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Commuter Mysticism

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Damp Wednesday morning, seven o’clock,
the sun not up, nor looked to be;
the park a triangle of nothing
bisected by the pale path, trimmed
on each edge with lights
and pallid rags of early daffodils.
I walk. Bin men, cyclists,
ghosts in washed out yellow,
pass me, smiling. Two cars, then silence.The secret holiness of streetlamps,
quivering amber in the mist,
lighted windows, bus route boards –
whose destinations glow, picked out in gems:
Merrow – Kingston
Bushy Hill –
and whirling flames on dustbin trucks:

Earth is afire today, and every breath
absorbs the sacred. Above, a sudden
blackbird.

Truth becomes real; dull illusions
I live between fold flat; more
dimensions leap into being, and I,
startled by sharp joy, can tell my gratitude
only in tears, and think how strange
to weep in wonder, where, bare
days ago I wept in desolation.

They stand close, close as to touch,
but never meet,
and both dissolve, and flow
in salt water.

Faith, belief, doubt, and pedantry

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I think, for me, there are two main elements to this: the way faith works for me in the context of my history of depression, and my religious background.

First, thought, it’s worth mentioning that I draw a distinction between faith and belief, and that I am acutely aware of the difference between knowledge and knowledge (why doesn’t English translate savoir and connaître properly?) – knowing intellectually, in the head, if you like, and knowing in the heart – the difference between knowing facts and knowing people.

Faith, for me, is not the same as belief. (This, I know, is not something that all Christians would agree on, but I am only talking, here and throughout, about one Christian.) I can remember a real lightbulb moment a few years ago, at one of my parish’s Lent Courses Where One Is Not Told The Answer, where somebody linked faith to trust rather than to belief, and I suddenly stopped feeling guilty about not believing hard enough. These days I think I would describe it as ‘relationship with the Divine’ and leave it at that.

I’m very Anglican. I am both catholic and protestant, and neither Catholic nor Protestant. My non-conformist streak is Quaker, and Quakers don’t conform with anything, particularly non-conformists. And I say all this because the thing about the very Protestant Churches that I was most glad to leave behind was their insistence on belief, the idea that one has to believe the right thing to be saved. It always felt all wrong to me.

I am finding increasingly as I get older (she says, from the ripe old age of 28) that what I believe is becoming less and less important. I don’t worry at all about whether other people are believing the right thing, whatever that is. My own belief has become less certain, and less defensive. I don’t know what I believe about all sorts of things, and that no longer seems to be a problem, except to other people. At the same time, my faith has become much surer. I can’t really describe it, except by saying that it’s a sense of being loved, in a very calm, sustaining kind of way.

Which is all very well, when my brain is working. Quite often it isn’t. I’ve had depression on and off for the past twelve years, I would guess. There are two things about this that are particularly relevant to this post. Firstly: when I am depressed I cannot remember how it feels to not be depressed. (Conversely, when I’m not depressed, I find it difficult to remember how awful being depressed is, but, because my brain is working better all round, I can – if I choose, which I usually don’t – describe it via imagination.) Secondly: when I am depressed I cannot feel love, either giving it or receiving it. I can have my best friend hugging me and feel about as much emotional response as a dustpan.

This is where savoir and connaître come into it. In my head I know that my family love me, that my husband loves me, that my friends love me. Sometimes they tell me this using actual words. They mean those words. And in my head I know all that, and it means absolutely nothing. It doesn’t get any further. When my brain is working, on the other hand, it’s fine. It all gets through and I feel it deeply. I can quite often be in love with the entire universe for whole seconds at a time. (An interesting side-effect of this is that I now cry at pretty much anything. Tinny call-centre Vivaldi, for example. Also discovering that I have more and better friends than I thought I had, which has happened quite a lot over the past few months because of my brain not being so broken as usual.)

What I am driving at here is probably obvious: that a faith that manifests itself predominantly in a sense of love cannot make itself felt all the time, particularly when I can’t feel love all the time anyway. And I suppose the spaces between might well be called doubt. The thing is, though, that I know that the ones who love me don’t stop loving me just because I don’t have the capacity to experience it, any more than the sun stops burning when it’s behind a cloud. The same feels true of the Divine. Apart from anything else, that’s always the first thing to come back.

So: that’s me, and faith, and doubt. I hope… I don’t know what I hope. But there it is. Be gentle.

Manifest

kathleenjowitt8 Comments

Well, you know what it’s like,
having a mother with Causes –
Or, I don’t know, maybe you don’t,
maybe you never gave up your Sundays,
stood out in the rain with a banner,
cried out in the streets for your rights –
or someone else’s –
Anyway, mine had plenty:
She was always out there,
smashing the patriarchy, putting down
the mighty from their seat,
that sort of thing. ‘Jesus,’ she said,
‘a woman’s body’s her own, her soul’s her creator’s.
Don’t you forget it.’ Or, ‘What this
country needs is revolution.
Lift up the humble.’ She thought big.
So I was surprised when, at the wedding,
she said to me, ‘They’re out of wine.
What are you going to do about it?’
‘Mother,’ I said, ‘this isn’t the time.’
Meaning, of course, that I had bigger fish to fry.
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘there’s one thing
you haven’t yet learned about changing the world.
You begin where you are
and you use what you’ve got.’
So I did. That’s where it started.

