A tuning fork for the soul

THE mystery of religion is difficult to resist, even for an atheist.

Alain de Botton

WHAT happened a decade ago? A veneration of ... what? Mystery. A veering towards it like an ocean liner subtly altering course for a new destination in the great ocean of life. Yet the destination's unknown.

Once I worked at Triple J, read Rolling Stone, wore black polo necks; God completely absent from that world except in the lyrics of Nick Cave. One of those pitbull atheists, a sneerer a la Dawkins. Yet occasionally I'd stumble across a church service and just ... sit; this supreme dagginess usually in some foreign place where none of the aberrant behaviour would be reported back. There was something calming about these illicit experiences. A leak through the veneer of aspirant coolness; a gentle drip, drip, through the restless, anxious, often bleakly alone 20s. I felt "righted" by these assignations, balmed.

London. Aged 30. Life greedy, busy, grasping. The chap and I in a bedsit on Fleet Street. Gruelling night shifts. He sensed I needed something else - an anchor - for I'd always gulped the tonic of the land and we had none in our little patch of London, barely a tree. One day he walked me to St Bride's (known as "the writers' church" because of its Fleet Street location). Soon, I found myself regularly slipping into its Sunday Evensong service; brought down into stillness by a spiritual enveloping from a service mostly sung. Those evenings were clean, the shining hours.

I don't go to church anymore. At times say no, it's ridiculous, I'm with that gentle atheist Alain de Botton on this one; tipping a hat to the graces within organised religion but not sucked in by it. I'll never be with Dawkins, thumping that believers are deluded, stupid; I've too much respect for the mysterious in life, can't turn my back on wonder. And then, sometimes, a little heart-tug. At night, standing in a room filled with the sleep of my kids, just ... breathing them in. A great warmth flooding through me, an enormous, heart-swelling gratitude, and I'm closing my eyes in unstoppable thanks. And again, in the wild places, where the silence hums - Antarctica's ice desert, central Australia's sand desert, under a full butter moon - again, yes.

Sometimes I feel silted up by the great rambunctiousness of living; grubbied, depleted. Need a tuning fork back into calm. The ocean liner on its unknown path is veering towards those most shining qualities of religious practice: generosity, compassion, quiet. Perhaps that's just a process of ageing, becoming a parent, stepping into the world. I gravitate to those artists who seem spirit-filled and questing, whether they dwell within a faith or not. Marilynne Robinson, Nick Cave, Michael Ondaatje, Les Murray, Philip Larkin. Those who declare seem brazen, courageous; I admire that. Wish I had their clarity.

What I do know: that religion's a miracle of survival. That places of potent spirituality do not belong entirely to Earth and there's the wonder of that. The sites that concentrate your being in some way, if you're still and quiet within them, that soften your presence into something ceremonial and inclusive; some echo of a ritual embracing you. The tugging, the faint whisper of a tugging ...

The mystery's impenetrable. Yet still we try, nibbling away at its immensity with our religions and our science. Always attempting to harness, explain, exploit. I'm not sure I believe, but want to - need to - at times. I'm an onlooker. Not in antagonism or disdain. My spirituality is private, bound by no institution, carved from years of bitsy church-going and from the land and from giving birth, carved from the shock of kindness I see again and again in people and am deeply moved by. These attacks of Dawkins and his ilk feel like a violation in some way, but I can't explain why. Because my head's telling me they're right, it's true. Yet, yet ...

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