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A Committed Marxist Discovers Jesus Christ

http://www.ccr.org.uk/testimon/marxist.htm


A Committed Marxist Discovers Jesus Christ


Gerald Daly, who is currently the administrator for Allen Hall, the
Westminster diocesan seminary, was for many years an atheist and
committed Marxist. Below he shares his faith story and how Jesus
Christ came to him and transformed his life

Gerald at 25 in his radical years, with his son KieranI grew up in the
50s in the East End of London in a typical Irish family. My mother was
a very devout Catholic and my father practised his faith, but his main
passion was politics. He was a committed trade unionist and a labour
councillor and our house was always full of political talk. I was the
eldest of four boys and my mother, like many at that time, would have
loved me to become a priest, but as I grew older I started questioning
my faith. I found Mass boring and although I went to a Catholic
school, most of my friends weren't Catholic and I saw the whole Mass
thing as an imposition which I would do anything to get out of.

It was the 60s, and as young people we were questioning everything,
politics, religion, morality. We wanted to be free and not bound by
convention. When I was 17 my girlfriend Helen became pregnant, so
instead of carrying on with my education, I had to go out to work. I
would have been quite happy not getting married, but I could see that
our situation was tearing my mother apart, and it was really to please
her that we eventually got married, when I was 19. I found out later,
however, that Helen had wanted to get married all along and was just
pretending that she didn't care, as at that time marriage was
considered very unhip.

When I was 22 I got a place as a mature student at Lampeter university
where I read Philosophy. Here our second daughter was also born. It
was a wonderful three years. The 60s were an exciting time to live in.
We genuinely believed that we were part of an epoch making movement
that would change society for the better and the university was a
hotbed of student radicalism. Any vestiges of the Catholic faith that
I had, dissolved here, both through studying philosophy and because of
the people I met. All the philosophy department, and in fact most of
the social sciences departments in the country at that time were
Marxist dominated. In fact, you couldn't really hold a contrary view
and survive, even if you had wanted to, which I didn't.

It was here that I got involved in the IMG (International Marxist
Group). It was a really cool group to belong to, and had a bit of a
dangerous image, which suited me. There were lots of late nights and
discussions about how we were going to change the world. The IMG was
led by Tariq Ali, who was a very charismatic figure at the time. After
university I got a job in local government, where many of us from the
left had found work. We felt we had a real possibility here of
bringing about the revolution and saw ourselves as vehicles for social
change. To be honest there was no real model we were working for. It
was just a vague dream for a socialist future which we hadn't really
worked through, but there were lots of discussions at the pub and
going on demonstrations and attending Trade Union meetings. We had
also infiltrated the Labour party, and were seeking to control it.

Life continued like this for the next decade or so. Even when Margaret
Thatcher came into power, things didn't really change much. The real
death knell of the left came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
collapse of communism in the soviet bloc, followed by the rise of Tony
Blair and New Labour.

Although we were aware that the Soviet Union was not a perfect role
model for a socialist state, at least it existed and had some of the
essential elements we were fighting for. So when 500 million people
rejected what we held as core beliefs, it was bound to dent our
confidence and there was a massive collapse among the left. I clung on
for a while trying to make sense of what was happening, but it was
very hard. We moved from absolute certainty about the historical
development of society to a condition of confusion.

By this time I was in my late 30's and my three children were growing
up. Although I was an atheist and my wife wasn't a Catholic, she had
taken her marriage vow to bring up the children as Catholics very
seriously, and had sent them to Catholic schools, although obviously
we didn't do much about pushing the faith at home. It was a bit of a
surprise thus, when Kerry, my eldest daughter, started going out with
Andrew, who was a practising Catholic. She even started going to Mass
with him.

It was through this young man that Christ started to come back into
our home, after 20 years, almost without me realising it. Just his
physical presence I think acted as a kind of emotional trigger
bringing up my Catholic past. This came to a head when as a family we
all went on holiday to Greece together and Andrew came with us. One
night as we were sitting by the waterside in a taverna having a meal,
Andrew and I started having a discussion about religious faith. I
can't remember what started it off. I think I just wanted to show off
a bit. He was a young man with quite a simple faith and with my
philosophical training and life experience I had no trouble in
humiliating him and his beliefs.

