Oh ye of little Faith:

Last Wednesday night – ‘Spy Wednesday’  – I was alone in my study after everyone in the house had gone to bed. Alone in the dark but for the light from my laptop screen I was draining the bitter dregs from life’s cup. For the second time in six months the sale of our house has fallen through.

Over the past week as I could sense the deal slipping away, first I agonised; then I pleaded; then I hoped and finally I prayed. We all would – you might think. What else is God for if not to call upon in our times of trouble? Yes, irrationally or rationally, we all would pray.

But I did not pray for the deal to come through and the sale to stand, rather I prayed for the strength to endure the disappointment and for the wisdom to forge something positive from this set-back.

And, all alone but not alone, I felt inspired (perhaps required) to admit to something….a  strange thing that’s reshaped my life over the last eighteen months or two years…. 

My story will disappoint both the faithful and the faithless.

It will disappoint the faithless because my story embraces an unproven irrationality that intellectually I had dismissed but to which I have returned without any evidence to justify my change of heart. I have betrayed the very basis of my vaunted analytical reason. I am therefore unreasonable. The reasoning will only pity me a best; at worse they will angrily denounce me.

It will disappoint the faithful because in every season through my life I have found the church I grew-up in wanting: wanting of meaning; wanting to please with easy change;  wanting of intellectual honesty; wanting of the love and charity of which it purports to be a custodian;  wanting of honesty about sex and sexuality;  and worse of all of not wanting me – a gay Catholic.  My naive adolescence was filled with honest religious faith – I was intently Catholic. Gradually my faith eroded. It was washed away by the waters of reason and by my acute sense of having no proper place inside an organisation that told me I was unnatural.

Like the Prodigal Son, I cashed in my chips and took off to find or to make for myself a better world.

It’s said a Roman Catholic conscience is a cruel master. But to be honest it’s never governed me that strictly: I have been remarkably untortured about my sexuality; about sex; about having a good time; even guiltless, perhaps like Augustine, praying always to be chaste if not quite yet. I lived the sentiments expressed in the words of the ineffable Bette Davis on some rising starlet brushing by her table whilst making Hollywood Canteen: ‘there goes the good time that’s been had by all’.

Intellectually I evolved away from my religious beliefs and gradually became agnostic and then more slowly, if more consciously, I became atheist. In this time the church’s self-righteousness sometimes has made me truly angry. I found the attitude towards HIV taken by African bishops almost incomprehensible. The lie that condoms did not protect from the HIV virus was pernicious in any circumstances. I judged it to be most pernicious when repeated by those claiming ownership of a special relationship with truth.

Generally, however, I must admit, unlike ‘a good political gay’,  I saw the Catholicism of my childhood bathed in the benign light of unreflective indifference.  I remained, I guess like the Tudor historian I had become, hugely interested in religious history; and culturally, perhaps because of being Irish, I felt an affection for my old faith even if I entirely ceased to believe in it and in God.

I was never an angry atheist like Richard Dawkins –  whose wonderful books I have read and re-read and always very much enjoyed. And even now in penumbra of Cardinal O’Brien’s exposure as less than honest and less than chaste I feel less than anger at his charlatan piety. I feel a willingness to forgive him his trespasses; a willingness to say there’s no need to make him suffer greater humiliation than that he has brought inadvertently and advertently upon himself. He will be in a lonely place; he will be alone with his conscience.

We humans enjoy the virtue of judging others vices. Smugly reflecting on others failures enables us to avoid facing our own. It is one of the ugliest aspects of our nature as social animals  Yet we are also capable of being honest with ourselves. In our hearts we all know the hue and cry of the legal hunt is nothing more than a lynching dressed in the judges’ hunting pink and the barristers’  wigs. Truth told there’s no harder judge than an informed conscience. You do not need to be a Christian to be advised by the wisdom of the Gospel’s parables and stories. Christ most potently refused to judge to Mary Magdalene (the woman taken in adultery) & when her accusers wanted her stoned to death he offered: ‘Let he who is blameless cast the first stone’. As the crowd dispersed Christ turned to Mary and said ‘if these who accuse will not judge you then nor shall I: go home and sin no more.’ Christ reveals in those few words a profound understanding that the self-aware are most aware of their failings of character. Profound regret for one’s faults is found in the grace of self-awareness.

