Notes from a Room

I wake up and I’m in trouble straight away. Don’t hide your face from me. What can I do to justify my days? They vanish like smoke. I have a word with myself, but I might as well look in a broken mirror. How long will you hide? You made me in my mother’s womb, in that secret place, and you’re with me now, in my secret life. My life is an open sore. Out of the depths you call me, out of the depths I call you. You were with me from the beginning. You know my resting and my rising. You know me through and through. I thank you, who wonderfully made me, who made my inmost being. They say you did it out of love, so let me see it.

Religion’s a funny one, Rob says on the way to the pub the next week.

Funny how? I say.

What does faith mean if it means believing in fairy tales?

It’s an act in itself. You like that kind of thing, don’t you?

You say that, he says, but where’s, like… the proof of it?

That’s with God.

That’s a nice get-out, though, isn’t it? he says. It’s like you only find meaning in the world after you believe in something that’s out of the world.

That’s true, I guess.

Look, I’m a socialist. I don’t think – ’

I know, I say.

So you just believe what the church tells you?

I believe in the creeds of the holy catholic church, I say.

So you’ve been brainwashed? he says.

You can call it that. A washed brain, wouldn’t that be nice.

I just don’t see it, he says. You people hide behind your faith. I’ll be honest, it’s infuriating. Look at how much harm religion’s done. I could give you an endless list. At least we try to change things.

Some of the folks in church do too, I say.

Yeah, but not because they believe in this world, on its own terms. They look at it through some mumbo jumbo, not the messy reality.

I don’t really believe in this world on its own terms, I say. Never did.

What, so you’re some kind of gnostic?

Seems like it’s pretty much ruled by evil.

You mean like the devil?

Yes.

Then the devil’s in church too, he says.

Oh yeah, he’s all over the place, I say as we wait at the bar.

So do you think you’re a better person because you go to church?

I don’t know. Yes, maybe.

I’m not seeing much proof of it, he says. Though I guess you seem a bit nicer these days.

I hope so, I say.

A woman turns to stare at us as we get our drinks. I wonder what she’s thinking.

I still don’t get how you think, he says, as we make our way to the billiards table. The devil’s in this world, right?

Absolutely, I say.

So you have to fight him here?

Yes.

But you don’t really want to fight him in the real world, do you? You said you’re not that kind of person.

I guess it depends on what you think is real and what the real fight is.

There it is, he says. See, it makes no sense. We can go round in circles.

Fuck all that, I say. Let’s play some bar billiards.

Now you’re talking, he says. Heads or tails?

*

Dear God, I think as I walk home, you’re higher than the highest thoughts. No one can think you. You’re with the lowest too, the tortured ones on Earth, that’s what they used to say, isn’t it? Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, deliver us from evil. Have mercy on me a sinner, who doesn’t know what he’s saying.

My ex-girlfriend – a lame phrase for what she’s become for me – came back to Norwich over the Whitsun weekend to visit old friends. She had a window for me on Saturday. In the Boar she told me she was engaged to the man she’d left me for. I steadied myself for days of confusion. Might be weeks, I thought, as we talked and I introduced her to whoever was at the bar.

At Pentecost mass the next morning, I slipped back into the habits of mind that helped drive her away in the first place. It was as if no time had passed, no spiritual progress had been made. I judged people in the congregation in the same way I would have back then. I couldn’t master the envy and grief and bile that came up in me, even while the lesson from Acts was read about the Spirit coming down on the apostles. Heavenly things were paper-thin in comparison. Churchgoing these past few years was a pastime. The gift of tears was laughable. Strange how easily the eternal becomes a mere idea when some old wound opens.

Then, walking home, the old feeling of absence. There was almost a pull to it, something like real evil, what they used to call the devil’s work. I’d have left too, in her place, I thought, and cried tears of self-pity when I got home.

A woman weeps in church before and after the Eucharist. Her shoulders move. No one gets up to comfort her. We keep our eyes to ourselves out of respect for the moment. The old writers called it the gift of tears, when such things could be said without embarrassment: not tears of self-pity. I can’t help glancing at her when the service is over. She looks slightly stunned as she leaves.

I meet Rob for a drink. I’ve known him since university, when we both read the same books and watched the same films and mistook that for a life. He works for a housing charity now and attends council meetings, tenants’ meetings, food-bank meetings in rooms where people try to stop something worse happening.

He asks about work and the inheritance straight out. I tell him a little.

So do something, he says, now you’ve got time. Going to church won’t change anything.

I don’t know about that, I say.

He says they need drivers on Tuesdays. Someone to take food boxes out to people who can’t get to the centre. Nothing dramatic. Mostly tins, nappies, toilet roll.

I don’t know if I’m the right kind of person for that, I say.

He looks at me. What kind of person do you have to be to carry a box?

Of course, I say. Only it might feel like I was acting.

You are acting, he says. Everyone is. We do it anyway. It’s not like anyone’s grading us.

*

He’s not wrong. Even in my room alone it can feel as if I’m acting, before imagined witnesses. These words too, changed and changed again, can seem like the words of others. Rob might say there’s no thinking your way out: just choose an act.

*

I start volunteering on Tuesdays. I get three addresses and a clipboard. They’re working on an app, the man says. I carry the boxes from the storeroom to the car and from the car to the doors. I hand them over, say hello and go home. No opening, no draught of joy. The real work seems to be with the people who set it up and run it, who know people’s names and needs. I don’t feel a charitable glow. They don’t seem to either.

*

There must be acting in church too. I imagine some of the others also confess sins they half intend to keep committing. We say words older and better than we are before we feel them. We ask for mercy while keeping a way out. We don’t know yet what it will be like to be changed into our true selves, but maybe the old forms can hold us long enough for something true to get under us. Dear God, closer to us than we are to ourselves, who made and fashioned us, hear our prayers and act in us.