In my young head the priest was an all-powerful being who had been heaven-sent to our humble home to keep us all from the raging fires of hell. My parents’ deference and the obsequious silence that prevailed in his presence told me that he was the most important person in the parish and beyond. The clergy of that era willingly colluded in this burlesque. Such barriers and condescension did not lead to understanding or further the Christian teachings of humility. My catechism taught me that we were all ‘one in the sight of God’; the practice told me different.
It took me a considerable time to understand why religion and reality can sometimes be at odds. Wresting the truth from the wreckage involved dismantling piece by piece the scaffolding that had held in place all the chaotic beliefs I’d grown up with. I have since discovered that the reason for the dissonance between man and God lies primarily in man’s interpretation of what God is.
The journey towards ‘understanding’ this anomaly started at my mother’s graveside. I travelled through the years and countless books that might render up the answer. I took John Henry’s lead, wanted to experience the fearless, careless beauty of a life such as his, and went to live and work abroad. I travelled, taught and painted in foreign lands for ten years, soaring back and forth across the skies, shuffling exotic coinage in my pocket, balancing alien languages on my tongue, and discovering to my amazement that all of those countries with all of their problems and delights held the same people – often fearful, sometimes loving – all of them presenting the same emotions as myself.
And all those experiences, and all those people, all of the obstacles and triumphs I encountered in my search, moved me towards the beauty of one truth; moved me ineluctably towards the ‘undeniable beauty of the one and only truth’ – that love is our only reality and that God is love.
There are only two emotions: love and fear. Love is God-given; it is our natural state. Fear is what we experience when we refuse to love.
When we refuse to love, the fear we feel condemns us to live in a hell of our own making. We express this fear through all the negative emotions: anger, greed, selfishness, violence. We become anxious, depressed, lonely and sad. In short, fear is our protest against the reality of what we truly are.
However the hard part is that in order to experience love in our own lives we must give love to others, not just family and friends – that’s easy – but to strangers, people we perceive to be different, whether because of their skin colour or their religion; or because they don’t have as much money as we do. It means that the beggar in the street, the struggling single mother, the ‘special’ child, the disabled adult, the lonely but cantankerous pensioner all deserve our love and respect because we are all equal parts of the human family.
To give love to another is to strengthen it in ourselves; to withhold it diminishes love in ourselves. Hence the meaning of the axiom: It is in giving that we receive.
The founders of every major religion – be they Jesus, Buddha or Mohammed – have all taught the doctrine of loving one’s neighbour. Therefore there is only one religion, the religion of love. Such an understanding renders all other labels superfluous.
All the conflict in the world today demonstrates our shared lovelessness, dating back to childhoods that were marred by one parent or another’s unwillingness to give love. Lack of love in the home leads to lack of peace in the world. Northern Ireland is one crude example.
No one in Ulster who ever planted a bomb, fired a stone, bullet or volley of invective at another adult or child did so out of a sense of patriotism. Rather their motives stemmed from the feeling that they were unloved, and therefore felt unworthy. When we feel ‘bad’ about ourselves we want to hurt others so that they can feel our pain as well. Every act of violence is a call for love. But hurting others will not ease our pain. Hurting others will not give us back the love we yearn for. Only loving and forgiving will get us there.
Reclaiming the love that was denied me in childhood, understanding why it was withheld, and forgiving those people who refused to love and support me enables me to stop the blame game and so right the wrongs of the past.
My Catholic upbringing taught me a great deal about sin and guilt but failed to emphasise the essential premise that all answers lie within. I looked for God everywhere: up in the sky, inside chapels and great cathedrals, and in the stones of those painful penitential beds on Lough Derg. I could not locate Him anywhere. And all the while He sat patiently in my heart, waiting to be acknowledged, the dweller within us all. I was never told that the surest way to hear Him was not necessarily through prayer but through meditation and silence.
In the light of what I’ve learned I can forgive all those unkind adults from my past – the uncles who never once showed they cared, the teachers who yelled, the master who beat me, those people who threw their rocks and stones before me and watched me fall. But most importantly of all I can forgive my poor father: he with his resistance to change, his unwillingness to love, his ignorance of the splendour life could hold. He, who more than anyone else bent and buckled my childhood out of shape and pushed me towards an adulthood of shattered hopes and angst-ridden longings.
