I’d started at the local Poly-as-was, just round the corner from my school. As far as God went, I had two things – a sense of the presence of God, and that the faith was very real. The latter was born of the enthusiasm with which our RE teacher spoke to us about social justice and the passages of the Old Testament and Gospels she had us read on the subject. Injustice cries out to heaven, and hell very much exists.
That was about it, really. Fr John was PP of the parish where my department was, an area of grey pebbledash and supermarkets that sell apples priced not by the pound or kilo, but per piece. He gave me his time – we went for lunch, or just tea. A real person whose Christianity was not some private add-on – when we talked, about people and life and interests, God was part of that life. From Fr John, not school, I first became aware of books that were serious and not fiction. Not that I hadn’t seen or read any, but somehow I hadn’t noticed them. Fr John is thus indirectly responsible for My Religious Opinions, if I were to write a Newman-style history of these. First, he lent me The Stripping of the Altars, and though I had yet to learn the phrase, sentire cum Ecclesia became a new principle. Second, this new interest in Serious Books took me to God’s Own University, whose Catholic community quickly evanglised me with vast quantities of respectable red wine and the Old Testament types of the Assumption. If Fr John hadn’t nursed that little Christian life after it left school, it might well have been washed away in a tide of righteous opinionating.
When I hear religious talking about poverty, the picture that comes to mind every time is of Fr John microwaving the contents of a tin of beans for his dinner. And on the meaning or witness of priestly celibacy (though of course he is in any case a religious) , his comment “If there’s no God, your parents still have each other”.
Fr John is also one of the warmest people I have met. It’s an example I haven’t always borne in mind, and we haven’t seen each other in, um, thirteen years, but he remains a model of Christian kindliness and warmth in manner and in action. Now I write this, I realise how much I have forgotten of our conversations – the impression remains, but the details are lost.