Hi Everyone,
I am not sure where I first heard the saying “Never underestimate the faith of your childhood,” but in recent months that motto has not let me go.
The first time I heard it, I thought of Catholicism, the “faith” or denomination of my childhood. I had a lovely Irish Catholic mother, whose faith more or less mirrored that of my father’s, an Austro-Hungarian Catholic, with the exception of one being enchanting and the other quite disciplined. In addition, having been raised and schooled in France and South America, I was introduced respectively to a very elegant sort of Catholicism and another fused with a cultural way of life that had preceded it.
So once upon a time I might have been considered a “lapsed” or former Catholic, which I personally think is not possible: once a Catholic, of whatever stripe, always a Catholic. “In your DNA,” as they say. What, on the surface, I took away from my faith as a child was wonder and magic, the majesty of worship. Somehow as a young girl when I saw a wave of people drop to their knees, a bell ring and a man clad in emerald green raise a (mostly) golden chalice, I believed in something beyond me—something invisible, a thing unseen. That wave of power that rippled from the back of the church to the front, landing in an uplifted and circular “host”, proved for me to be visceral. Yup, in my bones; as real as a cooling and startling breeze.
From those early days I adored the idea of worship, the idea of a whole group of folk lying prostrate in front of something bigger, better, wilder, taller, lovelier than they would ever be. I held dear the idea of people around the world giving themselves over to the unseen—even if at times, for example in Japan, the invisible was represented by something large, gigantic even, like the Great Buddha of Kamakura, which weighs 103 tons and stands almost 44 feet. Other times, in other places, a whole gathering could be silenced by the simple flicker of a beeswax candle in a glass jar or red ribbons tied on strings outside a roadside sanctuary. In fairness, I have seen or experienced myself that same sort of “giving over” (or surrender?) in a theatre or concert hall, on a nature hike, or before cracking open a book by a favourite author.
So did I take the faith of my childhood too lightly? Underrate it? Lowball it all those years? While it did elude me for years, recently I have come to understand that while I had the most ardent and loving of catechism teachers, my misjudging had nothing to do with altars, incense, organs, missals, veils, candles, holy water or rosaries—it had to do with the basics of belief.
Belief, to believe, the act of believing is what my childhood faith taught me. Belief alone and singularly as a sort of spiritual muscle, a holy thing, one on which the world at large and in my own life turns. So yes, I did underrate the faith of my youth, unaware that throughout all the years of pomp and show, silent prayer, the flicker of candles and celestial song, I learned a most important thing: to think, to pray, to believe, to demonstrate.
Happy Easter, 2025.
Love,