When I was a child, I thought as a child. I used to Wonder.
I wondered if sticky mud, stirred into a smooth paste would taste like chocolate, (it didn’t, and it was surprisingly gritty even though it looked deliciously smooth), and whether buttercups tasted like butter (wrong again).
I wondered why, if I sat and listened long enough, the sound of the clock-on-the-wall ticking would disappear, even though I could still see the pendulum swinging.
I wondered whether everybody saw colours the same way as me. It occurred to me that what I called pink, someone else might call yellow – and since we always called the same colour by the same name, we would never know the difference.
I wondered if all those people I saw out of the bus window had a mum and a dad and a sister, and a life, like I did. I wondered how it was that my life and my family mattered so much, and yet theirs didn’t seem to really exist at all.
I wondered if everything was turned upside down, and you fell into the sky, if you would keep on falling for forever.
I wondered what forever felt like. (It was a scary feeling.)
I had quite a lot of time for wondering in those days. There was always a huge yawning expanse of time-to-be-filled, and friends-coming-out-to-play didn’t fill it up. And since I was not a very active child (in fact I was so frightened of hurting myself that I avoided almost all physical play activities like climbing, swinging, jumping and bike-riding) I passed most of my childhood in imaginative or quietly explorative pursuits, with dolls and beads and insects.
And on Sundays, there was church. Church in the morning at Church-in-the-Woods (that really was its name), and church in the evening, just down the road at the newer church on our council estate.
I’m not really sure why my mother took me to church so regularly. As far as I can recall, she never talked to me about her beliefs, and she didn’t really strike me as a great Believer in God. Looking back, I suspect that it was more of a social activity for her than anything else. She was very involved in all the non-religious aspects of the local church community – helping at jumble sales, making salmon paste and egg and cress sandwiches for the Christmas parties, delivering the parish magazine to houses in our street, and stopping on the doorsteps for a gossip about the neighbours.
My father didn’t come to church. He often worked shifts, which gave him a good excuse, and if he was not at work, he seemed to relish the freedom of a few Sunday hours to himself, while we were out. Which is not to say he didn’t think about religious things. I can recall him on a number of occasions standing at the gate to the back of our house, arguing vehemently with unsuspecting Jehovah’s Witnesses who had made the mistake of knocking on our door when he was home and not busy watching horse-racing on TV.
Whatever the reason though, I had what must surely be described as a ‘religious upbringing’. I was baptised. I went to an anglo-catholic primary school instead of my local estate school. I went to Sunday School and was always an Angel (but never Mary) in the Church Nativity. I attended Brownies (where I got my house-making badge, and learned how to tie a reef knot), and Pathfinders (where I learned the rules of table-tennis, and what ”Doing It” meant), and CYFA (where I lost my heart to Gary Pilbeam, who only spoke to me once, to ask me for my best friend’s address so he could ask her out). I got ‘confirmed’ in a white dress, and wore a small silver cross round my neck, and partook of the body-and-blood-of-Christ, like a proper grown-up. I went to Bible Classes and prayed that God would help me to understand the incomprehensible nonsense I was about to study. And I went to church twice every Sunday, for what seemed liked very long time.
And in all those interminable hours sitting on uncomfortable church pews (generally with an uncomfortably full bladder) not-listening to dull-and-dreary sermons from modern vicars who tried unsuccessfully to enliven their uninspired preachings with pathetically amateur visual aids, I found myself Wondering about God.
I also wondered how many of the assembled congregation of old men with porridge-skin necks and middle aged ladies with special Sunday hats actually thought about any of the stuff they repeated with routine regularity week after week. Sometimes we’d recite the Nicene Creed, in a monotonous dirge, with insufficient stress on any of the words for it to make any sense……
“I believe in one God,
the Father Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten of his Father before all worlds,
God of God, Light of Light,
very God of very God,
begotten, not made,
being of one substance with the Father;
by whom all things were made;
who for us men and for our salvation
came down from heaven,
and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost
of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man;
and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered and was buried;
and the third day he rose again
according to the Scriptures,
and ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;
and he shall come again, with glory,
to judge both the quick and the dead;
whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life,
who proceedeth from the Father [and the Son];
who with the Father and the Son together
is worshipped and glorified;
who spake by the Prophets.
And I believe one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church;
I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins;
and I look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.
Amen.
Yawn.
