I mean I want to see

READING Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting On Religion In America — And Found Unexpected Peace, a book which centres on the Catholic clergy sexual abuse scandal:

Philadelphia’s lead investigator, a veteran assistant district attorney named Will Spade, would later tell the National Catholic Reporter that interviewing the scores of victims affected him like no other case in his career.

“It was like working in a factory,” Spade said. “And in this factory was a conveyor belt of damaged people. Every day it was another damaged person.

“There would be times when I would come home after a particularly bad day,” he continued, “and I would lie down on the couch with my head in my wife’s lap and cry, uncontrollably cry.”

It’s a book about the deconversion of the author, who had been a born-again Christian reporter. He was later devastated by observing the ugly, sinful underbelly of a self-serving institutional and individual religion. Victims’ stories, clergymen’s lies, and how members of the laity aren’t supposed to question their “fathers”. What happens in an organisation that’s run by leaders that do not pick up the phone to turn in child rapists — something most of us would do automatically? When the victims feel as if the church’s betrayal is worse that what the priest did to them — Jesus had told His disciples:

“But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)

There’s rage and contempt at how bishops and their lieutenants failed to protect children from pedophile priests. Much of it is about the hypocrisy and corruption within the Body of Christ. What’s the truth behind “smells and bells” or “happy clappy” religion? How can institutions be easily twisted for selfish and sinful needs?

One of the attorneys, Manly:

“Imagine every day your job is to go and pick up intestines that have spilled out of people’s guts.” Manly says. “You stuff them back in, and sew them up and try to find the person with the knife who did this. The clergy sexual abuse cases are like that, except it’s emotional guts you’re dealing with and you’re trying to put these people back together. Though they are adults, you’re really dealing with that child who got hurt.

“In my personal life, I was spiralling downward, and I kept thinking, how can the priest and bishops go on with their lives as if nothing happened? The priest wielded the knife, and the bishops cleaned it off and put it back where the priest could find it again — and you have to be one depraved motherfucker to do that. They are cold and calculating. How can these guys not do anything about it? And at the moment of consecration, these people are supposed to be in persona Christi, or ‘in the person of Christ’?”

He lost his faith.

“When I started this, I thought clergy sexual abuse was a holiness problem involving a few priests. But I’ve found no one in the clergy, in all my cases, who did the right thing. Some of them weren’t bad people, but they didn’t have the courage to do what was right.”

Alaska Native victims were molested by Jesuits, and the victims contend that many others — cut off for decades from legal and emotional help — have committed suicide to end their pain. Lobdell writes:

“No one would believe us,” Kobuk told me. “[Lundowski] worked for God, and I was just an Eskimo child.”

…

What had happened to helpless boys at the edge of the world made a lot more sense if there were no God. COnfronted with evil, whether man-made or satanic, our task is always to fight it. But it helps to understand it, too — and I found it refreshing to focus entirely on the fight, knowing that one bad man and one corrupt institution had been purely self-interested. I did not have to worry about God’s role anymore.

He’d seen too many innocent people live out lives full of tragedy and pain — the consequences of sin, heartbreaking emptiness of the abuser and the devastation of the abused. Basically, he lost his faith when he started to see extreme examples of “bad things happening to good people”.

It’s nothing new. Every atheist is aware of this argument, and every theist knows the answers against that. Still, it’s a good story about belief in Christianity, faith in humanity, the grey zones and all the colours of bruises in between. Welcome to the edge. There are many people there.

*

So how do you break the cycle? What if the abuser was also abused? There’s no ultimate healing until we recognise that all of us are fallen men and women in a fallen and broken world in which each of us needs to offer forgiveness to others and to experience God’s forgiveness of us.

Speaking of which, I like Rowan William’s Christmas sermon:

…Can we as a society accept and even celebrate the fact that there is a place for proper and mature dependence - that human beings need to receive and learn: not so that they can get to the point where they stop receiving and learning, but so that they can acquire the habits of receiving and learning in ever-new settings? Can we help children enjoy their dependency so that they don’t just leave it behind but get to manage it with freedom and imagination as they grow older?

