Not For The Faint Hearted

In the Catholic school I attended, we were urged, when faced with any kind of trial or difficulty, to ‘offer it up’. As I look back on this, I can see that urging us to ‘offer things up’ was a convenient way for the nuns to avoid having to engage with whatever it was that a child might be going through and to do something about it. But it was also part of their spiritual ethos. The idea was that you effectively sublimated whatever you were going through into the pain or ordeal that someone else was facing, or that whole groups were facing, persecuted Catholics suffering under Communist regimes figuring most prominently in this category. To be seen to ‘offer things up’ was deemed to be a sign of personal holiness. It was a noble idea, but I’m not sure how effective it was, or whether it was really something God wanted of Catholic 9 year olds.

That being said, the worst remedies can often contain a kernel of medicinal value, if not for the person on the receiving end of them, then for those administering them. The nuns were primarily in the business of saving our souls, rather than educating us to think and to take responsibility for ourselves. We were all destined for marriage and the home hearth in any case, unless we were going to become nuns, of course.

Needless to say, I gave up offering things up the minute the school gates closed behind me for the last time. But I am beginning to see that, looked at in a different way, the idea has some merit. It’s possible to engage with the ills of the world without being sucked into them emotionally with all the inevitable effects that brings in its train; depression, addiction, a generally nihilistic approach to life, to name only a few. So the exercise, I can’t help thinking, is worth it. It pins the reality of a situation onto the noticeboard of the real. In other words, it stops us looking the other way and either disappearing into a holy fog (as I fear the nuns may have been doing) or slipping lazily into a mindset that then becomes part of the problem.

One of the greatest evils at work in the world at the moment is coming about in part at least as a result of this second approach. I’m talking about the whole Trump, far right, Q-Anon saga that has been playing out in the West now for almost ten years. Even the most level headed are in danger of slipping into this mindset unless we can act proactively together to stem the tide of destruction that will surely follow the dismantling of government and democracy as we know it if Donald Trump is returned for a second term as President of the United States. This is not mere conjecture on my part. He has already announced his intentions from a Washington court room. So how can well-meaning liberals who don’t engage with US politics very much make a difference?

This is where the ‘offering up’ comes in. There is a way of turning things around in our lives that functions on a completely different level to the pragmatic and logical. It begins, I think, with turning the downs (the ups too, of course) of our lives into positive energy by engaging them as a kind of force for resistance in the face of perceived evil. It is an action of the will, a refusal to give in to whatever is making life particularly difficult right now; be it a relationship, an illness, a state of mind, exhaustion brought on by over-work, or by trying to resist alcohol or drugs, or by despair itself. We convert all these states of mind into something solid by refashioning them into resistance to the evil that is swirling around in the political stratosphere and inside the heads of some of the most powerful and influential people on earth. The idea that freedom and democracy are incompatible, that those who will ultimately control all of our lives will be either a powerful individual, or a faceless nameless entity, a kind of ghost built on the power of bitcoin and the dark web, is given some kind of credence and respectability by people like Lord William Rees-Mogg (father of the British MP) who part edited a book called The Sovereign Individual – Mastering the Transition to the Information Age. We should all be reading it with a view to understanding what it is we are up against, so that we can confront it from within.  

We do this by confronting lies with a greater Truth, a truth we have known by another name, perhaps, the name of Love itself. So we are not alone in this work. This is also where we part company with the ‘comforts of religion’, if ‘comforts’ is what they are. It is where we quite literally ‘put on the whole armour of God’ (Eph. 6:10) in consecrating our particular trials, great and small, into a greater concerted will to face down lies and call out plain evil. We do this together, as a body. The other name for it is spiritual warfare. It is not for the faint-hearted.

Compassion

Now here’s something I find hard to figure out. How does love actually work, in the ordinary course of life? Is it something that operates regardless of how you feel, or even act? Or does it require maintenance?

Take, for example, a very mundane situation. You have a friend who’s not really a friend but just someone who is in some way enmeshed in your life. The relationship, if you can call it that, seems to come from nowhere. You have no genuine ties to this person, no common story, or only a very thin one, no shared roots. There may or may not be familial ties but these do not bind you to the person, neither do they sustain you, or the person, in your efforts to be good to one another. You could give up on it, but you don’t. Neither of you does.