But sometimes, when the vicar wanted to make a swift exit at the end of the service (some unmissable Sunday evening TV programme, like “The Saint” awaiting his attentions perhaps), or when his painfully laboured sermon had over-run its allotted time slot, we were gifted the shorter treat of the Apostles’ Creed:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
Much shorter, but somehow less poetic. Less mystical, but still incomprehensible.
But it supposedly summarized what we all said we believed.
I wasn’t entirely convinced.
Since I’d learnt what “Doing It” meant, and felt myself to be au fait with everything there was to know about sex, I couldn’t help wondering about Mary’s virginal status. And the image of Jesus sitting on God’s right hand was never one I could take seriously. And what was all that about judging the quick and the dead?
And then the Big One. There it was again. That concept of forever.
A Kingdom with No End. A Life Everlasting.
On and on forever and ever. Infinity.
It didn’t matter how many times I tried to get my head round that idea of living forever – it always filled me with (on a good day) confusion, or (on a bad day) dread. But the alternative – dying, stopping, finishing, ending, ceasing to exist – didn’t bear thinking about either. I would try to imagine living ‘after death’, in ‘heaven’, without end, and I could just about manage to get to thinking about a very, very, very long time. But it always had an end point. And when I tried to imagine the end point not being there, I felt like someone had pulled the floor out from underneath me. My stomach, my whole being, would lurch, as if I had just dropped off a ledge into a bottomless chasm. And the more I thought about it, the more that coming to terms with the finality of death began to seem like a positive prospect.
But Church wasn’t all boredom, interspersed with incomprehension and existential dread. There were Good Bits. I loved some of the parables, and to this day The Good Samaritan has a special place in my heart, causing me to pick up bleeding drunks from Christmas Eve gutters and put them into prepaid, homeward-bound taxis.
And the Blessing which invoked “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding” to keep our hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God, always brought a smile to my chewed lips – not only because it signalled The End of the Service, (and the opportunity to relieve my by-now-bursting bladder), but also because a Peace which Passeth all Understanding sounded like it would be a really Nice Thing to have.
However, as my childhood years passed, and were rudely replaced by those tetchy, cynical, “I-know-better-than-you-and I’m gonna-do-it-my-way” years of teen hood, I began to feel that I had outgrown all this local churchy stuff, and to believe that I was the only person in the congregation who actually thought about what they were doing there. I was sick of endlessly repeating creeds and psalms and prayers and hymns with the verbal proficiency of a Shakespearean actor, and the heart-felt conviction of a cartoon character. Something was missing. Something was Not Right. I wanted to do something Different. I wanted to do something Meaningful.
And so, at the courageous, intrepid and very individual age of 14 years, I daringly and rebelliously joined….another church.
To be honest, I just started to go to a different church youth club, with a school friend. In those days the only youth clubs seemed to be church ones. And the biggest attraction was that there would be different boys there. Boys I didn’t know, who hadn’t known me since I was three years old, and who might not pass me over for my best friend, because now I was the new girl on the scene, and not her.
But when you’ve had God pushed into your head for your whole life, you tend to find that there are some pretty entrenched beliefs hanging about in your subconscious. So it wasn’t long before I started joining in with the religious meetings at the curate’s house that happened after the youth club bits. And it wasn’t long before I began to think that This was what a church was supposed to be like – a small group of True Believers, who met outside of the established rituals and routines; who followed no dogmatic, prescribed ‘order of service’; who prayed out-loud, as and when they felt moved to do so; and who talked about being Born Again.
This seemed to be more like it. It had more of the excitement and feeling that I imagined must have characterised the early meetings of Christ-followers before Church became an entrenched and boring word. I was happy. I had a new circle of friends. I had a boyfriend. I had a religion I could believe in. I covered my guitar with ‘Jesus Loves You’ stickers and learnt to play new versions of hymns with my Jesus-loving friends during Saturday afternoons in their warm kitchens, where we talked about Boys, and God and the Meaning of Life. And then some more about Boys.
But after a while, as the novelty wore off, I once again started to get the feeling that something was missing. As I sat with my eyes closed in a the quiet circle in the curate’s front room, waiting for the Spirit to move me or someone else to utter a prayer, my doubting mind started up. “This is all pretence” it said. “No one is really feeling the Holy Spirit, they just want to believe that they are”. I tried to ignore it, and listen instead for the voice of the Lord, giving me some words to speak, or at least giving me a sense of faith. But the seed of doubt began to grow.
