For the Birds

There is a note on my desk that reads Keep the Faith. Underneath the words are a love heart that I have coloured in with red marker on what must have been a slow writing day. ‘Keep the faith,’ my old camogie coach used to say at the end of a conversation or a particularly tough training session. Being part of a team working towards a common goal required faith that all our hard work would come good in the end and amount to something more than the individual, something more than ourselves.

It is March 2023 and I am struggling to keep the faith. It’s Monday morning and I’m sitting in a pew in St Patrick’s Church in Dundalk. I have driven an hour across the border from my home in Belfast in order to do paperwork that can only be done down south. Lighting a candle in the church is a poor attempt to make the journey mean something more than a two-hour round trip to fill out a form. I’m in no rush back to my laptop where a Word document is waiting to be transformed into a novel. I am exhausted so I close my eyes – that’s when I hear the birds.

Their twitters echo around me. I look up at the high ceiling, then towards the windows. I can see their silhouettes hovering in the stained glass, backlit by rays of late morning sun. They have made homes for themselves in the rafters of the church, sheltering from the cold. Their shadows make it look like they are outside, but from their chirps I can tell that they are in the upper void of the church, in the space between the glass and the walls that separate them from the world beyond it. They look like dancers flapping around backstage. My breath catches in my chest. I want to write again.

I haven’t wanted to write for a long time. I’ve been working on my second novel for years now, but I don’t have much confidence in the story. Hearing the song of those birds and seeing their shadows behind the stained glass has made me come alive in a way that is hard to explain. They’ve made me believe in the work again.

For quite an impractical person, I have always had a practical relationship with belief. When primary school rumours started to swirl around Santa, I was shocked for a different reason. Surely, everyone knew that it was a game that our parents played along with. Santa Claus existed, I reasoned, because there were presents underneath the tree on Christmas morning. The fact that there wasn’t a fat man – a virtual stranger – trying to squeeze down your chimney made it more magical, not less. The story of St Nicholas was just that: a story.

As a child, I believed in God in the same way that I believed in Santa. The bible was real only because we decided to believe in it. Mass was a space to listen to stories and reflect on what it meant to be human. To have faith was to be involved in the performance of belief. And boy, did I want to be a part of the show.

My First Holy Communion was a big day. I was determined to be God’s favourite. I was chosen to do the Second Reading. In the grainy video footage, you can see me standing behind the boy who was doing the First Reading, mouthing the words along with him. I had learned his lines just in case he needed an understudy. After my communion, I graduated to becoming an altar server. By the time I hit my teenage years, I had joined the youth choir. The X Factor was huge at the time, and the congregation were regularly subjected to the spectacle of me bellowing ‘Here I Am Lord’ into the microphone as if Simon Cowell was sitting in the front pew ready to give me a standing ovation.

I didn’t stop there. To this day, I don’t know whose idea it was to allow me to dance on the altar. I’m not sure if I was asked or if I offered. Nevertheless, while other fifteen and sixteen year olds were underage drinking in fields, I was floating around a tabernacle wearing a leotard and skirt. I will never forget running into my elderly neighbour the week after my liturgical dance at the Easter Vigil Mass and him asking, ‘Was that you, belly dancing in the church?’

My blatant need to perform at Mass seemed at odds with the rest of my personality. Like most writers, I was a quiet child. These days, when talking to other authors, a lot of them have a fear of public speaking which they’ve had to overcome. ‘You seem to be okay with it,’ they observe, and I nod, thankful that they’ve never seen me at Mass.

In my late teens, I slowly began to realise that my theatrics were compensating for something. I have a close friend who grew up in a much more staunchly Catholic household than I did. I had my first taste of vodka in her bedroom, and later stumbled up to the kitchen to say the obligatory rosary before her mother dropped us into a nightclub in town. The older we got, the more debates we began to have about the stickier aspects of the Catholic belief system. I confessed to her that I wasn’t completely sold on the idea of a man in the clouds. The prospect of heaven made me socially anxious, I quipped, only half-joking. In the same conversation, I voiced my secret longing to become a priest.

‘But Fr Nealon!’ she exclaimed. ‘You just said you don’t believe in God!’

I took her point. My fantasies about going into the priesthood were superficial at best – a middle child’s longing for attention. I wanted to be up there on the altar, front and centre, with people listening to me in revered silence.

I wrote my first ever fan letter to a priest when I was nine years old. Fr Paul was new to the parish – a young curate who was warm and funny. I got the same feeling listening to his sermons as I did reading books. They made me feel less afraid of the world around me.

I met Fr Paul again recently at the funeral of a family friend. He asked how the writing was going and we chatted about the work of John McGahern. Talking to him felt like chatting to a headline author at a literary festival. As we spoke, I remembered the part of the funeral ceremony we’d come from where he had reminded the congregation of our faith that our neighbour – a legend of the community – was in heaven.

‘We are a Christian people,’ he said. ‘We believe that his life has changed, not ended.’

I couldn’t tell if I had imagined the strained tone in his voice. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a priest in the landscape of lapsed Catholicism where religion often serves more of a cultural purpose than a spiritual one. People are still getting baptised, confirmed, married and buried by the church, but most of my friends attach more significance to star signs than bible verses.

