Losing My Religion.

This post (and others that will follow) are predominantly about my relationship with my Father and my brother Tom, how our relationships have affected me even to this day. There will be stuff about religion, discipline, sibling rivalry, love, hate, shame, neglect, oppression, hope etc; and I'll try to minimise the amount of posts if I can, but once I start rambling...Lol.

So here goes...

My dad was a devout Roman Catholic and attended Mass and Confession/Holy Communion religiously (no pun intended), he was Irish but had lived in England since he was a boy. Even so, he still had that infamous Irish temper even though he didn't really drink then. The drinking came much later, and although I suppose he was a "happy" drunk his anger would flare up and the violence would ignite (more about that later). My mum is Jewish so she never attended Mass with us. There was a fourteen year age gap between my parents (my mum being the younger).

From as early as I can remember we were "dragged along" to church every Sunday morning, rain or shine. If mum thought one of us was too ill to go out she literally had to beg my dad not to take us. He always relented but was not happy about it, then again he was rarely happy anyway.

Their bedroom had loads of religious icons on the walls and dressing table. I don't know if this bothered my mum, but it wouldn't have made any difference if it did. He was boss!!!

Now I'm not religious at all, sure I had to go to Mass and I had to say my prayers every night and every morning when I was growing up. I had to attend Confession/Holy Communion but that was a farce in itself. Tom and I were forced to go through this when I was about fourteen and him thirteen. We didn't want to and we told our dad that. We'd also asked him in the past if we could stop going to Mass. We thought that we should be given the choice whether we wanted to attend or not. We were only there because we had no choice at the time, and forcing us to go wouldn't make us believe. In fact it may make us resent the Church/God later. This made him really angry and of course the answer was that we would continue to go as long as we were living under his roof.

So, when it came to my first Confession I was literally shitting myself. The thought of having to tell the priest/God all my sins was terrifying, I felt physically sick.
I mean, by this age I'd known for years I was gay and I'd had gay sexual experiences with two friends too. Did my dad really think I was going to blurt all this out, regardless of it being said in a confessional and that it was "privileged" information?...I think not!!!! And besides, to confess all of my "sins" would've taken like... forever. I'd have needed a couple of gallons of tea and a dozen rounds of sandwiches for the amount of time I would have been in there.

So I just said stuff like: I was rude to my parents, I swore at a teacher, I fought with my brother, I broke some body's window and ran away etc. (I'll probably go to hell just for lying in Confession, but hey ho!)
The thing is, I remember sweating profusely whilst confessing, feeling like He knew that I was lying and would punish me for yet another sin (maybe he has already, maybe that's why I've never had somebody to love or somebody to love me, who knows?)

Anyway, it was many years after that I was finally able to stop attending Mass etc; and that was only because it suited my dad at the time.
I've never been to Mass since and that's because of the following reasons:

1] Being forced to go when I was young really pissed me off.
2] My prayers were never answered.
3] In my teens too many hypocrites (in my opinion) attended Mass and came across as nice people inside the church, but then went straight to the pub (or Church Social Club) and got drunk. There were arguments and fights (and not just between the men), piss-taking and general disrespecting of people. Some even went home and beat their wife and/or kids.

I was taught that to be "Christian" was to be kind, helpful, thoughtful, neighbourly and the rest (for any Non-Christians who may read this: I mean no offence,it's what I was taught but not what I believe)...but all I could see was a lot of drunken Irishmen, my dad included, who seemed to care about nothing except how many more pints or shorts they could drink before chucking-out time.

There's a quote I like, I don't who said it but it's:

"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian anymore than going to a garage makes you a mechanic!"

That rings very true to me, based on my own experience. By the way, I have nothing against Irishmen. My local church's congregation used to be made up almost entirely of Irishmen (the 11am Sunday Mass was anyway), so that's why I saw so many.

All of the above is probably secondary to how I was (mis)treated/disciplined, or how I felt that I was starved of love, affection and encouragement as a child, teenager and young adult by my dad.
I'll go into that in a future post where the opening will be the following quotes from the Bible:

"He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes."

(Proverbs 13:24)

"Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with a rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell."

(Proverbs 23:13-14)

All I will say at the moment is that my skin was no stranger to my dad's hands or his bamboo cane lol!!

Take care,

Col

Sorry about the block of text at the end but I'm having problems editing...again!!