A chance discovery of a childhood religion workbook brought
ROSITA BOLAND back to her schooldays, when angels could be good or bad, and sin was surrounded by lightning.
LAST
WEEKEND, while doing a reorganisation of my bookshelves, I came across
something I had totally forgotten about. Tucked among some books hoarded
from childhood was a religion workbook,
Christ’s Life In Us.
I’m not sure what age I was when I
used this workbook, as there is no class year on the front, but judging
by the wobbly, uneven handwriting and some back-to-front characters,
perhaps seven or eight. It appears to be the year I made my First
Confession, as the word “sin” goes through the book like a mantra.
To
some extent, any textbook decades old is going to be a document of
social history, but the fact that this one is a religion workbook makes
the intervening societal changes in Ireland more stark and startling by
contrast.
Take, for example, Lesson Five, “The Gift of God’s Life and Love”.
“God
loves everything He made. But He loves some things more than others. He
gives them more gifts. Draw a circle around the one God loves the
most.”
The four options were “Plants. Animals. Baby – not baptized. Baptized baby.”
Christ’s Life In Us was
published by CJ Fallon in Ireland, “by arrangement with WH Sadlier
Incorporated New York” according to the back cover. There is no
publication date, but I was using it in the mid-1970s, for what was
colloquially referred to in class as “Catechism”.
There are 26
lessons in the book, with exercises that variously required me to fill
in blanks, answer yes or no, make a drawing or write something. Lest
there be any confusion about who God loved the most, under the drawings
is a sentence asking me to complete the sentence: “I was baptised on
______.”
Lesson Seven poses the rhetorical question: “What offends
my Heavenly Father?” The accompanying exercise instructed me to “Draw
lightning around the word SIN.”
Lesson Nine is a statement,
“Heavenly Father, I am sorry!” The instruction here is to “draw a
cross”. I look at this now, and marvel at the apparent association
between a child’s act of contrition and a crucifixion.
I was
clearly confused as to what a sin was. One lesson required me to write
“sin or no sin” under a series of drawings. Under a picture of a boy
breaking a vase by accident, I have written “sin” in pink marker.
Since
finding my old workbook, I have been trying to recall filling it out,
and how I puzzled through these questions. I do not remember ever
showing it to my parents: we did these exercises in class, and thus any
guidance we received came from the Mercy order of nuns who taught us.
Fragments
of memories have come back. Since as a child I was – and still am –
poor at drawing, I clearly remember fretting about how to draw things
such as angels and God when I had no idea what they looked like.
One
exercise, My Picture Dictionary, asked me to draw six items: ciborium,
paten, tabernacle, altar, chalice and host. This exercise has been left
blank. As a child, it must have filled me with horror, because until
last Saturday when I Googled it, I remained ignorant as to what a
“ciborium” was.
Another lesson required me to draw “good angels”
and “bad angels”. As a child, all I was sure of concerning angels is
that they had wings and lived in the sky. Our Mercy nuns encouraged us
to imagine that our own personal guardian angels were with us at all
times, and we should pray to them every day.
Since I knew they were
meant to have wings, each day when we rose to say the Angelus at noon in
class, I imagined that my guardian angel was sitting perched on my
shoulder; an image which, recalled as an adult, now puts me on mind of
something akin to an invisible celestial parrot.
The good angels I
drew are purple, have smiley faces, and wings. The bad angels are black
and have downturned smiles, but otherwise they are identical. They were
bad apparently because, as I have written underneath, “The bad angels
were not sorry for their sin.”
Then there were questions that
required a yes or no answer, some of which were these: “Can those who
are not baptised receive Holy Communion? Does the grace of God grow in
us each time we received Communion properly? Does prayer make the life
of grace grow in us? Does sin make our love for God grow strong? Does
sin offend God our Father?”
I have circled “No” to this last
question, but reading my answers now, they appear to be entirely random,
as if I had no idea what the questions were about, which I probably did
not.
I have been agnostic all my adult life. I have not obeyed the final lesson in
Christ’s Life In Us , Lesson 26 – “My Promises to Jesus”.
I
wrote that I would go to Mass every “Sunday”, say my prayers every
“day”, receive Holy Communion every “weke” and go to confession every
“Monday”.
The correct answer to this question, by deducing from the
number of spaces left blank, was meant to be every “month”.
It
doesn’t matter now to me whether a textbook and ethos dictated that
children attend confession every Monday or every month, because I have
not been inside a confession box since childhood.
Looking through
that workbook was a deeply strange experience. Enough has been written
of the proven intervening disgraces of the Catholic Church in Ireland.
All I’ll say is that I’m relieved to now live in a society where
unbaptised babies are not discriminated against in a childrens’ textbook
by using them in some odious moral ranking against plants, animals and
baptised babies.