I can forgive him because I now see that he blindly followed the script his fearful parents had passed unto him, the one they had accepted without question from their parents; an entire three-act play of fear. The words ‘act’ and ‘fear’ belong together in this context, because when we live in fear we are really acting a part. In A Course in Miracles, undoubtedly the definitive work on enlightenment, it states:
Only perfect love exists
If there is fear,
It produces a state that does not exist.
As a child I read from this script of fear because as a child I had no choice. However when I reached adulthood I did have a choice. The script was a damaged one which did not make me happy. It was based on fear and produced a life of unworkable realities. So I tore it up and began to write my own and in doing so I discovered that the only way to transcend that fearful past was to understand it and so forgive it.
To hold any resentment would mean that I was simply repeating my father’s pattern; it would mean that I was making the choice to live in ignorance. Were I to make that choice then my spirit would shrivel up and die, as surely as the sun rises and sets.
I truly believe that all things in life are ‘lessons that God would have us learn’ and that my father’s life is the lesson that God would have me learn from. I do not pretend to know how astrophysics works, yet my ignorance does not affect our galaxy in any way; however if I do not question the reality of my own self then how can I ever expect to progress and learn and so become a better human being?
Every time I make a negative statement or judgement it’s my father’s voice I hear. In giving in to his voice I realise that I forfeit the spiritual in me; that I shrink to fit a lesser me and give voice to the fearful me. I must always be on guard. This awareness is pivotal to my spiritual growth.
And finally, all those years ago when I experienced the supernatural in the boys’ bedroom and embraced language and colour in the classroom, two new worlds came into being for me – the spirit world and the spiritual experience.
From the haunting I learned that when we choose to live a loveless life, this unnatural choice can actually have repercussions in the parallel world of spirit when we transfer to that dimension.
When I started to paint and write I understood that it was really a collaboration between myself and my higher self. The more I left things in the hands of that divine part of me the more successful the result.
And it is the same with life. The more I choose love over fear, or God over the ego, the happier I become.
I can now appreciate the fine people who sustained me and gave me hope, the few shining examples I found along the way: those whose positive example lifted me up and carried me forward. I had my mother’s love, Helen’s kindness, my first teacher’s goodness, Uncle Dan’s humility, John Henry’s drive
, the praise of those teachers in the English and art lessons and, in the creative stillness, the artistic vision of Kandinsky and the flawless verse of Heaney, Larkin and MacNeice.
Ultimately I’ve discovered that we must take the negative experiences from our lives and learn from them, and that the positive experiences, even though they may be few and far between, are there for us to build on.
Where there is no vision the people perish.
Proverbs 29:18
A scene enacts itself now in my mind’s eye. It’s a vision that refuses to be ignored.
I stand alone and unnoticed, a stranger in an unknown land. In a far-off field there is a party in progress. The sun shines brightly on this blithe spot, making it shimmer and glow with such vibrancy that the surrounding countryside recedes into the shadow.
The guests at the picnic seem very happy. I hear their laughter and talk and they are like streams of evanescent song carried to me on the breeze. Everything is effortless; people link arms and join hands as if they’ve been friends for eons. There are no inhibitions here, or neglect or loneliness. There is harmony and inclusion, and feelings of kinship and love. These feelings are so strong that they create their own force field – I feel it radiating outward and it has the power to touch me even at a distance.
The guests are well known to me. There is my mother – I focus on her first; she shines in her yellow dress and is smiling and talking to a gent in a nautical outfit. Those flashes of red cravat and hankie could only belong to one man: my effervescent Uncle John. Lying on the grass I see Sam, propped up on an elbow, chatting to his neighbour Helen, who suddenly twirls on those white stilettos of hers, and laughs.
Mr Edward Bradley has just arrived. He’s parked his motorcycle under a nearby tree and is struggling out of his leathers. And what is that he’s extracting from his satchel? It’s a fish, a salmon plucked from the great Moyola river, at last. Beside his motorcycle I see that great bicycle of Mary Catherine’s, still hung with the red-and-grey spangled shopping bag, full of brandy balls and novenas. She is in deep conversation with my angelic first teacher, Miss McKeague.
