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The other kids in my hometown used to ask, “Are you Catholic or Christian?” The truthful answer would have been “Neither.”
My father took me to Mass whenever his on-off relationship with the Catholic Church happened to be on, but I'd never been baptised. And I kept flirting with non-Christian faiths. In primary school, I was obsessed with the Greek gods, and as a teenager I would have converted to Judaism if the nearest synagogue hadn't been an hour's drive away.
The summer I was eight, I attended a day camp run by kind and welcoming nuns. One day they asked us to find Jesus in our hearts and talk to him for a while.
“I like you,” I told him, “but I like Athena too.”
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I was probably thinking of those nuns when, as an adult in a new country, I got baptised at last. I lasted about a decade in the Catholic Church before I fell away, partly from disgust at scandals, but mainly through exhaustion: the constant struggle to restrain my own thoughts, resolve contradictions, smooth over cruelties.
A couple of years ago, after some time listening to the Gospels, I felt called back to Christianity. I started attending a Methodist / United Reformed church, having first checked that both denominations were officially LGBTQ-inclusive. Then I came out as bisexual and found that that policy hadn't necessarily trickled down to the congregation. I briefly switched to attending Quaker meetings before a post-meeting discussion of trans rights made clear I'd have to keep my guard up there too.
Now I spend Sundays tending my bees and watching Columbo reruns. So far it's worked out OK.
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The essence of 神 is hard to pin down. The hugely influential 18th-century scholar Motoori Norinaga defined it as “any being whatsoever which possesses some eminent quality out of the ordinary, and is awe-inspiring.” In Shintō belief, it refers to the spirits which inhabit all things, but it's also used to mean the gods of other faiths, including Christianity.
The kanji itself is thought to derive from an early Chinese character for “lightning.” (Hello, Zeus!)
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If you ask a Japanese person about their religious beliefs, there's a good chance they'll say they're “not religious” (無宗教, mushūkyō). Yet that same person may pray at Shintō shrines, arrange Buddhist funerals for loved ones and have an altar in their home. For them, “not being religious” means not identifying exclusively with one faith or being bound by rigid rules. A relationship with the 神 is something else.
In this video made to promote tourism to Nagasaki Prefecture's islands, Fukuyama Masaharu prays at a shrine on Tsushima Island, dedicated to the husband and wife gods Hoori and Toyotama-hime, and said to be near the undersea site of the legendary Dragon Palace.
As customary at Shintō shrines, he claps his hands first to get the gods’ attention. Sumo wrestlers do the same before bouts.
Recently I visited the Zen garden at the Three Wheels Japanese Buddhist temple in West London. It's a beautiful place and I was interested to hear how it was made, but what truly moved me was the tea ceremony we witnessed in the temple itself. To my surprise, I found myself feeling something I only experience in deeply spiritual moments, such as when hearing certain passages from the Gospels, the silence of my first Quaker meeting or the In Paradisum at the end of a Catholic funeral. I felt, in fact, that I was in communion with something out of the ordinary and awe-inspiring.
Often I've taken such moments as guideposts to my future path, and have looked around for a sign-up sheet and a rule book. Not this time, though; I'm still bruised. And I've never trusted white Buddhists, except Leonard Cohen, so it might be wrong to become one myself.
More than that, I’ve come to see these moments as encounters, not instructions. I was arrogant to think that the force behind them needed me to do something. The awe is the point.
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I had another of those moments of revelation about 20 years ago when I visited Mount Olympus. Frogs were jumping in the ruins of Aphrodite's temple, making a call I'd never heard before: “brekekekex.” Suddenly I realised I was hearing the same sound as Aristophanes. And there it was: the spirit of something out of the ordinary where I least expected it.
I wrote a comical-yet-serious poem about those frogs a few years later.
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Another of my poems, Glasnevin, is about visiting Gerard Manley Hopkins’ grave in that Dublin cemetery. Or rather, the Jesuit memorial stone with his name among dozens of others; his grave is unmarked. Having left his family and social circle to become a Catholic, the awkward and sensitive Hopkins never found the refuge he must have hoped for. In his diaries he confessed lustful feelings for both men and women, but was equally troubled by his “worldly” love for nature's beauty, which the theology of the time told him must be sinful.
But I'm not sure he believed it. In his poem God's Grandeur, he wrote:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil …
He laments that, despite this,
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil …
before affirming that "nature is never spent.”
In the midst of this is the question, “Why do men then now not reck his rod?” This is often interpreted to mean, “Why don't people submit to God's authority”? But that doesn't fit the overall tone of the poem. I wonder if Hopkins meant a lightning rod – for doesn’t lightning shine out like shook foil?
Japan had just begun to open up in Hopkins’ lifetime, and it's unlikely he ever knew the word 神, let alone its connection to lightning. But I think he arrived at the same idea. The awe is the point.