You think about duty, the demands of your religion. The terrible word ‘ought’ creeps in and starts to dominate the situation. Perhaps this is what keeps you going, but duty or some kind of filial obligation, perhaps, is not going to carry you through to the next moment of having to do something, or be someone, for this person. At the same time, you don’t want to give up on them. Something compels you to keep going with this act of kindness, whatever it consists of, to go on with the acceptance of this responsibility.

To be responsible for someone is to be answerable for them, rather than to them. This being the case, it helps to know to whom you are answerable and why. I think this is where your religion can be helpful. Most religions do not depend on what a person feels in regard to someone they are responsible for. What is required is the action and occasionally, when it is given, the ability to be open to the possibility of compassion for the one you are helping or serving in some way. Most religions insist that we never block compassion, especially when that compassion impacts how we end up feeling about the person in question. But feelings in themselves are pretty much irrelevant.

Compassion is not to be had on tap. It does not respond to the pressing of a button, as if it was the cappuccino option on a coffee machine. It is more like a hidden spring of water that surfaces when we’re not expecting it. So the feelings that accompany compassion have to do with seeing the person as they truly are, in all the vulnerability of their humanity, regardless of whether or not they want you to see them in this way, which they probably don’t.

Knowing this, means that the subject must be handled with great gentleness, even if they themselves are anything but gentle towards us. It means being gracious to the ungracious and the ungrateful (or seemingly ungrateful), to the irritable of temper, to the sullen and taciturn. It means passing over the snide or cynical remark made in passing (a way of covering emotions they are unaccustomed to and don’t know how to deal with) but hearing them enough for them to register as having been heard. In short, it means drawing on the reserves of grace at our disposal.

For Christians, grace is something we return to continually, in the way a young animal returns to its mother for nourishment. Where I live, we are surrounded by Spring lambs who are doing this all day, in the face of unseasonal rain and wind. They are exposed to these elements despite the closeness of their mothers and the nourishment they receive from her. I think the same is true for all of us when we are faced with emotional demands and commitments that can be just too much at any given moment. We draw sustenance from that hidden inner spring which somehow or other gets replenished as and when needed.

None of this has any bearing on what we feel, objectively speaking, and this is a relief. As long as negative feelings are left alone, they will ultimately wither, or at least diminish to manageable proportions for as long as the compassion is needed. They will no doubt surface later, but this is OK. The main thing is not to dig them over like well-rotted manure so that they start to feed our actions and attitudes in regard to the person in need of our compassion, and of our practical help.

The surprising thing about all this is that treated in the right way, the stuff that we would normally turn over and over, if left alone, starts to reveal itself in a quite different light. The grace factor merges into it, so that the one eventually becomes indistinguishable from the other. The rotten stuff becomes the stuff of grace, strengthening the bonds of affection that we perhaps never knew we had for the person we are trying so hard to love.

Sunday

Yesterday, a Sunday, I experienced for about an hour what can only be described as untrammelled joy – in church, of all places, you might be surprised to know. It went beyond happiness, although it embodied the vital elements of happiness which, superficial as it may sound, also contains something of the way things are meant to be. All of this is a rather clumsy and roundabout way of describing what happened, not just for me, but for everyone there, yesterday morning between 11am and midday.

I don’t think joy, or even uncomplicated happiness (the kind children experience all too briefly in today’s competitive educational environment) happens by itself. It’s not a mystical experience. It doesn’t descend on you and envelope you in its own cloud of unknowing, to borrow briefly from one of the great unknown writers on mysticism who is thought by some scholars to have been an Anglican priest. It’s more playful. Again, as children are. It compels you to join in the dance, so to speak. It insists on a kind of hidden laughter taking you, and everyone around you, into itself.

Most people would be surprised to learn that this sort of thing can happen in the context of an Anglican Sunday morning church service – not the kind where emotions are whipped up by throbbing music or nerve tingling sermons – but an ordinary Sunday morning Anglican Eucharist. That being said, honesty compels me to admit that the hymn choices (again straight up and down Anglican hymns) were, shall we say, quite rousing. But what made them so? Liturgy alone does not quite cut the mustard when it comes to the engendering of true joy. Something else has to be going on to imbue the hymns and time-worn words with this joy.

