Why is it that people who, after much pondering and deliberation at some time in their lives, decide to temporarily or definitely opt out of strictly-organised religion tend to find religion such a fascinating subject still? It is a question I have often asked myself but am still without a really convincing answer.
The more rigid the religious strictures of childhood and teenage years, the more some of us seem to feel the urge to question and to seek other avenues via which one can continue to ruminate over the spiritual aspect of life in general, happily away from dictats and rituals for too long pushed down our throats by well-meaning mothers and fathers, uncles and aunts, teachers and self-appointed, egocentric village elders.
The examples of famous writers and actors who went down this same meandering road strewn with unanswered questions and who grew up in an unnecessarily strict, often suffocating, religious environment are many.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, not surprisingly, the Catholic Irish predominate. We recently stopped to pay tribute to Dave Allen, the great stage and television comic, when he passed away. His obsession with jokes about the Pope, popery and religion in general knew no bounds. He suffered for it as much as he suffered for his alcohol addiction. Quite by chance, during a visit to friends at BBC Television in London many years ago, I found myself a witness to one of his customary post-recording fracas – the studio in shambles and a complete wreck. It eventually led to Allen’s contract being unceremoniously terminated by the BBC brass hats.
Another Catholic comic and writer of Irish descent was Spike Milligan. In the “Goons” material for BBC Radio and his famous multi-volume wartime memoirs, religion features only too wildly and explicitly. He was a self-confessed manic-depressive.
And so it goes. Is it a chip on the shoulder or a natural reaction to years of compulsory conditioning? Many of Europe’s outstanding anticlerical exponents, particularly in France and northern Italy, came from very strict religious backgrounds, very much the same as many of Malta’s own prominent Socialist thinkers and politicians, who took on the Church in the virulent politico-religious dispute of the 1960s, who had in their formative years been to the Archbishop’s Seminary and some of them had even toyed with the idea of entering the priesthood.
Those of us who, as children and young teenagers, were brought up in that social environment could hardly avoid being influenced one way or another by the strange and confounding goings-on of that unhappy epoch. There were brothers who did not talk to brothers, parents who quarrelled with grandparents, priests who acted brusquely and foolishly, and politicians at village level who replied in kind. It was exactly the fodder required and was being fed to us as we gradually, not all too grudgingly, realised we were losing our religion, even if we couldn’t help it.
On a more personal level, when, as a child, one day I found at confession I had been treated differently from some of the other boys who formed the traditional Saturday afternoon queue at the local parish church – just because I had admitted buying the “forbidden” newspaper for my father – I knew immediately it was the beginning of an estrangement. And I was not alone to get that odd feeling. And I am not alone still in contending the whole episode has had a lasting effect on our psyche both as individuals and as one whole generation. We might not wreck studios and we might not so easily succumb to manic depression, but the scar is still there in the now ageing tissue.
We have of course all reacted differently to it. Mine has been more or less an overwhelming desire to discuss, even to study at tertiary level, that which we were supposed to accept blindly by our preceding generation of parents and moral minders. It brings to mind the story by Julian Huxley of the philosopher and the theologian. The two were engaged in a dispute and the theologian used the old quip about a philosopher resembling a blind man, in a dark room, looking for a black cat – which was not there.
“That may be,” said the philosopher, “but a theologian would have found it.”
Just back from a few days in an Islamic country, Morocco, that does not impose religion on its citizens, I could see why they too are so afraid of the possibility of fundamentalist dilution of everyday religion. It would ruin a successful lifestyle and, in the process, inhibit social and economic growth.
The Catholic world has been much more fortunate in that the ugly tentacles of religious fundamentalism have not, at least as yet in the modern age, reached up to its neck to threaten it with strangulation. But it does not mean that there are not within the same Catholic world those organisations and individuals who wouldn’t strive and contrive to push it back whole centuries. The sad and horrifying case of Terri Schiavo in the United States in the past few weeks is just one other example of how the embers of fundamentalism are regenerating into what many so-called born-again Christians hope will be a forest fire beyond control.
I may be the last person to talk of religion, but I do believe that some people carry their religion like a burden on their backs, when they should carry it like a song in their hearts. We certainly talk a great deal about religion in this country, but we need to stop long enough to let our feet catch up with our mouths.
For those of us still in search of a way out of the pain and the agony of the past, religion continues to be a dancing partner that still seeks to convince us on the marble floor of the Catholic Church. Again, a story that still rings true today. As the great artist Raphael was engaged in painting frescoes, two cardinals stopped by and began criticising his work, finding fault without really understanding it.
“The Apostle Paul has too red a face,” one of them said.
“He blushes when he sees into whose hands the Church has fallen,” answered the angry artist.