Carrying the Idiot Ball
I’m pathologically liberal, despite an upbringing in one of the last pockets of the 1950s left on the planet. The Isle of Man is a tiny community halfway between England and Ireland and, by dint of its presence in the centre of a pretty hostile environment, it’s very conservative. Gay rights were a huge issue when I was growing up there, to the tune of activist Peter Tatchell turning up to the symbolic opening of the Viking Parliament one year dressed as a concentration camp victim to protest them. It’s different now, but growing up it was all-pervasive to the tune of at least two people in my year at school having a go at me because I was polite and read books therefore must have been gay.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful place and I had a pretty spectacular childhood but homophobia was as much a part of the landscape as big hills and standing stones and to be fair, I understand why. Small communities are by definition a bit insular, small rural communities even more so and when you put a small rural community on a rock in the middle of the Irish sea it’s very easy to look sideways at anyone from the other side of the island, let alone anyone who has a different sexual identity to you. It’s not remotely acceptable,
I also grew up under the eighteen year Conservative government that ran through to the early 1990s. I watched my father’s profession, teacher, and my mother’s profession, nurse, be effectively destroyed by a government that seemed intent on widening the gaps between the north and the south and the rich and poor, that focussed on business to the exclusion and detriment of every other aspect of society,
As a result, I watched a country I wasn’t part of but had to sit next to slowly change into something hard and broken. I saw the horrific damage inflicted on the north, on Scotland and on any group that the Conservatives weren’t busy courting. I also knew, from a very early age, I was not in those groups and never would be. My parents worked in professions that were being actively attacked and the damage was there for me to see, every single day, in the effects those changes had on my father’s long term health.
I remember, one night after school, telling my Mum he’d screamed at a friend of mine for being less than ten seconds late to a class. I’d sat there, working very hard on having the floor open up beneath me, as it happened, cringing in embarrassment. I asked if he was okay and Mum said he was worried about the heart murmur the doctor’s had picked up. The heart murmur I hadn’t known about until that exact moment.
The norm was hitting your targets, the norm was a National Curriculum that changed every few months, the norm was my father alternating between Prozac and no Prozac. The norm was also yelling ‘backs against the wall, lads’ when someone who, rumour had it, was gay, walked past.
The norm wasn’t for me.
I’m Catholic. I have been since I was 12 and in that time I’ve known around ten priests. Every single one of them has been engaged, kind, intellectual and compassionate and none of the things that the Church in general and Catholicism in particular is regularly accused of.
I’m not an idiot. I have massive, massive questions about my faith that various events this year have forced me to turn head on to. I don’t have answers yet, I’m not expecting them if I’m honest but I know there are vast tracts of my faith that I disagree with, and disagree with utterly. There is, for me, a difference between the church and the faith and the spirit of the latter is far easier for me to follow sometimes than the teaching of the former.
More than once this year I’ve sat in mass on Sunday morning and felt very little. A few years ago, shortly after I was made redundant I sat in mass and felt nothing but vast, seething rage. On the flip side, there are times when I feel part of something larger, a community that supports and holds up each of its members, that offers nothing but unconditional, broad spectrum love and acceptance. My relationship with my faith is changing and I accepted that a little while ago. I’ve always questioned, always balanced my own beliefs with those of the church and always, I like to think, operated off the first principle of ‘Don’t be a dick.’
Whether I’m a practicing Catholic or not in five years, I honestly couldn’t say. But I’m in a dialogue with my beliefs, with my faith. I’m engaged and curious and asking questions of both it and me and there is absolutely nothing I accept blindly.
It’s very easy to throw religious people in the same basket, to tar everyone with the brush of the extremists who think homosexuality is a sin or an ailment or something to be treated with compassion and pity and condescension. It’s particularly easy to do so when fundamentalists, because that’s what they are, are both so vocal and so adept at completely failing to comprehend other people’s points of view or what’s wrong with their own.
Religion, for me, has never, ever been the engine but rather a framework, a sketched outline which you build over and around until it becomes something which is unique to you. By some people’s weights and measures I’m sure I’m a lax Catholic, by others I’m pretty sure I’m too hard line, after all, I go to mass every Sunday, hit the major holy days of Obligation and even go to Reconciliation when I remember. That’s fine, their opinions are as valid as mine because what works for me, by definition, will almost certainly not work for anyone who isn’t me. I have no problem with that.
But I have a huge problem being told I’m stupid, that I’m a sheep who blindly follows doctrine and by extension am the same as a fundamentalist. Working in genre fiction and being the level of religious I am is very hard some times, because at least twice a year, without fail, someone will open their mouth and insert their entire foot and then there’ll be a stampede of condemnation that starts out deserved and ends up lumping anyone with religious beliefs into the same category. Which is, of course, almost as stupid and offensive as the sweeping generalisations of the fundamentalists themselves.
