Sockface

It was an unkind remark that gave him this nickname. "Flat-face" would have been more descriptive, for his face looked as though it had been flattened by a road-roller. When we assembled on our first day in Big Boys' School, at around 8 years of age, one of the lads, looking at him, said, "He looks like he has a sock over his face," so we called him "Sockface."

This is not what made him so negative in his outlook, for I am sure he was always a cynic even before he came to Big Boys School. I think he may have originally believed his mother's cant of "My beautiful baby, my beautiful, beautiful boy," until, one day, he looked in the mirror and discovered he was not beautiful at all. If you can't believe what your mother tells you in the fondest moments, what can you believe?

That was the year the New Catechism was introduced. In previous years, my big brothers had to learn their religious doctrine from "The Penny Catechism," a small, dense book of difficult and archaic language. 

Penny Catechism


The New Catechism was a lovely book with A5-sized pages, a nice cover, and simplified, quite modern, language. It had pictures of religious scenes (like the Annunciation, the Stable Birth, the Three Wise Men, the Presentation in the Temple, and so on) throughout. These were all line drawings, so the students were invited to colour the pictures themselves, which made it a lovable book. If you coloured your catechism with coloured pencils, the results were excellent, making in every case a nice delicate painting. If you tried wax crayons or water-colour, the results were a disaster, for the paper was too fine; the wax only stuck in blotches and the water-colour buckled the page.

There was a little problem: the New Catechism cost a Shilling, whereas the old one, while it had gone up from a Penny, was still only Tuppence, or was inherited for free from your older sibling. Finding an extra shilling (equivalent to 12 pence) was quite a burden for the family (for this was a million years before the Celtic Tiger).

We opened our New Catechism at the first page, and Mossy, the teacher, lead us in reading the first question:

"Who made the world?
God made the world."

Then, in the pause that followed, we plainly heard Sockface's whisper at the back of the class:

"Who made God? The world made God."

"Falvey," Mossy said, for he went by surnames and would not know or acknowledge a nickname, "Come up here."

Sockface trod forward and, when bidden, projected one hand after another to receive the lash of a bamboo cane across each palm. 

Dissent was not allowed. We were there to learn our Catechism, not to question it. The questions were all already set out, we had but to learn and accept.

There were some bad boys in the class who thought that Sockface had a point. If we had to ask "Who made the world," and were told that "God made the world," was it not, in fact, logical to ask, "Well, who made God?"

If the answer was "Nobody made God; God always was and always will be," was it not equally logically to ask "If it is possible for God always to exist, is it not equally possible for the world always to have existed ... and if God made the world at some point in time, what was He doing for all of eternity before he made the world."

I had no time for this kind of questioning, but there was a group of ne'er-do-wells who gathered around Sockface in the school yard, cultivating cynicism.

It is interesting to note that Science asks a different question to Religion. Religion asks, "Who made the world?" but Science would prefer to ask "What made the world?" It pursues this enquiry by investigation and experiment, and goes on asking that question to the present day, spending billions and getting ever deeper into the answer, without an end in sight. The answer of religion is simpler: "God made the world - and that's that!"

The man of ancient times, answering his child's enquiry about things, did not attempt to explore the physical causes of mountains, rivers, rocks, soil, trees and plants, he simply relied on magic: "God," he said, "made it all." And then he turned his attention back to the things that mattered: sowing the crops, herding the cattle, fixing the fences, getting ready for the winter.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)