Reader, I Married Him: Living with Christian Unity

Simply Messy

20 “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 

John 17:20-21 (NRSV)

Fifteen years ago, my mother had a premonition that I would meet my future significant other at one of two religious events that summer: the World Gathering of Young Friends, a week-long gathering of young Quakers from around the globe; or an ecumenical conference at Iona Abbey entitled “Breaking Down Dividing Walls in the 21st Century”, which brought together young people from throughout the UK, from different Christian denominations, to talk about our differences and learn from one another in community.

At the same time, in a far away county, another mother had a very similar premonition: that her son would meet his future significant other at one of two religious events that summer: attending the Catholic World Youth Day as a very interested Anglican observer; or attending an ecumenical conference at Iona Abbey entitled “Breaking Down Dividing Walls in the 21st Century”.

As will be of no surprise to anyone who knows either of our mothers, it turns out they were both entirely right, and my future husband and I did indeed meet on that beautiful, far-flung Scottish island, and have been talking about our differences and learning from one another in community ever since. I had never been to Mass. He thought he knew all about silence as worship already. I stood firm in the interpretation of Quaker communities as a priesthood of all believers, and saw Catholics as bringing goddess-worship back into the Christian fold. He believed in the literal and perpetual virginity of Mary, and not in the ordination of women. It was, shall we say, a bumpy ride to learn to listen to one another with love, with respect, with acceptance without agreement. Now, in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, I am trying to put into words some of what this process has taught me, some of what I would rather ignore, and some of what I can’t avoid, despite my firmest intentions, because every time I try, it beats me over the head and refuses to give up instead.

Unity takes practise. The order of our social engagements in that rosy, hazy summer struck me much, much later. Both of us arrived in Scotland fueled with the enthusiasm of months of talking about and experiencing our own faith with others – those with similar ways of practising that faith, and those with very different ways of doing it, who still broadly came under the same banner. We had spent time exploring what was significant to us and explaining it to others, across language barriers, cultural expectations, and experiential divides. Our tongues were already in the habit of finding new ways and new words for old and comfortable traditions. Not such a leap, then, to move on to rockier, scarier terrain with those who did not already share that mutual language and tradition.

Conviction without condemnation. In a world of post-truth, and convictions that are made or broken on the back of one throw-away tweet, it is a constant struggle to hold to your own convictions, speak them and share them with others, without inviting or offering condemnation. To be able to say “I think this, and you think that. We utterly disagree, and that’s OK.” To be able to learn from each other, to share cultural understanding and religious heritage, to be able to learn more about your own faith when exploring it through the eyes of others, seeing it for the first time: this is a gift, and a route into deeper understanding. Be warned when taking this route, though. There will be stumbles, false starts, and dead ends way up in the mountains that you find only after days of climbing. You will at times be surrounded by rocks and razor-sharp drops. You will bruise your wrists from swinging, alone and surprised when you thought someone else was securing your rope. You will hurt each other. Sometimes you will hate each other. And all of that is part of a journey to a summit that really is worth every year and belly-deep gasp for breath it took to get there.

Find your balance. Everything needs balance, structure, stability: from see-saws to ecosystems to marriages, they only work if they have both solid foundations and equal amounts of give and take. In my household, it’s all about balance. We have two cats: one is named Fry, as in Elizabeth, a prison reformer strong enough to be put onto a £5 note, and a Quaker; the other named Ambrose, after an equally impressive Saint, who had a habit of speaking truth to power, as well as being patron saint of domestic animals. We go to church one week, Quaker Meeting the next. We go away on church Pilgrimages and on Quaker residential events. The Paleontologist joins the choir; I join Area Meeting trustees. It’s all about balance. And also, maybe, just a bit about general absurdity and the triumph of hope over experience.

Be patient. Be very, very patient. Sometimes things will be very important to another denomination, and no matter how hard you try, it will be nothing more than minutiae to you. Exhibit A: arguing over how improper it is to put Jesus in the crib before Midnight Mass. Exhibit B: a stand-up row involving such jargon as Sufferings, Right Ordering, QPSW and AMs. (I feel like someone should put together a Venn diagram showing who may understand the significance of both those sentences. There’s a part of me that is very afraid the overlap may be rather lonely, though.) Whether you understand it or not; whether you agree with it or it makes your teeth scream on end; you need to dig deep, keep your cool, and, if you’re anything like us, leave the other one to it and go sort out some washing up.

Fifteen years has not been enough to work out how to do all this without hurting each other sometimes. A lifetime may not be enough. Life could have been easier for me if I’d met a nice young Quaker from a similar tradition; or for him if he’d married someone more naturally prepared for the role of Vicar’s Wife. I could have continued unswerving on a path I trod and loved when walking alone. He could have shared his vocation with someone who knows how to behave around bishops and doesn’t leave out some sections of the Creed. It could quite possibly have been easier. But it would have been infinitely less fun. Less like a blindfold rollercoaster with the car attached backwards by mistake. And in the end, it would have left me less aware of myself, and my faith more faltering, more superficial, and far less full of convincement.

A view of Iona Abbey and St Cuthbert's cross, looking out over the sea
Iona Abbey: home of prayer, spirituality and, as it turns out, match-making

Inertia and goal-setting: making life simpler one junk-pile at a time

Simply Messy

“I am so angry with myself!”

“I know you are. But instead of getting angry, how about we think about why we were late, again, and try to find a way around it next time?”

“Not listening, not listening. OK, that was just pretending to be The Cowgirl. I am listening really.”

