A long way from home

A man from Japan, in Tsunami's wake, asked me to help him inscribe the book of condolences in English. I could help him with the language, the spelling, but not the sentiment. It was coursing through his veins, the blood of his own people.


He introduced himself as a serious man: an admirer, follower, worshipper of Jesus, the awkwardness of words made it hard to tell. He said he was lonely, but did he mean alone, or individual? He read the Bible at home, he said. Belonged to no church or fellowship.


He reminded me so much of Philip Larkin's description of a church as a serious house on serious earth. The fact that our encounter was in a cathedral seemed at once incidental and yet of great importance. Our communion, though imperfect, was serious.


As he left he asked me to take a photograph with his camera - of him overshadowed by this great pile of stone, "this special shell". It was a pillar of grief.

Let's hear it

We had to disturb Daniel the other night as we took to our bed. Aged six, he has never had the power of speech. He needed attention before he could settle finally and cleanly to his slumbers. He surfaced briefly to consciousness as I bent to plant upon his forehead a goodnight kiss. Seeing me he clapped his hands excitedly. I clapped mine. 

That's how he learned to clap. By copying me.

So we applauded each other. Then it was back peacefully to sleep.

He claps because I first clapped him.

Very nearly biblical.

A great big shame

My theological pulse has been quickened once again by a visit to a good and thoughtful friend, and by watching the discussion on BBC TV's The Big Question about the Japanese earthquake.

This is my angle.

If a God existed who had created a world like ours, and then allowed people like us to be born, to live, to suffer and die in such a world, then that God would be the very devil. There is in the New Testament both reference and allusion to Satan as the God of this world.


Now watch Brian Cox and The Wonders of the Universe. It's a wonderfully illustrated account of the origins and history of the universe. I have my problems with it. For one thing he talks as if the universe and even time itself could have something we could sensibly call a beginning and end. I don't get this.


But I do think Professor Cox accurately describes the pitiless and pointless world we inhabit. The idea that any kind of divine being might have created it - is diabolical.

Beware of the Bidet

My first close acquaintance with a bidet was when we moved into our present home, just over ten years ago. It has become an unalterable part of my daily routine. I can barely imagine how previously, without these ablutions, my nearer presence was even tolerable.

Today however I have one small cause for regret. Something not so much as hinted at in any risk assessment I have seen.

A scar to my forehead.

Which leaves me asking - Am I doing it wrong? 

Antenatal or Antinatal?

The radio announcer, a woman, jokingly remarked that if men had the babies the human race would cease to be.

I asked myself why that would be a bad thing.

The only answer that would satisfy me is in relation to the eternal purpose of God. Without such faith I have no answer. Human reproduction, it seems to me, is that serious.

Fortunately my own deciding about such matters is in the distant past. I do not see myself following my great-great uncle William who fathered two children in his seventies with a wife in her thirties.

Bless.

An inverted bowl

A sane person believes firmly in the uselessness of thinking about what she does not understand.


It does not seem to me that there is anything in the life of the average man, even of the modern intellectual man, which would not go on just as well, and perhaps a little more comfortably, if tribal custom happened to dictate belief in an inverted bowl overhead.


Thus spake Celia Green.


Thus spake my wife, on hearing the announcement of a TV programme about the origins of the universe:


"What on earth has that got to do with me?"

Reading Time

Last night our Book Group met.

Reading books reminds me of my mortality in that part of my enjoyment of a book is the feeling that if I like it, or don't fully understand it, I can read it again. And if it stimulates an interest in something I haven't discovered before, or sets me thinking in a new way, I have time to pursue it further.

I can remember when such future opportunities seemed endless. The growing awareness that they are not robs me of an innocent pleasure.

The Price

Returning from a lecture on the history of Manchester Cathedral I read this account of that part of Manchester my ancestors would have been familiar with:

"Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air - and such air! - he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch."
From Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), pp. 45, 48-53.

For crying out loud

When Daniel's mummy and daddy came to take him home for Christmas, he cried. He was born with a brain abnormality known as lissencephaly which has left him at the age of six still unable to speak. What precisely he is trying to communicate about anything is always therefore partly a matter of guesswork.


So what was he crying for?


We feel sure it wasn't simply because he wanted to stay, or not to go. His cry seemed to be as much of bewilderment as of protest. The tears I saw were shed out of helplessness in a world out of control - the human condition.


