'Omg'

An essay on faith, praying and the mycelium network of heaven.

In 2003 I carried on my lap like a small stone baby a 2-foot statue of Jesus to London on the plane. Lugged a clay effigy of Irelands conscience back to England with me without a second thought. Looking back on it now, I think it’s entirely representative of how we can be raised so deeply in one thing that we just don’t know any different. Cultural indoctrination is something that takes a long ass time to unravel. When I first got to New York I thought Kosher was a brand of hotdog and my new American friends, they thought I was Jewish. I’d never experienced any other version of anything outside of what I had known in my own life so far.

One religion, one god and one way of being.

I grew up in Catholicism. Steeped in it. As a child of two catholic parents in staunchly catholic Ireland there was no way of circumnavigating that. Jesus’ body was the bread of Christ that masqueraded as the pretty little white wafers we were fed in church every Sunday. So light were they that they had a knack for getting stuck to the top of your palate and I always let it rest there out of respect until it dissolved entirely. The body of Christ was never chewed, you had to just let it melt in your mouth and I totally got that. His blood of course was the wine that the priest swilled out of the chalice on the altar mid sermon. For good weather at a wedding, we put the child of Prague outside the front door the night before, if we lost something we hit up Saint Anthony to help us to find it. If someone was ill or was doing exams we blazed up a couple of candles in the church for them.

My mother would often text me saying ‘lit a candle in the church for you today’. There was a brief period of my life where she lit multiple candles for me …once going so far as to text ‘I lit 5 candles in the church for you today’. Which is obscene when you think in that one candle is enough to shepherd a person through open heart surgery.

When anyone did actually die we continued to talk to them as if they were still alive and sometimes, we asked them to stop the rain or help us get to a petrol station on the motorway before we ran out of gas.

My first roommate in London was my statue of Jesus. My second roommate was a boyfriend I had in the mid 2000s of no identifiable faith whom my dad had pronounced a heathen upon meeting. He had fashioned a tiny conical dunce cap for my Jesus and anytime I got home and saw it on his head, I would become consumed with fear, like god had my heart in a choke hold. I had been told he saw everything and so I would rush over and remove it because… and I’m not exaggerating here I thought that at some point I’d get to the gates of the heaven….yes the actual gates and they would tell me I wasn’t getting in because of all that ‘stuff with the dunce cap’.

He once found me on my knees praying under that statue and I can still recall the fear in his eyes. It was palpable and I totally get it, like he thought I was crazy. It never for one second occurred to me that everyone didn’t have it in them in some shape of form, you know like faith. Faith in things outside of tangible realness. Whenever I see the man in my Fed ex drop off centre kneeling down to pray on his little rug in the middle of the day, no matter what’s happening in the place or how long the queue is, I think it’s such a beautiful thing to witness. I don’t know if that’s just me because I know what that is, to believe in something so wholeheartedly that you give it absolute right of passage through your life, for better or for worse.

I was half raised in a boarding school run by nuns. Loreto Abbey Rathfarnham sat resplendent like a great big set of stone lungs at the bottom of a long looping drive in Dublin 14. Home to a smorgasbord of unrelated sisters, one childless mother and exactly 100 girls under the age of 18. I was a very fresh 12 years old in my first year there, if I was a quail egg in a supermarket you probably still could have incubated me into hatching even at a week out from under my mother. It was a holy place for sure like where else would you find a life size painting of a fore shortened Jesus flying through the air on the cross? Salvador Dali’s ‘Christ of the Saint John of the cross’ to be precise and on the next flight of the stairs up to our dormitory was an Athena poster of a foal fetlock deep in grass and on this one it said “If you love something set it free if it comes back to you it’s yours. If not it was never meant to be’. It was here that I started to pray. Not out of selfless devotion or anything like that but because I was desperate.

I attribute my absolute pursuit of independence and freedom in my adult life to have evolved from how precisely un-free I felt in this situation. My daily pleading with my parents to take me home was met with a consistent volley of ignorance. A long series of Aces served into the service box, the reality being that no one was going to hit them back to me. They just bounced off into the ether and rolled quietly under hedges and other varieties of nature’s apparatus where things that can roll away from you go to forever. That doesn’t mean they’re not still under there 30 years later gathering dust and showing up in all of your romantic relationships and self-sabotaging behaviours.

One day a few weeks in, I found myself on my knees, praying. And once I was there, God found me. God loves to find us on our knees because it means we have already given up. My dad would say it’s like shooting fish in a barrel except he would be referring to the police who hid in the bushes with speed cameras on the M50 motorway. The vulnerable and desperate are easy pickings for a sales pitch, weight watchers, fake diamond necklaces on the shopping channel or a religious community that promises a better life.

