A love to come home to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La via della loro santificazione*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I: What for?

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

I: Why do you want to know that for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

When all that's left is pain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bridging the abyss, an early attempt

Yesterday I get out of weekday mass at Leeds cathedral.

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

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

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

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

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

Lame, as ususal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun with Jesuit.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-opted by the Big Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So close you can't "feel" it.

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

But is God out in the stratosphere?

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

How much closer?

-Well like somewhere within you.

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

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