Walking through Westminster Abbey, London, I felt like I was in an episode of Hoarders, a disturbing television documentary series. I was in a funk within five minutes; unbearably depressed within half an hour. Here was a towering tribute to something that grew up in Christ’s name but didn’t seem to have much to do with Christ.
Every square inch of floor and wall, so it seems, is covered with a plaque, a grave, a statue, a monument of florid tributes and forever blessings on kings, queens, civil servants and many others who have served, as the Abbey’s website calls it, “the unique pageant of British history.”
Perhaps the Abbey itself is a mausoleum to Christendom. As much as it claims on its literature and on its website that it is a “living church,” and there is daily worship someplace in the massive complex, it is the thousand-year history that is the true attraction. Particularly its association with the monarchy. “The coronation of kings and queens has taken place here since 1066, and many of the nation’s kings and queens are buried in the Abbey,” writes the dean on the website.
Folks line up for a half an hour or more and pay £18 to see the over 3,000 memorials whitewashed by the corporeal powers of church and state. Take for example the story of Elizabeth I and her warring cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, now forever united in the Lady Chapel. They had spent their lives trying to kill each other, and it was Mary’s son, Charles who placed his mother within the Abbey. It makes a pretty good metaphor for Christendom; the church cleansing the crown, the crown commissioning the church. That dipsydoodle alone is worth $30.
I don’t mean to malign Westminster Abbey; just that these thoughts bubbled during my visit there. Many churches in our own denomination might also be considered mausoleums to a faded past. A past for which I have heard many yearn.
As Westminster Abbey shows it was really the power for which we are nostalgic. But, like all such histories it was deeply compromised. Christendom existed in a symbiotic relationship with the State; does the Church really need to bless Gen. Wolfe or Shakespeare?
There is worship at Westminster but it is a sideshow. Displays of power, earthly glory, are the central attraction, down the main alleys of the 2,972 square metres. And that, in many ways, is how I think of Christendom: A spiritually compromised power structure.
I try not to think these thoughts too loud, too often, for the abiding fear of sounding naïve. But, and while I’m not studied in this I have read some over the years, isn’t this exactly what Christ warned against, on numerous occasions?
I like the times we are in, where our faith is again a challenge, and not a balm, to society at large, to power in particular. Or so I would like to think, though it hardly seems we (and particularly our denomination) challenge either society or power at all. (Sending finger-wagging letters is passive-aggressive at best.) We are sidelined from the centre aisle of society. That’s a prophetic position to be in. And perhaps that is the best metaphor coming from Westminster Abbey today. After all, can you think of a more un-Christ-like phrase than Christendom?
