When I was very young, a relative, probably trying to say something comforting, told me that when adults died they became saints, and when children died they became angels. Apart from being theologically inaccurate (Catholics aren’t really into Bible reading) it was also, to my child brain, absolutely horrifying.
When I thought of angels, I thought of the painted cherubs that flocked to the feet of Our Lady in the sculptures at our local church in Cork. More specifically, I thought of the cherubs that were comprised of a chubby-cheeked baby head and wings. If I died now, I thought, I would spend all eternity as a floating flappy head. I then, rather understandably, became terrified of death.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, religion was as much a source of fear as solace. We were surrounded by what some people dismissively call “Catholic kitsch”, but which I found genuinely frightening. St Christopher’s painted face glared down at me in the room I used to stay in at my grandparents’ house. At school there was a decapitated wooden head of John the Baptist in a glass case, his eyes rolling, painted blood pouring from his stump. There was nothing kitsch about it.
While most of the priests I encountered had developed a kinder version of Catholicism, in which God was a sort of benign fog and hell was a metaphor, there were still a few who spoke softly of sinful souls and told us hell was a real place with horrifying demons, a lake of fire and true damnation. They always seemed more convincing. Somehow an angry God who might torture us for all eternity felt more robustly true than an amorphous entity argued about by thoughtful philosophers.
In 1985, in what was probably a desperate psychic response to unstoppable secularisation, a few Irish people began to see holy statues moving. It started at a grotto in Ballinspittle in County Cork and spread to other locations around the country. Crowds would gather to watch statues, usually of the Virgin Mary, shed blood or gesture to the crowd or wobble slightly in the air. On television intellectuals talked about optical illusions and mass psychology, but I spent my childhood terrified of seeing an apparition. An appearance by Mary would confirm something for me that I didn’t want confirmed — a cosmology of heaven and hell and demons and salvation and damnation. I had nightmares about biblical scenes. And I developed an obsession with prayer.
At the same time I was making my confirmation, during which I would be visited by the Holy Spirit, and my main concern was being allowed to wear a suit like the one Don Johnson wore in Miami Vice. Life is complicated. At 12, you can be simultaneously terrified of hell and have a strong desire to look like Don Johnson (I was allowed to wear the suit but not to roll up the sleeves or wear a T-shirt underneath, which defeated the purpose).
I often hate how Irish Catholicism is written about outside of Ireland. It doesn’t get the complexity of it all, preferring to depict the populace as simple God-fearing peasants. Irish faith, even when I was growing up, wasn’t like American evangelism. There was a cognitive dissonance between how the adults around me could reckon with the eternal damnation of their souls while simultaneously complaining about new traffic restrictions or watching Dallas.
That’s because religion was, for many Irish people in the 1980s, more about convention than strong belief. The church dominated education and medicine but despite all the holy (occasionally mobile) statues, few people talked much about religious faith and most distrusted those who did. Going to Mass was just good personal governance, like starting a pension or insuring your car. You didn’t bore people with the details. And you certainly didn’t get excited about it or talk about religion to a stranger. Yes, Jesus might be present in the Mass but don’t, for the love of Jesus, make a scene. Irish people have the same attitude to famous people to this day.
I was looking for stronger stuff. In my teens I went a couple of times to a retreat for Charismatic Catholics (a sort of evangelical version of Catholicism) over in County Clare with my friend’s more religious family. They were lovely people, but they were engaged in exactly the sort of behaviour that was viewed suspiciously by the average Irish church goer: they talked about their relationship with Jesus (name-dropping). It was a gentle version of Catholicism with caravans and acoustic guitars, campfires and compassionate clergy who were interested in your ideas (rather than the middle-management types I was more familiar with). Every evening we would all walk barefoot up a stony road to a small chapel in the desolate Burren, where the priest was moved to tears by Christ’s sacrifice and people would lose themselves in a love for God that was ecstatic and emotional.
When you’re in the midst of that it’s hard not to feel a presence that might be divine, but is probably, at least to the version of me writing this now, just what it feels like to be among the intensely loving faithful. Yet it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a visceral sense of belief, a religion without fear, and I can remember its power.
