A Confession: The Shop

I was going to post some Corpus Christi musings today, but there are two reasons why I'm not going to: i) it's not Corpus Christi in Leeds diocese until Sunday; ii) I don't have enough musings to go around. Instead, here's another chapter of the story of how I came to Christianity, with particular apologies to my readers, some of whom make up the subject matter of this latest offering.

I must now retrace my steps a little way, because there is one thread which, defying the chronology I have thus far attempted, runs consistently through from early in my second decade to the present day without significantly intersecting with my educational life.

Throughout most of my time at secondary school, the February half term saw me and my parents travel down to a holiday cottage at Riscombe Farm at Exford, a village in that smaller part of Exmoor which lies in Somerset. I still believe that Exmoor, with its bleak tops, precipitous coastline and green valleys, is a patchwork of the most beautiful landscapes England has to offer.

One of the children at the Farm, Sam, the eldest and closest to my own age, was a keen devotee of the science-fiction tabletop war game Warhammer 40,000. On my first visit, I looked at his collection of miniatures, a mixture of Space Marines (futuristic knights-templar) and Tyranids (aliens clearly inspired by the Aliens series of films) and had my curiosity piqued. I knew of a shop which sold the game back in Halifax, and I visited it upon my return home. At my next birthday (my twelfth, if I calculate correctly) I received the starter set for the Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Warhammer 40,000’s fantasy sister game, and began to accumulate miniatures.

I also began to accumulate friends. Wargaming is a first and foremost social activity, and through it I met a number of boys of around my age. Whilst I have fallen out of contact with most of the people I befriended at school, I still see many of those I met in the shop, and some of them are amongst my closest friends.

The shop was above a newsagent’s on Halifax’s Commercial Street. It was modestly proportioned, especially considering the number of boys who congregated there most Saturdays during its zenith. The shop’s layout altered a little over the years I frequented it, but it always had at least two gaming tables set out, and at some times more. On busy days people would queue for a game on one them. The shop was small, it was more than a little down at heel, and over the hot summer holidays it began to smell of overripe teenage boy. I would sometimes arrive at lunchtime, or before, and stay until it closed in the evening, gaming, hanging out and, if my modest means permitted it, adding to my collection.

We were mostly shy and socially awkward, as boys of that age often are, especially the sort who gravitate towards geeky hobbies like wargaming. The manager at the time, Gaz, realised eventually that none of us had properly introduced ourselves. We did not know each other’s names. As a result, he bestowed on us nicknames, some of which have stuck long after we have come to know each other much better. My own nickname, on account of my accent and manner, is Posh.

Here I met Dave, who years later was to become my godfather. He has often mused that people called Dave do not get to have nicknames and indeed he never received one at the shop. In my first flush of irreligious enthusiasm, I found in his Christianity something to be argued over incessantly. I marvelled that someone could seriously believe such things.

Scarf had a very religious upbringing. He was polite and thoughtful, and remains deeply thoughtful and caring; if he is less polite now it is in part because he is forthright in his treatment of subjects upon which forthrightness is often appropriate. He studied politics and has a deep concern for social justice. This concern has lead him, along with several other mutual friends, to be an anarchist. If I disagree with some of his conclusions I have great sympathy for his concerns. Of all my friends he is the funniest and most entertaining, his sense of right informing his satirical tirades and his eloquence imbuing even the most mundane of his stories with great humour.

I knew of Camo first of all from the shop, but became a close friend only when, at about the time I started out on my A-levels, I diversified from wargaming into roleplaying games. As with many others, my experience of roleplaying began with Dungeons and Dragons. Roleplaying is in many ways more involved than wargaming and so we would meet at each others’ houses to play on Sundays. Our sessions generally lasted five hours or so, and we eventually diversified into one or two other systems, particularly Vampire: the Masquerade and Mage: the Ascension. These Sundays continued until I left for university.

For a little while after I left, the shop remained, and I visited it when I was in Halifax. Increasingly, however, our little group moved out into the pubs of Halifax and Leeds, and the shop itself has passed into history, now an empty room above the still-thriving newsagent. We celebrated each others’ eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays in house parties, some of which were raucous enough to live in legend, and made that progression from teenage boys to young men, moving away to universities in Leeds, York, Sheffield and Newcastle but still seeing each other frequently and still meeting up in Halifax when we could. Having once been too shy to properly introduce ourselves, our lives are now intertwined in close and enduring friendship.

A Confession: The Divine Comedy

Here is the next section of the story of how I got here.

One aspect of this period has had such an influence that I believe it deserves to be addressed separately. During my GCSE Drama lessons we were often sent up to one of the English department classrooms to practice as a smaller group. Supervision, I fear, was not always tight and so we spent much of the time we should have been reading from The Crucible lazing around.