But if  every-man or every-woman may be advised by the wisdom in these ancient books of the Bible, it doesn’t mean we must believe literally in the stories told therein: the story of creation in the book of Genesis; or the story of the Flood and Noah; or the story of the Tower of Babel – these are myths and often found in the ‘birth mythologies’ of other ancient civilisations. Even the persuasive account in the books of Exodus of Moses and the flight from Egypt are certainly unhistorical. I am an historian. I understand sources. These books of the Bible are not factual – any more than the Iliad is factual – though there is a whole branch of modern evangelical Christianity devoted to the notion that they are. Simply put those beliefs are simply arrant nonsense.

I believe in evolution; I believe in the Big Bang theory or some cousin to it; I believe in science; I believe in rationality; I believe in secular philosophy; I believe in Einstein’s theory of relativity;  I’m a socialist without being Marxist; I believe in my life as an evolutionary one-off; and I very much believe in death.

I’ve seen a lot of death in my time. I’ve seen my friends die, many in slow wasting agonies;  I watched my beloved mother marooned in her paralysed body after her stroke whilst emotionally trapped in a miasma of hopeless depression tempered only by her irrational hope for a miracle cure. Sadly for her, the ‘Lourdes miracle’ never found its way to her small room in St Mark’s Nursing Home in Maidenhead.

I have never seen anything noble in pain; or suffering; or human want; or poverty; or ignorance. I have never thought Christianity should define civil society – nor should any religion indeed. Religion mediates how we live our own life. It should not empower us to abuse our beliefs by using them to govern the lives of others. Once we do that we are failing to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and thereby failing to render unto God those things that are His. If the Christian wishes to make an argument to regulate civil society it must be made upon the terms of the civil society. George Carey sometime archbishop of Canterbury is just wrong about this matter.

I believe women do have the right to choose – their choices are like my choices – they may be moral or immoral. It is not moral to replace legal abortion with a return to backstreet abortion. To reduce moral dilemmas over life and death into simple nostrums of black and white is exactly what God tells us not to do.  I have never agreed with the Church over civil marriage. I believe contraception is a valid choice to which men and woman should have free access and which they can freely choose to use or not. I believe allowing poverty to deprive equal access to these choices is also wrong. Equally, I believe any couple may choose to have as large a family as they feel is right for them. I am that thing the religious and irreligious most loathe – the bleeding-heart-liberal: full of noble ideals; passionate about freedom; passionate about liberty; choices and rights.

Coming from a sexual minority persecuted for being different has made me empathise with all minorities bullied into silence by a menacing majority. When HIV came along in the early 1980’s we all feared what would happen to us next. We knew the majority would use this as a weapon against our freedom just to be; and they did.  As we were picked off one by one by disease we clung to each other whilst learning to live each day, from day to day, living always with the certain knowledge we would be next to fall. As the early Christians knew – there’s a camaraderie that comes with social persecution. The progress of HIV/Aids transformed disparate groups of gay men and women with their own identities into a gay community with its collective identity. It remade the world under the collective diversity of the rainbow flag. Like the suffragettes in Edwardian England changed how society viewed women; the gay movement from the 1970’s change how society viewed minorities. Good therefore may come from evil. Miracles do happen.

In the 1990’s Richard – with whom I’d lived since the mid 1980’s – fell gravely ill. He had a viral encephalitis. In the space of a four days he went from feeling fine to almost dying in intensive care. He was totally unconscious; his breathing shallow; it had all happened so quickly; and suddenly we were being told it was a matter of hours, a few days, no more. We would sit and hold Richard’s hand; quietly fret and then go over the road to the pub opposite the Middlesex Hospital and drink gin. Then we would return to the bedside. We were warned that he had been so long unconscious he most likely would suffer immense brain damage even if he regained consciousness.  My mother Creena (who so adored Richard) and her partner Brian were in Spain. Somehow we got a message to them. They couldn’t come back so instead they drove from their holiday villa in  Villa-nova to Montserrat to light candles & pray for Richard and get mass said for him.

Two Catholic priests –  wonderful friends both to me and to Richard came to see him.They told me they had the permission of the archbishop to receive Richard into the church. Richard was a bit like Charles II – he’d sort of always wanted to be a Catholic but never got around to it. His closest friend Robert was an Anglican priest and I asked him his opinion and he agreed we should do it.  As I watched they anointed him with oils –  I was thinking Richard would not live long.

After the anointing – Robert, Brendan and I took the priests to the pub for another gin break. When we came back Richard was coming back into consciousnesses. In twenty four hours he was sitting up watching camp movies. Most extraordinarily he suffered had no brain damage. I knew it was a miracle of sorts even if I did not attribute it to the ‘magic’ of the sacrament.

