Do not freeze...

All void please

2012-01-26T14:27:00.000-08:00

It's been one of those periods. I thought that I was so immune to the feeling of God being absent that it did not really bother me. God tangibly present? That's awesome. God seemingly not there at all? Not much of an issue. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

But this one was bad, as I didn't even have myself to fall back on. Lots of nice subject positions dissolving into thin air. Lots of new and empty subject positions clamouring to fill the void. All I could do was resist and think: actually I'll have the void. The void is my friend.

And I know it sounds sort of smug, but I've got the spiritual resources to handle this. Just because others do not have them does not mean that mine are merely a self-soothing delusion. I enjoy the void, I enjoy it when my mental constructs are crumbling apart, I enjoy not knowing where this is going.

You make no sense to us. We don't believe in a six-day creation and don't believe in the seas opening up and don't believe in supernatural miracles. We find it hard to inhabit these fairy tales as our identity. Our dead are being eaten up by worms as we speak. There was no empty tomb for the people we loved. And it's hard for us to "get" you at all.

Our mistake was to be born in this disenchanted age, with a global capitalist empire that seems to big for us to change. It's not fair. We 're not worse people than the previous generations. We are a lot more confused. We'd love to make sense of you just a bit. Just that bit which would enable us to be your people for now, and enable our children to be that too.

Joy to the world, Christmas is over !!!

2011-12-28T01:30:00.000-08:00

Beth Anne, over at Heir to Blair wrote the following on December 19th:

I hate that for the past six years, the holidays had become a burden because of my previous employment. We pulled out dusty Christmas trees & bins of ornaments, thousands to take inventory. A week later, my day was spent decorating three, four, sometimes five Christmas trees & hanging garland until I trudged home exhausted & filthy. Then I would stand in my living room, staring at my fresh tree & wonder how I could muster another string of lights. I felt dull putting the pieces of my beloved nativity up, a present from Doug, because I had already set up two similar stables around my office. I wondered how I could bake cookies with my child when the sight of the piles of sweets, gifts from other companies, made my blood sugar & pressure rise. Last year, I did not plan or throw my traditional tacky sweater party because after two company gatherings & three resident parties, I was partied out. (& not in the exhilerated way we all remember from our twenties.)

I know the feeling. Christmas this year has been hectic, and at my 10th Christmas service in one week (all followed by socialising and answering the same dumb questions by total strangers), I thought my mind was going to explode. I'm sad to say that this has become a real drudge. We're so Chritmassed out we haven't even bothered to open our presents yet, or the kid's. I can't ever be with my family again at this time of the year because then my husband would have to be on his own. Must find a way to keep it real next year.

Quand l'enfant viendra

2011-12-17T23:21:00.000-08:00

Moi je ferai le tour de mon quartier
Pour annoncer son arrivée
Mon enfant est né
Mon enfant est là

Et je brûlerai la nuit une dernière fois
Et les amis des jours d'éclat
Boiront à tomber
Quand l'enfant viendra

Mais j'irai dire aux hommes du monde entier
Laissez grandir en liberté
Laissez le courir à nos genoux
Laissez le partir au bout de nous

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce lit de bois que j'ai fait pour lui

Et devant ce bonhomme de rien du tout
Serrant ses poings contre ses joues
Je dirai merci à ma femme aussi

Mais tous les chants d'amour toutes les chansons
Chanteront toujours à l'unisson
Laissez le grandir en liberté
Laissez le choisir sa vérité

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce monde là qui n'est pas fini

Laissez le grandir en liberté
Laissez le choisir sa vérité

Que jamais la guerre ne touche à lui
La drogue et le fer la peur aussi
Quand l'enfant viendra poser sa vie
Dans ce monde là qui n'est pas fini

Another advent pic while you're all waiting...

2011-12-13T14:59:00.000-08:00

"Story behind this? Her dad was leaving on a 2 year deployment. She was crying, and wouldn’t let go of her dad’s hand, even when he stood in line, saluting. No one had the heart to break them apart."

Source: http://beautifulwhatsyourhurry.tumblr.com/
Click for larger picture

Faithful to the wind, the hills, the olive groves...

2011-12-07T17:44:00.001-08:00

There is an image that is often in my head. Unfortunately I can't seem to locate who first put it there. Something I read somewhere and can't remember where.

The idea is that the gospel isn't full of cities, grand buildings, red, gold, crowns, judges, priests, kings... It is full of domestic homes, gardens, green, dirt, fields, sheep, sparrows, mustard, fishermen, labourers.

I first got a tangible feel for it when camping out in Corsica years ago. We camped out in an olive grove with a friend, and because we were not lugging a fridge along, we carried food that didn't go off in the heat. Mostly dried cheese, dried meats bread and oil-based pesto. Each night we opened a bottle of red wine or two.

There was nothing to do but to look at the rolling landscape and daydream. That and find some respite from the heat under the not very efficient shade of the olive trees. I sat there one afternoon and I've rarely been this happy.

On some level, I thought that it was incredibly poetic. It felt like we were living in Virgil's bucolics, or in the early gospel narratives, out in Gallilea. On another level the heat dulled my thoughts and the hilly landscape opened my mind. I was operating on another level. Far removed from the petty moment-to-moment rattle which is my usual mental fare.

It all felt bigger. It all felt freer. Sitting under an olive tree with some bread and some cheese, and not even a book to read, I was happy. I could read the wind, read the hills, read the song of the cicadas, read the smell of warm scorched dirt, of pine trees in the distance.

Since then, I've always loved green as a liturgical color. Green like the hills, green like the fields, green grass where the newborn foals first learn to stand hesitantly and where sheep graze safely.

And when my thoughts get too oppressive and my life gets too small, I pause for a moment asking: is it faithfull to the hills? Not faithful to this or that bit of the Bible, just faithful to the rolling hills, to the smell of wild lilies and of thyme, to the clumsy new lambs, to the wind.

Clergy wife 201

2011-12-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

After the spectacular debacle of the introduction course, we did make it to year two. What I've learnt this week:

I must be some congenial easy-to-access type of gal. I have never managed to scare anyone off. Hell, some days I can even pat the wildlife: squirels, birds, wild cats and field mice. I am just non-threatening in the best sort of way.

A lot of people who I am tempted to dismiss as not my type of Christian have huge pastoral issues. I should probably cut them some slack and be careful before saying no to their invitation to paddle in their indoor swimming pool.

I should be careful who (and when) I ask about what is going on on the community service front. If I ask the overworked busybody who is desperate for help, she would sign me up this minute while I was just enquiring and giving myself a week or two to see what I would indeed like to sign up for.

Stethoscope

2011-11-29T16:47:00.000-08:00

Can you guess what these guys are advertising?

What happened to the wedding dress?

2011-11-28T20:57:00.000-08:00

Well, I am on my way towards donating the cost of a real wedding dress to a charity that digs wells in Tanzania.

Meanwhile, I caught up with my old Arts teacher. She had been clinically depressed for years but her teannaged pupils called her out. They knew she had run a theatre club in the past and they wanted a theatre group too so they kept asking until she gave in and ran it once gain. This year they will be playing some Moliere. That's as fabulous a future as I could dream for my wedding dress, so there happily it goes, along with a couple of over-the-top formal dresses I bought in England.

At the same time, I was visiting someone at the nursing home, where my three months old baby was the star of the show among residents and staff alike and was getting lots of cuddles. One afternoon, some sinapses connected in my busybody brain and I called my arts teacher once more. Any way she could bring her theatre club to play Moliere at the nursing home too?

I know that in the grand scheme of things, these are tiny little gestures. I call them "cosmetic gestures". They take no effort and they don't change the world. Compared to some of the other things we might be trying to be as Christians, these are easy, fun and almost relaxing.

They remind me of the wisdom of the guy who was leading the marriage preparation weekend we went to. He said "Sure, you go set up charities and go change the world, but in the meantime remember that nobody can love YOUR family and YOUR friends better than YOU can".

L'amour en héritage

2011-11-10T02:30:00.000-08:00

J'ai reçu l'amour en héritage
Un matin au pays des cigales
La folie et le génie voyagent
Bien au-delà du temps
Bien par dessus des océans
J'en ai lu j'en ai tourné des pages
Pendant mes années folles ou sages
Pour quelqu'un qu'on met pas en cage
C'est un beau cadeau
L'amour en héritage.

Et si ma vie se traduit en je t'aime
Si mes chemins ont croisé des torrents
On est toujours un oiseau de bohème
Une enfant de printemps.

J'ai reçu l'amour en héritage
Un matin au pays des cigales
La folie et le génie voyagent
Bien au delà du temps
Bien par dessus des océans
J'en ai lu j'en ai écrit des pages
Avant de poser mes bagages
J'en ai vu tomber des pluies d'orage
Avant de trouver
L'amour en héritage

Et si ma vie se traduit en je t'aime
Si mes chemins ont croisé des torrents
On est toujours un oiseau de bohème
Une enfant de printemps.

Omer Wells are us

2011-11-10T01:49:00.000-08:00

I'm living my own version of the Cider House Rules these days. The going back part. The part where Omer puts his steps in those in those of his "father" while the father figure has just died and will never again hold his hand. This Sunday will be my last in the only church I knew while growing up in Alsace. The Sunday after that will be my first in H.'s parish, somewhere in rural Australia.

Unreservedly your servant

2011-11-08T18:06:00.000-08:00

I remember my reaction when I first came across a sco-ld's bridle. This was a medieval device used to punish goss-ips, a metal contraption that fits inside someone's mouth to prevent them from talking. My thoughts were: oh God I need one of those, I wish someone fitted that in my mouth until all I was ever able to utter was praise for you. I meant it too. It scared me to think this and I didn't tell anyone. Gosh I'm weird, I thought, who thinks things like that? Am I sick?

Then one day we took a friend to visit the ruins of a Scottish castle, and again my thoughts scared me. God, I'm so disempowered that I wish someone locked me up inside some damp medieval cell until, through tears and shivering and sickness, I was able to promise to do nothing but serve you forever. I meant it too.

No chance of that happening either... Instead, I would always fail and no one would help me, no one would discipline me, and my life would be spent sliding further and further away from my heart's deepest desire, because they are too weird for the time I live in.

It didn't go away. I wondered what it was that had got its nasty grip on me and was disempowering me? Why was I so in despair that shivering in a medieval castle would be the only thing that could rid me of this shapeless thing? I felt like a seabird caught in a oil spill, my wings and entire body caught into a tarry black stuff that was asphyxiating me, with nothing but spiritual death to look forward to.

The only way out I could see was to embrace the weirdness. My thoughts might be weird but I meant them. However, procuring a sco-ld's bridle or being shut away in some damp dungeon was not a very realistic option. So I thought up a 21st century variant. I put a soft hairband on my wrist and spent all of my free time and lunchtimes sitting on the floor with my wrists joined together in it. I'd refuse to read a book or watch a movie. I'd say nothing and think nothing except ask God for mercy.

The only time off was when I was at work, or volunteering, or spending time with my fiancé. At the jail where I was volunteering, I served tea and coffee while trying to remain humbler than my clients and serve them with deference. It might have been a tad artificial, but I didn't know any better.

A year and a half went by and the disempowering back tar did not go away. I just didn't know what to do. I was starting to see sense in some of the op-us dei self harm stuff but my intelligence drew the line. Barely. And only because I was pregnant. I kept doing what I was doing on the volunteering front. I kept begging God for help.

Bit by bit, the right things began to happen through me. All the stuff I'd felt disempowered to do. These occasions were brilliant and almost flawless. I could hardly believe that these were occuring through my body. All I knew is that I still wanted to be God's servant. And I was terrified that they'd stop.

I think that I have an inkling about what the guys at Emmaus meant when they said: were not our hearts burning within us while he was with us? A lot of my weirdest thoughts and decisions boil down to the fact that this foggy inkling is also my most valued possession. Whithout it I would feel like jumping into the next river and filling my lungs with water.

First follower

2011-11-07T03:08:00.001-08:00

I've thought a lot about this little video since coming across it. I'm not sure if I fit in as the initial nutcase, or the first follower of the initial nutcase. It depends on the occasion I suppose, but I'm often early to join in the nutcasery.

