God

Pope Francis, being a vicar's daughter, and Gaza

When I found out Pope Francis had died, the force of my tears surprised me. I hadn’t realised just how tightly I had been holding on to a man in a position of influence, because he was saying things that other men in positions of influence weren’t saying. I cried and cried, partly because I didn’t know what would happen without him. I cried because I read his tweets nearly every day and they comforted me in a hellscape of denial and obfuscation. I cried because I thought of the Holy Family Church in Gaza, the members of which wouldn’t be receiving the Pope’s video calls anymore. I cried because my soon-to-be-husband Joe had been confirmed two days before and he was now a full member of the Catholic Church[1]. I cried because it was Easter Monday.

This was all somewhat unusual to me. If you had told me four years ago that I would mourn when the Pope died, go through the day occasionally blubbering and clutching rosary beads, I would not have been surprised exactly, I would probably have laughed, but I would have also known that something monumental within me, and perhaps in the external world, had changed.

*

Dad grew up in the 60s, had already been divorced and smoked cigarettes on the same back step where he burned the ashes in tinfoil for Ash Wednesday. We didn’t say grace before meals, and there were no draconian religious rules set upon me and my brother. We were free to believe or not believe as we saw fit: I was confirmed to receive communion in the Church of England at age 11 while my brother never went through the same ritual, though we had both been baptised as babies. In those few Bible classes I had to take before confirmation, I felt the dogmatic version of the Bible brush up against my Dad’s softer and love-focused reading that he imbued in everything he did. Reading the bible as a manual for doing (i.e. rules and laws) rather than an accumulation of multiple writers with human hands felt wrong to me then, as it does now. But as an 11-year-old with a deep sense of wonder, the right or wrongness of organised religion wasn’t a concern. I knew what it was to me, and I knew what it was to my Dad, and that was enough.

A few years later, I began to read the Bible compulsively. Every night I had to read a section, and if I didn’t something bad would happen.[2] Sometimes I might glean a meaning from it, sometimes I was touched by a particular story, but overall, it was the act of reading, not its meaning, that I was using as a form of magic protection. Then, at secondary school, my world was forced to widen away from a safer existence at the primary school across the road from Dad’s (our) Church. Secondary school felt massive, and it was full of girls who scared me. The “Christian” girls confronted me on the playing field about whether I “believed” in “sex before marriage”. It felt like a test. I was so bewildered by this question, as I had genuinely not thought about it before that moment. A crack appeared that day. They had taken a hammer to my carefully shaped perception of Christian faith. Was I part of the same belief system as these girls who seemed so concerned about sex? One of them also lived in an overtly patriarchal household that I felt deeply uncomfortable in anytime I visited. I couldn’t recognise this as part of the same Church that I had spent my life adjacent too. Was I wrong? Were they doing Christianity the right way, while we squandered in our semi-secular home, straying further from the light of God every time we didn’t say grace?

*

You can’t just take religion off like a coat.

Away from home, at university, whenever I told someone that my dad was a vicar, no one asked what it was like. Usually it was surprise, a ‘really???’. I suppose, to them, I wasn’t the stereotypical vicar’s daughter. Perhaps a stereotypical vicar’s daughter should be dressed modestly, not swear, or drink, or have casual sexual encounters. Perhaps they shouldn’t be at a “liberal” arts university. Perhaps they should be pious and attend church every day. Perhaps the scent of Jesus should follow them like a bad smell.

Imperceptible to others, it had followed me around. Though I was rarely asked what it was like, when I did mention it, I felt some wordless shape expand within me. How do I explain to myself how something ineffable moulded every part of me? How growing up Christian drew me to what some would call “radical” political beliefs, but I would describe as the sacredness of all beings? How do I explain that without going to Church or praying, that even while being in denial of what it all meant for me, it was still there, and I still embodied it?

The problem with only experiencing one thing your whole life is you don’t know anything different to compare it to. I can’t tell you what I would be like without that foundation, and therefore I can’t exactly tell you what it means.

For a while, thinking about Church consciously caused me pain. I would become angry at Joe for spending time exploring his beliefs and leaving me to wallow in my resistance. I didn’t feel ready, not at all. Maybe I had to have my time to hate what humans have made from Jesus’s teachings. And I still hate it. On Ash Wednesday this year I told Joe I didn’t want to go to Church because I was angry at God. I hadn’t been for over a year—and the last time had been on Christmas Day. He said I should especially go if I was angry at God. I did go that day.

