‘Fuck!’ she said. ‘You never told me your family were so religious!’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. I was genuinely confused. What had given it away?
‘What do you mean “What do I mean”? Look around!’
I guess I’d never really noticed it before, the water I was swimming in, but as I looked around that day, and in the days following, it became clear to me that, yes, Defah might have a point.
Inside the front window, looking out on the street for all to see, were two child-size statues—one of the Madonna, and one of Joseph holding a toddler Jesus. In the hallway, there was a small holy water font, and a poster of a biblical quote of an old tree, and at the bottom of it were written the words: Lives rooted in God are never uprooted.
In the living room, I looked with new eyes at what had always been there—Bible quotes on the wall, crucifixes, smaller statues of Mary, the postcard of the Pietà by Michelangelo, and the large framed picture of a young bearded Jesus in contemplation, looking down at his palms.
Turning my gaze to the bookshelves and the windowsills, there were clogs and little statues of Dutch windmills, and blue-and-white original Delft pottery, and lots of art books and cookbooks and a dash of philosophy, but most of the decorations and most of the books were about Jesus, God, saints and faith.
It had never really occurred to me before now that Defah and I were different in this way—me Catholic, her atheist. How embarrassment! ‘Not at all,’ she said. As always, her openness and curiosity led the way. She wandered around our house like an anthropologist, and asked my mother just the kind of intense questions I tried, very hard, to avoid. Defah participated in all of our rituals—prayers before dinner, mass on Sunday, weddings, confirmations, baptisms. She did so eagerly and without judgement, and she and my mother grew very fond of each other, and they remain so to this very day.
I asked Defah recently, ‘Was that weird for you?’
‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘It was fascinating.’ She told me that what she felt in our house, more than anything, was that we were people who knew how to laugh, and how to love—and what else really matters in the end but that?
Joseph Campbell once said that most religions begin with the word ‘help’, and that makes sense to me. It was when Rowie was ill and dying that Mum—in a cry for help—felt her true faith was born. Dad went with Mum, although his own faith always remained much simpler. As an old man he still said the same prayers he’d said as a child, on his knees, morning and night, thanking God for the day and asking for the strength to face another one. It truly was thanks to the strength of their faith, and the support of our parish and school community, that our family was able to hold together as it did after Rowena died.
But despite my inheritance, I am, myself, a bit of a shit Catholic. I always liked praying, and lighting candles, and sitting quietly in churches, and singing, and feeling good hopeful feelings in my chest, and being loved and approved of, and doing the right thing, and being with my family, but with very few exceptions I have never been able to make much sense of the mass, itself.
Ironically, these days, every mass I attend leaves me feeling as though, by being there, by taking part, I am betraying the very same values I was always taught to uphold.
When I came back from London, thin-skinned, I did lean rather heavily on the framework of my childhood faith. I took comfort, I suppose, from the ritual of attending mass with Mum, and of praying morning and night. I was very grateful to have somewhere to go with my terror and my fear. Faith proved to be a great consolation. I was too tired to question anything. I was happy to follow the rules.
Alas, it was not to last.
One day, not long after I’d discovered The Weekes, the phone rang. It was Jenny Brookes, a childhood friend from Girl Guides who I hadn’t been in contact with since, well, the last I’d seen her was about five years ago when she was sneaking into the toilets at church during mass to smoke out the window. I remember admiring her guts. She had a very friendly voice, and spoke very quickly, saying she wouldn’t keep me for too long, but she’d bumped into our old Girl Guides leader at the shops and heard I’d been having a bit of a tough time (gosh, news travels fast!), and she was just calling to invite me to this thing that she and her friends went to—kind of like a youth gathering for young Catholics, but cool?
Catholic and cool: not words I’d ever really heard spoken in the same sentence before, although I’d always secretly hoped that somewhere, in some corner of the world, there existed a crew of Young Catholic Rebels—people who were artistic, curious, philosophical, intellectual, open and, preferably, really really good-looking. In my dreams, it would be kind of like Defah’s house on a Saturday night—coffee, wine, music, dancing, people snogging in corners, and so on. The only difference was there would be just a touch more God talk, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t quite sure if this was the kind of meeting Jenny had in mind but, hey, I was willing to give it a crack.
Three minutes into my car drive with Jenny and her fiancé, Tom, I realised that maybe I should have asked a few more questions before I agreed to this. The meeting was about an hour away—a