I think this ‘something else’ has to do with the assembled company. By that I mean a diverse collection of people who have come together in the confident expectation that something will happen in the context of the service which will bind them more closely to one another, give (if only briefly) a sense that there is more to life than what goes on during the rest of the week and, yes, meet God.

One of the great virtues of the Anglican way of going about public worship (and it has many virtues) is that it gives people permission to encounter God privately, but to do so in the company of people who, even if they don’t know each other, are mutually disposed to love and trust the person sitting next to them in the pew. It is this kind of trust which underpins much of what goes on in good Anglican church services.

Sadly, many people would dismiss all this as not being what going to church ought to be about, as wishy washy and unsound, as not facing up to the challenges of the modern world, as retreating into sentiment etc. etc. They are missing the point.

Surprisingly, it was John Calvin, that 16^th century theologian, more often associated with hell fire than with cosy church services, who got the point about Anglicanism, if unintentionally. He wrote that the ‘presence’ of God in any act of worship (he was referring specifically to sacramental presence, but the idea applies to all communal acts of worship undertaken in trust) is made ‘real’ by the collective presence, the will to worship, the common desire (or whatever else you might like to call it) of the priest and the people together. This is what I personally experienced yesterday morning and I would be willing to bet that most of the people present in that church were experiencing it too. It was communion in the fullest sense which, incidentally, also made it Anglican.

The Anglican Church is not a Church. It is a Communion.  It is a body of people, a global family, complete with all its fractious differences, but bound together in something that has to do with being under the regard of a loving God[1]. So I would dare to propose that what happens in a good Anglican service (not necessarily a Eucharistic one, incidentally) has something about it which reflects truth.

Here, I sense hackles rising as people instantly jump to the conclusion that I am inferring that only Anglicans know how to do church, or have the right theology. Nothing could be further from my intention. Anglicans have traditionally been at pains to reconcile extremes (for which see the Elizabethan Settlement which was the seminal document of the Church of England and integral to what later became the spirit of the Anglican Communion), to hold things in tension without diluting the essence of the faith.

All of this might seem rather heavy stuff in regard to a Sunday morning Holy Communion service in a small country church. But heavy stuff is needed if the structure which underpins the life of communion (and I use that word cautiously) is to hold in a fragmented society and, sadly, in a Church where the structures that have held everything together for centuries are no longer fit for purpose because they have become atrophied over time. They are too rigid. They lack the flexibility needed to easily adapt to the social and sexual mores of today and to the biblical scholarship needed to meet people in the lives we all actually live.  

This rigidity also skews concepts of authority into something that encourages a ‘do as you’re told’ approach to those who hold it. As a result, trust and empathy in top-down authority relationships become harder and harder to maintain and often require more time and personal energy than any one person (especially if they are in a position of authority) can realistically give. Nevertheless, Anglicanism, or the Anglican Communion, has something precious to give to the wider Church if it can hold true in its daily life to a concept of trust that has the space to grow out of a structured communion, beginning with its often unremarkable (in the best sense of the word) Sunday worship.

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[1]  Passim Rowan Williams

Dinner Party

I’m remembering a smart dinner party I went to not long ago, today in fact.  A collection of very important, if somewhat mismatched individuals were there; MP’s and the odd bishop, a few key financial men, some hard edged powerful women. Money in spades. It’s the kind of gathering where everyone tries to impress, well made-up and well dressed. But it’s also a gathering of the needy, those needing to get something from someone, ego and confidence reinforcement at the very least, the kind that comes with a good word in the right place, the assurance of status advancement, given in the wordless raising of a glass, the nod and the wink.

You go to such gatherings because though you’d rather be at home watching a good tv drama, it’s important to know you’re safe in your job, that embarrassing conversations or events (like the expedient termination of an inconvenient relationship, professional or otherwise, that happened not so long ago), are safely out of sight and out of the minds of those who matter.   

Some of the guests are there largely out of curiosity. They want to see the magic healer who’s also been invited, and who is probably a trickster but at least it will be something to laugh about with friends at the Club or the office the next day – which is why he was invited in the first place. Even so, they are already a little embarrassed and on edge. He looks a mess. What’s he doing here? Maybe it was a mistake to have asked him.

