In some corner of England

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

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

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.

Yee Haw: Canadian diocese to begin same-sex blessings

Full story here.

The need for a mentor

The other day, I was in Paris buying liturgical gear for H. He loves the stuff and it makes for great pressents. I was there happily spending an hour or so deciding which stole and thuribles I was going to get. The upstairs level part of the shop is mostly for the general public (pictures, candles and the like) while the downstairs level has got all the priestly stuff. The Italian-speaking nuns were very friendly during that time, but when I went back upstairs to get some incense, another nun appeared, who was just as friendly as the other, but seemed pretty clever on top of it all, and one of those instant judge of character.

Now it became clear that my presence in there, on my own, picking stoles as if they were flower arrangements, chatting away with the attendent nuns about how that one was too flowery and that one was too sober and that one looked cheap and that one was too modern, was a bit unusual. That fact sunk in further when a cyclist walked in and immediately adopted an overly deferential tone to ask one of the nuns for directions. Oh God, I thought, those Parisian catholics are all dead solemn. I look like an elephant in a china store. Or like a carefree young woman in a liturgical shop, indeed.

I could tell the nun from upstairs was quite curious to engage me. "You bought a lot of things today" she finally tried. Uh... oh... I'm totally busted buying stuff for my schismatic boyfriend, let's make a quick exit, I thought. "Yes" I said, sheepishly, and exit I did, fast. It was nothing. But a couple of days later I found myself longing for something like her seemingly wise presence.

I remembered my first ventures into idealistic do-gooding. Joining all the humanitarian societies on campus, and oscillating between the all-night phone counselling, twice weekly afternoons at the homeless shelter, running the Amnesty International campus branch and going to all the political talks, lying on a bed for hours with a newly-diagnosed HIV-positive friend talking and listening to The Piano, writing to a Californian death Row inmate while, on top of it all, my parents were getting a divorce. I don't think I was bad at any of it... but eventually I crashed, and abruptly gave almost all of it up (fortunately, as I've written elsewhere, the death row inmate was writing to many people at the same time, as for my friend, we're still friends of course and he's one of the best, most promising, prize-winning young scientists in the UK).

I remember my recently submitted doctoral thesis, in which I'd been longing for mentoring and got almost none. Noncommittal comments yes. Mean looks for missed deadlines yes. Drunken nights at the pub yes. But mentoring, no.

As I approach my thirties, I find myself chatting to my priestly boyfriend and he's got no mentor either. Sure, I mean, there are people that we call our mentors because it sounds good, on formal acknowledgements and the like. We're doing fine for thirty-year olds. I mean, he's an awesome listener and a very good priest. I've acquired a gentle touch which people around me seem to like. But we're young. There is so much wisdom we don't have.

I'm a bit ashamed to say, but the verses I love most in the Bible are Proverbs 8: 32-36, which refer to wisdom:

"And now, O sons, listen to me: blessed are those who keep my ways. Hear instruction and be wise, and do not neglect it. Blessed is the one who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors. For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the LORD, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death."

Definitely not the most famous or beautiful verses around, but I just love them. In very vain terms, one of the things that pleased me most ever was to see one of my online comments referred to as the wisest thing said on a particular topic. That was three years ago and I'm still massively pleased. But now I'm getting rambly. I always want more wisdom than I've got and I wish I had a mentor. Until I find one, maybe I'll read pastoral letters. But I would love a mentor who loved me.

Friendly young (female) volunteers

Having recently submitted my doctoral thesis for examination (not passed... indeed passing might be delayed by another year or two given the number of typos and approximative statements in the damn thing), I find myself with too much time on my hand, which is a NICE feeling after all this madness.

So I caught up with one of my quaker friends who works with mostly Kurdish and African asylum seekers in a major town nearby, saying I'd love to spend some time helping out while I'm exploring my options. The first thing she said was: I'm worried about a friendly young woman like you. See... many of the asylum seekers are single men, they are very likely to want to go out with you. That would be the answer to everything: the desire to get started in life, the end of crippling loneliness, permission to remain in the EU. Also, you've never lived in a Muslim country, you wouldn't understand the culture, you could really hurt them through your cultural attitudes. In short, you're definitley not my favourite type of volunteer but think about it. Then if you still want to, you can give it a go.

I was glad that someone had pinpointed this phenomenon, which I had observed many times over, and which totally destroyed many of my attempts to reach out towards vulnerable young men, and indeed made the whole situation far worse than if I hadn't initiated any contacts at all. I was also pleased that she didn't dimiss me out of hand. She just said: you're the wrong demographics, I'd rather have retired old ladies, but sure, if you want to be there next Wednesday, that would be great.

Roman Catholic Ecumenism?

I never went through RCIA, because I feel into it when I was little (as Obelix would have it). But browsing through the catechists' manual, the following fact jumped out of the page. The fisrt of the suggested hymn on the lesson relating to faith is... A Mighty Fortress is Our God. And for some reason that means a hell of a lot to me.