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I go to church every Sunday. Maybe I seek the weekly communal spiritual reflection because I was raised a Roman Catholic. I like to mark ‘the day of rest’ before I toddle off and do the shopping, check out the sales, get the papers, re-grout the bathroom – those kind of every day things we all do on a Sunday, now. Growing up I loved all the trappings of Catholicism: Crayoning endless pictures of a Jesus so hairy he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Dubliners line-up, except maybe for the stripy maxi I always gave Him. I loved dressing up for Holy Communion. My outfit was an homage to the sartorial splendour of frilly white nylon. Ah, the thrill of parading up the aisle as a mini-bride, on the cusp of ingesting Christ, and, potentially, spontaneously combusting thanks to the static from my clobber. But I was a shoe-in for heaven, because I was Catholic, and because, a couple of days before, I’d made my first confession. Another thrill, that, to be finally allowed into the wardrobe with the priest, wait for the hatch to slide back, and then admit to sins that three Hail Marys and an Our Father would see to. My soul was Daz white. “Can you give us an example of a sin,” one of my classmates asked in the run up. “I stole some sugar,” replied Fr. McGovern. We all stared at him bemused. He didn’t realise it, but it was as out-dated to us as if he’d suggested “I coveted my neighbour’s penny-farthing”. My two sins were always ‘I didn’t do what I was told, and I said a bad word’. They sounded plausible enough, if a bit idiotic by the time I was eighteen, and went to confessions for the last time. There was a niggling sense, from the beginning, that all this palaver wasn’t about Real Stuff, or if it was, it was so buried in rules and ritual it was impossible to get a handle on it: “I think I’m losing my faith,” a friend of mine offered in confessions, when we were teenagers. “And anything else?” the priest replied. Indeed. And does an ‘and anything else” play on the minds of those who are practising Catholics, and yet with good hearts still use contraception, engage in conjugal intimacy outside marriage, are divorced and remarried, are gay, or chose abortion for any of the complicated and difficult eventualities that people do. ‘A la carte Catholics’ dogmatists might dismiss them, not least, one supposes, the current by-the-book pope. But I’d be the first to defend their right to their Faith, and the last to dismiss their need to belong to a church that can’t openly embrace the complexities of life as it is lived. Yet, personally, just because it has beautiful rituals to mark life’s stages, the hatch, match and dispatch, it wasn’t enough for me. I couldn’t live with the ifs and the buts and the obfuscations that belonging to a church with strict, absolute dogma seems to entail. I don’t believe in the Virgin Birth, I don’t believe Communion is the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I don’t believe that I’m a spare rib, I don’t believe in The Big Boys Club that is the Catholic hierarchy: I have a huge list of don’t-believes – as do a lot of Catholics. But to me that meant I had, as they say, lapsed. Yet I still believe life is primarily a spiritual journey. And I still attend ‘church’ every Sunday. I call it that because of the tradition I come from, but the appropriate term is, I suppose, ‘service’. I’m a member of the Dublin Unitarian Congregation. Uni-whaa? I heard you say: Let me explain this way – they say that if you crossed a Unitarian with a Ku Klux Klan-er, you get someone in a white hood who went around at night burning question marks into peoples lawns. Or as Somerset Maugham facetiously put it – “a Unitarian is someone who passionately believes in they-don’t-quite-know-what”. A couple of weeks ago the American astrologer and writer, Courtney Roberts, gave the address. I was really stuck by one of the ideas she posited – that in the universe “meaning is as intrinsic as light, and meaning, along with time and space and gravity and mathematics was encoded and exploded into the universe that blossomed with the Big Bang and each of us, you in particular, were meant to be there from the start”. I don’t know what you will take from this idea, but for me it was an expression of the most fundamental thing I chose to believe: That life has meaning. If you chose to believe life has meaning, respect supplants cynicism, and that engenders love, and hey brethren, ya’all know who, or what Is Love... And yes, in case you’re wondering, I am a bit embarrassed writing this. But I just thought I’d tell you that weekly I go to a place where this message is reiterated, through the prism of many viewpoints, but without any dogma. As a principle it’s summarised for me in one of the Unitarian final prayers: “Be kind to each other, as you know you should be.” Given the times we live in, I find it good to be reminded of that.
Anne Gildea
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