Compostella

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I remember how when we came to the city
we stopped, having no urge to go further,
as though that which had led us there rested,
and there was peace there,
and rest, and time to recall
who we were, who we had been,
and why we had come there at all;

And, though they told us before we set out,
and all down the way, that we’d want to walk on
to the world’s end, west,
west, until the abyss
stretched endless, roaring, before us,
and, though we once wondered if after all
we should go there,
go on to the end, just to see what was there,
to quiet our consciences, say
we had been all the way to the edge,
we remained; we had found what we came for;

And though my soul clamours still
to walk that same great starlit way once again,
onwards, westwards, to wonder,
I don’t know that this time
(whenever it comes)
I would want to go further.

For Anne

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We’ll walk again.
We’ve known, between us,
sickness and fear, the madness
that makes friendship loneliness,
mislaid vocations, learned to love,
never quite forgotten that we walked
or that we’ll walk again.

We’ll walk again:
drink wine that springs from roadside fountains,
meet angels, know them by
their wire-spoked wing-umbrellas,
understand the Incarnation
eating sardines on Maundy Thursday,
hear the cock crow mid-Mass, standing
out where hands weren’t washed or wine poured,
toil across endless dusty plains,
follow the stars spread westwards, seen once,
follow the subtle trail of golden shells,
wonder how your great-grandfather
walked almost all the way up Everest
(and then, more, down again)
while your feet dissolve in friction.
I’ll turn out, another seven times,
not to be Irish,
disappoint another seven bands of pilgrims;
we’ll walk west,
catch wandering horreos,
sing psalms in kitchens so new,
so ill-equipped,
there’s nothing else to do there,
we’ll walk,
arrive,
hug, disbelieving, in the square,
pat St James
(timidly)
on his shoulder,
linger…

It won’t, of course, be like that this time,
but even so, we’ll walk.

Balance

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I have resolved that when I move to Cambridge, as I will at some point as yet undetermined, I shall make my bicycle my primary mode of transportation, rather than my tricycle. I love my trike, but it is impossible to get on a train, and occasionally a pain to lock up, and if I can’t ride a bike in Cambridge, the English Amsterdam, I’ll never do it.

To this end, and also because I felt like it, I took my bike to the park when I got back from Farnborough this morning. I got CTony to raise the saddle to something approaching the correct height, walked the bike down to the park, and spent a happy half-hour riding around in circles.

It’s been very interesting, re-learning how to ride a bike as an adult. It is still new enough that I marvel every time that first kick of the pedals sends me forwards, gracefully, not sideways, violently. That’s what it is, ‘learning to ride a bike’, finding that split second of trust and courage that gets you moving fast enough to take both feet off the floor and find you don’t need to put them down again.

I have been thinking today, though, about signalling. Signalling was what stopped me riding a bike ‘properly’. You know: on the road, to get to places. A cyclist who can’t signal is a menace, and I just couldn’t do it. I could manage to get my left hand off the handlebar, but if I tried to lift my right hand, I just went straight over sideways.

I always thought that this was because I am strongly right-handed, and am generally clumsy and unbalanced. All this is true: I am forever walking into things and dropping stuff. It turns out, however, not to be the reason that I can’t signal.

Because I can signal. If a year on the trike has done one thing for me, it has persuaded my brain that I will not fall off if I take a hand off the handlebars. Because whoever fell off a trike? (Me, as it happens, but only once, and it was a stupid bit of path that I should have got off for, really.) On the trike, it is second nature to steer with one hand, and use the other to grab the water bottle, or scratch my nose, or feel my pocket for the umpteenth time to make sure my keys are really in there – or to signal.

On the bike instead of the trike, I forget that if I signal I will fall off. And so I don’t fall off. Silly, but true, and very difficult to teach. It isn’t about balance at all; it’s about confidence, just like being able to ride the damn thing in the first place.

#justaboutclingingon

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The hashtag is cribbed from @davewalker. My reaction to that was, ‘oh, thank goodness, it’s not just me!’

It’s been a long Lent. A cold Lent, a hard Lent, a Lent that didn’t stop for Sundays, that ground me down, that wore on and on.

