The writer, Cassandra Clare, notes that we are all pieces of what we remember. My memories of growing up are tinged with all those loosening fragments swirling around me, writes Ann Rennie.
Family stories are whispered or celebrated, characters magnified or diminished, episodes amplified or hushed up, habits confirmed, rumours denied, the jigsaw pieces forever bound by the strange alchemy of blood and birth.
I have the inestimable blessing of happy memories to light my later years, although my siblings keep accusing me of being vague. We tell our stories in seven different ways with a variety of rhetorical flourish. Such narrative embroidery is part of our family inheritance, a bit of blarney to brighten the telling.
And there are later surprising admissions. Only recently, my brother confessed that my silver Glomesh purse, a 21st birthday present, as was the style in the late 1970s, was frequently raided by my three younger siblings for tuckshop treats.
I had no idea of this purloining as I diligently undertook my first proper job in the public service. Now, I am simply glad that my unknown largesse may have involved a sugary jam donut or a bag of mixed lollies on the way home for a sweet-toothed sibling.
I had the great gift of being baptised into the faith as a mewling infant in the church of Our Lady of the Angels in Nuneaton, Warwickshire. A couple of years ago I made a pilgrimage to this church.
Stained-glass window of St Thomas More and the martyrs, Our Lady of the Angels Church, Nuneaton. Image: Ann Rennie.
I walked around the marble baptismal font and prayed for my parents, their lives and their belief. My tears were ones of joy and gratitude. The church itself is smallish, but it has the most beautiful stained-glass windows, especially a recently installed one of St Thomas More and the 40 English and Welsh martyrs.
A detail from another window now sits on my desk at home as a reminder of the church itself and why I am here. It is a quote from St Teresa of Avila: I will spend my heaven doing good upon Earth. It has become something of a talisman, prompting me to do my best, to find grace and goodness in each new day.
My maternal grandmother’s faith echoes through my life. Greta, pert and pious, loved the fact that she lived across the road from Raheen where the Archbishop of Melbourne resided in the days before it became the celebrated home of one of the richest men in Australia.
At the end of her street stood the Carmelite Monastery. In those days, shards of jagged glass erupted from the top of the external walls. It gave me the shivers as I hurried past, wondering whether they were to keep the sisters enclosed or intruders out. These days, there is no glass, and something wonderful and calm and nearer to God happens in this cloistered patch of holy land in the suburbs.
When I stayed overnight, we would recite the rosary, the perfect enunciation of the first few Hail Marys gradually slipping away from the “blessed are thee amongst women” to what Malachy McCourt notes as “a monk swimming” during the fifth and final decade.
In the second bedroom, I would settle under a giant eiderdown quilt, exhausted by devotion. A large picture of the Sacred Heart hung above my head, gentle Jesus watching me, me not looking at him. My grandmother would come in to kiss me goodnight and we’d go through the God Bless litany, something I do to this day.
Then I’d mumble into my pillow Now I lay me down to sleep really praying that I would not die before I woke. I had things to do – playing netball, singing in the choir, helping with my little brother, dawdling home with friends.
Our family life was run by a roster system that kept things manageable. We knew our jobs and when it was our turn to clear the table, fold the washing or do the vacuuming. Scout Finch who narrates To Kill a Mockingbird speaks of the routine contentment of growing up in Montgomery, Alabama.
My childhood, too, was full of routine contentment growing up in Box Hill, a blessed ordinariness of small joys and the occasional joustings of large family life.
I used to love attending Sunday Mass at Sacred Heart in Kew when I stayed with my grandmother. When you gazed up into the dome, heavenly clouds and the Risen Lord would catch your eye, and the immediacy of the Mass disappeared into celestial cotton wool.
I loved the martial air of We Stand for God and would sing it out loudly, defiantly, tribally. In those days of large raggle-taggle Catholic families taking up the whole pew, such as we did at St Francis Xavier in Box Hill, there would be occasional sniggering and rolled eyes and secret signs to meet-up as soon as Mass was over. Later, I would sing at the folk masses, happy to show off a bit as I warbled songs by Ray Repp or the Medical Missionary Sisters.
My grandmother instructed me in the miscellany of devotion. Fuchsia flowers, purply pink and pendulous, were known as Our Lady’s earrings; mantillas, black and white, were kept in the top drawer with the best handkerchiefs.
Sunday Best was for Mass, where she would meet her bridge and bowling friends, the garrulity of grandmothers. She saved stamps for the Jesuit missions and prayed for babies in Limbo.
Sometimes after Mass we would do a quick trip around the Stations of the Cross before setting home to her other Sunday ritual, World of Sport, where she took a shine to the race-caller Bill Collins and rued her small losses on the horses. Chops, baked potatoes and lemon sago pudding were on the menu for lunch. Grace was said with gusto.
My grandmother made frequent novenas – nine days of special prayers for a special purpose. St Jude was a pin-up saint, the hope of the hopeless. St Anthony was regularly called on to find lost things. St Christopher was prayed to before long car trips.
The saints in her household were as real as friends. These were no plaster-cast effigies but saintly interventionists who helped shape her day. She talked to them. That the saints couldn’t talk back to her may well have fitted her agenda as she went about living a life full of faith.
Greta loved listening to talkback radio in the days when Norman Banks was the doyen. This reminds me of the recent death of 3AW radio fixture, Philip Brady, a stalwart of Sacred Heart, whose night-time show with Bruce Mansfield provided comfort and camaraderie for those who could not sleep, shift workers, the lonely, the lost, my mother, Barbara, from Mornington, a frequent caller.
Some may call this the graveyard shift, but I like to think that their friendly voices provided a chirpy constancy for their audience. There was a holiness happening over the airwaves, the gift of companionship and inclusion, for those who might have felt that the world did not hear them.
The iconography of devotion decorated Greta’s home; crucifixes, a statue of the Infant of Prague, scapulars, medals, holy pictures, the framed print of Feruzzi’s Madonnina, Mass books. Most beautiful was a large silver figurine of the Madonna and Child. I have it now, sitting atop her escritoire in my lounge room. I will pass it on to my only child, with a prayer for her life and the life of children to come.
Our Lady of the Angels Church, Nuneaton. Image: Ann Rennie.
I am looking back over half a century to those formative years where attitudes and behaviours are irradicably imprinted. A certain seam was sown into my soul as I prayed in the school chapel, learned my spelling lists and capitals and river systems and breathed in a Catholic cosmology as part of my growing identity. This is how I came to belong.
Today, the Church has changed, as it must. Limbo is certainly off the list. Cultural practices drop off and new ones take their place. In this pervasively secular age, believing is not what it was half a century ago. A cynicism about institutions has dismantled what has been hegemonic for centuries. Crimes and corruption have been exposed and trust lost.
However, we must continue to look for the sacred in the secular, alert to the buds of faith around us, giving us spiritual ballast when the social current is turbulent.
My six siblings have taken on the many good lessons of our childhood about kindness and sharing and the handing down of toys, clothes and books, the looking out for those who did not share our life chances.
They may not go to church as they once did, but their hearts are compassionate, open, and non-judgmental. They know how to love their neighbour with charity and service and good humour.
Pope Francis reminds us that all human beings are our fellow travellers, regardless of creed or lack of one, and that rather than living in an era of change, we are living in a change of era. We must accept that change while holding fast to our many rich Catholic traditions.
There will be new ways of belonging to the faith in the families of future generations. We do not want to be mired in the way we were, but encouraged in the way we could be; a new Church for a new era, pulsing with the breath of the Spirit, renewing and energising us as we take our story forward into history.