I have a tendency go unnecessarily hard on things, like so hard for a month or three that I will completely destroy it for myself. This comes in many guises, a particular brand of kale chips for example, pop songs, coronas with lime, people too unfortunately. It’s a bottomless brunch of a list, I swear It would make you sick. I did this with praying. Afforded myself the tom foolery of a mirage, a deep cool green island in the barren desert of my spiritually bankrupt existence. I prayed myself to sleep every night, I prayed when I woke up. I prayed at lunch, I prayed when I ran and I ran a lot. I visited the church nestled into the right stone lung of the Abbey and I prayed in there. In case you don’t know, prayers are much more potent in church, like one ‘Our Father’ kneeling in a chapel is basically the equivalent of 10 lying down in bed. On your knees anywhere is double or triple points depending on how hard the surface is.

You see where I’m going with this? It’s about suffering in exchange for salvation.

All this praying became instinct after a week, second nature. I started to believe. I could feel it, tingling in my fingertips, in the ends of my hair, the omnipresence of it. My faith. Spooning me in my sleep. I woke up with it holding my hand. I floated on top of it like the Dead Sea and it held me aloft like an ocean buoy, like a baby. I started to feel powerful, like I could move things with my mind or make it snow. This went on with consistent intensity until finally one day after months of fervent benedictions, I found myself stymying the urge destroy a flower pot containing a sweet little fluorescent pink geranium. The rage of my unanswered prayers was trying to find a way out of my body. After all those days and nights of simpering devotion I felt like a fool because I was still in boarding school and so, I told God to fuck off forever.

Except of course it’s me and it wasn’t forever because I change my mind all the time, about absolutely everything. I now know that I would pray again and find God again and even though I thought it was the end. It wasn’t. Even though I thought that we would never ever ever get back together. We did. Transactional devotion is not real devotion and maybe that’s why I wasn’t helicoptered out of boarding school in the first place. My early faith was entirely dependent on me wanting things from God. I offered up prayers like lap dances, then put my hands out for dollar bills.

My later in life faith is more like the oxygen mask on a plane, I don’t need to see it dangling in front of me for the whole flight. I just need to know that it’s there in case of an emergency.

I replaced my tm mantra with the ‘Our father’ and now it’s my go to when I need to calm my nervous system or get myself to sleep. I find myself saying it without realising and there’s something about it that makes me feel better. I’m not praying to a long-haired, white hot Jesus in a robe with his flaming heart burning out of his chest or anything like that. I’m just sending a vibrational frequency through my body to give it a heads up that I’m going to be okay, that something much bigger than I am is looking after me.

I could never have predicted that a Billie Eilish concert this summer would become the greatest Sunday service of my life. It eclipsed my holy communion and my confirmation put together. It’s an understatement to say that Billies people are zealous because that feels like a disservice to the levels of utter devotion amongst her fans. Every time she moved towards any of the four sides of the stage the audience would scream to an hysterically high pitched crescendo like a metal detector getting closer to something precious. A golden calf embedded deep into the loamy earth of the land on the Sinai Peninsula. Billie the kid, the little goat, an unlikely deity, romping around the platform, her metaphorical guts spilling out all over the floor and her hopping and skipping around and over her own vital organs. It was transcendent. It was so many things but at it’s core just one, it was love.

If we extract the word god from religious context and give it autonomy to represent something else, then surely the symbolism of that can be love? I didn’t doubt for one second that Billie loved me that night and I’d guess neither did any of the other twenty thousand people in the parish of the O2 Arena. All the feelings I had expected to catch at the Lana Del Ray concert the week before caught me at Billie. Hooked me out of the sea of Galilee, flipped me into a frying pan and ate me up for dinner. My little translucent bones neatly arranged in a row around the rim of the plate. If Billie was my preacher, I’d be in church every Sunday rollicking on the floor and speaking in tongues. The congregation operating like the mycelium network of heaven and Billie Eilish as the divine mushroom they have raised.

Or Lana or Liam with his tambourine halo ….

‘Some might say they don’t believe in heaven. Go and tell it to the man that lives in hell’.

We can thank Noel Gallagher for that line.

God is in us all if we want them to be, we create it inside of ourselves or we help to create it in others outside of ourselves. Either way we can choose what that is. If we want to get really real about it, God can be found in everything, it’s a kind of sub atomic resonance. Like Scarlet Johannsson in that movie Lucy. Or the terminator T-1000 that can turns itself into the black and white checkered floor of the hospital using it’s mimetic polyalloy abilities in Terminator 2. Except not evil of course.

There’s a poem we all loved when we were kids. It’s called ‘Footprints’ and basically God and one of his children (ie; any one of us because adults are also called God’s children) are walking on the beach and the follower says ‘Lord why in the darkest of times when I needed you the most was there was only one set of footprints. You deserted me! Where were you?’ and Jesus replies ‘My child, those were the times that I carried you’.

I guess that’s why they call it blind faith. It really is nice to feel like you’re not entirely alone even if you actually are! And you know what? There’s a part of me that’s less scared of dying because after all this praying, I will 100% be getting into heaven.

And so as the story goes there’s one set of footprints in the sand on the beach and you can be the person making those impressions or you can ride shotgun on the shoulder of a god of your own creation and that’s got to be the best seat in the house you’ll ever get on the road trip of your own life. Knowing that you can hop down anytime you like and walk alongside them but ultimately and this is the most important part, you’ll never walk alone.

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