After hearing about the massacre in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, I went to church, happily sang the word God and stuffed £20 in the collection plate. I’m a believer and am lucky to have a lovely church on the corner of the square where I live. I attend irregularly, but on my frequent walks to my volunteer job I always enjoy disapproving as I read the list of activities going on at the community centre which is in ‘the award-winning conversion’ (the sin of pride, for starters) of the nave of the church — bridge (gambling), astrology circle (false prophets), kung-fu (violence) and pilates (vanity), all in one week! Tutting happily, I go on my merry way.
It makes sense when we consider the strange and splendid fact that there are now more churches than pubs in our notoriously thirsty and libertine country, the temperance movement scoring a somewhat posthumous victory. There’s little chance of the building disappearing. Nevertheless, for more than a decade I have rarely walked past without thinking: ‘What will come after the churches have gone?’
This vague notion was made blazing flesh when Notre Dame went up in flames. Curiously, I noticed on social media that the people who were most upset about it were my atheist friends — I mean, I love gargoyles and it’s always a shame to see a building go up in smoke, but perhaps if you believe that the Lord is everywhere you don’t tend to pin him down to actual postcodes. And it’s one of those fancy Catholic churches anyway — I prefer the stark Protestant kind, with lots of plain stone and a cross, just in case anyone misses the point.
Due to my lifelong fascination with Judaism, I’ve struggled with the Christianity I adopted in my mid-twenties when after a predictably atheistic youth I had a textbook religious experience.
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