“Well [now speaking through gritted teeth] the problem seems to be that you see we might be late, but instead of doing something about it, you panic, get very stressed, curl up in the Wake-Up Chair facing the wall, and generally continue doing exactly what you were doing before. And that’s why nothing ever changes.”

“Oh. Well. That’s a bit like climate change, then. Everyone knows it’s happening. Everyone talks a lot about it. But no one actually does anything.”

From a girl who showed limited interest at best in the climate catastrophe before, The Paleontologist nailed it this morning. And I would have applauded that, if I hadn’t been driving too fast round the ring road on our way to church, being, as we were, late. As usual.

A couple of days earlier, I was teaching my students about motivation, and we talked (well, mostly I talked) about the difference between goals and dreams. Anyone can dream, and the bigger and wilder and more enticing your imagination is, the more fantabulous your dreams become. But goals? They have a cost. It may be money (nods around the room as they remembered previous discussions about the joys of student loans). It may be sweat and tears (a few were surreptitiously wiping away mascara run-lines at that moment, having just watched a heartbreaking and challenging clip from The Do Something Movement, so that wasn’t about to be argued with). But the hardest cost of all is giving up the things we have worked so hard to achieve: the ideas, the identities, the incentives that gave us the get-up and get-busy when what we’d far rather have done is hide under the duvet. Giving those things up, because they used to keep you moving forwards, a lifeline in the darkness, but are now an anchor once the storm is over, holding you in place when you need to soar free over the next horizon; giving those things up takes the sacrifice of stepping, blind, over the cliff-edge.

A bleak landscape: dark trees on the horizon, and dry and cracked ground. In the foreground is a dust blue boat, and one, bright, red flower.
Image by Ralph Klein from Pixabay

The Paleontologist is right. We talk and stress and panic about what may be around the corner, but we don’t actually do anything. Because doing something means letting go of what we still think is success, and joy, and the sign that life is actually going OK for once. We watch others going on exotic holidays. We save and hope and plan, and finally all our work pays off. Are we really going to turn round and decide not to go now, after so many years of empty longing? How is it fair to ask some to give up something they have never experienced, when others still take it for granted three times a year? And yet, if real change is going to happen, we are going to have to let go of those imaginings, the incentive of owning the best or the brightest or the newest, the idea dreamed up when the world felt younger and the future was not full of floods and wildfires.

Over the next few months, I am going to spend some time looking back over my self-set #Challenge2019 ambitions. This is partly because I was asked for an update, and mostly because I am both a perfectionist and a masochist, and do so love going over things I have done before, scrabbling around in the dusty neglected corners, reopening the cracks in the name of learning from my mistakes. I’m also going to look at them again because there were some pretty good actions in there, and I would like to continue them this year.

So, let’s begin. #ChallengeJanuary: to not buy anything that wasn’t essential, for the duration of the month. This was the challenge that most altered my behaviour during #Challenge2019: the act of consciously trying to reduce the amount I bought for a month had a lasting effect on the habits I took forward through the rest of the year. Probably the most significant change was my returning (in excited puppy who can’t wait to destroy a cherished item of clothing mode) to the guilt-free utopia that is the world of used items on eBay. Knee high boots, a Fitbit, new cards for Trivial Pursuit – it turns out you really can get just about anything that way, leading to less of an environmental impact, less internalised despair over going up another clothes size, and less screaming in frustration next Christmas when my mother-in-law is the only one who can remember any trivia from long enough ago to answer any of the damn questions.*

Setting goals means being Specific, Realistic, Achievable, Time-limited; much like my teaching nemisis, the omnipresent SMART target. (Always Achievable, interestingly, never Ambitious; an oversight and both a blessing and a curse.) This year, I will return to #ChallengeJanuary with this in mind. Being Specific means sharpening up the idea from just saying that I will avoid buying anything new – that isn’t sustainable in the long term, leading as it does to guilt trips over unplanned treats and agonising over new school tights. I have changed it to taking the goal of simplifying our household by the horns, wading unflinchingly in the midden that is the girls’ bedroom, and re-gifting or re-purposing all the things they no longer fit into or use. As a rough guide, I would like to remove two things for every one that gets added to their delightfully decorated black hole. Ultimately, they will have space to store things they still enjoy in the currently-overflowing cupboard-tops in their room. Is that Achievable? That remains to be seen. It is unquestionably Ambitious. And how to make it Time-limited? Saying I’ll have it done by the end of January is about as realistic as saying I’ll have climbed Mount Kilimanjaro by June (says me, the lady who generally finds perfectly reasonable excuses to avoid walking up 3 flights of stairs to the staffroom every morning). My honest goal is to achieve this by the beginning of the summer, learning as I go.

Changing everything that makes us who we are and tells us how to value one another is, as it turns out, something that is quite a big ask. It’s OK to be scared by that. We’re all scared by the unknown. We’re quite often scared by the known just as easily. But we don’t have the option of freezing, or hiding our faces in the cushions of the Wake-Up Chair until Mum or Dad comes in telling us how to fix the problems we have helped to create. We need to break it down and just take the next logical step. Get up and go through the airing cupboard to find clean school uniform; dig through the mess of Lego and ink stamps to find an unsnapped hairband; commit to borrowing all our books from the Library, or giving up meat for one meal a day, or to stop equating someone’s core nature and identity with their economic status, refusing the trap of judgements based entirely on what form of employment they perform. We need to take that step. And then the next one. And the next. And trust that Bilbo Baggins is as reliable a source of wisdom and insight as ever, and that it truly is a dangerous thing to take that step into the unknown: you never know where you may be able to end up.

