Old school welfare state

The following is an extract from a speech delivered by Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town in the House of Lords on October 5th 2010:

In my early years, I was a great fan of Titmuss and continue to be so. In The Gift Relationship, he sets out his belief that altruism is morally sound and economically efficient. Titmuss thought that a competitive, materialist and acquisitive society -I do not know what he was referring to- ignores at its peril the life-giving impulse towards altruism that is needed for welfare in the most fundamental sense.

The Gift Relationship is about blood donation. Those who have read it will remember that Titmuss thought blood donation exemplified the ethical socialism he believed in and the political sense that the voluntary donation of blood is the most fundamental representation of human beings because they give in the purest form without any anticipation of reward. Like one and a half million other citizens, I give my blood in that way.

However, I think that Titmuss's ideal was wrong in three ways. First, even with blood, although we are voluntary, unpaid donors, the substructure of staffing, transport, cleansing and testing is provided by paid professional staff. Secondly, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, charity,

"is apt to be accompanied by a certain complacency and condescension on the part of the benefactor; and by an expectation of gratitude from the recipient."

The rich, said Stevenson, should subscribe to,

"pay the taxes. These were the true charity, impartial and impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all."

Thirdly, another problem about charitable giving is that it tends to support rather popular causes, such as animals, babies and cuddly things, and what are seen as deserving causes. When I was trying to raise money for Alcohol Concern, I used to think that I had a difficult problem. But I was complaining about it one day and someone who was raising money for incontinence pads for the elderly said that I knew nothing. It is similar for the ex-offenders-the unpopular causes.

We have to be wary of thinking that even the large benefactors of whom the noble Lord spoke will not always give to what they see as unpopular causes.

I fully support -how could I not when I have described my own charitable background?- the marshalling of altruistic causes and the contribution of charitable giving to help produce a better, stronger society. CASA is a small charity in Kentish Town, of which I am a trustee, which looks after people with drink problems. For a mere £800,000 a year we work with more than 800 individuals. One third becomes abstinent; another third retains abstinence; and one person in five reduces their intake.

We are doing that for just £1,000 per client, which is probably the cost of one night in a hospital bed. Another local charity, the Coram Foundation, started in adoption and had its origins in charitable work. Today, although local authorities do much of that, Coram helps to place some of the most vulnerable children and has one of the highest success rates.

Finally, Community Service Volunteers uses about 200,000 volunteers aged between five and 105. It supports ageing and disabled people to stay in their own homes or to go to university. It helps to feed people in hospital, particularly those who are frail and elderly. It has a lovely system of "grand mentoring" for those aged 50-plus, as well as putting volunteers into general practice.

Clem Attlee was right when he attacked the idea that looking after the poor can be left to voluntary action. He said that if a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly and not dole out money at whim. He believed that the state should look after its poorest citizens. Rather as Howard Glennerster looked at the Conservatives after the war when they were worried about the move to a welfare state with benefits available to all and the tax cost of that, I wonder whether we are now reverting to see the same in this Government.

Yes, we want to use the voluntary sector and we know how effective it can be in all sorts of ways. But it can be effective only with an infrastructure of people who clean premises, those who do auditing and accounting, and those who pay the staff and do all the administrative stuff. Without grants being available for that, and with the cuts that are coming, we will see that charities which could be best at responding locally will not be able to do so. I fear that as local authorities slash their funding, the first thing they will do is look at their grants to charities and say, "That is an easy one". All that will undermine what happens.

While the big society has been inspiring and as we want charities to help, the big society vision of the Government will depend not just on civic action but on organised civic action; that is, a professional and well organised third sector. Yet it is this sector which is likely to be most hit by public sector cuts. The charitable sector can strengthen civil society only if it itself is strengthened. Are the Government up for that?

The full debate (on the role of Voluntary Sector Organisations in British Society) can be accessed here. It starts halfway down the page.

A love to come home to

I like to think that I "got" God first, and then translated the experience into human love. This undeniably happened and continues to happen. Simply by tuning in to God, I am sometimes able to bring about a fair bit of love around me.

Still, if I'm being really honest. I didn't get God first. God built on existing experiences of human love and magnified them a thousand times. But qualitatively speaking it was people who first showed me love, and then God entered the picture.

Could it be that God piggybacks on whatever imperfect human love there is and that God is sometimes even dependent on it, not wanting human love and divine love to be separate things but letting them be forever tangled? Loving us first through people and being loved first through people.

It's a process really. If someone loves me really well, I start to think that God probably loves me like that. While if I grasp something about the way God loves me, I'll try the same with people, as I should.

I'm just thinking aloud here, but the challenge this raises is that a lot of people do not have a love they can come home to. Which render parables such as the prodigal son and the lost sheep pretty useless in my opinion.

So okay then, if the person I'm with has no concept of love to come home to, then where do I start?

What were the authors of the Gospel thinking? Did they mean that people should just get back to Judaism, knowing that's where their interlocutors came from? Well good luck with that when your own interlocutor has no concept of God.

Do I narrate it from scratch as in: "you really do have a love to come home to, you just don't know about it". Maybe... but if that's just an intellectual explanation, it will remain meaningless. As Pascal has it, nobody can look for something they haven't already found.

So my approach will be to offer imperfect love, aiming to be a Bishop Myriel of sorts and seing how it goes. And by this I don't mean anything overly saintly and unsustainable. I'll just be real. This requires me to believe that God is fond of me, Dany, and does not require me to have a complete instantaneous personality transplant and be the mega saint that I am not.

God will build on what I am, and on what what you are, and maybe even piggyback on our imperfect love. God will sometimes shine through our own lives, if that's what we earnestly desire and humbly work towards.

La via della loro santificazione*

I've been meaning to write this post for a while, but somehow, I wanted to say a lot and wasn't quite sure I could pinpoint it all in one place. I'm still not sure I can get everything down, but I thought it might be good to start somewhere.

For some reason, I've always thought that marriage was a cop-out. That ideally a Christian should remain unmarried so as to be fully disponible to whoever or whatever needs them at that time. Because of my catholic background, I have seen celibacy done extremely well. I don't know what it was exactly, but I think it was a willingness, on the part of the priests I've known, to remain thirsty for human love, which enabled them to love and fully welcome anybody.

I've personally benefitted a tremendous lot from it. My family of origin was sometimes rather cold, At a very young age, I would be left to amuse myself in my own rooms all evenings and all weekends. I was a moderately well-adjusted kid, not all that popular. The local catholic church really welcomed me, my questions, my awkwardness, the full person. Anybody who's been near a priest-led Roman Catholic chaplaincy in a university setting knows exactly what I'm talking about. The three Roman cathoic priests I know well are the most welcoming people I know.

So marriage really didn't see like the best Christian option at all. And for a while I thought that God was almost anti-marriage. All that talk about leaving behind your wife and kids to follow Jesus and proclaim the Gospel left, right and centre and getting yourself killed somewhere far away. I actually always felt sorry for the wife and children left behind.

Georges Bernard Shaw also wrote a fantastic essay about how marriage and the Christian life are not compatible in his preface to Androcles and the Lion :

When we come to marriage and the family, we find Jesus making the same objection to that individual appropriation of human beings which is the essence of matrimony as to the individual appropriation of wealth. A married man, he said, will try to please his wife, and a married woman to please her husband, instead of doing the work of God. This is another version of “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Eighteen hundred years later we find a very different person from Jesus, Talleyrand to wit, saying the same thing. A married man with a family, said Talleyrand, will do anything for money. Now this, though not a scientifically precise statement, is true enough to be a moral objection to marriage. As long as a man has a right to risk his life or his livelihood for his ideas he needs only courage and conviction to make his integrity unassailable. But he forfeits that right when he marries.

And yet despite these objections, and despite my desire to do something really different with my life, along the lines of the life of Henri Groues for instance, deep down I had an intense, irresistible desire to love and to be loved as part of a couple. I grew dissatisfied with just loving God. While God was the source of all the love I knew, the excusivity felt misdirected somehow. Surely the love I had in store should be lavished onto another person, that way it would flow out into creation more. I used to beg God to let someone human benefit from that love too.

I developed a weird theology of "being in love" while being single. I used to say to myself that you didn't need to wait until you had a human partner to be in love. That wouldn't be fair on singles. They can be in love too. Just be in love beforehand. With God, with life, with people... Maybe someday a partner will want to climb into that love affair with you.

