WE’RE fortunate in Ireland, north and south, to have some very fine newspaper columnists; you may not always agree with them, but there are some great writers who articulate arguments interestingly and make us think.

In last Sunday’s Independent, columnist Roslyn Dee pulled me up short when she made a very profound point about visiting her parents’s grave, looking at the marble headstone, when her sister suddenly said: “I have absolutely no sense of them here.”

Instead, she recalled, an hour earlier as she stood at the door of the shop her father worked in, the memories came flooding back. In her mind, he came alive again in a place so central to his life.

How true.

Family graves are important; that’s why I visit the places where my mother and father are buried.

It’s a sobering thought that it will be 50 years next March since my mother, Iris, died so young from cancer.

When I stand at her graveside, I know as the poem says: “Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there,” but even so I feel a lump in my throat and a tear coming, even now.

Even after a half a century, I can still hear her voice, see her in my mind’s eye throwing back her head of black hair in laughter, and the memories that flood back are of her in places where she was very much alive.

The kitchen, where she loved to bake, the living room where we all gathered as family. And church; we were a Christian family, and regular church goers.

Church was central to her life; she was a firm believer.

That was an era when the vast majority of people in Ireland regularly attended their place of worship, and I couldn’t have imagined then that a time would come when not only were churchgoers in the minority, but society is seriously asking what the point of church is at all.

It seems almost fashionable now to knock people of faith, even to mock belief.

A few minutes before she passed this life, my mother’s last words to her cousins who were with her were a strong affirmation of her belief, and such conviction wouldn’t have wavered in the least in the face of today’s doubters.

Successive Census results have shown that church attendance has been declining for years, and when the 2021 Census is published, it’s expected to be at its lowest ever.

That was already the case before Covid struck, and churches have been hit by the pandemic like everyone else.

Although my own church has had services for some time now, I’ve only been a couple of times, even though I was a regular attender before.

I suppose I’ve felt wary of wearing a mask, didn’t feel it was quite the same experience as before, and I’ve been tuning in to services on Facebook or online.

A survey by the Iona Institute carried out in July has suggested that there are many like me.

Although it is a Catholic advocacy group, it’s fair to say the results are probably similar across denominations.

Less than half of the people surveyed who’d been regular Massgoers before the pandemic restrictions have returned to church, and of the 54 per cent who haven’t gone back, a good majority (62 per cent) say the main reason is fear of Covid.

But 19 per cent are saying they watch online or on TV, while six per cent say their faith isn’t as strong.

Worryingly for the church, almost a quarter say they either don’t know if they’ll be back, or say they definitely won’t.

Such are the changed times that the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin has spoken in an interview that “the visibility of faith has for all intents and purposes has vanished” and he referred to a younger generation increasingly lost to faith.

But the Archbishop sees this as a challenge, that a church “tossed in rough waters” should respond to this crisis and become relevant to the issues of today, such as climate change and the housing crisis.

We have not been abandoned by God, he insists ¬– God is to be found in this situation.

All churches have faced crises over the years, and Covid has brought it into focus even more.

Gladys Ganiel, a reader in sociology at Queen’s University, Belfast, has written a report on churches in Ireland during the pandemic, which takes a wide-ranging look at the impact on people of faith.

The report says a survey found that the most stressful experiences for clergy during the pandemic have been around pastoral care, including comforting those bereaved by Covid-19, comforting those bereaved by other causes, conducting funerals, and ‘feeling guilty that I am not doing enough to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic’.

Interviews shed further light on these challenges, the report says. A Catholic priest described conducting funerals during the pandemic as “the hardest thing I’ve done as a priest, by far”; while a Methodist lamented the clinical nature of the restrictions meant, “I’ve buried a dog with more emotion”.

Others described creative responses to the challenges such as people standing outside their homes as small funeral corteges passed; and livestreaming funeral services.

The title of the report is ‘Something other than a building’, and it looks at the understanding of what it means to be a ‘church’.

The report says: “Of course, this is not an entirely new perspective: most clergy who articulated it already held this view prior to the pandemic.

“Some had been trying to communicate this idea to their parishioners or congregants for years.

“But for them, the pandemic was an opportunity for this idea to spread more widely.

“It was a chance for churches to change: to become characterised by deeply engaged laity, serving with enthusiasm outside the ‘four walls’ of their church buildings, including in online spaces.”

In a follow-up article on sluggerotoole.com, Gladys also refers to the words of American Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, who once asserted that the church in the West wasn’t dying, God was killing it.

For Hauerwas, this was because the churches had become so caught up in exerting power that they had neglected their mission of love and service.

Despite all the challenges facing the churches over the years, and perhaps a disillusion in the institutions, the people of Ireland still retain a strong sense of faith. The country is one of the most religious in Europe.

But perhaps in our case it’s the old cliché of too much religion and not enough Christianity.

And just maybe the pandemic should remind us that the real power of God lies in how we treat others outside the walls of the church building.