Talking to God: On Losing Religion But Not Faith

The closest I ever come to any kind of bad touching is when I am twelve, on a retreat weekend to prepare for my Confirmation into the Catholic Church. It is a set of circumstances so cliché that my overwhelming urge now is to roll my eyes and never think about it again except occasionally, and when I do remember it is with dull surprise, as though I am hearing a story about someone else. Nothing really happens in it, after all. One of the guys running the retreat centre (dark hair, part Italian like me, he says, early thirties at a guess) takes a fancy to me and holds my hand a few times, stands close enough for me to know I’m uncomfortable without knowing why. There are a few comments from the other kids, darker in tone than anyone realises in our cusp-of-adolescence-innocence, about me having a boyfriend, and he’s an older man too. When I tell my mum about it later, when I get back, saving it until just before bed because there is still a shame in it, and it is easier to say in the dark, she asks me in a voice that I will only later understand is thick with fear and potential panicky fury, “What did he do?” Nothing, I say. And I tell her the whole of it. Nothing really happened but whatever did, it probably wasn’t right. My best friend’s mum was one of the supervising adults; I was safe. Nothing ever really would have happened. The next day, my mum, sick with relief, will ask my friend’s mother about it and she will say, yes, she had picked up on it, she had kept an eye out. My mum tells me the man seemed like he was a very lonely person. I was safe. There’s so much worse that could have happened.

Worse does happen, that year, and if it’s someone’s fault then it’s Philip Pullman’s. I’m sitting in church, the Saturday evening six o’clock service, which we get to go to when mum is tired or we beg especially hard, because it’s only half an hour long and there are no hymns. Our priest begins the service – he’s a liberal priest, as they go, in years to come he will do a sermon that comes as close as he’s allowed to giving homosexuality the thumbs up – and tells us who we’re praying for this week. And from nowhere, the thought – clear as a bell, in a voice that is and is not mine – “You don’t get to tell me who to pray for.” And the split second before it lands, “Oh my god, he was right.” The he is Philip Pullman, the thing he is right about is religion, and from that moment my belief is irrevocably, painfully altered. The final voice of the three that plagues me in that moment is the one that thinks to record it. “On Saturday 9th August, 2003, I stopped believing in God.” (Not true, I will find out. Not nearly true.)

It is a blow to my still-shaping sense of the world because for several months, I have been talking to God. And God has been listening. Not talking back, of course, that was reserved for Joans and Bernadettes and Thérèses of Lisieux, and even I am not presumptuousness enough to aspire to sainthood (save, of course, the occasional idle wondering whether I could be the second Mary, but that’s for the drama more than the kudos.) But God has been listening. I can feel it with a clarity unlike anything I have known before. When I pray, He lends a kindly, attentive ear: when I ask dutifully for him to look after those I care about and then desperately to make things a little better, that maybe we could have not quite so many arguments, that maybe I could be better, kinder, selfless, possessed of virtues I know already I do not have. It is like picking up a phone and knowing with absolute certainty I will get through first time, no waiting. I have acquired, in those months, something close to serenity. Perhaps it is even grace.

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