The healing

The Tommy Tiernan column

I’d like to tell you something that took place, but that is also kind of made up. Two things that happened to me, and without leaning on them too much, I’m going to connect them. They have, perhaps, a kind of silent significance to each other, in that if you try and explain the link between them, you destroy it.

It was the morning of my wedding, and my great friend H leans over the table and says: “C’mon and we’ll go to confession. There’s wisdom in it.”

So in an attempt to feel part of a tradition, as if this was what we were supposed to do, off we went. A church down the road was hearing them, so we bundled along and in, and sat down in the queue and got ready.

I think the idea of it was to start the new marriage with a clean slate. Lay all your foul deeds at the door of the Lord and begin again.

I had a lot of sins to confess, and I was determined not to leave anything out. A once-in-a-lifetime chance to scrub the soul.

A lifetime of sin

I do think about sin, you see, and suffering. You’ve done something wrong and you feel bad about it. No harm. Maybe you’re supposed to feel bad. Maybe you feel bad for a long time. Years. Very well, that’s your penance. You don’t decide when it’s done. You wake up one morning and realise that it’s over. Your penance is at an end.

Other sins might only take a week, or a day, or an hour, depending on the severity. Some might take a lifetime. Others, a few lifetimes. Incarnation after incarnation of suffering, until one day, you’re free.

A fiction? Maybe, but perhaps a good one. We have no choice but to live in a story.

I used to worry about everything being invented, and that there was no objective truth from which we could live, but not any more. We

are creatures of imagination, and so, let us live accordingly. Fish in the sea; birds in the air; people in their thoughts. We are who we keep telling ourselves we are, but we are also born clean, without name, allegiance or creed.

I got into the box and the ceremony began, whereby the source of all life in the universe was going to forgive a human his humanity. And I did it because I believe in mystery.

The priest’s gift

I told the priest of this and that, and he listened. My list of regrets; a roll-call of dishonour. He gave me a few prayers as penance, and out I walked. Underwhelmed. I was hoping for a seismic shift in feeling. I was hoping to be obviously unburdened, but I felt the same way coming out as I had going in. Ordinary. Perhaps the healing power of those ceremonies is gone for me.

Perhaps that was this priest’s gift. It was as if he had no presence.

He was not going to let his personality stand between me and god-knows-what. I may as well have been whispering to the wood.

I knelt down and said the prayers, and thought, “Well, that’s that. Maybe, on some level that I’m not aware of, something has happened.”

Anyhow, I’m up off my knees and looking for H. Time to move on. I’m walking toward the door, and this woman enters. Small and round, every bone in her body wrapped in fat. Mother universe. A bouncy-castle of womanhood. She was all hip. The backs of her calves were hip, the tips of her fingers were hip. Hips either side of her large heart. She looks at me. She’s in the door now, between me and the street.

Maith dom

“Tommy Tiernan,” she says, taking stock of who’s standing suddenly in front of her. She looks at me and smiles kindly. And with great softness, she opened up her arms, and I went forward and got an almighty healing hug off her. She held me tight, there inside the church…

Wasn’t that a wonder? I didn’t feel forgiven or anything. But a strange thing is that the Irish for forgiven is a variation on maith dom. Goodness toward me.

It felt, to me, a miracle of sorts. Something neither priest nor prayer could give me, but I wouldn’t have been in a position to receive it unless I’d gone to the church in the first place.

Now I still labour under most of the sins I’ve committed. I’m still doing time for stuff I’ve done. That woman didn’t relieve me of those things, but there was something in it. Something that, if you tried to explain, you wouldn’t be doing it justice, but you’re compelled to tell the story anyway.