Queueing in all sorts of places

This column appears in this week's INM Irish regional newspapers.

By Michael Commane
Queueing at a Dublin Bikes’ bay last week while waiting for someone to leave back a bike I had a flash back to other queueing I have done. I have an antipathy about queueing and can never understand why people spend time in queues, or lines, as they call them in the US.

We have gone from queueing for a bike, queueing at an ATM and before that queueing in a pew, waiting for ‘confession’. Not to mention the silly queueing that Irish Rail makes us endure.

So while standing at the Dublin Bikes’ stand I recalled queueing in the nearby Carmelite church in Clarendon Street maybe 50 years ago. My Dad and I had gone there to go to ‘confession’ for Christmas. I can still remember the pews upon pews of people that evening kneeling down and waiting to go to ‘confession’.

That was the norm back then. Large numbers of Catholics in this State did what their priests told them to do. They went to Mass. They went to ‘confession’. They believed that if they lived a particular type of life they would be rewarded with eternal life with God in Heaven.

Of course there were those who muttered under their breaths but it would seem the majority obeyed the rules of Holy Mother Church.

Was it a true personal faith conviction? Was it that people were simply subservient to an authority? Was it that people were afraid – afraid of authority and also afraid of going to Hell?

It is also worth asking how well that faith sat with people and what knowledge or understanding they had of this faith to which they subscribed.

Why was it that so many people simply sheepishly followed church authorities? It seems as if there was no real attempt or interest to have a grown-up understanding of the Christian faith.

We went to ‘confession’. And people still go to ‘confession’. Has no-one ever told us that ‘confession’ is only one aspect of the Sacrament. It is the Sacrament of Reconciliation where we confess our sins. Contrition is the most important part of the Sacrament. In many ways by calling the Sacrament by its incorrect name we have caricatured it – made a bags of it. What’s new?

We begin every Mass by asking God to forgive us our sins. Had the theologians been brave and prophetic enough there could have been a great renaissance of this Sacrament after Vatican II but instead, the hierarchical church has played a significant role in overseeing the demise of the Sacrament.

Right across every aspect of church governance there has been an appalling lack of leadership. Maybe that happens in all walks of life – wherever there are human beings. But the church seems to excel at inefficiency, fear and sycophancy. And when that’s mixed in with authoritarianism and the worst forms of that sycophancy then it spells disaster.

Back at the time of the queueuing for ‘confession’ we were told that if we did not go to Mass on Sunday we were in grave danger of losing eternal life. That was the worst and most idiotic reading of the crassest form of any theology.

I can still remember in secondary school laughing with others at the idea that you could ‘sin’ on a Friday night, go to ‘confession’ on a Saturday and then receive Communion on a Sunday.

I can also remember being told that you could be the greatest sinner of all time and then that moment before you died you asked for forgiveness and then, hey presto, you were with God in Heaven.

Everything to do with faith is nuanced and nothing is simple. It is impossible to talk about the mystery of God in clichés. Faith can never be confined to open and closed solutions.

But back in those ‘dark’ days, people simply did what they were told. The trouble is maybe today we are doing exactly the same. This time round we have just changed the star we are following.

The moral of the story might be that we all need to grow up and start thinking for ourselves. Still, we are herd animals and there is little we can do to change that.

Back in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and even ’90s it was seldom you would see glamorous women and men on bicycles. These days so many cyclists are head turners.

Most of us are slaves to fashion and the mores of the day. Unfortunately.

That’s the way it is.