Chapter 9: Being a Catholic

In the end, it was an easy decision to leave. It wasn’t a decision made quickly. In some ways, I think I had been making it all my life.

As I child, I completely accepted all the beliefs. I remember the rituals as a child, the rote learning of the catechism, the chanting of the answers. I remember on All Souls’ Day running in and out of church saying set prayers each time, knowing that each time I did this I was ‘saving’ another soul who would jump out of the fire of purgatory into the everlasting happiness of Heaven. That particular belief made me feel very smug and self-satisfied.

I wanted to be a priest from an early age but couldn’t even be an altar girl and so knelt on the front row at church making all the responses in Latin that my brothers were making on the altar.

I loved the ceremony, the incense, the organ playing, the candles and the hymns.

And I was always affected by the atmosphere created in majestic buildings with high ceilings and stained-glass windows.

But gradually, my mother and father’s Catholic beliefs became increasingly inexplicable to me. I remember when I was eleven and my grandfather died. It was, at the time, only my second experience of death. I was going on a girl guide hike that morning. I knew Mum and Dad had been up with Grandpa all night. I remember taking a last look at him before I went to bed the night before – grey face, mouth hanging open, rasping breaths. I asked my brother as I came downstairs the next morning, “How’s Mum?”

“Fine,” he said.

“How’s Dad?”

“Fine,” he said.

As I turned to go back upstairs, I turned back and as an afterthought said, “How’s Grandpa?”

“Dead,” he said. I returned to my room and knelt down and said a prayer, then sat back on the bed and waited for the tears. Eventually, knowing I couldn’t do anything else until I’d cried, I thought about sad things until the tears came. Then I went on my hike. The real tears came at the funeral in the church when the organ started and the incense filled the air. The combination of organ and incense still makes me cry now.

Still, at the time, I was vaguely uncomfortable. Why was everyone upset? Why was I upset? My grandfather wasn’t hugely important in my life. And anyway, wasn’t Grandpa in Heaven? Why weren’t we celebrating, for goodness sake? Something wasn’t quite right.

At this time the Friday abstinence was still in force – no meat on Fridays. It wasn’t such a great hardship, although bacon did smell so much better on a Friday. It was a very minor sacrifice to go without it. So why, if you had a special dinner to go to, were you able to go to the priest and get a dispensation? Oh, Father, I’m going to the firm’s dinner tonight, can I eat meat? Of course, my child. What’s the point of having the rule if the only time it might be hard you get permission to ignore it?

Much later, when I was at college, I remember approaching the counter and seeing wonderful crisp battered fish and measly, wizened pieces of meat. Great, I thought – it’s Friday – fish day. Then I thought again. If this fish thing is supposed to be some sort of sacrifice, I’d better make it hurt. I had the meat. Months later, I casually mentioned this to my father in a conversation about something else. My father went absolutely mad. He told me I was on the road to Hell, that my job on Earth was to save my soul. That I should just follow the white line down the middle of the road and deviate to neither right nor left. That I was to follow the rules. I was not to question them. It was not my job to think. If it so happened that the rules worked to my advantage, then that was my good fortune. My unease continued.

I had a growing awareness that the church’s teachings were antithetical to who I was becoming as a woman and as a spiritual person.

Although I was attending a Catholic College, none of the nuns cared if you went to church or not, and many of the girls didn’t. In my first year there, when I was living in digs, I used to walk on my own to the other side of the town, in the rain and snow sometimes, to attend Mass on a Sunday evening. I seriously thought about leaving the Church. But I knew that if I stopped going to church, I would get out of the habit. I thought I should continue to go while I made up my mind. I decided to remain a Catholic. Attending Mass was one of the few ways I had of feeling a deep peace in my heart and soul.

Next time I was home I told the priest I wanted to be confirmed next time the Bishop came to our parish. He said I couldn’t as I had already been confirmed and you can only get confirmed once. I protested, “But I was 13 then! I didn’t know what I was signing up to. But now I do and I want to declare it. I know I won’t get ‘the mark on my soul’ again but it’s important I stand up and profess my faith.” He refused again. Now I was frustrated and irritated, as well as uneasy.

After college, I met my future husband Martin during my first year of teaching. Martin had to sign a document saying he would agree to the children being brought up Catholic. That was fine. I wanted the children to have some base to start with and we had both agreed that when they were old enough they would decide for themselves. Many years later, when Emily was 14 years old, she stopped going to Mass. Amy followed a year later. Emily remembers now that when I said she could stop going to church, I said to her, “Yes, you can stop going to church but you have to find God in your life.” She told me this in her 20s and said she was still looking.

