Coming back to God

I’m in a fancy members-only drinking club in London. The kind of place where management say that if you want to walk around in your pyjamas all day slugging whiskey, you can. Maybe tomorrow. I’m angry today and I don’t know why.

This is a place of privilege and I am well looked after. I’m here to do a gig for YoungMinds UK, a charity that helps kids with mental health issues. I’ve just had a few wonderful shows in Vicar Street and the calendar is well booked with work. I’ve wanted to do some acting recently, and, lo and behold, a flood of offers came in and I’m on set both this week and next. The TV show is coming back in the winter too.

Am I depressed?

I wonder, am I depressed? I wouldn’t be surprised. I get great kicks out of life and am surrounded by love, but there is an underlying discontent. A feeling as if somehow, somewhere along the line, I lost the point of it. I fantasise about the different lives I could have had. We all do, but I know that the life I’m living is one of the ones I fantasised about. I could very well come to consciousness a few moments from now in a carpet-packing warehouse on the Kells Road in Navan with a foreman roaring, “Take your head ou’ o’ your arse, Tiernan, and ge’ me dem rugs.”

The things I hunger after are so ordinary. You don’t need a Leaving Cert to find peace. I love the rain. I feel like I’m being baptised into me senses when I’m out in it.

The smell of the air after a summer shower. The opportunity in your life to be able to pick up a child and wrestle with it. To feel their soft skin against the side of your face. I bought a pair of Japanese jeans recently that you don’t wash. You just leave them on the whole time and they mould around you. Mould around you too in another sense, perhaps, but I love them. Its like getting into a friend! A dangerous notion, but there you go.

I love getting up very early in the morning. In and around the dawn. It feels exciting. For an hour or two there’s hope and the thrum of something new about the day. It wouldn’t be there if I left it till half 10 to get out of the bed.

The Rosary

I fell into a Rosary last week in Dublin. I didn’t mean to; ’twas on in some church I went into. I sat in beside them. I have to say in all fairness now that it was dour enough. I felt an awful sense of burden in the words of it — not the words as they are, for I’ve been to decades where you’d be lightly transcended out of yourself and into something wonderful; no, burdened by the delivery of it.

I tried to hear was there any vulnerability in it, but I couldn’t. It felt oppressive. I opened my eyes at the end and had a look at them and they were all blooming with smiles, but the intonations during it would not be a place where I would like to pitch my tent. It wouldn’t be good for my soul. I heard one out in Aran recently, in Irish, and I’d live in it anytime.

The church works

Whatever works. Gather about you whatever it is that you need to help you on your road. Imagine the scandal of that. Allowing your humanity to shape your life rather than conforming to any ideology. A river, wandering where it has to, a canal doing what it’s told. I have a great sense of ‘ought to’ in my life. Feeling that I should be doing this or should be doing that. That there’s a right way and then there’s my way and that my way is always wrong. And it permeates everything from my approach to my work to my relationships with others. ‘Ought to’ comes from a feeling of ‘not good enough’. And that comes from, well, do you want the address? But our parents suffer from their humanity as much as our children will suffer from theirs. We’re all in this together.

So, whatever works. And, for me right now, it’s church. The only place that I can find where my heart is nurtured, and a pathway shown, is in Christianity. Phuck! Alleluia.

“I love getting up early in the morning, in and around the dawn. It feels exciting”