What happened to religion?

On Ritual (part 4) Purification, ordinary divinity and the possibility of religious continuity from Bali to the temples of the deep past

What happened to religion? To the colour, vivacity and the laughing children? What happened for the women and their voices to be pressed to the sidelines to the point of total suppression but for the chaste, restrained and self-effacing nun?

In the churches of my childhood, nuns were only half women. The rest was shadow. I was afraid of them. Their empty eyes and withered hands and bodies that seemed separate from their voices, which rose out of a communal cauldron of regurgitation and echoes. An echolalia. I found myself understanding the language of foxes more than I did theirs.

Some nuns were harsh like a slap. Others silent forever. And the priests the silencers. Not just of nuns but of little girls with questions. My Welsh grandmother, who was a practicing Protestant, told me once that at Church one day, when I was still the size of a cat, I tugged at her sleeve during mass and announced in perfect English (my family jokes that I learned to speak pretty early on and never stopped): “God isn’t here!!”

My divinity, when I was co-ordinated enough to run, was a field of corn and its gold passageways like the stories of labyrinths reigned by friendly beasts. I used to clamber onto every boulder that hung over a view to sing to the audience of rivers, ants and olive trees below.

But what happened to religion? Why did we cast out the groves from our courtyards and why is singing forbidden but for recitation of scripture and hymn?

I don’t know what God is. But I know where she isn’t. And she is not in the suppression of wild things.