Articles on allsorts

The carol service at Kirkby Stephen Parish Church starred children from the local primary school, 200 of them, between five and eight years old. Just to get them to sit in an orderly manner was some achievement. It was wonderful to see youngsters singing their hearts out, particularly after they’d been trailed round town over the previous week entertaining Christmas shoppers and residents in local retirement homes. I had even seen one class sing under a canopy outside the Co-op. Poor things must have been approaching carol saturation.

Today’s performance was the grand finale. At the conclusion, 2.00 PM precisely, the teachers relinquished their charges into the hands of parents for the Christmas holiday. Sighs of relief from the teachers, sighs of another sort from Mums and Dads who know their lives will not be quite the same for the next three weeks.

The service was lovely, traditional carols mixed with fearless youngsters reading snippets from the nativity story. A young lad near us had learned the words to every carol so needed no song sheet, he just sang his head off. One young girl had the self-assurance to adjust the microphone before she read her piece. While she fiddled, we waited in silence. She was nerveless and paid no heed as a hundred pairs of eyes watched on until she was good and ready. Ice in her veins but a performance to melt our hearts.

Superb, all of you.

But I have a bit of a problem with this talk of donkeys and virgin births; I’m pretty sure I’ve become an atheist. In other words, I no longer believe in the existence of God. In fact, I’m probably an atheist and agnostic - meaning I also don’t believe it’s possible to know whether God exists. How can we possibly prove it? ‘Have faith’ is the advice. But I need more than that.

When did this start? To be honest, I’m not sure. The question I’ve found myself asking is, did I ever believe, or was it just accepted that I was a God-fearing Christian right back to pre junior school? I wasn’t given a choice, so my unchosen faith is a cross I have borne through life. Not a malevolent cross, just superfluous, which most of the time went unnoticed.

My, schools, all four of them, were Church of England. The senior one was Christian, and welcomed all denominations, so I was hauled to church every Sunday. Throughout my school days I also thanked the Lord for the food we ate before each meal – at one school, in Latin.

From my baptism, aged about 2 I think, I was a Christian and it went on from there, unquestioned till many years later. I knew that food at junior school had nothing directly to do with God. In our case, definitely not, because meals were provided by a chef called Gilbert, who had a cigarette in his mouth from dawn till dusk. Consequently, our sausages were sometimes dusted with what we called ‘Gillyash’.

Later, at senior school I was confirmed into the Christian Faith by The Bishop of Lichfield – not that I really understood why, although we had to undergo some ‘religious instruction’. I did it, I think, because some of my friends did. Looking back, it didn’t seem to make any noticeable difference to my life. My mathematical abilities didn’t improve, nor my Latin and my golf handicap remained stubbornly high. But why should earthly things improve? Confirmation meant I’d been through a rite of passage to ‘publicly affirm my faith and receive the Holy Spirit more fully’, at which time I miraculously achieved ‘spiritual maturity’. Outwardly I remained a sports-loving dim-wit more suited to cricket than religious studies. In fact, the Bishop of Lichfield was a school friend’s father, so without that terrestrial connection I may have been looked upon as a less than suitable candidate - unless they were short of ‘the confirmed’ and the numbers needed a boost. Post school, my faith was cemented into my genome when I nominated Church of England as my religion on various applications, passport or NHS for example.

But gradually, instance by instance, I saw ‘stuff’ that disturbed me, and I started to question the existence of a benevolent deity. Do other people go through this? Quite possibly. Did I have a light-bulb moment? I don’t think so, more a gradual dawning - like a persistent drizzle interspersed with a few heavy downpours. More than 35 years ago, I’d taken to praying because I was desperate when my Mum was dying. We nursed her in her bedroom, distressing, dirty, depressing stuff, then I would go down the corridor to my room, get on my knees and ask for divine help. Nobody listened then, or if they did, there was no earthly reaction as she gulped her final desperate breaths like an out-of-water fish. More importantly, neither she nor I drew comfort from my prayers as she died her horrible death.

I had muttered increasingly meaningless spiritual messages to myself for many years, living in a kind of divine suspension. At some point I’d just had enough and finally went public. I ‘came out’ officially in 2022 just after Ian, my brother-in-law, died. I published a book around that time and dedicated it to him. Poor man had lived a desperate existence for his last couple of decades and chose his own moment to call a halt and simply fade away.

I still get a lump in my throat when I read the dedication I wrote for him - heartfelt and written when I was still raw and angry:

For Ian

Inveterate chuckler and nice man.

refuse to pray that you have gone to a better place,

because no god is deserving of my prayers.

No benign deity would have let you suffer as you did.

So, no prayers. Just my hope that somewhere

beyond the clouds, you are at peace.

RIP my friend.

I try to remember us having a chuckle or a chat about cricket or football, but I can’t get past the memory of seeing his ravaged husk lying there and so hoping that whatever was inside him had been released to a better place. Nobody deserves what he went through. Sadly, appallingly, millions do.

Another instance that accelerated my push towards the ‘dark side’, was when a dear friend died a nasty, cancer-battered death and I needed someone to blame. I took my frustration out on a deity that had been forced on me all those years ago. My pal succumbed a couple of months before my brother-in-law. Even if I believed in something at that point, it certainly wasn’t the fairy-dust entity who chased me through junior school. He wasn’t the God of the nativity, and he certainly wasn’t someone I wished to worship. Those two thoroughly nasty recent deaths coupled with my Dad, who was taken over 50 years ago, consumed by Leukaemia and memories of my Mum, finally sheared my faith. Non of this represents the joy and celebration of a benevolent, bearded chap on a throne. In other words, I now decided there must be an alternative to blindly being a believer.

As I tumbled towards atheism, bear in mind that I was in a poor place and took it out on God and Christianity. So, with a rather skewed view, I thought about the various incarnations of the ‘The Bible’ upon which a huge proportion of the world relies for spiritual guidance, either for love or mayhem. Perhaps with a touch of cynicism, I believed that many contributors to those testaments were mere animal herders. Would we take the BBC’s 6-o-clock News seriously if it had been written by a goat-keeper? Actually, based on recent performance, it would quite probably be more accurate!

It seems to me that people find ways to rationalise religious texts rather than merely dismiss them as mischievous claptrap. We want to believe them. It’s only blasphemous to shun these (man-made) writings if you believe in God which I apparently no longer do. As a result, I can shed a large chunk of nonsense from my life. You’ll get the impression I’m rather angry and need someone to blame for the bad bits. I don’t think about God during the good times - there’s no need is there? Perhaps subconsciously, I’m in search of a balance.

But in the meantime, I’ve parked God in my Mum’s empty bedroom and if I let him out again it’ll be on my terms. It was the same room incidentally where I said my final goodbye to Dad - another reason to keep the door bolted until I have completed my inquest. I can see them now, though they died sixteen years apart, he lying ill on the right as we said goodbye, she dead on the left sixteen years later. Dear me. I’ve never thought about it till this moment, but I hope they are together and I hope they are happy as they journey on. Yes, I’ve waved them off, and it’s some comfort to think about them, because it keeps part of them around - the smiling part.

I’ve gone from blindly believing to angrily unbelieving - neither is particularly rational so I have begun to dig deeper. I hope you’ll see more rationality as I move on. Stick with it, it really is quite an eye-opener.

I don't Believe it.

Chapter 1

Change of Heart