I’VE lost my faith.
Wait, before you send up a flare for the nearest padre, rabbi or imam, it’s not the big man upstairs I’m missing. No, I’m a fully paid-up member of the God Squad. I had the exorcism, folks, there’s no spirit in this girl except the kindred. Even my moleys are holy.
When I say I’ve lost my faith though, I don’t need a prayer group to get me back on track; I need a media blackout. It seems like each day, with every news bulletin or hashtag, another evil joins our world’s painful litany. And unless you tend towards sociopathy, it’s impossible not to feel somehow guilty in the face of such horror.
Faith is a strange beast. Like trying to experience an elephant by touch, faith is different whichever part you’re feeling. Whether in yourself, your species or your own preferred brand of higher power, faith is unshakeable – until it’s shaken. Only then do you finally find out what it’s made of: mostly hope, happenstance and hairspray. But the bouffant is optional.
Just as it can be misplaced though, faith can, I reckon, be replaced, often with the least likely of inspiration, as I found out recently on a visit to an abandoned institution in Argyll and Bute. The Hinterland installation launched Scotland’s Festival of Architecture with an incredible demonstration of faith.
Okay, technically it was an incredible demonstration of construction, music and projection lighting but, to my mind, its heart was faith. St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, once a hub of spirituality, now empty and decaying, has never lost its place in the country’s collective consciousness.
Fifty years since its keystone was first laid, St Peter’s long ago hung up its cassock, after serving its original purpose as a training college for priests for only thirteen years. Designed by the renowned Glasgow firm, Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, the seminary is famed for its brutalist style and even more brutalist plumbing, leaking as it did both in pipe and population.
Its doors closed to all in the 1980s. Where once there was instruction and theology, now lies only a lesson in ageing. But seemingly even cement bounces when mixed with the right element, and in the case of St Peter’s, that element is NVA public arts group and a team of creative partners, determined to resurrect the seminary into a permanent cultural centre. And Hinterland marked the beginning of the site’s next chapter.
Bussed from Helensburgh, along with a sell-out crowd of fellow ticketholders, I joined the final night of the event on Easter Sunday, to find out what all the fuss was about.
Making our way through the woodlands of the moody Victorian estate, as daylight fell and chatter faded to quiet, not even the drizzling rain or the mud sucking at our wearying shoes could dampen the anticipation.
While the trees seemed to huddle in over our heads and choral music drifted to excited ears, it was easy to imagine the emotion of arriving there with a calling, whatever that calling may be. For this pilgrimage though, the journey wasn’t one of holy orders or even the unholy kind. It was pure choice – and I was already glad I’d made it.
With the glow from those gone before us leading our caravan ever onwards, we followed the trail through the parkland, while volunteer markers waved us in the right direction, a beacon for wide eyes with their own special red light sticks.
Peeking through the tree-line, I caught my first glimpse of the spectacle awaiting us, but it wasn’t until turning that ever-illuminating final bend that the full extent of St Peter’s industrial beauty found my eager retina.
The seminary loomed overhead; its concrete jaw jutting steadfastly into the night, reaching out to the world beyond its own confines. Having never seen the building before, the sight made quite an impression, all imposing heft and stern silhouettes.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected of a venue with such heavenly credentials, but it certainly wasn’t the earthly hulk that bore down upon us. Looking upon geometry of which Euclid would be envious and a layout that screamed Lovecraft, it was hard to picture a world of divine inspiration therein.
That was, until I actually stepped inside. For St Peter’s, inside, contrary to the popularised definition, is more than just a farther away version of outside, unshackled as it is by the confines of roofing and, in certain areas, walling too.
Trying to capture the essence of the seminary with words on paper is akin to trying to capture a wave with a fishing net. But as it’s my job, I guess I’d better try. Rising from the ground as though coughed from the earth itself, the carcass of St Peter’s settles around you like a stranger too close on a train.
Every remaining surface, from the staggered archways to the exposed beams, now plays host to the non-commissioned artwork of the spray paint masters. PLEASURE SCENE daubed in white blocks across a gantry, maniacal faces grinning from glassless window frames, and endless names tagging their owners’ much-felt presence. With candles throwing shadows across waterlogged paving and a soundtrack to the experience provided by the St Salvator’s Chapel Choir, the Hinterland installation brought to St. Peter’s life that had long been served its last rites.
Upstairs, the mood intensified as watchers gathered around the sunken central basin, filled like a makeshift font, as two spectral figures in rubber aprons and balaclavas crept from the sidelines to wade through the water and swing the censer hanging low between them. Lights flitted from beam to beam overhead, choir-song burst the pregnant silence, and every eye focused on the eerie scene unfolding before it.
I might have stood on that solitary spot for mere moments but the effect could be measured only in a daze. Maybe it was the seminary’s soul settling my own, maybe it was the power of a shared experience, or maybe I shouldn’t have touched those mushrooms on the way through the woods. Whatever it was, I left St Peter’s with a renewed sense of wonderment at the knowledge that life, even in decline, will out.
Faith, like ruined buildings, can be restored, I’ve found, with some collective energy and the will to foster something good from what is left behind. And as long as I keep believing in that, then there’s hope for my humanity still.
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