Let me define what I mean by 'style'. It isn't anything that can be bought, for a start. Advertisers bend over backwards trying to convince us that they have bagged or bottled it, but they haven't, and they can't.
Style bubbles up from some spring of humour and originality in the self, or it does not.
Pause for a note on the 'self'. I know Don Cupitt mentioned in his lecture at S.o.F. II that the self is a construct, much like God, I presume, and one that is passing away now into philosophical disrepute. I would like to make one point about this concept of a concept called the self. For centuries, women have had no selves. Now we have claimed that space, and just as we get there, what happens ? Someone 4... declares that there's nowhere to get. It seems a bit mean to me, and while I'd hate to be paranoid about it, it also seems a mite suspicious that men should decide the self no longer exists just when I can finally afford one, so to speak. I think we should prolong the notion for another hundred years or so, if only as a sort of teething ring. Men seem to have cut their teeth on it after all.
English people like to scoff at style. That may be why it has hit so hard, during the eighties - there was no immunity to it. But the most eccentrically dishevelled and filthy English rich person with a houseful of old toilet rolls and newspapers (and I've met them) has style. A lot of kids sleeping rough on the streets of London have style. They ask for change with dignity, they thank you, even wish you a good evening. That's style. It's other things as well - in fact, much as I want them all to have nice warm homes, I find the streets diek of London the friendliest they've ever been, right now, in a heartbreaking sort of way.
I just want to make the point that style is totally democratic and costs nothing. "Manners are modes of being, " says an Iris Murdoch character somewhere. Manner is even more so. Style is an attitude of being, I would say. And just as individuals have it, religions do, too, if only by default.
The religion I was brought up in, Roman Catholicism, is, I would venture, the most stylish religion in the world, and, as such, dear to my heart. There's a sense of the dramatic at the core of it which is deeply thrilling and satisfying. Again, I do not use the word 'thrilling' in a pejorative sense. Thrills enhance life, they make it livelier. Roman Catholicism provides a lot of them, not cheap ones either, but the real thing, spine-chilling, effective thrills. The processions of my youth were passionate experiences. Wearing white organdie and a crisp white veil, gloved in felt, even socked and shoed in white, kissing rose petals and dropping them down on the aisle in front of the monstrance - wow. Add incense, music, candles, a tall altar boy behind the swinging censer, and you don't get much more stylish than that. You don't get much more than that, period. The Mass, not Barnum & Bailey's Circus, is the Greatest Show on Earth, and I suspect it will always play to packed houses somewhere in the world.
There's an enormous But coming ... but I shall prolong the suspense. I have been an erratic attender at a local (Blackheath) Quaker Meeting off and on for twenty years. Quakerism has a style, too, but it isn't my style. It doesn't try to compete with circuses or carnivals. There's nothing vulgar about it. Whereas there's a side of me as vulgar as the worst excesses of Spanish religious iconography - well, maybe not the worst. There's nothing murky and questionable and sado-masochistic, like the Stations of the Cross.
I sense Quakerism denies, or prefers to avoid, something as much a part of life as darkness is to light. If Catholicism is bloodstained, Quakerism feels bloodless. On another level, its 'house style' is somewhat scrubbed and puritanical, and my own is not. It tends toward the flamboyant and the spectacular.
There may be a corrective element in the Society of Friends for me. Be that as it may, I had talked myself pretty well out of Quakerism when I came to S.o.F. II.
Then Loyal Rue said, "Don't leave the churches to the morons", or words to that effect, and I thought, "Maybe I gave up too easily. I'll try again. I know the worst. I've spent a year reading Liberation Theology, and I know about the gagging of Leonard Boff, etc. I shall go in armed and critical, this time, and see if there's a place for me.
I think, looking back, Father Boff had as much to do with it as Loyal Rue. I love Boff's books. I love his gorgeous, baroque spinoffs from the Trinity which make me forget to ask whether I 'believe' in the Trinity. I love his unsentimental book on Francis of Assisi. I even love his terrible book on the femininity of God, which makes me think he never met a woman in his life. It's so touching that he tries to make up for it by inventing one.