2011-11-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

Something pretty huge is happening to me these days that I'm not even at liberty to write about. It doesn't involve only me and it would feel wrong to weave a story out of it. In fact, this is pretty strange, but I don't even feel like I should think about it.

It isn't my story, it's yours. I'm a quasi stranger parachuted into more intimacy than I have been explicitely given, it isn't my place to be there. But if I'm honest it's all I can think about. So I'm just going to jot down my feelings in a semi-structured way and see what comes of it.

Fear

I fear that I'm not good enough, that I haven't got the heart qualities I need. By these heart qualities I mean knowing what to do, how to be and whom to call upon. I'm spending hours upon hours second-guessing myself about what the best course of action is, but I'm playing by ear entirely and I wish I was someone with a better habitus for this. I fear that I'll do too much, or not enough, or not the right things.

I fear that I'm almost abusing you in some way, that you didn't choose me to be with you in this vulnerability. That I came across it at a time when you couldn't hide it and it isn't fair because you might not have desired to show it.

Shame

I'm vaguely ashamed that I can't just take this in my stride. That it's taking so much of my mental energy just to process it.

I'm ashamed that it's your story not mine and that I have no right to make it such a huge part of my mental landscape, because we don't have that level of friendship and you might not have wanted that if you knew.

Anger

I'm angry at the local subculture which is allowing this to happen with noone lifting a finger to reach out.

I'm angry at your hierarchy for not taking into account the incredible loneliness of this occupation and I'm angry at their choices and at their indifference.

Sadness

I'm so incredibly sad that I could cry my bodyweight in tears. And mostly, when nobody is watching, that's just what I do.

Pride

I'm proud that I've been able to break free of conventions and come and visit you anyway. I'm proud I put my son in your arms. I'm proud to extend joy, tenderness and laughter. I'm proud of my imperfect best attempts. I'm proud of my genuine desire to acquire more heart "for next time". And despite all the awkwardness, I think you would have been proud of me too.

Love

I hadn't realised how much I loved you until now, and if this hadn't occured I probably never would have done. I feel like the kid in The Mission who picks up the monstrance from the floor when the priest gets killed and holds it high again. And it's true that kid hasn't got the full habitus, but he's got the seed of things to be, that seed which time and time again prevents the whole mission from failing.

Watching life win

2011-10-25T15:26:00.000-07:00

Becoming a parent really messes with my brain... Every moment is a mixture of extreme thankfulness and extreme hatred. I'm pathetically thankful for every bottle my son drinks and extremely hateful towards anything or anyone that keeps food away from anyone else's child. To me, buying food as part of the Red Cross' Horn of Africa Appeal is as essential as buying milk for my little one. And, somewhere, to an extent, life is winning.

As my son fights off the weakened germs of all the diseases he's being inoculated against, he's hot and he smells different. Something smells off. The smell of lots of diseases that are going to lose their battle. And I hate them. Meanwhile, they're being wiped off away from my son's body and off the surface of the planet. Right here, life is winning.

you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be

Charles Bukowski

Starting the kiddo on baroque music...

2011-10-25T02:07:00.000-07:00

Sheep May Safely Graze by Bach/Petri (BWV 208)

Corelli: Pastorale, op. 6 no. 8 (from Christmas Concerto)

My two months old only cries... when that music stops! Still, like probably the entire population of the Western world, his favourite work is Pachelbel's bloody Cannon in D. he's also partial to a bit of Haendel. I wonder why.

Our accepted codified culture is getting real dodgy

2011-10-22T02:52:00.000-07:00

Somedays I wish more people were actually familiar with the catechism of the catholic church. Stand where you will on contraception and gay marriage, that document's got a lot of good things in there too.

There is a huge watering down of morals and people are engaging in their own reasoning about what they think is moral. I'm appaled by what's out in print these days:

So it's no longer that killing is always wrong, it's not even that killing that is always wrong unless absolutely necessary in very exceptional circumstances, it's not even that you can't kill without a due process of law, but apparently the new moral standard is that people deserve some privacy in death.

Forget all life is sacred; forget that abortion should be safe, legal and rare; forget abortion for medical reasons; now you can just let a twin pregnancy develop long enough for a doctor to reduce it to a singleton pregnancy (by aiming a needle into the chest of a 14 weeks old viable fetus) because you only want one kid.

It's no longer that all people are of equal and infinite value. It's not even that you should try in public to pay lip service to the belief that people are of equal value. In the new DIY moral, life has a pecking order and you should spend your formative years fighting your way up its ranks.

Seriously, my son is going to know that little black book like the back of his hand by the time he is twelve.

Just don't trust me.

2011-10-02T18:32:00.000-07:00

In this post a few weeks ago, I wondered what humility was. My brand of it, it struck me, was just a brand of reverse snubbery. I feel so rich and so loved that I don't even need any pride. Too bad for those of us who do need pride (and need it desperately at times).

On the other hand I've been confronted again and again with my own mediocrity and a few spectacular failures on the relational front. I've tried to be better than I am and I could not sustain it. I've now come to the conclusion that I simply cannot be trusted. The spirit might be willing, but my motives are flawed, my determination is flaky, I harbour massive doubts about God and heaps of formless resentment about I don't even know what.

I've tried to rise above all of those dozens and dozens of times, only to fall desperately short almost every time. Like 99% of the time. Given this rate of failure, I've concluded that I simply cannot be trusted. It's amazing that this realisation should have taken me that long.

This changes nothing to my reverse snubbery though. In itself this reverse subbery is not a bad thing. I still feel rich and beloved without bounds. There is a form of prayer which I invented years ago which I used to call the car boot sale. If you've been to car boot sales you realised that people's crap gets exposed in the morning sun, in the hope to be loved again. So I would expose all of my own crap, for hours on end or until I got tired, to see if I could still get loved by God. God loved me with all of my crap, all of the time. So like a lizzard enjoys the rays of the sun, I would sometime come out of the darkness from time to time to sunbathe in God's love.

But back to my topic. I cannot be trusted to deliver what I wish I could deliver. Whether I like it or not it's a fact. It's taken me ten years to look it in the face but I cannot rely on my own character, and I cannot even rely on God sorting out my character and turning me into someone who does not fail so much. I know. I've tried. I give up.

My friend Dan, in his comment to my original post, made the following contribution:

Basically, I've come to the conclusion that humility is the deeply-rooted realization of one's absolute and total insignificance and the utter futility and meaninglessness of pretty much everything one does.

And still, a few sayings float around in my mind, which beg to bear on this state of affair:

They are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit (Matt 15)

Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me (John 15)

Evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread (D.T. Niles)

A saint is someone the light shines through (source unknown)

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (John 3)

What these sayings have in common, it strikes me, is the relative absence of self-reliance they imply.

The first one seems targetted at self-reliant teachers. The second one is possibly an attack on the very notion of the individual as individual, the third one seems to want to circumvent any cult of personality and questions the importance of person-to-person relationships when it takes up the space of the God-to-person relationship. The fourth one shifts the onus of sainthood to "the light" who shines where the heck it wants, as the fifth saying makes clear.

What I'm really coming at, and what gave me enough hope to write this post, is an intuition that if I can't trust myself, maybe I can trust something else instead.

This is hardly a scoop. Christians are no supposed to trust themselves but God. We know. Thing is, I've tried several understandings of that. I oscillated between the two extremes of calling in God's support in my projects, or getting completely despondent and doing nothing at all of my own accord. Still all about me me me.

But I'm getting rambly, let's cut to the core. My conclusion is don't trust me. I can't be trusted. Don't rely on me, I can't be relied on. Seriously, I'll fail. I failed before, and I'll fail again, we'll all get hurt. Maybe the kingdom of God is just more fluid. Sainthood is fluid too. It doesn't attach itself to a person but to a people. There is a thing called grace and it works, but we don't know where and we don't know how. By rubbing shoulders with God's family you'll come across some of it some of the time. Not a whole lot. Sometime in you, sometime in others. There is no rule. But if you are going to trust anything, trust in the dynamics of the Kingdom of God.

Now this really cracked me up...

2011-08-25T14:12:00.000-07:00

From the B movie catechism.

Towards a theology of disaster

2011-08-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

It's Monday morning and I'm reading blogs in bed. I can't believe that this gorgeous baby is sleeping next to me in his Moses basket, making baby snuffles. His life is so right! So fundamentally good! The love that engulfs new parents is so pure that it must be close to heaven's.

If I had been born 150 years ago, or in this day and age in a place where state-of-the-art obstetrics is not available, I would have been very likely to die in childbirth together with my baby. The pregnancy went overdue with no signs of labour. Given the size of my bump on my decidedly petite frame, doctors suspected cephalopelvic disproportion and booked me in for an elective C-section. Our child weighted in at 9lbs 10 oz.

By the time the operation was performed, he was swimming in grade III meconium-stained amniotic fluid. His AGPAR score the first minute was just 3 out of 10 and he needed heavy-handed intrusive resuscitation.

So now, theologically speaking, how does one handle this kind of information? Is it a case of simply thanking God for a fabulous outcome to what looked like a very hairy birth? Do we give thanks for modern medicine and the skills acquired by men and women over centuries which now regularly turn potential disasters into routine non-disasters?

If I'm being honest, I'm not very good at giving thanks. I've always got survivor's guilt because I can't help thinking of others who are not so lucky. In this instance, the 350 000 women who die in childbirth each year around the world. And I get incredibly angry with God. You're telling me that I and these hundreds of thousands of women were "intelligently designed" to die in childbirth? If nature was left to run its course without intervention our beautiful babies would never even have taken their first breath.

What kind of God designs such a f*cked up plan? A plan that could have killed me and my unborn baby? I'm not a bad person. I do my best to love my neighbours in all the ways I can. And my baby is surely the most innocent being in the entire universe. What kind of a f*cked up intelligent design is that?

I can't help myself. I'm no good at blocking out the negative. If we give thanks to God for nice things that happen to us why don't we blame God for the bad things? As this was unfolding in the last days of my pregnancy, I googled like a maniac about the whys of unqualified evils. Why cancer? Why AIDS? Why all this s**t?

I'm sad to say that the only answer that gave me any solace was someone typing in that either God is a sick b*stard, or there is no God. I knew I'd have to move on from this eventually, but right then cognitively this is where I was, and I was not prepared to pretend that this wasn't how I genuinely felt.

Now I'm thinking that we need a theology of disaster. And a good one at that. Not the usual lame-a**ed theodicies you come across. Christianity strikes me as one of the only religions that can handle disaster, although I don't yet know how. The cross is the ultimate disaste.

I must say that I do tremendously respect those authors who try to provide the best theology and pastoral care they can come up with. Even if they still don't convince me, I find their attempts incredibly moving. Harold Kushner's is case in point. I wish I had the inspiration to write the most pastoral book ever. Nowhere is good theology more needed. And good theology starts with the truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how unpalatable.

And I'm starting to think that good theology also starts with the wonderful smell of my baby's hair. ´

I used to think that if you had not experienced disaster, you had no right to talk about it. But then disaster has a tendency to stun you and destroy your better faculties. So it might be that a new division of labour means that those who are still able to connect to the smell of heaven have a role to play. It takes joy, it takes ecstasy, to delve that deep. And I've got both of them lying in a Moses basket next to me.

New arrival!

2011-08-05T16:31:00.001-07:00

We love this little guy so much it hurts! Needless to say, I'm an emotional mess of crazy postpartum hormones but it feels awesome. More soon!

Assuming I'm okay

2011-07-15T02:51:00.000-07:00

It happens all the time...

Assuming someone's doing fine is so much easier than genuinely finding out if they are.

In the eyes of friends, families and colleagues, I'm always doing great, even if I try to say that this is not the case. If we're being honest, it's just laziness on their part. Because if I'm "doing fine" they don't have to be there.

Or worse, they can use my disclosed vulnerability to load me up with their own drama. So if I make the mistake of sharing some of my concerns for five minutes, they share theirs for two hours and expect me to make space for them forever after.

It's true I'm happy, strong and resilient. I've got lots of resources to make myself okay and to help others too... But on rare occasions*, the entire system breaks down, I don't want to be there for anybody and I wish someone was there for me.

