Return to the Catholic Church

 

Perhaps my rather peripatetic relationship with the church comes down to the fact I was the child of a mixed marriage.

I hasten to add here that “mixed marriage” had quite a different meaning in the 1950s. When my parents wanted to get married in 1959 there was uproar in the families about where the wedding should take place. It was not a concern to my parents: my mother was a declared atheist and my father more interested in sex, clothes, and rock and roll than existential questions. It was not a concern to my grandfathers: one was an atheist like his daughter and the other didn’t appear to have any religious connection. But both my grandmothers were stubborn, irrational ,and unreasonable women. My Grandma Holdbrook (who hadn’t attended Mass for decades) insisted that if they didn’t get married in the Catholic Church, she’d never speak to them again. My Grandma Emerson (a Northern Irish Protestant from Londonderry) declared that if they got married in a Catholic Church, not only would she never speak to them again but no-one from that side of the family would attend the wedding.

Grandma Holdbrook carried the day. No surprises there, And so my parents were married in St Joseph’s Catholic Church and the only person to attend from my father’s side was his best man and brother, my Uncle Pat. (As an aside, my Grandma Emerson relented 9 months later when I was born and she sent a message to say she would like to meet her first granddaughter.)

 

My mother continued in her atheistic ways until I was 6 when a conversion experience during a thunderstorm sent her to the local Anglican church. I have fond memories of this place: the gentle priest, harvest festivals, and my brother attending a Christmas service one year dressed as a dalek. When we moved to Duffield, I attended a Church of England primary school. But my mother had another encounter with God, and this time she went back to the Catholic Church taking me (and later my sister) with her.

In the years that followed, in New Zealand, my mother taught at the local Catholic school and was very involved at St Thomas Moore Parish. All my parents’ friends were Catholic. This church in the 70s was in the grip of charismatic renewal and we attended a charismatic prayer group for years.

Fast forward to my university years and I was the only Catholic in a very ecumenical group of young people. Most days, I took a sleepy walk down to the Mercy chapel for 6:30am Mass with the nuns. Sundays I would go to Mass in the early morning, catch up with friends at the Christian Centre at 10am, and then join the whole group in the evening for a service at All Saints Anglican church.

I was married in the Catholic Church. Gerard belonged to an eccentric Catholic family, and his complex relationship with the church disrupted my simpler faith. My two older children were baptized in the Catholic Church and I have memories of being a member of the parish council at the then St Patrick’s church, the youngest there by decades, my baby asleep in a basket beside me.

But my faith was unravelling. Parish council meetings were incomprehensible and discouraging, and Gerard’s constant rage about the church was eating away at my naiveté. So when my marriage exploded and I went to see the priest to discuss the situation with him, I finally lost heart. It was no problem, the priest said. We could get an annulment and then it would be “as if the marriage had never happened”. He meant to be kind. I knew that. But I thought about my two young children and the damage I’d experienced through this marriage, and I thought “that is madness. The church has nothing to do with the truth. This is the end for me.” I left, and I thought I’d never go back.

Apart from a blip in my early thirties, though, I could never leave the (small c) church. I spent 15 years at All Saints, becoming a lay minister, lay preacher, and warden, and then 12 years at Central Baptist, again becoming part of the preaching team and an elder. These are stories for another day.

But a little over two years ago now, I woke up one morning with a clear voice in my head: go back to Mass. I was completely flummoxed. Such an idea seemed ridiculous. But the voice was so unmistakable that  I went to Mass at midday at the Cathedral the same day.

It was an ordinary mid-week Mass. There were maybe 30 people in the church. A tired old priest said the Mass pared back to the essentials. And there, in the Eucharist, I found something so remarkable, so holy and mysterious and true, that I struggled to hold back my tears. It was like coming home to something I'd always known but never truly seen before

 

I was cautious at first. It seemed incomprehensible that a female preacher and liturgist could be called to the Catholic church. For six months I carried on attending CB on Sundays but slipped into Mass during the week. Every time was the same: ordinary and remarkable. I could not – I still cannot - describe it. I could not mount a defence of transubstantiation but what I can say is that a great mystery is present every time the Mass is said, something so vast and huge which fills my heart with longing.

Mary Wakefield (from the Spectator, of all places) expresses my own feelings well:

I can still summon my old impression of the Catholic church – kitsch, gloomy, misogynistic – but then there’s how life inside it feels too. It’s like the Tardis or C.S.Lewis’s wardrobe: an unpromising little doorway that happens to open into a whole new land….Transubstantiation, celibate priests, active saints, venerated bones, the dominance of Mary: from a distance, to me they all seem absurd, distasteful. But take a few steps towards them, and they begin to make frightening sense”.

So many things I thought would bother me…don’t. I thought I would mind that all priests were male. But what I’ve noticed is that the priests have a way of….this is so hard to describe – disappearing during the Eucharist, so that who they are really doesn’t matter.

I thought it would bother me that there was no quality preaching in the church. But one priest commented that the homily is not intended as exegesis or teaching: its purpose is to uplift the people of God to prepare them to receive the miracle among them. That makes sense to me. A powerful sermon would distract from what really matters. A powerful preacher cannot help but draw attention to themselves. Instead, everything, everything points to the Eucharist. To that holy miracle of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection and presence among us.

I’ve never attended such a multicultural church. I’d been at the church for about a year when I attended a Maundy Thursday Mass. We sang “One bread, one body”  and as I watched lines and lines of people move towards the altar for communion it seemed like a passage from Revelation, a glimpse of heaven, as people from every nation (darling Indian children in their fancy clothes, slouching teenagers in hoodies, a group of Tokelauan men in native dress) streamed towards the throne.

The Catholic Church is still to me a baffling institution. It’s been incredibly hard to make friends. Their attitude to any kind of prayer outside of the Mass makes me shake my head in bewilderment and frustration. Their meetings are studies in disorganization. I know there are problems, long historical abuses, archaic attitudes to women.

But what I also know is this: that when the priest raises the host there is something there, some call to my heart’s deepest desire, something that I’ve never experienced in any other church, something so full of joy and glory that it calls me back again and again and again.