Dover Beach - a poem by Matthew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
۬The tide is full, the moon lies fair
۬Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
۬Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
۬Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
۬Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
۬Only, from the long line of spray
۬Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
۬Listen! you hear the grating roar
۬Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
۬At their return, up the high strand,
۬Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
۬With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
۬The eternal note of sadness in. ۬
۬Sophocles long ago
€¨Heard it on the Ægæan, and it brought
۬Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
۬Of human misery; we
۬Find also in the sound a thought,
۬Hearing it by this distant northern sea.۬
۬The Sea of Faith
۬Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
۬Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
۬But now I only hear
۬Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
۬Retreating, to the breath
۬Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
۬And naked shingles of the world.
۬Ah, love, let us be true
۬To one another! for the world, which seems
۬To lie before us like a land of dreams,
۬So various, so beautiful, so new,
۬Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
۬Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
۬And we are here as on a darkling plain
۬Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
۬Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The poet seeing the ebbing of the sea at Dover Beach, alludes to ebbing of Religious Faith that he sees ebbing in England as a consequence of the collapse of Christendom. Does the Sea of Faith flow again, will the cycle of the sea reverse itself at low tide and give us again a rising tide? Arnold does not envision this in his poem, and relative to Christianity there has not been a rising Sea of Faith in the United Kingdom.
What does this mean for Unitarian Universalists in North America? We have experience many of the same cultural, intellectual and social changes that the United Kingdom has experienced. Many North Americans have lost faith with traditional and authoritarian Christianity. Yet either because of a more flexible polity among the churches, or a peculiar national psyche, the does not seem to be an ebbing of religiosity so much as upheaval of conventions of thought and affiliations.
Unitarian Universalists have experience in the last decades of ministering both to those who have experienced a loss of faith, and to those who are seeking spiritual renewal, I believe that this will be true in the future as well, I believe that the Christendom is in crisis and a new spiritual and religious paradigm is rising. I believe that Unitarian Universalism has the potential to give form and substance to this new religious paradigm, but that will require that we cease to consider the building of one's theology to be a private affair, and begin to work together for the sake of our "the re-enchantment of our world." *
I am quoting from the title of a To Re-Enchant The World: A Philosophy of Unitarian Universalism By Richard Grigg. I will comment further on Grigg's book after I have finished reading it.
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