When my Aunty Toyin died in 2019, I propped open a laptop and searched for YouTube clips of Sister’s Act. I was somewhere in Ojo, a coastal area on the western tip of Lagos with garrulous motor parks and open-air markets. In one clip, Whoopi Goldberg directs a choir of nuns as they give an unusual rendition of Salve Regina. It took me back to when I first saw the movie with my aunt.
As I made to exit YouTube, the thumbnail of another video, an image of a singing woman, caught my eye. Clicking it, I arrived in the nave of an old Norman church, where two choirs, clad in black and separated by an array of votive candles, stand by the sanctuary. The little light stealing into the room falls on the conductor’s blond hair and the marble floor, while the rest of the space teems with shadows, giving the set-up the air of an ancient, secret ritual. With a big Latin cross and lit candelabras bearing witness, the first choir sings: “Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnum misericordiam tuam.”
I sat up. I had not sought out Catholic music since losing my faith years ago.
The choirs, unaccompanied by instruments, sing in alternation. Then there is a plainchant by a solo male tenor, who is up alone in the triforium. It is as though a hundred people are speaking simultaneously, but with one throat, projecting a single message. The stone walls and rounded arches absorb and then disperse the sounds, making the church a kind of third choir. I was reminded of the Gregorian chants that I enjoyed as a boy, which I learned from watching my aunt’s mouth shape the Latin words.
It had been three years since I stopped going to church and became the kind of person whose atheism showed up orthographically. I relished referring to the Abrahamic god with a lowercase, giving him the treatment usually reserved for so-called lesser gods like Sango and Obatala. But that afternoon in 2019, I felt a quiver from watching the YouTube video. This should not move me, I told myself. I willed myself to remember my quarrel with Christianity, with religion.
The composition, a motet set to King David’s penitential prayer in Psalm 51, is known as Miserere. It was composed around 1638 by Gregorio Allegri, an Italian composer, choir director, and priest. Allegri wrote the piece for the famous Sistine Chapel choir, and it was the tradition to perform it during the Holy Week’s Tenebrae services in Rome. High Renaissance composers, like Constanzo Festa, Josquin, Andrea Gabrieli, and Giovanni Gabrieli also set the psalm to music. But Allegri’s is the most well-known, in large part because of a popular performance in 1963 by the Choir of King’s College, a famous Anglican choir. The YouTube clip was by a London-based chamber choir fittingly called Tenebrae Choir.
I took a deep breath when the singing ended. Then I replayed the video.
***
One evening in 2016, I was in my bedroom staring at a number on a phone screen: 185. My hands were curled into fists. The number was my score in the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination, a prerequisite for university admissions. Weeks earlier, I had come out of an exam center and bragged to my mother that “I killed it”, not only because I had studied hard and knew all the answers, but also because I had begged God for success.
I stepped out of the house and saw my mother and siblings sitting on a mat spread on the veranda. Around them, Ikorodu slinked into dusk. They were having dinner, plates of egusi soup and mounds of eba.
I joined them, unsure how to break the news. It had been five years since my graduation from secondary school and I was still not in a university, not for a lack of good exam scores, but because in Nigeria, it also takes some luck. In those five years I had seen my former mates announce all kinds of milestones on Facebook.
“I failed JAMB,” I said.
I had barely ended the sentence before my mother butted in with an optimism common to devout Christians: “Don’t worry. God will give you admission soon.”
I banged on a plate. Yellow egusi spilled onto purple mat.
“God? Which…which God? Prayers don’t work, mummy…God isn’t real.”
All four pairs of eyes present looked at me.
“Gbadebo, how can you say that when you know all God has done for you?”
My mother called my name in full only when I was in trouble.
“But…” I struggled to form the words. “But why didn’t I get a good score even though I prayed and knew all the answers? And I see online that students got wrong results due to a computer error.”
I faltered when I said “even though I prayed”. The truth was that the hold of theism had long grown tenuous in my mind. I had merely worked myself into a lather of faith when the prospect of going another year without university admission stared me in the face. On Sunday mornings, I would tell the house that I was leaving for church but branch off to a street a few yards away to watch neighbourhood boys play soccer barefoot, using worn-out tyres as goal posts. But I was not yet committed to my burgeoning disbelief, afraid of living without the scaffolding of theism, and because I was aware of the ostracism and persecution that atheism invites in a hyper-religious country like Nigeria.
