Listening for a Whiff

Wendy H brought this excerpt from Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith) to our Thursday night group this week.

“I tried to explain: ‘Well, once you stop believing in an old gentleman with a beard . . . It’s only the word God, you know – it makes such a conventional noise.’

‘It’s merely shorthand for where we come from, where we’re going, and what it’s all about.’

‘And do religious people find out what it’s all about? Do they really get the answer to the riddle?’

‘They get just a whiff of an answer sometimes.’ He smiled at me and I smiled back and we both drank our Madeira. Then he went on: ‘I suppose church services make a conventional noise to you, too – and I rather understand it. Oh, they’re all right for the old hands and they make for sociability, but I sometimes think their main use is to help weather churches – like smoking pipes to colour them, you know. If any – well, unreligious person, needed consolation from religion, I’d advise him or her to sit in an empty church. Sit, not kneel. And listen, not pray. Prayer’s a very tricky business.’

‘Goodness, is it?’

‘Well for inexperienced pray-ers it sometimes is. You see, they’re apt to think of God as a slot-machine. If nothing comes out they say, ‘I knew dashed well it was empty’ when the whole secret of prayer is knowing the machine’s full.’

‘But how can one know?’

‘By filling it oneself.’

‘With faith?’

‘With faith. I expect you find that another boring word. And I warn you this slot-machine metaphor is going to break down at any moment. But if ever you’re feeling very unhappy, well try sitting in an empty church.’

‘And listening for a whiff?’

We both laughed and then he said that it was just as reasonable to talk of smelling or tasting God as of seeing or hearing Him. ‘If one ever has any luck, one will know with all one’s senses – and none of them. Probably as good a way as any of describing it is that we shall ‘come over all queer.’

‘But haven’t you already?’

He sighed and said the whiffs were few and far between. ‘But the memory of them everlasting,’ he added softly. Then we fell silent, both of us staring at the fire. Rain kept falling down the chimney, making little hissing noises. I thought what a good man he is, yet never annoyingly holy. And it struck me for the first time that if such a clever, highly educated man can believe in religion, it is almost impudent of an ignorant person like me to feel bored and superior about it. For I realized that it wasn’t only the word ‘God’ that made me feel like that.”