My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress (28 page)

Both my primary schoolteachers, the unassuming Miss McKeague and the unpredictable Master Bradley, took very different routes into that everlasting light. Miss died happily and peacefully as she slept, and the Master by his own hand.

In retrospect the Master's manner of exit should not have surprised us. One September morning, shortly after I'd left Lisnamuck school, he decided he'd had enough and drove many miles up the Antrim coast to the Giant's Causeway. He did not, however, stop at this much frequented beauty spot but continued for seven more miles along the coast until he arrived at Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge. Every year the local salmon fishermen sling this precarious bridge across the 60-foot wide and 80-foot deep chasm that separates the mainland from the islet of Carrick-a-Rede. But Master Bradley had not come to admire the scenery on that fateful morning. He stepped out onto the bridge, ventured halfway across, and flung himself off into the surging breakers.

I attended his funeral and stood with other past-pupils at the graveside. There were no tears. As his coffin was lowered I was aware that some kind of blemished justice had come to my classmates and me, and to every trembling child who'd sat before him down all the years. A class full of children had waited for his arrival on the morning of his suicide and I could not help thinking of them. They'd waited and prayed with Miss on that sunny
September morning – just as I had done so many times. Were they, I wondered, struck by a bolt of pure joy on learning that they'd never see him again? An era of suffering had ended, because Master Bradley had decided to kill the suffering within himself.

F
ROM
F
EAR TO
L
OVE

T
hough I did not know it at the time, those who made me suffer were in far greater pain than I was. As I grew up I began to realise that there was a valuable lesson to be learned: I saw how negativity garnered nothing but unhappiness in a person's life, and this made me want to look for more positive alternatives. I was beginning to see that by understanding the
meaning
behind the chaos I could learn from it, rather than repeat the same negative patterns. I began to see that it is not the events of our lives that shape us but our understanding of what those events signify.

My father, like his brothers, was totally opposed to change. Had our mother not been there to cajole him then life would have been unbearable. There'd have been no birthday cards or Christmas presents, and no annual day trip to Portstewart. These snatches of happiness rescued us; it was
her
love that gave us hope.

Father lived his entire life looking to the past – never mind that this past was a far from happy one. The old ways were the only ways he allowed to guide him, and therefore were the ‘best' in his opinion. So opposed to change was he that he'd ‘taken on the job of stopping the world'. This fixed reality, quite naturally, never brought him happiness. It brings happiness to nobody.

Beliefs can be either empowering or destructive. We choose the tenets which matter to us and live according to them. My father and his family adhered to a set of
limiting beliefs about the world; it was as though they were swallowing a small amount of poison every day, until finally they'd ingested so many toxins that the build-up was fatal. With each unquestioned negative their spirits died a little more.

Courage unused, diminishes,

Commitment, unexercised waves.

Love unshared dissipates.

With my father there was little growth or evolution; since we use our minds to evolve it follows that a closed mind cannot do so.

It was the simple, basic, rural pastimes that shaped his life: playing those IRA songs on that green record-player, listening to GAA matches on the wireless and scanning the
Sunday Press
before falling asleep on a Sunday afternoon. He farmed the land according to the monotonous dictates of the calendar and expressed himself within confines of his own making. Such unchanging activities and circumstances could hardly produce creative thought. To change is to grow; the more varied our experiences, the more knowledge we accumulate about ourselves and the world.

Even from an early age I suspected there was something very skewed about the way he looked at life. His conversations usually started out with bland comments on the weather or the farm and ended with the defamation of someone's character. No one was ever good enough – for the simple reason that he did not feel he himself was good enough. When we're unhappy with ourselves, when we are fearful, we perceive others as flawed. It is easier to judge them than to look at ourselves objectively, and perhaps make the necessary adjustments. It was impossible to escape the fallout from this warped
thinking. I grew up believing that to be critical and judgemental of others was the norm. I absorbed all this negativity and became a fearful child and for many years an unhappy adult.