*[Like when I'm 40 weeks pregnant, have been throwing up day and night for nine months, sleeping on a recline to try to ward off the heartburn and holding down a job that's a two hour commute from my home. Like when I face the delivery of a 4kg+ baby and countless trips to the French consulate in London only days after the birth to try to get a baby passport while orchestrating a move to Australia via France to keep the grandparents happy].

If you speak Italian...

2011-07-09T02:47:00.000-07:00

You may now go and read the transcripts of a beautiful series of talks given by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini on the Miserere psalm.

Seriously, some prayers just sound a whole lot better in Italian, no matter which language they were initally written in. I also suspect that the Italian language, and the beautiful phrases and habits of the heart which are associated with it, has the ability to convey a joyful, hopeful and sunny quality to theological reflections which could sound almost grim in other languages.

Furthermore, I am getting increasingly concerned about the lack of curiosity of the English speaking world towards thinkers whom the whole of continental Europe holds in very high esteem. Martini's works have been translated in French, Spanish, German, Polish and many other languages, but very few of these works are available in English!

English is NOT the only game in town, though many think it is. Meanwhile, people who speak nothing but English deprive themselves of some of the best theological thinking there is. Anyway, and just for the record, here is a beautiful (though not very precise) translation of psalm 51 in Italian:

Pietà di me, o Dio, secondo la tua misericordia;
nel tuo grande amore cancella il mio peccato.

Lavami da tutte le mie colpe,
mondami dal mio peccato.
Riconosco la mia colpa,
il mio peccato mi sta sempre dinanzi.

Contro di te, contro te solo ho peccato,
quello che è male ai tuoi occhi, io l'ho fatto;
perciò sei giusto quando parli,
retto nel tuo giudizio.

Ecco, nella colpa sono stato generato,
nel peccato mi ha concepito mia madre.
Ma tu vuoi la sincerità del cuore
e nell'intimo m'insegni la sapienza.

Purificami con issòpo e sarò mondato;
lavami e sarò più bianco della neve.
Fammi sentire gioia e letizia,
esulteranno le ossa che hai spezzato.

Distogli lo sguardo dai miei peccati,
cancella tutte le mie colpe.
Crea in me, o Dio, un cuore puro,
rinnova in me uno spirito saldo.

Non respingermi dalla tua presenza
e non privarmi del tuo santo spirito.
Rendimi la gioia di essere salvato;
sostieni in me un animo generoso.

Insegnerò agli erranti le tue vie
e i peccatori a te ritorneranno.
Liberami dal sangue, Dio, Dio mia salvezza,
la mia lingua esalterà la tua giustizia.

Signore, apri le mie labbra
e la mia bocca proclami la tua lode;
poiché non gradisci il sacrificio
e se offro olocausti, non li accetti.

Uno spirito contrito è sacrificio a Dio,
un cuore affranto e umiliato
tu, o Dio, non disprezzi.

Nel tuo amore fa' grazia a Sion,
rialza le mura di Gerusalemme.

Allora gradirai i sacrifici prescritti,
l'olocausto e l'intera oblazione,
allora immoleranno vittime sopra il tuo altare.

House cats and wild cats

2011-07-08T23:26:00.000-07:00

While I liked going to church as a kid, my family didn't. Neither did a lot of my friends or their families. They'd turn up for baptisms, weddings, funerals, and at times of major life crises. I know that a lot of people disapprove of that approach but it never bothered me.

The way I see it, in God's household there are house cats and there are wild cats. The house cats wouldn't even think of foraging for food in the open countryside when they are being so wonderfully cared for in-house. The wild cats sometimes tip-toe around the house and grab themselves the meal that is being laid out for them.

I know this well because I'm a recovering wild cat.

At some point, I did make the conscious decision to start behaving like a house cat. My reason for doing so is that the house cats have a duty to keep the house looking good and welcoming so it can be there and visible for when the wild cats are starving.

And yes, it's daunting. I'd rather not have that responsibility. But I also don't feel like I have a choice. It's like being dragged into a sports team when you're useless at that sport but you keep getting asked because without you there, there wouldn't be enough people for a team, and nobody would be able play. I feel I've been recruited to be on the house cats team and that I can't say no.

As grieved as I've ever felt that I did not have a sense of "calling", this is as close as it gets. I'd rather not have to be the face of the church because I wish the church looked better than me, but there you have it...

Unsurprisingly, the thing I'm best at is outreach to the wild-cats. Quite a few times I've amazed myself providing exceptionally good pastoral "answers" that I'd never even thought of before and didn't even know I had in me.

I've seen faith, hope and joy burst forth from chance conversations which people have initiated with me because of my notorious status as the "religious one". In most cases, the questions seemed to have been harboured for years but nobody "religious" was approachable enough for the people to explore them.

Let's face it, if you're a wild cat, you're not going to bare your soul to a formal religious figure whom you've never met before (although this can happen of course, usually at times of great crisis). Still a lot of the real pastoral stuff is done by the average house cats on the train, in the pub or after a late dinner.

Hence, the duty of the average house cats is at once incredibly simple and incredibly daunting. Just be who you are, go to church and don't be ashamed of it. No need to talk about it, just don't hide your faith. You're going to get saddled with some of the most deeply meaningful conversations ever.

And if the church hierarchy wants good outreach to occur, they'd better make sure you're the most beloved, well nourished and tenderly cared-for house cat you can be. One of their key jobs is to fill the house cats' heart with song.

So, on a more practical level, how do you ensure that the wild cats get some sustenance when they need it?

By being there, by being visible and by laying out the cat food at a place where the wild cats might find it. I mean even Simone Weil, the queen of all wild cats, was drawn in by Portuguese hymns sung in the street...

That's something Portugal, Spain and Italy do quite well. Church people are visible, their churches are open, and they often provide a table at the entrance of the church with some really good black-and-white flyers and small aterfacts such as holy cards and plastic rosary beads.

All of these fulfill the purpose of keeping the rumour of God alive in the world, and it's the wild cats who most eagerly pick them up.

I've picked up some seriously good, incrediby pastoral flyers in my time backpacking around in these countries. Some of them were nothing short of life-changing, the work of local priests explaining in 15 lines that God loves you and that you're not "going to hell", how to make a confession, how to pray for someone who is sick, how to pray when you're not even sure that there is a God.

So I wonder if one of my next endeavours will be to retrieve some of them, translate them into English, get them printed on some gritty A4 paper, and see if the parish council wants to let me put them on a small wooden table near the entrance.

Somebody tell me just what is humility?

2011-07-02T23:58:00.000-07:00

Oh God, I think that all my understandings of humility are all very very wrong.

It's one of those areas of theology in which I definitely feel less than inspired and have zero inklings about where the life-giving truth might be hidden. This bugs me, because on many questions, I can usually find a good seam to explore. But on the topic of humility, I simply have no idea!

For a while, I thought that humility was a luxury. Basically, if you are secure in the things that matter, you don't need recognition all that much, you're free not to seek it and you can be as humble as you want because you're loved quite independently of any outward achievements. You don't waste any time seeking glory and you don't give a rats about what people think.

Now this strikes me as a very flawed answer. It's reverse snubbery I'm talking about here rather than humility. And I don't even know where to start...

Poverty, precariousness and livelihoods

2011-06-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm on shaky ground here, but I've been thinking about those three concepts for a while... Some forms of poverty are not at all precarious, while some form of intense precariousness do not (yet) amount to poverty.

So for example a monk or a retiree on a meagre state pension can live in objective "poverty" but their situation does not lack stability or security. If they are prepared to be frugal, they can be fine forever and still be very generous towards others.

Precariousness on the other hand implies that all could be lost at the drop of a hat with little prospects for support. To various extents, precariousness can force individuals into increasingly selfish behaviour patterns. Therefore, I wonder if precariousness is among the great social evils of our time.

There was a bit of thinking done about this in Italy at the end of the last decade. It was a fascinating movement really. Individuals who found themselves living in precariousness availed themselves of a made-up patron saint, San Precario.

San Precario informally became the patron saint of precarious workers, the unemployed, the underemployed, people made redundant, the uninsured, illegal immigrants, the physically and financially dependent and those isolated from formal and informal circuits of solidarity. He is invoked against neoliberalism, evil goverment decisions and the precariousness that ensues. That's a pretty cool idea.

People began to print holy cards (seriously!) and to give them out at demonstrations. They look like this:

I like using the concept of precariousness because I wonder if people need a modicum of security in order to feel empowered to be generous. Or whether security itself is a false god that should be relinquished entirely. Big debate here...

I've seen lots of fairly secure (though by no means wealthy) people launch into great ventures. On the other hand, my generation is often accused of not being very generous. But then they are saddled with student debt, have no job security, no savings, no retirement plan, and no prospect of being able to buy their own homes.

Should Christians aim to design forms of moderate material security that do not depend on the functionning of the capitalist system, like most pension funds do, like the church too often does?

I feel for the people of Greece because I sense that it is precariousness, not necessarily enforced frugality, that is killing them.

I often dream of a green and hilly land where people and households are simply able to have a somewhat ethical livelihood that enables them to feed their family and enjoy creation. Is that a crazy dream to have? To work towards?

Must be time for a Blaise Pascal quote...

2011-06-23T00:48:00.000-07:00

"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason"
Blaise Pascal

What might distract the author of this blog from thinking of nothing except her unborn baby's little kicks

2011-06-10T01:12:00.000-07:00

An intervention by Rowan Williams on our government and its "Big Society", that's what!

I must admit that I do enjoy reading the man's thoughts on mostly everything, even if I'm not particularly fond of him sitting on the fence for nearly a decade in the evil fundamentalists vs. cuddly liberals stalemate. In particular, I was massively impressed with his thoughts on 9/11 which are still incredibly relevant today and well worth a read.

So now let's hear the key points from his New Stateman's piece (read the full text by clicking on my first link above):

'An idea whose roots are firmly in a particular strand of associational socialism has been adopted enthusiastically by the Conservatives'.

'Managerial politics [is] attempting with shrinking success to negotiate life in the shadow of big finance.'

'With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted.'

'While grass-roots initiatives and local mutualism are to be found flourishing in a great many places, they have been weakened by several decades of cultural fragmentation. The old syndicalist and co-operative traditions cannot be reinvented overnight and, in some areas, they have to be invented for the first time.'

'[There is] a quiet resurgence of the seductive language of "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, nor by the steady pressure to increase what look like punitive responses to alleged abuses of the system.'

'There is [a] theological strand to be retrieved that is not about "the poor" as objects of kindness but about the nature of sustainable community, seeing it as one in which what circulates - like the flow of blood - is the mutual creation of capacity, building the ability of the other person or group to become, in turn, a giver of life and responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this is what is at the heart of St Paul's ideas about community at its fullest; community, in his terms, as God wants to see it.'

Feminist and Queer theology: here I come!

2011-05-20T00:53:00.001-07:00

Over the last few months, if there is one thing that really got me fuming it is stupid pregancy books written by men. I don't care how many pregnant women they've talked to and how many babies they've delivered, I still resent pontifying discourses written by men. Every atom of my body is crying: get the heck out of our field, talk about whatever you want, but growing babies is women's stuff.

And I must admit that this primal womynist anger is spreading quickly to a lot of other fields as well. I find myself longing for a women's bible, that isn't all about "the seed of men" but the "eggs of women" and all that kind of stuff. I'm sure I could find that on Amazon somewhere. I long for entire passages in the bible that would be love letters to women. It annoys me that we know so little about key female characters because men couldn't be bothered to write them in fully.

I'm not alone in this... Every once in a while my female theologian friends end up exclaiming, quite despite themselves "Will there ever be any bounds to the mysogyny of the [catholic] church?" The same is valid for extraordinarily gifted gay theologians such as James Alison who are having, like the rest of us, to reimagine a God that wouldn't treat women and gays as any less interesting than straight men.

So right now, a male-centric bible doesn't talk to me, and a male saviour doesn't talk to me all that much either. I don't know if this is right or wrong, all I know is that I'm feeling it quite intensely and that denying isn't very helpful. It's far more interesting to explore why this is and what insights into the creative genius of the Shekinah this might shed light upon. Making honey from a lot of flowers, you bet!

