Paul D’Alton has done something he hadn’t done for 20 years —
returned to Sunday Mass.And he reckons he wasn’t the only ‘prodigal son’ there.
IT was like riding a bike for the first time in years. It was instinctive. I was climbing the steep hill up to my local church and doing something I had never expected to do again: going back to mass.
The last time I was in a church was seven years ago, at my father’s funeral, so that memory was raw.
But what, on Easter Sunday just gone by, made the experience unnerving and surreal was that, like many lapsed Catholics, I had never thought I’d voluntarily and happily line up behind the regular faithful and walk through doors I’d sworn never to darken again.
And nor, would it seem, am I the only one.
Although recent polls have shown a continued decline in the numbers of people in Ireland attending weekly religious services — according to one global survey, we’re one of the most ‘lapsed’ nations in the world — on the ground, there is something of a different, embryonic picture.
Beside me, as I blessed myself with holy water, was Donal O’Brien, 31, a friend and neighbour. Originally from Quin, Co Clare, he now lives in Clifden, the ‘capital’ of Connemara. “I know people say that no one goes to church anymore,” he says, “but I’ve started going back and, more and more, I’m seeing young people, much younger than myself, doing the same.
“I’m not saying the polls are wrong when they tell us that we’ve all turned our backs on the Church, but that’s not the whole picture. It would be an exaggeration to say the place is packed every week, but I’m amazed by how many people of my age, and below, are popping up every Sunday, and that’s only very recently.”
Now I was one of them and the big question, of course, is: why? Why, after years of scandal, a Church brought to its knees by its own perniciousness, are some people, myself included, tentatively resurrecting a faith we were born into, but which, for so many years, we blithely tossed out the window as both irrelevant, if not malevolent?
Perhaps Donal O’Brien is right when he says: “I’m not sure this is the case for everybody, but in these hard times, when people have nothing, they have to believe in something.”
Belief?
Donal has a point there. Because with our blind belief in a different faith — the ‘God’ of spend-spend-spend — now gone, and with so many of us feeling rudderless and actually penniless, it is with great irony that some are returning to the faith of our forefathers.
Until very recently we would scoff at houses that still had the red-flickering flame of the Sacred Heart by the kitchen range, but our current need for succour, for reassurance, might, as it is slowly becoming for me and others, emanate once again from the Church.
Indeed, the rekindling of that flame has further been fanned by the recent election of Pope Francis.
Whatever our initial disgust at the Catholic bureaucrats who covered up the evils of abuse, here, suddenly, was a simple, seemingly approachable man, a figure whose modesty mirrored our own new penury.
The right man at the right time?
Whatever the reasons, here I was, for only my second attendance at Mass in 20 years. It’s the rush of memories, the subliminal reaction to being back in church, not just for a wedding or funeral, that hits you the most.
Psychologists say that one of the most pungent triggers of memory is smell, and so it was as I did the ‘holy curtsy’ — quick bob of the knees and bless yourself — before taking my seat in the pew next to Donal.
Being in church again, its smell immediately propels you back in time: the faint whiff of incense, the sickly-sweet patina of the altar flowers, the dusty, dank aroma of cold stone, it all flooded back.
As the priest emerged, I truly felt like a child, taking my first communion again. Would I remember when to kneel and when to stand, like we were taught?
Had they changed the roll-call of prayers and readings?
Was there some new-fangled ‘God squad’ manoeuvre they’d recently introduced, as they did, much to my late grandmother’s horror, when we all had to turn and shake the ‘peace be with you’ hand of your neighbour, even though you might have hated their guts?
There was little of that, actually. Mass has remained, largely, what it always has been: a somnolent ritual of the godly.
A few things were different: where, once, as children, you silently cheered after the Gospel was read, because you knew you were over half way through the bloody thing, the 55 minutes rushed passed like seconds.
Although the church was only half-full, the other major change I noticed, apart from a sprinkling of surprisingly young faces, was the fact that, unlike the old days, there were no groups of farmers slumped at the back of the church, on the floor, also waiting for the rigmarole to be over, so they could get to the pub.
“Are you taking communion?” Donal whispered to me. I shook my head.
In my latent memory, I remembered you could only do that if you’d recently been to confession. I hadn’t, and so there was to be no ‘Body of Christ’ for me.
Afterwards, smiling nervously at the amazed faces of my neighbours seeing me back at church, I did, however, resurrect one time-honoured tradition. “Fancy a pint?” Donal offered.
That was one ritual I wasn’t going to refuse.
Old habits do, indeed, die hard. We might yet be better for it.