Aileen La Tourette goes back to church.
OK, I went because I was desperate. Typical cliché return to Holy Mother Church post-devastation, post-tragedy. A counsel of despair, not an act of faith or renewal or anything of the kind.
I did some research. The church nearest me, less than five minutes away, was of the fascistic RC ilk, given away on their web site by a proscription against receiving communion any way – or anywhere – but on the outstretched tongue. That signalled everything I most wanted to keep away from. Roman Catholicism is a very divided religion right now. There are basically the Vatican II Catholics and the pre-Vatican II, Pius XII brigade. The latter – of whom the last two popes were leading examples – are anathema to me, to nail my colours to the mast.
I did locate a church, most inconvenient, whose prayer on their website was to Archbishop Romero and whose aesthetic looked almost Quaker in its simplicity. I have form as a failed Quaker. I have a lot of time for Quakerism and a lot of respect for it, but I couldn’t be one. Temperamentally unsuited. The Roman Catholicism of my youth had sunk too deep. I loved the silent meetings but missed the drama of the Mass, the rituals and the sacraments, and something I felt to be more raw, more primitive, less gentrified – though I was also minded of the Inquisition, which John Paul II had continued, forbidding as he did the mere discussion of a female priesthood. I have a friend who is a nun, a friend who taught me in high school and had made me aware of the vile treatment some North American nuns have received from the Vatican for their radical missions and ecological approaches.
So I was guarded as I entered the little church, probably frowning, prepared to be decisively turned off. The first thing that happened was a dog, trotting up to say hello and ask for a little stroke as I hesitated by the holy water font, wondering if this whole idea was simply ludicrous.
Which, of course, it was. But life had become ludicrous anyway, so it more or less fitted. I carried on inside, ignoring the holy water, and registered the simplicity of the interior. The statues were all made of wood, the cross on the altar carved in such a way that it could be a bird. There were lovely draped bolts of cloth from the altar steps, pine cones and candles, and more cloth spilling in long folds from the pulpit. I was reminded of an exhibition I had seen some years ago at the Royal Academy by Artist in Residence Alison Watt. She had taken Old Masters and copied, not the saints in their long flowing robes but the robes themselves, magnified, in particular the folds; folds and folds of shadow in huge canvases that took up whole walls.
I found my way to a folding chair – no kneelers here. We stand and sit, I learned, and we also say Mass together. In the old days, the verb was to hear Mass – and that was what you did. You listened, as intently as you could, and you heard the priest say Mass.
Not here. You said it with him – and his style was conversational, a dialogue that included the formal words of the Mass but also included remarks addressed to us and himself about what we were all doing, about the God in whom he clearly believed, remarks about unconditional love and ‘bringing everything’ and how ‘It’s not about being good, it’s about finding goodness’.
It drew me in and over the weeks I watched myself being drawn in, except for the moments when I forgot to watch and just was there. I had a sensation early on that I can only describe as something like what I imagine people felt in the bizarre practice of trepanning – drilling actual holes in their heads – which apparently they did, or maybe still do, with some impunity.
This feeling had to do with being with other people in a way that seemed to slice off a layer of self, or separateness, or ego, something that I was only too glad to lose. And at the same time as something heavy and onerous was lost, something else was let in; maybe just fresher air, made up of other people’s breathing around me. I wouldn’t like to define it. In fact, I don’t define very much, these days. I have no idea what I believe or don’t believe and I prefer to keep it that way. I think lots of people have kept it that way down through the centuries, quietly ‘finding goodness’ where they could and leaving the rest.
The parish is quite a poor one. There are lots of collections for hot meals during the school holidays and similar things like help with heating and electric bills over the winter. The bidding prayers always include refugees and others in need, as well as families with all their travail. The priest, a friendly Celt, is realistic about the difficulties families face, and mentions them often.
He does a very poetic Monday night prayer service I get to rarely, made up of readings and incense and music. He also includes those things in his Sacrament of Reconciliation, which he does according to the Third Rite, a communal event where we line up as for communion, stand in front of him one by one and say ‘Bless me Father for I have sinned’ with his hand on our shoulders as he absolves us. I can’t say the word ‘absolution’ resonates for me, but there is something about participating in this communal acknowledgement of human frailty and failure that does. It’s a far cry from the old whispered list in the dark sin-box in the back of the church like a huge upended coffin, and the gabbled Three Hail Marys that followed. None of that.
I didn’t care for the watered down Ash Wednesday ritual, and longed for the old ringing tone of Remember Man that thou art dust and into dust thou shalt return. Of course the man part was a stumbling block, but I could live with that, rather than some clappy-happy claptrap about the ‘Good News’. I was grateful for Francis – very probably couldn’t have managed getting myself into a church without him – but I did and do wish he were a lot more clued about women.
I have other reservations, of course. But religious practice seems to be somewhat steadying, and that is what I need from it, at this juncture. Sometimes you need lots of little things to keep you going – is Mass more crucial than the little white Jack Russell bitch I walk on the beach? Not really. It’s just different. Maybe they’re both rituals, even sacraments of a sort. I certainly do not enter into either one without reluctance, most of the time. But pushing yourself out of yourself seems to be an act that’s worth something.
It isn’t what it was, and that’s what makes it possible. Apart from the brief vintage years of John XXIII when I was a teenager and it was really great to be a Catholic, and we visited the Catholic Worker in New York, founded by the great Dorothy Day who isn’t a saint because she didn’t want money spent on that – it’s very expensive to be canonized – apart from that amazing period, when we naively thought it would go on and on getting better and better – the Catholic Church has meant little to me in recent decades other than history and all that history implies, until now.
But Francis is a welcome relief, despite his shortcomings. At least he seems to like women. And uptight cardinals call him a heretic, which has to be a good sign, most lately because he might not believe in hell. He does, clearly, believe in mercy and a merciful God, like the priest at ‘my’ church. And people who believe in those things are good to be around. There are not too many of them. I’m glad I’ve found one. And his dog.
Aileen La Tourette is a poet and novelist. Her most recent novel is The Oldest Girl (Caliband, 2011). In 2016 she won the Live Canon International Poetry Competition and edited The Green Door: Poems by Paper Voices (Psychology News Press, London). She was a lecturer in Creative Writing at John Moores University Liverpool, retiring in 2011.