God and pumpkins

is there a god of small things... and big things for that matter?

When I was a child I believed in God. I did my first holy communion and prayed every night in bed. I was a teenager before I realised that some people didn’t believe. I thought they were saying it just to be cool. Like they pretended to like the Cure.

To me not believing in God was like saying I don’t believe in trees and sky and mum. I had grown up in a world where God was part of the furniture - literally. Jesus was hanging off crosses in every room of the convent school I attended from 4-17. Mary was in mossy statues in the grounds of the school.

I thought she looked so pretty. So serene. So peaceful.

I wanted to be like her.

And so I prayed, every day. I read stories of young girls being called on to do saintly deeds, half wanting and half dreading being one of them. What if God called on me to leave my family and feed the poor? Would I do it? What if God wanted me to be a nun? Would I? I mean, blue did suit me…

While most kids are dragged to church by their parents, I was the one doing the dragging. My sisters had no interest so I’d pester mum to take me. She and dad were no longer believers but had been too indoctrinated by their childhoods to ever be free of being ‘Catholic’ - which is why we were sent to Catholic school. They had a cultural loyalty to Irish nuns - as well as believing they were good enforcers of grammar and manners.

As a teenager I got confirmed - which is when you choose at 12 or 13 to confirm your faith. You go to God classes, do some volunteering and pick a saint’s name to take on as your confirmation name. I chose Brigid. I didn’t know anything about her but it was the name I picked from the long list. (She is now having a moment).

Anyway. God. I was into him and all his family and friends until I was eighteen. Then I got skin cancer and my dad had a massive heart attack and we were both in and out of hospitals for the next year.

I went to university with a bloody hole in my leg from surgery that didn’t heal and I thought that every phone call coming from home was to tell me that dad had died. It was a stressful time so I did what any eighteen year old would do: I drank. A lot. Pints and pints and pints of watery lager drunk in the Student Union while listening to Oasis.

God just fell away. I’d go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve after being in the pub with friends and would go into churches during the day if I needed to think but I stopped going to mass regularly.

Then when I was living in Dublin in my late twenties the report into child abuse in the Catholic church came out. I cried reading the letters of the children - now parents and grandparents - who had been systematically raped, bullied, beaten, humiliated, silenced. The shame they felt for something that was never their fault. The secrets they were forced to keep. The lives ruined before they had even started.

After that I could not set foot in a church without feeling cold rage. Going to weddings were a problem. Christenings too. I didn’t want anything to do with religion or the buildings in which religion happened.

God didn’t just fall away, he was locked out. Fully. Properly. Padlock. Done.

I worshipped the god of success instead, the god of buying nice jeans and being a good friend. Normal, non-spiritual life. It worked until it didn’t. I got the success, the nice jeans and gorgeous friends… and I was depressed.

So then I started the self-help lark, followed by the tantra lark. God started showing up again but I would kind of skim over the God related sentences when they appeared in books and workshops. It didn’t put me off but nor did it do anything for me.

But lately God is getting impossible to ignore.

God is a big part of The Artist’s Way programme a group of us are currently following. The word is used on most pages and can put people off. Ut put me off at first but now I like it. Julia Cameron’s’s God is a very different God to the one I was brought up with.

She believes God is the life-force that animates the world, like the one that Dylan Thomas describes as: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”.

This life force is what wants to come through us when we write and sing and dance and live and love. It is the life force that creates trees and butterflies and blades of grass and singing birds and… well, you get it.

It’s not a capricious, punishing God who wants us to confess our sins and do our homework. It’s a generous God, a flamboyant one even. A God of celebration and joy and creativity. This God, when I start to get used to him/her/it, sounds fabulous. Also a bit too good to be true. If this God is real why do so many awful things happen?

Last week I was assisting on a tantra retreat called Love, Sex and God.

It was “a celebration of the sacred, the connection with “divine mystery” that happens when we allow ourselves to trust fully in the flow of our body, our energies, our heart, and our soul. The processes invite you into communion with life, moment by moment, so that every touch, every word, every movement is a dance with the “Beloved”.”