The sun is rising in the background. A faint mist hovers over the road that leads from the foreground into the distance. Trees stand beside the road. Five hot air balloons float through the morning air.
Image by Cindy Lever from Pixabay

*Am I the only one with a family tradition of playing Trivial Pursuit on Christmas Day? Please tell me someone else shares this pain. We start at 10 and it’s all going well, but before you know it, it’s 1 in the morning, no one has more than 3 cheeses, and if we get any more questions suggesting Tony Blair should be in the history category we will all go into collective meltdown.

New year, same world: a million marvellous shades of grey

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New Year’s Day is at once mystical and terribly ordinary. It symbolises the endless possibilities of fresh starts and new horizons, stretching before us like an ocean of snow that no one has yet jumped through, or pinched all the deepest drifts of for their own snow sculptures. At exactly the same time, it is an ordinary, boring day, full of hungover, sleep deprived adults and children who have reached the end of their secret stashes of chocolate and are suffering their first sugar low for two weeks. Every year, I tell myself I won’t buy into the general hyperbole and hype of NYE. Every year, I am lying to myself.

I love New Year. I enter fully into the principle of fresh starts, New Me initiatives, plans and schemes to sort out the things that have been bugging me about myself since September. They usually start well, not least because I have been saving them up and planning for them, putting off doing anything about them until we have Survived Christmas, since about the middle of November. But, let’s face it, they do always peeter out (Exhibit A: my #Challenge2019). That too is a part of this season.

There is something definitely both backwards and forwards facing, Janus in January (hey, could that be deliberate?) about this time of year, a thinness and honesty that can creep through the mugginess and unexpected nothingness of the weather and the atmosphere around today. We look back at what was different this time last year, or, in decades with a 0 at the end, at what we were doing this time a decade ago. And we prove that, once again, the French were onto something with the idea that the more things change, the more they stay the same:

  • Family life has to have seen both the most and the least changes over the last decade. I now have two children instead of none (hooray!) and, as of last week, one cat instead of two (sob). I have the same husband, who I love in whole new ways. We have developed and strengthened how we listen to and support each other, and aggravate each other in all the same old ways.
  • Church life was in a village church I only fully appreciated when we moved away (so typical). We have moved on from the church we moved on to, moved on and into a new new Quaker community too. We are established and have even pencilled our way onto the tea rota. Those shoots and roots that come only from a worshipping community are deepening, slowly, painfully sometimes, gaining nutrients from the darkness and the dampness of being unobserved.
  • Politics ten years ago was infinitely different. We had a government no one liked, an NHS no one thought would see out the decade, and people on the far right and the far left both had megaphones and visions that had no recognition within the mainstream. Oh, wait…

So the mystical nature of New Year encourages us to look back and marvel at the things we have done, the things we have created and sustained and quit, the things that have changed us and hardened us and tempered us. And shimmering, mirage-like through the mysticism, is that same pile of dirty washing up you didn’t quite get around to yesterday; the same reading from the scales (if you’re lucky); the same unfinished to do lists and unmarked assignments (speaking for a friend, naturally). And, at your core, under the resolutions, the intentions and the incomplete Forth Bridge nature of the household chores, is the same person. Same hopes. Same inconsistencies. Same drive and same stumbling blocks. And that is a good thing.

It’s a good thing because the times that have gone past are entirely necessary to the stories of our lives. The mistakes and almost-misses are frequently the bases of our favourite stories, the ones that get told year after year until they have a life of their own and are part of our shared community. (My personal favourite is a story from my wedding day, involving a mysteriously missing taxi, replaced with a decrepit old Nissan Micra, uncomfortably squished full of my hooped wedding dress – with a train, elvish sleeves, and a cape, because if you can’t dress like that on your wedding day, when can you? My husband assures me it could not have happened as I tell it; but I point to the number of people over the years who have heard it, laughed at it, retold it. If that doesn’t make it part of the story of that day, what would?)

The stories I tell and the actions I take are so often stark, with crystal-sharp outlines, black and white. My job is incredible, or it’s killing me. Dieting is awesome or the work of the devil. My children give me life or drain their energy directly from my soul. But life isn’t really like that, is it? It can be a rainy day with an afternoon of laughter and board games and baking and petty arguments and everything else that makes up the best, most forgettable, parts of family life. Depression isn’t limited to the winter. It is, I’m told, possible to eat a chocolate digestive and not write off the whole day as a breakdown in healthy living. So that is my challenge to myself for 2020: to look beyond black and white, and see the glorious technicolour embodied within a million shades of grey.

Clouds shadow a face - an angel, a goddess, an inanimate stone figure? - who gazes beyond the middle distance. Behind her, a clock spirals into oblivion.

https://pixabay.com/photos/fantasy-clock-statue-light-spiral-2879946/

Bloody-minded selfishness: why I will be voting this week

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“Of course, as a woman, I have to vote. Because of the suffragettes.” Nothing like Radio 4 to get me cross on the drive home after a looong day/week/decade. It’s something that’s said a lot. Women died so that you could vote, so vote you must. And they are right, on many levels. Some women did die. Many others were tortured, ostracised, tormented. Women marched and wept and slept in broom cupboards so that I could vote. But that was their choice, and they fought so hard so that I, and my daughters, would have our own choice. Their actions are not the reason I am going to vote this week.

