In which I go to church and unexpectedly cry
Navigating faith and nostalgia, I reflect on family, childhood, and unexpected church connections.
Last week I went to church.
My family brought me and my sisters up as Christians, attending church each Sunday morning and all of us coming to play parts in the various functions of the local parish: kids helping run Sunday School and singing in the choir for weddings; parents organising the music for services and holding leadership roles within the church structure. It was a big part of everyone’s life for a while back there.
None of us attend regularly any more, though I think the rest of my family still maintain their faith in their own way. Once I finished secondary school, I went through all the teenage atheist clichés and haven’t really thought about it since.
Faith has come up again recently in a few ways, though. My son is almost six and is exposed to a wide range of religions and cultural practices, one of the reasons we love living where we do. I found out recently, though, that a group of local Christian leaders have been coming into his school to run “Open The Book” sessions – a national program where kids are taught Bible stories, often dressing up and recreating them.
I’m softly opposed to this in a kind of hand-wringing, middle class secular way: I don’t consider myself religious and don’t particularly want my child to be given any steer down the path of faith/religion by people older and more experienced than he is with life. Whenever he returns from school saying “I believe in God”, or “the world was created in seven days”, I have to carefully demur with “yeah, some people believe that’s true”. Teaching your child that some grown-ups are going to tell him things that may not actually be true is quite a hard thing to express.
I’m overthinking it, of course: he can believe anything he likes at this stage of his life and when he’s old enough to start really interrogating these stories (“but dad, how can everyone in the world be descended from the same two people?” etc) then I think he’ll probably reach the same conclusions that we have. But if he doesn’t, that’s fine too – as a parent you’re always extremely conscious of the impact of anything you do or say on your child and their beliefs and behaviour.
So that brings me to last week: I was attending the christening of my niece, and my sister asked us to be godparents for her. It’s lovely to formally vow to protect and love someone you care about and I was honoured to be asked! And I also—childishly—crossed my fingers while standing before the congregation and repeating after the vicar that I would “promise to teach her to follow Christ” (or words to that effect).
Also attending the service was a family friend who I hadn’t seen for 20 years – I used to babysit her children when I was a teenager, and she helped me apply for university many years ago because she was an academic, one of few that my family knew. As I walked across the church to greet her, she stood up in floods of tears, and suddenly I was fighting back tears of my own, standing in the same church where I’d sang in choirs as a child, laid to rest a step-dad, witnessed marriages and performed plays.
We caught up and she showed me photos of her kids, now with children of their own, and we squeezed each others’ hands as she fought back more tears. I reflected on it later: seeing me must have taken her back decades through her own life (and those of her children): the tears weren’t (just) for seeing me grown up and with a family of my own, they were in unconscious recognition of the time that had passed us both by, the youth that was now in the past, and the things we’d all been through since I last saw her all those years ago, slipping a tenner into my pocket as she dropped me off at my mum’s house for the last time. We’d come full circle.
At the end of the service, another family friend appeared, who I’d also not seen for a while – these are the perils of growing up in a small village where everyone knows each other, then moving away as soon as you get the chance. People’s memory of you remains static: the precocious child (and later the sullen youth), while I stand there feeling like a completely different person with almost no connection surviving to the earlier incarnation of me.
She hugged me and I introduced the kids, and we chatted about life, family, work and society. But just before she left, she turned to me and inquired “I hope you don’t mind me asking… are you still a Christian? Do you still go to church? Tell me somebody from my group still does!” she half-pleaded. It all came crashing back to me: she taught the Sunday School “youth club” that I attended as a teen, and suddenly the memories of the two sisters who performed a “rap” of the books of the Bible came (cringeworthily) pouring back.
I found myself explaining to her that I no longer believed, and even started to explain about a school trip to a Holocaust museum and how it shook my faith. I found myself unable to utter the words “how could God allow such suffering" while standing inside a church – I had to abandon the sentence and trail off apologetically, eyes heavenward. Maybe the religiosity of the day was affecting me more than I realised.
I have no profound conclusions here: there’s probably a point to be made about the value and power of communities of people set up with a shared moral value and deliberate goals of care, compassion and support. Richard Dawkins tried to argue that even this was rooted in “delusion” and was ultimately futile, but it didn’t quite convince me as a teenage atheist. I can take or leave (well, just leave) the deity-worshipping, miracle-believing, water-into-wine magical thinking of it all. But maybe there’s something about people, in all their messy, awkward, well-meaning ways. That’s the part I’ll take.
Mini-feels this week
Sing for England
I went to a former colleague’s leaving work drinks a few nights ago. We ended up at a karaoke bar above a Vietnamese restaurant and someone was busy assembling DIY Jägerbombs from a bottle purchased from the exorbitantly-priced bar just outside the karaoke room. The music was too loud, the microphones too quiet, and everyone was singing their hearts out, myself included.
What I forgot, in my beery haze, was that because of the upcoming four day weekend, all my Friday and Monday meetings had been moved to the following day, and so when I staggered into a taxi at 1am, I began nervously wondering what the next day would be like.
Sure enough, at 9am I crawled into my office and dialled into the first of six one-to-one meetings, my voice croaky and broken. I tried to hide the hangover and appear alert and engaged, but if any of my work colleagues are reading this: I’m sorry. No more karaoke on a school night for me.