The Beloved is Jan Day’s word for God.

The workshop was about learning to be danced by life rather than planning all the moves yourself. Learning to trust the flow of life. Learning to see God in everything - even the crappy stuff.

It was beautiful. Truly, beautiful.

At one point we were asked to write about our relationship to God. I found myself writing: “I believe in God and I want to fully surrender.”

I didn’t know until I wrote that sentence that I did believe. Again. It felt nice.

And what does it mean to fully surrender? I guess it means to let go of my own limited plotting and planning. To trust the flow of life. To have faith that things are working out just as they are meant to even if it doesn’t feel like it. But then, I ask, if that’s true why do bad things happen to people? Where is God in Gaza? Where is God for the man passed out on the London pavement, an empty can by his side?

On the way home from the retreat I listened to Krista Tippet’s On Being podcast. She was interviewing musician Bon Iver, real name Justin Vernon.

Vernon had been religious as a child and studied religion at college but then saw the mess religion had made of things and became an atheist. In recent years he has softened: “I think at a certain point there’s just, if you take that word off the table, you just don’t have anything else. “Synchronicity”, “coincidence”, these are also words that I use and… they are not as good.’

Tippett said to him: “You like the word “God” these days.” To which he replies: “Yeah. I’m back saying it.”

Next I listened to a conversation Tippett had with the late great Jane Goodall who spent her life studying chimpanzees. Goodall said: “And you know what’s fascinating? More and more highly intellectual people — philosophers of science, physicists, and so on… all of these great brains have said there is no way that what’s happened is just chance. What that intelligence behind the universe is — what it is, who it is; probably what it is — I haven’t the faintest idea, but I’m absolutely sure that there is something. And seeking for that something is part of being human.”

Another great mind - Mum - has come to the same conclusion. When I got home she was telling me about sitting on the toilet watching a tiny insect cross the tiles. ‘It was no bigger than a full-stop, a moving full-stop… how can you not believe that there is something making all this happen…’

A moving full-stop. I loved that line.

And so here I am. The door is open to God again. Or god. Or the Beloved. Or whatever we are calling it. And it feels nice. Like a relief. Like seeing a long lost friend you didn’t realise you missed until you see them again and a part of you slots back into place.

Justin Vernon wrote a thesis at college called “Leaving Religion, Finding God”.

That’s what I’m doing.

xx

PS - after writing this post I turned the radio on. Guess what the song was? I kid you not.

xx

IN OTHER NEWS

I am doing an event with Pages of Hackney bookshop on 20th November with the icon that is Anouchka Grose. We will be talking about the many different ways to live and love. I can guarantee that Anouchka, who is one of the most stylish people I have ever met, will look AMAZING. And we will of course be clever, funny, interesting and all that. Thank you to Jo at Pages for inviting us. The last event we did sold out, so if you are interested it might be good to book sooner rather than later.

IN OTHER OTHER NEWS

I haven’t had any long covid symptoms since July. People keep asking me what made the difference and I don’t know. I did so much - well, so little - in the bid to get well, that it’s hard to tell what helped. Was it the meditating and more meditating, the sleeping, the therapy, the complete stopping of life as I had been living it?

One thing it was not was my diet. I remain as devoted to almond croissants and coffee as I ever was.

I am sitting in a cafe now getting my sugary fix, grateful to be able to live life again, to be able to go for walks, to get on trains and get through whole days without naps. Though I do still like naps, they no longer have to happen two hours after waking. All those cliches about health being the most important thing really are true. Thank you God, or whoever is up there, for letting me get well.

Oh and the pumpkins:

I saw this arrangement in the village of North Curry in Somerset.

And the UK looks like this at the moment. I was worrying about money when I took this photo. The thought occurred to me that it’s foolish to worry about money when the world is LITERALLY SHOWERING US WITH GOLD.

As Gary says, God is a drag queen, nothing is too much, nothing too FAB-u-LUS.

Oh dear, I’ve gone all in, haven’t I?

Normal serial killer tv watching will resume at some point I’m sure.

Love and hugs

xx