I put the incident to the back of my mind and thought that was the end
of it. But two days later, I went out on my own to climb a nearby
hill, which had an orthodox monastery on the top, where there was a
kind of shrine to Our Lady. I don't recall praying there, but I did
stop for a while, while a little nun looked on at me. Then I went back
down to the beach and started reading a book I had in my rucksack
about the history of the Balkans.

I suddenly came to a very disturbing part in the book, when it told
about the slaughter of 30,000 Christians by the Turks. The horrible
evil of it struck me. I began to feel very odd and an overwhelming
sense of futility of life rushed over me. It was quite frightening. I
looked back at my own life and the whole meaninglessness of it. What
was the point of it at all I wondered.

The next thing I knew was that I had lost my vision. I don't know how
long it lasted - a few seconds or a few minutes - but I suddenly felt
the presence of Christ

The next thing I knew was that I had lost my vision. I don't know how
long it lasted - a few seconds or a few minutes - but I suddenly felt
the presence of Christ. It was strange but I knew instantly who was
there, who was close to me and making himself known. I didn't see
anything but the Holy Spirit was communicating to me through an inner
sense that I couldn't understand. It was all about love and in a
wordless way love was presented to me as the thing that held the
universe together and this was where the meaning to life lay. I also
knew that the source of this love was Christ.

When I came round I was deeply shocked. I knew that Christ had somehow
come to me, but my head wanted to reject it. I had after all been an
atheist for 20 years and this was the basis of a deeply rooted
intellectual and secular approach to life, which was not easy to just
let go of. I wondered if it had all been an hallucination and whether
I was having some sort of breakdown or if it was stress related. But I
just couldn't get the experience out of my mind. I didn't dare tell
anybody about it, in case they thought I was crazy. Over the next few
months, however, I kept going over and over it in my mind trying to
find a human explanation. I am a very logical, rational person, but in
the end I had to come to the conclusion that what had happened was
real, and that the supernatural did exist, but I wasn't quite sure
what to do about it.

I remember it was some time later, on Christmas morning. I was making
a cup of tea downstairs, when I suddenly had this conviction that I
should go to Mass. I'm sure it was the prompting of the Holy Spirit.
My wife was stunned as she had had no inkling about the interior
religious struggles I'd been going through. I hadn't mentioned it to
anybody as I'd been worried that I would be lampooned the way I had
others.

When I arrived at Mass it was an emotional moment for me. Everything
was so different from how I remembered. The Mass was in English for a
start and I didn't know any of the responses. It was a Nigerian priest
celebrating Mass. I will always remember when he rose to read the
gospel. I couldn't hear a word he was saying, all I heard was running
water, flowing from him and flowing through me. I started crying my
eyes out because I knew I was where I belonged. I knew I was back
home. My wife was very disturbed by it all and thought I had had a
breakdown. In fact we went through some very difficult times because
of it, but in a strange way the sacramental side of my marriage has
become stronger than before. It has been enriched and deepened in a
wholly different way. Kerry eventually got married to Andrew. She now
has two children and has become a very committed Catholic. All in all
I've been very blessed.

I have had my ups and downs over the last 13 years. It's been hard to
put my faith into practice the way I would have liked, particularly at
work. I was a political advisor to councillors in local government and
much of this centres on finding ways to destroy the reputation of your
opponents, as you promote your own candidate. Sometimes I was asked to
do and say things that as a Christian I believed weren't morally
right, but this had become accepted as part of the job, so it was
difficult to know what to do. I tried my best not to compromise myself
but I wasn't entirely successful. I was finding the tension between
what I believed and what I was being asked to do more and more
difficult. Things were building up to a head, where I knew I just
couldn't work in the job anymore but I wasn't sure what I would do.
Then out of the blue I saw a job advertised in the Catholic Herald for
an administrator for Allen Hall, the Westminster diocesan seminary. It
was a huge cut in salary and would badly affect my pension, but the
moment I saw it I knew that this was the job that God wanted for me.

My work here is challenging but in a different way. I have to be very
flexible and turn my hand to anything. I have always been very self-
reliant, believing it was all down to me, but more and more I realise
it is about trusting God, and working with him, because He can do more
than we can possibly imagine or think. Far from life being meaningless
as I was tempted to think all those years ago on that Greek beach,
life has now become for me, one incredible adventure. Thanks be to God.

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