Holy shit

The tragic death of Sinead O’Connor is a reminder of the continuing legacy of Catholicism in so many lives: a legacy that is highly contradictory. On the one hand there is the powerful attraction – necessity even – of spirituality, combined with an idealism that breeds an atruistic pursuit of personal perfection. On the other, the deep awareness of hypocrisy, based on concrete – though often unspoken – personal experiences of abuse and tyranny. It is difficult, in these knowing times, to use the word ‘innocence’ but these contradictions have often been played out inside a culture in which scientific knowledge of the real world is kept at bay.

When doubt is a sin, questioning the faith is not allowed and this is inextricably entangled with a prohibition on challenging authority. Yet (at least in the convent schools of my childhood) little girls are also fed stories of virgin martyrs, exhibiting enormous bravery in standing up for their sense of rightness. So some kinds of courage (including suicidal courage) are rewarded with everlasting glory while others are savagely punished. You want to be good and unselfish and caring, but are also denied autonomy and told to stay silent. And then there is the beauty (of the music, especially, but also often of the architecture) and the safety of belonging to a community that allows you to abandon independent thinking in the knowledge that there is a socially sanctioned right answer to any question. Not to mention the joy of singing together.

I had got thus far in writing this blog yesterday morning when I was interrupted by a visit from an engineer who had come to do some maintenance work on my house – someone I had met before and taken a liking to. By coincidence, someone of Irish origin from, now I come to think of it, more or less the same generation as Sinead O’Connor, though brought up in 1970s London rather than Dublin.

There had been a recent death in his family and we talked about grief, and mourning and wakes, and how differently these were handled in different cultures. And soon we were swapping tales of funerals and Catholic priests. And then we got onto the hypocrisy and the politics. In my case, how the Irish nuns at my convent school in the 1950s ranted against communism; in his, the way the Irish priests in the 1980s preached against the miners strike, and how his father (a member of the SWP, though still a practicing catholic) had stormed out of the church, slamming the door as loudly as he could, followed by quite a few other members of the congregation. And the betrayals of the confidentiality of the confession. And the racism.

And then we got onto tales about the sexual abuse of children, so common and so covered up, and people whose lives had been ruined by it. And then we talked about how long it took, despite this widespread knowledge, for people in Ireland to express it. Sinead O’Connor must be credited with being one of the first, brave voices, to do so, too soon to be able to garner much public support (although she undoubtedly inspired a generation of young feminists). As far as I can tell, it wasn’t till the mid-90s, that there seemed to be a sudden and generalised moment (which I think of as the ‘Father Ted moment’) when the majority of the population found itself able to burst out laughing at the emperor’s lack of clothes.

But however progressive modern Ireland now is, there must still be so many people bearing the wounds of that contradictory legacy. Sinead O’Connor left us not only a record of the pain but also the spiritual beauty that is so entangled with that tortured history. Listen, for example, to her singing the Kyrie Eleison, in the same spirit as a Hindu devotional chant (but with the real world and its conflict present in the background) or the aching simplicity of her Scarlet Ribbons.

May she rest in peace. I have never understood why so many people on the left refuse to use this phrase, preferring ‘rest in power’. I find the idea of power as a sought-after eternal state deeply disturbing. It is of course revolutionary to want to overturn the oppressive power of the regime that is holding us back and, indeed, to substitute for it some kind of peoples’ power. But surely power, implying as it does a social relationship between people who are not equal, is a dialectical thing, part of an ongoing struggle in this, the real world. When we depart this real world, I am sure I am not alone in thinking that what we want, more than anything, is an escape from this conflictual world into a true state of rest and harmony: peace. There is a lovely Welsh hymn (O Fryniau Caersalem), often sung at funerals, that speaks of reaching the hills of Salem at the end of life’s journey, from which we can gain an overview of the twists and turns of our lives, and (in my translation) ‘with our minds filled with sweetness, we can look calmly at the storms and the fears and the terrors of death and the grave. Safe now from their reach, to swim in love and peace’. So yes, may she swim in love and peace for all eternity.