"The body was put in a plastic bag" by Ian M Fraser

2011-05-01T23:36:00.000-07:00

Expecting a child was the best thing to ever happen to me, Christian-wise. While stories like the one I'm citing below used to upset me before, I now positively can't bear them.

It might be linked to the low blood sugar in the morning. It makes me wake up every day with a ravenous hunger which I am fortunate to be able to alleviate by walking down to the kitchen. Before, I never even felt hunger except as a mild annoyance which I could ignore for half a day if I wanted. I once did a good job of keeping Ramadan with a friend for a little while and found it quite easy. Now it often feels like I'm going to pass out if I don't eat some carbs quickly. I am so pathetically thankful for a sweetened cup of tea, especially because, as an added bonus, it makes the baby kick!

Also, it's incredible how protective I feel towards the little creature in my belly. I can't imagine what it must be like to be unable to feed your child or to provide them with essential medicines. Just the thought of it evokes a raw, incredibly powerful anger. So I'm fully in line with all the feminist theologians who conceive of the Wrath of God as something akin to the rage of a mother bear whose cubs are being threatened (by reference to Hosea 13:8). It is scary as all f*** and you don't want to be in its path.

So on with the account by Ian Fraser. It dates back to 1982 and in a way I hope to God that this sort of thing isn't going on so much anymore as a result of international scrutiny, but I wouldn't put it past public authorities even now.

"In 1982, Margaret accompanied me to the Philipines. It was her first visit. We saw one of the effects of holding the South East Asian Games in that country at that time. We were in an area which was deemed to be an eyesore by the authorities. It would disgrace the country if competitors from many nations saw it. So although the tenants had a legal right to their property and could not be faulted on payments of dues, bulldozers were sent in and their shacks demolished.

Residents were dumped on the outskirts of Manila, including a husband, wife and five children. They had no resources, no work was to be found. They drifted back. The husband, worn out by malnutrition and worry coughed up his lifeblood. There was no money to bury him. The body was put in a plastic bag and lay around for two weeks. Neighours at last sacrificially raised enough to secure his burial.

The neighbours then built a lean-to against a wall and covered the framework with plastic (from the bag used for the body) to provide minimal accommodation for the widow and children. Its total extent was about 10' by 4'. A low platform kept the family off the mud and had to serve for beds. Five plastic bags acted as wardrobes for the chidren clothes. That had to be home."

Extract out of This Isthe Day. Readings and meditations from the Iona Community. Month 2, day 2.

Voices from the past

2011-05-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

From as far as I can remember, I was out trying to invent new devices and new solutions to the problems I saw around me. I'd spend a weekend thinking my stuff through and then I'd expound it to my parents. I only ever got one answer: "if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it". I must have heard that sentence more than a thousand times.

On another occasion, I was happily butchering a Tracy Chapman song on a cheap guitar I'd bought at a car boot sale. I actually quite liked the sound I was making and was quite proud of myself. Until my father told to stop because it didn't sound good and I was just annoying everybody.

I resisted that one after a while, and a few years later I would lock myslelf somewhere really remote and sing Mozart's Arie der Koenigin der Nacht and Haendel's I know that my redeemer liveth to my heart's content, thinking that the important thing was that I enjoyed it, and it didn't matter if it sounded bad. Once somebody walked by, stopped and told me that it sounded really good.

To this day, I abort most of my ideas, thinking that there must be a catch somewhere and that "if it was that easy, everybody would be doing it". I also very rarely take pleasure in singing or making music any more. Indeed my singing has gotten a lot worse over the past ten years. The Germans are on to something with their concept of Erfolgerlebnis (meaning: a structuring experience of success). I wonder how cool it would be, just to create whatever I feel like creating and to sing whatever I feel like singing without these voices from the past?

Around me, people go on creating things that I'm convinced I could have created. One of our acquaintances decided that the water in village he visited in Tanzania wasn't safe to drink. He raised funds among his friends and contracted a company to build a deep well that goes right into the phreatic table.

Along these lines, I think I'd really like to create links of solidarity between a church where I live and a church in the developing world because the later have got a hell of a lot of work trying to alleviate the plight of those people whom capitalism forgets.

I keep thinking: in this day and age how hard can this be? We need two bank accounts, a reliable supply of funds on our side and a reliable team of people to administer them on the other side. It really isn't rocket science and it sure doesn't take a Geography Ph.D. to set it up.

I can't belive I still feel disempowered and this is begginning to really anger me. A good kind of anger. A good bellowing of the Arie der Koenigin der Nacht is fully in order.

Let me not forget by Rabindranath Tagore

2011-04-26T02:52:00.000-07:00

This poem is a bit at odds with the liturgical season, but it is oh-so-beautiful it would fit in any season:

If it is not my portion to meet thee in this life
then let me ever feel that I have missed thy sight
---let me not forget for a moment,
let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams
and in my wakeful hours.

As my days pass in the crowded market of this world
and my hands grow full with the daily profits,
let me ever feel that I have gained nothing
---let me not forget for a moment,
let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams
and in my wakeful hours.

When I sit by the roadside, tired and panting,
when I spread my bed low in the dust,
let me ever feel that the long journey is still before me
---let me not forget a moment,
let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams
and in my wakeful hours.

When my rooms have been decked out and the flutes sound
and the laughter there is loud,
let me ever feel that I have not invited thee to my house
---let me not forget for a moment,
let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams
and in my wakeful hours

Read the full of Tagore's Gitanjali (meaning: 'Song Offerings') here.

A beautiful quotation

2011-04-25T14:33:00.000-07:00

It would be downright embarassing to reveal just how much of my existence and how many of my better choices have been motivated by that single quotation by Henri David Thoreau:

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Fragment of a love letter

2011-04-24T11:04:00.000-07:00

Like a ten months old baby who wants to walk, I pull up on anything and anyone that’s remotely stable in order to get on my feet and to either walk or die trying.

Like an adolescent who’s got a crush on someone five years older, I spend hours upon hours trying to find out everything about them in order to quietly emulate all I can, every music track they listen to and the brand of deodorant they use. I despair of ever being this cool.

The mark keeps moving and I keep reaching for it, weeping with frustration, but with an ever more dogged determination. Life is meaningless without you.

Volunteers in the Big Society

2011-04-15T22:55:00.000-07:00

I really wasn't in the zone yesterday on my volunteering shift. Term is off so all the students are gone. In addition, quite a few paid staff have been permanently axed by funding cuts within the last two weeks... So the remaining volunteers are asked to do more and more by a management team that seems increasingly stressed out and desperate.

I moderately enjoyed being asked to be there during my maternity leave "if I'm feeling well". I'm already in the third trimester as it is, and I wasn't feeling particularly well on that day. I also sense that compassion fatigue is starting to kick in. It does affect me when little kids are visibly hungry and Eastern Europeans are so skint they can't afford a 50pence cup of coffee. Some days I'm just not in a place to brush it off and I want it all to go away. It seems to me that I might be in need of some TLC. I'd better ditch Barbara for a while, dig out my copies of Regena and Debrena, buy some posh make-up and get into a pink bubble bath.

The reason I'm letting myself be so uninspired in here is that there is no point in pretending that I don't sometimes operate according to common cultural standards that are miles away from what I would like to be about...

So hang on a minute... I don't have to be there and I'm not at all interested in propping up the a**holes we've got in government, especially when the people whose job it was to do what I'm doing for free are now at risk of losing their homes. I still cannot believe that those millionaire b**tards would so shamelessly highjack the goodwill of lefty idealists while doing no amount of volunteering themselves.

On another level, I'm only just realising that I do like to feel valued. Even though I should know better than feel entitled and expect others to do the emotional work of patting me on the back all the time. I don't enjoy new expectations being placed on my shoulders when not a moment of attention is being paid to how I'm feeling or to my physical wellbeing. If management doesn't provide the warm atmosphere we need to thrive in, maybe I could find the resources to help.

Everyone can have bad days. It's just bad luck when we have bad days at the same time but it's nothing to worry about for the long term.

So I'm typing this here, not because I'm right, but because I want to keep it in mind that we can't always function as if we've just gotten drunk on communion wine. Some days the assumptions of the culture we grew up with will get the best of us. When this happens, it's not such a terrible idea to get into a pink bath, or browse the Book of Common Prayer, or both.

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us, and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end.

The Book of Common Prayer, "A General Thanksgiving".

The grey book

2011-04-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

One of my work colleagues is my all-time hero. She's got a fantastic attitude when it comes to making the voluntary sector great and she sets up charities left, right and centre whenever she sees a need. The last one she set up was for dads who, through false allegations made by a former partner, were prevented from seeing their children grow up. In three months she had them organised and had supervised Saturdays set up. This means that, provided someone else is with them (unobstrusively), the dads can be with their kids. Julie is A-MA-ZING.

Once, she told me something along the lines of: "Look Dany, it's our job, we're getting paid for it, we're knowledgeable and we have great networks. If we can't do it, then tell me who the hell can."

Let's not kid ourselves though. She is also very much the exception and most third sector professionals, while reasonably efficient, are nowhere near displaying this level of enthusiasm and hard-headedness. But some are, I'd say maybe one in ten, one in five if I'm optimistic... By working in this sector, you do end up meeting them.

An interesting thing to note is that Julie is not great at everything she does. She sometimes "signposts" people to complete dead end services that may not be all that useful to them. Her signposting drives me crazy. Still, if she were perfect she'd be unimitable. As it is she's not perfect, she makes mistakes, she sometimes lacks reflexivity, but she get things done like there is no tomorrow.

Her signposting is not such a bad idea though, if it worked. It acknowledge the fact that one person or organisation cannot do everything and that the service user might need to be signposted to another person or agency which can be trusted to do a great job. For a while, I've been thinking that the medical first aid training I received should be complemented by some form of social first aid training. I received a tiny bit of it as a Niteliner, mostly to to with exam stress, HIV, suicide and bereavement.

I'm thinking that I need a "grey book", with a couple of paragraphs of best practices under each heading, and the best people or agencies that people could be signposted to if I or the people around me do not have the capacity to help. This is becoming quite pressing now as it's only a few month until H. has to be the visible face ot the Church in a middle size town. My thinking is, if you're going to walk around in a dog collar, then you'd better put on a damn good show and not ignore the needs around you, especially when approached directly. He agrees.

So now grey book will have to be compiled and fast. Fortunately, I've just spent two years as a third sector professional, I love collecting information and I enjoy networking with cool people. Here are the possible headings:

Advice and information

Animal welfare

Armed services

Arts and Community Arts

Bereavement

Carers and Carer respite care

Careers and worklessness

Childcare

Clothing

Counselling

Crime prevention

Education (adults)

Education (children)

Environment and conservation

Ethnic minorities

Families

Finances (personal and family)

Foodbanks

LGBT

Health promotion

History

Hospital visits

Housing and homelessness

Libraries

Listening services

Learning disabilities

Loneliness and isolation

Lone parents

Marriage

Meals-on-wheels

Mental health

Mediation

Older people

Overseas aid projects

Perinatal support and young children

Physical disabilities

Politics, democracy and campaigning

Poverty (hidden)

Prisoners and past offenders

Prisoners' families

Recreation and leisure

Refugees and asylum seekers

Road safety

Safety in the community

Substance abuse

Toy libraries / toy buses

Transport issues

Women and girls

Young people

The work of trusting again

2011-04-07T13:47:00.000-07:00

Appointment with the midwife today. Twenty five weeks and a textbook perfect pregnancy so far. Our son is the right size, has no detectable anomalies whatsoever, a regular heartbeat and he energetically kicks around all the bloody time. I've got no complications apart from an oddly reassuring nausea (hormones pumping and all...).

I'm starting to think that it's time I started to trust again, that I can, again, just rejoice in the fact that I'm alive, healthy and happy. But I can't help thinking that I'll believe it when I see it. I wonder if I'm on to something here...

What exactly is the process of beginning to trust again? I wonder if again we need to liftour understanding of the Gospel a bit beyond Sunday school level... Does "men of little faith" mean: "you clearly haven't got a lot of faith and you'd better find a way to muster up some". Or does it imply a question along the lines of "what hurt is killing your trust? How can it flow again?".

It strikes me me that Jesus does not condemn Thomas' "lack of belief", but provides the experience that enables Thomas to start trusting again after the trauma that he has been through. Same with the Emmaus guys...

