The church is gone but still the pilgrims come

Wednesday, 30 September 2020

The church no longer stands but the congregation still comes.

OPINION: Last night a man was crying outside my house.

He’d been there the night before, and the night before that; he’s been coming here for so long now the dog’s stopped barking to let me know he’s there.

Sometimes he stays in his car to cry and sometimes he stands at the fence, looking at where the church used to be. Once he knelt on the footpath and put his head in his hands; I know this because I was watching from behind my curtains.

One night I crept through my gate and clumsily asked if he was OK. He didn’t speak English but the language of grief is universal; I stood on the footpath and made a sympathetic noise.

There’s something tragic about the destruction of a place of worship – even for a heathen.

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The church was a place of worship for 72 years before it was knocked down.

Ever since the church came down there's usually someone outside my house. The place where it used to be keeps changing; first it was a pile of rubble and then it was an empty lot.

Now there are two rows of very big houses being built on very small sections and the hymns that used to drift over the fence have been replaced by whatever music the builders play. Today it’s Rage Against The Machine.

On the day it was demolished there was a crowd.

They came, as the faithful do, to stand and watch their holy place destroyed. Being a writer, or a vampire, I hung around to collect their stories of christenings and weddings and funerals to feed on later.

One woman told me she wed her husband in the building, then farewelled him from the same place 30 years later. Another told me her family had attended mass every week, and a bloke on a mobility scooter said his children were all christened there. I put their stories in my pocket for later.

The church has been gone for months but still people stop and look; a few months ago it was an elderly woman.

I heard the workmen talking to her in that peculiar way we speak to the old: Loudly and slowly and meant for others to hear. She’d walked here for a service, she told me, but the church was gone.

“Have they hidden it?” she asked, and I, as subtle as a hammer to the head, told her they had knocked it down.

“That seems a peculiar thing to do with a church,” she said.

A builder asked where she’d walked from, and she named a place more than an hour away, an unlikely story for a little twisted lady with a walker.

We sat her down on the low church wall and asked if she came from a nearby retirement village, but she’d never heard of it.

“I don’t remember where I live any more.”

She could remember her name though and offered it up like it was something she’d made just for me as I folded her walker into the back of my car.

“You are a very kind girl,” she said.

In the car she told me her father was an Italian man, and asked where I went to church.

“I’m a heathen,” I said, as we drove about looking for somewhere she might recognise.

For a while we cruised around the retirement villages and talked about churches she remembered. There was a beautiful one she went to when she was a child but oh, were the services dull for a little girl.

When we found the people looking for her, she gave me a kiss.

“It must be nice living next to the church,” she said, “Even if you are a heathen.”