When I met H., his warmth felt qualitatively like God's. I couldn't believe it. I didn't think it existed in humans and I was not expecting it, but it was the same thing which I had first discovered in prayer a decade before. And I thought that if that love was available to be lavished on me, then yes please! It was fairly instinctive. I didn't think I was a great lover of people, but I was willing to learn. Some Foreigner's lyrics come to mind.

H. didn't thave the right politics though. He was all about getting more bums in the pews and didn't give a monkey's a** about liberation theology. I still had nagging doubts, right up until my actual wedding day. I thought that I was giving up on another, more beautiful vocation which I had neglected to fully explore. It was a real struggle.

At some point, we attended an awesome and highly recommended Anglican marriage preparation weekend. There were about twenty couples about to marry, and while the weekend is not designed for couples to share information with other couples, the body language of the other participants was incredibly beautiful. Their obvious delight, love and trust for one another brought me to tears a number of times.

At this point I thought that if God really wasn't in the marriage business, then God ought to be. All this love breaking forth out of vulnerable and broken individuals looked a lot like Heaven to me. You could see healing taking place right here and there. Everysingle participant ended up tearful at one point or another, including the freaking leaders. So H. and I ended up picking the Wedding at Cana as our Gospel reading. Because maybe God was in the marriage business after all or at least didn't object very much to weddings.

After the wedding, I thought "okay sainthood's not happening now". On a day-to-day basis my commuting expenses are very high and this leaves me without a lot of money to play with at the end of the month. I'd quite like to own a house at some point, I'd quite like to have an income in retirement, I'd like lots of free time and lots of rest after work, and I don't always have the mental and emotional energy for much social engagement. All in all I'm just another brick in The Wall.

Add children to that mix, or early pregnancy at any rate, and I don't even have the energy to even think about it. All I do is work and sleep. I'm still painfully aware of all the things I don't have the resources to change, and I can't think of a way out. Slowly, the flame is dying within me and I find myself giving up. I don't talk about Tony the homeless guy anymore. I don't talk about liberation. I give up.

And then, something stupidely psychological occurs. H. calls me at work and says:

H: Bradford's right next to Leeds isn't it? Because in Bradford nearly all the churches have teemed up together and they take turn to make their building available for the night to those who are roofless. Do you think that through your job you could have access to these guys?"

I: What for?

H: Do you think you could find out how they do it. Particularly health and safety?

I: Why do you want to know that for?

H: Well so I can reproduce it. So I never have to turn away a woman with kids who's got nowhere to sleep and knocks on the door of my parish office.

In the three years we've been together, H. has resisted all my social engagement talk. And God knows there has been a lot of social engagement talk. And then he comes up with this stuff while I have been quietly giving up for the last three months.

At first I thought he missed that element of my character and was trying to fix me back to normal. But the impulse really came from him and I had been crowding it out, not giving him the space to explore his own feeling and spending all my time feeling outraged that he didn't share mine.

The less I talk, the more he does. The less I lead, the more he does. I unwittingly give him a three months break from my strident liberationist stuff, and the stuff blooms in him in a much more mature and thought-out form than it ever did in me.

So I can be myself, but take a break from what I'm usually on about. Begin to be interested in what he's on about. It's a refreshing little holiday away from my ususal self. And then I realise that it's truly me, with all the politics, that H. fell in love with.

*The title is a passage in the Italian Roman Catholic liturgy of marriage. It means "the way of their sanctification", and points towards marriage as one of the ways of life you may choose (as an alternative to celibacy) and that this way can and should become the way of your sanctification.

When all that's left is pain

Of course, the elephant in the room "is where on earth was Tony the next night?"

I was surprised by the icredible, continuing pain that engulfed me in the weeks that followed. I did not have the resources to see him through to wholeness. By resources I mean finance, space, time, personal qualities and the co-operation of those who already share my day-to-day existence. I reached a point in which I could understand why someone would chose indifference. All that was left was pain and powerlessness.

I collapsed on the kitchen floor one day, thinking I did not have any freaking leverage. I was always wanting to make my environement more abundant with life an healing, and finding that my leverage was almost non-existent. I wished I was the prime minister or something, not just an average punter. H. pointed out that if I became prime minsiter I'd be surprised by how little leverage I'd have then.

So I racked my brains about the sort of answers I've come across before:

1. "It's the little things that count". True enough I suppose. But the desperate state of modern capitalism is not altered in any significant way when I listen to an anxious prison visitor, watch her kids for the afternoon, or have some tea and cake with an isolated old lady. If anything, those a**hole politicians love it when I do things for free.

2. "You're not that disempowered, you're just not willing to think outside your comfortable box". True too. You could move to a new house in a new place with new people and create an environement that could and would accomodate Tony's needs for however long it's called for.

3. "You are extremely cynical for a nonprofit professional". True, I do work in the sector and have plenty of friends, colleagues and contacts who do too. It's pretty crazy that I'm not even thinking of them or their organisations. I'd need to put my cynicism to one side and phone the housing associations I actually personally know, and use my higher degree in bureaucratic hair-splitting to actually fill in some paperwork and write some references.

The answer, I think, will be a combination of the three. I know it works. I've done it. I've had my beginner's luck. My whole experience as a Christian has been characterised by brilliant beginner's luck and early experiences of success ususally followed by a sense of crippling powerlessness and a feeling that I can't possibly wing it again. But in my usual flawed sort of way, maybe I still can.

Bridging the abyss, an early attempt

Yesterday I get out of weekday mass at Leeds cathedral.

It's about 6pm and my head is spinning full of grand theories about our lives should be living sacrifices, permanent outpourings of love in endless unspeakable gratitude. That like the seraphims, we would cover our eyes and find ourselves unable to do anything else than shout "Holy" all the time, except it wouldn't be a vocal "shout", it would be our lives doing the shouting.

I should really give up those funny-smelling cigarettes at some point...

But it being Leeds we're talking about, you can't walk around with your head full of that stuff without being woken up by the poverty and destitution right under your nose, most of which you can't fix durably on your own. If you're lucky it won't be right opposite the cathedral by the entrance of the holy cards shop whith a guy shivering in the winter rain, a rosary round his neck.

I end up giving a couple of quids to a guy who's begging on the pavement (next to a busy cash machine) and asking whether he would like to come up for a pint with me. I hate it that it's me having to take the initative, talk of dodgy subject positions... But it's that or walking past, so I choose that.

He says: "I can't come to the pub, not in those clothes, they're grubby and all, I can't come out to the pub with those clothes and I love pints, but I'm trying you know, not to, I can't I really can't". I'm worried about his sleeping arrangements so I ask: Where do you sleep? He says in the passages under the train station. I ask if there's anything I can do for him. He replies: "You're alright love, unless you could like put me up, you're alright". I said I don't really live here, but 200 miles further North on the train and I slip him a couple more coins.

Lame, as ususal.

With cognitive dissonance of this magnitude I think I'm going to end up banging my head on the walls of an asylum sometime soon. But I can't give up my theologising without feeling like jumping in a river. So I keep the theologising, and the cognitive dissonance stays too. It's the mental health that's going...

Funny that "clothes" thing thought. I'd walk into a pub with smelly Glastonbury clothes without thinking twice about it, I know they don't care. I think about puting Tony (not his real name) up in a hotel, but I'm not sure that's helpful given I can't really afford more than one or two nights.

I walk to M&S to see of I can get clothes, but the shop is closed. So I walk into a supermarket to get some cool food (not all of it is what I would get for myself, but I rely on my past observations to get warm pasties, Mars bars and the like). I know full well that Mark might very well have walked away but I don't care.

And yes, it's nighttime and he's walked off...

Fine with me, I walk towards the station to catch my train and at some point I stop right in track to daydream for a minute or so. I do that quite a lot, I just stand there and think, trying to catch the next idea before it escapes. I look up and half a yard from my face on that really busy street is Mark waiting at the same crossing I'm at. It takes me a couple of seconds to realise and then I say: "Hey, I've sort of bought that stuff for you. I've written my phone number on the receipt, but you'd walked off and I'd given up and now the receipt is all crumpled but you can still read it if you want". He has a quick look and seems to like the stuff.

