SO MANY QUESTIONS . . .

Being a wife and mother left little time or energy for me to do much else. I no longer attended the church but still believed in God and at that stage the teachings of Heaven and Hell - not to forget Purgatory! I knew that in the eyes of the church I would be called a ‘sinner’ because I did not attend Mass and did not take part in the Sacraments - but even then I guess I knew in my own heart that it wasn’t necessary for me to do all of that to be a ‘good’ person.

I had always believed that when people died their spirits floated around and they were able to look after you and give you comfort. I never wanted to actually see or hear from one - that was every person’s worst nightmare in my book. It was okay for me to think about them floating about with a hazy appearance but anything else was more sinister and definitely not something to tamper with or to invite into your life. That was just asking for trouble. The thought of my loved ones cloud sitting and harp playing for eternity did not fill me with gladness. Surely I thought, God did not go to all the trouble to put us onto this earth to then have us taking up air space for eternity when we died. I could see that it was going to get pretty congested up there in time and I wanted there to be more to life than that.

So many questions went around and around in my mind and I know that they are the same questions others are troubled by. Why are some people’s lives so tragic? Why do evil people seem to get ahead in life? Why is there so much anger, hate and destruction on earth? Why are some people poor, some rich? Some powerful, some repressed? The questions go on and on forever. Questioning your own purpose in life is also part of our spiritual growth. What am I here for? Why has my life been like it has? Why do I have the parents, the family the friends I have? Do prayers work? Does anyone hear them? I still wanted to live a good and honest life and I had also come to terms with the fact that Purgatory would be my home for an extended period of time when I left this world! Not exactly ideal I know - but I could live with those conditions if I had to.

But old habits die hard. It is funny how religion becomes part of your subconscious and old patterns are hard to remove.

The next crisis of faith hit me when we had our first child. Again, I wanted the children baptised as Catholic and whilst my husband had no problems with that - again it caused an enormous amount of conflict again with his parents. Looking back on it all again now I am still amazed at how strong my desires were to be married in the church and to have the children baptised as Catholic, knowing full well that I would never demand their attendance at mass etc. and that I was probably not a good example for them with my own religious practices or lack thereof.

Still, I thought it best to give them the groundings of the faith and we sent them to Catholic schools so that they could get a balanced view of their religion. They are both young women now and both have their own spirituality which is a combination of many different teachings. It is up to them to find their own spiritual niche and they are both good people which is the main thing in my mind.

So, it seems that you can take the girl out of the Catholic but you can’t take the Catholic out of the girl!