Finding God
Though Jackie’s mother Tess came from a Catholic family, her father Norman was agnostic. He believed that no religion should be imposed on a child while it was young. So he insisted that Jackie grew up ‘free from religious indoctrination’. “She can decide for herself once she is eighteen”, he used to say.
But Jackie found God. Let us listen to the story in her own words:
“Each one of us as persons had a unique journey through life, some searching consciously, others not so consciously. But throughout life change is inevitable, we cannot remain static. At its most obvious, age in time means change – and this kind of change we share with the rest of creation. Yet at a deeper level for us as people I feel that our thinking reflects who we are, and our belief in who we are changes how we respond to others in the events where we journey on with the power to become . . . and with the power to create meaning in who we are becoming.
It is with these thoughts in mind that I would like to consider the ideas which struck me when reflecting upon the quotation from scripture mentioned in John 8 ,31-32: “If you continue faithful to my word, you are my disciples in earnest; so you will come to know the truth and the truth will set you free”. This saying of Jesus seems to me a good starting point to reflect upon the beginnings of my own belief in Jesus, not only as a religious teacher of his place and time, but as having power – the power of the Risen Lord as I believe now – to break through the barriers of time and space with his living word to belong to the NOW of our everyday events.
Jackie, in college
A morning coffee break; sitting in a busy, noisy college canteen – hardly the place for any religious’ experience – especially a change to affect the rest of my day . . . and the rest of my life. Surely an experience such as this would take place at a retreat in the silence of surroundings more in keeping with prayer and contemplation. Didn’t it need the quiet cool arches of gothic architecture, a posture of prayer and the rest of religious trappings . . . ? mine didn’t.
My own discovery and awareness of the reality of God began in times of my becoming more deeply aware of life. By this I mean the impact of certain thoughts and events punctuating the ordinary routine of day to day existing; of following a laid down life-style or of just getting through the day along with everyone else. I sometimes glimpsed a greater depth. I sometimes knew of another dimension. Perhaps the background to an appreciation of the fullness found in silence had come before – in my thinking when I walked through fields and forests. Or again when I sailed over wind powered waves of an estuary along the lonely East coast meadows, their flat cloud filled horizons stretching between cornfields and trees – Constable country – and only river birds called and sky larks, high beyond sight, saturated the drying marsh grass with cascades of silver sound.
When I eventually hit on the Church I hadn’t experienced any of the trauma of growing up in a secure faith only to have it knocked down around my ears as an adult as I know others have. I didn’t have the chance to be bored with Church convention, language or stereotyped prayers because I didn’t know any. The only set prayer I knew was the ‘Our Father’ which I had learnt at school. I used to occasionally say it very slowIy to myself as a child when I ever thought about praying. It satisfied me at the time that this was a suitable way of telling God I be lieved in him which I remember I’d promised to do when about seven. That had been a doubtful time especially as it was considered ‘a dare’ to say ‘I don’t believe in God’ . . . and I had whispered this along with some boys and felt the thrill of daring. Until on my own one day I knew this was not true and promised ‘I believe in you God. I really do’. The doubt went and I left it at that.
Yet as a teenager doubts loomed larger than ever again, and I cast around me for some kind of meaning. With the ‘grown ups’ religion was a taboo subject – it wasn’t mentioned and wasn’t supposed to be mentioned. With my peers the main interests in life were horses and boys. If they went to Church at all it was the boys they saw there they talked about, nothing came up about God. I watched some Catholic cousins carefully, and noticed that though they dressed up and went to mass quite cheerfully every Sunday, the only other concern was not to eat meat on Friday. When I asked them if they believed what they read in the Bible they said they weren’t allowed to read the Bible as the nuns at school said it was too difficult for them to understand. It all sounded a bit thin, to me.
The nearest I came to learning anything about God through someone else’s experience at that time was in our English literature classes. One of the poems which formed part of our exam study was the Hound of Heaven. This poem fascinated me as no other work had done – little did I know at that time that Francis Thomson had been a Catholic, and a convert. Also in Browning’s Abt Vogler the creative artist sees for a moment the spark . . . before coming back to the ‘C major of this life’. I knew what he meant when I listened to music which became too great for words, and by being caught up in wonder with landscape too magnificent to describe.
I’d just started life at college when some newspapers began to run articles on ‘why I believe/don’t believe in God’. It was a fashion in the fifties and many papers and magazines cashed in on the subject. From the famous, the notorious, the man-or-woman-in-the-street opinions poured out. There were all kinds of proof for and against belief, suggested remedies for unbelief and suitable recipes to secure belief. One of these in a Sunday newspaper caught my eye – someone suggested that you decide that there is no God, and keep this decision up for a week and you will see at the end of the week whether you really do or don’t need to believe in God. Looking back I can see that it was a pretty shallow kind of theology to say the least!! But for lack of anything better I thought I’d have a go at that. It certainly did one thing for me . . . at the end of that week I realised how empty and meaningless life would be without some kind of belief apart from material things . . . and I hadn’t until then realised just how much I did pray. I knew that maybe I had no proof for others but that I believed and I could never again see my life stretching ahead for years without some religious belief.
