Last year I had the opportunity to live a bit of the London
life. I worked in the posh Chelsea area located in South West London, I stayed
in Bounds Green, I jog in Battersea Park and I went to Brixton on the weekends.
The Brixton area hosted the first wave of African-Caribbean, who now form part
of the British-African-Caribbean community. Because of this, there are many
African-Caribbean shops and many colours too. There is also the quirky Brixton
market with an array of restaurants and cafes, and very tasty food, from all
over the world. Even Portuguese food is prepared and sold in the Brixton
market! I also attended a service in a church in Brixton. The minister was a
woman of Nigerian origin and the co-minister was a woman of British origin. The
women’s preach sound very ethical, eloquent and engaging to me. They also
acknowledged my presence by asking my name, by singing a song and with clapping
of hands at the end of the service. I felt very welcomed and I thought I would
be happy to attend these services more often if I lived in Brixton. This also
made the mass in the church close by my house in Portugal look obsolete. I was
raised as a Catholic and played the organ and directed the choir for 17 years
in this church. Then, I grew more and more disappointed with the machoism still
implanted in the Catholic Church, where women cannot become priests, priests
cannot marry, preaches do not make any parallelism between the Bible texts and
the real life etc. Of course, there are also very intellectual and progressive
clerics, who are a pleasure to listen and to read, but unfortunately this is
not the rule and they hardly make to these little country churches in Portugal.
I still go every now and then to the church for any special event but I long
for something closer to the service I once attended at a Brixton church, in
London.