The first two weeks were OK and I had good intentions. Things like doing a lectio divina – not every day, because I am realistic, but twice a week at least, let’s say, and not buying things in supermarkets, and not buying things I didn’t need at all, and I was doing reasonably well…

Then there were all the people: two weeks where I had to see people every day, to be interesting and polite and to talk, and then have to do it all over again in the evening, because it was a PCC meeting, or my mother was staying the night, or there was something else that meant I had to talk to people, and I never had an evening, let alone a day, to just crash; and then my brain broke and I cried at work and I know I shouldn’t have gone in in the first place.

Then I caught a cold, which put me in bed for two days (not consecutive) and has put me on limited spoons (to the extent that my reasoning goes like this: “I would like to go out for a cycle. But my front tyre needs pumping up. But pumping my tyre up will be so much effort that by the time I’ve done it I will be too tired to go out cycling. Also I have evensong tonight oh God oh God there is so much stuff to do I just can’t…”)

And they put the clocks forward an hour and I’m not sure I’m ready for Easter. Because it’s already here and I’m still tired and cold and grumpy and coughing like a blocked drain, and not feeling spiritual in the least. #everythingchanges, says the Church of England, and I am here going, really?

But new life doesn’t always come with a boom as the stone crashes down. Mostly it creeps out in tender little green shoots, or tiny sticky leaves. It is not spectacular, but it is hope, of a sort.

I went to church this morning. The last hymn was Thine be the glory and our organist played little twiddly bits between the verses, because it’s Easter. The one between the second and last verses was particularly reminiscent of another famous Handel piece. Hallelujah! it went. Hallelujah!. Then, diddly diddly diddly pom pom pom NO MORE WE DOUBT THEE…

It would not have had me on my feet (had I not been already, I mean…) But I did feel a tear prickling at the corner of an eye, and thought, oh.

I am alive, after all. Hallelujah.

“Ignore him and he’ll just go away…”

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I feel that I need hardly repeat to my followers and friends list that no, Lord Carey does not speak for me and that in a country where I am free both to practise my religious faith and to make flippant remarks about it on Twitter (with obscure TV references for good measure) I do not feel marginalised.

I really cannot be bothered to go through all this again, but Bishop Alan has done a pretty good job of summing up what are, I suspect, the feelings of a lot of us. Vicky Beeching is also good.

Adventures on Two Wheels

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Today I took my bike to the park.

This was something of an achievement. I am a reasonably keen cyclist – but the cycle in question is a tricycle. I learned to ride a bike when I was eleven or so, but I have never had very good balance, and always had problems with the whole ‘signalling right’ issue when on a bicycle – which meant that bicycling on roads was contraindicated. When we moved to the Isle of Wight, that was about the only place to ride a bike – so I stopped.

Last year I bought a tricycle and got reasonably good at cycling. At the beginning of this year I asked my brother to bring my bike (actually one I’d inherited from my aunt, and had never ridden myself) up from the Island. He and Tony have had a whale of a time taking it to bits, cleaning it, and going, ‘ooh, we have a sandblaster at work…’

Today I took my bike to the park.

It is not true that one never forgets how to ride a bicycle. One does remember fairly quickly, but one has to endure a certain period of blind terror, wild flailing, and falling off into puddles and leylandii hedges first. Then one finds that one foot follows the other, and one is half way across the park and hasn’t yet fallen off and OH HELP THERE IS A LADY WITH A DOG, so one brakes, and slithers forward, and discovers with extreme gratitude that one’s foot is on the ground and the bike hasn’t fallen over, and the lady is still fifty yards away, and the dog has disappeared completely.

So then one turns around to go back the other way and OH HELP THERE IS A CHILD ON A SCOOTER. But one is feeling quite brave (at least compared to when one started) and gingerly wades forward and starts pedalling, and is fine, and so is the child on a scooter. And then THERE IS A TREE AND THERE IS ALSO A LAMPPOST and one has to go between them oh my goodness (let us wuss out and stop and walk this bit) and then one decides to go between the public lavatories and the cricket pavilion and there are PUDDLES AND A HEAD WIND.

And after about half an hour of this one’s nerves are in shreds and one’s thighs are feeling likely to come up in magnificent bruises – and that’s quite enough for one day.

I am really quite proud of myself.

But I don’t think it’s going to space today, or even to Billingshurst in July.

Posters

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There is a church near me (there’s probably one near you, too) that reliably displays some sort of ‘inspirational’ poster. These range from the mildly amusing (e.g. a few Advents ago: picture of TARDIS; caption: WHO IS COMING TO SAVE THE WORLD?) to the bemusing (really, what was the point of that Alpha one with the wheelie bin?) to the irritating to today’s teeth-gnashingly infuriating one:

God is dead – Nietzsche

God is Dad – Jesus

P. S. Nietzsche is dead – God

Argh. The top two lines would fit into the amusing-to-irritating range, depending on temperament, but that P. S. is just horrible. If I thought God were so smug, vindictive, mean-spirited, rejoicing in the demise of one of God’s own creatures, as to write something like that – well, I would not have been on my way to church.