There’s no telling what he might come out with. He seems to know an awful lot about people he’s barely or never met. They’re all feeling the need to be guarded, to keep their distance from him, to avoid eye contact, (they barely greeted him when he arrived) but they do want him to perform, so they flatter and patronise while egging him on by appealing to his vanity which, also embarrassingly, he doesn’t seem to have much of. This is causing the jokes to wear a bit thin for them. They are running out of banter and by now they are all a bit drunk. Some of the women are embarrassed by the more raucous guests. Embarrassment combined with alcohol makes people loud. The women are starting to feel a bit protective of the miracle healer, as he’s come to be known.

One of the women there gets really carried away and starts pouring expensive scented oil all over him. She’s crying and saying things which only he seems to understand. She’s wiping his feet with her hair. All a bit gross and over the top really. There is a tense silence. It’s all so embarrassing, as religion always is. None of them are religious. Why is he doing this? What right has he to behave like this? It’s offensive. They’ll definitely make that clear to him, but not right now, as the host, for some reason (Oh yes, he was raised from the dead by this chap. Ha.) likes him.

The silence stretches out. One or two people are visibly disturbed, beginning to shed a few tears. Perhaps they’re just sympathising with this woman who’s clearly going through some kind of mental crisis – the menopause probably. It makes you emotional. And then he says something odd, that the reason she’s doing this is that she’s preparing him for his burial. No idea what he’s talking about. But one or two of the prelates are looking different. Not so much embarrassed as wanting to be different people in some way. You could almost say that they sympathised with the woman, that they wanted to be like her, and to have done to them whatever it was that the miracle maker had done, or said, to her that caused her to behave in the way she’s behaving now.

And they’re not the only ones. One or two others are suddenly wanting this ‘whatever it is’ to happen in them, so that they can be different, no longer a part of this ‘scene’, or any ‘scene’, no longer needing to take refuge in tribal belonging, or needing that first whisky of the day in order to feel OK about themselves, no longer only partly human. The cynical and embarrassed muttering has ceased. For some reason, they all want this thing that he, and only he it seems, has to give. They need it, whatever you might call it, more than they’ve ever needed anything in their lives. If you want to know what it is, read the story John 12:1-11.

Lament For An Orchard

Bulmers is selling off our local orchard. They are uprooting all the trees because the land will fetch a better price without them. So the trees stand there, piled up together, their naked roots exposed to the sky. Perhaps they feel shame.

I don’t think it’s fanciful to imagine that trees uprooted in this way might feel shame, and that there might be some hidden urge to protest against this violation of their sovereignty and beauty. Bulmers will no doubt argue that the orchard is relatively new, planted within the last twenty years, and that the land will be returned to its original agrarian state, assuming we believe that. They will no doubt assume that we will forget all about the orchard and its uproarious crowd of blossom which normally would be showing signs of appearing around now, or the luminous redness of its fruit in late summer. Perhaps they argue that those who will live in houses built on the pillaged land (the time will surely come when that happens, whatever anyone says about current planning constraints) won’t give a thought to the trees, even though the new housing estate they will live on may be called The Orchards. The violence done to the place in the name of commerce will have been smoothed over by then and forgotten, vastly outweighed by the losses cut and the benefits incurred by Bulmers.

I have been trying to rationalise my unruly feelings in regard to this minor rape of the landscape – minor compared to developments, drills, mines and excavations undertaken on a much vaster scale in other parts of the country. But perhaps my feelings are justified because violence, whatever form it takes should always be resisted. I’m thinking right now of the violence, still relatively unremarked, but all the more dangerous for being so, we’re seeing coming out of China and its control of Hong Kong. Draconian measures are being put in place for the slightest infringement of China’s ‘security’ laws beginning with a crackdown on writers and artists that hails back to the Cultural Revolution. Violence is inevitably inflicted on those with the least power who are also those a violent and paranoid regime will most fear.