Looking at my mother, whose eyes were now liquid with concern, I realised the folly of my ad hoc faith. I really had not believed there was a creature who could pull cosmic favors on my behalf.
“I have not been a Christian for a long time now,” I said to my mother. “But…but now it’s official.”
I stalked off into the house, letting the front door slam shut behind me.
You lose your faith for many reasons: from sensing as a seven-year-old that all the world’s animals could not possibly fit into Noah’s ark; to learning that flood myths, like in the Epic of Gilgamesh, predate the Bible; to realizing that all the angels conveniently have Jewish names; to seeing how your religion sanctioned slavery and colonialism; to concluding that no self-respecting person would accept a religion whose prophets do not share his race or ethnicity. But sometimes you need more than an intellectual awakening to overcome the fear of living without beliefs with which you have always negotiated the world. Sometimes you need rage.
***
Days after listening to Miserere in 2019, I attended a Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, a simple structure in Alaba with stucco walls painted in a fading brown and yellow. Its Gothic-style windows hinted at the grandeur of old European churches, but its blocky shape and sharp angles announced that it was built to be functional. Inside, sober-faced altar boys wore green vestments, and the tallest of them swung a silver thurible, filling the air with sweet-smelling incense. I was reminded of late-night Benediction services I attended as a boy, where the aroma of burning myrrh and olibanum filled the air.
When the choir sang the opening notes of the Nicene Creed, it felt both strange and familiar, a relative I had not seen in years. I wanted to join in, but wondered if I could since I disbelieved its content. Still, I was moved by the hymn’s sheer beauty. Could I partake just for the rapture it was sure to make me feel? Would it make me a hypocrite? Would my participation be a mockery of Christianity?
Midway into the Credo, I eventually joined in, fumbling some of the words. But soon I discovered a fluency I did not know I still had. A wave of joy washed over me as I sang the hymn which bristled with a melancholy common to Catholic songs. I had always thought this melancholy, the predictability of the Mass, and the sparse drumming and dancing during the liturgy made the Catholic Church an introvert’s paradise. I saw traces of melancholy elsewhere at St. Patrick’s, such as in the fourteen images hanging around the church depicting the Stations of the Cross.
During the Mass, I looked at the large paintings hanging on the chancel walls. There was a painting of the Nativity, with Mary and Joseph looking down protectively on a babe swaddled in white sheets. It did not have the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio’s Nativity nor the crowdedness of Bernardo Cavallino’s, which was painted around 1650, the same year that Allegri became the Sistine Chapel’s choirmaster. Somehow, the Church, through facsimiles, had introduced me to high art. Born to a modest family in Lagos, I could not visit the Santa Maria delle Grazie to see The Last Supper, but a church in Somolu projected a similar image on its altarpiece. The Pieta might have been stowed away in the Vatican City, but a reproduction on the front cover of a little cyan-blue prayer book, with a deceased Jesus and the Virgin Mary who looked like she might be posing for a picture rather than mourning, showed me how Michelangelo, using a single block of Carrara marble, imbued despair with dignity.
It would be much later I learned about the people behind many of the works considered Catholic art. Caravaggio. Vivaldi. Borromini. Gaudí. I glowed with the knowledge that my Catholic heritage puts me within their force field, and I suspected that many of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics are enamored of the Church for how it speaks to their vanity. What the Church provides more than other sects are pleasurable associations with genius. You are partaking of church traditions that the Medici family once partook of, singing the same hymns Raphael once sang, and are heirs to the same sensibilities that made transcendental works like David and Miserere possible. The Catholic mind cannot fathom a church whose history goes back only a few decades or years, to the night Head Pastor had an epiphany.
When I walked out of St. Patrick’s into an Alaba International Market still at rest, I was certain of returning the next Sunday. I longed to once more be associated with something older and grander than myself, to recite prayers weighted with history. I wanted to sing the Credo and pretend that my aunt stood next to me, singing too. I wanted to do these things, even though I felt like a fraud.
