Spiritual Voyeurs

Last night I was composing an email message when I got on the topic of the author Roberston Davies. This woman I was writing to had said that Davies was one of her favorite authors. I wanted to say something about him (to impress her, of course), but the only book of his I ever read was Fifth Business, the first of his Deptford Trilogy. And that was a long time ago. I remember finishing the book but not finding it quite compelling enough to read the other two in the series.

That being said, the more I thought about the story, the more I remembered. I even vaguely remembered a certain passage from the book where the main character, Dunstan Ramsay, recalls the different churches in the town where he grew up.

"We had five churches: the Anglican, poor but believed to have some mysterious social supremacy; the Presbyterian, solvent and thought--chiefly by itself--to be intellectual; the Methodist, insolvent and fervent; the Baptist, insolvent and saved; the Roman Catholic, mysterious to most of us but clearly solvent, as it was frequently and, so we thought, quite needlessly repainted."

Another interesting thing about the Ramsay character was that he made a point about not being particularly religious (or perhaps not religious at all) and yet his profession in life was that of a hagiographer -- one who studies saints. As I recall, this came as the result of his life being spared in a bomb explosion during World War I. Right before the blast, he saw the statue of the Virgin Mary, and from that moment on he had an undying curiosity about saints.

The phenomenon of people being attracted to religion in some sort of intellectual way, yet not expressing piety or acknowledging its truth, has always intrigued me. I call these kinds of people "spiritual voyeurs."

In my first year of college I took a course entitled Early American Religious History. It was an upper division seminar that I enrolled in by mistake. However, since I was interested in the subject and since there were dismally few students enrolled, the professor let me remain. (He even kindly gave me a B- on my term paper.) The course was not about Native American religions as the name might suggest. Rather, it was mainly about American Protestantism, from its beginnings in Europe through the Second Great Awakening. I remember the professor asking the class up-front whether any of us were actually religious. Only I and one other fellow answered affirmatively. I always wondered at that. Why would people enroll in a course on religion if there felt no spiritual pull?

On this same subject, another character from fiction that comes to mind is Roger Lambert from John Updike's Roger's Version. Lambert is a defrocked and disaffected Methodist minister, who teaches church history at a modernist New England seminary. Again, it's been a long while since I read the book. But I do remember the scene where Lambert is sexually tempted by his promiscuous niece. I also remember him having all but abandoned his religion. And at the end of the book, when his young wife begins attending church again, he is greatly chagrined and asks her why. She responds, "To annoy you." I enjoyed that ending.

And then there's good ol' Sri Joseph Campbell. I was going to transition to him at this point, but I think that's another blog entry in itself, perhaps two.