For a while now, I’ve found my atheism challenged, in a few fundamental ways, but I’m finding the journey to discovering a spirituality that fits in with my values and which isn’t just a way of reinforcing inequalities and prejudice challenging.
My first challenge came from someone who I still count as a close friend, though I’ve not seen or spoken to her for some years now, not since her mother’s funeral. We shared a love of politics and doing it better, a love of beer and a love of Tolkien. But her world view was a lot more full than mine, in that her world was literally populated by spirits. And even to someone who is committed to decolonisation, it took me a long time to join the dots between my knee-jerk dismissal of the spirits in the forest, the trances of the traditional healers, and the imposition of a uniform (and patriarchal) religious life, by force, by education, by a multitude of subtle or not-so-subtle compulsions.
It was the start of a re-evaluation. I should add that my atheism was hard-won. At the age of five, I played Mary in the Christmas Nativity. Adorably, I’m sure. While we meandered through various churches, alongside my father’s Sikh Gurdwara, what remained constant through it all was my mother’s reassurance that the important thing wasn’t which God you worshipped, the important thing was to believe in God (she recanted when she found the true Truth, but that’s another story).
Nonetheless, by the age of 16 I rejected Christianity, Sikhism and the old-man-in-the-sky version of religion, while coming top of the class in religious education. God was passe, and I was past it. And there was good reason: the distance between the religious lectures and the everyday cruelty exhibited by many of the most religiously zealous teachers that I encountered; the ways in which religion is and has been weaponised against women, whichever faith you want to examine; the obscene wealth of many religious institutions.
Set against this was my love of Blake, of art and song that incorporates religious imagery and iconography, and my ongoing openness to seeing spirituality in the canvas of the sky at night, the rushing of a waterfall, the smile of a beloved child.
