Tag: personal

Walking Godstuff

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It was about time I did another long walk anyway. Having most of a week to myself to walk out allowed me to integrate some things that were buzzing around in my head. (‘Integration’ and ‘integrity’ seem to be this year’s words; I was aiming for ‘balance’, but of course there’s an element of separation to that which turns out to be not what I need…)

Quite apart from the usual OMGWTFBBQ sea! butterflies! lizards! houses! yachts! cliffs! thing (um, God revealed in creation, you know what I mean…); also, a Non-Tame Lion, and connected spontaneous thankfulness, I did manage to get some thoughts, if not nailed down, then at least with a paperweight on them for five minutes.

It mostly seemed to be about sex and the Incarnation. I got about a third of the way through Women’s Experience of Sex (Kitzinger) – it’s very eighties and occasionally made me want to punch someone, but had some good stuff in – specifically, about letting sex be about more than genitals. And I read this post about the Incarnation and the necessity (or otherwise) of the Crucifixion, which is an elegant rendering of the idea that Anne and I ran into over pasta and sardines on Maundy Thursday in Redecilla. (Incidentally, I have been catching up on La Vuelta a España, and getting very excited when I see Camino waymarkings at the roadside. I have been looking out for them specifically, but still.)

What I have been getting from this particular combination is that I need to get my sexual and spiritual aspects meshing with each other, I think. This is yet another thing about myself of which I do not have to be frightened, but it’s not that easy. That in becoming human Jesus made the physical world good, or demonstrated that it was good. That it doesn’t matter whether he was married or gay or whatever, because just by being human he made it right to be what you are. (This makes more sense in my head.) (If anyone can recommend any reading around this, preferably something that isn’t a How To Have Good Christian Sex manual, that would be extremely useful.)

That’s probably enough brackets. Anyway, it all feels like a significant spiritual gear shift, and there will probably be more to it than that. I have been feeling surprisingly positive of late (Friday evening, big brain crash, excepted), reading all the back entries of Hannah’s blog and not feeling jealous of her for having a calling. (This is something that I struggle with more than I like to admit.) And this despite the fact that I’m slightly dreading going back to work, though going back to work will allow me to sort out some of the things that have been bugging me, and usually the vocation jealousy pops up when I am feeling frustrated when work isn’t going too well…

PM says PE teachers not sadistic enough. ‘We do our best, dammit!”

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… is the message I am getting from this story – which is unfair both on Cameron and my PE teachers, most of whom were fairly decent sorts. However, it does seem to me that there are two competing aspirations here, both laudable, and making school sports more competitive will only work for one of them. To win more Olympic medals, and to get the nation’s children, and, indeed, the nation’s adults, more active.

Let me tell you about how I became more active.

I hated sports at school. As I have hinted above, this was not because of my teachers. It was because of me. I was unremittingly hopeless and, because I was good at pretty much everything else (Design Technology excepted) my sporting incompetence was horribly conspicuous. This held true from primary school (where I was in a year group of five) through Key Stage 3 (class of thirty, year group of ninety) to GCSE, where I was in a year group of one and managed to lose it from my timetable.

I was hopeless. I was the fat asthmatic kid with glasses (not all at the same time, I will admit – the asthma came first, then the glasses, then the fat) and, no matter how hard I tried, I was never anything other than slow and clumsy. I did try. I was a conscientious child, at least in other people’s time, and not being good at stuff frustrated me, so I tried to get better – but my classmates always improved more, and so I continued to be slow and clumsy, and increasingly disillusioned with sports as played at school, with the (apparently insufficient) emphasis on competition. I was never going to be as good as Nicky or Jack or Abby, so why was I even trying?

None of which stopped me being reasonably active. I skipped; I hit tennis balls against walls; I taught myself to ride a bike by throwing it and myself down the drive until I stopped falling off. I stayed fit despite school sports, competitive or otherwise, not because of it. (Although, now I come to think of it, I did do trampolining for a while as an after-school club; that was fun, and I wasn’t too bad.)

Then we moved to the Isle of Wight, and to a house with a much smaller garden, I moved schools three times in one year, I hit puberty (late), my parents separated, and my first bout of depression set in. None of that was much fun, and I stopped doing pretty much everything that could be even vaguely described as ‘physical activity’.