Being a huge square even at so young an age I browsed the shelves for books which piqued my interest. I can’t remember most of the books I browsed through, and the English literary canon is still, for the most part, territory known to me only by hearsay. There are two books I do remember: Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy. Both were far beyond me, and I cannot imagine either being particularly accessible to even A-level students, but something about them captured my imagination.

I have, to date, still never managed more than the first third of Paradise Lost. There is still time, I hope.

The Divine Comedy, however, is a marvel. I delighted in the maps of hell, purgatory and heaven and read each canto’s précis and some of the notes, trying to figure out the structure and narrative of this fantastic book. I was fifteen at the time, so I had very little success but Dante went to the back of my mind and stayed there for three years until I arrived at university.

In my first semester at York St. John’s I came across the Inferno translated with notes by Dorothy L. Sayers in Goodramgate’s Oxfam, the same edition I had perused previously. I bought it and spent the next month or so slowly working through it. By the end of the second semester I had acquired and read Purgatory and Paradise.

Quite apart from the appealingly, Ptolemaically tidy vision of the universe depicted in the Comedy I was struck more deeply than I then realised by the “love that moves the sun and other stars.” This is Dante’s central theme and his final end, one which is lost upon those who only read his most famous and least lovely first canticle, Inferno.

Everything in the Comedy is somehow related to this central theme. In hell we see sin, which is not a new creation but rather a perversion of God’s perfect Creation, love unrestrained, misdirected or corrupted. Because Inferno has a certain grotesque appeal which is not at all reliant upon its spiritual or theological content it is easy to miss, and if one were to read the first canticle without reading any further one would be missing the better aspects of the work. Dante, the self-deprecating protagonist of his own tale, climbs from the depths of hell to ascend Mount Purgatory, upon which repentant sinners are cleansed (himself included), before he is taken up to heaven and converses with the saints.

Through all this, Dante is guided, either personally or by proxy, by Beatrice Portinari, the unrequited object of his courtly love. Romantic as well as divine love is an important theme of the Comedy.

I believe unreservedly that, if there is a God, love must be His most perfect principal. It is by following this belief to its sensible conclusion, maturing in my understanding of love as I go, that I have arrived in my present position.

A Confession: Parallel Lives

It seems an act of extreme hubris to write what amounts to autobiography, especially in the progress of an ordinary life which is in any case only in its twenty-sixth year. I have been trying to write down how I came to became a Christian. Indulge me. This will take a few posts, I think, but here is a first chapter.

I was a non-Christian for a long while. I don’t mean this in the sense that I was baptised when I was twenty five, although it is true in that sense also. I mean, rather, that I long moved alongside but not part of Christianity.

I was born in a happy family with no serious interpersonal issues, and it has remained so thus far. For this I count myself lucky. My parents are good, conscientious but irreligious people, sadly moving in a direction opposite to my own. I have no siblings. At the age of five, of course, it was time for me to go to school, and my parents chose the nearby St. Malachy’s Junior and Infant School. It was a reasonable place to send me and only ten minutes walk from home. It was also, as may be gathered from the school’s name, Roman Catholic.

I do not, I think, specifically recall my earliest encounter with Catholic worship. I do remember going to Mass from quite a young age, and of course it must have begun at five when I first started attending the school. I remember the stained glass window behind the altar, very bright and, to my mind then, very interesting. It stands there still, of course, and is the most appealing feature of a somewhat down-at-heel parish church.

I slowly learned the words in the same way as everyone else. Repetition made them familiar, although I never quite managed to memorize the Creed or the Gloria. I still can’t recite them on my own without prompting. With the new translation of the missal in the works, I suppose now is not the time to work on it.

I was perhaps vaguely aware that I was neither a Christian nor a Catholic but it was not until preparation for First Confession and First Holy Communion that I fully appreciated that I was not really part of the club. The school asked my parents what they wanted me to do during this preparation and my parents said that, rather than taking me aside to do something elsewhere, I should go through the same lessons as everyone else and then attend the First Holy Communion without participating in the communion itself. I was taught to go up to the priest for a blessing, a practice I continued until I was finally received into the Church years later.


A Catholic ethos naturally permeated the school in plenty of ways other than the occasional Mass we attended. Religious education was heavily weighted in favour of it. I remember doing a pastel drawing of the Good Samaritan with which I was particularly pleased. I remember also talk about materialism and pride. It was not forced upon us, and it was certainly not indoctrination.

What I received was a way of looking at the world which was contrary to the assumptions of society as a whole. Material success is quite secondary to love, and love is not just for those who deserve it.

My secondary school was St. Catherine’s Catholic High, or Halifax Catholic High as it was named through most of my time there. Masses, of course, continued. I was always worried about what I should say, as I was not a Catholic, when it came to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. It seemed odd to me for someone who did not believe to say all the responses, so I often kept quiet.