Others, so very many of them,  did not have lucky escapes. In their extremis, I did what I could as a friend to mitigate their  waiting-agony. I held hands as they held on to life;  and then I let go only when they had let go of life. I happily went to as many non-religious funerals as to religious ones. It never occurred to me to proselytise.  Strangely when my time came to walk that tightrope between life and death I never thought of God, confession, communion or the church. I never considered heaven or hell. I did not send a priest away I simply forgot to call on one. I was given a few weeks to live. I know mum prayed; I know Masses were said; I even kept a few Mass cards sent to me. When they did the tests for chemo my cancer had disappeared. That too seemed like a miracle but one transacted by Nature and entirely without God. I still had the chemotherapy. Little did I understand how it would change my life.

I passed on from physical illness through another darker time after my cancer treatment; into depression; into a world where I hid from reality in the unreality of drink and recreational drugs.  I agonised about how I had let everyone down and then took myself further down into the abyss. Thanks to Richard and Brendan and to all my friends I finally faced the unpalatable truth. I needed to stop and with their help I found the courage to seek-out the help I needed and I came through. I did not do it with recourse to God, the church or prayer;  but with recourse to talking therapy and writing, cooking, laughing at myself and lots and lots of walking. When I finally came through it was as if it had been a bad dream. Afterwards I even managed to stop blaming myself for mum’s stroke.

I had long felt the worry of my failures had made her ill. I also felt this terrible distance as I tried to make good what had happened to her while feeling uncomfortable with her – with the new her- the person changed into a stranger by the stroke. Mum kept to her religious faith and in her last years after a brief period of being suicidal when she tried in a pathetic way to end her life in the nursing home outside Cashel.  Afterwards we brought her back to England & she clung tenaciously to life –  even her  much diminished life –  and to her religion.

Mum’s religion: it was always something I could smile at and smugly look down on…not very nice of me…but it’s true.  I think she knew it too but never said anything.

So, this is who I was and had become.I wasn’t looking to or expecting to have any new religious experiences. Like many phases of my life I thought had lived through it; enjoyed and felt I had grown out of it or gotten too old for it or simply intellectually had gone beyond it. I had survived against the odds. It was odd but oddly I never reflected on it.

Here I am looking 60 in the face each morning in the mirror and thinking, ‘gosh I never expected to get this old’. As I get into the shower I glance at my old man’s tummy and those other bits of me that seem these days to be attractive only to gravity. My winding path through life has been very special but probably not especially unusual. My youthful looks are gone; my hopes for a life partner are gone too…but I don’t mind…there are still so many things left to enjoy. Life changes with you and you change with life. You find what you want and need are not the things you once believed to be so important. That’s  part of life’s elusive beauty. Above all I don’t fear death…of course dying is frightening…but then I’ve seen enough of it to know it will take its own course in its own time.

So here we are almost bang up to date….except…yes, you are right like all stories there is an unexpected twist.

…But again this isn’t the great Damascene moment of conversion….a moment of blinding revelation which I’m urged to share with every Tom, Harry or Dick…

I suppose it started with mum’s last months.

In the last year of her life we again became very close. I got comfortable with just turning up with flowers. I’d rub perfume on her arms and forehead. Sometimes I’d stroke her face and kiss her forehead   Sometimes I’d comb her hair. I’d hold her hand. On occasion she would be well enough to watch a film – usually My Fair Lady or the Sound of Music. I would sit with her all afternoon. We didn’t talk much. She’d  doze and wake up and say ‘you’re still here’ and smile. I’d make her tea or toast.  These were visits like a voyage of rediscovery. We re-found together our old togetherness. I don’t why we got on because in many ways we were very different but we always had an easy affection with each other.

Then in the last months she got considerably weaker. Her heart was giving out. She knew the change in her.   She was very frightened of death.  Though she was fervently religious her faith didn’t extend to these last steps on life’s pilgrim path each must walk alone. She had always been fearful of doing things by herself and now these little fears loomed large. All she had was her little wooden rosary beads and her Simple Prayer Book which she couldn’t open easily with one hand; or hold open read. As she became dehydrated she couldn’t even pray.

