St Andrew's Church, Westland Row, Dublin
On this day, Saturday
23 August 1980, I made the following entry in my diary:
It was a sunny, warm day. By mid-afternoon I left the meeting feeling very fed up and incapable of continuing on with this way of life. On my way home, by bicycle, I stopped in Westland Row to pray in Saint Andrew's RC Church. I simply went in, genuflected and knelt down and started to pray as I looked towards the tabernacle. I did not stay very long.
The entry is significant because for 7
years prior to that date I had lived as a self-proclaimed atheist. I had stopped religious practice in the Autumn
of 1973. This was a rather unusual step in so far as most people of my
age-group maintained some degree of outward religious practice even if not that
frequent.
There is, perhaps, a germ of personal hope in recounting this personal story because it seems to me that the widely adopted option of disowning belief (or simply declaring ‘I am not religious’) which seems to more or less the norm nowadays among millennials or Gen Z persons may not be sustainable in the very long-run. What I am trying to say here, in plain English is that:
