Here we print extracts from some of the fourteen contributors who were asked by editor Teresa Wallace to write about themselves and what has led them to their present understanding of religion in a world where traditional religious belief is ebbing away like a receding tide. The result is in turn provocative, moving hilarious, contemplative and passionate, revealing the Network as a collection of women and men from widely different backgrounds and with very different faith allegiances but united in the commitment “to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation”.
My Story, My Song Dancing in the Dark “| hit my teens running. From school, mainly. In those days it was a punishable offence to be small because teachers thought everything you said was cheeky. | got belted silly by that unique Scottish educational implement a thick thong of hard leather — but quickly learnt to write my own sick notes (diarrhoea my speciality) and that was the end of my formal education. | eventually made a dash for freedom on a stolen bike but got arrested halfway to the English border. The Darkness followed, of course. | could not run away from that. Religion had never impinged on my life. | certainly made no connection between the “thinks” and the Orange Walk, or the ladies-in-hats emerging from gaunt buildings with faces like hatchets. Being a “Proddy”meant following Rangers, not Jesus only religious acts consisted in throwing stones at Catholics and chanting “Fuck the Pope” (whoever he was) on school trips.
It was therefore a surprise when the marched into its youth club, got chucked out for stealing, kicked the young officer, sloped back to a meeting to mess about (with my ‘gang’), gang left, | stayed and listened, and came back. Why? | felt the Light.” Duncan Park (who was too mythic to move anywhere). My Salvation Army marched into my life. Actually | | Twilight of the Idols “My journey to the priesthood was far from simple. | managed to get myself thrown out of Osterley (a pre-seminary college) at the age of 19. | had just discovered sex in arguably the most inappropriate place possible. My name was added to the long list of ‘Duvet Martyrs’; | had rather naively thought that God would take care of that aspect of the human experience. After all, | was preparing to make a vow of celibacy; the least He could do was provide some self-control.” Jude Bullock This is my song “God and Jesus filled our weekdays as well as Sundays. As small boys, my brother Brian and | would play at being God the Father and God the Son. | was the Father because | was older and bigger, Brian the subservient Son, which he rather resented. We would perch on the back of the sitting-room settee, our Heaven, and smile seraphically down on the carpet, our world below. After a while, God would urge Jesus down to earth to fulfil his mission. If he resisted, as he usually did, a fight ensued in which Jesus was forcibly ejected from the celestial sofa-back. Once he bumped his head on the way down, and Jesus wept. God the Father then had his bottom smacked by his mother”.
David Boulton Skinny-dipping: Acting on Faith “It is not that the work of the Leaveners, a Quaker community arts group, has become a religion, but that its work is essentially at the heart of what religion is all about. A community endeavour that powerfully bonds its participants to witness to a human need, whether in the outer world of non-violent direct action or in the inner world of stories told through music and drama, is surely a religious quest.” Alec Davison Birdsong at Night “| have a kaleidoscope of memories of being there [in the Orkneys]. | remember one of the first weddings | conducted, when | had replaced the Book of Common Order’s rather grave and stilted introduction to the service by my own more personal version. When | arrived at the reception afterwards, the mother of the bride was anxiously waiting to ask if | was sure that her daughter was properly married. | remember the burials (‘There have been so many deaths since you came, Miss Alexander!’) mostly to the windswept cemetery overlooking Scapa Flow, sometimes to ancient, tiny churchyards on the shoreline or beside a loch. Once | had to return a man’s mortal remains to the island of Wyre.
A boat was commissioned to cross the Sound, with the mourners and me crammed silently within the wheel-house, and the coffin strapped to the deck outside. We held the service in a hall some way from the pier. The car that had transported me there from the pier had mysteriously vanished at the end, and | rode back to the waiting boat on a trailer loaded with hay. It must have been a curious sight: the young black-skirted ‘lady minister’ from Kirkwall, clutch- ing her cassock, wedged between the bales.” Helen Alexander Falling in love again “There are plenty of Goliaths: the greed of our society; the exploitation of indigenous and low-caste people (in India and elsewhere); cultural imperialism of the West and the North; obsession with retaliation and punishment which continually blocks the way to justice; religions defining themselves over against each other instead of offering their insights in a complementary kaleidoscope; and the hypocrisy of our attitudes to violence for political ends.
And the biggest confidence trick ever played in Britain — exploiting our greed, taking money from many to make a few richer, and corrupting the voluntary sector by causing us to compete for sterile money with no love in it — is the National Lottery.
David standing firm against Goliath is in my blood.” David Paterson Making the Breaks “1955. | walk up the long chestnut-tree-lined drive to what was to be the centre of my universe for the next four years. What was a priest? A holy man in the world but apart from it, celibate, and with power to bring the Son of God down on to the altar in the form of bread and wine. He was a distributor of the Grace of God to the humble faithful, baptising their babies, hearing their confessions and administering Extreme Unction at the moment of their departure. He was the bridge between God in heaven and earth below.
But | was soon to learn that the realities were somewhat different. Priests returning to college warned us of the pitfalls. ‘No Sex’ was a tough one, they told us, but there were ways and means of getting round it. The pious urged the wearing of a scapula of St Monica.
Others removed their dog collars and slipped out into the night to find someone to share a bed with. After all, the rule of celibacy only forbade marriage. Some priests gave up the struggle. These became known as ‘fallen angels’ and they quietly merged back into the world they had once forsaken. But above all, priests were to be utterly obedient and submissive to the Will of God as expressed in the rulings of the Bishop. They were civil servants, serving a church which long ago had transformed itself into a secular state but which sadly persisted in wearing the badge of its founder who had spent most of his short life railing against the very kind of institution the church had become.” Derek Chorley Pick and Mix “| became increasingly uncomfortable wondering how far any of us is entitled to call our story our own. We learn from the first to think of our lives as intimately belonging to us in a way that nothing else does. We are taught to make our own way, to take responsibility for our own actions and ultimately to rely on our own perceptions, hunches and interpretations of events — with reference to a developing personal conscience. However, it has taken this particular writing exercise to show me the extent to which my story cannot be justifiably called my own. Indeed my life has been continually immersed in the life stories of others. | am still troubled that the story you get today will be different from the one you might get tomorrow: my mood at the time of writing will profoundly affect what actually comes out.
Narrative written over several days will reflect a contrary range of attitudinal swings. Even more significantly, perhaps, comment on my early life made in my forty-ninth year will be inevitably distorted by hindsight. In the stark terms of cell replacement the present writer is of course simply no longer the same person she was then — she has already undergone seven complete changes!” Penny Mawdsley This is my Story is obtainable from the Network Secretary, Ronald Pearse, 15 Burton St, Loughborough LEI! 2DT at £5 plus £1 p&p. Other SoF publications are Agenda for Faith by Stephen Mitchell (now £2.50 post-free) and A Reasonable Faith: Introducing the Sea of Faith Network by David Boulton (£2 or free to membership enquirers).
Extracts compiled by editor Teresa Wallace from contributors to the SoF book This is my Story: voyages on the sea of faith.