Strong Meat

Cal has only been to Swanvale Halt church once since the death of his grandfather, which hit him so hard: he did make it for the Midnight Mass although the church building, with which he's been familiar since small childhood, now causes a sort of religious numbness. A longstanding friend wants Cal to be godfather to her daughter and invited him to her church recently, and that being so very different from ours seems to have done him good, which I don't mind that at all (as a member of the congregation commented, 'Whether it's white bread or brown bread matters less than whether you're getting something to eat').

Cal came for a long talk with me this week. He described the most off-putting religious experience he could recall, which took place in a church in Bruges while the family was on holiday. Behind the altar was an enormous painting of the crucified Christ with angels collecting his blood in chalices, an image he found entirely weird and inappropriate. A relic of a saint was brought in, 'some bloodstained bit of cloth ... and two ladies in the congregation fainted'. 

Curiously I have to work hard to remember that this kind of extreme Catholic devotion is very bizarre and uncomfortable for a lot of people, I suspect particularly English people, who tend to the undemonstrative and sceptical no matter what their beliefs and opinions may be. Making that very graphic connection between the sacraments of the Church and the sacrifice of Jesus is something that causes me not a tremor, although I might feel differently if it was presented to me six feet high and in oil paint rather than in a little black-and-white old-style Missal print. I thought, too, of my relationship with St Catherine, and that time when I almost burst into tears in Pickering church when confronted by nothing more fleshly than a churchful of tarted-up wall-paintings. That kind of intense concern with any intangible figure is alien to most people, and to be frank that includes Jesus himself. It takes a lot of preparation before you're ready for this kind of gamey spiritual fare, and the great majority of English Christians haven't even begun the journey.