And that involves two difficult lessons for us adults. One is simply to reconnect ourselves to our own capacity to receive and learn with joy and excitement - to become like little children, as Somebody once said. The other is to be ready to give the nurture and security that children need - to create the safe places where they can learn, where they can make their mistakes. To do this is to show that we treasure dependency and that we shan’t either exploit it or ignore it. Embracing and celebrating our own dependence gives us the vision and energy to make sure that others have the freedom to make the most of their dependence too. And this means working to give all the children of the world the security they need.

In our own society, there are problems enough - children who have never known stability in their family life, who have never known a father or who have been pushed into taking responsibility for a parent or for brothers and sisters, with a mother who is ailing, addicted or otherwise incapacitated; children with workaholic parents, materially well off but deprived of warmth and relaxation with their family; worse still, children and young people who are systematically exploited through sex trafficking, children who are trapped in gang culture. Worldwide, all these problems and more are all too visible; perhaps one of the most appalling phenomena, still affecting hundreds of thousands of children, is the exploiting of children in the meaningless and savage civil wars in places like Congo and Sri Lanka - children who are abducted, brutalised, turned into killers, used as sex slaves. To hear of these experiences is almost unbearable, yet the scandal continues.

These children are created, like all of us, to become fully and consciously children of God, to enjoy that glory we reflected on a few minutes ago. Their suffering is an insult to the purpose of God, a contemptuous refusal of the gift of God on the part of those who keep them in their different kinds of slavery. God’s gift at Christmas is relationship, not just another human relationship but relation to God the Father by standing where Jesus stands, standing in the full torrent of his love and creativity, giving and receiving. To come into that place and to be rooted and grounded there means letting go of our fear of dependence and opening our hearts to be fed and enlarged and transformed. And that in turn means looking at how we handle dependence in ourselves and others, how we accept the positive dependence involved in lifelong learning and growing, and help one another deal with it positively.

…And that again means a particular care for those who need us most, who need us to secure their place and guarantee that there is nourishment and stability for them. As we learn how to be gratefully dependent, we learn how to attend to and respond to the dependence of others. Perhaps by God’s grace we shall learn in this way how to create a society in which real dependence is celebrated and safeguarded, not regarded with embarrassment or abused by the powerful and greedy.

God has spoken through a Son. He has called us all to become children at the cradle of the Son, the Word made flesh, so that we may grow into a glory that even the angels wonder at. To all who accept him he gives power and authority to become children of God, learning and growing into endless life and joy.

*

Pretty interesting case study.

1) I was handed books by co-workers.

The more that people choose their religion, rather than just inherit it, the more likely they are to make a noise about it. Miroslav Volf, director of Yale’s Centre for Faith and Culture, says this is showing up in the workplace: “It used to be that workers hung their religion on a coat rack alongside their coats. At home, their religion mattered. At work, it was idle. That is no longer the case. For many people religion has something to say about all aspects of life, work included.”

2) I attended the Alpha course, an example of an evangelical outreach contained within the older traditions.

Easy answers can come from the pulpit, but what appeals to me is Graham Greene’s doubting Catholicism, or intellectual Anglicanism, a more cool and cerebral approach. Still, what’s happening is that preachers are adapting their faith to the times. In America, Rick Warren took post-war evangelicalism and reshaped it for the world of suburban anomie and the search for meaning, becoming a one-man dispenser of “purpose”.

There’s the belief in some Christian circles that Christianity must retain the right to seek and receive converts, even in parts of the world where this may be viewed as a form of cultural or spiritual aggression.

3) Conversion

Sometimes conversion is gradual, but quite commonly things come to a head in a single instant, which can be triggered by a text, an image, a ceremony or some private realisation. A religious person would call such a moment a summons from God; a psychologist might speak of an instant when the walls between the conscious and unconscious break down, perhaps because an external stimulus—words, a picture, a rite—connects with something very deep inside.

THE first thing I thought about religious people was that they were crazy. But a calmer study of the archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, and a majority of religious leaders reveals that while they may all wear funny hats and perform peculiar ceremonies from time to time, they are not actually mentally ill.

