Why I still go to Mass with the views I have

View from the Pew
BY JAKE THACKRAY
SO WHY, MR Thackray,"
said Professor Randolph Quirke, "do you go to the Catholic Mass every Sunday and sometimes on a weekday when you hold the views you have just claimed you hold?"
This was in November 1960, at a tutorial in a house off Saddler Street, Durham, at about 11:30 on a Thursday morning.
I was 17 and the Prof was 35. He was wise and slick and he knew it and 1 was young and slickless and he knew that too.
He was the Professor of Linguistics and never stopped asking us cocky boys from the North Riding what we meant when we used words.
He nagged us into language, he nagged us into a kind of honesty. He was a wonderful teacher, Randy Quirky, nag, nag, nag.
I had just delivered to him my definitive essay on Jonathan Swift and his superlative vision of the worthlessness of the human species, the dodgy God who purportedly created it, and the looniness of the religionisers who say they know how to save it. It was pretty hot stuff.
"I cannot but conclude," I intoned, "the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
"Gosh, Mr Thackray!" said the Prof, who had heard everything before, "Who'd have thought it?"
"And furthermore, Swift later remarks," I was on high intone mode by now Ithat we have just enough religion in us to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another."
The wise man of Saddler Street sat back and lit a fag. "Yes, Jake lad. Swifty got it on the button. I'd love to have met him, wouldn't you? Young Thackers, you are a young Yorkshire prat but you could not have come across a finer moral sense or an honester, savager, peculiarer, Englisher prose style than that of Dean Jonathan Swift who was an Irishman.
"I think I admire your admiration for the great man. But, but, but. Why do you go to this Mass thing? Come on, pal. You can tell me. Go for it, baby."
Thus spake the Professor of Linguistics. So I went for it.
I sat back and I lit a fag up too.
If a •professor up in Durham could do it so could a young prat from the Ridings. There was a first time for everything.
If he could tell the truth and own up and ask awkward nagging questions well, bugger me, so could I. Seventeen is the best time to learn how to own up and Professor Randolph Quirke was the best teacher I could have had for the job.
"Sir. I started going to Mass because my mummy and daddy and my brothers went.
"So did my gran and my aunties and all my cousins. We all went. We used to take the dog too.
"I liked the Latin and the plain chant and the costumery and mysteriousness of it all.
"I was the altar boy at the seven o'clock mass before school and was given breakfast by the housekeeper and loved the smell of priestliness mingled with ground coffee and the quietness and stillness of the morning.
"Even now these are among the reasons why I go.
"A more recent reason is that the only other Catholic in my college is Luciana the Master's Italian maid and this is the only occasion when I get to be with her and sometimes touch her.
"At the Jesuit school in Leeds I was taught the Four Proofs of the Existence of God and even at 12 I didn't believe any of them although
I passed the exams on the s bject.
"But these days, Profess r, I do believe in God and a though I do not know e ctly why, yet, I think that c ntrary to any evidence of
e pectation, I one day shall. "I do believe, Sir, in the p ople who believe in God. I eluding my mummy and
d ddy and the aunties and e priests and the cardinals, 11 some of them, and espec yin the Italian maid who I believe has got the same h is for me as I am getting f r her.
"I believe in a God who ves us the hots, the moral s nses and brains, and the
dignations, and the capacit to raise our eyebrows both in church and at tutorials; who gave us professors of language and above all who gave us Jonathan Swifts. Give us another fag."