God and Me

I grew up in what was a theocracy in all but name. Hell and heaven and purgatory were places real and certain we would go to after death, dependent on the Judgement. Churches in my part of Ireland were so crowded that children and old people who were fasting to receive Communion would regularly pass out in the bad air and have to be carried outside. Not to attend Sunday Mass was to court social ostracism, to be seen as mad or consorting with the devil, or, at best, to be seriously eccentric. I had a genuinely eccentric school-teaching cousin who was fond of declaring that she saw God regularly in the bushes, and this provoked an uncomfortable nodding awe instead of laughter. In those depressed, God-ridden times, laughter was seen as dangerous and highly contagious. The stolidity of the long empty grave face was the height of decorum and profundity. Work stopped each day in shop and office and street and field when the bell for the Angelus rang out, as in the Millet painting. The Rosary, celebrating the Mysteries, closed each day. The story of Christ and how He redeemed us ran through our year as a parallel world to the solid world of our daily lives: the feasts of saints, Lent and Advent, the great festivals of Christmas and Easter, all the week of Whit, when it was dangerous to go out on water; on All Souls' Night, the dead rose and walked as shadows among the living.