It is a terrible indictment of the human animal that when a person of low self-esteem is given power over another his first thoughts turn to how he can set about torturing that other. History proves this time and again. My father had no power in his life until he married and had children. Being himself the product of a loveless marriage, he felt that the only way to deal with the awfulness of those early years, and ‘right' the wrongs done to him, was to repeat the same pattern with us. He withheld love from us in order that we might experience the pain of his childhood. This prolonged act of vengeance never brought him happiness, however.

We children were his opportunity to experience the love he'd been denied. Ignoring this fact simply created more resistance in his life. He had nine offspring and several decades to figure out what it was he was doing wrong. It saddens me that he died never having experienced all the love that was there for the giving and receiving. Love is our greatest miracle. To love unselfishly surely is our highest calling; it's our only antidote to fear, and with this recognition comes understanding, tolerance, open-mindedness and peace.

I wish that he and his brothers could have come to this realisation, this appreciation of the essence of life. Sadly they did not. Life was something that happened to others while they sat contemplating the land and money that would one day be theirs. When the oldest of them, Robert, died and the golden prize was in sight, all the happiness they'd postponed since youth did not suddenly erupt like struck oil into their lives. By the time
it arrived they were too old and embittered; the long wait had made them so. Whatever illusions they might have had as young men lay collapsed and broken like the decaying barns in the yard, the nettles and briars of those neglected dreams growing up to choke out the light.

People do not grow old, someone once remarked; when they cease to grow they become old.

Along with those limited belief systems I also received religion of a sort. In my youth I witnessed a dedication to the Church which, seen at close quarters, turned out to be hypocrisy. It served to distance me from churchgoers in general as I gained control of my own life. Christian teaching did not seem to figure much in the day-to-day lives of those around me; I suspected that prayer was otherwise than the empty words I encountered during the celebration of the sacraments. There were definite echoes of Shakespeare's King Claudius:

My words go up, my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

I saw also that the nature of God was open to all sorts of misinterpretation. That supernatural event following my great-aunt's death had proved to me not only the existence of a supreme being but also the reality of a parallel and invisible universe where the dead lived on in spirit.

I watched as mass and confession were attended on a regular basis, sins were forgiven and communion received; I saw a ‘huge remembering' of the importance of God for a half-hour on a Sunday or when someone died – ‘God, it's too bad wee Barney's gone … suppose it comes to us all' – then it would be back to the anger and resentment, the scheming and prejudging.

On most evenings there'd be my mother's order: ‘All down on your knees for the rosary this minute.' And on each occasion my mind was duly numbed by the rambling decades of petitioning prayers. I prayed without conviction because the idea of God sold to me as a child was an abstract one I could neither relate to nor understand. I gained little solace from weekly attendance at mass and the fortnightly visits to the confessional. Those sacraments only served to induce great fear and give me an exaggerated sense of my own inferiority. If believing in a god was supposed to make me a better person then why did I not
feel
better, why was I not experiencing all the ‘love and peace' that were on offer?

I could see that my mother, for all her devotion, was not experiencing any of this love or peace either, so I could not learn it from her. The guardians of our morality – the priests and bishops – inhabited an elevated region that was so far above us laity that we felt we could never hope to breathe their rarified, incense-rich air. Miss McKeague, with all her well-intentioned pious wisdom, could not explain to me that I was ‘God's success story'. Are not all of us worthy of this description, regardless of colour, creed or class? No one told me that this was so.

Every year the ‘stations' were performed in our home; mass was said by the local priest and the neighbours were invited to participate. The ceremony was rotated to ensure that the home of each family in the parish was thus honoured. In the wake of Great-aunt Rose's haunting, our back bedroom became the place of celebration.

The stations were conducted in early morning. I remember the tremendous effort my mother put into the preparations, akin to those preparations for the Yankees but with infinitely less colour and flounce
attached. The best linen was taken out and she'd worry for weeks in advance about the priest's breakfast. A humble egg was treated like the most exotic delicacy. Mother would try to second-guess the priest's preferences: would he want it boiled, fried, scrambled or poached? All eating utensils, polished to perfection, lay in readiness in the kitchen. And oh, how that table sparkled! The china gleamed, the silver shone, the butter ‘curled' and marmalade glittered in a crystal dish: a table fit for a king. And invariably the priest would spoil it all by announcing that he'd like, ‘a slice or two of toast and nothing else, thanks'.

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.