A Church I No Longer Recognise

4 min read4 days ago

Itis forty-nine years since I left Dalugama, a small, drowsy village ten kilometres north of Colombo. In those days, even Colombo felt tentative — an unambitious town stretching no higher than a handful of buildings, the tallest barely seven storeys, as if the city itself was unsure how much space it was entitled to occupy. Life moved without insistence then. Days were shaped by habit, not hurry.

Dalugama, despite its proximity to the capital, was unmistakably a village. The roads were narrow, some little more than gravel tracks, and traffic was sparse enough to be memorable. People cycled everywhere, though I never recall seeing a woman on a bicycle — one of those unspoken boundaries that passed unquestioned at the time. Places south of Colombo were thought refined, aspirational. Dalugama, by contrast, was considered neither urban nor particularly important. It existed quietly, without ambition.

When I return now, the change unsettles me. The air feels heavier, the roads perpetually choked with dust and impatience. What was once open has closed in on itself. The village of my memory has been absorbed by growth — unplanned, relentless — and the slow rhythms that once defined it have been replaced by congestion and fatigue. Nothing pauses anymore. Everything presses forward.

Dalugama was not always like this. It was a hamlet where familiarity was assumed. People knew one another, or at least recognised each other well enough to exchange a nod. Even boys like me had a ready circle of friends, gathered not by design but by daily coincidence. There were hardly any cars — perhaps ten in the entire village — and movement was modest, unremarkable. Ambition, too, seemed restrained, content to remain unspoken.

I left Dalugama – and Sri Lanka – long before these changes took hold. I was absent for the gradual encroachments: the garish buildings, the ugly hoardings and signboards, the small concessions that, over time, hardened into something unrecognisable. Perhaps that is why the change feels so sudden to me. For those who remained, it must have arrived quietly, almost without notice – one compromise yielding to the next.

My father grew up here. Each day he walked to the Catholic school run by the local church, his life firmly anchored in the routines of the village. I belonged more loosely. I was a homeboy, yes, but also a Colombo boy — educated in private schools, living between two worlds that I kept carefully apart. In the city, I was unmistakably urban; in the village, I knew how to belong. My clothes — bell-bottoms and skinnies — betrayed that quiet duality more honestly than anything I ever said.

It is the church, though, that unsettles me most now. When I left, it was modest and unassuming, almost reluctant to draw attention to itself. Faith then was lived quietly, without spectacle. It allowed space for uncertainty, perhaps even for doubt. Humility was not performed; it was assumed.

The church I encounter today feels transplanted from elsewhere — from another century, another sensibility. Its façade is grand, theatrical, echoing fifteenth-century Italy rather than a village on the outskirts of Colombo. Inside, towering pillars rise beside gold-coloured columns and glass enclosures that gleam with certainty. Nothing here hesitates. Doubt has been carefully engineered out.

This is not a space that invites reflection; it instructs. It overwhelms rather than shelters. Faith is no longer tentative or private — it is declared, confidently and without apology. Where simplicity once suggested humility, excess now signals authority.

That certainty revealed itself most starkly during the Covid-19 crisis. Elsewhere, the pandemic was understood as a medical emergency. In Dalugama, it became a divine test. During restrictions — when gatherings were prohibited — a long lorry was decorated entirely with flowers and fitted with a statue of St Francis de Sales, the church’s patron saint. It was driven slowly through the village while people gathered to pray.

I remember seeing men standing shoulder to shoulder around it, faith overriding law and caution alike. The virus, it seemed, could be negotiated with. Science was optional; belief was not. I could not help wondering how many infections followed that procession, how many lives were quietly lost, how many transmissions were later absorbed into the language of fate.

What troubles me is not faith itself, nor even change. It is certainty — unquestioned, amplified, and reinforced by spectacle. The church, like the village, no longer feels anchored in the life I remember. It has grown louder, more assured, less willing to doubt. Perhaps the Catholicism I once knew has absorbed something of its surroundings — a fondness for gold, ritual, and blind faith — mistaking ornament for devotion.

And perhaps my unease speaks as much about my own distance as it does about Dalugama’s transformation. I left a church that made room for uncertainty. I return to one that has built monuments in its place.