So I started asking questions. “How do you know when God is speaking to you?” “What does God’s presence feel like?” “How do you know you’re not imagining it, just because you want to believe it?” I listened to the answers, and tried to concentrate on feeling the same feelings. But I didn’t. Why wasn’t the Spirit entering into me? Why everyone else and not me? How likely was that?
But I didn’t say anything more. I just carried on acting the same as everyone else and going along with it all. This was my friendship group, and my only source of contact with the opposite sex (I went to an all-girls’ school). I wasn’t about to mess with that just because I had a few doubts about the God stuff.
And then my sister and her family moved to a new town, and my mum and dad decided to follow them, and suddenly, after 16 years in the same place, I was about to have everything change in my life. When I told the curate where I was moving to, he literally praised the Lord! Not because he was glad to be rid of me (although on reflection there might have been a bit of that in there somewhere), but because it turned out that his best friend from college was the curate in the very church in the very part of the very town I was moving to. So he rang him up, told him one of his young flock would be shortly moving pens, and secured his friend’s agreement to welcome me into his patch, and look after my spiritual well-being.
Well, even doubting ol’ me was a bit struck by this piece of happenstance, and my belief in all-things-Jesus took a turn for the Up. It even turned out that the vicar’s Born Again daughter was in my tutor group in my new school, and that she also had a guitar covered in Jesus-love-you stickers. So while my home and school arrangements altered quite drastically within the space of a few weeks, my spiritual transition to the new town was virtually seamless. And inspired with the newness of it all, I determined to hide my doubts away in a safe place, and throw myself wholeheartedly into the Born Again Christian Thing.
Suffice to say I was a bit of a Jesus-bore for the next year or so, but my new-found religious enthusiasm didn’t get in the way of me having a good time, at least not in the beginning. I even managed to conscript my new and very disreputable boyfriend into the church youth group. His father used to refer to me as “that skinny Jesus-freak”, but our relationship blossomed beautifully until he was “asked to leave” the school half way through the 6th form. Then he got a temporary job in a rubber-glove factory, and discovered the lure of sex with buxom (and religion-free) Iris. And I discovered that Jesus wasn’t a whole lot of help to a 16 year old who’d been dumped by the first-great-love-of-her-life.
The following year my father died. Despite my professed belief in the Life Everlasting, and the ‘comforting’ words uttered by the vicar at his funeral, I couldn’t imagine any part of him surviving the finality of death, except inside the heads of the people who loved him. I recalled the experience of a friend from my previous church group, following her discovery, shortly after I moved away, that her father had a terminal illness. Until that point, she had whole-heartedly expounded the belief that only those who were ‘Born Again in Christ’ would gain everlasting life. But her father, like mine, had not even attended church, let alone been born again in Christ. She had asked the curate whether her father might still be able to ‘go to heaven’ – he was after all a Good Man, who tried his best live a christian sort of life. The curate offered her no words of consolation. She reportedly left his house in floods of angry tears, and as far as I know, never set foot in there again.
So, by the time I had the important-end-of-school conversation with my very-worried curate about my decision to study Psychology at University (“Psychology eh? That’ll play havoc with your religious beliefs”) I had already dug my doubts out of their safe hiding place, and was wondering if the whole Jesus Lives Thing was just a bandwagon I’d jumped on to because it happened to come along when I was looking for a lift. Somewhat unexpectedly, I had actually started to Grow Up and had begun to see that there were many different ways to look at the world.
My deep-eyed, deep-thinking sociology teacher had lent me his copy of R D Laing’s “Self and Others” to read. My enthusiastic, snuff-snorting english teacher had inspired in me a love of D H Lawrence novels, and the poetry of John Donne. My bearded, long-haired history teacher had opened my eyes to the complexities of politics and the iniquities of both despotism and democracy. I recall, with astounding clarity, the moment just before lunch, as my history teacher paced back and forth in front of his desk, gesturing wildly whilst struggling to explain the concept of ‘Divide and Rule’ to a small bunch of bored and hungry teenagers, when I looked out of the rain-straggled window at the grey outline of the school buildings against the brightening sky, and was hit full-in-the-face by the sudden realization of All the Stuff I Didn’t Know. There was just So Much still to learn.
My world view suddenly seemed ridiculously narrow and insubstantial. I was like the foolish man of the parable, who had built his house upon the sand. It was only a matter of time before the Walls would come Tumbling Down. It was only a matter if time before I would have to give some serious thought to Putting Away Childish Things.
