My psychiatrist once asked me if I had any faith. I think she was getting desperate, given my slide into existential nihilism had me begging her to tell me what the point of anything was. The question, “Do you have any faith?” took me aback. What did she mean, I asked. She wondered if I believed in anything.
“In God, like?”
“Well, anything?”
I would have thought the answer was obvious, having told her how fruitless my obsessive Googling of “what is the meaning of life?” had been, up to that point. I told her I had been raised a Catholic, but none of it had stuck. Why not, though? Why had the significant amount of time given over to fostering belief in a higher power, in a certainty that we will all live forever in the comforting embrace of the Creator I’d been indoctrinated to believe in for the first 18 years of my life, why had this not resulted in faith?
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I was raised in a practising Catholic family, went to Catholic-ethos schools with all the associated rite preparations and church celebrations. I went to Mass every week (although we did regularly leave after Communion on a Sunday to beat the queue in the shop for the paper and cream for the apple crumble) until I became old and bold enough to refuse around the age of 14. I sang Here I Am Lord in the classroom and coloured in the gory pictures of Jesus on the cross. I’m too old to have made Communion chalice halos out of CDs but I’m sure tinfoil was used in their place. I joined the church folk group in my early teens to make the whole thing more bearable. In hindsight, our devotion to the songs of A Woman’s Heart was a little strange but I suppose if you really want to you can see God in everything, even Wall of Tears. My convent secondary school had nuns on the teaching staff, a prayer room and retreats, and loved an aul religious service, yet when I was recently asked to return to speak at the annual “Mercy Mass” at the start of the school year I had to say no and explain that I have no relationship with the church and couldn’t bring myself to speak from an altar. The last time I did that was for my father’s eulogy and I couldn’t not go to his funeral. Besides, he had faith, especially as death grew closer. And I’m glad he did, if it soothed him.
It makes sense to me, that someone who knows they’re dying might feel their faith strengthening, or that they might even find it for the first time. What doesn’t add up is the insistence on attempting to indoctrinate children from the ages of four and five. Speaking to an older relative about this recently I mentioned that a friend’s children go to an Educate Together school and know nothing of Catholicism except for whatever they might touch on during an occasional broader lesson on world religions. They wonder about the “scary” statue of a man on a cross outside the church they pass daily, and at Christmas one of them asked if they could have one of those “Jesus sets” to play with, ie a crib. My relative was slightly perplexed at their ignorance, and worried about the lack of faith formation. I presented myself, a walking, talking example of how driving home the message of the Catholic Church in schools does not work. I learned a few banging tunes, but that was it.
The Instagram account Education Equality Ireland (@educationequalityireland) posts daily testimonials from parents and educators about their frustrations in trying to access or provide classrooms that are free from faith formation. They deliver worrying stories about children who are “opted out” of religious lessons being sidelined and left out. Some children who are opted out are still being taught about prayer and sin, despite their constitutional right to attend a state-funded school without participating in religious instruction. They hear from teachers who cannot apply for jobs in state schools without a Certificate in Religious Education. At a time when school divestment should be ramping up, it seems like boards of management are digging their heels in and getting their way in a discriminatory education system.
My psychiatrist knew that faith was a dead end, so she prescribed the poetry of Mary Oliver instead. Now that’s a religion I can get behind.