Exiliado: Que Soy, Era
There was a night when I was 13 years old, where I spent the night at the Grotto in Lourdes with my mother and my grandfather. I sat on the floor wrapped up in a blanket from about 10pm until 6 the next morning.
It seems like a wonder to me today, when I can barely keep my hands off my phone for five minutes, that I spent 8 hours staring at a statue of the Virgin Mary in a hollow of the rock and repeating the Hail Mary. And what did I wish for? Everything that a thirteen year old saw in The Bible and heard in church growing up. Essentially, magic.
I wanted the hollow to start glowing and for a woman to appear to me, to tell me that I had achieved that state of religious grace and faith that allowed for such visions. I wanted water into wine, fish and bread by the thousand-fold, and for those in wheelchairs to stand up and walk.
I drank the water. I said the words. I did the work. So why did I go back to the campsite where we were staying feeling nothing, other than tired and frustrated? I watched a man pull off the bouquets of flowers surrounding the statue of Mary in the plaza by the Basilica. I walked past the rows and rows of shops profiting off people’s hopes. I saw no magic. I was done.
When I look back at that time in Lourdes, and all the holidays we spent there, I have fond memories of the beautiful landscape and the bustle of the place. When it comes to faith, what I think of most, in retrospect, is the monastery next to the campsite where we stayed.
Over the wall, I remember seeing monks walking around the grounds in perfect silence, tending to the garden, and disappearing into the building for evening prayers. What I long for most now that I have grown up is not the spectacle of miracles, but the stillness and peace, the simplicity that comes with the faith of someone willing to leave the noise of the outside world behind.
I recognise now that what happened during my childhood is not that I was displeased with my faith, but that I was living someone else’s expectations of faith. It had never occurred to me that I would be able to investigate, enquire, and be able to have a say in the matter.
My teenage years were ones of predictable rebellion. What was made clear to me through sermons and discourse was that the church was somewhere I was not welcome. The opportunity for questions was never present. At school, we piled into end of term masses and made all the right moves so we didn’t get into trouble. From time to time, we were called out of classes to go to confession. We all learned exactly what to say to get it over with as quickly as possible. I remember during one RE lesson, asking why the Vatican had so many riches when Jesus spoke about living modestly and of charity. The teacher snapped at me that those were gifts, and it would be rude to sell gifts. I wasn’t convinced, but there was no space for further questions. What else could I have done, through my lack of understanding and the inability to enquire, but reject it all completely?
But I had moments of longing. It nudged at me, called to me from where I stood at the borders. I went to Rome and wandered the Vatican. I found myself at mass with the Pope himself. I read up on other religions. I toyed with atheism too, but I found Richard Dawkins as judgemental and blindsided as many priests I had dealt with growing up. So I don’t think the answer for me was as much the message as it was the speaker. Still, life got in the way.
There’s a softening that happens in exile. Your homeland becomes a memory, an imagined place of idealism or destruction where you reshape as you see fit. When I began to write about home, the concept of rituals appeared again and again the narrative. One of the friends on my Masters course, who had read a few of my stories, told me I was obsessed with waves.
I looked at my work again. It was true. I set a lot of scenes at the beach, with someone looking out to sea and watching the waves go in and out. That rhythm is present in a lot of my fiction in other ways too. Characters preparing food around the kitchen table, celebrating New Year’s Eve together, and the looming iconography of faith. The idea of my religion transcends faith, it is infused in me through my Gibraltarian culture and I have come to accept it as a part of me. I started referring to myself as a ‘cultural Catholic’. Present in the rosary hanging over a picture frame, the little estampitas hidden inside books, and the Belén coming out every Christmas (with the baby Jesus asleep in a drawer until Christmas Eve).
Last year, I had the opportunity to take a course in Catholic theology for extra credits. I’m not sure I expected anything other than some easy extra credits, but divinity had other plans. I listened to the lecturer talk about Bible stories in a way I hadn’t considered before. I discovered new things about a book I had thought tired and worn out, things that even shocked me with how close they came to the concepts I have of decency and social justice. As I mentioned before with the monks, I realised what I hadn’t been given is an opportunity to explore my faith for myself.
There’s a lot of behaviour now I can see, from those who beat their chests and loudly proclaim themselves Christian, that is profoundly Unchristian. I can also see that there’s a lot of behaviour I had before, during the years I rejected a notion of faith, that threw the Baby Jesus out with the bathwater.
Where I am now is a place of space and intermittent silence. It is something I have given to myself, particularly in this lockdown year. That spectacle I craved so badly when I was 13 is not something I long for anymore. I don’t want that moment where I get down on my knees in tears and consider myself reborn and repentant. I’m not going to walk around blessing everyone in my new-found fervour. What I want is quieter, stiller, a place of intellectual and spiritual investigation where I am able to make my mind up about things for myself.
I don’t know where to start sometimes with the Bible. I have no idea how to pray a rosary. I’m not really very sure I know how to pray. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by it all, but I feel it’s better to be honest in your failings than go through the motions. That’s the secret of Lourdes too, I am beginning to realise. It’s not about the miracles, it’s about the thought process that takes you there. It’s about your ideas of goodness, of hope, of belief in humanity and divinity united in the want of beauty in the world despite pain and death. And the desire to do better, think better, and live better.
There’s a scene at the end of the movie Dogma (which was condemned by the Catholic Church at the time, ironically) where Rufus asks Bethany if her crisis of faith is over. ‘Are you saying you believe?’ he says. ‘No,’ she replies, ‘but I have a pretty good idea.’
For now, it seems like a good place to be.
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