When I was eighteen I got a job at a hotel two miles away. The job was pretty grim, but the two miles was wonderful – I could walk it. Two miles of soul-cleansing cliff-top, two miles of beauty, two miles of exercise – and the first glimmerings of my independence. I started walking between my parents’ houses, four miles apart, and those four miles became mine in a way that neither house ever did. They connected my broken family, but they also gave me space away from it. And – incidentally – I was getting fit. Suddenly I had a form of physical exercise (I’m not sure one can really call it a ‘sport’) that I loved wholeheartedly. The same thing has happened this year with cycling. I’m one of the slowest things on the road – and that’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s just a thing, and meanwhile I keep cycling.

And so my point is this: making school sports more competitive may well give us our next generation of Olympic medallists, and I will be as pleased for them as I am for the current ones – but it will not get the nation fitter all round, because it will do nothing for those of us who don’t do exercise that way, who don’t particularly want to compare themselves to other people, who just want to find something they enjoy and to do it. I have found that I enjoy activities that get me from A to B and allow me to enjoy the scenery. Other people will enjoy other things. Trampolining! Badminton! Judo!

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s at school that’s the problem, the way that most people hate most of the books they had to read for English. I don’t know. I don’t think there is an obvious answer – and I am convinced that making school sports more competitive isn’t it.

(As for the private vs state school question – the GCSE years, where I managed to escape sports altogether, were at a hilariously terrible private school. I will tell you about my wacky adventures there some other time.)

Describe your daily, common soundscape, from rouse to turning in.

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Waking. Fighting the dry, tickling cough until the inevitable defeat. Up. Kettle burbles and clicks; computer sings. Now for a proper cough. Feeling more human: patter between bedroom and study to deal with emails (ping!), alarms (bringle, bringle, up and down the scale). Gather together the necessaries for work (‘I shall be late!’ and cursing freely), pack the bag and unlock the trike (‘what’s the time? I shall be late!’), and – now it starts:

– the click-click-click of the freewheel, the clunk of the gear change, the whir of the tyres. A sulky purr from the car behind me (‘yes, well, you can wait, can’t you?’), a honk if I’m unlucky, the roar as it passes. If it’s a motorbike, roar-whoosh. If a bike (they’re all faster than me, and can pass more easily) a slight disturbance in the air, and perhaps a ‘good morning’.

Birds. I never used to hear birds on my way to work; the fresh air never moved fast enough past me. My own gasping breathing (‘come-on-you-bastard, come-on-you-bastard, come-on-you-bastard’) – and down the other side of the hill, and I’m not sure whether I hear the air or feel it.

Back towards the main road, now. A siren. A hundred engines ticking over. The shrill peeping of the pedestrian crossing. The clatter of a train. Sometimes this seems like the longest road in the world. I am so nearly there.

Into work. ‘Kayjay!’ I am not fit for human interaction until I have had a shower. And yes, I am allowed to take the lift to it. I’ve just cycled seven miles you know. GROUND. FLOOR. Lift going up. SECOND. FLOOR. The extractor fan in the shower sounds more like a jet engine.

Phones. ‘Good morning, how can I help?… I see – when is your meeting?… have you spoken to your branch?… I’ll get the duty officer to give you a ring back…’ Will this bloody computer never load up? ‘Where are we with this committee?’ ‘What’s the craic?’ Always questions. The sickening crunch that means the photocopier has broken again.

The hum and the bleeping of the microwave. The inane witterings of whoever’s presenting this property show. A colleague’s get-rich-quick scheme (why does he never try them, if they’re so good?)

More phones. The tinny Westminster chimes of the doorbell. It is the photocopier man, who is not best pleased at being out here again. Or a courier with a trolley. ‘You coming out for a fag?’ Of course one of the smokers’ phones goes immediately afterwards. ‘No, I’m afraid he’s away from his desk at the moment. No, he’ll only be ten minutes or so. Can I get him to give you a ring back?’

‘Bye everybody!’ And then the long ride home. Whir, gasp, click, whoosh.

I am a tenor when I shower at home. ‘Yes! let me like a soldier fall!‘ The camper the better. ‘this breast expanding for the ball to blot out every stain. Brave manly hearts confer my-hy doom, which gentler wu-huh-huh-uns may tell… and the planet of love is on high, beginning to faint in the light she loves, on a bed of daffodil sky‘. Marie Lloyd used that to prove that smut was in the eye of the beholder. I don’t think she would have had to try very hard, but I suppose they hadn’t invented Eng. Lit. back then, at least, not the sort that deals with Subtext. ‘Beginning to faint in the light she lo-oves, to fa-int in the li-ight and – to die! Come! Come! Co-ome, my own, my sweet! Co-ome, my own, my sweet! Maud! Maud! Come! Come! I am here at the gate – alone! pom pom pom pom’.