And this returns me to the trees, because their power lies in their beauty and in the uncompromising redness of the apples. The violence being done to them by a large corporation feels like a form of sacrilege, perhaps because the trees and the apples speak of the potency of the Eden myth, something beautiful taken unlawfully, an act that would prefigure rapes and pillages of every kind down through the centuries, culminating in the final moment of triumphant resistance to violence in the vulnerability of the Holy One, the author of all life and beauty, who is struck in the face by a soldier. The soldier is probably still slightly drunk from the previous night spent torturing this same victim.  As with all violent acts, the shame ultimately devolves on the perpetrator, but for now it belongs to the Holy One – and to the trees being uprooted by Bulmers.

Forgiveness

Sometimes, on a blog like this, it’s hard to know whether to dwell on the deeper questions of faith and belief (the two are not necessarily the same) or the meaning and purpose of life as it is to be lived in today’s multi-choice world. Or perhaps living and faith itself, along with belief, are different facets of the same thing. They just need to be viewed through both lenses of life’s telescope, in order to get the full 3-D effect. Or, to deploy a slightly different image, to keep rotating the view so as to get the full benefit of all the possible permutations it has to offer. Here, I’m thinking of one of those telescopic toys we had as children. The end of it was  filled with coloured crystals which changed their configuration and patterning as you turned the ‘telescope’. The patterns changed with every turn. At least, I don’t remember them ever turning out the same in any two or three viewings. But perhaps that’s just a comment on my childish impatience. If I’d waited long enough perhaps the object would have run the full gamut of its possibilities and returned the viewer to the place they started from.

I sometimes think life is a bit like that. You pass a certain life bench-mark (no specific age, but you know when you’ve reached it) and realise that you are being returned to the emotional place you started from, however many years ago it was. The difference lies not in what you’re feeling right now, because all the old feelings are there pretty much unchanged from the minute they were sown through some careless remark made by a family member or teacher, or by life events themselves, but in how these feelings have been ‘ploughed under’, how they’ve been used to enrich, or possibly contaminate, the soil of your own life and of other people’s. Quite a lot of this has to do with the question of faith, though not exclusively with questions of belief, since faith and belief are not invariably connected to each other.

In terms of the ploughing metaphor, faith matters as much, if not more than, belief. I sometimes get asked, as a priest, whether what you believe matters. The answer I give is not really an answer because in a sense it’s the wrong question, or at least it’s a question that is framed in the wrong way. Whether, in the context of faith and belief, it matters, is a question only the individual can ask in regard to the purpose and meaning (I hesitate to call him or them the object) of faith which is God. That person may have been asking the question, one way or another, for as long as they can remember – way back into early childhood. Or perhaps they’ve never considered it worth asking until this particular moment which also may be their last, or not far off it.

The urgency with which the question is asked will depend very much on the moment. Very young children who come, as the poet Wordsworth puts it, ‘trailing clouds of glory’, ask it with a particular kind of urgency which may have to do with the need to recapture something they have known but which is fast receding from their consciousness, although it will never quite disappear from their memory. The person at the other end of the life spectrum will perhaps ask it with a more pressing and immediate sense of its urgency, or they will blot it out, along with the urgency itself, with whatever amnesiac method is available to them at the time.

In the case of the latter person, assuming they feel the need for faith, or sense that it matters, there is an avenue that remains open to them until they draw their last breath, and possibly for far longer, but that is pure conjecture. There are some things we cannot presume to absolutely know for sure. The person in the very final stages of life, if they are afforded the possibility (hence my not wanting to pass what might be taken for judgment if they die suddenly without a last chance to make this necessary choice) will reach for something like forgiveness. It may be the first time they have ever done this in all earnestness. In other words, unconditionally. It may be that unconditional forgiveness is not something that has ever made sense to them. It defies logic. Forgiveness, for them, must always depend on something in the way of retribution. They imagine that it depends for its own existence on conditions that need to be met. It is understandable that they should think this. Most of us when it comes to the need for forgiveness, our own need for it, or for our need to give it, equate it with terms which must be complied with for the forgiveness to be valid, or even possible. But the dying person does not, at this point, have anything to offer, to bring to the party, so to speak, when it comes to laying claim to forgiveness. But they need it and, or, they need to give it.