After my seven-year career as a teacher, my professional work took me into the area of developing and training people, particularly women. My company advised organisations on how to develop the potential of all employees, how to establish quality and diversity in the organisation and how to free employees to think for themselves. Much of the work I did with individuals was about accessing the inner strength within them and helping them to develop a sense of their own worth.

Yet, here I was, belonging to an organisation, the Catholic church, based on male hierarchy and with power invested in a few elites.

Its purpose is (still) to make sure that people do what they are told so that it can preserve itself as an institution. Yet, I continued to attend Sunday Mass wherever in the world I was. I loved the familiarity of the ritual, which I understood, however alien the language or the culture I was in.

I often wondered what kind of ‘hold’ the Catholic church had over me. Was this what indoctrination looked like? Yet, as soon as you begin to question, I think indoctrination ceases. Was it the fear of hell and damnation if I left? Was I feeling guilty that I somehow couldn’t grasp some essential Catholic truths? I had reached out to my aunt, who was a Carmelite nun, and asked her to tell me why I should remain a Catholic. I was looking to be persuaded to stay. But she wrote to me and said that she was at such a higher level than me that I wouldn’t understand anything she said so she couldn’t help me!

There were two things that stopped me from leaving. The first was my mother. I knew that at some level, breaking with the church was to risk my mother’s acceptance, validation, inclusion and being part of her world. Her faith seemed to be unshakeable. My relationship with my mother was not great and I dreaded what the impact would be on her and on our relationship if I told her I was leaving the Church. The second thing that held me back was that it would have been a negative act. An act of rejecting something rather than moving towards something else. And I felt I would be losing a core part of my identity.

For a long time, I ignored the organisation of the Church and concentrated on Christ and God beyond it. My religion became a very personal one. I tried to make sense out of the goodness of God and not be bogged down by the sinful nature I kept being reminded I had. I took my turn at reading at Mass, always changing ‘mankind’ to ‘people’ and ‘brothers’ to ‘brothers and sisters’ and changing ‘men’ to ‘all’ in a very loud voice in every hymn it appeared in.

Three things were instrumental in forcing me to act. The first was my younger brother’s death.

Well, not his death exactly, but my mother’s reaction to it. Andy was 29 years old and still living at home. His car skidded on his way to work one Sunday morning, climbed the central barrier on the motorway and crashed onto the other carriageway below. He died immediately, on the hard shoulder 70 yards away – he was ‘flung into eternity’ as my mother put it. No one else was involved. Now, although I have seen at first hand the grief when someone loses a child, I cannot really imagine it. But during that time something shocked me more than his death and it was this, the religion which she had followed all her life, all those novenas she had said on her knees, all the sacrifices she had made didn’t seem to help her now. She had faithfully kept the rules, even when they were difficult. She had told us that when my eldest brother was a baby, she was up with him on Christmas Eve. He was screaming with colic and she tasted some warm water to make sure it wouldn’t burn him. But then she couldn’t go to communion on Christmas morning because she’d broken the midnight fast. She went and saw the priest on Christmas morning and told him what had happened and asked if she could still take communion. He refused. She was denied Communion on Christmas Day.

But now, she was tormented for years after my brother’s death as she agonised over where he now was. She couldn’t be sure that he was in Heaven, because, after all, he didn’t have a priest to give him absolution at the moment of death. In the Catholic tradition, if you go to Mass on the first Friday of the month for nine consecutive months you will be guaranteed a priest at your death. Andy did ‘the nine first Fridays’ many times but he still died alone – lying on the hard shoulder of the M56.  In addition to that, she knew he had had sex once (‘once’ is what he told her!) and he wasn’t married. That’s worth a ticket to Hell. All those years the family had deferred to her faith… and now, when she needed it, her faith deserted her and she suffered while we could only watch, quite helpless. What kind of God would banish my brother to Hell so easily? Not one I cared to believe in.

The second thing that happened was my growing awareness of what I didn’tbelieve in which can be listed as follows:

• The Church’s position on birth control, which I saw as the systematic oppression of women.
• The pomp and ceremony of the Papacy (not to mention the infallibility question). If Christ came now, he would surely come as Mother Teresa and not reside in the luxurious Vatican.
• The bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Jesus. It didn’t matter to me anymore whether they did or not. It didn’t affect how I felt about God.
• The Church’s position on homosexuality, married priests and women priests.
• The emphasis on fear, evil, sin and guilt, as opposed to joy, love, forgiveness and union. It’s interesting that Christ only gave two commandments: ‘love God and love your neighbour as yourself’. God, apparently, gave ten, and eight of those are about things you can’t do. When I told my parish priest of my decision to leave and tried to explain some of what is here, he wrote me a nice letter and spoke of our fundamental differences. He said, “I believe the Catholic Church is a church for sinners.” I offered to continue to print the parish newsletter but he made other arrangements.