“I don’t know anything about any of this. It doesn’t mean anything to me.” One of my students said this when I told them we were talking politics this week. And she’s right – she proved in that lesson that she did not watch the news, or think about the election, or understand the different actions and reactions that divide our nation at present. And yet, she is an intelligent woman with a passion to go further. One who has very firm views on the health service and on social care, working as she does within the health sector. She is passionate to see her children given more chances than she feels she deserves. She, and so many people like her, think of politics as something that is done to them, that disempowers them, something they have no control over, no say in, no stake in. Although I work to help them, and pray for them, I am not one of them, and I will not use my voice or my vote to speak, unsolicited and unchecked, on their behalf. It is not for them that I am going to vote this week.

“As a mum I care more about the future of this country, of the world.” If hopefuls to be the next prime minister could say that, should I say it too? Yes, absolutely, I care that I can expect a worse quality of life than my parents did, and I care that it will be worse still for my children. I care that their future is being ripped away from them before they are old enough to understand what they are losing, by shadowy figures who speak golden words and show in their actions that they believe none of their own propaganda. But that is still not why I am voting this week.

I am not voting as a woman, weighted down by the oppression of women in history. I am not voting as a teacher, accustomed to trying to give voice to those who have been silenced by stifled dreams and stunted expectations. I am not voting as a mother, staring into a void and trying to give my children the skills they will need to thrive in a world of unimaginable possibility and overwhelming fear. No. I am voting as myself. I am curious. I am ashamed. I am despairing of the hope I have been teaching for years, the lines I have used, the expectations of honesty and goodness and hard working bravery that I have credited those in control of all our lives with. I cannot remember a time I have been more angry with the establishment authorities, and more despairing of those who would tear them down. So I will go, with bloody-minded fury, to vote on my own behalf. I urge you to do the same. Because without shouting about it, now of all times, how will I ever be able to shout at the radio again, without also screaming at the mirror?

A painting of the three furies screaming as they surround a man with his hands over his ears. One points to the woman behind him, killed with his knife.
I’m not saying they’re anything to aspire to, really I’m not, but the Furies were known to get a bit put out by “men who had sworn a false oath”, among other things…

By William-Adolphe Bouguereau – https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/orestes-pursued-by-the-furies/SQE-jakW_S49YA, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81006118

Simple creativity: Making something is one way to say I Love You

Simply Messy

You know that feeling of standing in the kitchen after a long day of achieving not very much, trying to avoid looking at the washing up piled forlornly by the sink, vaguely ignoring the nextdoor grunting of sofa gymnastics to the soundtrack of a slightly familiar theme tune, when suddenly, out of nowhere, you hear the line from a made-for-Netflix programme that puts a whole new slant on your thinking? For me, tonight, the programme was Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood. I had been mulling over creativity, why I love it, and why I give it so little time, when suddenly and repetitively came an inanely animated voice singing “making something is one way to say I Love You.”

Of course it is! My father was a past master at this one. Once he put together a whole new wall for my bedroom to avoid saying he missed me when I was away for a week. He passed the skill on to me: most noticeably around birthdays, because if you don’t make someone the perfect birthday cake (thank you Pinterest), how will they know you love them? My crafting projects around the house suddenly blur into focus as acts of love towards the family I want to enjoy them; so much easier than thinking about needing to keep up appearances or avoid judgement from passersby. Though let’s face it, saying I love you isn’t the only reason to be creative…

What could possibly say I Love You more than a cake topped with dinosaur bones and biscuity mud?

Then there’s making things for Christmas – food, beds, decorations, to do lists, an unholy mess, and everything else needed for good old-fashioned relaxing fun. Let me make one thing clear: this is absolutely not me saying it’s time to think about Christmas. Not until Advent; don’t even get me started. Why would the council put up Christmas decorations on Remembrance Day? How can people be sorted except for “a few last minute things” by the end of October? And the people who manage to have jobs, small children, and send out Christmas cards all at the same time… No, this is about me thinking about why it is so important to me to make things myself when my eyelids are trying to close themselves over burning balls of fire at four o’clock in the afternoon, and why I keep cards, and ribbons, and paper from one year to the next, to the next, to the next, in the hope that maybe this year will be the year they get transformed into gift tags, origami stars, or anything from my recently borrowed copy of Paper Christmas. (Borrowed from the Library at the same time as Stuff That Sucks. Is my subconscious overdoing it, do we think?)

Why do I put us all through this every year? Because how else can I say I love you to my man, who works into the night so often through December (Midnight Mass is an early finish in comparison), holding and supporting and grounding everyone else’s festive spirits and crashing out on the sofa by 6pm on Christmas Day (and if we ate lunch at lunchtime that day he’d never make it that late). How else could I say it to my children, who struggle through a season of snuffles and broken routine and hype and impossible dreams, and all they have between them and devastation is whatever we manage to spin from our imagination and overnight Amazon deliveries? How could I say it to my extended family, who have fussed and fretted their way through Advent, watching the weather forecast and praying it won’t snow yet, that the roads will be clear, that there will be room in the car and the house and their brains for everything that needs to be remembered?

It turns out I quite like carving pumpkins. It also turns out I’m not very good at letting the children take a turn, in case they Get It Wrong…

Saying I love you is important. It is important to children who need security; to spouses who need appreciation; to friends who never get as much time as they deserve; to people we have known forever and people we’ve only just met. It’s also important to ourselves. Writing; baking; crafting; planting flowers: they are all ways for me to say to myself that I am worth the time I am spending on me, OK being proud of the results of my labours, that enjoyment for its own sake is allowed to be an act of love. Creativity in a world of numbers and statistics and targets has been weighed, and measured, and found wanting. It will not solve the climate catastrophe. It will not save humanity from itself. Being silly and spontaneous and simple does not often make it onto the news, or even our highly edited Newsfeeds. But for me, at least, it brings peace. Balance. Acceptance. And making things is one way to say I Love Me.