But how? Suddenly, the matter is a life or death issue which takes them way outside the bounds of belief. It takes them into the realm of faith. They need something more than belief to lay hold of, so that they can know themselves forgiven, or be able to forgive another and so find peace. They need to accept that they are loved irrespective of their need for forgiveness, whichever direction forgiveness needs to travel in at that moment. They perhaps don’t know how to go about accepting this love. They have never been shown or, if they have, they have not wanted to listen. It was too embarrassing at the time. So there is nothing really left for them to do except the one thing, which is to know, more than they have ever known anything in their entire life, that they want forgiveness now. Furthermore, they want to give it in equal measure to wanting to receive it. They need to surrender to it. The two needs, the receiving and the giving, are of a piece. They will also know, no matter what state their mind or body is in at this moment, that it is theirs in the wanting, and in the surrendering.

Loneliness

Following on a bit from my last post; right now it’s a case of get a paragraph down (one that makes sense) before moving to the Nespresso machine. This is the basic discipline, if you can call it that, which I use to cajole myself into putting something, almost anything, into words. But as I write this, I’m immediately aware of the whole purpose, and the challenges that go with any kind of creativity and not just writing.

The heart of the creative process addresses, both for the person doing the creating and for the one on the receiving end of it, the fundamental condition of human loneliness, and perhaps of all loneliness. Reaching for the Nespresso machine, or its equivalent, is partly an expression of this fundamental loneliness. There are also plenty of lonely creatures going through a comparable situation to yours or mine right now, but without the coffee. So perhaps we write, paint, play music, or sing for the dogs left for hours alone in apartments, for the birds and tigers in cages dreaming of some long forgotten mythic past, for horses standing alone in sodden fields, all of them waiting for something or someone to speak into their loneliness.

I stumbled on these distracting thoughts earlier this morning while entering into the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and of Judas. Each in their way is dealing with loneliness, the loneliness of the human condition and the loneliness which all sentient beings experience at some point in their lives.

In the case of Judas, it seems to me that his is a reactive loneliness that comes from a resistance to love. It is expressed in defiance. He wants to force an issue almost more than he wants to force the hand of the individual he loves to hate right now. He hates him because he  feels betrayed by him, but he also loves him. He experiences the bitter vindictiveness that can overtake a person who feels betrayed by circumstances or by a person he loves. He is alienated and he is profoundly lonely, so he betrays his friend with a kiss.

There is a palpable silence following this moment of betrayal, before someone fills it with a clumsy act of violence, cutting off the ear of one of the people who has tagged along with the police, wanting to be in on the action, or just see what would happen next. I am reminded of the silence I witnessed some years ago in New York. Someone had jumped from a 23^rd story window and was lying on the pavement surrounded by a ring of silent onlookers as they waited for an ambulance or the police to come. In the garden, Jesus speaks into the silence that follows the shock of the moment by asking who the police are looking for. He grounds the loneliness of the moment by offering himself as the person they are seeking.

We are all looking for someone in our moments of loneliness, loneliness that comes with flashbacks or with memories of a happier past, or of a person missing from our lives, or with an acute sense of human vulnerability and of the vulnerability and transience of all life as we know it. Often, it is only our fellow sentient beings, the dog or cat or horse, who have the empathy to own the situation for what it is. We have much to learn from them and perhaps at some future time they will have much to tell us about who we are really looking for. Meanwhile, their physical presence assuages our loneliness.

The Blank Page

The blank page. Every writer’s nightmare, or if not a nightmare, the fear that bugs us most of the time. What shall I write about? If only I could write a novel. But it is not given to me to write novels, or anything at all at the moment, though I have stories to tell.

Whatever it is that occludes my thinking right now, the blank page represents an awesome reality. Awesome is  a word that is used far too lightly nowadays. To be in awe of something is to reverence it, to be subject to it. A writer is always subject to the blank page. They are subject to the work. They owe it.

The blank page isn’t just about not being able to write anything right now. For the writer, being faced with the blank page represents a kind of death, not some elevated intellectual state trying to give shape to itself with words, but more what it must feel like to lose physical speech after a stroke or accident and be unable to articulate thought, unable to convey need.  

The blank page must ultimately convey something to the reader. It must resonate in some way with their need. What is written must be to the reader what Joyce described as an ‘epiphany’. It must reveal a sudden understanding of truth, not a specifically empirical or exclusively moral truth, but something the reader has always known but never realised they knew until the moment of reading. Writers enable us to discover for the first time something that is intimately familiar. God perhaps. They may or may not intend doing this.

