First person: Religion is seeping into the life of novelist Emily Barr
The other day, I ordered an "atheist" T-shirt for my husband, James. He is as scathing about organised religion as only a former Catholic can be: the air rings with words such as "medieval superstitious claptrap" when the subject comes up. Our bookshelves groan under the weight of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. His adult life has been a rebellion against the religion that made him rack his brains for things to confess when he was seven. His current aim is to ride on a bus bearing the atheist advertising campaign - I can imagine him making a special trip to London, hanging around on a corner until one comes along.
Together, we live a happily secular existence. Our wedding was conducted by a registrar in a fort in Cornwall and our three children have not been christened. I once played Mary in the school nativity play but these days I see Christmas as the traditional midwinter festival and have done enough research into the co-opting of existing celebrations by Christianity to justify celebrating it. Similarly, Easter is a spring festival of renewal, rebirth and chocolate, rather than anything more harrowing.
I am, however, always happy to go to church for a special occasion, when we are invited to support friends and family. The special occasions have included weddings, funerals and baptisms. This summer, we added a new event to the list: we went to Wells cathedral to celebrate my mother's ordination.
Last year, for the first time, more women than men were ordained by the Church of England. About 400 women have been ordained so far, and their ranks are swelling by the year. The days when reactionaries scuttled off to Catholicism in protest at the shocking news that women were to climb the pulpit steps - let loose on something more meaty than flower arrangements and coffee mornings - seem a long way behind us. Despite my lack of interest in all matters religious, I was delighted, in 1994, when the General Synod finally agreed on the ordination of women. I remember having a heartfelt argument with a man at a party who kept repeating, "I can't explain, it just isn't right," on the night of the vote.
All the same, I never imagined for a moment that my mother would be joining the ranks of women in dog collars. If I had known, I would have been perplexed in the extreme.
As we sat in the 12th-century cathedral, breathing in the musty smell of damp stone and hymn books, I looked at James and smiled. He grinned back: the whole scenario was so unlikely. The cathedral was packed as 11 people, four of them women, were being ordained and all had brought supporters. The atmosphere was friendly, excited; there was a great sense of occasion. We were welcomed by the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Our children were in the creche, making stained-glass windows from paper, and the rest of the family were sitting on pews, trying not to look like heathens. Many of the people who didn't go up for holy communion during the service belonged to my poor mother.
Then we saw her: my mother, in a cassock and dog collar. She stood in a line with the other ordinands and we watched with amazement and pride as she became a member of the clergy.
Through my childhood, there was little to suggest that one day I would become a vicar's daughter. (The vicar's daughters I knew were, like convent girls, wicked in a very particular way, and I was rather jealous of their status.) I had the standard liberal agnostic upbringing - my mother's journey to the church was a gradual one. As a classical musician and someone with a fondness for grand architecture, she was often to be found in church choirs, generally training them. I remember the children's choir assembling in our sitting room, on Thursdays after school, being coaxed through The King of Love My Shepherd Is and All Things Bright and Beautiful. A wardrobe mistress from the local theatre made us blue and white cassocks and we often earned tubes of Smarties by singing the aforementioned hymns at weddings.
Perhaps I should have realised something was afoot when Mum was the only person in the family who enjoyed watching the Vicar of Dibley. When she and Nigel, my stepfather, moved to Long Ashton, near Bristol, they set up a choir at the church. I took Gabe, my firstborn, along on Christmas Day when he was 15 months old and was surprised that nobody minded when he yelled "Tree!" in delight during a quiet moment (he had finally noticed the 10ft Christmas tree). When Seb, my second son, was born, we were invited to tea at the vicarage so that Mum could show off her new grandson. Then it cranked up a notch. Mum was suddenly doing an MA in Christian spirituality. Then she applied for the vicars' course and spent three years working extremely hard at it. Now she is a very busy deacon in Somerset.
Our children used to say, "Oh look, a castle," when they noticed a church. We lived in France, where the state school system is secular and religion had no more place in their lives than it did in ours. There were no nativity plays for them, though they had a vague idea that Christmas was connected with a particular baby (there was once a Yuletide confusion in the supermarket between Babybel cheeses and the baby Jesus that made me cry with laughter, to the bafflement of all around). Occasionally, we would wander into a church to admire the architecture and they loved putting a euro in the slot and lighting a candle. They knew that God was something you could believe in if you wanted to, but were also certain that they didn't.
When we went to Mum's ordination, two-year-old Lottie called the cathedral "Granny's Castle", and for a while afterwards would point out churches and say, "Granny live there." A few weeks later, we moved back to Britain and settled in Cornwall. In September, the boys started at a new school. It is a wonderful environment where they are outrageously happy. Compared with this one, the village school in France, with its ultra-traditional teaching methods and bare classrooms, looks joyless and Victorian. St Francis is the school in our town that felt right for us. It is also a Church of England school. "At school," Seb said, after his second day in reception, "we have to do this," and he put his hands together in prayer and closed his eyes, looking briefly angelic. "I don't know what it's for."
Gabe joined in. "Yes, we do," he agreed, "and I don't know what it's for, either." Seb, who is four, is now fascinated by the idea of God. "He could be sitting right there," he says, pointing at an empty chair, "because God's invisible!" God, at the moment, is a kind of superheroic imaginary friend (which, arguably, is religion in a nutshell).
Our prejudices about the church have started to melt away as, in spite of everything, it becomes a fixture in our family life. The more I see the way my mother lives, the more respect I have for it. The three-year course she did was gruelling and she got to study New Testament Greek and all sorts of interesting things. She has worked as a chaplain at a children's hospice and supported families through experiences that I, as a parent, shy away from even imagining. She conducts harvest festivals and funerals, runs a choir (as ever) and supports anyone who needs it, without judging them.
She is still my liberal, accepting mother and has not magically developed a set of prejudices. The headteacher of the boys' school is the same. So I began to see that it is possible to have the church as a pillar of your life without being unbearably smug and without being the kind of blinkered evangelist who explains the existence of dinosaur fossils in a biblical 6,000-year-old earth as "God playing a joke on us", which was the desperate suggestion made by an American I once met. It is, it turns out, possible to be within the church and to see much of the Bible as metaphor.
Now the Synod has voted to allow women to train as bishops, and this will be confirmed in February next year. It seems inevitable that the priesthood will soon be dominated by women, and ridiculous that there are still people out there who think this is in any way a bad thing.
And so, while I have been too involved with my three children to be paying attention, my mother has been quietly smashing down centuries of barriers every time she goes to work. She is a woman in a traditionally male profession, showing up the hundreds of years of sexism for what it was. It is impossible to do anything other than celebrate that; impossible not to be fiercely proud of her.
I know I will never believe in God. To me, Christianity will always seem to be a tradition rooted in times when people believed the Earth was flat, the stars pinholes to heaven. But at Christmas I will take the children to church to support my mother. James will probably skulk at home in his atheist T-shirt.
He is still prone to asking Mum, "Are you taking mass, Bridget?" because to him church will always mean Catholicism. And, after the service, the skulking, the plastic babies and 10ft trees, the house will be full of Lego and Doctor Who toys, overexcited children and too much food. It is, essentially, business as usual.
Emily Barr's latest novel, The Sisterhood, is published by Headline Review at £6.99.