My favourite teacher is forever her smiling, attentive self; the brooch and the watch with its anchored handkerchief are still her only adornment, answering to some quiet need in eternity. Beside her there is a lady cutting a jam sponge and surreptitiously sipping sweet sherry. Yes, it could only be dear Margaret. I recognise at once that shiny, thick hair and those unmistakable suede shoes. And who is that in a furious orange inferno of a dress, that brassy wig of curls and straw hat beside him on the grass? It’s Norrie, free at last from censure and exclusion.
My Uncle Dan sees me and raises his cap and his hand in greeting; as he does so, the entire assembly turn in my direction to do the same. They open up like a beautiful peacock fan, before folding again and returning to the picnic.
But there are others. I hadn’t noticed them before, loitering as they do at a distance from the group. They huddle in sombre clothes, looking sad and forlorn. As I draw closer I see that it’s my father and his brothers and my Great-aunt Rose. The vibrant party hasn’t escaped their notice – and comment.
The schoolmaster’s voice is the loudest. I hear it first.
‘I s’pose a body would need tae make a shape over there, on account of Big Frenkie,’ he says.
‘Not much odds about him,’ father answers, and Great-aunt Rose nods in agreement.
But here is Edward, breaking free of the group.
‘Don’t ye want tae see Mary?’ he says. ‘She’s over there and she’s waitin’ for ye. She’s waitin’ for all of us.’
Father responds with his customary dalliance.
‘Ah, it’s time enough,’ he grumbles. ‘There’s no hurry, so there isn’t.’
Uncle James agrees.
But Robert is not so certain and shakes his head.
‘Wouldn’t be too sure about that!’ he says darkly. ‘A body can wait too long, you know. I wouldn’t want tae end up like that great-uncle of Johnny the Digger’s. He waited so long in the same spot that he died; never got livin’ atall, atall.’ He shakes his head ruefully and adds: ‘Aye, and it was on this very spot where it happened, so they say, in eighteen and fifty-six.’
There’s a minatory silence while they all consider the Master’s words. Edward, however, seems to have made up his own mind; he begins to walk away, in the direction of the party.
Bathed in glorious sunlight, the party continues, joy and happiness abound. Outside the magic circle, fear and loneliness prevail. As I look on the scene I see to my delight that the outsiders are beginning to move – hesitantly at first – but they are moving all the same, in the right direction, towards the party, towards the light. The only thing that will get them there is a willingness to love, a willingness to forgive. A simple lesson that can take a whole lifetime, or many lifetimes, to learn.
Yet of one thing I’m certain. They will make it to that party, no matter how long it takes – because God wills it. The miracle of unconditional love is freely available to each and every one of us. That is our purpose here: to discover this great truth for ourselves.
Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless,
Each of us with his or her right
Upon the earth;
Each of us allow’d
The eternal purports of the earth;
Each of us here
As divinely as any is here.
Walt Whitman
Christina McKenna was born in Ireland in 1957. She attended the Belfast College of Art and the University of Ulster and went on to teach in Spain, Turkey, Italy, Mexico and her native Ulster. She continues to paint and has exhibited her work around the world.
She has written two other books: The Misremembered Man and Ireland’s Haunted Women.
First published in 2004 by
Neil Wilson Publishing Ltd
www.nwp.co.uk
© Christina McKenna, 2011
The author has asserted her moral right under the
Design, Patents and Copyright Act, 1988, to be identified
as the Author of this Work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
The following terms are Trademarks ® and as such
are recognised by the publisher:
Babycham, Bakelite, Boeing, Brylcreem, Budweiser, Fanta,
Findus, Ford, Formica, Gallaher, Harvey’s Bristol cream,
Horlicks, Lycra, Marks & Spencer, Mars, M&M’s, Mr Kipling,
Pentax, Play-Doh, Playtex, Primus, Saxa, Scholl, Singer,
Tate & Lyle, Tupperware.
Print edition ISBN: 978-1-903238-76-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-906476-60-9
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress Page 22