So I knew I would from then on believe in God. I would talk and pray to him as I knew he had created me for some purpose. But that didn’t mean I would need to be a Christian. I hadn’t been brought up as one, and anyway people who had didn’t seem to know much about it anyway . . . so what did the rest matter as long as I just believed in God? Yet in all this reasoning there was a lingering uneasiness in my mind. God did seem to be still so far away – and anyone could believe in a secret God like this and carry on as usual . . . where did it all link up? Where did this faith in God belong? Where did I belong in this faith?
What about Jesus?
I thought I might do some serious study on Jesus Christ and all he meant later on. I felt there was no time at that stage because of my college studies and securing some kind of future. I told myself that before I could believe that Jesus Christ was more than a great religious teacher, who I did have an admiration for from our haphazard and often non-existent ‘divinity class’ at school, I would need to know much more about the whole background and set up. I would also need much more convincing evidence from people around who claimed to believe in him enough to link him in some way with this’ rather general ‘belief in God’. Still, I did find at college that there were a few people with a real Christian commitment – or searching along those lines – and it was while talking to one of my friends that my real answer came in a way in which I least expected.
I was sitting with my friend at a canteen table during the morning coffee break in the first week of a new term. We’d talked about religion often, as he had a Church of England background which he was seriously taking up again at a deeper level after drifting away from it for a while after leaving school. I was interested in what he had to say as to my mind he was better equipped with knowledge than I, and was one of the few people I knew in my own age group to be serious about religion yet at the same time reflective and questioning. He’d just returned from a Christian life-style camp run by a Church group during the holidays. He was full of enthusiasm about faith and the power it had. Just listening to him made me feel weary / and dull at the thought because I really couldn’t match the same mood myself. As he was talking I thought again that one day when I had the time I would look into it all . . . but I could only see that I’d need to know a great deal about Jesus Christ before I put my faith into him to become a Christian . . . and through these thoughts came the words of the Gospel my friend was quoting _ I’d heard them before – nothing new – about the power of faith to move mountains with a word (Mark 11,23). And he went on to say how even the canteen door – and we both looked at the brown swing canteen door – could open on its own with the power of someone with faith.
The canteen door didn’t open then . . . but something in me opened. I suppose that is a moment without words when explanation becomes experience. It was as if I knew in a split second faith within me in Christ had become a reality. It had come now, and it had come to stay.
The new dimension
sketch by Jackie
Everything turned round and all the struggle of getting through to God with an effort seemed to vanish and this power of Christ’s concern caught me up into a sudden new way of looking at life. It was not collecting knowledge so that faith is somehow gained . . . but a gift within space creating power which time unfolds gradually through a life time of knowledge. I was suddenly within a new dimension of knowing Christ, whose life and the knowledge of him I would be able to go on discovering for the rest of my life. In a certain sense the past goes before us as a way to follow, as well as being deeply engraved upon us in the heritage of our belonging. So it was in this sense of needing to belong to a tradition that was one of the factors eventually leading me into the Church. It took some time. A time in which everything to do with God was movement – I was caught up in it. The excitment of knowing Jesus as God coloured the unfolding of the way I read Scripture now, and the way I looked upon situations and events around me. The idea of God going on before us makes sense to me, not only did he seem to be before – but leaping ahead – and I needed all my energy to keep up!! It was a time in which I became much more aware of the power of the Holy Spirit. My new insight gave me a new way of looking at Pentecost. I could now identify with the gathering of the Church as an experience, and understand more about the power of healing and coming to terms with painful situations in life.
From then on my awareness was opened to a Church much broader and wider in scope than I had gathered from the few Catholics I knew. When I asked my Catholic cousins at this stage ‘what do you believe . . . ? Why do you believe . . . ?’ they were non-plussed . . . and then came the usual reply ‘what the nuns have told us at school’. In my disappointment with their lack of personal conviction I felt at times as if we belonged to completely different religions. Yet what I read made sense to me as I saw through the eyes and minds of authors different facets of a tremendous experience in faith. My reading was sprinkled with the works of Thomas Merton, Chesterton, Belloc, Graham Greene – a struggle through Newman, and an inspired taste of what prayer may mean with Teresa of Avila. And after some intense instructions by Redemptorist priests in our local parish, I was admitted to the Church through a conditional baptism – because I found out that my grandmother, who was a Catholic, had secretly baptised me when I was born.
line drawing by Jackie
It was the Catholic papers which kept me on the ground with attitudes to daily events – when suddenly the Hungarian uprising hit the headlines. For the first time in my life I realised that people in communist countries had something else to say . . . they were not just submissive to their governments. Most interesting of all, Christians still had something to say, and obviously thought it was something worth living for, stuck as they were beyond the normal reach of the rest of the Church they belonged to. The rest of the world began to open out for me . . . not just as other foreign countries as before . . . but into places to know and to care about.
Of course, much has happened since the first days of my belief, and although many years have gone by living within the Church, I still experience the same joy in the wonder of the moments I experienced as the ground for what matters today. Because of the kind of search I have had, it is always a matter of concern for me to communicate and share my faith today in tune with the signs of the time. It is in this continuous search to live a positive and outgoing Christian life that Vatican II has been like a breath of fresh air – one in which with others I have found more meaning and hope than ever before. As the wind blows the Spirit breathes where it will . . . and the heartbeat of the Church alive keeps in rhythm with those who care, and with those who choose the Way the Truth – and Life!”
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