Hope and Irrelevance

Beyond the final No there is a Yes, and upon that Yes rests the entire future world.

-Wallace Stevens

My last freehanded attempt on the life of the church in Kabul needs a sequel, I think. For while such places may be home to the innocent banter that has long been the refuge of humans in our bewilderment and need for company, they also have the secrets of blood and belief in their foundations and they are filled with things that even angels long to see. I would be remiss not to honour that.

I approach the church with a sharp eye to what Paul the Apostle called “the foolishness of God.” Standing earthside to the secrets of heaven, one cannot help but wonder about the wisdom of staking the redemption of a lost world on such as us, with our hymnbooks and our prayers, our innocent blinking, clinking communion glasses, and squeaky pews. If I say that this church in Kabul seems irrelevant, it is only because coming to it through the dust and ash and heartbreak of the landscape it seems that you have only entered an insulated space, a hard one to reconcile with the world outside. The dissonance makes for a difficult approach.

While I was in Europe for my vacation after Christmas, I had two significant moments between glum, lonely train rides and airport waiting rooms. In Paris I happened on the Cathedral of Notre Dame in time for Sunday Mass. I was enchanted by the place. I see how you could believe that God lived there. The architecture makes your mind soar up, and in the archways there are lights and angels. All through the Mass there was the constant shuffle of tourists around the perimeter, and the priest’s face was lit by flashbulbs. A man stepped into the aisle by my elbow, camera held up like an offering, and stood there snapping pictures while the Host became the Body and Blood of Christ. I remember thinking that the sacred has become pedestrian. We no longer remove our shoes for holy ground, but set up tripods and lenses on it to capture some facsimile of a holiness we’ve forgotten and add it to our memories: at one time people believed in something. In Hell, maybe we will keep our memories like a book of photographs, only to each will be added the glimpse of heaven, the vision of God, the only thing we really longed for but missed, because all we wanted was a picture. Feet shuffle, shutters click, but the Mass goes on, a Body is broken for us, Blood is spilt, and our sins are once again forgiven. Here, as in Kabul, there is strange company between the cynical earth and the hope of heaven, between faith and incomprehension.

Notre Dame has stood for ages, the Kabul church for years. What keeps them there, like rocks in the stream of a mostly disinterested world? Is it not faith, that slippery thing, that undying hope that what can be grasped with the hand or seen with the eye is not the end of the matter? Is it not belief in the foolishness of God, which began with the very creation of this world while foreseeing its fall, continued with the stubborn insistence that we could choose love in the end despite hearts that lean toward greed and selfishness; Foolishness that chose a most unlikely Hero, a carpenter from the laughingstock of towns and the most wayward and tragic of nations, and climaxed with the impossibility of life sprouting from the gaping wound of death? Is it not some secret smile inside those who believe, some gambler’s sixth sense, that these places, these churches and temples may stand alone against the tide of the rushing world, but in the end they will stand for something, an ending so unbelievably good that people will fall to their knees as their longing is met where tears and laughter flow together?

The world may not believe it. They may use words like those I have written and laugh at the believers, they may shake their heads and make shrill protest as I have done in moments when the dissonance overtakes me. But they will still go in droves to the cinema, that modern place of worship and belief, to see and feel the hope that yet infects them, despite their best efforts. It is this way for me, and my second significant moment in Europe came at the movies. Professor Tolkien bristled at any hint of allegory, but he knew well the power of the fairytale. In a theatre surrounded by Parisians I realized, as I have realized again and again when I confront myself with the dissonance of church and world, that it was hobbits - those masters of innocuous conversation, those perfecters of innocent blinking, those champions of pew jumping and clinking glasses – it was hobbits in the end who saved the world.

So now I come to it, with no small apology, for I know I have not been fair to those who, better than me, have given their time, their strength, even their lives over to restoring health, dignity, and life to the people of Afghanistan, a task that must be buoyed up by a tremendous belief in things unseen, more tremendous than my own. I still hold that such people are irrelevant to the world’s eye, but theirs is an irrelevance that I wish for my own life, the irrelevance of hobbits, the irrelevance of those who change the world. For in the end, it is not relevance that saves us in our ruins, but hope.