Speaking Truth with Love

Simply Messy1 Comment

Getting used to change is a bit like growing used to regularly being slapped around the face with last week’s unfinished to do lists, left out in the rain and still dripping when they hit your cheeks. Yes, there are worse things that can happen; yes, it sometimes brings the wake-up call you really need; but it is an experience to endure, not enjoy, when you are actually in the moment.

Change erupted within my household this week, catching us unprepared, bursting onto the scene in the shape of a red cassock, topped by a very self-satisfied grin. The Paleontologist is now officially a choir girl, and has been corraled immediately into a gaggle of rehearsals, services, and outings to Greggs. As her parents, we are of course delighted, and keep reminding each other of that as we search for the give in already stretched-to-bursting timetables that will allow us to officially transition from independent adults with some control of our lives into stereotypical glorified taxi drivers.

The Cowgirl is not delighted. Don’t get me wrong, she’s very proud of her sister, and very happy to announce her pride at the top of her voice in a crowded church. But she is also having the security that has always surrounded her shaken to its foundations, and she quite frankly Does Not Approve. Her sister is, in many ways, more of a constant than her parents: the one she conspires with after lights out; the one who held her hand in the long and lonely lunch breaks when she first started school; the one she worships as she treads the road less travelled, her footsteps, like King Wenceslas, breaking the terrors and harshness of winter and setting a clear path for her sister to follow. And now, sometimes, she’s not there. She’s singing when she used to be helping to imagine a zoo, an aeroplane, an exploration of the Antarctic; rehearsing when she used to fight for control of the remote control; absent when she should be walking into the swimmig pool and giving her sister courage by her mere presence. And so swimming lessons are avoided; TV choices change; shouting matches and clingyness both increase in equal measure.

As a parent, you know that one day, you will no longer be the centre of your child’s world. They will no longer believe you have all the answers, and they will be right. They will ask for your advice, and mock the answer you give them. Their hearts will break and kisses and cuddles will no longer fix anything at all. But when one of your children falls apart because the other is growing up very slightly faster than they are? All you can ever do is love them as hard as you can, and hope that will still be enough.

Two children in matching jumpers, carrying matching Lego, travellating together into the distance.

Five year old Cowgirls are not the only ones who don’t like it when their familiar realities shift under their feet. Those still fighting the transitioning reality of climate change are in the same position. Everything ahead of us is concealed in a haze of uncertainty and the disagreement of experts. Everything behind us is not only familiar, but also heavily weighted in the favour of those who most like to cry nonsense at the mere idea of climate change. Everything is about to come crashing down on our heads and their profit margins. And like a five year old, they are losing their tempers and overindulging in their freedom when they have it and spending a lot of time pretending they are not huddled on the sofa hoping this is all a bad dream.

Speaking truth with love is a phrase often used, and often misused. Sometimes it means “I’m going to explain everything that is wrong with you, but say it with a smile and terribly earnest eyes.” Sometimes it means “No offense, but…” Which is inevitably followed by a list that is likely to make you curl up into a ball and hide in a dusty corner until the middle of next summer. What it should mean can be just as difficult to face. It should be an honest reflection, a clear and unblemished mirror, held up without judgement or pain. But it is not speaking truth if you say only what your audience is already aware of, just as it isn’t loving if you say what they are utterly unprepared to hear, then leave them alone to deal with the consequences. Love is not an easy thing to feel, to offer, or to accept. But honestly offered and willingly accepted, it is a thing that can open minds and hearts and bank accounts, and is probably the only thing left that has a hope of saving the world.

A fence crowded with padlocks, looking out over a deep blue ocean.

I’m a Quaker; this is why.

Simply Messy5 Comments

It should be said much more often than it is that inviting questions when you haven’t worked out the answers yet is a Bad Idea. I learned this the hard way a few years ago, when I said on Facebook “I’m a Quaker; ask me why.” When someone did just that, I tied myself into a Gordian knot of “well, I suppose some people say…” and “I don’t mean you can’t” which confused everyone concerned and in no way answered the question. This week being Quaker Week, I’ve decided to have another go. So, in a slightly more premeditated way, here is my answer: this is why. It’s a different answer to the one I would have given 15 years ago; a different answer, no doubt, to the one I will give in 20 years time; but it is as true as it can be right now.

Lights and darkness, hope but not too much hope. A candle burns in a bedroom window, surrounded by lighted windows and a starry sky. In its reflection, the candle has just been blown out.

Loyalty. The Quaker community has been a constant throughout my life. As I have moved around the country, new Meetings have welcomed me into membership and joined the chaos of my family life. Quakers introduced me to my husband; gave me my first kiss; made me believe that there were others around me who valued me just as I was; gifted me with friends without whom the world would be a darker place and I probably wouldn’t be here at all. There are prophets in this community who dare to say the things no one wants to hear; lone tigers who do terrifying things against everything society and their quieter minds are telling them; people who shape the norm and people who shatter it; people I love and people I honestly can’t really stand. Every one of those people has an equal place and an equal voice and without any one of them, this community would be poorer. They took me in and made me strong enough to take on a world I would often rather avoid. They have loved me and my children, baby-sat for us, driven us around the country to gatherings and weddings and conferences, and quite frankly, have dug themselves far too deep into the centre of my being for me to just get up and walk away.

