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or a desire to shock, but as if it was something he had always known.
So who made the world, I asked. It's just there, he said. And what about
Jesus Christ? He saw the break-up of the Roman Empire, my friend told me
with absolute and quiet authority, and he sought to replace it with a
notion of treating thy neighbour as thyself, but it never caught on.
Instead, we have all those priests and sermons and silly rules.
I still walked up the Cathedral aisle and took communion, and walked back
to my seat with my eyes cast down. I still prayed, but slowly my faith was
fading. I attended a seminar on vocations when I was sixteen and a
theologian spoke about 'the paradox of faith', the idea that to believe
you must first 'believe', that faith required a blind leap and then a more
rational approach. In certain (and,indeed, uncertain) ways I came to
realise that I had never believed. I had always known that the interest all
around me in security, money, power and status was greater than any love of
God or belief in his mercy. Religion was consolation, like listening to
music after a long day's work; it was pure theatre, it was a way of holding
people together. By this time I was in a school where most of the priests
spent their summers in America, and debate was allowed on every issue
relating to faith and morals. I drifted away, I read Kafka and D.H. Lawrence,
and by the time I reached university I had other things to think about.
In university I knew no one who believed. Thus it was always a shock on Ash
Wednesday when a majority of students walked the campus sporting ashes on
their foreheads. I looked at them in wonder, wanting to ask if no one had told
them, as my friend had told me, that it was all nonsense. Could they not wake
up? How could they still believe? Those were the early l970s, the days of the
Women's Movement, the Divorce Action Group,
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