The pathways, and the roads.
The summers, the fences, the houses where the old ladies lived.
The road that went down into the wood.
The church; it was far off among the woods. You'd have to be driven there, go down a road, under a bridge, through the ancient medieval wood.
That was a mysterious trip. That road seemed a priestly road, and it reminded me of the priest. Sometimes we'd play around there, one time we were on that bridge, throwing things down on the empty road. All around was the wood. It seemed half-neglected, half-abandoned, medieval and yet industrial. There would be found wreckage which was industrial wreckage, or a patch of burnt ground.
The trees clustered around the dark road, overhung it.
You'd be driven down this road, and eventually you'd come to the church, on the right side, in the middle of this nowhere, standing on a slight green rise, denuded of trees, white, and clean, sometimes startlingly white in the sun, and shaped, it seemed to me, like a rocket ship, vertical lines pointing upward.
There was a curving gravel path that led up to it.
Inside it had a powerful, yet subtle smell. It was like dust, it was like polished stone. By the door were stone fonts full of the cold holy water, wherein you'd dip your fingers.
The smell of the church: it was an incense smell, a dismal, holy smell, an ancient smell, a serious smell. It spoke to me somehow of years of suffering, centuries of pedantic and meticulous faith, millennia of mysterious labours. Genuflecting awkwardly and taking your place in the bright wooden pews, the glossy modern pews, with their padded green seats, that smell would be in your nostrils. It was the smell of the holy water in the stone fonts, and it was an incense smell, and it was the smell of the ashes on Ash Wednesday, and it was the smell of the emblazoned altarcloth, and the wooden board announcing the hymn numbers, and the plaster statues.
It smelt almost like Christmas, almost like tinsel, but much more serious and grim, much more concentrated and monkish.
The altarcloth, emblazoned with a chi-rho. The mysterious back parts of the church. The wooden pictures. The statue of the Virgin. The upper galleries of the church, with stairs leading up, where it was never permitted to go.
I hated going to church. It bored me horribly. Try as I might, I could not concentrate on the words of the priest. There would be an interminable homily, which I could pay no attention to. I'd resolve to listen this time, and follow for a minute or two, as he'd pick a Bible verse and expound upon it, but my attention would always fade away and wander around the building. I'd look at the wooden board with the Latin numbers on it, at the wooden pictures, at the windows, at a patch of masonry, and I'd wonder about the Middle Ages, about the monks, about the martyrs, about the sufferings of the saints, and be impressed and repelled by it all.
It seemed to stretch on for an infinite amount of time. I followed mechanically the responses and went through the required motions, always feeling awkward. Many times I committed faux pas through inattention, and knelt at the wrong time, on the hard wooden frames of the pews which swung down, or fumbled with the hymn book and couldn't locate the hymn.
The priest, Father McNay, had an odd voice, he recited the Mass like a poet intoning verse.
"He took the bread, gave it to his dis-IPLES AND said.... TAKE THIS allof youand eat it... for this is my body, which will be given up for you. DO THIS, in memory of me".
The repetitions and the atmosphere, impressed me and moved me, but something about it would irritate me. Perhaps it was the glum coughs of the parishioners, the squaling baby in the back row, the depressing hymn book. The chanting voices, repeating, over and over again, "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again"... The voices of earnest aunts and old ladies, in unison, as though reasurring themselves.
"Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world". The imagery frightened me slightly, and I didn't understand it. I knew only that it was old, and significant, emblematic and allegorical, and that it was to be taken seriously.
The Christ invoked was a suffering Christ, a Christ of the Passion, a serious Christ. Somehow I understood his suffering very well, understood the blood, and I dreamed in my bored moments of Christ himself there at the altar, a tortured Christ among the woods, mounting his rack, and the smell of the cold water in the stone font, and the polished stone, and the masonry, was like the smell of his Blood. This Christ was a Northern Renaissance Christ, emaciated and haggard, with a pragmatic ladder leaning on his cross, and under a leaden sky. In such a place, in a church near the woods, in a clearing of its own, by a dark road, he could still be conjured up, and primitive voices could still intone his name, all the iconoclasms and battles had after all not eradicated his enormous, theatrical, significant suffering, had not after all stemmed the blood that poured down his face.
I got so bored, lost in the interminable Mass, that I lapsed into fantasies, and, in an agony of faith brought on by enduring the Mass, attempted to conjure up Christ himself, to see him. I used to imagine him, by the altar, mounting his cross, spotlit among the shadows, the drips of blood marking his face clearly, just as if he was a plaster statue. The Mass stretched on so endlessly that finally all I could prompt myself to do was imperfectly match my suffering to his, to this Christ who was supposed to be present in the Mass.