***
I like to joke that sloth played a crucial role in my deconversion. Even as a staunch Catholic—when I served at Mass for days on end and religiously studied the Bible—I was loath to attend vigils and pray those long decades of the rosary prescribed at confessionals. I grumbled over the hefty tax on my physical comfort. So, in the first few months of unbelief, I felt relief.
On Sundays, I had more time to read and take long walks in dusty Ikorodu towns. I no longer felt guilty for having a snack a few minutes before Mass or for kissing a girl to whom I was not married. And because I no longer worried that witches and spirits could scuttle my plans, I felt safer. I soon realised just how alike religion and atheism were, that both were essentially about personal safety. When a Christian pays tithes or kneels under the praying hands of his pastor, he wants to be shielded from the unpredictable, from terminal illnesses and car crashes. Likewise, an atheist’s disbelief acts as a screen against things—like predestination and vengeful sprites—which, if real, would be frightful indeed. Spells cannot harm you if you disbelieve their efficacy. Religion protects through faith, atheism through doubt.
In those days, I was drawn to the hellraising atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. I cheered how they cut down religious myths with the scythe of critical thinking and evidence. I would replicate this kind of Bible-bashing polemic as an anonymous user on a Nigerian chatroom site, tirelessly pointing out the follies and contradictions in Christianity and Islam. I often blamed religion for the political docility of Nigerians. And to the theists who cited religion as necessary for morality, I liked to ask how come various animals, without having read the Ten Commandments, knew not to attack their own species.
It was not that I was blind to the good deeds done under the name of religion, but I was convinced that religions were mostly solving problems they had caused, like arsonists with fire extinguishers. At the base of these criticisms were my innumerable bad experiences with religion: the cousin who was duped of millions of naira by a pastor; the sick friend who took concoctions prepared by her imam rather than visit a hospital, resulting in her death; and the young men on the news who killed their girlfriends in the name of money ritual—all avoidable scams and deaths enabled by religious belief.
***
News of my mother’s death found me in my New Jersey apartment this June. I had not seen her in months, since I came to the United States for graduate studies. The ensuing weeks were a blurry picture of sleepless nights, overgrown facial hair, and unwashed utensils. To paraphrase Ocean Vuong, my world collapsed into two moments: when my mother was alive, and when she died.
Days before her passing, I had been reading Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee’s novel where, in what now looks like a bit of macabre foreshadowing, parental loss features prominently. I tried to finish the book, to see if it would console me with what James Baldwin called the communal power of books. But grief made me dyslexic. I had always thought that art—literature, music, theater—was the antidote to the nihilism Nietzsche claimed was the inevitable consequence of the death of God. But when my mother died, art failed to replace God.
Instead, back in Lagos for her funeral, I found comfort in the clichéd words of the officiating priest: “She is with God now”. I found it satisfying when he incensed her casket in the view of a full church. I found myself wishing that the afterlife did exist, and that someday I would see my mother and aunt again.
***
I asked the person sitting beside me to please make way, and walked out of the church. It was a bright Sunday morning in 2022. I now attended St. Patrick’s frequently, still very much a nonbeliever but feeling much less compunction about participating in church activities. But, walking out of St. Patrick’s and recalling the sermon from earlier, I was sure that I would not return.
The priest, in a cream-colored chasuble which made him appear bulkier than he actually was, had preached at length about the importance of faith. If we had “faith even the size of a mustard seed,” he said, we would thrive in our businesses and succeed academically and recover from the most hopeless illnesses. As I thought about my mother, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, the sermon sounded like an unfair accusation, particularly because my mother’s faith was a lot larger than a mustard seed. I never liked how personal suffering usually opened up believers to victim-blaming, how a streak of bad luck is taken as proof that you are not praying and fasting hard enough.
I recalled a phone call with a friend from days earlier. I had asked him for a loan to pay for my mother’s chemo, and he said, in a somewhat condescending tone, that I needed to be more prayerful. It struck me as cruel, particularly because he was aware of my atheism. The implication seemingly was that the cancer cells colonizing my mother’s body were partially a result of my apostasy. I was reminded of the kind of schadenfreude that I had always found revolting about religions—the tendency of the religious ilk to use other people’s suffering as a foil for flaunting their own special connection with God. It is common to hear Christians or Muslims say: “Many people died today, and many are in hospitals. But here I am, alive and well. Thank you, God.”
