The Prime of Miss Joan Williams

I was born in Belfast in 1981, the eldest child of what was then called a “mixed marriage” – one parent Protestant, one Catholic. My father had been a Church of Ireland choirboy; my mother educated by nuns who encouraged them to walk around the playground with their arm outstretched so their guardian angel could hold their hand. But by the time they met, in their early twenties in my mother’s home city of Bristol, they had each moved away from the strictures of their respective religious upbringings. They got married in my mother’s parish church, to appease her devoutly Catholic father, but when they moved to Belfast it was an easy decision to stop attending church at all, and to raise their children outside of any faith – my sisters and I were never christened, never baptised.
Mixed marriages, though unusual, were more common than you might think. Not attending church, of any denomination, at all, was far less common. Northern Ireland was a place both defined and ruled by religion – where the swings in the playgrounds of my childhood would be chained up on a Saturday night, so that nobody could use them on the Sabbath. My youngest sister remembers one primary school teacher going round her whole class of nine-year olds asking them which church they went to. Only two said they weren’t churchgoers. The other girl had recently moved from Edinburgh, and the teacher interpreted her answer as meaning she just hadn’t found her new parish church yet. When my sister had no such excuse to offer, simply the fact of never having gone, the teacher was disgusted.
I asked my sister about this incident recently, wondering if it had become distorted or exaggerated in my memory. But she was instantly vehement: I will always remember, she said, just how disgusted she was with me – the way her lip curled up – the look of pure contempt on her face. My sister was so ashamed she didn’t tell our mother, didn’t even tell me or our other sister about it, for months. The homework the teacher set the class that night was to learn the sequence of books of the Old Testament. My sister spent all evening memorising them until she knew them by heart. The next morning the class had to stand up and chant them, each girl sitting down when she stumbled or made a mistake. My sister was the last one standing. She still remembers that too – the feeling of defiance.
It wasn’t shame, or defiance – though there were certainly elements of both – but a sort of curiosity that spurred my own childhood interest in religion. At a basic level, I loved the stories of the Bible. I didn’t distinguish between our illustrated book of Bible stories and the books of Greek and Roman myths that I used to borrow on repeat from the library, or the collections of Irish myths I loved, Cuchulainn and the cattle raids at Cooley, Deirdre of the Sorrows, or Madhur Jaffrey’s Seasons of Splendour, retellings of Hindu legends vividly illustrated by Michael Foreman, which was one of my favourite books for years – blue-skinned baby Krishna touching the raging river with his toe, the demon nursemaid with poison on her nipple... My mother always told us that God was like a mountain – people standing in different places, or at different altitudes, would have an entirely different view, and what they didn’t know was that they were all describing the same thing. Other versions of this story, that I use now with my own children, see God from the perspective of four blindfolded men touching an elephant, or people seeing different colours of a stained-glass lamp…. My mother said we had to remind ourselves of this, if and when anyone told us that they were right, and we were wrong.
My grandma’s minister once told me off for admiring my newly-bobbed hair in the mirror in her hallway – I’d had it cut that afternoon, shorter than I’d ever had it, and was enjoying the way it swished over my shoulders. Vanity, vanity, he said, tutting and shaking his head, and he asked my grandma whether vanity in a woman wasn’t a terrible thing. She was a staunch churchgoer, member of the choir, of the Mothers’ Union, one of the women who took turns to do the flower-arranging, and she agreed with him, in front of us, that it was indeed a terrible sin. I was nine years old. My mother was furious. That, she told us as we left, was one of the reasons why we didn’t go to church.
But in spite of this, or maybe because of it, I was fascinated by churches too – places that felt to me, if not forbidden, then certainly charged. I was an eager-to-please, observant, often painfully sensitive child, but I could be thran too, as the Ulster Scots word has it – stubborn, obstinate, determined. If there was somewhere I wasn’t meant to go, I wanted to know why, and I wanted to go there. I knew from the novels I read that churches were places of sanctuary – once you crossed the threshold, you were safe. That’s why it was so shocking that the villainous Carver shot Lorna Doone at the altar. If I slept over at a friend’s house on a Saturday night, I liked going to church with them in the morning – to Ards First Presbyterian with my friend Laura, to my friend Susan’s North Belfast Methodist church. Once, at a Catholic mass in Carnlough, I followed my friends up to the altar rail to take the Eucharist, and afterwards they were beside themselves with glee – I wasn’t Catholic, I wasn’t even christened, I was definitely going to Hell. I wondered about that for years – how unfair it would be to be punished for a genuine mistake.
But to enter a sanctified space – it’s still something I love to do. To accompany friends to their places of worship – Friday prayers at an Ismaili mosque in Kensington, Saraswati Puja at a Rama Krishna temple in Jaipur, a Quaker meeting; some of the greatest peace I have ever known I found in a cathedral of blue glass in Brasília.
In my teenage years, my interest in Bible stories, and churches, developed into a curiosity with religious philosophy and theology – still an abiding interest to this day. That this flourished, in and despite the so often unforgiving and punitive religious climate I have outlined here, is almost entirely due to my secondary school teacher of religious studies, a woman called Joan Williams.

We often misbehaved in Miss Williams’s lessons. It was the done thing, by secondary school, to moan about how boring compulsory religious education was, to show that you didn’t take it seriously. In RE lessons the boldest among us would sneak up to the clock on the back wall when Miss Williams was busy at the blackboard and wind it forwards, then plead that there was no point starting a new topic as the bell for the end of the lesson was about to ring. One day I had the brainwave of turning the clock back instead, so we could beg for a break on account of how much ground we’d covered, how much of the lesson was still remaining, and so we started to do this too. When the bell went, invariably when she wasn’t expecting it, she took it in good humour, just rolled her eyes at us. We would ask her questions designed to provoke, and she would answer them with wit and good grace. We’d ask what she’d done at the weekend and she’d say she’d been to the Crescent, meaning the Crescent Church, and we’d be in fits of laughter, because to us “the Crescent” was a notorious underage drinking den. She must have known, but she always played along with it.
I opted to take Religious Studies as a GCSE, and even on to A-level, where there were only three of us in the class, with me the only atheist – as I would have described myself then. I didn’t intend to take it for exactly that reason, but Miss Williams came and found me in the sixth form common room one afternoon and said that she’d checked my timetable and A-level RS was fully compatible with my other A-level classes and my free periods, and why didn’t I just do it, she thought I would like it and it would – I remember her mischievous look as she said this – keep the other two on their toes.
My friends, both the non-religious and the religious, were mystified by my interest in religion. Throughout school I won, to the indignation of the more evangelical girls in my year, every RE prize going. I went to Bible camps where, after a day’s bouldering and abseiling, we’d study Bible verses and sing Christian songs, and I’d take pride in the fact that they weren’t going to “convert” me, or convince me that I, that non-churchgoers, were somehow lesser. I’d think that it was a kind of arrogance, to assume that theirs was the only way, and I’d pity them, though I think that I must have envied them, too. I have tried and failed for much of my life, from my teenage years on, to find a religion, a doctrine, that chimes with what I instinctively think and feel, capacious enough to contain, or generous enough to submit to.
In my later teenage years, coming out of pubs like Lavery’s, or music venues like the Empire, I would gladly take on the evangelicals standing with their placards ready to shame you, shouting at you about the wages of sin. For every cherry-picked line of Leviticus with which they’d attempt to condemn you, I could counter with something ridiculous: But what about the clothes they were wearing, undoubtedly woven, contra Leviticus 19:19, of two fabrics? Was that not, according to the Old Testament, as much of a sin as homosexuality? I could quote Jesus right back at them in a triumphant way that was no better, really, than what they were doing, though it felt good at the time.
The gift of the Bible as a repository of great wisdom and yet simultaneously a historiographical document, a flawed and human enterprise, is something for which I will forever be grateful. Miss Williams, devoutly Presbyterian herself, saw the Bible not as something to be unquestioningly obeyed, but something to be intellectually engaged with – even to be challenged. The Scriptures were so often used in a punitive way then, to instil fear, requiring submission, but she taught us that we had to see them, for all the great wisdom they might contain, as human documents, riddled with human hopes and worries, shortcomings, misunderstandings, errors. She told us of the human dramas and philosophical controversies of the First Council of Nicaea; she put into context for us the Gospels – told us to imagine us, now, attempting to write an account of our grandparents’, or even our great-grandparents’ times. She told us that there were other gospels, Mary Magdalene’s, Judas’s, that had been excluded from the canon. I remember the surge of wonder on reading Mary Magdalene’s gospel for the first time – how real it is, the panic and confusion after Jesus dies, the way the others beg her to tell them anything that he might have told her and not them, that might help them; the way Peter disparages her, saying angrily that of course Jesus wouldn’t have entrusted secrets to a woman…
Miss Williams allowed us to express our own ambivalence about Paul, his impatience, his tinge of misogyny. My grandma’s minister, I remember thinking, was definitely cut from Paul’s cloth. Miss Williams held open a door for me that otherwise would have slammed shut – she showed me that there were ways of reconciling questions of faith and intellect, of feminism and religion.
I became very interested in Buddhism as a teenager, after the horror of the sarin nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo underground, which were blamed at the time on “a Buddhist sect”. A Buddhist monk from a monastery in the south of England wrote to the letters page of the Independent, my mother’s daily newspaper of choice, and said that even if the sect was being called, or was calling itself, “Buddhist”, it was not, because – and he set out what Buddhists believed. It was a revelation to me. I wrote to him that evening, at the address provided at the bottom of the letter, and he wrote back, and we corresponded for the best part of the subsequent decade about life, and matters of faith. I discovered the devotional poetry of Rumi too – that great Sufi mystic so often demoted in the West to a poet of just romantic love. I learned that in Islam, you don’t “convert” but “revert”, as if you’re only ever coming home. I loved this. I loved that what matters, in Islam, is niyyah, the sincerity of the heart’s intentions. Miss Williams, for all her own certitude of faith, encouraged my interest in all faiths – encouraged my doubts. The word “education”, as Miss Jean Brodie famously says, comes from the root e from ex, meaning out, and duco, I lead. It should mean, she says, a leading out. A leading out rather than a shutting in – I can imagine no better example of that philosophy in action.

Miss Williams died in the summer of 2019, and although we’d stayed in touch a little, and she’d come to some of my book readings, I never told her, and I regret this often, just how important those Religious Studies classes were to me. Her death notice took a verse from the book of 2 Timothy, 4:7: “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.” In that shabby mobile classroom, always freezing cold or far too stuffy, with its treacherous clock, through dreich and dreary afternoons, at a time and in a place riven with contempt and suspicion and fear and condemnation, she did fight a noble fight – to keep us thinking, independent, to keep all things possible, and true.

This text, 'The Prime of Miss Joan Williams', is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. No part of the Work may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purposes of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. The Work is protected and reserved from text and data mining.