I ask what's the plan now? What are you up to tonight? He says well I've got this place, it's a hotel, they keep my stuff all the time but they only let me stay there when I can pay twenty pounds. I say, If you only need twenty pounds that's really easy, I can give you that.

Mark is delirious with joy and can't stop saying "you are good, you are beautiful, you are so good, after the day I've had, you are so good, you are good" and he hugs me for ages. I protest that I'm not good, and that he would do the same. "It's true I would do the same, I would, I would".

Fun with Jesuit.org

While browsing the Penguin History of the Church series, I read a passge that I've thought about maybe a hundred times since. It's about despair and our response to it.

The authors basically states that two of the most moving figures of Christianity, Luther and Loyola, were basically confronted with the same issue: no matter ho hard they tried to be relevant Christians, they failed pretty badly and freaked out.

And then our two guys came up with two separate answers. Luther's was: "So what you fail? That will never stop God from loving you. You are saved by grace through faith. The life open to you is one of gratitude". Loyola's answer was: "So what you fail? That does not stop God from loving you, just give the Christian life your absolute best shot".

I can't help but loving both answers. I believe they are both right but also, somehow, lacking without one another.

So anyway, while I've spent my twenties revelling in the simple and beautiful Lutheran piety to be found in the work of Bach (and the Schemelli songs in particular*), I've just got into Loyola. Most websites are quite defensive about the Spiritual exercises, shying away from publishing them online because apparently you really need to do them in a rereat and not just read them online.

But here there are anyway. It's too bad I spend two thirds of the time reevaluating them for consumption by the wishy-washy liberal universalist that I am. The passion and the commitment to be found in them is stupendous.

So that leaves me wanting to be a quasi Lutheran, married, female, wishy-washy liberal, universalist Jesuit. And why not?

*Here's just one example, not the best, just the first I could find. I credit these songs for instantly soothing me in every situtation I've ever been in since first coming across them. German is the true language of love!

Co-opted by the Big Society

I've been meaning to post about this for a week or two but wasn't really sure how to start, or if I had that much to say beyond the feeling of being utterly co-opted by politicians I heartily dislike.

The new ConDem government we've got here is forever rambling on about the Big Society, as in: people doing things for free out of the goodness of their heart.

There are lots of issues with this. To begin with, if you're the parents of young children and you work full time, how the hell are you supposed to volunteer on top of that? Then, the jobs we do as volunteers could easily get done by someone who would get paid for it. In an era of high unemployment, wouldn't it be a good idea to give someone a job rather than abandon them on the dole and relying on volunteers who, for whatever reason, can afford the time commitment?

I volunteer at the local prison one half-day a week, providing a centre for the visitors. I absolutely love it. There's always lots of kids and the vistors are delightful (apart from the odd really scary one of course). It's largely a weekly exercise in shyness. I make it a point to be more humble, shy and deferential than the users because I am here to serve them.

For a start you would not believe how hard it is, even if your bloody religion has beaten humility into since you were six. And then you wouldn't believe the response you get. You've got to try it for yourself I'm afraid, it's hard to put into words the surprise, the bursting joy and the all-embrassing welcome you get from someone who's not at all used to being consistently deferred to. Some of the most hands-on liberation theologians have written about that stuff, if you know where to look.

Finally, there's the completely unlikely mix of volunteers, ranging from the card-carrying Tory old ladies, the dreadlocked anarchist, the retired cop, the crazy-assed heathcare worker who already works 6 days a week on minimum wage helping the elderly with personal hygiene but volunteers on the seventh day, the burntout Christian dogooder, the criminology student who needs something on her resume, you name it... One thing they all have is their own brand of awesomeness and otherwordly brilliance.

But at the end of the day, there we are, loved and endorsed by a government that is also obsessed with cutting public expenditure. We're running essential services for free so we can enable that government to continue to suck up to capital and to reward the rich at the expense of the poor. Is there a way out?

So close you can't "feel" it.

It's one of my bad days... I'm tired of sending ardent heartfelt prayers into the stratosphere and feeling nothing back. I start thinking in terms of "complete waste of time" and "cosmic emotional child abuse", you get the picture.

But is God out in the stratosphere?

-Uh oh, yes and no, but for the purposes of that question the answer is a "no". God is closer.

How much closer?

-Well like somewhere within you.

You mean among all the other random stuff that's "within you"?

-Nope, closer still, God's not an item amongst my dozens of neuroses and petty concerns, it's not an "item" at all, God is closer. God lives as we live, loves as we love, laughs as we laugh, fails as we fail, dies as we die. So God's not even distant enough to be detached from the action. I lose sight of that. Then I think God's out there not freaking answering while God's been crying my own tears.

Strange days and strange nights too...

I was thinking about my next post in here, and wished I knew a website that does snazzy little curves.

I would have used it to illustrate my level of churchiness these days, which has taken an alarming downward turn. The curve would have landed in the bootom right corner of the screen into an abyss of "I don't feel like anything churchy or God-related or none of that stuff at all". Sleeping in for Jesus on a Sunday, or reading a big fat copy of the Sunday Times with a pot of tea and croissants, sounds absolutely great and that's exactly what I've been up to recently.

During the day, my mind is thinking "No more God!", "God feels like air that's too thin, it's way too insubstantial! I want God to have coffee with me, not feel like some sort of imaginary friend that can't even be seen or felt or nothing", "Church's boring! The same words every week that I try to mean and succeed less and less each time".

And then at night, my dreams are so full of God that it's scary. In actuall dreams (not just half-awake dreams) God is there all the time, teaching me cool stuff that I never thought about and go on to forget immediately, demonstrating love to me in lots of strange and wonderful ways. In actual dreams, I'm more churchy than your average carmelite. I wake up and my head is still full of the stuff and I think something along the incredibly subtle line of: wtf?

When necessary, use words...

I have never been in the zone like yesterday night. Everything from the last few months (and some things from way further) just came together at that point in time and made sense. I wasn't preachy, I didn't even say much at all, but by the end of the evening we were giddy with laughter and delight.

I have seen, not so long ago, an elderly priest entrust himself to disease and ultimately also to death. It was the most loving and trusting thing I've ever witnessed. I can't believe I was there. I don't feel worthy to be around so much of the real deal.

Now I don't need to relate that event in order to bring about its trust and delight. Such events become part of me after a while. I just need remember this trust. And bizarrely it enables me to enter doubt, pain and ambiguity without freaking out too much. After a little while you feel that trust too. I caught it from the old priest and you caught it from me.

OMG OMG OMG !!!

I struggled not to fall down on my face right on the road in Durham and utter nothing but "Thank You God, we Love You the best we can!" for the next thousand years (and become a beautiful set of nondescript atoms in the process).

I could not believe the relevance of my months of doubting, until I had a chat someone with (possibly) terminal cancer who shared the very same doubts.

When I'm nothing but a collection of atoms of dust, cremated by fire or just eaten up by worms, I believe that the God who created the whole entire freaking universe will say: "Danielle, my Beloved, Come out"!

I believe that with popes, I believe that with bishops, I believe that with drunk nobodies. I believe that with anybody who would believe (or even attempt to believe) that with me.

God loves sinners.

God wants to spend eternity with sinners like you and like me.

And... Guess what? God will.

Clergy wife 101: learning the (very) hard way

I'm booked in for confession next Wednesday.

I was having a hard time pinpointing my latest collection of sins. Mostly laziness, things left undone or not done well, quasi nonexistent evangelising, a good hundred tiny lies and cheating on the train a couple of times.

And then today something cropped up that left me speechless and wanting to give up trying to be a Christian and just plunge head on into endless despair.

The kind of massive sins that makes you cry out "Oh God no! How could I do that? Why am trying so hard to do the right thing all the bloody time and then go on to sin like I'm the devil incarnate? How could I be so self-involved that I did not even notice I was commiting a sin so huge that I would never be able to forget it?"

I'm not very good at socialising after church. Mostly I want to ponder my own thoughts. Chitchat with the card-carrying Tory old ladies used to bore me to death.

I got a bit better and I now make sure I eat something sugary before church so I'm not grumpy as hell when coffee time comes.

I do engage in chitchat, sometimes inadvertently dropping the f-word, or even launching into a tirade about why Karl Marx was right. The parish tolerates me well enough because they love my fiance.

A few times, a guy that comes fairly unregulalrly asked le if H and I wanted to visit him at home, because he was having trouble coping with his wife's illness. "I'm her only support" he said, "it's really hard".

So after church I would tell H. "Look this guy wants us to go have dinner sometime because his wife is not well at all". H said well, it's not my parish, I can't do visits, that's a job for the priest in charge, we'll have to ask him for permission. So I said yeah but someone's got to go.

Not that I remembered the guy's name, or asked for his phone number or anything.

I guess you can all see where this is going...

The guy asked me and H. over for dinner three times over about six months. Each time I said we'd try to organise something.

H. and I had this somewhere at the back of our mind.

We also had a lot more on, including crazy work deadlines, someone jumping in front of a train right in front of H.'s house, a young cousin of mine getting kicked out of his prestigious university and needing a weekend of TLC, and two separate wedding ceremonies to organise.

All the while, I was battling a serious onslaught of nihilism and completely lost my footing.

This morning the guy came to church and wept the whole way through. His wife had just died.

Which part of "my wife is dying, I am on my own, can H and you come to dinner" did I not understand? Three times in a row? Over several months? We let the guy's wife die without support for him, without support for her, and without extended sacraments.

Damn my overblown sentimental piety!

I think I'm going to give Eucharistic adoration a miss this week. I'm stunned and I can't quite believe the inequities on my own hands. I never thought I'd be someone to neglect her neighbour to such an extend. To let down the Church I love.

And all the way I was trying so hard, I was wanting so much to serve, to be an "Instrument of His grace" and all that jazz. Cheating on the train was pretty harmless, considering...

I'm gonna hang out with my ol' mate Kind David tonight and afterwards live with the shame until the end of my days.

I guess there are worse activities than picking songs for one's wedding in sunny France...

And this one is just stunning...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtcLOJLF2T8

IMHO, it's worth learning French just to get Brel's lyrics!

Quand on n'a que l'amour
A s'offrir en partage
Au jour du grand voyage
Qu'est notre grand amour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Mon amour toi et moi
Pour qu'éclatent de joie
Chaque heure et chaque jour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour vivre nos promesses
Sans nulle autre richesse
Que d'y croire toujours

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour meubler de merveilles
Et couvrir de soleil
La laideur des faubourgs

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour unique raison
Pour unique chanson
Et unique secours

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour habiller matin
Pauvres et malandrins
De manteaux de velours

Quand on n'a que l'amour
A offrir en prière
Pour les maux de la terre
En simple troubadour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
A offrir à ceux-là
Dont l'unique combat
Est de chercher le jour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour tracer un chemin
Et forcer le destin
A chaque carrefour

Quand on n'a que l'amour
Pour parler aux canons
Et rien qu'une chanson
Pour convaincre un tambour

Alors sans avoir rien
Que la force d'aimer
Nous aurons dans nos mains,
Amis le monde entier

Servanthood for beginners

A few years back, H. had the food he offered to someone who had asked him for money thrown back at him in his parish office. He wasn't very impressed, and this topic still crops up regularly in our conversations.

My point is: if they asked you for money why did you offer food?

His point is: I can't support an addiction to drugs or alcohol that any money will most likely fuel.

My point is usually then: actually you don't know that. And even if you're right, you've just robbed that person of their dignity and completely destroyed any chance of further dialogue.

Recently, my brain has been fairly obsessed by the topic of servanthood. I mean I'd been mulling it over for something like 6 months and my thoughts still seem to go nowhere creative. But let's apply it to this situation. If the Queen asked you for money you would not offer her food because it would not be your place to judge. So I decided to apply my servant-of-all obsession to the random street encounters in the streets of Leeds where I get asked for money quite a bit.

Once I fell back into the old mistake and invited a guy who was sitting on a street corner next to the Roman cathedral up for dinner. He said defensively and quite dismissingly "I'd just like some change please". So I said, of course, I'm sorry, and gave him some money. I thought "great, now he thinks I'm one of those mindless punctual dogooders, I bet they're dime-a-dozen in Leeds".

I've bumped into him quite a few times since and have always given him a quid or two since, absolutley unquestioningly, just in sheer obedience, as if it was the Queen asking. He's taken a total liking of me and recently even opened up to quite an extend. I'm the passerby who obeys him.

The other day, I did not have any change and said so. He replied by saying with a huge smile "that's okay, you're alright, you always give me lots!!!"

And still, I'm tiptoeing there. Because none of the dozens of "solutions" I think up in my PhDed head everytime I'm sitting in a boring work meeting may not be appropriate. I guess I'll continue to serve, and to listen too...

David E Jenkins is awesome!

Despite all the crazy wedding preparations and the last minute work things before we set off, I took the time to go and listen to David Jenkins preach and have a bit of a chat with him after the service.

That sermon, reflecting on his relationship with God after a life of ministry, was the most moving thing I've heard in yonks, I had to remind myself that I did not have a tissue and so could not bawl out without making a huge mess of myself. It was hard, especially since the guy himself fought back a few tears, wondering if this was one of the very last time he would address the people of God in this way.

If you haven't read any of his work, jump on the stuff at once. I'm just finishing "God, Miracle and the Church of England" and it oozes love, just like the guy himself does. If somebody in my neck of the woods has had a full on, lifelong love affair with God, it's that old Jenkins who lives a few miles away. I begged the sermon printout right off him (after all, he's got the original on his computer) and I got an autograph on it too. Which will now live right next to sister Helen Prejean's between the pages of my bible.

I'll leave you with a passage from his book that was exactly what I need to hear these days:

...the Greek actually says that the father [of an epileptic son] bursts out and cries, "I believe, help my unbelief!".

The father's faith was not falling short. He had faith because he had glimpsed something in Jesus which he longed for for his child. But he did not have faith because he did not dare. It was too much to hope for. "Lord I believe, help thou my unbelief". No falling short. Surely that is much more like what true faith is really. Risky commitment to a glimpsed possibility in the face of reasonable human hesitation about whether it is really possible [...].

Talk about falling short reminds me, I fear, of those somewhat alarming sects or individuals who seem to want, so to speak, to blackmail you into hyping up your faith on the grounds that, if you jack it up, the faith pressures will somehow compel God into a miracle. Here faith comes dangerously close to being an attempt at manipulating God.

But real faith surely is something very different, the sort of thing you have and do not have, and that is whay you go on having it. Afterwards the disciples asked him privately, "Why could we not cast it out", and he said, "There is not means of casting out this sort but prayer."

The temptation of materialism

I don't want to shut up about it any longer:

Materialism really, really makes sense to me as a historically-situated 21st century Western European! (i.e. http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004_09_27_newsweek.html )

And so what is God made of then? My own synapse connections of course!

I sometimes wish I was living in pre-modern times. No wonder a lot of my scientist friends don't believe in God if that's the paradigm of the time... Why do I have to live in a time and place in which the notion of God is so freaking strange, and not at all universally accepted?

Francis Bacon once said that "a little science estranges a man from God. A lot of science brings him (sic!) back." I guess I don't have a lot of science.

So now, if I promise to read lots and lots of Christina Rosetti, can this ridiculously crude materialism depart from my consciousness please? Do I even want it to go away?

I take some comfort in the observation that this is probably the numero uno lamest attempt at approaching God that I know of. And yet I hold Blaise Pascal to be amongst the greatest and most incredibly moving mystics that ever lived.

So yay for the kind of intellectual honesty that is both aware of its limitations and culturally reflexive. For now I'll just doubt my doubt.

Time to get me some TLC...

"The only sign that he had held the hand of tragedy was the slightly subdued level of his affability, and also the swift, deep look of bafflement that might suddenly pass over his face. " ~ Elizabeth Strout

Monday, H. and I just got hammered. Never knew I could put so much beer into me in just one sitting. I came home, nursed a further very full glass of Scotch and then cried all night long.

Tuesday at work, I thought I would never be able to smile again. I was completely unable to relate with my work contacts in the friendly way I had before. Making a simple work-related phonecall while sounding reasonably friendly seemed impossible. I asked one of my friends from the counselling class if I might debrief with her for a quarter of an hour. She was great. I then forced myself to go to a voice class though I did not feel like it and hated every minute. Didn't sleep at all that night.

Wednesday, I got plenty of praise at work for a organisational relationship I'd spend six months repairing by being the middle man in all their communications and making sure this worked out. I also had plenty of time on the train to finish the novel I'd started reading a few days before on that platform. That night I slept like a baby.

Thursday, meeting in London. They all love me down there and can't quite believe what an efficient, clever girl they managed to recruit. I juggled stats for the whole day which impresses the hell out of people who don't do stats. It feels good. After the meeting I walked from Hyde Park to Clerkenwell Close just to take in a bit of London. At Clerkenwell Close I met the lovely girl from CRED Jewellery, who have been trailblazing fairtrade gold since 1996. I bought H. and I some seriously kosher wedding bands right here and right there. On the train back to Durham I read Joseph Stiglitz. Food for thought.

Friday in Durham, H. had an interview with the still-bishop of Durham for his research. I helped him prepare. I wish I could have gone in but meanwhile there was plenty of bookshops for me to browse in Bishop Auckland. H. had a rocking time and came out of his scholarly interview with a huge smile. I'm mildly jealous, but I'll listen to the MP3 anyway so it's almost as if I'd been there. We had a pub lunch. Then I called my best friend in hospital. Looking out the same window at H.'s place, I kept her entertained during the early phase of her first son's birth. Soon, we'll get hammered in his honour too. Any excuse.

I burst into tears right in the middle of the street each time I see a child or young adolescent for fear that they will grow up to throw themselves under a train.

H. screams in the middle of the night while he sleeps. This didn't even make the news anywhere. Not even the local news...

Dead stranger in my street

I'm writing ten metres away from some of the remaining body parts of a young woman who jumped under a train of the East Cost Railine around 4pm yesterday. H. heard a "bang", went upstairs to look at what that was on about and saw half a female body on the railway.

The police had to clean it quick as they had to reopen the line. So they picked up the obvious parts, turned the stones where there was too much blood. Poured a liquid on it that i've no idea what it does. But the vegetation being quite dense, bits might still be around. The policemen were sitting shellshocked in their car when I turned up, trying to get to grips with it.

I was out charity-shopping in a nearby town, just about to get back, on the train. I was miffed that it was delayed and had to beg the taxi office to let me use their toilets, because I had hoped to use those on the train and then that train didn't arrive. But it was a beautiful sunny day, and I'd just picked a few great books, so actually I did not mind reading in the sun in that semi deserted station of a very small town, I was having a fantastic time.

I try not to write that kind of mis-lit on my blog ususally. I find it plain voyeuristic and on some disturbing level I'm afraid it might be a bit self-serving: look at what piece of gossip I've got now! But this is the place where I collect all the bits that make my heart beat, and I didn't want my blog to be without this. I wanted this to be part of it for years to come, somewhere in the archives.

So when they reopened the line my train arrived, and then six or seven minutes later I was at the front door and H. pulled me apart and told me the whole story. I immediately lept into my rational self, inwardly, so I could listen to H. I ruled immediately that there was nothing I could do about the young woman, that in all likelhood it had not hurt one bit, and that she was in a better place. I still cried a bit. But I kept it together. We sat in silence completely stunned.

A couple of years ago something similar happened. Not quite in my street but close enough. It prompted a massive questionning crisis. I wondered why God would let us pray as earnestly as all f**** to let us serve him and our neighbours while three streets away someone was killing themselves, and we didn't know. I know for a fact that this young woman died ten metres from the most caring and genuinely warm person in this town, because H. is that person. He can listen to someone for months. He loves every obnoxious drunk at the pub, every annoying old lady at church, and they all love him back.

So I suppose you could theorise. Capitalism. Individualism. The death of community. It makes us unaware of the young lady five metres from our front door. But what are you going to do? I'm not a mind-reader and I'm happy to repent her death but I don't even know how. And in the immediate sense, her death is not my of H.'s fault in any way that I can meaningfully think of.

As we sat watching the football like 80% of the population yesterday night, H. thought about the family, who might have just been starting to realise that their loved one had not come home. He hoped that she would be identified so the family would not have to go through the complete horror of their loved one simply going missing. We were both disturbed by how invisible it all was, an our after her death, you could not tell that anything had happened there.

So I said, let's get flowers. Let's make it known, visually, that young women in our street jump under trains and it's not all pretty in good old Durham. I wrote a card apologising for the culture we lived in. I wrote that I wished she had knocked on our door. But then what kind of an idea is that? I worried that it might just give other people ideas of how to be really succesful at getting yourself dead. I can't be that stupid, so I bought the flowers but I kept the card.

A little while after the football, we took out the flowers to that little stone wall that separates the street from the railway, at the place where the wall is no higher than 1.80 metres and thus easy to climb. They are chips in the paint where I would have put my feet if I had tried to climb that wall.

I brought that candle-in-a-red-jar thingy I bought in Vancouver. I loved it because it looked a bit like a sanctuary light, and so whenever I needed to be reminded that God was present I would sometime light it. The whole area felt horrible and scary. There was nowhere that candle-jar-that-looks-like-a-sanctuary-light was most needed. There were those flowers and that light in a sea of hostile green vegetation engulfed by the dark night. And no matter how dark it all felt, my God that candle-jar was needed.

Later in the night, H. suggested we get the candle-jar back. I suspect he liked it too. It being a Saturday night, the World Cup being on, and our little street being one of the main throughways between Durham city centre and the suburbs on the hill... It gets a bit rowdy with kids walking home drunk. They're destructive somehow and break all the flowers in the street on purpose, that kind of stuff. I said leave it, if it gets broken it gets broken.

H. had to finish his sermon while the cops were still around picking the body bits they could. I asked what the Gospel was. It's the woman dousing Jesus' feet with tears. I know what I would have preached...

And it says that we need to get into despair-management. The type that doesn't involve getting your beautiful, God-created lips and nose and body smashed by a train, but just maybe go and despair in the right place, bathing Jesus' feet with our tears.

But hey, even that's dangerous. Because I get a lot from prayer but not everybody does, and importantly, I did not always do so myself. I went trough hell for years. I was a slave in Egypt and there was no sign of it getting any better. And although I wish I could show someone else the way, that is one area in which I'm not confident at all. And it goes without saying that I do not advocate "prayer" as a replacement for speech-based therapies or medicines when these are called for.

At 3am a bunch of kids threw the candle-jar up the street and it smashed. I pretty much expected it. And although I treasured it and have plenty of other red candles in the house, I wanted it there. And when I heard the sound of it smash on the pavement, my heart smashed too. Everything around me in that moment was and felt broken.

And so now I'm drinking the tea made with the teabag that I wish I'd used at 3pm yesterday to brew a cuppa for the dead stranger in my street. While I drink it and cry, I listen to the birds pour some healing on my soul, the trains go by, and I hope the dead stranger in my street is praying for us. God, have mercy on your sad and confused servants.

Jean Vanier and the abyss in Luke 16:19-31

Once in a while, your cool little radical readings on the train are going to bite you like an angry rabid Rottweiler. This is precisely what happened when I gingerly set out to read "Becoming Human" last Friday. So let me begin by quoting straight from the author:

In Luke's gospel, Jesus tells a moving story. There was a beggar named Lazarus who lived in the streets. He was hungry and his legs were covered with sores. Living opposite him in a beautiful house was a rich man who used to give big parties for his friends. Lazarus would have liked to eat some of the crumbs that fell from his table but the dogs ate them up. One day Lazarus dies and went to the place of peace in the "heart of Abraham". The rich man also died and he went to the place of torment. Looking up he saw Lazarus radiant with peace and he cried out: "father Abraham, please send Lazarus down to put some water on my lips for I am in pain!". Abraham responded: "It is impossible, between you and him there is an abyss that nobody can cross". He could have added: "Just as there had been an abyss between you and him during your life on earth."

This story of Lazarus tells us a lot about today's world, where there is a huge abyss between those who have food, money and comfort and those who are hungry or have no place of their own. I remember seeing children in Calcutta with their nose glued to the window of a luxurious resaturant. From time to time the doorman would shoo them away. The rich -and that includes me and many of you who are reading this book- do not like to see dirty beggars starring at them. Haven't we all felt embarassment and fear in front of those who are hungry?

One day in Paris, I was accosted by a rather dishevelled woman who shouted at me: "Give me some money!" We started to talk. I learned that she had just come out of a psychiatric hospital; I realised quite quickly that she had immense needs and I became frightened. I had an appointment and I didn't want to be late so I gave her a little money and went on my way, just like the Pharisee and the Levite in the Gospel parable of the Good Samaritan. I was frightened of being swallowed up by her pain and her need.

What is this abyss that separates people? Why are unable to look Lazarus straight in the eye and listen to him.

I suspect that we exclude Lazarus because we are frightened that our hearts will be touched if we enter into a relationship with him. If we listen to his story and hear his cry of pain we will discover that he is a human being. We might be touched by his broken heart and by his misfortunes. What happens when our hearts are touched? We might want to do something to comfort and help him, to alleviate his pain, and where will that lead us? As we enter into dialogue with a beggar we risk entering into an adventure. Because Lazarus needs not only money but also a place to stay, medical treatment, maybe work, and, even more, he needs friendship.

That is why it is dangerous to enter into relationship with the Lazaruses of our world. If we do, we risk our lives being changed.

[...]

Why do the rich and powerful -you and I in short- fear so much the Lazaruses of our world? Is it not because we are frightned of having to share our wealth, frightened of losing something. It is easy to give a few coins to a beggar, it is more difficult to give what is necessary to maintain our own standard of living. We feel so inadequate in the face of poverty. What can we do to change so many seemingly impossible situations? When I rushed away from that woman in Paris who had just come out of a psychiatric hospital, it was because I did not really know what to do, what was appropriate, I had this fear of being sucked into a vortex of poverty. To be open is an enormously risky enterprise; you risk status, power, money, even friendships, the recognition and sense of belonging that we so prize; you risk the chaos of loneliness.

[...]

I am not suggesting for a moment that each one of us must welcome into our homes all those who are marginalised, I am suggesting that if each one of us, with our gifts and weaknesses, our capacities and our needs, open our hearts to a few people who are different and become their friends, to receive life from them, our societies would change. This is the way of the heart.

Boy does that hurt! Boy does that hit so very f***ing close to home! At the same time, Vanier's words are incredibly gentle and fall like water on the parched land of my soul.

Vanier echoes my own sentiment in that recent post, in which I oscillated between feeling some pride for obviously being the nice girl in the story, but also an intense shame. I think Vanier is right in associating the guy who gives out a few coins with the Pharisee and the Levites. There is no openess. There is even less compassion. Just the desire to walk away. I felt like the parable's bad guy, maybe rightly so. The following bit of text -my own blog entry- is just plain embarassing...

I always liked the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16. What I liked about it was that it was really scary, with all that sending the rich guy down to a hell-like place and all that. I liked Jesus's harshness in that story. I thought that if Jesus was prepared to use that kind of language he must have meant business. I thought that what seemed like a doom-and-gloom threat of hell was indeed a gift. A forceful way of saying: "Look, just freaking do it. There are not that many passages in the Gospel that are as scary as that one, just walk that road NOW, trust me on that one".

Fairly pleased I was too. I may not always behold the pearl of great price but at least I know where to look. Do your works of mercy to the absolute best of your ability and understanding, pray like a madwoman and then, well, then just wait. You're in for the best ride and the greatest happiness available to humans, be ready to fall on your face and cry for joy once in a (okay long) while.

But beyond that thinking about the tone of the story, I forgot the story of Lazarus and the rich man at pretty much Sunday school level. The rich guy is an idiot, I thought, why didn't he set up a direct debit to the Red Cross of his time? Why didn't he just send someone to give Lazarus a sandwich once in a while? That was just beyond comprehension.

If I encounter someone on the street, I'm pretty good at giving out change, £20 bank notes sometimes, cigarettes, buying Big Issues and what not. I might even go for a meal and a couple of pints if I've got time. But I'm so emotionally unavailable I'm not sure it's helpful. This is a matter for this evening only. I won't give you my phonenumber, I won't friend you on facebook, I don't want to take responsibility for more than my 45 minutes of availability, which really is not availability at all... It's pretty horrible, once you look into it.

Because at the end of the day, my real friends are a very select group of people I like, preferably former valedictorians, well-read, gentle, and damn clever.

This is only just starting to shift. And there is the catch. Jesus' harsh words are truly a gift because, no matter how many progressive books you've read, those crappy prejudices don't begin to shift until you get on with doing your works of mercy with thankfulness and humility. It doesn't even really matter what your motives are, they can be self-seeking as as all f***. Join any organisation you respect and do what it is they do with them. Just do it, zip it, and wait.

Incredible pride!

It's hard to put in words something which altogether is pretty wordless. I suppose I'm only trying to type it up because I want to keep a record, although that it precisely what I vowed not to do when I started this blog (hence the title of this blog: Do not freeze).

I hope my story is common. I stayed out of church for yonks, meaning years, a decade even, come to think of it... I was not good enough, I was not holy enough, I was failing miserably at being even the semblance of a Christian and I did not want to be a hypocrite.

It went on and on and on. It felt alright mind you... There is some serious grace in that sort of path and I do recommend it! And then I gave up. I just needed it too much. I decided to fail maybe but try my damnesdest. And I found my home.

The same with a cheesy little brown scapular I got in Paris a while ago. I'd always wanted to wear it, a permanent reminder of the yoke of Christ. But I was not holy enough so it stayed in a drawer, a reminder of the person I would have liked to be.

When I put it on for the first time a couple of days ago, I felt like a hypocrite and a fake. But I'd felt like that for a million years so that was nothing new and I guess I thought I could live with it. Leave it on and see. That stuff is not dependant on my personal qualities. Just submit, like an ox to a yoke, that was precisely what we were talking about.

After days of feeling hypocritical and uneasy as all f***, all that was left was incredible pride. Literally. Oh My God! I am forever a servant of Christ Jesus! What a privilege! My God what a privilege! I thought I might melt on the spot like a chunk of butter in the microwave from sheer thankfulness. All I wanted to do was fall to my knees and pray.

I don't disown my critical self. Indeed I doubt that my awareness of my hypocrisy will ever depart. It is so much of a baseline that I don't know what life feels like without it. But so far I just about manage to tolerate the incongruency of (hypocritically enough) wearing the image of my Lord on my chest and on my heart. Let's call this "creative tension" for now. I so much hope to be further liberated for His service that it hurts. Cor Jesu, miserere nobis!

Reblogging an an old article by Sarah Lynne

I've found myself scrolling down the archives of Jesus Manifesto for just that article time and time again. Despite the material being nothing new, I find that that article has had more influence on me than anything I've read online in the last year or so. So for my benefit and yours I'm adding a little link in here:

http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2009/10/repent-for-the-kingdom-of-god-is-near/

I'm always the parable's bad guy, part one.

A number of years ago, I was living in Lille. I may have blogged about it before, I can't remember, but it was one of the most challenging things that I have been part of.

I was living on the Parvis St Maurice, right next to a neo-gothic church in the centre of town. I was pretty pleased with myself for landing that great flat, which I was subletting for the summer from a couple of teachers. I thought they were nice to let me inhabit their things, and I liked the feel of their home. I was sharing the place with a delightful young woman who became a great friend, and whom I am still in touch with.

Outside the window was the St Maurice church, a fairly beautiful edifice, despite the fact that it is not really gothic at all. I loved the view from my window, although I was fairly disturbed by the stained glass windows depicting the crucifixion and never looked that way.

One evening, a homeless guy had settled under a door, about five metres from my door. I did not invite him in, but I felt horrible about it. What a universe-shattering failure.

I can't remember if we had any exchanges on that first night, but if we had it would have been along the lines of me enquiring whether he knew of the night shelters in the area, and him saying they would not let him in soiled clothes. I think I came back down with a list of the shelters and drawn maps about how to get there.

It was high summer and fairly warm, but I lay inside feeling completely horrible and not sleeping at all, sort of hoping it wouldn't rain. Mostly I racked my brains about what I could do, thinking my flatmate would kill me if I let him in, thinking I could not take responsibility for the future and that a punctual night inside my flat could be fairly destructive.

Morning came. The guy was still there. In worse shape than the evening before, his pants definitely soiled. I was working on a paper back then but I could not do any work. Mostly racking my brains further. I came back down, said hi, asked if he wanted some food, coffee, or water. He wanted none. He said "If I die here can I have candles in the Church, just for a while". I brought some food and drink down anyway in case he changed his mind.

All I could focus on now was the visible lice on his head. I felt downright Kafkaesque and wanted to drown myself in the river just to drown the reproaches in my head along with me. This is so wrong, this is so wrong, and this is happening literally ten fucking metres from the reserved sacrament.

Night came again. My flatmate and I were increasingly aware of the guy sleeping in his own excrements five metres from our doors and ten metres from Jesus. I was the one to obsess about it and drew her into my obsession. We racked our brains together this time. And then went to bed thinking conveniently that we had done what we could with all the addresses of shelters, the food and drink, that he did not want to be anywhere else.

The next morning the guy was still there. This is France we are talking about, for the record, and nobody else in the centre of Lille, either individual or institutional had done a thing. By now the guy was so badly off that some of his flesh was exposed and he was asleep, still under the same door and I remember thinking don't bother going to church ever again if you do not understand that this is the body of Christ or choose to ignore it. And good fucking luck explaining it to God if he dies five metres from your door.

I had a cup of some fancy French tea, and then decided that by the looks of it, the guy downstairs owned nothing in the world, or, at any rate, nothing he could access right now. So I went to the nearest shopping centre, wrote down a list of what I would like if I was sleeping on the street that night, and proceded to buy a whole kit.

From memory, this included a backpack, clean pants, clean t-shirts, socks, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, shaving foam, a comb, some styling gel, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a phonecard, a writing pad, a pen, a big bottle of water, a big bottle of juice, a huge loaf of fancy corn bread, some salami, some cheese, a knife and wooden board. I went for the best quality of stuff I could think of, something that would have him look great. None of it was cheap, I went for the most impressive items. I included a whole list of social services that I'd googled up, all accessible on foot from the city centre.

Then I wasn't too sure how to proceed. The guy hated my gut, ever the concerned girl. He had eaten the stuff I'd brought down before, but never when I was around, and I thought he was just going to chuck my stuff in the next bin as an act of defiance.

Another homeless guy that I was friends with happened to be there too. So I asked him for advice. Asked him if he knew about the totally dishevelled guy on the parvis. I told him I didn't know what to do. I told him I'd bought some stuff for him but feared I was going to get told off.

My friend had seen him too. We went to see him together. I said, Hey it's Christmas! I know you didn't ask for it, but I went to the shops and got you some stuff. All that's in there is for you, I even bought cigarettes. When he recognised the other guy along with me he said thank you. Him and the other guy then literally broke the loaf of bread and tucked into the food.

That night, the guy was not sleeping under the door five metres from my flat's and ten metres from the sacrament.

It is my flatmate that noticed as she cheerfully walked in. I said yeah, I'm freaking Jean Valjean, France needs to recover some of its pride.

I've no idea where he went as I left Lille soon afterwards. Fairly likely, he went with the other guy to the garage where the other guy was staying with his girlfriend and newborn baby. The social services would have freaked out because of the lice just like I had.

I know a lot of middle-class Christians would think that what I did was a beautiful act of charity. I'm still ashamed. It's not bad what I did. Lame as it is, it shines right up to the door of Heaven. But I let a baptised man sleep in his own excrements for two nights right next to my flat. I was horribly condescending and only managed to do something positive by teaming up with someone who genuinely had compassion, but not purchasing power. I wish I'd done something more. Maybe just dealt with the lice, that would have helped. I wish I'd done what it takes to bring this guy to wholeness.

And I still walk past quite a number of guys shivering in the cold rain at 1am while I'm on my way to my warm bed after a night at the pub. I'm always the bad guy in the Good Samaritan's parable. But as my experience shows, the good guys are out there too, and they're not who you think. But if you enter into that story just a little bit, you will see bread being broken, love being extended and a baby in a garage. The gospel etched into the life of Lille.

Quaking and shaking...

When H. left his career as a succesful lawyer to go to a tiny seminary in the middle of the Australian pampa, he felt so "weird" that his body gave way and he had to be hospitalised on the first day. Lying on a hospital bed, completely confused for days, he was visited by an unassuming second year seminarian every day. That guy is still his best friend.

I'm going to wear the shining rain

A while ago I found a wedding dress in an Edinburgh charity shop. It was beautiful and brand new (with tags on and all) so I got it thinking "that can be my backup, and that will take away the stress of having to find a dress, if the worse comes to the worse, I can just wear that one".

But the more I look at "real" dresses from "real shops", the more I like my dress. But still I feel pretty cheap having bought it in a charity shop, while hunting for books and funky crockery and not at all for a wedding dress.

Then I thought, well, if I feel cheap, I can just make an equivalent donation to some cool charity, like the guy from our parish who goes and digs wells in Tanzania every year (the really deep ones that ensure a permanent supply of clean water for the forseable future and keep water-borne diseases at bay).

You can have a dress made of the brilliance of raindrops caught in the brambles that shimmer

in the sun while you brush your teeth. You can have a dress weaved of the unspoken,

unknown joy even, of a mother whose child will not die but thrive. An ivory dress, the colour

of an old washed out skull come to think of it, and shining as the raindrops

in the brambles on some sunny morning, in the whirlwind of time.

F*ck I'm weird. That was my next thought. Okay, calm down and let's make an effort to think some normal thoughts here. Like what's for lunch. That kind of normal.

My days are few, O fail not,

With thine immortal power,

To hold me that I quail not...

HEY! You bizarro psyche of mine, I said normal thoughts, not launch into a seventeenth century hymn. Maybe there is no hope.

I love that Italian quotation so much I can't believe I haven't blogged it before...

"It is a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with moderation"
Roberto Benigni.

I am the experiment

Okay so I've been reading the sermons of Martin Luther King on the train from Leeds to Durham one evening instead of playing bubble breaker on my phone. I guess that's an improvement.

I highly recommend them. The most striking thing about them is the level of empathy that MLK expresses in his sermons. Here is a man that relates to the feelings of his congregations. He himself was highly educated and had a number of valorising subject-positions which would have enabled him to feel pretty good about himself. MLK also had the intelligence, self-awareness and access to the right books and the right people that would have enabled him to avoid feeling fear or a sense of inferiority and move on to be emotionally comfortable if that had been his choice.

But he feels these things nonetheless, pathologically at times, and speaks to people that feel them too. At the same time, he retains the amazing humility of acknowledging the many ways in which his congregation have pointed him back to being connected to the love of God when he was loosing his sense of this reality and could not find his way back on his own.

From my point of view, there is something holy about being shown the real deal. Something in us that says: That is of God. This something makes the stinky train carriage full of weary commuters dearer to me than the most stunning cathedral. A moment of the real deal.

A lot of passages in MLK's sermons are stunning, but for some reason, his approach to his suffering really resonnated with me. So I thought I'd reproduce the passage here:

As my suffering mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation - either to react with bitterness or to seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the later course. Recognizing the necessity of suffering I have tried to make it a virtue. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transfigure myself and heal the people involved in the tragic sitaution which now obtains.

This attitude echoes the work of Bruno Bettelheim, who emotionally survived the n*zi death camps by seeking to understand the hows and the whys of the human behaviour he was observing. He kept trying to make sense of it so it could be used to help the human race understand itself and connect to its created purpose.

What Martin Luther King and Bruno Bettelheim are giving us is a recipe against burnout. Their approach takes the pain and makes something of it rather than seeking to escape it, or just taking it without a purpose. Both have fought horrendously hard to not succoumb the bitterness in two of the most harrowing times of the 20th century. But nowadays nobody teaches us what to do with pain anymore, and so we are increasingly feeling depleted and unable to go on. Jesus asks us to not fear suffering and to not fear death. And to not let the fear of these things interfere with our purpose. MLK says: Well, I'm going to suffer and it's not going away, so how do I survive this without becoming bitter?

MLK's hero was St. Paul, by the way. He never ceased to be amazed at St Paul's lack of bitterness and wanted some of that attitude (or Grace or whatever) for himself.

So I'm adopting their approach. I'm the experiment. If the going gets tough I'm going to be in tune with what I need in order to not become bitter or burnt out. I will transcend the pain and, through curiosity, vulnerability and child-like prayer, turn it into more love. There is a way out of burnout. I'm going to find out what it is and write it down right here. Maybe one day someone will print it and read it on the train.

And I'm pleased. Because I've been living without passion for a while, and did not have a clue how to reconnect with it. I have the honour of working with some of the most passionate do-gooders in the UK, and quite often I sat there watching them wondering why do I feel dead inside? What have they got that I haven't?

I lived for months with that question, but I found a way through. I hadn't counted the cost. I hadn't acknowledged just how much I yearn to be normal, to buy girly clothes in a clothes shop without thinking that "if they are made by a child, or an exploited young woman, you can't wear them at the Eucharist". How much I yearned to maximimize my income instead of only working part time and volunteering. How much I yearned for the respect of a mega-successful profession rather than having people think that I'm not clever enough to be a City lawyer or an investment banker. How much I wanted these things. And how lonely I feel when all the other volunteers are bored housewives in their late sixties and nobody gets me.

And there was my passion. The more the cost, the more the passion. If it costs you 40 quids a day to take a train from York back to the North East in order to volunteer in a prison while everyone else is working full time jobs and buying houses. Then you have to ask yourself every day why you're doing this. And you have to find an answer. And you have to make a choice again every day. And you have to take the pain like Martin Luther King (even if its not commensurate). Welcome to the straight and narrow.

Four very scary developments...

I've just watched the latest BBC Panorama entitled "Are you a danger to kids?". In it, four things sent chills down my spine:

The first one, obviously, is the threat to civil liberties that paying attention to rumours entails. You're guilty until proven innocent.

The second one is the constant suspicion of anybody functioning less than optimally. I remember playing with that boundary a couple of years back. Basically I'd always been squeaky clean in everything and been rewarded for it. On the whole it is a comfortable place to be in and I wondered what it was like to be on the wrong side for a change. I threw a glass on the outdoor concrete floor of a pub. It was safe and at no danger of harming anyone by a mile. Besides the floor was already covered by accidental broken glass others had broken that night. Fifteen people rushed in outrage to report me, I got the worst explicitely racist verbal abuse I've ever been exposed to and nearly got arrested. The reason I didn't was because I'm a cute young woman who's obviously from the right middle class background. But it got me to think about the attitudes and messages that petty criminals are the recipients of day in and day out. And I hated this society which is so ready to clothe itself in moral outrage and doesn't give ten seconds of thought to the individual in front of them. You cross into the wrong side, ever so slightly, and the sweetest, most innocent-looking beperfumed group of young girls want you punished, immediately. I dare not imagine the proportion of people in this country who would have the death penalty back in a heartbeat.

The third one is the awful suspicion (again, from the documentary) that anyone wanting to work with vulnerable adults is a pervert of sorts. Because "normal" people are not wanting to do that sort of work, they want to shop at IKEA and lead their lives in indifference. What kind of pervert actually *wants* to reach out to the vulnerable? What kind of sick needs of theirs are they trying to fulfil? I wonder.

The fourth one is the scary culture of victimhood that has a grown man crying on BBC panorama (i.e. one the BBC's most watched programmes) because he was abused 35 years ago. I mean I don't know what it's like to be abused or to function afterwards. But to an extent I disapprove of this culture which so reinforces the vulnerability of the victims that they are left with nothing but victimhood. But if you're in the army and you've lost two legs in Afghanistan, they'll get you walking and parading, basking in your heroism, three months later. No such subject position is made available for mainstream victims. They serve the purpose of justifying our disciplinatory society. They're useful when they're fucked up, the more fucked up, the better.

I'm scared. Where's the Gospel in this? It's in my books, it's in my head. Can someone please show me the Gospel somewhere in this? I hold to it all the more strongly because so little around me looks like it. Some days, I feel like I live in freaking Satan-land.

God, being engaged is hard work!

I cannot believe the amount of energy that preparing for marriage calls for. I spend hours and hours researching for a mission statement of sorts that will make H. and I's life meaningful in a Christian sort of way. And let me tell you, St. Francis's rule looks like a beginner's attempt next to my concoction! H. is supposedly doing the same on his part. Hopefully, this should make for interesting reading in the not-so-distant future...

Another great post form Alan Knox.

Alan Knox writes one of my favourite blogs. Alan is enormously resourceful and reads widely across the blogosphere, making his blog quite a fantastic little cyberspot. I found this post quite touching, and well observed, as always.

Training the heart with mmmmms

Since October last year, I have been taking part in a course in client-centered counselling. My motives were a bit dodgy, I was bored on Monday nights and H. kept lording it over me that he had undertaken pastoral training and I hadn't. So to shut him up, I went for the most acknowledged and accreditted course in Leeds, which makes his two dozens of CPE hours in seminary look like the catpiss that they are.

After the first few hours of painful awkwardness during which we pondered on the basics, I found that the training was amazingly rewarding. For the level two CPCAB award, they really hammer into you the ground rules of counselling. A bit like learning to drive, you've got to be outrageously obvious in applying each of the rules, not like real life at all. While participants found it really constraining to be taught the same few principles every week like pre-schoolers, we also got a lot better, more relaxed and more real, with each passing session.

My favourite aspect of the course, though, was the openness of the course leader. I kept pushing the limits of the theory. It turns out that this was quite acceptable, and that, when you reach a certain level of skill, you are expected to break all the rules again, when this feels called for. That is why they hammer them into you during six months.

Self-disclosure is a case in point. The ground rule is "stay focused on the helpee's agenda, no self disclosure at all", so we spent hours and hours doing it it Carl Roger's style and encouraging the helpee to spill their beans with nothing but "mmmm". That worked for a while until someone cried out that IF KEVIN MMMMS ME ONE MORE TIME I'M GOING TO PUNCH HIS FACE OUT. This then led into an hour-long discussion about the limits of mmmm-ing and paraphrasing.

At the end of yesterday's class, we were told that we would soon be ready to enroll for a level 3 course, if that's what we wanted to do. Level 3 being more of the same, but with more questionning, more of "being real", and a series of supervised placements. Almost two thirds of the class was totally taken by the idea.

Right now, I feel sorry for people who've had nothing but a very short introduction to counselling skills, like I received when I was a volunteer nightliner. Counselling practice is so much more than mmmm-ing along like a moron. It is a course in loving people, and some very clever folks have spend their lifetimes finding out how to do just that.

Growing the social enterprise bubble

The other day, I was attending a social enterprise fair for work (actually more than attending it, my employer set up this fair years ago and runs it every year). At lunchtime, while everybody balanced their lunches on their knees, we had a designated table.

I'm fairly junior in that organisation, but as that table wasn't getting used and I spotted one of our trustees in the room, I invited him up there. Soon another guy showed up. Our trustee runs a very succesful children's charity. The other guy runs a social enterprise alternative to Starbucks. That means his coffee is uber-ethical, and his workforce is almost entirely composed of vulnerable adults. None of the styrofoam plates feel here though. He simply does a great job.

Before my very eyes, the trustee with the children's charity said to the other guy that he was looking to sell coffee on his street corner, to raise funds and be more visible at shopfront level. The two guys very nearly stroke a deal right here and there.

I said something along the lines of "mmm this social enterprise fair seems to work alright, doesn't it?".

We then talked about how social enterprises can support each other and be each other's first clients. For lack of a better word, I said we could be like a tumour, growing our own little organism doing its thing in relative autonomy from the mainstream capitalist beast, to the point at which it becomes easy for groups and individuals to choose to inhabit the social enterprise bubble. I felt like plugging one of my favourite motto, the IWW principle of "forming the structures of a new society within the shell of the old".

But then I thought, hang on, where do we draw the line between what's a social enterprise and what isn't?

Specifically, I was thinking of my local sandwich shop near work. I mean sure, her sandwiches are way more expensive than what I could bring from home, so I could think that buying them is a luxury of sorts. But on the other hand, something in her eyes tells me she really needs my business. Is she a social enterprise? Nope. Should she be included in the bubble? I think so. Because a business that keeps a couple of people in employment bestows essential quality of life on them, and this is eminently desirable. So I'll favour a bubble for the dogooders and independents together.

As an aside, society is talking a lot about ethical stuff these days. The tories have been at it for half a decade too. And so pretty mainstream firms are rebranding themsleves as social enterprises because they have realised that a number of government agencies simply lurrrrve comissioning with social enterprises and favour them over mainstream firms. Buggers.