I never saw my father pray or heard him mention God. On the rare occasions he talked about religion, it was to express his amusement about the church-going public. He wasn’t hostile towards religion. Instead, his predominant attitude was benign condescension: Going to church was something the little people did.
When I was a teenager, he bought an abandoned church in County Cork in Ireland. This was in the 1990s, before anyone thought of Ireland as an economic success story. The church was half a kilometer outside a remote fishing village and had previously been owned by an eccentric Englishman. I still don’t know my father bought it as an investment, if he saw himself spending part of his retirement there, or if it was something else. We went there in the summer. It turned out to be a dump. There was a water tank full of algae, serviced by a broken wind wheel outside the church. The toilet didn’t flush. It was damp and it smelled. The extensive grounds were overgrown with blackberry bushes.
One of my sisters had come along with her new husband. She refused to stay in the church and instead rented a room in the village. The village consisted of a single street with a few dozen houses, half of which appeared to be pubs. They had signs next to their doors saying no-one under the age of 18 was allowed, but nobody seemed to mind when I ignored them and entered. In the evenings, the patrons took turns singing old songs.
I spent days helping my father clean the inside and the outside of the church. It didn’t make much of a difference. We tried to fix the wind wheel and got it to pump water. We stripped the moldy wallpaper off the walls and filled several large trash bags with it. We never got the toilet or the hot water to work properly.
Since there was no place to cook food, we relied on self-heating meals. I don’t remember what they tasted like, but I remember my sister’s horrified reaction to them.
We came back the subsequent summer and stayed a few days. I think it rained a lot. After that, my father must’ve sold the church, because we never returned. I think he must’ve lost money on it: My sister recently told me that she thought my father made some terrible investments and she specifically mentioned the church.
Nehaveigur 