The blank page, which is too often conflated with writer’s block, makes for an end of the road feeling. You will tell yourself that things will open up when you feel less tired, have a coffee – or something stronger, smoke a cigarette – or something stronger. Or perhaps you should just stop and take up crochet instead.  But the blank page admonishes you. It does not give you permission to shut the computer down or close the notebook. From the moment you first put finger to keyboard, or pencil to paper way back in your school days, when your English teacher thought you showed promise, you were committed. The commitment was not a decision on your part. It was made by someone else, voiced through someone else (your English teacher, perhaps) or else through accruing experiences that cohered into plots of one kind or another, or ideas that needed to be given shape so that they could connect with people and give shape to their own ideas, or a meaning of some kind to their life.

None of this is guaranteed to fill the blank page, of course. Thoughts do not flow in a mystical way onto a screen or notebook. They are honed, often out of nothing, or out of the mere whisper of a thought. But it is not the thought that counts right now. It is the blank page which exists for itself. It has its own life. It makes demands. Perhaps, in this sense, it has a certain religious side to it. But treating any creative process as a religious exercise of some kind is dangerous. It invites self delusion, for one thing, and grandiosity, which is death to writing and to any genuinely creative work. So you could say that it is best to keep self completely out of the picture, whatever the picture is, because we are not talking about self expression. We are talking about the kind of creativity which only comes to fruition through self discipline.

In art, as in life, self discipline is not a very exciting exercise, so it has to be learned early. I learned the need for it from the nuns at school whose parting words of advice to sixth form leavers were to get up in the morning at whatever time you’d resolved you would get up, no matter how late or early. It seemed inconsequential at the time, as a life resolution, but it has been invaluable to me as a writer. Sit in front of the blank screen or page regardless of what it gives, or doesn’t give, at any one time, but do it at the same time every day. Do the same thing with prayer, along with anything else you might resolve to do on any given day.

When The Going Was Good

It hasn’t rained for a few days here, although the rains are set to return tomorrow and remain for the foreseeable. This brief respite from the wet has given the ground a chance to drain and even dry out a bit in places, as I found yesterday while discovering a new walk. I couldn’t have done the walk for the first time if the ground had been sodden, for fear of sinking in and causing possible injury and then being stuck half way up a hill and out of mobile range.

These are the kinds of anxieties that beset us as we try to come to terms with advancing years. Being stuck somewhere, out of range, out of earshot. Growing older is not for the faint-hearted, not because we have to push harder to achieve goals or even climb steep hills without falling into the bog, but because of the reverse. We have to accept that much of the time we can’t do these things and it would be imprudent, and unfair on others, to try.

Acceptance is the first challenge in that stage of life when the going is not as good as it used to be and I think it will probably be the hardest, for me at least. You have to be by nature a patient sort of person to accept life as it is and I am not patient by nature. I like goals and deadlines. I like to get things done. I like to move around and discover new walks – in life as well as in the countryside. I am also someone who has spent most of their life with one foot in the future. There was always going to be something new and exciting just around the corner.

One of the biggest challenges of getting older is coming to terms with the fact that we are now living the future we were dreaming of in our younger years. Whether for better or for worse, it is almost certainly different. And it is the difference that matters. The difference is full of things that were not envisaged or planned for. They are the sum total of the present moment. They are worth relishing – even the not so good ones. By relishing I don’t mean a vaguely enforced sense of gratitude for character building unpleasant experiences, like a failed love affair, but the owning of what these occurrences felt like, how we dealt with them, how we would deal with them now, with or without the wisdom of hindsight.

By wisdom, I don’t mean the ability to make cuttingly clean decisions in regard to any one course of action, or to remain aloof and objective in every possible trying situation, or in regard to people who, try as one might, it is very difficult to like. Wisdom is won the hard way, in a gradual process of learning to understand at depth what it means to be human. In other words, to understand the significance of story.

