Reuters:John Lloyd ……….This “hunger to be more serious” is acute now, in Christmas week, when, in the countries of long Christian tradition, the broadcast air is replete with carols, sacred music and invocations to rejoice in a miracle birth. It is a hunger which also contains something of a languorous sense of guilt – that something which should have been precious, or sacred, had been casually lost, dispensed with in the getting and spending of contemporary life. A stirring of regret that there is no solid faith beneath that yearning; and a nostalgia for a childhood acceptance of the message of Christmas, wrapped up in the pleasures of adult attention and the receiving of gifts (to be sure, reality can be quite opposite: but most of us sugar-coat such memories).

But mere keening over lost times – even when as beautifully done, as Larkin does – holds little value for us, or for the society. If we cannot have certainty of faith, we might create a space for the discussion of faithlessness. If the church is still remembered, however vestigially, as a place “proper to grow wise in,” then we should put it to that use.

Read more: