Methodists & Catholics
Catholics have it all. They have pomp & circumstance, cossies and incense, the Pope, the Vatican, tizz and glitz. And they have Guilt. Especially lapsed Catholics. Not that I can define or quantify this guilt with much accuracy, but they all seem to know about it.
Lesser mortals without this vaguely specified baggage carry something around with them but it has no jumbo-size, fluoro-coloured label the way Catholics can label their Guilt.
I was brought up a Methodist. You may laugh but I attended a church which was not only built of cream brick but had loudspeakers from which boomed on Sunday mornings a gramophone record of church bells. The Methodists of my childhood were anti-pomp, they celebrated a sort of 'fifties drabness, and I ran away from it as soon as I was able and had the words to express what I was running away from. Oh, I had guilt too but not Guilt (with a capital `G') I imagine the Catholics are blessed with. My guilt was that if you didn't Believe you'd go to Hell. Not so much life insurance as life-after-death insurance. Grandma would be up in Heaven, beating out those wonderful Wesleyan hymns, in a voice steady and resonant, and with a gusto only the Saved could muster. All around the piano the family would be gathered, smiling their Heavenly smiles. Meanwhile, I would be in Hell, which would not be the barbecue of popular fiction but a sort of tedium, perhaps like our Methodist church on Sunday mornings. But the terrors of Hell (which I suspected but couldn't be sure about) gradually evaporated as I learnt about Faith: no-one was sure but some were surer than others and made a career of spooking the rest of us to add more notches to their guns.
That image of the family around the piano praising their new landlord was flawed: how can they be so jolly and without remorse if I'm down in the basement in a sort of eternal Sunday morning timewarp?
But my Methodist upbringing did leave me with something. And it's taken a long time to work out what it is. While Catholics have their Guilt, Methodists have No Fun. Being frivolous for its own sake when you could be doing something Useful would seem to be higher (or lower) in the Sin Stakes than adultery or stealing or dishonouring your ma and pa. For example, unless you were on a brief and officially sanctioned holiday, doing nothing on any day Monday to Friday inclusive was Fun when you could be doing something Useful. Or blowing the rent money on a shirt so frivolous that you'd only get to wear it to one party (parties are okay ... in moderation). It was okay to buy a book (educative) but not a rock'n'roll record (fun). You never had casual clothes (fun); you wore your old, threadbare work clothes on the weekend (thrift). And drink! That was particularly fun and was particularly singled out for disapproval. But interestingly it seemed to be universally ignored by Methodists (in moderation). Dancing, although threateningly like fun, did not seem to be frowned upon.
This No Fun was not imparted by fear (or terror) but by disappointed sighs and, as a last resort, a spot of cajoling: if we did something for the sheer whim of it, the sky would not open and a booming voice thunder reproach and a Divine hand throw thunderbolts. Instead there would be an ever-so-slightly perceptible air of disappointment from the clouds, that we had let the side down... He knew we could do better if we tried. Or a pious earthly voice would say, "You know you can do better, don't you?" or "You know it's not what I expect, but if you must, well ... (sigh) ... so be it."
Much has been said about the hypocrisy of the Catholic going to Confession, spilling his guts about all the vile and horrible thing's he's done, trotting out, the catharsis achieved and then doing all those nasty things all over again. Methodists were given no such outlet; you had to carry the burden around with you. Not that we ever did anything actually worth confessing, and I'm sure neither did the Catholics, but in our innocent world our little sins loomed large enough in our own minds.