Challenge. There is beauty and peace in worship that consists mostly of silence. It isn’t easy, though. It’s very hard to hide when all there is is you and a Light that is digging around in all the dark corners you haven’t hoovered for quite some time and were really hoping no one would notice. I frequently go into Meeting with a Big Question I want answered: you know, “what should I be doing with my life?” or “how can I make world peace happen by lunchtime next Tuesday?” I usually come out with no answers at all, but more questions; or answers to questions I hadn’t dared to ask; or instructions that go beyond anything I want to admit to. In decision making I find myself going in the opposite direction to my expectations; in daily life I am suddenly, utterly convinced with no premeditation or control that this is what Needs To Be Done.* And then I have to live with that knowledge, that decision, that call, and try to hold on to that certainty when the clouds of the world roll over those beautiful starry skies and I cannot remember, quite, what it was that I saw there.

Discipleship. “By this will all men know that you are my disciples: if you have love one for another.” (Always in a soaring melody, for me, never spoken.) To me, the stripped back act of discipleship, of following the summoning and the footsteps of Jesus, is about talking the talk and walking the walk and living a life that rings true, resonating through my bones and becoming a conduit for a Love far greater than I am. I find the strength to yearn towards this through the stillness of Quaker worship. I’ve tried other styles of worship; I find them moving, energising, interesting, intellectually stimulating, educational, tedious and baffling, but I do not find them to be a way to the still small voice that lies in the midst of chaos and noise and walks the straight path through me. If I spend too long away from that deep pool of stillness I get cranky and lose my way. Much like I do when I haven’t eaten, or haven’t slept. All these things are equally fundamental to my being.

Action. Quaker is a doing word. It is about seeking opportunities to serve our society, making tea and keeping the buildings standing and caring for each others’ health and well-being and taking care of all our resources; it is taking a proactive role in our local communities; it means playing a role in politics, in social witness, in showing how business and ethics can work together to make the world more peaceful, more sustainable, break out of the current mould. It means finding the paths you are meant to get involved in and jumping in with two left feet if that’s the only way to do it, rolling up your sleeves, getting muddy and tired and lost along the way and knowing you are doing it for all the right reasons. It is saying that faith without works or works without faith are both meaningless, as each informs, drives, sustains the other. It is saying that even when these ambitions are achingly out of reach, the very hope of trying is itself an action.

Are Quakers perfect? Of course not. A worshipping community is like any other kind of family. Some are full of light and love and silly in-joke moments. Some are filled with darkness, forbidding silences, fear of crossing the threshold because there is nothing left within them of the goodness they once aspired to. And most are somewhere in the middle, with times of brilliance, and times of apathy, and times when you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong, but somehow, everything is just uncomfortably askew. It’s in those trying moments that worship binds us together, striving to live God’s love in a world that really, really needs it. And it’s in the moments that we shake each others’ hands when we disagree, when we agree, when we celebrate and grieve and struggle together, that we are closest to Him.

*This has been, at various points, praying, moving house, teacher training, calling my Mum, and any number of other things at other times.

Soft times are going: being part of the change

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“It isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft time going.”

A week ago today, millions of people went out on the streets, chalking their hopes and furies onto walls; pavements; each other. It was one moment in an evolutionary story. It was a chance for weary prophets to draw in breath, feasting upon the energy and optimism of those not yet broken by the inertia of others who will not care. It may be a turning point; it may be another marker on a chaotic scattergram of things the youth of the 21st century choose to care about; it may be seen as mass hysteria if we discover that the dramatically changing climate is not, in fact, in any way affected by our presence on this world, and it is just humanity showing off its crazy-huge ego once again.

I couldn’t be part of that striking moment, which to me is an unexpected diamond in the string of plastic beads that thread together the realisation that doing something to reduce humanity’s negative impact on the world around us is a no-brainer. To make my contribution, I spent 7 days keeping track of the actions I take, trying to consider their greater impact. As any fluctuating participator in dietary fads and avoidance tactics such as myself will be able to tell you, nothing holds you to account quite like writing down what you are doing – both the positives and the wrappers you’d rather hide behind the back of the sofa. Even better, telling other people about it allows shared stories and mutual re-invigoration. So here’s what I’ve been doing, diesel-car driving and all. How about you? What’s your story?

Day 1: Saturday dawned bright, sunny, and a perfect start to a renewed way of looking at things. Full of enthusiasm and with a family day ahead of me, there were plenty of wins today. We went to the library (got to love a guilt-free book fest), hung the washing on the line to dry, put together a bag of clothes to donate to charity, watered the plants using water from the butt left behind by our predecessors (which obviously meant that it started raining about 15 minutes later). It was not a day without its downsides, though. These would become the features that, on good days, bad days and just a bit meh days, would form a constant muttering behind me, the monotonous burble of “actually, never mind the rest of it, are you ever going to do anything about us?” Overusing my lovely diesel car, moving slightly too fast, trying to combine tasks into single trips but consequently driving round and round and round and round, depressingly frequently in rush hour traffic jams full of everyone else in the same town also trying to fit errands and clubs and emergency shopping into the 15 minutes of unscheduled time they have squeezed in that week. Energy-boosting, energy-crashing, pre-packaged, plastic-wrapped snacks eaten when not hungry because it feels the only way to get from home time to bed time. Tumble-drying school uniforms and only checking the labels afterwards because frankly, even on good weeks I don’t have the energy for 15 rounds with The Cowgirl when I have the temerity to suggest that, in a lack-of-washing emergency situation, it might not be the end of the world if she wears a skirt instead of trousers.