So mechanically I started to fill in for her.  I used to say the Angelus with her using her Simple Prayer Book; then morning and evening prayers. It just became another of our shared rituals.To be honest I never thought about it. I just did it because it seemed to help her. I knew where we were going from own experience of watching my friends fade away. A couple of times she and I had the death conversation. I told her she would never be alone once she crossed the little gap between life and death. I told her she would be with us  but we would have to wait a little while to be with her again. And though you never want someone to die there comes a point when you also no longer want them to go on. It took her so long. It was not beautiful; it was difficult for her; it was not until they put a morphine patch on her arm that she finally rested; then gradually she slipped from our arms into death’s embrace. Those words rich in pathos come to my mind – from St John’s account of the Christ’s Passion: it is accomplished.

My sister was with mum when she died. I arrived a little later and put perfume on her as I had done when I visited her. There were two angel lights my brother Peter had given Creena for Christmas and we put them on either side of her and kissed her goodbye. She was hardly recognisable from the struggle to live and to die. I looked back one last time as we closed the door.

When you move from having someone to not having them something composite sets within your memory –  love caught inside life’s amber. I cannot express this very well. It becomes a sensory experience, like quenching a candle and smelling the meld of wick and wax; or the passing fragrance of a dog-rose on a river bank; or the savour of the last of a glass of desert wine; or maybe the sweet hotness when you hold a baby in your arms. It is clearly etched; bathed with emotional significance;  yet, not a particular memory. Naturally I was at mum’s funeral mass. We said the Angelus one last time with Creena and it had a peculiar intensity for me but I thought nothing more of it; or of going to Mass; or anything beyond. I’d pop into the odd church and light the odd candle – a sort of Catholic thing to do for friends and family. I’ve done it all my life.

Then not many months after mum died I went to the Dream of Gerontius.

I’ve always loved my choral music and, together with my later passion for opera, it defines my musical taste. I’d never been much of a one for either John Henry Newman nor Edward Elgar, though both are Catholic converts, they are quintessentially English. I was not exactly overwhelmed by Gerontius, more perhaps intrigued…as if one has uncovered something…a bit like an historian finding a document that explains some event.  I found myself reading the poem. I found myself being moved by its very personal, intense, account of  faith, and of God and mostly of Purgatory. I kept on returning to it; drawing the words from its sacred well. In Gerontius there is a deep pool of holiness. Then at Brompton Oratory – that grand baroque church that sits next to the V&A – I found myself lighting a candle beside Newman’s altar. Newman was an Oratorian and is buried in their church in Birmingham. I lingered in the portentous religious gloom which always makes me smile. Then out of nowhere I felt a special…intense presence –  as if the cardinal and I might be speaking directly to one another. I did not mention this to any one. These imagined Irish vintages don’t travel well in England, as they say.

Richard and I decided to go to Mass at Westminster Cathedral – maybe it was around Christmas. I can remember being utterly choked as I heard the choir sing the plainchant Introit.

….Here we go, like all Catholics you’re thinking, you just don’t grow out of it….

It wasn’t like that at all. It was actually rather annoying; more like a nagging; like the spirit of Gerontius – it just would not let go of me. I distracted myself with all my usual things and then…so I went back to Mass a couple more times.  I’d blank out the homily. I am not one for the didactic liturgy of the new Mass – way too Protestant for my tastes –  noisy blasts of prayer busily informing the Deity of what He already presumably knows about Himself. Nor, were these the best of times for me to rediscover my religion as gay civil marriage was blowing-up and the church was blowing-up very hot against it – and by extension against all things homosexual characterised but not limited to the homophobic rants of Cardinal O’Brien.  And often I felt very angry with what was being said from the pulpit.

At the same time, Richard and my friends began to notice my new Sunday habit…which started to spread weirdly into the week. And they teased me as friends do. And generally it seemed easier to say nothing very much for fear of making them think I was taking leave of the last remains of my few senses.

A ‘voice’ kept calling me; quietly insistent; quietly nagging: get up; go to church. Then of all things at Mass one Sunday –  I thought I should go to confession. Now even my religious heyday I was never a great one for this particular sacrament. Last June I just found myself on the bus one Friday about midday taking myself for no particular reason to confession. And when I got in – I know I could  still be there and not have exhausted the limits of the ‘sins’ I might need to confess to – but it wasn’t like that at all. I was not guilty; not ashamed; not agonised. I just blurted out that I was so sorry and I wanted to do better.  I did cry – I do cry easily – but it hardly adds up to anything when I put it down here –  but at its moment it was singularly profound.

