Welcome to Eureka Street

back to site

ARTS AND CULTURE

Why I still go to church

  • 02 March 2010

Why I still go to church                           This moment                 Which doesn't drift away.                                   John Foulcher                                 'Why I go to church'   never for the flat parish choirs   sometimes for tea-towelled shepherds and tinselled sleepy angels   possibly for the story of St Martin de Porres who promised the rats he'd feed them if they stopped annoying the prior   certainly not for the sermon that never asks can Neanderthal men be saved? can a single death two thousand years ago redeem the hypothetical populations of 55 Cancri's planets 41 light years away?   partly because even if no one is there sometimes in the vaster spaces of St Kit's, I feel a charged stillness   always because of the kneeling, the touch of fingers on forehead, the taste of the host the red, green, purple rhythms of seasons wisdom of parables, music of psalms   now because of you kneeling beside me, thumbing the scarred leather of the little mass-book your grandmother hid at the back of her Protestant linen-press   and perhaps because driving up Canberra Avenue when the spire of St Stephen's briefly aligns with the national flagpole soaring like Lucifer above Parliament House, the Big Syringe of modern communication on Black Mountain, the stone steeple has human dimensions.   Sanjusangendo Temple For Takayoshi Fujiki   east and south antipodes intersecting near the Greenwich Meridian   at the beginning of winter's long wet days, she bumped into him among the second-hand books   secular Buddhist, lapsed Catholic entranced by Langland's medieval certainties   though his Japanese schedule took him away too soon fast pace of other duties   time paused for an hour she chose him books they might one day   talk about together irrelevant to schoolgirls in Toyono and perhaps none of her business   she took him to the train station without remembering to show him Shelley's statue   twenty-four years later arriving in Osaka wearing his gift of a scarf as a sign   what will we say to each other have I brought the right presents why did I bring so much baggage               Don't mind he says, heaving my case don't mind.   what will he give me to eat am I staying too long will he let me pay for the hotel?   No, he will not, but when he holds my hand to say goodnight our eyes are as certain as siblings.

***   this place taught me to take off my shoes leave money at the gate   this word taught me to count in Japanese — San-ju-san-gendo   thirty-three bays filled with a thousand gilded Bodhisattvas   three thousand pairs of hands turned up my heart turned upside-down   the smell of incense, the massive timbers Buddhist prayers for my sea-dog dead father   my grandmother dying at one hundred and three the wild rage of new-born infants   carved on the huge faces of armoured spirits the calm flow of sacred characters   The Buddha is always there, but alas he never comes in sight. At the soundless