‘Lost congregation’ is the title of Scottish stained-glass artist Pinkie Maclure’s debut solo exhibition which transformed a gallery space in Glasgow into an abandoned church haunted by the masses who used to worship at its altar. I have the birds behind the stained glass in St Patrick’s Church to thank for introducing me to the work of Pinkie Maclure. Thinking about stained glass was a way of prolonging the feeling I had in the church. I listened to a podcast with Maclure and immediately connected with how she spoke about the creative process. I hoped that her work was as good as it sounded. It was better. It blew the windows of my imagination wide open and let in some much needed fresh air.

My newfound obsession became a craving. I joined Facebook groups and followed stained glass artists on social media. In order to justify the amount of time I was spending reading about stained glass, I decided to make a secondary character in my novel a stained glass artist. I went to a symposium in Trinity College Dublin and attended a poetry workshop in that focused on the work of Evie Hone and Harry Clarke. I even took a tour of Canterbury Cathedral and learned about some of the oldest stained glass in the world. Our guide introduced us to the Salvation and Peace windows, the work of Hungarian stained glass artist Ervin Bossányi who was commissioned to make windows that replaced those destroyed in World War II. I learned about glass restoration and how current stained glass artists can be in conversation with past ones by working with perceived imperfections in the glass centuries later.

One afternoon, I came across a documentary called Holy Frit which followed the making of the largest stained glass window in the world. In the film, an eccentric stained glass artist Narcissus Quagliata is asked about his process and he gives this answer:

‘I can’t answer, ‘What is an artist?’ because it’s too big a question. Everything I did that had a foundation in common sense, I always failed in. But everything I did when I dreamed something intensely, I always got it. It’s like you’re holding it together with nothing rational. It’s pure energy stream … almost like Micky Mouse that goes off the cliff and he falls only when he looks down? It’s kind of like that.’

There’s another word for that type of thing – faith. Following a whisp of an idea, the ghost of potential that exists only in your imagination – paying attention to it, tending to it, hoping it will grow into something that can find its own way in the world, separate from you, into the imagination of someone else.

Having faith also involves something that is common in all kinds of creative expression – the suspension of disbelief. A friend of mine, a piano teacher, once told me that examiners love to use the word ‘convincing’ when describing a particularly excellent performance. It implies that playing a piece of music can inspire belief or doubt, but in what? In the player of the music? In the piece of music itself? Or does it inspire belief in something that transcends what can be measured by marks on an examination sheet?

The older I get, the more I struggle with suspending my disbelief when it comes to the idea of a higher power. If anyone asks, I describe myself as a lapsed Catholic. It feels disingenuous, like I’m trying to be cooler than I am, agreeing with the big kids in school that Santa is a sham instead of asking them if they have considered the possibility that it’s a metaphor for goodwill and risk getting bullied in the playground. By the same token, there was part of me that felt like a conman when talking to Fr Paul about the sign on my desk reminding me to keep the faith. For me, at least, having faith requires the performance of belief – to keep going when the story and characters feel paper thin, waiting for those small miraculous moments to come and connect me to something bigger than myself. I don’t know what it’s called but I know how it feels. It’s the best part of being alive.

I still enjoy a good Mass. These days, I’m struck by having nothing to do for the best part of an hour other than listen to the words from the altar. My phone burns in my pocket, begging for attention. I look around at what other people are wearing, itching to pull a stray hair off the back of someone’s coat. Everyone is wearing their Sunday best because even being part of the congregation makes us part of the performance.

Over the years, I have morphed into one of those people who only go to Mass on occasion, looking around at the regulars for cues to sit, kneel and stand. Some of the responses have changed enough to trip me up and stop me from joining in. “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” has become, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.” I found the additional words so jarring that I had to look up what they meant.

The line comes from the Gospel of Matthew in which a Roman Centurion asks Jesus to heal his paralysed servant. He is a non-Jew, so he understands that Jesus cannot come into his house as it would be ritually impure for a Jew to do so. This gives a whole new meaning to the words, “I am not worthy to receive you.” The army officer is saying that if he invited Jesus into his home, people would have something to say about it. “Only say the word and my servant shall be healed,” he says, believing that the word of God can heal his servant from afar.

This is a million miles away from the perjury I thought I was committing for upwards of thirty years, when the bell rang during the consecration and we knelt down in our pews. Out of all the responses at Mass, this was the one that bothered me the most. Like many Irish people, I have always believed that my tendency towards low self-esteem was compounded by my Catholic upbringing. By giving the response, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” I presumed that I was admitting to being a waste of space. It was a relief to learn that those lines are an affirmation of perhaps the only part of religion that I can’t deny: faith in the seemingly impossible – the power of words to heal.

In the bible story, Jesus is able to cure the Roman centurion’s servant of paralysis by word alone. I experience existential healing on a daily basis when reading a book or listening to a piece of music that has come from someone else’s imagination – a soul that I’ve never met. There are times when I take this for granted until something so undeniably miraculous happens, like hearing birds twitter in a church on a Monday morning and seeing their shadows dance behind stained glass.

It is November 2025, and my publisher has revealed the cover of my second novel Everything that is Beautiful on social media. I upload a photo of the cover to Instagram: a flock of birds scattered across a turquoise background, flying in the direction of radiating light. In the post, I describe my meeting with the birds in St Patrick’s Church. Moments later, I get a message from Pinkie Maclure who tells me that her next show has a sound installation of a swallow twittering with a projection of stained glass flickering, inspired by being in a church where a little boy was having a piano lesson and seeing a swallow flying in circles above him. I close my eyes, and for a moment I can hear them: the boy, the piano, the birds.

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