It was as if someone held up a mirror into which I looked and said to my reflection I want to do better but I now know I can’t do better without help. Essentially this is the exact act of the returning Prodigal Son. I hadn’t thought of that at the time. Admitting I needed help – call it grace – to do better –  that made me aware of…I hate this…it sounds so clichéd…of being lit from within with a quiet joy; a peace; to borrow from Wordsworth – a sense sublime. It travelled outwards; a surge of comforting warmth – a sensation both emotional and physical: not giddy; not happy; not overwhelming; but absolutely real.

Indeed my sense of this being real grows only stronger the freely more I embrace my express need for help. The more it happens the more certain I feel this different strength. It is liberating. As it happens it has not “magiced” away my problems; it has not helped me sell the house; it has not made me a better person – well maybe a little bit – in fact if anything it is complicating my life. The more it goes on the harder I seem to have to work at it but equally the easier I find it. This is a world of paradoxes. I get this sense that God thinks it highly amusing that I – the know-all, ever-ready with a-quip, the smart-Alec me, that I am left by this new reality in a state both of knowing and not knowing what the hell I’m meant to do.

Then I look back over my strange life experience and I’m now haunted with the realisation that, well, He’s been around all along – sorting things in a strange way…and if that realisation is faith and if my acknowledgment of it is prayer…then to borrow the words of Lady Byrd Johnson on leaving the Met after its opening night in 1967 when asked how she enjoyed the evening and she replied in her heavy Texan accent: ‘I was trans-for-m-ed’…and indeed I am…

I find myself in continuous dialogue with… with God I guess…it sounds so arrogant. This is not the capitalist God of American evangelism who repays faith with goodies. God as the celestial slot machine in a heavenly Las Vegas who eventually pays out if you put in persist in placing your few prayers in the appropriate place in the ethereal machinery. Nor is the God whose bestows some dignity upon life’s important personal and society’s important public occasions: the God of wedding, funerals, inaugurations and jubilees: that is the God with whom you do a deal in one way or another.

In the Dream of Gerontius Newman presents us with another God entirely. Newman sees god as an active personal relationship accessed through prayer. Prayer being essentially a communion between two conscientious minds, one lesser; one infinitely greater; a dialogue where deeper acquaintance with and knowledge of God makes one more conscious of a desire to love (and praise) Him….I guess rather akin to a growing friendship or even to falling in Love…when you wax lyrical about your partner’s wondrous virtues to anyone who will listen to you.

Newman’s prayer is modeled on intense conversation. It is a dialogue where, because the Word Made Flesh became man, a man’s Words may be heard by God; the subjective emotional sensory experience of human love, becomes in God, a experience of Love that is continuous reality; it is the Love that is the Light; it is the burning passion that alone alone satisfies our Nature.

You may to regard all of this to be more than a string of poetic phrases purporting to be a solid  philosophical idea;  no more than empty words meaning nothing.

But it’s easy to sneer at the simple beliefs of others whilst overlooking the simple truths about oneself.

At its best, in wise minds, God can be more than our idea of better; He can represent in our actions towards others  the best in each of us. And to pray He does, even if God seems merely to be another construct of our imaginations; another consumable image in an age of endless consumption stimulated by image; it is still better than believing we are not capable of being better towards each other than we are; it is better than believing there in no alternative to the chains of a dead-end jobs and the prisons of working-slavery that is the reality of life for the great majority of our fellow men and women.

To hold up that failed world as one we cannot better – a world to which there is no practical alternative – that is the real failure of imagination; that is real godlessness; that is real wickedness writ large and small. It is the moral slough; the quicksand of envy that consumes us all. It is the world of bankers; the world of financiers; the world of gaudy celebrities and shallow entertainments. It is the world where mindless conspicuous consumption alone imbues meaning to human existence. It’s vacuity occupies the space where each human life should be lived and like knot weed it chokes the hope from all life around it.

For in our minds there is something bigger than the sum of our individual parts and that is what makes us special and consciously different. It doesn’t mean we are destined to rise to the occasion but at least we are born aware that life is an occasion worth the effort of rising to…and denying that of God in us denies us everything.

Rising to occasions: that’s a good metaphor for Easter…..

I have travelled through this Lent holding to my little denials: in the few hours before the Easter Vigil I can smile. I’ve won my little struggle to deny myself booze, biscuits & chocolate. A small victory of the selfless over the selfish. It reminds one we actually all can do more without too much struggle – though how did I resist a drink over the last week of trauma over the house – I don’t know….

Except you see I certainly do know how and in the knowing is this – weird, weird, worry-some thing called Faith…