The sizzle of hot fat. ‘I know I say this every time, but I don’t half make a damn good omelette.’ Somebody hits ‘shuffle’ on iTunes. Something loud and French. Or something sugary and soppy by the Kings Singers. Bairstow. Jackson. Or Youtube. Horrible Histories (‘My name is – my name is – my name is – Charles the Second’) or QI (‘Good evening, good evening, good evening, good evening good evening’).

And so to bed. ‘Night night.’ ‘Sleep tight.’ ‘Do not let the bedbugs bite.’ ‘Wake up in the morning light.’

A single car passes. And the call of a night train – wah-waaah.

Describe the most remarkable sky you’ve seen

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Early to bed, early to rise, in a land that only woke properly in the evenings. I had walked for weeks, and seldom seen a true night sky in that time. I had walked for miles, through Navarra, La Rioja, Castile, and now León, from the snowy Pyrenees to the arid plain; the variation in the landscape had petered out (though I was following James), the relief of walking a flat path at last replaced by the tedium of crossing a flat plain, hundreds of feet above sea level and with nothing on earth to see.

But the sky. My God, the sky.

It was cold. I stood, bare-foot, bare-legged, at the centre of a wooden O, a tiny world, between bed and bar and bathroom, and there was the great bowl of the sky curving above me, reaching down beyond me on every side, deep velvet blue spangled with countless stars, all of space layered thick in one dark illuminate dome.

A very slow-cooked post

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I seem to have been learning a lot this year; or perhaps I have been coming to understand things that I only knew before. If you’ll excuse the franglais, I am beginning to connaitre things that previously I only savais. In the process, several disparate things are beginning to join up. Take this, the end of an extremely rambling comment on someone else’s journal (a good couple of months ago, I must admit – this post has been a long time in the writing):

That said, from the comments above it does appear that it can be a useful exercise for some people, and at the moment I am trying very hard to remember that what works for me may not work for someone else, and just because something doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it won’t work for other people. But that’s another story.

This is the other story. If you like, this is the first story, because I have been thinking about this for a while, whereas I only realised that the comment above could be applied without redaction to either issue when I read that particular post and the comments. Things are joining up.

I started thinking about this around Christmas, when somebody updated a Farcebook status to read something like: ‘I wonder what Carols from Kings would be like if you added a worship band?’ I contributed little to the subsequent discussion other than some rude remarks about John Rutter, but things happened in my head.

Now, the Nine Lessons and Carols works for me, just as it is. Trust me. The music works, the readings work (Authorized Version or no Authorized Version, but I do like the cockatrice); the bidding prayer takes my breath away. It works for me in a way that drums and arm-raising never have. Now, you can look back on my life and say ‘this is because X, Y, and Z’ – which will include but not be limited to the fact that this is what I grew up with – but this does not make it any less true. This works for me.

It is only recently that I have come to appreciate the converse of this: that drums and arm-raising work for some people in a way that the Nine Lessons and Carols service never has. That, when they say this, they mean it: that it is true. More importantly, that there is room for both of us and room for both our traditions. That I can express my spirituality through early twentieth century Anglican liturgy, and all manner of choral music. That other people can express their spirituality through lively movement. That, although the one doesn’t work for them and the other doesn’t work for me, neither of us ought to stop doing what works for us. That there is room for both of us.

I will tell you what would happen if Carols from Kings suddenly sprouted a worship band: it would stop working for some people. Some other people would suddenly understand what it was all about. And you can write your own Daily Mail headline.

Things work for me in a way that they do not work for you. Things work for you in a way that they do not work for me. In short, YMMV. (O internets, how great is ur wizdmz!) We find God in different places: how obvious. We knew that already, surely? But still it happens. In every tradition, there arises sooner or later a tacit or spoken assumption that everyone who doesn’t do it Our Way is DOIN IT RONG. Every tradition, I say. (I should point out that my examples all come from the rich battleground of Christianity, this being what I have come across in my own experience thus far. I am convinced that other faiths could provide their own examples, but I rather feel that it is not my place to do so.) There is, in one camp, an assumption that all who do not say mass facing the altar are little better than heathens. In another, that a choir that includes females in any capacity is not a Traditional Choir. Or, ‘move around! stop worrying about what your body does! stop being self-conscious! if you’re self-conscious you can’t be God-conscious.’ No. I only half-believed then, and I do not believe now, that my self-consciousness was a fault, to be cured by more leaping around. It was a manifestation of my discomfort with that style of worship.

