Rise and fall of religion coming in from the side

Acclaimed comedian and writer Tommy Tiernan offers his unique perspective on the world at large in his column by ‘The Badger’.

People often ask me how I feel about religion. Not what I think of it, but how I feel, and I always tell them this little story.

I was on a Laudanum bender with my very good friend The Archbishop of Choom. Laudanum is a heroin-based cough suppressant and my pal was thinking of using it at Mass instead of the wine.

We had studied theatrics together in Belmullet in the early 1980s. Twas just the two of us living in a caravan at the time, translating Ibsen into Old Irish and then putting the plays on in the town. Fair to say we were unloved.

We did a two-man Gaelic version of An Enemy of the People, renamed An t-Asshole, on the back of a truck driving round the parish.

We drove through every estate and down each boithrín within an eight-mile radius of the youth cub. Twas hard going. The roads are bumpy up there and we were probably being driven a bit too fast for anyone to be able to keep up with the story. We fell off a good few times.

He was a star though. Even back then I knew he was destined for greatness, his ability to conjure meaning out of nothing and make everything he said sound believable was truly awe-inspiring. Little did I know that he was destined to the religious life.

Of course he had dilly-dallied with the fairer sex, but in Belmullet the fairer sex is rough enough. Couples often take it in turns to be the fairer sex and tis many the Monday morning you’d see big men a little unsteady on their feet and jumping every time a door opened.

From there he went to France to live in a cave with six Dominican nuns and emerged a year later with a one-man show entitled Christ Almighty, What Was That! which went on to get a special mention in the drama section of the Ploughing Championships.

Such was the depth of his ecclesiastical knowledge and such was the width of his wisdom that it wasn’t long before he came to the attention of the mystical wing of the Catholic Church, men, and women disguised as men, who travel so deep into the bowels of the mind that they drop below dogma and rules and a lot of the time below coherence.

What they needed was a vessel who could travel far under the surface of things and yet emerge understandable. They believed that Milo was their man. He wasn’t up to much so he said he’d give it a lash confiding to me over the phone ‘it’s a gig Tom, it’s a gig’.

We often speak over a phone and if it rings, we take it in turns to answer. He did the seven years training in a fortnight and only spent an hour being a priest before being promoted up the ranks and handed the Archdiocese of Choom which was often thought of by the powers that be of being an incidental parish on the outskirts of Europe where experiments of a theological nature could take place without anybody really knowing, least of all the inhabitants.

They knew well enough though and said nathin, content in that age old Irish tradition of playing dumb in order to be left alone.

Milo took chances with Mass, he used to say it sideways. Music could only be played on animals that were still alive and he made a point of baptising cattle and hedges and attending conceptions.

He blessed petrol, wore transparent plastic trousers and during Lent ate only magic mushrooms and drank only cold Barry’s tea. He was working hard at the coalface of perception.

He spent a year walking backwards, only to end up right where he started. He had a mask made of his own face which he used to wear on himself, sometimes to the back sometimes to the front.

He had his right hand amputated and grafted on to his left wrist and his left hand taken off and put on his right.

A fine enough idea but once he had it done he couldn’t shuffle cards or deal a hand of 25. He’d be looking straight at you, aiming for you and throwing cards left and right onto the floor. And at dinner would often send his fork into his ear and him aiming for his mouth.

Three days of the week he muttered inaudibly to himself in Hebrew, a language he didn’t understand but somehow spoke fluently. Of course the parishioners sometimes sickened of him and used to throw him down a well for a few days when they saw him getting a bit hyper and leave him there til he came back to himself. But most of the time he was cherished.

Anyway there we were the two of us, leaning over the phone, yapping. The laudanum was by now wearing off and we had resorted to poitín to help take the edge off our comedown.

It had been brought to him by the children of the local primary school who had made it themselves as part of a project on rural disobedience. It was tough stuff.

A hint of apple at the front with a jammy aftertaste and the middle bit tasting like fermented Lynx. We were on our fifth glass when he said to me:

I think I need to lie down

I told him he was already lying down and then he said

Well then I need to get up

He stood up and almost immediately collapsed back down again

Well, he said, that didn’t work out quite the way I had it planned

You’d be as well off staying where you are now I told him

I am Chumbawumba he declared struggling up again

And thus proceeded an awful half hour of rising and falling, rising and falling

I haven’t the knees for this, he said

And that’s how I feel about religion, I don’t have the knees for it.