There was a Mass celebrated every Thursday at lunchtime. At primary school Mass was, I think, said on or around the important dates in the Church calendar - we would have Mass before breaking up for Christmas or Easter and at other times throughout the year. Attendance was not something we ever had a say in, and that was no different at St. Catherine’s when it came to Masses for feasts. The lunchtime Mass was open to all staff and pupils not otherwise occupied but was mandatory only for those who had been banished to the chapel in lieu of detention.

I went through plenty of phases when I was at St. Catherine’s, including the mandatory brush with Marxism, so I am reluctant ascribe too much significance to the phase during which I attended Mass on Thursdays. It was, nevertheless, my first entirely voluntary engagement with religion. At this point I have no recollection of how it came about. For only a few months, at most, I would go to the chapel and be one of the dozen or so people (unless an entire class had been sentenced to penal religiosity) who turned up. There were always some familiar faces there, and I have an inkling that the core of this group, consisting of an uncompromising and devout R.E. teacher, a classroom assistant and a handful of schoolchildren, possessed a degree of stability.

Regular attendees notwithstanding there was still a shortage of competent readers. Father Jonathan, a young priest who I remember for his easy manner and his Doc Martens, served as school chaplain at that time. He noticed I did not receive communion and assumed I was an Anglican (I must have looked like one). He was short of readers and so he would often press me into service as one when I attended Mass. I like to think I did a reasonably good job of it, but I’m not sure that readings by curious yet unbaptised teenagers are strictly canonical.

Until I started my GCSEs, R.E. had never particularly grabbed me. I did enjoy looking at other religions, which we did in Year 7, and I had always been interested in the myths and legends of other cultures. Something, and I cannot remember what, made me warm to R.E. part way through my GCSEs. I suspect this coincided roughly with my brief attendance at the Thursday Mass.

I had gotten my first taste of philosophy at the hands of Sophie’s World by Jostein Gardner, read to me by my mother. This is the story of a young Norwegian girl who starts to receive letters from a mysterious source, posing a series of metaphysical questions which spark her interest in philosophy. As I approached my A-levels, I realised that I would have the opportunity to explore at least some of these questions if I did Religious Studies.

In my whole year, only four students did the AS level in Religious Studies, of whom only myself and my friend Tony remained when we came to the A2. A classroom seemed unnecessary, so we often had classes in either the little meeting room or the staffroom which served the R.E. block. Attitudes were relaxed, and we often spent our lunchtimes in the meeting room, away from the hubbub, listening to Mr. Long’s Bob Marley CDs.

The R.E. department at St. Catherine’s during my time there consisted of about four members of staff, two of whom took responsibility for my A-level tuition. Mr. Milton Sharman was the only teacher in the school shorter than me and was an Indian by birth, having moved to England when he was a child. He taught our philosophy of religion classes and would often pass good-natured judgement on the books he found me reading in the form room. He thought I could be reading better things than Orwell’s essays, and was disappointed to discover that the only T.S. Elliott I knew was Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. I hope he would be pleased to know I have come to appreciate Elliott a little more broadly now, although I still like Orwell.

His colleague was Mr. Tony Long, who taught us liberation theology, his sympathies clearly lying with the liberation theologians and the poor for whose plight so moved them. He was a potentially fearsome teacher, and not one to suffer fools, but gifted with a wry sense of humour.

I was, by this point, close to being an out-and-out atheist. As with many people first asking religious questions, I latched onto the Problem of Evil as a fundamental rejoinder to the Christian God. I do not want to belittle the beliefs I held as a sixteen year old, because whilst I was certainly guilty of the sort of overblown philosophizing which is endemic to teenagers of a certain temperament, the questions I asked were quite valid, even if my conclusions were hasty.

How can God, in his loving-kindness, permit evil? Similarly, how can the existence of the all-loving God be reconciled with the existence of hell? When it came to the Church’s moral teachings, I was similarly critical. Modern society’s beliefs regarding sexuality are quite different to those of the Church, and I accepted the prevailing opinions pretty much uncritically.

But I believed these were questions worth asking, and I enjoyed R.E. immensely. When it came to be time to apply to universities, I could not decide between my two favourite subjects, history and religion, and so in the end I decided to take a joint honours degree and do them both. I arrived at St. Johns in the autumn of 2002 and within the first year had decided to concentrate mainly on religious studies, albeit mostly in the form of comparative religion rather than perhaps the slightly more exacting philosophical and theological side of things.

I was happy at St. Johns, albeit occasionally little lonely and unsociable in my first year. The expected homesickness did not manifest itself. I read much, and I particularly remember Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill, minds synonymous with modernity and secularism.