That style of worship did not work for me. And that, my friends, is absolutely fine. And if my style(s) of worship do(es) not work for you, that is also fine. If you have found one that does, hold on to it.

Do not get me wrong. I am not suggesting for a moment that you should never try anything new. Quite the opposite: never be afraid to try anything new. But, if you try something new, and it doesn’t do anything for you, for heaven’s sake don’t feel guilty about it – and don’t believe anyone who thinks you should, because This Is The Right Way. It is. But it is the right way for them, and it may not be for you.

Reflections on the Camino

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Looking back on it, the most striking thing about the Camino de Santiago (literally, the Way of Saint James) is the way that it takes you through everything. The Camino was never intended to be a tour; it is simply a more or less straight line from east to west, and as a result runs through places of no importance whatsoever, besides the ones that have made it a European Cultural Route – and, because it runs through them, you have to walk through them. We walked through seven provinces of Spain in rain, snow, wind and blazing sun; we crossed spectacular mountains, monotonous plains, and terrifying dual carriageways; we saw industrial estates and Gothic cathedrals. We never knew what to expect from day to day, and we learned very quickly not to plan too far ahead, and never to work out how much of the total distance was left to walk – it was always horribly daunting!

However, we also found that it never really mattered where we were. The daily routine of eat-walk-eat-walk-eat-sleep varied very little, and the goal of every day was to reach somewhere with food and a bed, whether we were in city or country. If we had exceeded our average of 20km we felt a particular sense of achievement, and if it seemed that our laundry had a reasonable chance of being dry by morning that was even better. (You can always tell a pilgrim by the damp socks safety-pinned to their rucksack!) Whatever the terrain, the most important thing to look out for was the waymarking. Most of the way you follow yellow arrows painted on walls, rocks or trees; in some places there are concrete bollards with blue and yellow shells to point you in the right direction; in the cities there are metal shells set into the pavement. It is surprising how much faith one puts in these markers; we very rarely looked at a map after the first week. Similarly, we just had to trust that at the end of each day’s walk there would be a pilgrim hostel with two beds free, and a shop, or a bar that served food, that was open. There almost always was: we never went without a bed, and we never went hungry.

The pilgrims are a remarkably cosmopolitan group. We walked with people of many nationalities: French, Slovenian, Korean, Australian, Austrian, Scottish, German, Finnish… The majority of them were our age (gap-year) or recently retired; the youngest pilgrim we met was a nine year-old walking with his father. On the whole they were very dedicated; some do the Camino stage by stage over a period of several years, beginning again where they left off the previous year. It is relatively rare to do the whole journey in one long stint, as we did, and we felt very lucky to be able to devote almost two months to it. I will never forget the kindness we met all along the route, not only from fellow pilgrims and hospitaleros (hostel wardens), but from ordinary Spanish citizens. It seemed that every time we were lost, or in trouble, or simply needed a little encouragement, someone would pop up to help. They didn’t seem to mind our execrable Spanish, and often seemed to go a fair distance out of their way to make up for the deficiencies of our guidebook. I owe rather a lot to people whose names I’ll never know.

And then there were the unique little experiences, the quirky things that perhaps didn’t contribute so much to my spiritual development, but are nonetheless unforgettable – the chickens that live in the cathedral at Santo Domingo de la Calzada, for example; the surreal ‘Gaudí building’ in Astorga; the young wild boar that followed its owner into a bar in Triacastela – far more than can be fitted into a short article. I am still unsure exactly what to make of them, but they were part of the experience!

Somehow, after all that, Santiago de Compostela itself avoided being an anticlimax. I was terribly afraid that it would be, after two years’ planning and seven weeks on the road, but in the event it was all we had hoped, and well worth the effort. We had originally intended to catch the bus on to Finisterre, but we decided that we liked Santiago too much, so spent all our time exploring the city or hanging around in the cathedral to see if anyone we knew would turn up. It was the right place to stop.

So – what next? I must confess that I am not entirely sure where I am headed next, but, if the Camino has taught me one thing, it is how to accept uncertainty and to trust that when I need to know the way I will be shown it.