For a while, as a child, I wanted to be a priest.
I was raised in a devoutly Catholic family, went through all the standard sacraments, became an altar boy. It was the magic of it all that gripped me – that there was something beyond us: a sky-sized, bearded, kindly superhero who we were ultimately working for and towards. Heaven sounded cool, too. Certainly compared to the alternative.
I wasn’t a great altar boy, to be honest. I was a daydreamer, which meant I would often drift off during the longueurs of mass and forget to ring the bell when I was supposed to. My crowning moment came while accompanying the grumpy local Canon around the Stations of the Cross, carrying a burning candle on a long pole, with which I set my own hair on fire.
As I grew, easy acceptance of the Catholic faith fell away, and any ecclesiastical aspirations went with it. Entering my teens, I was full of questions and doubts for which the Church seemed to have no answers beyond: “It just is.” There was too much of the budding journalist in me to accept that – I was set for a life of taking no one’s word for anything. And, anyway, as puberty hit, a different and equally mysterious kind of creation act was increasingly occupying my thoughts.
I’ve fallen and fallen. Today, a middle-aged man, I suppose I consider myself a battered, tattered atheist. I’ve seen nothing, heard nothing and felt nothing over the years that has challenged me to reconsider this position. Still too many questions, still too few answers. The Catholic indoctrination is still there, of course, buried deep, and occasionally hits me square in the emotions – when a new Pope is chosen, say – but it’s nothing more than a kind of fellow feeling, a recognition and acknowledgement of former tribe.
Life would be easier if we all had unending faith
The world is a harsh and bruising place in which we should do our best, and make a difference where and while we can. That seems to me the lesson of the long life, and now death, of Queen Elizabeth II. Like most of you, I’ve been stuck in front of the telly in recent days, absorbing the images, commentary and anecdotes, surprised by the depths of my own feelings, aching for her grieving children and grandchildren, concerned for the country, recalling and reliving my own past losses.
The Queen had, by all accounts, a faith that was both impermeable and relatively simple, which sounds like the best kind. It’s said her favourite conversations weren’t with prime ministers or visiting dignitaries but with religious leaders, to whom she displayed a deep knowledge of their craft and practice. That faith provided the iron support that enabled her to do her duty day after day, year after year, with a smile, until the very end.
Life would be easier, would it not, if such faith were accessible to all? There are many atheists and humanists, good people living lives of purpose, who have long since made peace with the idea that we are given our span and that’s that – off we go, rejoining the stuff of the universe from whence we came.
We had faith in the Queen
And it’s not as if we are short of moments of uplift and awe – we can be hijacked in the everyday by the perfection of a flower or by an unexpected act of kindness or by a sudden, transformative scientific breakthrough. The deep-space images so recently beamed back from Nasa’s Webb Telescope were both staggeringly beautiful and a reminder of our place in things. The love we have for our children is the purest reward of existence.
But, still, I miss the comfort of religious faith. I don’t think about it all that often, simply because there is too much else to be getting on with, but the gap has never quite closed. I used to think I’d return to the matter in old age, perhaps in the peace of retirement (ha!), perhaps in the traditional Catholic rush to safety, almost cynically hedging your bets as the end nears.
I’m no longer so sure. Faith takes many forms, not all of them related to God. Watching people line the route taken by the Queen’s coffin from Balmoral to Edinburgh, and all the crowds we shall see filing past over the coming days as she lies in state, and then the event of her funeral, has not been and will not be, for most, a religious experience.
It marks, rather, a country saying thank you to someone who for so long shaped its sense of what it was and was now becoming, and who its people are. She provided steadfastness through our hardest times: it is gratitude for an example set.
It was always clear that Elizabeth had faith in us, and, in turn, that we had faith in her. I hope our coming together shows we still have plenty of faith in each other, too. We, the people, are our own strength and stay. Perhaps, in the end, that can be enough.
Chris Deerin is a leading journalist and commentator who heads independent, non-party think tank, Reform Scotland
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