Volunteers in the Big Society

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

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

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"

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...

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".