Day 2 arrived and saw me waving the flag for multitasking vicars’ wives everywhere, as I represented the college I work for at a civic service in my husband’s church. (Getting TOIL for going to a service I was going to attend anyway, you say? That is what I call winning at life.) My positive actions for the day started with a rather lovely outfit, if I do say so myself, bought second hand and already worn by someone else from eBay, with accidentally matching shoes. Later, we looked at food as a family, and made a set of lolly sticks to try to balance the variety I need to keep some kind of sanity around cooking dinner with The Paleontologist’s need to be the boss of Everything In The World. They should also be a way of cutting down food waste, avoiding too much of today’s negative action: having to throw away a loaf of bread that had been sneakily lurking behind some gorgeous flowers gifted to us by a parishioner, and was now mouldy beyond salvation or freezing potential.

Other highlights of the week (by which I mean other actions playing on repeat because that is what life is like on the days I’m at work) included walking between different teaching sites and eating leftovers for lunch instead of taking trips to Aldi. They also included this week’s champion success story: taking my winter coat to have its zip changed. To put this into context, I sewed up the scuppered zip as a temporary fix the night before catching the train to Paris for our tenth wedding anniversary. My colleagues have been mocking me for the year and a half since then that I’ve spent struggling to get it on over my head. This gold-medal-winning moment happened as a result of seeking concrete actions to put in this post. The act of observing and recording genuinely did change my behaviour. Please don’t ever let OFSTED hear me say that.

Over the week, I tried harder with some things, and noticed my own hypocrisy with others. As a lifelong vegetarian who has been resisting giving up dairy with the passion many meaties show in the face of giving up bacon sandwiches, this is not an unfamiliar feeling. This is a process, for all of us. I’m not ready to give up my car yet, and neither is my local transport system. Reducing food waste, on the other hand – that is something we definitely can do. And let’s face it, with the utter unknown of Brexit just round the corner, wasting less food and working better with whatever we happen to have in the house might just become something we all need to go back to being better at. Chaotic uncertainty does have a way of making us appreciate what we used to have. Let’s just hope we all get there before we reach the point that no one will have anything any more.

Re-finding wonder: peer pressure and climate catastrophe are not the end of the story

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Is it just me, or is it pretty much impossible to teach your own children anything?

A couple of years ago, when The Cowgirl was still at nursery, she came home one day and started a conversation that I genuinely believed I was never going to have to have.

Cowgirl: I can’t be a doctor. I’m a girl, so I can be a nurse.

Me: ??? ? ???

Cowgirl: Only boys are doctors.

Me: But, but, but, your Godmother is a doctor, remember?

Cowgirl [scrunching up her face in concentration]: Oh. Yes. [Suddenly her brow clears.] She’s got short hair. [Sits back in satisfaction at having won that one good and proper.]

So there we go. Girls can only do things like being doctors if they have hoodwinked everyone into believing they are actually boys, by having short hair.* But how did The Cowgirl imbibe this view of the world? We’d read books that had strong female heroines; talked about all the great things girls had done (and occasionally touched on some of the rather fun things boys had done too); made it clear at every opportunity that had come up – and created some where it hadn’t come up – that any job is for any one, be they male, female, or non-binary. We avoided gendered clothes wherever possible (no Girls Can Be Princesses and Boys Can Be Anything here). And still, here we were, finding all this undone by outdated cultural stereotypes inadvertantly introduced that day in an environment that we had chosen, but could not control.

This was not the last time that this happened, it will come as no surprise to hear. Wanting to have exactly the same snack, backpack, shoes, hairstyle, toys, holidays, car, skin colour, as their friends is a regular conversation around the dinner table (though that might partly be because the number of their friends who have been to Disney World, Florida is growing every year). Fads come and go, and everything I do to celebrate or deny them seems to fall on deaf ears. Every day, they come home full of the importance of combatting climate change (hooray); wanting to wear make up to school (boo); wanting to join a sports group (hooray); wanting to never read a book again (boo). Then the next day, the wind changes, somebody sneezes, and that determination is out of the window and its opposite is now true. Not only that, it always has been true, and it clearly always will be true. Seriously, anyone who thinks that 1984 is a novel that came up with new and horrific ways that people can be brainwashed into believing things entirely contradictory to their previous opinions has been away from primary school playgrounds for far too long.

So how, then, am I to encourage my children to do the things that lead them to a stronger relationship with the world, with other people, with God? One such relationship is to “rejoice in the glory of God’s continuing creation” (an ideal Quakers link closely with care for and stewardship of the world and all the life dependent on it). Can that become something that is relevant to their experience, link with their daily lives, their own beliefs and expectations of the world, and yet still take them by surprise and fill them with awe and wonder? My own view of the glory of creation is very traditional: that inward breath when you drive round a corner and the sun is setting into the sea in front of you; the sweep of a line of mountains marching into nothingness; the infinite gentleness of a butterfly landing on a dandelion flower. The peace and overwhelming presence of nature is where I see God most clearly, and find it easiest to settle into joy.

Sunset over Dubrovnik, lights shining across the town. Cable car wires disect the picture; islands disappear into the ocean and the clouds. A moment that still makes me suck in my breath at its absolute perfection.

As I have said, my children are not like me. And the world that they inherit will not be the world that I grew up in. Most scientists agree that our view towards the world and the elements will change, as they fight back and become something to fear, to hide from, that bring destruction in their wake. Moments of peace and enjoying the presence of entirely oblivious butterflies, dragonflies, bees as they busy around us might become something I will talk about, and my children will have to grope into the distant reaches of their memories to recall at all. Travelling to foreign lands where the air is thinner and God lies in every stone and corner should become something that is done once in a lifetime, not the expectation of every summer holiday. So where, in all of this, will my children find the glory of God’s creation?