Elsewhere in the country, faith was waning. A lot has been made of how the appalling revelations of clerical and institutional abuse that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s led to a reduction in Mass going, but the trend had started well before that. By the early 1990s, many families I knew were going to Mass less out of belief than habit. A few weeks after my youngest sibling stopped going, so did my parents. I think they were relieved.
My own faith gradually wafted away. There was no big moment when it left me. At one end of my teens I was praying in terror, and at the other I was listening to Frankenchrist by the Dead Kennedys. I had, by this stage, met iconoclastically atheistic friends, and because I largely associated religion with either boring old Mass or a way to avoid hellfire, I happily took the opportunity to leave it behind.
Over the years, I was in and out of contact with religion. The moments when I really missed belief were when I lost people I loved. I’m shocked at how easily I shed religion in my teens without ever contemplating its hard sell: everlasting life and seeing your loved ones after death. I think that’s because by my late teens, I didn’t really believe that I, or anyone I knew, was ever going to die.
When my lovely religious friend died far too young, I found myself groping around for meaning and hoping for signs from him from beyond the grave. I spent a year perceiving him in the movement of trees or clouds or in strange sounds I heard in the night. A year of animism. (It’s not lost on me that the people watching moving statues in Ballinspittle were also just searching for signs.)
The idea that people cease to exist was incomprehensible. I realised that my conception of dying, the one built in childhood, involved going somewhere. Religion is a map that takes you from birth to the world beyond. When people I loved died, I would instinctively look for that map only to see squiggles and gibberish and the contours of a place that didn’t exist. Yet that map was the only one I had.
I was still figuring things out. I read pseudoscientific books about spiritualism and the astral plane that came embedded with poorly understood quantum physics. You know the stuff: complete bollocks. Later, I read more thoughtful books by theologians like the former nun Karen Armstrong, and I realised faith wasn’t necessarily about certainty but could also be a ritualistic, collective practice performed by hopeful doubters. For others, the more mystically minded, religion was about contemplating the unknowable mysteries of existence. And when science answers some of these unknowable questions, these mystics can always move their gaze back to unknowable things because there are a lot of unknowable things and there always will be. Both of these were visions of religion I could get behind — collective hope and mystical contemplation — where literal belief was beside the point. I quietly slid my settings back from atheism to a sort of communion-curious agnosticism.
Don’t get me wrong, nothing could ever lure me back to the Catholic Church, a power-hungry, misogynistic institution that has never truly reckoned with the terrible things it has done. Over the years, the evidence of institutional abuse grew and grew, and that stopped many of the lapsed from returning. The secular progressive Ireland that’s emerged is immeasurably better than the cruel church-ridden version I grew up with. I won’t go back. Instead, like other people who have lost their faith, I exhibit some latent religiosity. I sing religious folk tunes. I find myself buying scented candles that smell of Mass incense. And I sometimes pray. Not, I think, as a conduit to God, but as a frequency I can tune into, made up of millennia of people hoping. It isn’t quite the same as belief.
Fifteen years ago, I went as a journalist to see people gather at Knock in County Mayo to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary predicted by a rogue mystic. Though Knock had been the site of Marian apparitions in 1879, these newer appearances were not sanctioned by the church (a local priest tied himself in knots explaining to me why the old apparitions were real and the new ones were not). Hanging about waiting for an apparition was, by the 21st century, very much fringe behaviour in Ireland.
A few thousand people gathered in Knock Basilica before rushing to the car park to watch Our Lady appear in the grey sky (a man literally came running in and said, “She’s outside!”). In the car park I found people gasping at what they saw, which, depending on their level of faith, involved the sun moving in the sky, Mary blessing them or, in some cases, a detailed vision of God on his throne flanked by angels and saints and loved ones who had died. I spoke to those people. They really believed they saw these things. The journalists saw nothing but sun and clouds, but around us people were pointing and crying with joy. A small boy to my left kept saying, amid gasps of the crowd, “I can’t see anything! Is she there? What can you see?” I felt a little bit sorry for the boy. And I felt a little bit sorry for myself too.
Patrick Freyne is a feature writer with The Irish Times. His essay collection ‘OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea’ is published by Penguin Sandycove
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