Early morning walk to the allotment with a bag full of new plants I’ve been nurturing at home on the back step. Soon to go in the ground to see what takes. Not everything does of course, as Sarah’s often told me, that’s the way it is with plants.You never know how a thing is going until it gets going.
Humans too, I was thinking on the way over here. Thinking that with Easter just gone, that makes it fifty five years now since I woke up on Good Friday in 1969 and realised I wasn’t a Catholic boy any more. That the Catholic faith I’d been brought up and trained to believe in, simply hadn’t taken.
Like a plant in a garden that can fail for all sorts of reasons, I was thinking on the way here, I hadn’t grown up into a Catholic after all.
Naturally this was taken very badly at home, this thinking for myself. As well as by the parish priest when he soon visited. My refusal to go to mass and other religious services any more was seen as an act of teenage rebellion. And it was, but I was serious. And never went to mass again.
Still, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic” I’d often and confidently be told in the decades that followed. Except I’m not and haven’t been since that long ago Easter.
But I have been thinking. Writing too, on here. And recently this thinking involved writing a short paragraph about my “religious or spiritual beliefs” as part of an Expression of Wishes I’ve been organising about possible future care and treatments. To go along with a Lasting Power Of Attorney I’ve also sorted out. Now I’ve reached the age I have, when it seems to me things like that need taking care of while they’re still my decisions to take.
Anyway this is what I wrote in the spiritual beliefs paragraph:
“I am spiritual in an enquiringly agnostic kind of way. As I write this I would say I certainly don’t believe there is a personal God who is interested in each of us as individuals. But think there could be something beyond our imaginations, some sort of elemental energy, which causes the universe and all its creatures to exist and continue. Something I’ve heard best described as “A cloud of unknowing.” But I don’t know. And I enjoy the not knowing, and reading and thinking about spirituality and eternity, more than feeling I want to pick any one existing belief system and stick with it.”
Not a Catholic then. I simply didn’t take in the ground I was born in. But not an atheist either, as I’d probably have claimed for most of my life. I enjoy the not knowing and often think about it these days.
And think I’ll say more, as well, about the Lasting Power Of Attorney and these Expressions of Wishes and Advance Decisions, which I’ve kind of enjoyed the thinking through and writing about. All with the help of an organisation called Compassion in Dying who’ve been a great find.
But for now these plants I’ve brought here need their own taking care of.