Matt Charlton

This is certainly going to be an interesting piece to write.  It’s not about the George Michael song, its about Faith – the god-like stuff. I guess religion is a bit like marmite these days – you either love it or you hate it.

Whilst I would never begrudge anyone for following a particular faith or belief system, its just not for me -  I believe that faith is a personal thing.  What bothers me is that I don’t seem to have any these days as such, no faith in anything.  I don’t know if I’m meant to have a faith or whether its okay not to have a faith.

Now I apologise if any of the following offends anyone – especially anyone in my family, its just something I’ve been thinking about over the last couple of days and something I want to throw out there so that its not in my head anymore.  I don’t mean to criticise or offend and anything written is purely personal experience and a collection of thoughts, feelings and stories.  It gets fairly personal in here and I’m pretty sure I’m writing about things that I’ve never spoken to anyone about before.

I was born into a Catholic family, raised as a Catholic (sorta – we went to church at Christmas and at other times, I guess we were lapsed Catholics), I went to Catholic nursery, Catholic first school and had a year in a Catholic middle school before getting a place at a City Technology College (Science and IT ftw!) – my grandparents are fairly religious and to some extent I think my mum is fairly religious.  She really likes some of the stories – especially the Footprints in the sand story by Mary Stevenson.

I’m trying to think back to my earliest memories regarding religion.  I remember my first holy communion, I remember some sort of rehearsal we had before it and I can visualise images from the actual day itself – they might be memories of seeing photos of me in a white shirt and a red tie at a later date though.  I never got confirmed, and although I went to church a fair few times when I had to, I hated it.  I think back then it was so mind numbingly boring that it just completely and utterly bored me to tears.  I could think of many, many better things I’d rather be doing.

I always remember the end of mass – go in peace, everyone shook hands and said “peace be with you” – I knew it was over and I was looking forward to getting out of there.

Nowadays, the only time I seem to go to church is for funerals – I haven’t been to any weddings at churches recently, I find it really difficult to cope with the whole thing. I guess I still see a funeral as a sad, bad thing – a negative thing.  Some people see it as a celebration of a life – the problem is that I tried to do that yesterday and the Vicar started talking about regrets and negative thoughts and feelings, so that didn’t last all that long.

As far as participation in the actual services go – I’ll stand and sit with everyone else as a mark of respect, not for the church or the religion as such – but as a mark of respect for the other people that are worshipping there and do follow the faith.  When it comes to singing hymns, I stand legs apart hands together and just stand and think.

As much as I love singing, I think it would be both hypocritical and wrong for me to sing songs that I a) don’t believe in and b) really don’t want to sing anyway.  Same thing with the kneeling or the bowing of the head in prayer – I sit there quietly, maybe admire the architecture of the church building and stained glass windows – lets face it, they just don’t build things like that anymore and there are some really pretty buildings. The funeral yesterday was at a COE church – they do things differently there, theres no communion or there certainly isn’t at a funeral service.

I’ve been at some kind of personal “war” with religion for a while.  I know that I was forced to do Religious Studies GCSE at school (obviously not too Science/IT ftw there then) and that for some reason we were doing the Christianity exam – thinking back I think that we all did the exam for whichever faith we “were”.  I hated this – so I failed it on purpose.

I say I failed it – the answers that I wrote were both blasphemous and extremely stupid – I flushed a qualification down the toilet and whilst its not the biggest regret of my life, its certainly something I maybe regret not taking seriously.  At the same time, it was one of the only ways as a (just) 16 year old I felt I could rebel. I still managed to get an F.  In old school terms an F was a fail – when I did my GCSE’s – F was still a passing grade, you had N and U which were something like Near Miss and Unclassified.  I must have given whoever marked my paper a good laugh – either that or I managed to answer the questions in a way which ticked a box or two.

I vividly remember two of the questions.

There was a sketch of some protesters who were moaning about pollution, they had placards that read “God is Green”.  The question asked for three reasons why this might be:

1) Maybe they are ill
2) Maybe they are Vulcans and have green blood.
3) I can’t remember the third answer that I wrote.

The other one was about the bible itself, it said that people obviously use the bible for study/prayer and asked if we could think of any other uses for a bible. I can only remember one answer for this, it involved a small child sitting on the bible so that they could see the altar.

So – there you are, that was my stupid GCSE Religious Studies stunt, as I said – it’s something that I regret now but its something I think I needed to do at the time.

Thinking back to the actual catalyst for me falling out with religion, I’m pretty sure its when my Grandad died (on my Dad’s side).  He died of cancer, I was about 11.  I remember we went to the funeral, I wasn’t allowed to go to the cremation but the funeral itself I was there.  My grandad was in his 50s, I remember he used to smoke a pipe and he used to carry me on his shoulders.  I also remember seeing him when he was sick (I realise now I’m older -  from the chemo) and I remember going to see him in some sort of clinic which I think must have been a Marie Curie respite/centre where people go for their last few weeks and months. I’m struggling to remember much else – its funny how memory can seem so fluid and easy to recall at times.

