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The Sign of The Cross - A Native Son
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had to look as well. My mother had a prayer which had a note at the
bottom reminding you that it was so efficacious you must be sure you
really wanted what you were asking for. I was a child when my father
became ill, and I can remember vigils of prayer, I can remember a nun
telling my mother that she was going to go that very night and,
literally, knock the tabernacle and ask Jesus to make my father better.
It was something she had done very few times, but it had always worked,
she said. When my father went to Lourdes now it was not part of an
exotic journey to the European mainland, it was to take the waters,
to pray, to get better. Suddenly, it was serious.
When my father died his body lay overnight in the cathedral and I
remember watching an altar-boy with a large cross which he held with
his two hands, as he led the coffin down the centre aisle of the church.
*
My father was dead now and there was a greater need to study and try and
do well for myself. I kept a mass card in my missal with his photograph on
it and special prayers which my mother had chosen printed on it. In all
the advice given to me there was a mixture of worldliness and unworldliness:
the need to save your soul was coupled with a need to get on in the world.
The need to find and keep a good job and the need to please God and save
your soul at the same time were intrinsic parts of the same dream on which
I was brought up, after my father's death, in that small town.
I was about fourteen when a friend a couple of years older announced with
certainty that this religion, this Catholic stuff was all nonsense, every
bit of it - not just the rituals, not just the saints and the holy pictures,
the relics and the days of obligation, but the fundamentals. There was no
God, he assured me, not with bravado
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