I had a growing sense of the fact that if I couldn’t accept the main principles of the club, I shouldn’t be in it.

And all of this before the child abuse scandal became known.

It seemed very clear to me that the Catholic Church was really not interested in helping people grow towards God. It was interested in people knowing their place and accepting it with humility and asking God’s forgiveness for everything along the way. And this was – and is – especially true of women.

But finally, what made me leave was a growing sense of my own spirituality – the books I read and the people I talked to who enabled me to free my spiritual self. For a long time, I had been afraid to really listen to God, to really open my heart, because I had been afraid of what might be asked of me, of what sacrifices I might have been expected to make. I realised how naive this view was of God and my relationship with him/ her/ it/ them.

I was introduced to A Course in Miracles and in there found a different kind of Christ, one I could relate to, one who showed that responsibility for one’s own evolution comes from every thought, word and action. Now, I had something to turn to, not something to run from.

Now I am not afraid. I know that God is within me – is me – and that I am a part of the whole. I know that love and forgiveness are the only important things and through these my Higher Self will seek to join the perfection that is the oneness of all things and all beings. I know that my purpose in this life is to learn whatever it is I need to learn to move me towards this perfect state, and that if I don’t achieve it this time around, I will keep on coming back until I do. This is purgatory, not too far removed from the Catholic version, really. I know that on a moment-by-moment basis I need to tune in to the God in me and connect with the God in others.

So, ultimately, the Catholic Church was too limited, too confining… and too easy.

Easy to feel like you’re living a fairly good life and to feel pretty good after church on Sunday. Now, all thoughts, words and actions are moments of truth. I am aware of my spiritual self constantly and the more I tune into it, the more peaceful I feel and the more awakened to the best part of myself, the God in me.

I waited 18 months after I had left the church to tell my mother because I was afraid she would confine me to Hell and never get over the upset – and never get off her knees praying for me. I used to go round and see friends at Mass time when she was visiting me. I would pretend I was going to a different church.

My friends would say, “You’re 45 years old and you run a business about empowering women and you are hiding from your mother…”

Finally, I found that my own faith, growth and maturity, and the possibility of upsetting my mother was no longer a calculated risk. It was just the truth of who I was and a clear step into that. I wrote my mother a letter explaining why I was leaving the Church, ending with, “The Church is working for you, Mum, and you couldn’t have it any other way. I’ve found another way and I hope you can accept that. Now I feel that I can help you to accept it and I hope you will let me. And I will see you in Heaven.”

I took her the letter so we could discuss it, but she wouldn’t read it while I was there. She read the title only – ‘How do you Tell Your Mother, a Staunch Catholic, That After 45 Years you Have Decided to Leave the Church’ – and said, “Dear God,” and put it down and said she would read it later. She didn’t read it for some time but meanwhile she started having panic attacks. It didn’t help her when I told her I was going to become an interfaith minister. She referred to it from then on as, “That cult you’re in.” I remember being out for a walk with her brother, my only uncle, who I loved very much. We had flown him over from Canada as a surprise for her 80th birthday. We were in one of the beautiful woods near where my mother lived. It was cold but sunny and the leaves had all dropped from the trees and our feet swished through them all as we walked.

He suddenly stopped and looked at me and made a comment about my leaving the church, “You know,” he said, “You stuck a knife into your mother and then you twisted it round and you will never be forgiven.”

I felt the truth in what he said like that same knife twisting deep into my gut. My mother never understood what she considered the ultimate betrayal.

We never discussed it again but, even though we became closer in the last few years of her life, I think she went to her own grave 11 years later, still praying that I wouldn’t go to Hell.

Love and kindness and forgiveness are the things that link all religions and spiritual philosophies. I had nothing to forgive my mother for as she had tried all her life to act from her beliefs, hard though it was. But I was finally able to forgive myself – for the guilt I felt from having caused her so much pain.

Two years after she died, while studying a postgraduate course in Spiritual Development and Facilitation, we were asked to do a meditation imagining our mothers on our left and our fathers on our right, also sitting in meditation. This was already weird as it was so hard to even imagine them sitting in meditation, but I visualised this picture and looked to my left. My mother looked back at me and smiled with the most beautiful, shining smile – a smile I had never seen in her physical life. I suddenly realised that she finally understood everything. And I wept.

Photo

Me in my back yard on my First Communion Day

Questions For Reflection

If you had a religious background do you still practice that tradition? why or why not? Would you describe yourself as religious or spiritual? What do you think they difference is? If you don’t have any spiritual or religious affiliation what do you think the purpose of your life is? What are the values you live your life by?

A Blessing While You Reflect

“And when we come to search for God

Let us first be robed in night

Put on the mind of morning

To feel the rush of light

Spread slowly inside

The colour and stillness of a found world”

From John O’Donohue: Benedictus