Friends,
For my contribution to the Contact this week, I’m sending you something I wrote while sitting in the library of the Iona Abbey. As I wrote this, the howling wind was lashing rain against the leaded glass window that afforded me a wonderful view across the water to the Isle of Mull.
I’m sure I’ll be telling you more about my stay in Scotland in the coming weeks, but for my first report on my time away, I’d like to tell you about an experience I had while visiting Shrewsbury in England on the first day of my trip. I was in Shrewsbury because it is the birthplace of Charles Darwin, and on my trip I was trying to finish up a book that, in one chapter, tries to address what I consider to be the unnecessary folly of those who, in the name of faith, reject Darwin’s ideas about Evolution.
The passage is below.
May God’s spirit blow through you like the Scottish wind.
Warmly,
Ben
***
On the night I stayed in Shrewsbury, as I was preparing to leave my hotel, to go out into the rain and find a simple dinner before collapsing in jet-lagged exhaustion into comfort of my bed, a young violinist started talking to me in the hotel lobby where I was using hotel’s meager WiFi service. He was free with suggestions about where I could find a nice dinner that wouldn’t break the bank, and he invited me to join him and some of his friends, later in the evening, at a nearby pub, where he told me the best jam session in all of Shropshire would be taking place.
The invitation made me feel a little bit nervous. Part of me still felt like a child who’d been warned never to talk to strangers, and I wasn’t sure if the violinist inviting me would misinterpret a visit to the pub as an invitation for further romantic overtures, but I went anyway, and I’m glad I did because it was a magical experience. The pub was tiny, and the room we occupied —no larger than my study at church—didn’t really hold all of us. The musicians included the aforementioned violinist, three guitars, a bassist, a mandolin player, a guy on banjo, and a gentleman with a penny whistle; those of us without instruments included the wife and daughter of the banjo player, a tourist couple from somewhere in the south of England who seemed to the in the very springtime of romance, a lonely-looking trans-woman and me. The music ranged from traditional Irish jigs, to bluegrass, to the Beatles, by way of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and the Delta Blues. Those of us without instruments sang.
All the musicians played well, and as the evening turned to night, and as we sang song after song, I came to experience deep joy and a sense of belonging born not of nationality or of personal familiarity, but of music and of fellowship between people in from the cold and sharing the warmth of a small room, heated by a fireplace, bodies, and beer. I have no idea if any of the people with me in the Shrewsbury pub were people of faith, but I do know that religion deals in the currency of such moments, when a diverse and beautiful gathering of God’s children come together to make music, to share friendship and to extend hospitality to strangers.
When yet another musician showed up with a dreadnaught guitar, I gave up my seat and walked back through the rain to my hotel. It was 11PM in England and I’d been awake for more than thirty hours; I needed sleep. There on dark, damp streets of an English town I realized that Darwin’s detractors don’t just misunderstand the science of evolution, and they don’t just read the bible in ways it was never meant to be read, but they also misunderstand what it means to live a life of faith. Religion’s finest moments don’t happen when defenders of a relatively modern way of reading the Bible are able to banish evolutionary biology from high school classrooms; rather, religion is at its best when the people of God make music together, singing in such beautiful harmony that they become impatient for all in the world that is ugly, violent, unjust and unkind.
And nothing Darwin–or his detractors for that matter–has ever done, can compromise the Christian faith so long as Christians remember to come in from the cold, to sit down by the fire, and sing, welcoming the stranger and creating beauty, with all that true beauty means for justice and peace.