Now this raises some issues as well. I'm not saying you can only "trust" or "have faith" when things are going well for you. Instead, as I've stated before, I believe that one can have a terminal illness and have this trust. To some extent we all have it, it's just a matter of tuning into it.

Simone Weil and the "self"

2011-03-31T00:32:00.000-07:00

Alright, I did not intend to pick up Gravity and Grace when I was kept awake by a mighty heartburn from hell last night. "How to raise a happy baby" was more like what I was after. But right now all of my twenty seven baby books are in Durham and I'm in Alsace.

The books I've got left at my mum's are so dense that I never even fancied taking them to Durham to try and read them. Gravity and Grace is sitting right on top of Bonheoffer's impossibly dense Ethik (in the original German, which is so freaking dense that even my German friends read the English translation first). So anyway, 3am on a Thursday and a raging heartburn was a good a set of conditions as any to revisit my love-hate relationship with Simone Weil's oeuvre. The notes I scribbled in the book tell it all, ranging from "pure unadulterated genius!" to "you f***ing sicko".

I'm convinced that I'm not doing justice to her chapter on "self" and superimposing some thoughts of my own, so I do recommend getting the original text if you can. I'd love to link to the full text but I can't find it online. It's a short text which not disappoint those Christians who find themselves dwelling in the absence of God more often than they would want to.

Right at the begining of the book, Weil asks a fantastic question: "How come people never seem to have nearly enough energy to do the right spiritual things but have plenty of energy for immediate self-seeking priorities"? The former energy she calls "grace", while the latter is "gravity". The objective: more grace, less gravity. That is bound to get me interested.

Her chapter on "self" turns out to be suprisingly practical (or maybe it's just my reading of it). Weil posits that all human start out with quite a high level of "self" which in itself is neither really good nor really bad. The self can be -externally- destroyed by evil (she's thinking war crimes and extreme exploitation and alienation) or the self can be -internally- given to God by the creature. Because of her first hand experience of the Spanish Civil War, she has plenty of experience of the total collapse of the selves of people who have suffered intensely under evil powers and also a fair deal of experience of the ineptitude of those ideqlistic types who would have liked to "help" them.

She reckons that there are stages in the -external- destroying of selves by evil powers:

1. At the first stage, individuals suffer intensely from the humiliation and feels extreme revolt "like a fighting animal".

2. At the second stage, when the self is "half dead", it can be woken up by pure love. And yet the experience is incredibly painful for the individual who frequently lashes back at the dogooder. At this point she says it is our duty to absorb some of the anger.

3. In most extreme cases the self has been fully killed by evil forces. The person enjoys receiving streams of love and attention from a variety of sources but s/he is not nourished by it and does not fully re-emerges.

On the other hand, she reckons that your "self" is the only offering you can ever give to God.

When you do, some of the space formerly occupied by your "self" is occupied by the presence of God, which alone has the resources of love which does not harm. Bit by bit the presence of God (in what was formerly you) can at times restore the selves that have been destroyed. It's a bit like St Paul saying that he does not live any more, but Christ lives in him, although Weil herself does not use this specific example.

But that's not easy to do, and surrendering your "self" is not something you can do in five minutes, or in five years either. You can kid yourself that you did, but that has the potential to make you dangerous if you engage with people who are vulnerable. Weil cautions against the danger of love that isn't pure love.

Weil says that this offering of your self to God takes supplication. Now if you supplicate a human being, she says, you are trying to make them see things like you do so they will change their mind. But suplicating God involves forgetting about yourself and what you think and begging God to "rewire" you so you can see and operate in God's way and God changes you. [And in my opinion that can take a hell of a lot of time].

I'm going to leave this post here for now. The stuff I'd like to write about next, while directly related, is not found in Weil's material but in other things I've got from various sources. So it seems fairer to start another post later. I haven't fully digested the chapter yet, and there are some ideas I'm not entirely comfortable with but I can't pinpoint why. Mostly to do with my unconditional allegiance to Carl Rogers I suspect. Weil is way too pessimistic.

On baby clothes and trash bags...

2011-03-02T17:36:00.000-08:00

Part 1

I just met a woman who was storing her baby stuff in trash bags in the dampest part of her attic right before the birth of her daughter. She did not have a nappy in the house. When she was almost due, her partner went to the attic and retrieved a couple of vests which they washed and stuffed in the maternity bag at the last minute.

What this woman and I have in common, besides storing our baby stuff in trash bags, is that we both lost our first pregnancies. Not the current one in case you wonder, but the one that came before that...

H. and I actually fell pregnant on our honeymoon a few days after the wedding. We did not expect things to work out so quickly but they did. H. was completely shocked and stared at the thin blue line for ages. Then he suggested praying, and that thought in particular still hurts like hell each time I think of it.

Now H. and I are both pretty jaded Christians who don't believe in miracles. Or who stopped believing in them early on as we were confronted with realities that called for miracles. They did not happen and God seemed to not give a monkeys. So we deduced that God does not work like that. On the scale of providence theology, we're as far removed from faith healing woodoo as you can get.

Also, prayer-wise we're pretty formal catholic types. Somehow we benefit from liturgy more than what we can come up with "off the cuff". But that evening it all changed. H. was so delirious with joy that he wanted to kneel down and pray straight away, something I've never seen him do at any other time before that time or since.

Soon enough, we were the type of expectant parents who don't store baby stuff in trash bags. We had a moses basket and a teddy bear, and like most first time parents we spent hours upon hours talking about our "little alien". I got lots of books and started keeping a journal.

Part 2

Then one day I started bleeding a bit, and then more and we ended up in A&E. To cut a long story short, I ended up losing the baby on my own at 1am in a dimly lit hospital room. I pretty much discharched myself and physically ran away from the bloody place a few seconds after they'd finally taken off the catether they'd put into my arms at about 8 in the morning.

I was a mess for about a week afterwards, thinking that I was doing the right thing by grieving as much as I could and "getting it all out". We deliberately ignored medical recommendations regarding when you can start again, and about three weeks later, my period was late.

But there was no home-test kit this time around. At some point I told H. that I thought we were back on and all he said was "mmm, let's wait".

But we were back on. My period was one and a half month late and it was time to start getting some antenatal care. So a few days before I was supposed to see a midwife for the first time (around week seven) I did a cheap test, which was very clearly positive. I held on for it for a few days and then tossed it in the bin.

I found it easier to assume that I would lose this pregancy too. I convinced myself that there was something wrong with me and that this one would go bad as well. Like everyone I've met who suffered a miscarriage, I was only interested in "beating" the date at which I had lost the first pregnancy.

No sweet baby talk this time around, no cute name, no stroking my tummy, no journaling, no baby shopping, no nothing...

Then my midwife decided I needed a dating scan because she could not calculate a due date given that there had been no period. At eight weeks, we got to see a healthy little punter happily kicking about on screen. H. asked if we should wait until 12 weeks to tell people, but the sonographer reckoned that this one looked like a stayer and that we could tell our families and friends straight away.

All were massively thrilled for us, especially the few who knew about the miscarriage. So I piggybacked on their enthusiasm and started trying to get into things a little bit.

Part 3

But I could never find the quiet trust and giddy excitement I had experienced the first time around. I had no desire to daydream about what the future held, I opened pregnancy books only when I needed some specific information, and found that I could not "talk" to my growing baby as I had before, even after I could feel it move.

I was getting worried about how detached I was. Every time I felt like enjoying the pregnancy something in me felt stuck. I was still happy at all the milestones. I started talking about "the baby" a little bit more, but that was it.

I'd read in a church bulletin that a service of rememberance and thanksgiving for babies who have died before or around the time of birth was being held by the hospital chaplaincy. I hated to think of my 5 cm long "little alien" being unsupported by its own parents so I went to it. I was surprised to see how I ended up needing my whole stash of tissues within the first 5 minutes.

And yet I soon had to forget about myself and try to tune in to the other participants a little bit. I noticed a couple of starrs aimed at my middle-sized bump. I really did not mean to hurt anybody else, to parade my bumb about or to be a voyeur, although I readily admit that I might have wanted to feel that I was not alone in this.

Refreshments were offered after the service and an old lady ushered me to a table with three other women who seemed to be a little bit less upset than the rest. It turns out that they have been coming every year since 2005 or 2007 and that their loss was less recent.

I shared that I did not know why I was still so upset, since I fell pregnant again right away and everything's been going perfectly fine with this pregnancy.

That is when the other woman told me about the baby things she initally stored in her damp attic. It struck me that my own baby things are currently stored out of sight in trashy supermarket bags under the desk and not lovingly folded away in a wooden piece of furniture.

And curiously, I found that while I had nothing to "say" to the baby growing inside me, I had lots and lots to say to the deceased little alien. There were unstopable streams of affect flowing in that direction. I felt that I could talk to it for days. This is precisely what I'm not able to do with the new baby.

So I don't know where this is going. I'm hoping that I'll work through this to find a fondness for the baby whose mother I will soon be. I make myself look at pictures of newborns, thinking that there's every chance that I'll soon be the mother of a screaming live baby, not an incredibly fragile-looking dead embryo.

The other woman said she was really quick to get her stuff out of the trash bags, wash it all up a couple of times and decorate the nusery when her daughter was with her. I'm hoping I don't have to wait quite that long to feel less hurt and less terror. But I'll never again enjoy an innocently happy pregnancy.

The baby is kicking right now, by the way...

Art & Faith Top 100 movies

2011-02-27T14:35:00.000-08:00

It's hard not to be excited about this wonderful list of films because I promise you, it's not all Ben Hur and the Ten Commandments.

I am thrilled thrilled thrilled that the Dardenne brothers are making the top ten with The Son and make another appearance with The Child. And Yay for Wim Wenders' Paris Texas. Crowd pleaser Babette's Feast is fully expected here but always nice.

In my not-so-humble opinion, the list misses out on Moodysson's unbearably raw Lilja Forever and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi's very honest It's easier for a camel (I really love that film!). And maybe Nadie hablara de nosotras. And where has The Hawks and the Sparrows disappeared to? And The Little World of Don Camillo for crying out loud... As far as mainstream movies go I suppose I could live with The Mission and the spookily catholic Brideshead Revisited.

So in short:

Anything Dardenne or (early) Moodysson: unmissable.
Anything Wim Wenders: should be very watchable.
The Art & Faith's Top 100: not bad at all!

But obvioulsy I suggest they start reading my blog more...

Mildly supernatural

2011-02-11T05:38:00.000-08:00

I don't do supernatural. I'm highly suspicious of all miracle stories, mostly because I can't make sense of them not happening when they should. So I tend to block them out entirely as a made up pile of fairy stories laced with wishful thinking and the occasional coincidence.

But in the name of intellectual honesty I probably should admit that there is one supernatural phenomenon I experientially believe in. That is that if you ask God in prayer to help you out in serving God and neighbour, God will more often than not carry you there. Not all the time, and not necessarily the first time you ask, but when it works it really works.

The first time I experienced this I was about fourteen. I was one of the most enthusiastic go-to-church types and I always had all the right answers in church. I was seriously coasting and finding it incredibly easy to know exactly what to say and what to do (those were the days). At some point the church was really short of children's catechists and my mum encouraged me to put myself forward. Needless to say I was the youngest catechist by an average of about 40 years.

I crumbled under the responsibility. I sort of realised that I was not entirely sorted-out myself. I was not the most charismatic or popular person, and I was scared that the kids wouldn't get it. I used to pray like a madperson that it would work. Every week I was terrified and begged God to help.

And it just so happened that it worked like nobody's business. The kids' blossoming faith was absolutely beautiful, they wrote the most amazing prayers and nearly all wanted to be altar servers for the forseable future.

The following year I had gained some confidence and I was much less desperate. The catechism classes were also a lot less good. I didn't quite find them boring, I was still very much looking forward to them but it didn't work as well.

And so years later, I began to understand that attitude was everything, and that humility and dependence on God were eminently desirable while superficial confidence was not. I enjoyed being "carried" by God and fell into the other extreme of completely giving up on my own intelligence and willpower and waiting to see if God would carry me. It did not happen a lot.

So in conclusion I deducted that I needed to re-harness my brainwaves and willpower to do what I thought was best, but without losing the humility and prayerfulness of this first year as a catechist.