Now I’m not sure if I was too young to go to the funeral, or whether its just the age that I was at and this would have happened regardless because of his death.

There was a big, long mass (Catholic mass goes on FOREVER) and the coffin was there, I was crying and upset.  I wouldn’t have wanted my parents to not let me go – I think it helped to kick start the grieving process proper but  I don’t think theres any ideal age for someone to go to their first funeral.  It must have affected me quite strongly because I don’t remember going to any more until I was fairly close to my twenties.

I remember asking my parents – “If there’s a God – why did he let my Grandad die?”.  As far as questions you can ask your parents, I’m betting that ranks right up there with “Where do babies come from?”.  You can see where this is going…

I’ll come back to this in a bit.  The other thing that completely messed my head up – we’d been to the funeral, I was at my grandma and grandad’s house with the other kids and an aunt/uncle or someone was looking after us.  We went to a “party” down the road at a hotel.  People were smiling, they were laughing and joking.  Now – grown up, I know and understand what was going on, I’ve done the same thing.  Back then – I couldn’t understand why everyone was so happy and laughing and joking -I mean hadn’t we just had my Grandad’s funeral?.

So that was the problem.  My Grandad died of cancer, cancer was a bad thing.  God is this all powerful, omnipresent being and he can do anything – he created the Earth in 7 days, etc, etc.  Why does cancer exist and why dod God let my Grandad die?

I’m pretty sure thats when I lost my faith.  Going through puberty is a strange enough process as it is, couple that with all these thoughts, feelings and emotions and you’re in for a strange ride.  Guess I came out of the other end fairly well adjusted.  Maybe. Depending on who you ask, the jury is still out on that one.

My other grandparents – on my mum’s side.  They’re really religious.  Church every Sunday, always helping out with various church-type things, they helped out the handicapped a lot, took them to Lourdes, did loads of really good stuff.  Three or so years ago, my grandad suffered a stroke.  Over the course of the last few years he’s gotten worse and he’s in quite a bad way.  It breaks my heart every time I go and see him.  Here’s not the time nor the medium for me to talk about this – but it’s relevance to the subject matter is this – here we have a great man, a man who devoted so much of his life to God and his faith and he is struck down with a debilitating condition that renders him paralysed on his left side completely and has caused problems with the way that his brain works.  How does that work then?

I’m sure I remember someone saying that everything happens for a reason, I know I remember my mum talking about my Grandad asking my Grandma how God could let this happen to him.  I know for quite some time he lost all faith and who can blame him?  I’m not sure if this has since recovered or not but I know that its certainly done nothing to help my feelings towards religion.  I can’t even begin to imagine how this must feel for him.

All the bad things going on in the world, all the people, all the children who die every day.  It just doesn’t compute for me.

Most faiths have some sort of endgame – Heaven or Paradise whatever you want to call it – couple that with the other place downstairs and you’ve got the whole – be good or you’ll go to hell stories, on the flip side, you can denounce your sins and seek forgiveness on your deathbed and ascend to Heaven.  That might not be to the letter but its pretty close to the mark.

All the people blowing themselves up because its the will of God, all the people who have been executed or excluded in one way or another because of their faith.  Religion to me is filled with so many negatives, I struggle to find any positives and therefore any point to it.

Over the last few days I’ve been trying to think about what I do believe in – I think I believe in Karma.  What goes around comes around and be nice to your fellow man – that sort of thing.  All the horrible things that go on in the world, its difficult to have faith in people but there are still a few good souls out there, people who will return a mobile phone if you leave it in a taxi, help a little old lady across the road without mugging her and bashing her head in and generally just do their part to make a difference.

The last few months when I’ve been doing ghost hunts, I guess I’m looking for something.  I want to believe that there is something there after we die, and I’m looking for proof.  I’m not looking for a heaven or a hell – I’m looking for whether or not the soul/spirit of a person ceases to exist when they die and their body is burned/buried.  So far I haven’t found anything, it’s looking fairly fruitless but I still find it fun to wander around in the dark.

The funeral we were at yesterday, with me not taking part in the singing/praying, I found myself analysing the words, what the vicar was saying and what she meant.  Some of it sounded so silly to me – I felt quite bad that I was being that cynical and analytic.  It just sounds so old fashioned and so very, very dated.  I know why we were there – this was something that Sue’s uncle really believed in and as a mark of respect I’m more than willing to go and be a part of the funeral service and more importantly be there for my wife.

I don’t know whether or not I’ll ever recover my faith – be that within the Catholic Church or some other church somewhere.  What I do know is that I don’t really have anything at the moment, so when the 2011 census comes round, I’m marking myself as a Jedi (My mum wouldn’t let me do it back in 2001).

Having re-read this before posting I’d thought I’d written more, it certainly took nearly an hour to put together.  Might just be the way that I’m reading it.  I’d be interested to hear about anyone else with a similar set of circumstances.  It’d be interesting to hear about your stories.  Pro-religion too – if you’ve had something happen that has proved to you beyond doubt that there is a God – please let me know.