Mr. Paisley's Sunday
By JAMES BOYCE
IF you visit Belfast and find yourself outside one of the prefabricated tabernacles of our more evangelical sects you will hear a curious sound— a wail as of a congregation of converted but dis- consolate banshees still labouring under convic- tion of sin—the sin of their fellow citizens trying to desecrate the Sabbath. For, mind you, the Ulster Sunday is a thing to send the whole wide world into a wonder and a wild surmise. The English Sunday is commonly thought to be a very dull business but believe me, brother, in comparison with what we have here, it is a wanton debauch of unbridled licence. For that day we add a crusading religious fervour to our normal national injunction to the young: 'Find out what wee Willie's doing and tell him to stop—especially on Sunday.' You see, the Lord's Day Observance Society, not content with worshipping God in their own bleak way, want to compel everybody else to the same course of harsh and joyless austerity. They're convinced that you'll go to hell if you behave on Sunday as do 99.99875 per cent of their fellow human beings all the world over on that day. If they're right it's a very thin trickle of 'Hosanna in the Highest' that will re- sound for all eternity through the courts of Heaven—most of it in a strong Ulster accent.
So far they have won out all along the line, and their main victims are the children. They can't go to a cinema on Sunday but can burrow into the smuttier passages of holy writ as they attend church for the third time in twelve hours. They cannot look at paintings in the Ulster Museum but are at liberty to thumb through girlie magazines in the furtive fastnesses of the loo. The playgrounds are closed, for a slide down a helter-skelter can become a Gadarene rush of the infant soul into the nethermost depths of the pit. Swings are locked up lest the wrath of God fall on the curly-beaded five-year-old blasphemer in the romper suit. For the more mature sinner, the outlook is equally dismaying. A Sunday football match would be the abomina- tion of desolation, and the thirsty soul who wants. to slake his parched throat with a half-pint of
shandy is held to be tottering on the brink of the DTs and is reminded by raucous-voiced open- air hot gospellers of his latter end 'where the worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched.'
For myself I think the explanation is pride. The Ulster soul is such a valuable commodity that its least peccadillo is a matter of the utmost moment to the Lord God Almighty. Our religious life is a constant tweak at the beard of the Ancient of Days lest he divert his attention to some lesser breeds without the law—the Ulster law, of course. 'Keep your eye on us, Lord,' we say, 'for we know we are the apple of it!' We'll be the quare feathers in the wings of the angelic host when we get home to heaven. And home to heaven is where we are going to get come hell or high water. The hell, above all, of our own sectarian devising.
It is true that we sell rather short on such paltry virtues as charity and loving kindness, especially today, in the grip as we are of one of our recurrent crises of religious and political imbecility. Just now if you play a round of clock golf at Whitehead on Sunday you'll end up in the brimstone, but if you cut the throat of what is currently called a Pope-head you're booked for a heavenly harp, with presumably a built-in blackjack to use on St Peter if he doesn't toe the Ulster doctrinal line.
I have for some time felt the need for what might be called the Battle Hymn of the Anti- Republic and have ventured to concoct the first verse of it:
Here we stand in ranks unbroken, lambs of God with trotters clenched
'Thou shalt not' our holy slogan, Break the Lord's day you'll get lynched.
Open skulls but close the playgrounds, spill the blood but lock the swings Raise the banner of the bigot, while the Ulster tocsin rings.
Aptly enough, in view of the world press cover- age of Ulster recently achieved by our tiny bedlam of holy goons, it goes to the tune of 'Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken.'
Previous page