Sometimes it meant acting off my own bat to the best of my ability with no cognitive awareness of the presence of God (and it's not for want of asking!). At other times it meant being supernaturally lifted right out of a funk when I'd started to completely despair and wasn't even being that prayerful anymore.

What it feels like? Mighty strange. I'd go from months of being hugely uninspired, living by the standards of the world, wanting to be selfish, to not do my works of mercy but instead go shopping and read books under my duvet for all eternity... To the other minute having my synapse connections completely reworked for me with no effort on my part and leaving me in tears because I'd yearned for God for so long and had been once again in the process of giving up.

I've got a few other examples, but not a lot of time to spell them out today. So I'll leave you with one of my favourite quotes ever by Paul Ricoeur: "Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again".

The next generation

2011-01-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

13 weeks and doing just fine!

Old school welfare state

2010-12-31T02:39:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-29T03:07:00.000-08:00

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*

2010-12-18T22:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-11-12T02:32:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-27T23:11:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-22T10:56:00.001-07:00

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.

2010-10-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-09-25T01:22:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-08-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

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 !!!

2010-08-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-08-21T10:18:00.000-07:00

Clergy wife 101: learning the (very) hard way

2010-08-01T11:21:00.001-07:00

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...

2010-07-30T03:50:00.001-07:00

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

2010-07-23T01:22:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-07-18T14:22:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-06-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

"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.

2010-06-14T06:07:00.000-07:00

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

2010-06-12T20:20:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-22T20:56:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-05-07T09:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-30T01:48:00.000-07:00

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.

2010-04-09T22:46:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-03-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-03-21T09:34:00.000-07:00

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...

2010-03-05T22:32:00.000-08:00

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

I am the experiment

2010-03-05T02:36:00.000-08:00

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...

2010-02-12T01:36:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-02-06T09:52:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-02-06T09:43:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-19T04:42:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-12T20:45:00.000-08:00

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.

"Your Palestinian Gandhis exist… in graves and prisons"

2010-01-11T02:01:00.000-08:00

Further to the non-violence dilemma, I strongly recommend Alison Weir's scathing response to Bono's waxing lyrical about non-violence in Palestine. She's got one hell of a point.

"For the reality is that nonviolence is only as powerful as its visibility to the world. When it is made invisible through its lack of coverage by the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, Fox News, et al, its practitioners are in deadly danger, and their efforts to use nonviolence against injustice are doomed."

Everyday greatness

2010-01-06T02:27:00.000-08:00

Welcome back, lover of the cute little anectdote drawn from observations of day-to-day life in my neck of the woods!

I cannot fail to observe the following phenomenon: a couple of years back, my divorced mum met a new partner, Tom, who had been very isolated in the decade that preceded their meeting. Broadly speaking, he could not stop talking, all the time, and for hours on ends, about a whole lot of random stuff. To be honest it was fairly annoying, but my mum kept saying that it was getting better, and her partner is otherwise a fairly impressive all-round good egg.

Next door to my mum's lives a deaf man, Frank, who's not got the best of social skills. He would ring your bell every twenty minutes and is fairly pushy. To be honest this too can be annoying and his beahviour has driven away exasperated neighbours who ended up hating his guts and selling their house just to get away from the guy. My mum just thinks he's a bit pushy, but that it's hard acquiring a grasp of normal (read incredibly individualistic) social norms when you're deaf, isolated, and hated by your neighbours, so she does not mind him and is fairly welcoming.

But Tom and Frank get on like a house on fire! They "chat" all day long and have lunch together whenever they can, or whenever they know that their neighbour is likely at home alone and would love the company. As a result, Frank loves my mum's house, watches the cat, and rings her bell to give her and Tom home-made soup quite often.

Ten months ago, one of my school acquaintances moved into the house which lies on the other side of Frank's house with her partner and three children. I urged her to go and speak to my mum so she could learn about Frank and not start hating him. I have never been so insistant in my life, I pressed the point like a maniac, but I did not think she would go. In fact she did. So far she has no problems with Frank and does not resent his clumsy pushiness. She also decided to re-arrange her home like my mum's (the houses are built the same, but the walls and stairs were in different places and she likes my mum's better).

So there I go with my little story of flawed, communicant members of the body of Christ who are all divorced, pushy, talkative, hurting in so many ways, and are having a ball of a time together. I don't really like pontifying cute stories, even when I write them myself, because they are the essence of the toothless spirituality I grew up with. But deep down I know that in that story, I would have been the exasperated neighbour who sold their homes to get away. And so I write cute stories. Hell, Jesus told cute stories. And at the end of the day love lives on my street (the awesome lyrics can be found here)!

Sorry for the absence...

2009-12-20T00:23:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking that I should be writing something here from time to time, but I am in such a bad place that I don't know if that would be helpful. I'm drowning in mediocrity. Flying 4 or 5 times a year despite my awareness of greenhouse gas emissions. So I look out the plane window and see the brownish exhaust fumes of other planes. Denial only takes you so far. But then if I don't fly I never see my family. And adding an Australian patner, and countless trips to OZ into that mix will make it all better, I'm sure.

Since H. and I have merged expenses, I'm not as good with stewardship of my resources as I used to be. I used to care a lot more about the carbon footprint of the stuff I bought, and generally about redistributing resources. Now I'm roped in with H.'s spending patterns and I'm appalled that our charitable giving in the last few months is maybe five percent of our wine-drinking budget. And still, while visiting friends of ours I longed for their careless existence, in a huge pristine flat furnished entirely at IKEA with not a grain of fairtrade coffee in it.

I hate this mediocrity. Right now I just hate everything and everyone. If I hear another lamo sermon by another self-satisfied preacher I am going to scream. I loathe the churches we've got, these cultured social clubs that just don't give a rats about the rest of the world population. Or actually they do sometimes talk about it a little bit.

And nobody's got a clue about how to conciliate climate, the economy, and the exploitation component of it. Just in the UK, how on earth is a charity supposed to help ex-offenders find a job if there's close to 10% unemployment. And most of us who are in employment derive our income from the capitalist beast, directly or indirectly, so Copenhagen stood less than a snowball's chance in hell anyway.

And if I'm honest, the only feeling I feel towards God is hate as well. For being so intangible and as good as absent. I've given up praying because by the looks of it it makes no difference. I just feel worse, worse for addressing a cosmic someone who won't give me the time of day. I'm thinking the "personal relationship with Jesus" is well overrated. What I have is a confusing, emotionally exhausting relationship with some entity that, to me, feels like nothing at all.

The presentation of the virgin by Tintoretto

2009-11-24T03:35:00.000-08:00

Pretty awesome painting, methinks (click for larger picture):

Am I entitled to my culture?

2009-11-21T09:23:00.000-08:00

This blogs contains a few posts that celebrate life in the mainstream. I always thought that the mainstream was suffused with beauty and love. For this reason I was loath to entirely dismiss it, and to try to reconstruct a worldview and set of practices that have no place for it. And yet, my life and my thinking have taken me so far from the French mainstream that I find myself longing for it, wasting time on forums which give me access to the normalcy of others, while I feel forever unable to relate.

So, for a while, I read the writings of all the other outsiders, Albert Camus or Simone Weil, but at other times I wish I could just unreflexively be a West European. It's a balancing game, being who you are while being who you are called to be. Can we love where we're from?

Web poetry

2009-11-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

Alice blogs from a place in France where my grandparents used to live. This post of hers is so poetic that I can't help but want to "save" it in my little corner of the web:

Pourtant elles étaient là ces secondes de vie
la dernière fois que j'ai porté mon enfant sur la hanche
la dernière fois que sa main s'est glissée dans la mienne
ces instants où je m'asseyais à la table avec confiance
alors que j'étais pour toujours ton enfant
le temps de ta joue encore douce
avant le temps des larmes et du bord de la tombe
je les cherche et crois les saisir mais elles me glissent des mains
petits poissons d'argent le long d'un fil qui me brûle les doigts

Life in the maintream: Octobre

2009-10-11T03:52:00.000-07:00

I'm careful not to be "radical" all the time, because I don't want to end up hard-hearted and judgemental. Fortunately, there is always so much to love to life in the maintream:

Le vent fera craquer les branches
La brume viendra dans sa robe blanche
Y aura des feuilles partout
Couchées sur les cailloux
Octobre tiendra sa revanche

Le soleil sortira à peine
Nos corps se cacheront sous des bouts de laine
Perdue dans tes foulards
Tu croiseras le soir
Octobre endormi aux fontaines

Il y aura certainement,
Sur les tables en fer blanc
Quelques vases vides et qui traînent
Et des nuages pris aux antennes

Je t'offrirai des fleurs
Et des nappes en couleurs
Pour ne pas qu'Octobre nous prenne

On ira tout en haut des collines
Regarder tout ce qu'Octobre illumine
Mes mains sur tes cheveux
Des écharpes pour deux
Devant le monde qui s'incline

Certainement appuyés sur des bancs
Il y aura quelques hommes qui se souviennent
Et des nuages pris aux antennes

Je t'offrirai des fleurs
Et des nappes en couleurs
Pour ne pas qu'Octobre nous prenne

Et sans doute on verra apparaître
Quelques dessins sur la buée des fenêtres
Vous, vous jouerez dehors
Comme les enfants du nord
Octobre restera peut-être.

Vous, vous jouerez dehors
Comme les enfants du nord
Octobre restera peut-être.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHNrIiuTbiM

Leeds

2009-10-11T03:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve been thinking about blogging about this for a little while, but it took some time to settle in and I’m still not sure what it’s going to lead to. In a way it’s still premature to blog, as I’m just confused.

When I passed my viva in May I was quite anxious as to what I was going to do next. I applied for a number of jobs, not as many as I should have, ten maybe, although I was happy to let everyone believe that I’d been way more active than I really had been in this respect. But the vulnerability of not having a job got me thinking a lot about all those around the world who shared this with me, and in somewhat more dire circumstances.

I became a lot less judgemental about people who took jobs at big supermarket chains, and wondered if it was true that many in the developing work actually do want the exploitative jobs they have, because they’re better than none at all. The constant talk of economic downturn and the lack of response I was getting from the places I applied to was on the whole depressing, and made me feel totally irrelevant with my ivory tower Ph.D. in social science.

I developed a bit of a thick skin, thinking that sending in applications was very much like sending resumes into the stratosphere. Once you sent it, you stop thinking about it, and you write the next one, maybe at some point you’ll hear back from the stratosphere, but don’t count on it. I told myself and everyone around me in the same situation that we could hope for 5 little bites out of every 100 applications and a “little bite” was not a job yet. Then, on my 11th application, I got an interview. Two hours after the interview, I got the job.

I had planned to spend some time in France with my family around that time, but I shortened the holiday and started on the 18th of August. I was eager to start as, for some reason, my new colleagues reminded me of my Durham bunch of Quakers, very socially and environmentally aware, they were the type of folks I hung out with in my free time anyway. This new job was going to be a big fired-up-coffee-time-after-quaker-worship affair and I was looking forward to it.

The job is at an infrastructure organisation, i.e. an organisation designed to be available for and assist voluntary sector organisations in their everyday activities. So I get to meet lots and lots of voluntary sector organisations and social enterprises. I’m also meant to be useful to them, which means picking up a lot of the information, knowledge, skills and red tape which they might need. The job includes setting up social enterprise fairs, volunteering fairs, and picking up the brains of random people and activists for a database of third sector intelligence. I’ve met the some of the most touching, exciting, dedicated people of this fair island just by turning up to work. And I’m picking up some serious compassionate practical wisdom eight hours per day. It’s like I’m being force-fed the stuff.

The job is also in Leeds. I’d picked up in countless conversations that Leeds was one of the most activist cities in the country, very unlike Durham, but I’d never actually been there. The place is very vibrant but also in many ways very fucked up, it has the best and the worst of Britain, all of it very much in your face, so you can’t pretend that either don’t exist.

I didn’t even do that well in the interview. But I fell into this thing I needed so much, when I was too lazy and clueless to go seek it out. I feel like I’ve been pushed out of my inertia, which I loathed with all my heart but was too discouraged to address. You want to mix with the best do-gooders under the British rain? There you are, enjoy the ride.