*

Something had been forming within me, but I had also been purposefully stalling it. I realise now, I cannot write about how I have begun to return to a concept of God without also writing about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I’ve delayed writing about God because to write about God I must write about genocide, and writing about something so serious scares me. It seems trite to put it side by side with a personal telling of what it was like to be a vicar’s daughter. Overall, my experience of being a vicar’s daughter was to be safe and held. But I also know what it’s like to feel fear and discrimination from the world as humans have created it. I have been wrestling lately with the amount of ableism, and in particular widespread hatred towards autistic people, that perpetuates unchecked.[3] All these forms of discrimination are of course, connected. And so is liberation. To liberate one cannot be divorced from liberating the other.

In the face of such unthinkable acts happening with impunity at the same time as one is alive, I suspected that I would have to confront an existence without a God, without justice, and without peace. The people of Gaza, however, showed me differently.

I’ve often said to my friends that the way the genocide has unfolded has made me feel loopy, mad, crazy, like institutions are trying to convince me/us that what we have seen, we have not seen.[4] I also witnessed the unwavering faith of those within Gaza and Palestine—at times, it was the only thing that would cut through the unsteadiness of witnessing the worst on earth and at the same time being implicitly told it was fine, acceptable. I often cried thinking about their unshakable belief in a just God, the way in which murdered men, women and children were described—not just described, extolled—as martyrs. That was a God I could recognise, one that venerated those that died needlessly, killed by forces of greed, of hatred, of evil. Allahu Akbar I heard them cry in the videos I watched endlessly of hospitals and homes being bombed—God is great, or God is greater. God is possibly the only thing that can be greater (bigger) than this man-created hell on earth. With the end of each video, another one would start—the closest I’ve felt to infinity (God).

I also read Charlotte Shane,[5] extol a similar feeling. She writes:

Last year I began to feel there was a question inside my despair that could not be silenced by or answered with political activity alone. The question was, what does it mean to live and abide in a world like this? Does it have meaning at all? After October 7th, increasingly, I found that the only language that made sense to me was religious, because what can you say in the face of this “moral cataclysm" except “I pray”? I wish with the whole of my being, I hope past hope with every atom of me that is capable of love and care, I beg the universe for this mercy, I petition the force of life to intervene on behalf of life. I call on something outside and beyond me, because no matter how intensely I want this to end, I cannot end it on my own. And I began to look to religion for something I had not found anywhere else.

And in a later post she elucidated something I couldn’t put into words previously:

It seems to me that the bottomlessness of the evil being done in Gaza suggests a goodness and love and mercy that is equally relentless, unquenchable, and transcendent—more so, because the energy it takes to destroy is much poorer than the energy required to nurture and create. I’m not capable of conceiving, in the physical realm, a radiant force that would match the interminable loss and destruction. So what does that leave? That leaves God. To see the antithesis of God is to see proof of God.

*

I don’t know where I am yet in this web of religion, belief, God, ritual, practice and institutions. I don’t know whether I can counter my deep distrust of institutions with the unique ability that the church has to form community in a world where community is being daily eroded. Even when I was crying about Pope Francis, I could hear the other part of my conscious name me as a traitor. How dare I believe in something so fraught with the pain—with the pain I felt when I couldn’t bear to think about Church, about what it also took away from me.

A couple of months ago, I read Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by Lamorna Ash, a book that helped me to start thinking about specificities again—the actual stories from the Bible (which she pulls apart with deft literariness), and places like Iona, a special and holy place that we visited almost every year as a family. In all my confusion and anger there are places I can return: the Church of England services I know off by heart, the stories about Jesus, conversations with my Dad and Joe and anyone else who is open to talking about God, and perhaps Iona.

For Christmas I bought Joe a prayer candle with Pope Francis’s photo on it, alongside the painting ‘Our Lady Undoer of Knots’, which was of special significance to Pope Francis. It spoke to me because of all the knots we have and share together. I previously believed that I would have to go outwards, away from religion to have any hope of untying all these knots. Now I know I have to go further in.

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[1] The journey to which he has been on the whole time I’ve known him.

[2] My experience of religious OCD is complex and something I want to write about on its own, especially as I now believe that God is the antithesis of my OCD.

[3] The leftist elite has to my mind never centred disability as the crux of liberation as I believe it should be. Jesus, however, was always hanging out with the crips.

[4] What could be more biblical than that? Of course, it is the miracles that Jesus performs that prompts the message from him to ‘go tell what you have seen’. But old power does not want this news spread. It disrupts the well-worn order of things. It would mean that things would have to change

[5] I had just read her memoirs on the experience of being a sex worker, which are great by the way.