Demolition

When I was nine years old, I found God in church. I recognised him from spending winter dusks in our garden with that strange familiar inconsolable longing in my heart; a longing that will never be fulfilled in this world. Those tantalising glimpses of the divine are held in a trembling moment like fat raindrops at the top of a window pane. He came to church like most of us do – firstly to the flat car park where flowering weeds forced their way through the cracked tarmac. I have a human heart that belongs to the early evening when the dusk is drawing down and that was when I noticed God in the dust motes drifting between the empty pews. There were flowers in the side chapel and he was there too. There was music at a time when I first heard about a death of a stranger, God was there in the beautiful sadness. These were the things that were written and echo the secret signature of my soul. I hope you know what I mean because that lovely pained desire is found in the loneliest places.

I knew ten years ago that the building was to be knocked down and replaced with a state-of-the-art parish centre and church on the outskirts of town. Quite a lot of parishioners were upset about that. But I had moved to the city and those glimpses of the divine were becoming scarce. Sometimes, at dusk, in the haze of pollution, God was there, yet I could not get out of my own way, egoistic, rebellious and mostly drunk. Some people spend their lives searching for religious experience, some people spend their lives trying to avoid them and some people careen between the two like a plastic bottle on the neap tide. It isn’t about finding God any more but rather about choosing whether to follow his ways or storm out of the classroom in an adolescent rage. There are two types of sin in life; the ones I would never reveal and the ones I try to justify – repentance is difficult.

So, back to the church of my youth; they knocked it down all right. I drove past recently and saw. The hall where I had been a girl guide and attended youth club; the church where I had seen God, touched the cold face of a dead friend who had killed himself, watched my old headmaster’s coffin carried away, sung Vivaldi’s Gloria. I saw the building reduced to pile of rubble and I felt nothing.