Funny lady finds religion

“I have to warn you — I’ve had the flu for the last few days, and my landlord’s selling my house so I have to clean up for an open inspection today. I am high on life.”

You don’t need to hear that last sentence for yourself to know how steeped in sarcasm it is. After all, this is Judith Lucy, a comedian who’s made her 20-year-career out of greeting life’s challenges with a cocked eyebrow and a deeply unimpressed one-liner.

So it comes as something of a shock that Lucy’s latest project, Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey, is a six-part TV series investigating the nature of spiritual and religious belief. On the surface, it all sounds rather earnest.

“I don’t know if people worry that I’ve suddenly found God. It’s really just a topic that — thanks, middle age! — I’m becoming increasingly interested in,” she told the Star Observer.

“Having read a lot of books about spirituality — and that word itself makes me want to puke — I thought, surely there is a way of looking at this stuff without being earnest or wanky or starting to wear a lot of mauve.”

She’s struck the balance perfectly. Thoughtful encounters with nuns, grief counsellors and priests are tempered with hilarious recollections (and re-enactments — yes, that is 43-year-old Lucy dressed in a school uniform to play her teenage self) of her bizarre upbringing and wine-soaked sexual escapades.

“Obviously it’s a pretty personal show, because a) all I ever do is bang on about myself, and b) it’s such an enormous topic, the only way we could really give it any kind of narrative or direction was to keep coming back to me when we were in doubt.”

Her interview with parish priest Gerry Gleeson in episode one proves particularly personal. Lucy makes no attempt to hide her distaste for Catholicism, the religion she was raised in.

“Wild horses would not get me to go back to that religion, but it was a part of my life for 17 years. It’s a bit like a rancid old slipper — it’s comfortable and familiar, but clearly it should be thrown in the skip.”

Her interview with Gleeson plays out like an extended, awkward break-up scene, as Lucy enquires about officially separating herself from the church and Gleeson, clearly wounded, tries to put on a brave face.

“As soon as I started talking to him about the doctrine, I became furious. Despite the fact that Catholic priests don’t have quite the reputation they did when I was growing up, it’s so deeply ingrained in me to treat them with respect.

“If you had said to me when I was 17 that I’d tell a priest I’d had sex with an acrobat, I would never have believed you.”

That encounter aside, Lucy keeps her cool when speaking to the many and varied people she encounters on her spiritual journey.

“Take [US psychic] John Edward. I thought he would creep me out, but I actually found him really lovely, and I think he genuinely believes he talks to dead people.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people I spoke to, even if I thought what they were talking about was crazy, they were still sincere, nice people. I tried not to judge, I guess.”

Even when it came time to drop in on a service with the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, a movement characterised by Bible prophecy, healing and ‘praying in tongues’?

“Obviously I thought that was crazy. One minute they’re singing a normal hymn and the next minute they sound like someone’s said, ‘Sing like a demented Enya now’. But they were the nicest fucking bunch of people.”

So middle age seems to have softened Lucy’s scepticism somewhat — she admitted she regularly practices yoga, and spends episode three trying her hand at New Age therapies in Byron Bay.

“There’s everything from tantric massage to gong therapy to shamanic healing. I also tried rebirthing, which my mum tried at one point. People are meant to remember their own birth, but my mum remembered in graphic detail giving birth to me. She wrote it all down in a letter that was so graphically disturbing that I read it once and threw it in the bin.

“Try to imagine how much more disturbed I was when I found out several years later that I was adopted.”

Perhaps most challenging of all for the verbose comedian was a 10-day silent meditation retreat, although 240 hours of silence didn’t quite have the desired effect.

“When I spoke to the cameras at the end I sounded like a speed freak. I met a woman while I was in there who told me at the end of the 10 days, it would put me off intoxicants of any kind. I thought, you have no idea who you’re talking to.

“About an hour after getting out of there, I was pissed.”

INFO: Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey premieres Wednesday, July 27 at 9.30pm on ABC1.