St Mary's Church, Upper Street, early morning

encountering belief

And it is the light streaming in the windows, so pure this winter morning and my head aches dully after two hours sleep and I sit in the pew, run my hands over the polished wood in front of me as I pick up a Bible and turn the fine pages, that crisp thin paper you never find in any other book, to song of Solomon, a book of such absurdity I still think it beautiful and in front of me hangs a large cross, painted gold, and it is not the presence of God that surrounds me with calm but rather his absence, that I can sit on this morning, here with the light coming in and with the cross, the symbol of pain, of resurrection, of renewal; I can sit here with the ridiculous and the sublime and no one in the pulpit and no one about to preach, it is just me, turning the pages no longer gilt edged of a book I cannot believe in and will never resolve, not really, my complicated feelings to, but just to sit, and to feel the sense of relief felt by others who’ve done the same, is nearly enough. Cynicism is tiring. Still feel the lure of belief. How easy it is. How difficult it is. Submission is harder than it looks. Requires a degree of surrender I do not possess.

There is a scripture I want to find though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death - that rhythm, it never leaves you but other things do. I want to think I am too tired to remember where it is, Psalms, I know, remember defacing a Bible, maybe I was four, certainly I’d just learnt to read, writing followed quickly, but Psalms, it made no sense, crossed it out, replaced it with Sams and my mother, incandescent not because of the lack of possessive apostrophe but because we did not write on Bibles. But it made no sense to me when we wrote on all the other books, the study books, the Watchtowers, the Awakes, finding the right answers and putting our hands up and waiting for the microphone but we did not write in the Bible, did that mean there weren’t right answers there? But this was the HOLY word of God, and in the beginning was the word and the word was God and look at what I’m doing, this daily blasphemy I am enacting through making new Gods from words.

I cut a Bible up once.

I sat for a whole week with a scalpel. Eviscerated it.

I did not think myself like my surgeon father then, although perhaps I should’ve. It was the same week they burnt him. The same week it was suggested his ashes be thrown to the bottom of the Vaal and as they were fighting over his final resting place, to find the safest place to leave him, all of us fearful that in being burnt he might assume new forms and take new flight, I sat with the scalpel and carefully cut words from the thin pages. Reordered them, stuck them back down, made new meanings of them. Found it entertaining. Thought for a while of calling it art. Or poetry. Not the insanity it was.

I burnt the remains.

The following day, when the ash was cold, scooped them into a glass jar, screwed on the lid and have not opened it since. Thought for a while I would turn this ash to charcoal, but it just sits at the back of the pantry. There are more worrying ways to get revenge, perhaps.

I find often find myself in churches in the most literal sense. In these holy spaces I can abandon myself. Or I try. I try. I try. I try. I am tired and I want to. I so very much want to. I want, for a fleeting moment, to believe. To truly believe but also recall how hard I have worked to make myself forget, harder work than it ever was to believe. I cannot remember where the scripture is because to remember where it is would be to remember what else it says which would be to start the cascade I have worked so hard to stop, the vengeance of Revelation, the punitive flood, and Jehovah, the God of war, the God of Abraham, the God of Issac, the God of Moses and just look where that’s got us but still, I want. I want. I want. I want. In this space I am again found wanting. And the word was God and John’s having a laugh there, isn’t he; all these acts of sedition. But still, also true, the word is God and the word is master and the word will expose me, all this want only finds me wanting, only leaves me wanting.

In this white lit morning, the pure light, the true light, it is the struggle that appeals, to enter again into the grappling, the essentialness of it; the not knowing, the impossibility of certainty, that pulls me back to pews, makes me often push open the door of empty churches, sometimes I am surprised to find myself crying. Maybe I’m just a masochist. I sit with the Bible in my disbelieving hands. The day I left the Kingdom Hall, I knew I would never set foot in one again. But churches are different. Spaces hewn by belief, reaching towards heaven, rising to the uncertainty and the certainty. Buildings built from faith. Not quickly flung up and turned for a profit. Testament to the power of belief to create something beyond ourselves and shit, this is what we need right now, and to find it in a church, well. Irony works in mysterious ways.

Stand up. Wrap my coat tight around me. Tie my belt. Pick up the Bible. Walk to the back with it tucked in my hands. Muscle memory. Put it down on the back pew. Out into the morning. Quickly down the steps.

(For paid subscribers, How the War Began will be posted tomorrow and not Saturday as it usually is - this week has been a little bit on its head with publication day. Back to normal now.)