If you have read this far, you will have a life story of your own. You will be concerned with making sense of your life story. This is not the prerogative of the old. It is an open invitation to anyone. Making sense of one’s life, however short or long it has been so far, involves connecting with other people’s stories, even if they have never told them. We only really understand ourselves (and so begin to forgive ourselves) when we understand others. The reverse is also true. The alcoholic parent was simply a human being who couldn’t cope, who was angry, felt betrayed and at some crucial point in their life, unloved. They have no means to work through these feelings, or to accept them, so their ‘anaesthetic’ as my mother used to call the gin and sherry mix which she reached for at eleven in the morning, lies in some form of mind-numbing drug.

Everyone has a story. Everyone brings to any experience a heady mixture of half-forgotten memories, of pain, joy, boredom, disappointment and various kinds of fear. Every person has their own fear, or numerous fears.

Most of us only come to terms with these fears later in life, when we realise what they are really about; the desire to please a parent, perhaps, or the fear of oblivion that keeps a person awake through the small hours of the night. We fear sleep as we fear death.

But it need not be like this. Sleep, even if we need a bit of chemical help for it to kick in, is ultimately about acceptance. It begins with the acceptance of the present day. There is always something to be grateful for, and by that I mean real gratitude, not the kind of enforced gratitude that comes with saying grace at meals. I mean the gratitude that comes with thinking ‘thank God that happened today…or didn’t happen’. It means acceptance. Acceptance is surrendering into the eternity of the present moment. Who knows which side of eternity we will wake to? One thing we can be sure of though is that Someone will be there to meet us. Thank God for that.

Candlemas

January-February. Season of forgotten promises and limp resolutions. Season of questions; questions about the future, our own or someone else’s, and questions about the past. A season of reckoning up before moving forward, if moving forward feels remotely possible which, at this time of year, it often doesn’t. We welcome the short days and early nights. We are tired. We are ‘mithered down’ by the everyday and the absence of magic.

But there are snowdrops challenging the monochrome that is both within and without. More than that, there is something about their purity that speaks not so much of magic as of the holy. The holy signifies some state of existence, mental or spiritual, that is largely unattainable to most of us, since it seems to require great effort and sacrifice, or so we like to think. But the snowdrops speak of this state of holiness and embody it without the slightest effort. They neither toil nor spin.

It would be easy to dismiss snowdrops. They are, after all, short-lived, and, on the face of it, serve no significant purpose, which is maybe how we’re feeling about our lives right now. Along with waning resolutions, comes a waning sense of purpose and, if we let things get that far, a loss of meaning. What is life all about? That’s the perennial January/February question which nags right now. Following on from this question comes the next one; what have I achieved so far? And then the very heart of the matter; have I been or achieved everything my parents expected of me – enough for them to make them love me?

This, for many of us, whether we care to admit it to ourselves or not, is what drives us in life. It is what tells us to make something of ourselves and, at the same time, that we have never managed to do this, and never will. Judgment awaits us, perhaps in the form of the parent we have failed because we have not made it possible for them to live vicariously through our perceived successes. We have been a disappointment.

Snowdrops would seem to have little to do with all this and yet I think they are a vital component to reaching an understanding of what a successful life really entails. It entails acceptance of the fact that we are loved. I have to admit that when people talk about the love of God in this way, I can find it cloying and patronising. But I am beginning to realise that God’s love for each one of us has nothing to do with sentiment. It has to do with the brutal realities of life, the components of disappointment and despair.

This is why I love the season of Candlemas which falls on the 2^nd of February. It’s a season of expectation, a time of expecting the Messiah to ‘suddenly come to his temple’ as he did in fulfilment of the promise made to Simeon and Anna, two elderly people who were on temple duty that day. They would have understood the deeply personal significance of this moment, so aptly portrayed in  Giovanni Bellini’s painting. It’s a moment of promise fulfilled.

Candlemas also marks the official end of Christmas and Epiphany. It’s the day we take down the Christmas crib which sits in a tiny window alcove half way up the stairs in our house and is visible to passers-by. We replace the crib with a candle which will burn for a few evenings. After that, the space will be left empty in preparation for Lent when a wooden cross made of drift wood from Bardsey Island will replace it and remain there for the year.

Everything will have come full circle with the re-instatement of the cross, but it will also be the beginning when, paradoxically, the image of ultimate failure and disappointment becomes the ultimate sign of hope, just before the snowdrops disappear.