A Singular Christian

I’m the kind of man who prefers a church when there are no other people in it; even a priest would be in the way. There’s nothing quite like the solitude offered in that crepuscular domain; the echo of scuffed feet and a single cough which resonates and rattles around every Station of the Cross. A congregation would just smother the sound.

 Other people think I’m ‘good with people’ but I could well do without them in the main. Maybe I’m just proficient at ‘putting up with people’ and that’s a whole different thing, borne of necessity not any desire of mine. I’m no networker either. I well realise the useful utility of such a skill but find it hard to be false and forced. Really, I should have been a monk in the Middle Ages, a minor character in ‘Name of the Rose’. 

Religiosity appeals to me in this way. I like words like ‘solitude’ ‘sanctuary’ and ‘at one with God’, they reach me where I live. It’s just the whole faith and belief thing that defies me; its irrationality, the suspension of belief as if one were attending a theatre and forced to suspend logic for the sake of the story. 

Apart from that, I like the idea of it all: ceremonies and rituals and ‘peace be with you’. It gives me a good feeling and I’m not really sure why. Perhaps it’s because living in a city there are too few places where one can truly be quiet. Even a city centre church is plagued with extraneous noise. Sitting in the beautiful St John’s at the west end of Princes Street one day I started noticing the sound of bagpipes blaring from one of those tartan tat tourist shops across the road. I worry for the staff in those places who have to listen to bagpipe versions of Hey Jude and No Woman No Cry all day. It must drive them bonkers. Like having Tartan Tinnitus!

I’m writing this while sitting in another St John’s, this one in sleepy Portobello out of season.

Bliss. Just me and the iconography and the man himself in agony on his cross.

If I was to become a Christian it would need to be on my terms, none of these prayer groups and coffee mornings and small-talk and gossip and sanctimony. I’d need to be a hermit or ascetic preferably in a centrally-heated cave with all mod-cons or someone like Charles de Foucauld the French aristocrat who went out to live a life beneath the stars in the desert.

My religion would be a solitary affair and even Jesus would need an appointment for a chat.