So off I went to Mass. I loved it, just like I always do. I got carried right away, into another state of consciousness. Religion is a hard drug for me, always has been. An opiate for sure, but Marx forgot to mention that opium dreams are sublime. It breaks my heart to give it up. Worse than foregoing nicotine, and that was bad. But the return forced my hand. I can't dart into Notre Dame for a quick fix when I'm in Paris, even. Because for all the beauty of it, the wonderful, erotic intensity, the sheer style, "there is no heresy or no philosophy so abhorrent to my church as a human being" as James Joyce so brilliantly said. As for a female human being ... but I anticipate.
I went to Mass for five weeks. The first week, I met the parish priest afterwards and told him belligerently how much I agreed with Graham Greene's recent comments about the Church. He replied, "I'm sure a lot of us do," and said that the Church had to be constantly reforming itself. He was also warm and humorous. So far, so good. A woman held the chalice at Communion and I thought, "humph, so they can hold the cup but not the hosts," but then the next week she did, so that hurdle was cleared.
And yet, there was a fearful sense of walking into a wood, and getting lost, delightfully perhaps, but lost just the same. And there was a more subtle sense of something being quietly eroded, and that something, when I thought about it, seemed to be the very thing I was there to celebrate, my religious sense. I began to wonder whether religion wasn't invented to take it away, rather than to reinforce or express it, to relieve one of religious feelings, rather as bad therapy relieves one of certain feelings, rather than to assist one to accept and contain them.
I should mention, since this is a confessional sort of piece in place, I suppose, of the Confession that I never made, that I was also in the throes of deciding to increase my own (psycho)therapy to two sessions per week. I suspect that going to Mass once a week was a way of postponing the decision, and when I made it, I stopped going. It seems relevant to bring up that embarrassing detail.
The sympathetic priest went away on leave and another one took his place. He gave a sermon, my fifth week, about Confession, which I was contemplating. In it he said he had to deny Absolution, sometimes, to people who were committing a Serious Sin and refused to say they'd stop. It was very clear that he was talking about one specific Serious Sin, and that sin was Contraception. He never named these things, but they were there.
I don't practice contraception, because I have had a hysterectomy. But I would if I hadn't. And I believe in a woman's inviolable rights over her own body, including her own pregnant body. And it makes me seethe with indignation to hear a man pronounce on these things, especially a celibate man.
And I looked around. And there were the families of my childhood, with kids like steps and mothers looking like they'd been run over by a bus. It's their choice, people said. Choice ? Denied absolution is denied choice.
And then, the last straw. I went to Communion, because a Mass without it is a meal without food, for me. As I reached for the host, the priest stopped his slow, deliberate bestowing to say to me, "No, not like that. Use your other hand". I had no idea what he meant. On reflection, I can only imagine that I had absent-mindedly let my left hand drop and reached for the host with my right, and that to him the gesture looked too offhand, too casual. He may have been within his rights to admonish me for what seemed half-hearted or sloppy. But it was the end for me. I can't explain it, except that it stirred up that old childhood feeling of being in the wrong, of being wrong, inexorably and incurably.
I've come to two conclusions. The first can be summed up as - well, what the hell did I expect ? The second is a feeling that going back involves more fealty, more conscious alliance, than I have for or with Rome. If I had stayed, all this time, like Mr Greene and others, I could criticise from within, and find a comfortable priest, and go on, squeamishly, perhaps, practising my faith. But I didn't stay in, I left, and going back is a different matter. It's deliberate. You can't fudge it. Like it or lump it, I've made my bed. I've fought for a modicum of self-esteem. I think priests who tell women they can't practice 'artificial birth control' should have unspeakable things done to them.
Which is not a Quaker sentiment But I went back to my Quaker meeting and it looked and felt damned good, after five weeks of Catholicism. I'll never be a 'good' Quaker. I don't even want to be. I'll always be, not a 'lapsed' Catholic, which insinuates something let slide out of indifference or negligence, but a Catholic who has left the Church, in anger and sorrow, for the second time. I shall miss it and mourn it. But there is no place for me in the Church of John Paul II. I watch with trepidation as that Church grows stronger ; I won't do anything to strengthen it further.
I shall leave it to the women who can hack it and the men who haven't noticed what it says and does to one half of the human race as well as to many of their own half - or don't care ; or can accommodate. And to Leonard Boff, who is probably a saint, if there is such a thing. As I am probably not.
Aileen La Tourette led the Drama workshop at last year's Conference and lives in Lewisham, south London.