Daniel is not able to utter a single word. He cannot express himself verbally. He cannot speak. Many of us can - but don't - mainly because it is too difficult or painful. But somehow Daniel's lack of articulacy is the clearest articulation of his distress.

Body and soul

What I miss most about being a regular Christian is the thing I always had the most difficulty with - the practice of prayer.


Victor Hugo wrote, 'There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.'


My problem was not, was never, how to pray, but how to stop praying. And so it remains. My soul is still on its knees.

Escaping from reality

How to spend the rest of his days freed now from the responsibility of earning a living and raising a family? Short of a major disaster in the national economy he has quite enough to pay his bills and meet his needs and even more surely provide for his wants till kingdom come - his kingdom at least. (He had made due provision for his darling spouse should she be fortunate or unfortunate, about that you must ask her, enough to survive me.)

In the meantime, what should he do? Become a spectator, or a passenger, seek to be entertained, amused, or travel the world and see its far-flung beauties? Or join in the human evasion through social or political activity?

Something odd here. If he takes up a hobby or pastime, or joins a club that gets him out and meeting people, it will be perceived by others as a personal achievement, a mark of sanity. If he stays in and devotes time and thought to solving the riddle of existence, and perhaps becoming disillusioned and discouraged by what he finds, he will be seen as escaping from reality - the very reality he is trying to understand.

Religious sense and innocence

Watching 'Songs of Praise' last night I was overcome by a sense of lost innocence. Worse, when I looked into the sweetly sympathetic, staring eyes of Richard Coles as he interviewed the woman speaking expertly about hymns I realised that I have never been able to emanate that gaze.

Down the years people have come to me as a priest looking for someone to confirm them in their religious innocence, indeed somehow to reinforce it. I have tried hard not to disappoint them.

But finally, perhaps long since, I have reached the point where all I can do honestly is share with them my own sense of religious loss, trusting that they will be as sensitive to my bereavement as I have always sought to be to theirs. 

Members only

In our society you are lucky to find someone who cares for your individuality, your subjectivity, what is peculiar, different, unique about you. People are more likely to be scared than attracted by these things. They prefer you to be sociable, clubbable, easy-going, undemanding, unknowing, unreflective, uncritical, unchallenging - one of them.

Life after therapy

Before therapy I used mainly to think.
My therapist (and Wittgenstein) said, ‘Don’t think. Look.’
So I tried to cut down on my thinking.
Apologised for thinking too much.
Since therapy
I have learned
To think and look
And think again.

Before therapy
My mother said
You can’t do better than your best.
In therapy I learned
To do less than my best
And be happy with it.
Since therapy
I have decided (thoughtfully)
That only my best is good enough.

How are you?

Sorry to be all introspective and gloomy, but it is the season to be jolly.

Someone asked me, "Are you OK?"

Few people have any idea how much energy and effort I have expended throughout my life in an attempt to persuade myself and the world at large that I am indeed OK - when for the most part I don't even know what being OK actually means.

Sometimes people respond to such solicitude by saying, "I'm as well as can be expected under the circumstances."

But what if those circumstances are the conditions of human existence: darkness, ignorance, finiteness, helplessness? What if the ingredients of this particular festive dish include disappointment, disillusion, the weight of unfulfilled social expectations?

Oh, did I tell you by the way? I'm down with the flu.

A Christmas Helping of Quentin Crisp

"I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds."

Exposed

Thus saith Julie Burchill:

"Show me a man who loves football and nine times out of ten you'll be pointing at a really bad shag."

Whereupon I feel I must confess that last night I watched the whole of the Man City v Man United game on TV.

Why do people want to have children?

When I shared my puzzlement about this with my therapist she took it as evidence that I was still inclined to think too much about things. She said with impatient tone that people always had wanted to have children, without even thinking about it. In effect - Go with the flow. Not advice that an intellectual protestant like me finds easy to accept.

But why DO people want to have children?

And why are so many of my otherwise thoughtful friends using their Facebook page chiefly as a birth announcement gazette, with pictures?

As a wise person once wrote: People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

Disturbance

Seeing that the world - reality - is so disturbing, why are so few people obviously disturbed?

 

And why do we treat people who are obviously disturbed so harshly?

Really

This morning, while it was still dark, I heard the cry of a child we look after.

I was at home. He was miles away at his home.

I heard him because I was listening for him.

Did I really hear him?

What does it mean to say that I didn't really hear him?