The young have never had a better world, and they are besotted with it. What is strange is that this great love of life as they know it has not generated in them any desire for a repeat performance in an ‘afterlife’.
They can’t believe it can get any better. This is heaven, and there can be no other. The result is a form of atheism. Pleasure is –must be – tangible and immediate, and the young have little trust in promises. ‘I want it all, I want it now’, say the offsprings of the Prodigal Son. Pay goes with work, and don’t tell me about free beer tomorrow, because tomorrow never comes.
Meanwhile, I am bemused by the fact that the rather more regimented religions – the Muslim, the Buddhist and the Hebrew – are far less challenged than the Christian one. The young are still held fast by the family, while the Christian religion has had to survive in the liberal West, perhaps because the young leave home and cut ties or assert their independence in a much freer way. So the Christian religion is depending on a dying generation, and generates little – if any – rapport with the young. It struggles to attract priests and nuns (look at our religious schools as micro-evidence).
Yet religions –particularly the Christian one, to my mind (and this is natural because I am a Christian, a preoccupied Christian) have had a civilising influence, restraining the inherent barbarity residing in absolute libertarianism. It would be a pity if we come to the point where ‘there ain’t no religion left’, or so I think.
A poem written by the late great Philip Larkin, called Days, is terribly pertinent to all this. Let me quote the closing lines:
“Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.”
The Priest and the Doctor. One tries to keep you in days, the other promises that days don’t really matter, because you’ll have a dayless eternity later, filled with either bliss or despair. Science and religion are at odds, as usual, and so are the generations. But it is intriguing to ask: where can we live but days? To many, it seems that Larkin’s question is only to be posited when one runs out of days. When it’s too late to do anything about it. All this is heady, heavy stuff. The trendy universal prayer is for obliviousness. Shall we pray?
Charles Caruana Carabez sits on the National Commission for Further and Higher Education.