These thoughts, and the sermon, were the invisible hand pushing me out of St. Patrick’s.
***
One section of the Miserere has become its highlight, inspiring even memes. It is when a solo soprano, soaring above the other voices, hits a high C note. Somewhere on the internet, there is a video skit of a boy treble in the King’s College Choir inhaling from a helium balloon in order to hit the famous high C. In the Tenebrae Choir’s rendition, the daunting task falls to a thin-faced woman, who pulls it off gracefully.
Equally intriguing is the apocryphal story behind the piece. It is said that Pope Clement XIV found the Miserere so moving that he banned it from being transcribed and performed outside the Sistine Chapel, threatening excommunication. And so it was for a long time until a fourteen-year-old Mozart, arriving in Rome during the Holy Week in 1770, heard the piece only twice and transcribed it entirely from memory, a feat which, rather than anger the pope, impressed him enough to award the child prodigy the Order of the Golden Spur, a papal knighthood. It is said that, because of Mozart, the piece reached the Protestant and English musicologist Charles Burney, and then the rest of the world.
It is an intriguing story celebrating genius and derring-do, while alluding to the Promethean theft of the Protestant Reformation. (Mozart could be Martin Luther snatching the Bible from the tight hold of the Church and, translating it into German, making it accessible to das volk.) Except, none of it is true. There is no record of a papal ban. And before Mozart’s trip to Rome or Burney’s publication, the Miserere had already been performed twice in London.
A part of me wished the story was true. I thought of stories in various religions: Prophet Muhammad splitting the moon, Ogun leading the Yoruba gods on their first earthly journey, and Jesus feeding the five thousand. We are drawn to these stories not only because they make reality meaningful, but also because they are, like Mozart’s fabled theft, infinitely more interesting than reality.
***
This spring, I started attending a church in Queens to do some reportage. Long after completing my assignment, I found myself returning for the music and the chance to fraternize with other Nigerians. It is one of the few Catholic churches in New York offering Igbo Mass. I still carried within me memories of charlatan imams, murderous ritualists, and unempathetic Christians. Living in America had also brought me into close contact with certain right-wingers who, hiding behind a perverted version of Christianity, spew all kinds of bigotry. An undercurrent of racism, in fact, runs through the history of the church in Queens: it only started to have a predominant black population after a series of white flights, in the 1950s and 1960s, sent its Irish, German and Italian immigrant congregation scurrying to Long Island suburbs. But I was not thinking about these things. My mind was fixed only on the fact that I would get to hear the church sing the version of Otito Diri Chineke composed by Jude Nnam.
Whenever I visited the church, I made sure to send my mother pictures. She knew I was still an atheist, but my presence in church made her happy. I told her that I thought it was weird that an American flag was hoisted on the sanctuary, and that it evoked associations with the vile strain of Christian nationalism sweeping through the country. But I did not tell her that, during one of my visits, a nun had told me that I, “a Pentecostal”, should not be reporting on a Catholic church. (I did not correct the nun’s impression that I was not one.)
I first came to the church on Easter Sunday, around which time the Miserere would have been sung in the Sistine Chapel centuries ago. But what would have been missing in the Sistine Chapel’s rendition, besides female voices (only men could be choristers in the 1600s), was the high C. The famous note, as I would learn, was not even a part of Allegri’s original score. Instead, it was the result of an error by music scholar W.S Rockstro in the first edition of A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which was published between 1879 and 1890. I listened to a performance of Allegri’s original score, but decided that I preferred the “erroneous” version, with its theatrical high C. It felt truer to me.
The more I thought about the Miserere, the more I related it to my own plight—the question of if I was allowed to be a church-going atheist. I think that the composition—with embellishments accrued over centuries, from the high C to the peaks and width acquired in the eighteenth century—is a repudiation of purism, of fixed identities.
When the church launched into songs during Thanksgiving, I sang along in halting Igbo, the loud drums drowning out the nun’s words in my head. I stood when the church stood, sat when it sat, and clapped when it clapped. I said to myself: This thing, which I do not believe in, this thing both beautiful and problematic, is also mine. E