Rue du Pont Louis Philippe

2009-10-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

I should remove my blog from google. I already feel for the random web surfer googling "Rue du Pont Louis Philippe" and landing on my bizarre musings, but anyway...

Rue du Pont Louis Philippe is one of my favourite streets in Paris. Not far from it, on the Rue des Barres, there's a cool little tea-shop, l'Ebouillante, where I go back every time and where I've got memories of some fantastic brunches surrounded by friends, and of rainy afternoons reading Zola.

On the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, there is also a small craft shop, kept by a monastic order. The way it works is that Paris has got so many churches by square mile that some of them have been "given" to monastic orders for them to bring life to the building with whatever it is that they do. So the St Gervais church is run by the Fraternites de Jerusalem. From what I gather, they're a pretty benign bunch, a far cry from the acerbic conservative catholicism that regularly invades the streets of Paris.

I spent a few days there in January and the communaute's shop had some beautiful santon-like statues. The most impressive one, however, was a shepherd, about 50 cm high, which they had displayed right at the centre of their vindow shop, with almost nothing surrounding it. It was so stunning it beckoned you to stop, and for a moment it filled me with longing. For all I know it could have been a solemn shepherd carrying a sheep, but it could also have been a visual depiction of the parable of the lost sheep. There was such tenderness in that little statue that I could never forget it, and it propped up in a number of conversations, notably with my dad.

I walked past that shop-window again in August with H., the santon had been replaced by an angel (which looked almost as good) but the shop itself was closed. Then last week, while visiting my best friend and looking for a present, I walked back there, hoping to get one of those if I could. To my delight the shepherd which had been displayed in the window several months before was still there, tucked away in a corner. Trembling with excitement, it took me about 30 seconds to purchase it. My best friend and I were both quite excited because we both found the statue stunning. And, because she's nice and because it's true, she said it reminded her of my lovely fiance, who is also full of that same tenderness.

A day later, H. unpacked it, and loved it. But strangely I found it less jaw-droppingly stunning in H.'s living room than I had when it was at the centre of a shop window on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. And I felt a bit strange for having brought it into private ownership, it seemed to belong on the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe where it had literally glowed. In H.'s living room it was just a pretty statue, which looked a little sterner, and a little bored. I'm sure shop lighting had a bit to do with it.

Then I thought about all the other passer-bys on that street, who maybe had once interacted with the statue of a good shepherd who would leave behind ninety-nine sheeps to go look out for a lost one. Jesus for once not depicted dying on a cross, but tenderly caring for the oddball sheep. I thought about Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, a street which had been the centre of the jewish community, and from whose flats children and adults had been sent out to die, less than seventy years ago. The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe, in whose letterboxes came the last postcards of young dads who knew that they would never see their families again, and who hoped against hope, and prayed to God, for their wife and children to live.

The Rue du Pont Louis Philippe finally, now at the centre of the fashionable gay district, a pretty posh street, but I could imagine quite a few sad souls, me included, walking past on some nondescript days, wondering if God's tenderness was for them also.

I wasn't the worst person to take the little statue out of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe. For one, it was no longer on display in that window. It might be produced as part of a series and there might be several more of it. And then of course I gave it to an Anglican priest. I wonder if someone will interact with it again. I'm really not into auras and things like that, and it's embarassing to write this, but that little statue seems to say, sadly almost, "I was the good shepherd statue of the Rue du Pont Louis Philippe". And this gives art, and material culture, a whole new angle.

(grrrr... I'm ambivalent about this post. I don't like writing cute reflexions that end up sounding like Zondervan fodder, but I'm unwilling to take the post off, because it's got something in it that is quite important and that I like, though I don't really know what it is. I wish I could postface it with Hemingway's scathing observations of the way in which the rich and comfortable kill art. It's at the end of A Moveable Feast. But I don't have the text with me and it's not available online.)

Late capitalist "harvest festival"

2009-09-27T08:39:00.000-07:00

1. A capitalist venture is viable if it costs you less to make your product than to sell it.

2. A capitalist venture is viable if you are able to sell products that are either of better quality, altogether cheaper or for some other reason more desirable than those your competitors are making.

3. The curent order rewards individuals primarily for making their workforce available or for investing their assets. In some countries, the system will also reward individuals who are unable to find work or who do not have assets. This is by no means a universal provision, and countless individuals are unable to find work and do not have assets. To these individuals, employment in slave-like conditions is arguably more desirable than no employment at all, though not desirable in absolute terms.

4. Manufacturing of hard commodities is mostly done in countries able to offer cheap labour. CEOs of western companies who wish to uphold the welfare of their western workforce (SIEMENS is a case in point) neverthless delocalise some of their production to countries where labour is cheaper in order to remain competitive and able to sell their products and services globally.

5. Using the phrase of Charles Leadbeater, a sizeable portion of Westerners are "living on thin air", by largely working in the service and knowledge economy.

6. Even in the knowledge economy, productivity is essential, thus employees work long hours with excessive dedication as the need to be competitive is pressed on them by management. Many young and committed professionals are tempted to throw in the towel under the pressure.

7. In a recession, a number of sincere theologians advocate investing instead of giving. The argument is that many jobs, and the welfare of those who hold them, are dependent of a non-essential economy of luxury. This "non-essential economy of luxury" is the first to suffer in a recession as people scale back their expenses. According to them, it follows that the right thing to do is to invest in these businesses who struggle to sell their services and, in these economic circumstances, do not have easy access to credit

(cf. http://www.dur.ac.uk/StChads/docs/golden-cassidy.pdf ).

8. We are in a world full of abundance, yet the way in which we make this abundance available is seriously flawed. We simply cannot continue to reward only those individuals who have assets or who are able to find employment, because this leaves a huge number of people out and it is not getting better.

Perfect contrition vs. perfect despair

2009-09-17T03:49:00.000-07:00

At some point in the past year, I really thought that God was asking me to walk away from my Ph.D. thesis, burn all my bridges professionally and start anew somewhere in India. It would have been a ballsy thing to do, because failing to submit would have had very serious repercussions for my department - basically, the department cannot receive funding for two years if more than 40% of funded candidates do not submit, and we were already fairly close to those 40%. I would have been blacklisted forever if I did that, but in my mind it was a bit of an Abraham and Isaac moment.

I ended up not walking away from my Ph.D. and passing my defense a few months later. I was never really sure that this was a real call from God, but I wasn't entirely sure that it wasn't. I tried to discern whether I should have taken this seriously, but deep down I knew I probably wouldn't have done it anyway. At some point I sort-of-prayed that I could not even repent it, since I had no intention of altering my trajectory, or "converting".

I was walking from one place to the other chewing things around in my mind, and I thought that St Peter would probably have given anything to undo his denial, he would have cut off a limb for a chance to undo it, surely he must have had perfect contrition... But we are forced to observe that he did not alter his trajectory when the cock crowed, he did not run after the maid, saying "umm, sorry, I made a mistake, I do know this guy after all", Peter did not have perfect contrition, he weeped out of perfect despair.

I realise that I'm on shaky grounds here. There is undeniably infinite value in "perfect contrition" which is a Roman Catholic concept which states that basically you really should resolve to never sin again, and do everything you can to undo the sin as soon as you can when this is possible. But by the time Peter was forgiven he probably still didn't have perfect contrition, and he had no idea whether, given the chance, he would have the courage not to deny his Lord again. My guess is that he lived with perfect despair for a while. A man in perfect despair who loved Jesus and knew himself to be loved, not insignificantly. A man who was given the power to forgive or retain sins. The one stone on which the church was built.

2009-07-17T23:38:00.000-07:00

H. and I got engaged last night. I sort of envy the unchurched types for whom the pre-wedding period is also a church-going high and a spirirtual awakening. For Revd H. and I, church-going is about as exotic as your own backgarden. I guess we get a lifetime of a church-going high!

Tom Wright's overconfidence is rubbing me the wrong way

2009-07-15T06:54:00.000-07:00

This guy clearly thinks that he's personally got a direct access to God's own mind and has an unparalleled personal grasp of the One and Only Correct Understanding of the One and Only Biblical Narrative. It drives me nuts.

Here is his latest appearance in the British media.

Life in the mainstream: Office at night

2009-07-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

I love this painting by Edward Hopper. The guy is a genius at depicting 20th century urban loneliness and the people's humanity nevertheless springing out, vulnerable and beautiful. And I like the bizarre atmosphere of an office at night, when you're working with someone you don't really know all that well, the camaraderie that emerges as we offer each other a cup of tea.

I should really stop posting quotes

2009-07-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

... but I like collecting them. So here comes the next one:

"Dwellers live in a stable place and feel secure within its territory; for them the sacred is fixed and spirituality is cultivated though habitual practive within the familiar world of a particular tradition. Not that they are untouched by social change, but they are relatively well anchore amid the flux. By contrast seekers explore new vistas and negotiate among alternative, and at time confusing, systems of belief and practice; for them the sacred is fluid and portable, and spirituality is likened unto a process or state of becoming. The language of the journey fits their experience"

Jackson Carroll and Wade Clark Roof "Bridging divided worlds: Generational cultures in congregations"

Mystical Disney Song

2009-06-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

Look at this stuff
Isn't it neat?
Wouldn't you think my collection's complete?
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl
The girl who has everything?
Look at this trove
Treasures untold
How many wonders can one cavern hold?
Looking around here you think
Sure, she's got everything
I've got gadgets and gizmos a-plenty
I've got whozits and whatzits galore
You want thingamabobs?
I've got twenty!
But who cares?
No big deal
I want more

I wanna be where the people are
I wanna see, wanna see them dancin'
Walking around on those - what do you call 'em?
Oh - feet!

Flippin' your fins, you don't get too far
Legs are required for jumping, dancing
Strolling along down a - what's that word again?
Street

Up where they walk, up where they run
Up where they stay all day in the sun
Wanderin' free - wish I could be
Part of that world

What would I give if I could live out of these waters?
What would I pay to spend a day warm on the sand?
Bet'cha on land they understand
That they don't reprimand their daughters
Proper women sick of swimmin'
Ready to stand

And ready to know what the people know
Ask 'em my questions and get some answers
What's a fire and why does it - what's the word?
Burn?

When's it my turn?
Wouldn't I love, love to explore that world up above?
Out of the sea
Wish I could be
Part of that world

"Part of your world" The Little Mermaid.

I wish I wasn't so busy

2009-06-19T05:02:00.000-07:00

... doing corrections and all sorts of other pressing stuff, because that book sure looks good: A Post-Capitalist Politics, and I'd rather be reading it.

And yet another quote of the day

2009-06-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

"You eventually learn that true priorities are like arms, if you think you have more than a couple, you're either lying or crazy."

Hotdogsladies

Another quote of the day (or more lazy blogging)

2009-06-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

To the Christian, love is the works of love. To say that love is a feeling or anything of the kind is really an un-Christian conception of love. That is the aesthetic definition and therefore fits the erotic and everything of that nature. But to the Christian, love is the works of love. Christ's love was not an inner feeling, a full heart and what-not: it was the work of love which was his life.

Søren Kierkegaard

Quote of the day

2009-06-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

"The fact is, the views men (sic) take of the atonement are largely determined by their fundamental feelings of need - by what men most long to be saved from."

B.B. Warfield

Which oppressor would you confront?

2009-06-09T04:33:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I engaged with a friend's post about the uses of nonviolence and violence when confronting tangible evil. Faced with the ineffectiveness of non-violent means, he ends up asking himself whether it is better to ask for God's forgiveness for allowing the poor to be crushed while doing nothing about it, or wether we should do something about it, maybe use violence even, and beg God's forgiveness for using violence against those who crush the lives of the poor (which I undertand to be the option chosen by the likes of Klaus Von Stauffenberg and Dietrich Bonheoffer when confronting the n*zi regime).