It seems that I need to change my interpretation of continuing creation. It cannot be something static, something permanent, something that has always spoken to me in the past; it lives and breathes and shifts around us, through us, with us as we are all continuing to form new relationships. It is within technology, within people, within buildings and structures and artwork and abandoned empty spaces, just as much as it is within the grand old bones that make up this planet. It will be a challenge for me to find things within this brave new world to rejoice in, as I say goodbye to the things that seemed easy and seek to look harder and deeper and question the assumptions that I have been making all along.

Maybe, in fact, I need to ask my children to help me with this one.

*(I would like to clarify at this point, just in case she’s reading this for the record, that no-one could ever mistake this magical Godmother for anything other than the fabulous, beautiful woman that she is…)

What the hell are we doing here?

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I have steered clear of talking about politics here. Well, a bit, anyway. This is partly because simplicity is the polar opposite of any form of current affairs (though messy has certainly come into its own), and partly because when I think about politics at the moment it gives me that clenched up feeling in your throat that you get when you’re arguing about something you really care about with someone who just won’t listen.

This morning, I accepted that I couldn’t ignore that lump in my throat and keep on trying to breathe through it. Why? Because the start of the teaching year is just around the corner, and so, possibly/probably/definitely/never in a million years (delete as appropriate) is a General Election.

A mobile polling station in an area with no community buildings. With nicer weather than the next election, I suspect.

As anyone who has ever been in a classroom with me for more than 10 minutes will know, I quite like talking about politics. In fact, make that anyone who has spent 10 minutes with me in any situation at all. (Overhead yesterday was The Cowgirl, the roll of her eyes evident through her voice, muttering “Not boring Brexit again…” Sometimes struggles to work out which way round her trousers go, but already knows about Europe.) We have discussed Brexit, immigration, budgets, whether education should be free, climate change, the NHS, and so many other things besides. Sometimes they come up naturally. Sometimes they are shoe-horned in to tick a box (you want me to talk more about British Values? Well…) Sometimes they are deliberately planned because I think it really is so much more important than a bit more on how to pass an exam.

One thing that falls clearly into that category is teaching students about elections. I first taught a lesson about voting back in my first year as a trainee teacher, and agonised over it for hours. I have honed it, shaped it, vastly improved it, and used it again for every election since. I teach adults. They need to know not only that they can vote, but how voting works, and how to choose who to vote for.

And that is the key problem I am having now. The first part of the lesson is very straightforward. Take my usual rant about why everyone should vote, tone it down, remember not to do it with a large glass of gin in one hand, tone it down again, and job done. Then things get harder. Normally, at this point, I would go into a variety of things that should probably be obvious, but, apparently, are not. My students leave either bored out of their minds or fired up with new-found enthusiasm, and I can sit back and know I have done my bit for democracy, compose Facebook updates detailing the most interesting things to come out of the lessons, and feel delightfully smug.

Not this time, I suspect. My usual list of What Students Probably Don’t Know runs into neck-deep quicksand by about minute ten:

  • You do not vote for a party; you vote for a candidate. Well, I suppose that is still true. More so than normal if yours is one of the more than 30 MPs to have changed party this year. (I admit, that figure is based on Wikipedia, which lists every shift in allegiance, expulsion due to scandal and bigotry, re-admission, and re-expulsion in dizzying detail.)
  • We do not elect our Prime Minister. So far, so accurate, of course. This has caused seismic incredulity every time, even in the days when we had a conventinal Prime Minister. The obvious question is always How are they chosen then? Um. He’s the one who can command a majority? On the day even his brother abandoned his party, I don’t think that works. He’s the leader of the largest party? By this time next week I’m half expecting the Tories to have been overtaken in number by the Lib Dems. He’s the one who has the confidence of the House? When it is both publicly acceptable and not even questioned to say that Boris Johnson will change his mind as soon as it suits him, I doubt he has the confidence of his own reflection, never mind Parliament. Well, never mind. We always knew Boris would break the mold. Let’s move on.
  • Choose who you will vote for by what matters most to you. In a world with so many demands crushing in from every direction, who is going to be our R2D2 and stop the walls before they kill us? Climate catastrophe lurks in every shadow, questioning every choice available. The NHS is in crisis. Education is making our children less equipped for daily life as it overwhelms their resilience and their ability to make independent choices. Brexit hovers over us like that spaceship in Independence Day, and none of us really know which worldwide icon it will consume next. Given all these paralysing priorities, I’m not convinced it’s fair to put anyone in the position where they have to decide on the spot what is most important to their lives. I certainly can’t ask them to defend their choices to people they have only just met.
  • Find out what each party stands for. Quakers seek that of God in every individual; here, I seek that of God in every party. I have to provide materials on each one for my students, as none of the parties produce their manifestos in a way that can be understood by low-level readers who are also politically inexperienced.* I attempt to read them, summarise them without bias, make up my own too. It does, however, require manifestos. Or at least, it requires people to say things and then stick to them for at least as long as it takes to teach one lesson. This taxes my time, my neutrality and my patience with current affairs at the best of times. These are not the best of times.

It feels more important than ever to teach about the next election, precisely because it is so unpredictable, so unusual, so contradictory. We need to teach each other, our children, ourselves. We all bear responsibility for getting into the unfathomable fiasco facing us now. What do we do now to take responsibility to get out of it again?

Thunderstorm, courtesy of Pixabay. Amazing colours surround us as nature crashes down on our heads. https://pixabay.com/images/id-3440450/

*You can get easy read versions, but they still run to about 50 pages and tend to be even more biased than the standard ones. She says, with no bitterness at all.