A century ago, the big issue, for Catholics and Protestants alike, was the automobile. The Spanish Flu, of course, was a problem too, killing millions as it did. Yet it was the automobile that was a more enduring threat some thought, more of a game changer.
Protestants worried a lot about drinking and driving; for some reason, Catholics not so much. Everybody worried about the speed these cars were going; people we’re getting hit and runover in droves. G. K. Chesterton even suggested some drivers were hitting people for sport; now I don’t know about that, but that was Chesterton’s style, hyperbole. But it wasn’t just all about public safety: one preacher even complained the presence of the automobile made his parishioners demand shorter sermons, because now everyone wanted out of church by Noon in time for their Sunday afternoon drive.[1] Again, that’s likely exaggeration, but one for which I am particularly sensitive. Yet it was, nonetheless, a grave subject for concern to many Christians, the rise of the automobile. Because it was changing things, fundamentally and permanently. And people could tell.
One change was actually in how people went to church. Warren Wilson was a social reformer and sociologist and a Presbyterian; and writing about the influence of the automobile on church life in 1924, he said it’s amazing to see some churches on a Sunday surrounded by “acres of automobiles.” But, “[o]n the other hand,” he said, “the abandonment of country churches goes on apace.” “Churches that are not on the lines of motor travel show uneasiness…While those…upon the new highway, or near enough for convenience, see a future for themselves and hold their ground,” he said. His advice to churches was to get near to the road as quick as you can, and to build larger churches too.[2] Because, of course, now parishioners could choose to travel to other churches, no longer stuck in their provincial little communities. Wilson didn’t see much problem in this; it was what is was. Christians were mobile; the churches needed to adapt to survive. Christians were no longer rooted; the churches needed to attract to thrive. After the advent of the automobile, Christian life wasn’t just about being disciples, it was also about being drivers.
It’s all quaint to think about today. One priest interviewed in 1916 said he thought the automobile was “here to stay.”[3] You wonder what he would have made of the rest of the century, landing on the moon, for instance, or this century with our growing list orbital billionaires. One wonders what he would have made of all the dying towns all over rural America. Thinking of churches, one wonders what he would have said. Today it’s not just cars, it’s the internet; today you can participate in a Mass halfway across the world, going there in some sense, without leaving home, without darkening the doors of your local parish. Or, you can easily drive to another parish, perhaps where the homilies are shorter. We are freer now more than ever, rootless more than we’ve ever been. And honestly, I love it. I’m not giving up my car. “Life is highway,” Tom Cochrane sang; you bet it is.[4] As Wilson, the Presbyterian sociologist said, it is what it is; churches need to adapt and attract to survive. That’s just true.
But perhaps we should think about it.
I think it’s interesting that in the Middle Ages churches on occasion would pass laws forbidding parishioners from moving from one parish to another. Parishes were very small, usually only a few hundred people. The priest was often raised up in the parish, and so for many a medieval Christian, his or her whole experience of the Church would have been of but one small community and perhaps just one or two priests. And the Church seemed to prefer this; although, the Church had to enforce localism at times, even for clergy. In the thirteenth century, the archbishop of Canterbury had to order the bishop of Coventry back to his diocese. “[T]hings need your attention, but you have been absent so long that you seem not to care,” he wrote.[5] In the Christian tradition there has always been at some level hesitancy and concern about the wandering, rootless, cosmopolitan life; Christianity has always tended toward Stoicism in this sense. Admitting the reality and even, at times, the benefits of travel; still, the Church has always wanted to preserve the local: the village, the parish, the neighborhood, the home. To be completely rootless, without home or community or parish, was always considered spiritually dangerous. Saint Benedict, at the beginning of the Rule talked about drifters, “gyrovagues” he called them: “Always on the move, they never settle down…slaves to their own wills,” he wrote. Benedict said it was better just not to talk about them, miserable as they were.[6] The desert fathers said that when a monk learned to stay in his cell, when he finally stopped wandering about, only then would he finally find God and “the greatest purification of the soul.”[7] Fascinated, like us, by the freedom of the open road and the wide horizon; still, our forebears were cautious, still prizing what was small and local. Dante, in the Inferno, for instance, was clearly fascinated by Ulysses, that great ancient explorer and traveler; but Dante also wrote him into his fantastic hell, because in the end all his traveling about was but a “mad flight,” he makes Ulysses say.[8] Because he abandoned his community; he didn’t keep close those who were close to him.
Now, I bring all this up—I know, in my own strange way—because I want to talk about this parish, about renewal. We’ve given this weekend over to what in the past we’ve called “Community Weekend.” But this year I want to emphasize, really, one thing over the rest. Of course, we need you to keep contributing financially to the parish. Thank you so much for your generosity; many of you are so beautiful in your giving. I’m so grateful to those of you who give a lot and those who give a little. Giving to the poor, giving to the parish, is a good thing. I’m not embarrassed to say that. It’s spiritually good; we always strive to do good things with what you give. But it’s also spiritually good for you to give from your first fruits thanksgiving offerings to God; it’s actually good for your soul, to express your thanks to God by building up his body, the Church (and bruised though we are, this is still the Holy Catholic Church). Early Christians actually read Jesus’s words about building “treasure in heaven” literally; giving to the poor, giving to the Church, they believed was spiritual and redemptive, commercium spiritale, a “spiritual exchange,” they thought of it.[9] And I think that might be right, more biblical, the truth: that such generosity is not just good but necessary for the soul. But about this, I really just want to say, thank you! Please continue. Please give what you can. Please give more. Please commit.
But as I said, I want to emphasize something else, and that’s this ancient wisdom about community and stability, about the spirituality of the local and about staying in place. Because I think that too is spiritually good for you and for me: to be here, to love here, to forgive here, to put up with each other until it all gives way to heaven. Because I love you, and I want to be in heaven with you; because I hope we love each other and want heaven together. So, let’s become friends in the meantime, in this community, this parish, so imperfect but still so beautiful, each of us such sinners but loved so very much by God.
And that’s my ask (in addition to your pledge): that we commit to this community, this place, this parish. Because such rootedness is good, such stability, putting up with each other, not wandering, is good for us as Christians, as disciples learning to love our way to heaven by way of truth, sacraments, and forgiveness. And it’s good for the wider Church, for our city and the world. There’s a lot that needs fixing in this world, no doubt, Wendell Berry once wrote: politics, big stuff. “But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities” he said.[10] And that’s right. And that’s what you and I can do if we commit to this parish community, building that little hope, that local love that changes lives, and maybe the world in time. That’s my ask: that we begin our renewal by gathering in this parish, sinners though we are, trusting in a grace big enough for all of us. Amen.
[1] John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life, 87-91
[2] Warren H. Wilson, “The Automobile: Its Province and Its Problems,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 116 (Nov. 1924)
[3] The Automobile and American Life, 89
[4] Tom Cochrane, “Life is a Highway” (1991)
[5] Sophia Menache, The Vox Dei, 65-67
[6] Benedict, Rule 1.10-12
[7] Evagrius, Praktikos 28
[8] Dante, Inferno 26.55-142
[9] Mark 10:21; Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, 84, 230-235
[10] Wendell Berry, “Think Little,” The World-Ending Fire, 54
© 2021 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
