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‘Spirituality Begins Where Religion Ends’ was published in a book called Soul Searching, edited by Kieran McKeown and Hugh Arthurs (Columbia Press, 1997). Ithink my first awareness of spirituality came from my mother. She was a simple, gentle woman who was herself genuinely spiritual without even being consciously aware of it. She was Church of Ireland simply because of her upbringing but had no prejudice whatsoever . I remember, as an example of her simplicity, that one day I found her reading a book on the Blessed Virgin and I asked: ‘Why don’t you become a Catholic?’ ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said, ‘but I wouldn’t like to offend Mr Collins.’ He was her local vicar at the time. All through my childhood, she read medical books. Perhaps she dreamed that some day she might study medicine but she was before her time for choosing a career, especially after marriage, and my father was a traditionalist and could never have imagined a wife with other interests than him and his children. My mother and father were married in the Church of Ireland, not because my mother wanted it, but because of his insistence. He was a complex man and many of his actions were in the service of his rebellion against his family. He was afterwards reconciled with the Catholic Church by his brother, who was a priest. He refused to sign the Ne temore decree and decided that his sons would be raised as Catholics and the girls as Protestants. So on Sundays my father, my brother and I would head off to mass with my father while my sister and mother went to the local Church of Ireland. This seemed clear enough until one day, after attending mass for several years, I was glancing dreamily around the Church and, lo and behold, I became aware that there were women and girls there! Until that day I had assumed that all men were Catholics and all women were 33. ‘Spirituality Begins Where Religion Ends’ 457 Protestants. I was undoubtedly a rather dreamy child but this did nothing to relieve my confusion of identity. I was born at 12:30 midnight on 18 March 1929, half an hour late for St Patrick’s Day, and so missed being called Patrick. I would have liked to be called Patrick but instead I was christened William Ivory Browne. The name William Ivory sounds innocent enough, but, although I didn’t realize it at the time, this was the beginning of my confused identity, for this was the name of the Cromwellian soldier who was given the lands of the Brownes at Mulrankin when these were confiscated after Cromwell crushed the rebellion. William Ivory must have been one of the most detested men in south County Wexford at that time and of course the hatred of him would have lived on in folk memory in that part of Wexford right down to my father’s time. The choice of my name was part of my father’s life-long rebellion against his conservative Catholic, Irish Republican family, as was partly his reason for marrying a Protestant. I have no doubt he loved my mother but undoubtedly his unconscious motivation in marrying her was part of that protest. Although he did this, in 1922 it did not alter his underlying Catholic conditioning, which was revealed in his rejection of all my mother’s relatives. As a child I regularly heard him say, ‘I’m afraid Ivor was a mistake. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to rear him.’ Now, of course, I understand how my birth must have intensified his anxiety about providing for his family, for he was beyond middle age when I was born. His form of family planning had been to sleep in a shed in the garden until the night he ended up in my mother’s bed in the house and I was conceived. Not having wanted a third child, he identified me with the Protestant side of the family and always referred to me as a Fitzmaurice (my mother’s maiden name). In light of this, I came, eventually, to understand the personal significance of ‘William Ivory’ and that his choosing the name of the hated Cromwellian was clearly no accident. My first experience of Holy Communion was a spiritual awakening for me. I recall the strong feeling, as the host melted in my mouth, that Jesus was inside me. Of course...

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