Before
I can read, I think that God’s name is Peter. This is based on nothing more
than saying the response “Thank, Peter God,” to various prayers every Sunday
for the first few years of my life.
My nine-year-old
son confides in me that every other week, when there is a whole school mass,
the sight of the stained-glass windows makes him want to stand up and shout, “Burglar!”
at the top of his voice.
Aged
15, I secretly change the words of The Lord’s Prayer so that I openly blaspheme
during the twice-daily house prayers and the weekly school mass: “Our father,
who never listens...” but it’s not just God I’m mocking.
My
room-mate tells me he has a vocation to be a Roman Catholic priest. At a school
reunion twenty-two years later, I meet my former room-mate; he is a Roman Catholic
priest, and the only person out of nearly ninety who has come in work clothes.
I have one conversation with him where he is scathing about the poor and the
needy (as Jesus would have called them) feckless, scrounging underclass (as he
calls them) of his parish.
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