POEMS IN HOLY WEEK vi. Good Friday - Rejection

This poem tries to address my need to 'go to church' each Good Friday.  As a professed atheist, this intention has been met with incomprehension by those around me - and at times from me too.  When asked, I always say that I am an Anglican Atheist, as I am fairly clear about what it is that I do not believe, and those ideas centre around the faith in which I was raised: Anglicanism and The Church in Wales.
          In some ways the visit to my local church here in the centre of Castelldefels in Catalonia was one of the least satisfactory 'jaunts' that I have made, for reasons the poem makes clear.
          I would be foolish if I tried to deny the importance that Christianity and Anglicanism have had on the way in which I have developed.  The language and stories of the Authorised Version of the bible and the language of The Book of Common Prayer have played and continue to play an important part in my writing and my thought.
          It will be interesting to see if my 'sort of ritual' is continued next year.

Poems in Holy Week

vi.       Good Friday – Rejection

The knowing glances seem to say,

“To own a lack, is to admit to loss.”

It puts me on the back foot, straight away,

as I insist that I am not content

until I’ve stepped inside,

and sat a while, in church.

It’s just today.  A sort of ritual

for me.  And I insist my lack

of faith is strong enough to let

the need, on this one day,

be satisfied without denying

what it is I think I do believe.

The church, which occupies

the central square of our small town

is windowless.  The bays are filled

with giant trompe l’oeil paintings

of the Life of Christ - but difficult

to see in sacred gloom.

The altar was well lit.

And stretched across its length:

a full sized, realistic, loincloth wearing

corpse, whose damaged head was resting

on a pillow fringed with dingy lace.

The stuff of nightmares! 

                                   

                                    Not for those

whose sensibilities are dulled

by other bloody horrors chapel-caged.

But on an atheistic jaunt,

with only half-remembered Anglican

restraint to guide me through

the foreign country of a different faith,

I felt like an intruder on a savagery

I did not understand, and did not want

to visit, even once a year.

I am looking forward to putting all these poems together (when they are complete) and finding out how they read as a sequence.  It may be that I change the order of them, cut the names of the days in the title and reform the sequence in another way.

          Given what I have written so far I am interested to find out what the last two days will produce.  I know it sounds strange for the person who is writing the work to speak like that, but I have no idea whatsoever what form the last two poems will take.

          And that, in itself, is interesting!