The original post was a bit too general, and it was hard to pinpoint what type of an oppressor we would be dealing with. A n*zi leader, a local pimp, a "capitalist pig"? So I'm guessing that each reader just undertood the post in relation to the form of oppression which they are most aware of. In my case, it is the systemic oppression of globalised capitalism which most captures my imagination. I read "oppressor" and the first thing I think about when I think of nasty b*stards crushing the poor are fat capitalists, so my comments related to the very tangible exploitation of young Jasmine, who works in a jeans factory in China, and whose experience is depicted in the documentary China Blue. I could not stop thinking about it because Jasmine is really grateful for her job, and yet her job is massively exploitative. The kind of exploitation that makes you want to confront the nasty b*stard who makes her live in these conditions for a ludicrously small salary. So which oppressor should I confront:

- Jasmine’s dad, who got around to having a second baby, in the hope of having a boy, but Jasmine was a girl. She grew up trying to make up for that and earning some hard currency in the big city was one way in which she could do that.

- Jasmine’s direct manager, who implements the drastic productivity expectations of her workplace.

- Jasmine’s employer, who is trying to stay in business by agreeing to his client’s ridiculously cheap prices (less than four dollars a piece for a set of jeans AND jacket) and never misses a deadline, even if it means pushing his workers to exhaustion, on the fear of losing his clients.

- Jasmine’s employer’s client. An Indian guy who lives in the UK and buys clothes which he ten sells to retailers. He’s trying to deliver goods reliably and still make a margin to keep himself in business.

- The retailer of jeans made by Jasmine, who would also argue that he’s trying to make a margin and stay in business in tough economic times, when everybody else is selling similar goods cheaper.

- The girl who works at the retailer of jeans made by Jasmine who needs a job (and pays taxes).

- The buyer of jeans made by Jasmine who likes fashion, preferably cheap, and at the end of the day keeps that particular industry going.

- The person who refuses to buy jeans made by Jasmine and threatens her livelihood without doing anything postive about her situation.

- The person who works in a relatively ethical field, funded either by taxes or donations, and who still ultimately benefits from the system.

Who’s the nasty oppressor, I wonder? I’d say track the one with the most unreasonable margins, and encourage them to redistribute these in terms of better resources and quality of life for Jasmine. But then compared to Jasmine's wages, all of the above make unreasonable margins, and all should redistribute some of it towards her well-being.

It just gets me thinking of Clause IV. You know, the clause that got slashed when Labour became New Labour, and lefties started to largely disinvest the party-political processes to do whatever it is they do outside of it*. It used to be printed on all membership cards. Clause IV read:

"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry, and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best attainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service."

*Some of it is eminiently worthwhile, don't get me wrong. It is a mistake, a cop-out , and a wate of our time to wait on political parties to bring about the tangible solidarity which is our God-ordered responsibility. We're better of developing versions of it on the ground. But it might also be a mistake to abandon the party entirely to forces that move it away from solidarity.

Abide with us, for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent

2009-06-03T12:08:00.000-07:00

Painting by Vasiliy Polenov, click for larger picture

Life in the maintream: empty nest

2009-05-24T00:19:00.000-07:00

Schoolbag in hand, she leaves home in the early morning
Waving goodbye with an absent-minded smile
I watch her go with a surge of that well-known sadness
And I have to sit down for a while

The feeling that I'm losing her forever
And without really entering her world
I'm glad whenever I can share her laughter
That funny little girl

Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see whats in her mind
Each time I think I'm close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time

Sleep in our eyes, her and me at the breakfast table
Barely awake, I let precious time go by
Then when shes gone theres that odd melancholy feeling
And a sense of guilt I can't deny

What happened to the wonderful adventures
The places I had planned for us to go
(slipping through my fingers all the time)
Well, some of that we did but most we didn't
And why I just don't know

Slipping through my fingers all the time
I try to capture every minute
The feeling in it
Slipping through my fingers all the time
Do I really see whats in her mind
Each time I think I'm close to knowing
She keeps on growing
Slipping through my fingers all the time

Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture
And save it from the funny tricks of time
Slipping through my fingers...
Slipping through my fingers all the time

Music & Lyrics: ABBA

In some corner of England

2009-05-09T01:47:00.001-07:00

Our q**ker congregation has a process called "afterthoughts". After the meeting, people stand up and share whatever they want to share with the congregation, when somehow they don't feel like it's actual ministry straight from the Holy Spirit (in which case you share right in the middle worship, and feel free to quake, too). So the other day, I had actually been to volunteer with my friend, and had been very impressed. This is the best run drop-in I have ever seen! It's held in the hall of a catholic church. It's attended by hundreds of folks who look forward to it every week.

The volunteers lay up an enormous banquet made of whatever the surrounding shops give us for free + we have a budget to complete with things that people like (pizza, mostly) + the little old ladies always bring lovingly crafted cakes and extra delicacies (like expensive sweets and chocolate), with the result that our banquet table looks better than a freaking wedding.

In the room, there are games of pool and table-tennis and the catholic church lends its kids' games (they've got lots, and the kids love it). Various services have been invited to set up a table in the room too. So there's the association that teaches computing skills in one corner, they set up five laptops with free internet access. There is the National Health Service in another corner, there to inform people about their right to FREE health care at the point of need, no matter who they are and how to get that. There is the employment service (JobCentrePlus, that sends specially trained staff to help refugees enter employment). There is a specialist for asylum seeking applications (she deals with Section Four, which is a sum of money you can claim while applying for asylum) and various other associations. Because there are almost too many volunteers, we make tea and coffee for about ten minutes, and then go about in the room to have a piece of cake (and ward off the marriage proposals).

On the human side, I was really impressed with my friend. You know, I had been rash to judge her as a posh lady who had trvalled around the world doing good to poor people with her husband. I didn't think she'd be all that great (in my simple mind posh and older = not good). And she's A-MA-ZING. On the whole she's got a very small pension, which is half what my Ph.D. was. Turns out she gives a huge part of it away to people at the drop in who have no resources at all. She pretends it's from us (the q**ker congregation) while in fact, I'd be surprised if we gave more than ten quid on any given Sunday -members give to their own preferred charity, or even to the q**kers, in private). Of all the volunteers, she is the one who knows everyone by name, and knows their story too.

Quite a lot of the people who attend have escaped brutal wars. One woman in particular has been raped and has lost most of her family in the Somalian conflict. When she arrived she was very very broken. But her kid loves playing with the other kids, and so she keeps coming. As I was there, she asked my friend whether she would take her and the kid to Newcastle to do kids activities, and to have tea and cakes somewhere. My friend volunteered her whole saturday and started making plans. It's inspiring to see how much the woman wants that kid to be happy. The kid is a drop-dead beautiful little girl. Yay for human love!

So the other day in afterthoughts, I popped up and said all this. I said you know those five quid you leave in the collection box every week or so. We always support the same charity and isn't it boring after a while? Well I'll tell you what happens to them. They will be given directly to someone for them to buy food, toiletries, and charity-shop clothes. I talked about the drop-in and how it worked, just generally, for two or three minutes.

Five minutes later, the collection box was full of banknotes, and two women -shy ones who could use some company- were going to start volunteering there the next week. My friend wiped away a tear: "you know they're tired of me telling them the same thing every week. You said it in such a fresh way...".

All hyped up in Lefty theory

2009-05-05T12:04:00.000-07:00

For two years in a row, during Easter time, I thought I recognised in Easter Homilies and Easter messages the traces of conversations I've had with the priests who delivered them. So tonight the conversation with H. went along those lines:

D. Hey H., that guy from your diocese is pretty hooked on Liberationist theology, see all this talk of preferential option, of alternative community, that's amazing coming from him, in his freaking Easter message!

H. I'm sure he did not write it.

D. Yeah well, he signed it. And I like whoever wrote it.

I'm excited because that's what I'm on about right? I tell anyone who will listen about the stuff. And I'm enthusiastic enough to make the stuff pretty intriguing. I witness folks picking it up and, in no time, they start talking around like they've spent the last five years in Guatemala. Oh well, Liberation theology IS intriguing, it's pretty compelling and I think it's got a healthy dose of sheer TRUTH to it, so let the people rejoice!

"There goes my little Chardonnay Socialist", H says. H is not getting into any theory and it's not for lack of trying on my part. He's in the business of keeping the church alive and solvent in his diocese, and of getting drunk with guys who never thought they'd catch themselves liking a priest. And that's it thank you very much.

He says his first mission is to be who he is, and to be openly Christian. That's what he's done even before getting ordained, he was "the one that went to church on sundays". I tried that too. With the result of having friends ask me if I'd go to church with them. I said no way, repent or go to hell, that's what I said, but I did it lovingly :-).

I don't know why I'm not keen on people taking up the liberationist agenda (and this includes me) and then racking their brains about what they can do for "the poor" when the answer is often not much. Sure, we can give more time and money, we can individually and collectively be more welcoming of others. We can choose to be located in a spot where we will meet a lot less privilege than we are used to encountering.

But once we're there and we're doing that, the recipe is the same as elsewhere. Keep the rumour of God present among God's people, get in the way of oppression and abuse when you can, love everyone the best you can and hope for the resurrection. There's a time for getting all hyped up with theory, and there's a time when theory -while still painfully relevant- becomes the paradigmatic background of what you do, not the foreground.

Satt und Selig

2009-05-03T14:24:00.000-07:00

Satt und selig is the name of a restaurant in Berlin (Spandau), situated opposite a rather large, beautiful church. The name is derives from a German saying and means full (as if: full after a good meal) and blessed. This name has annoyed me for a while. Or rather it didn’t. It was just that it triggered some reaction, both positive and negative and I could not pinpoint what they were.

Simone Weil, who herself never took part in communion (she felt unworthy or something), noticed the blessedness of those who did, expressed in beatific smiles of which the concerned were not always aware. I’ve noticed that a few times too. Furthermore, I’ve observed this in Germany but I’m sure it is the case everywhere; the regular churchgoers follow mass with a meal, at the Biergarten or at home, and a relaxed afternoon. By all definitions they (we) are satt und selig.

This is further complemented by keeping up with church seasons and feasts and giving the home a distinctively churchy atmosphere. I’m not above any of this, and I have been known to pass a couple of holy cards to friends before the birth of a child which was making them anxious, or to hide an icon in a bouquet of flowers if I thought this would be welcome, or sticking a resolute Easter flag in my mum’s kitchen while she was mourning for the death of her last parent and going through a bit of a churchy phase anyway. In H.’s terms, it’s keeping the rumour of a Loving God alive in an overly secularised society, not in itself the worst thing you could do.

I can’t help the joy. I can’t help the healing. That’s just what church does to me and to people (hopefully). But I wonder if I’m overdoing it. It’s easy to fall into complacency from this perspective. We become the happy-go-lucky Christians full of their blessed certainties and lose the ability to feel for those who are not inhabiting these certainties in quite the same ways. And as much joy as we derive from the Easter period, what I really wish I could gain was empowerment to inhabit hurt also. A joy that is so certain that it doesn’t need to be felt. A joy that is so great that it loathes sin somehow.

Maybe I’m a bit of a sicko, but I think I get why some saints sometimes inflicted physical pain on themselves (WHICH I DO NOT ADVOCATE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES FOR ME OR FOR ANYONE). Somehow they were grieved by their propensity to sin, and they were trying to get out of it. It’s hard to be grieved by sin when you’re just plain happy. And I think that it is also hard to be truly compassionate. I cannot count the time when I’ve exited church on a Sunday, in squeaky clean clothes and surrounded by good friends who love me and whom I love, only to become painfully aware of the street life around the church.

And so my stand on satt und selig? I don’t know what it is. Not in itself bad, surely. But can you be too strong, can you be too secure? One of H.’s teachers once told him the following: “you know, the congregation does not want you to be busy doing things. But when their life falls apart you’ve got to be compassionate and a solid presence. The way to do this is to be grounded in prayer, not frantic parish improvement”.

Now, just what is the relationship between the blessedness of being who we are as Christians and the ability to journey into hurt interests me. The more I enter the Christian life, the more solid I become, and this scares me. I never wanted to be solid. I wanted to be vulnerable. By becoming all satt und selig I’m losing some of the rawness which I actually like but I’m gaining a strength and stability which I (and others) can draw on.

Having all. I’m just too happy because I have all. To be of infinite worth to God (as is each and every human being) and to know it. Bliss. Maybe the progression is to start by having all and self-empty until the “all” is barely visible and hardly ever felt, but it is there nevertheless like an Ariadne’s thread. Self-empty until even the Ariadne thread breaks. Until I'm lost again.