I’m liberal, I’m Catholic, I work in genre fiction and I’m not an idiot. But sometimes it’s very hard to not get angry about being given the idiot ball to hold.
.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful place and I had a pretty spectacular childhood but homophobia was as much a part of the landscape as big hills and standing stones and to be fair, I understand why. Small communities are by definition a bit insular, small rural communities even more so and when you put a small rural community on a rock in the middle of the Irish sea it’s very easy to look sideways at anyone from the other side of the island, let alone anyone who has a different sexual identity to you. It’s not remotely acceptable,
I also grew up under the eighteen year Conservative government that ran through to the early 1990s. I watched my father’s profession, teacher, and my mother’s profession, nurse, be effectively destroyed by a government that seemed intent on widening the gaps between the north and the south and the rich and poor, that focussed on business to the exclusion and detriment of every other aspect of society,
As a result, I watched a country I wasn’t part of but had to sit next to slowly change into something hard and broken. I saw the horrific damage inflicted on the north, on Scotland and on any group that the Conservatives weren’t busy courting. I also knew, from a very early age, I was not in those groups and never would be. My parents worked in professions that were being actively attacked and the damage was there for me to see, every single day, in the effects those changes had on my father’s long term health.
I remember, one night after school, telling my Mum he’d screamed at a friend of mine for being less than ten seconds late to a class. I’d sat there, working very hard on having the floor open up beneath me, as it happened, cringing in embarrassment. I asked if he was okay and Mum said he was worried about the heart murmur the doctor’s had picked up. The heart murmur I hadn’t known about until that exact moment.
The norm was hitting your targets, the norm was a National Curriculum that changed every few months, the norm was my father alternating between Prozac and no Prozac. The norm was also yelling ‘backs against the wall, lads’ when someone who, rumour had it, was gay, walked past.
The norm wasn’t for me.
I’m Catholic. I have been since I was 12 and in that time I’ve known around ten priests. Every single one of them has been engaged, kind, intellectual and compassionate and none of the things that the Church in general and Catholicism in particular is regularly accused of.
I’m not an idiot. I have massive, massive questions about my faith that various events this year have forced me to turn head on to. I don’t have answers yet, I’m not expecting them if I’m honest but I know there are vast tracts of my faith that I disagree with, and disagree with utterly. There is, for me, a difference between the church and the faith and the spirit of the latter is far easier for me to follow sometimes than the teaching of the former.
More than once this year I’ve sat in mass on Sunday morning and felt very little. A few years ago, shortly after I was made redundant I sat in mass and felt nothing but vast, seething rage. On the flip side, there are times when I feel part of something larger, a community that supports and holds up each of its members, that offers nothing but unconditional, broad spectrum love and acceptance. My relationship with my faith is changing and I accepted that a little while ago. I’ve always questioned, always balanced my own beliefs with those of the church and always, I like to think, operated off the first principle of ‘Don’t be a dick.’
Whether I’m a practicing Catholic or not in five years, I honestly couldn’t say. But I’m in a dialogue with my beliefs, with my faith. I’m engaged and curious and asking questions of both it and me and there is absolutely nothing I accept blindly.
It’s very easy to throw religious people in the same basket, to tar everyone with the brush of the extremists who think homosexuality is a sin or an ailment or something to be treated with compassion and pity and condescension. It’s particularly easy to do so when fundamentalists, because that’s what they are, are both so vocal and so adept at completely failing to comprehend other people’s points of view or what’s wrong with their own.
Religion, for me, has never, ever been the engine but rather a framework, a sketched outline which you build over and around until it becomes something which is unique to you. By some people’s weights and measures I’m sure I’m a lax Catholic, by others I’m pretty sure I’m too hard line, after all, I go to mass every Sunday, hit the major holy days of Obligation and even go to Reconciliation when I remember. That’s fine, their opinions are as valid as mine because what works for me, by definition, will almost certainly not work for anyone who isn’t me. I have no problem with that.
But I have a huge problem being told I’m stupid, that I’m a sheep who blindly follows doctrine and by extension am the same as a fundamentalist. Working in genre fiction and being the level of religious I am is very hard some times, because at least twice a year, without fail, someone will open their mouth and insert their entire foot and then there’ll be a stampede of condemnation that starts out deserved and ends up lumping anyone with religious beliefs into the same category. Which is, of course, almost as stupid and offensive as the sweeping generalisations of the fundamentalists themselves.
I’m liberal, I’m Catholic, I work in genre fiction and I’m not an idiot. But sometimes it’s very hard to not get angry about being given the idiot ball to hold.
.