On baby clothes and trash bags...

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

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

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

13 weeks and doing just fine!

Old school welfare state

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

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

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

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

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

The rich, said Stevenson, should subscribe to,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A love to come home to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

La via della loro santificazione*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I: What for?

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

I: Why do you want to know that for?

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

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

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

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

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

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