Maybe they’re delusional. A delusion is an irrational belief. But that’s not true. There are thousands of religious believers who exhibit a high degree of rational ability, function well in the ordinary affairs of life, whose faith enable them to live well and be happy, and can produce a reasonable and coherent defence of their beliefs. It’s a mark of rationality that we accept that many of our most important beliefs will be contestable. This is true of beliefs in ethics, politics, history, philosophy and so on. There are some people with such closed minds that they regard everyone who disagrees with them as insane, deluded or irrational — and that itself is a mark of irrationality, or at least of someone who finds it impossible to adopt a dispassionate and balanced view of a subject. There are such people in the world, but they are not all religious by any means. The best-selling trio of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are engaging polemists, but their disbelief has a religious quality to it.

So okay, let’s be dispassionate and balanced. Hadn’t God had been undone by Darwin, dismissed by Marx, deconstructed by Freud?

Let’s look at what Christians believe. If I think the Bible is so full of errors, what are these errors specifically? Enumerate them so they can be checked out. Let’s look at Luke’s gospel, which is written with straightforward clarity and detail. Firstly — no resurrection, no Christianity. I read, and I studied, and I found to my increasing discomfort that evidence points to the fact that the resurrection did happen. Still I was clinging very tightly to my scepticism, saying I’m not sure, and have to complete my investigation by reading the Koran, find out more about Buddhism, the Baha’i faith and so on. After all, if I’d been born in Morocco I’d probably be a Muslim.

I avoided commitment as it’s not just an intellectual exercise. What am I going to do with all of this? I still believe people should discover faith for themselves rather than be energetically introduced to it.

TBC…

*

As I rearrange the mental furniture I realise: What’s been largely controlling my life is this desire for Approval — a lot of it’s been driving that need to Achieve. I’ve tried desperately to be better than others: smarter, more interesting, funnier, even more moral. “Service about self,” the Interact Club motto said — true servants don’t need to cover their walls with plaques and awards to validate their work. They don’t wrap themselves in robes of superiority, and don’t need to measure their worth by their achievements, like I did.

So there’s insecurity, worrying about how I appear to others, fearing exposure of my weaknesses and hiding beneath layers of protective pride and pretensions. Which is why I’ve always been putting off going to church and getting baptised though I believed — I didn’t want to appear superstitious and foolish.

Yet it’s as the vulnerable, fallible, questing and questioning human beings that we are, that we speak of God, with our doubts, the hesitations, the struggles and surprises and delight. As Timothy Radcliffe points out, “conversation only happens if we are truthful with each other. So when I share my faith, then my words must be true to the complexity of my faith and humanity”¹.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I had always felt life first as a story –
and if there is a story there is a story teller.

- G K Chesterton

Our stories tell us who we are, why we are here, and what we are to do. They give us our best answers to all of life’s big questons, and to most of the small ones as well

- Daniel Taylor

CALL UPON the name of the Lord and be saved…:) It started as I liked to swear “Jesus” in the office — and I was seated next to LF, who took offence.

We’re the sort of friends who can spat and talk it over and no stings remain, though at that time I was thinking: “Yikes, Jesus freak. Must. Be. Careful.” Sometime later she lent me a book, A Question Of Integrity, (or The Wonder Worker, as it’s titled in some countries), which I really enjoyed. While I had no time for that Bible rubbish, couldn’t understand it, didn’t need it, I loved a well-told story. Nothing restores me like a good story. And I adored Howatch’s characters and got drawn into their lives — Alice, shy, dumpy and unhappy, wanting to belong with a painful hunger; Nicholas Darrow, the well-educated, flawed, charismatic priest; and oh I love Lewis, the irascible traditionalist with a Rottweiler temper and a quick sense of humour.

Now I’d avoided those people who tried to “bring me to Christ” with tactless nagging or unimaginative ranting or pushing off of religious tracts onto me. And someone who asked me to be a “sister-in-Christ” gave me the willies. “Leave me alone,” I muttered under my breath. “I don’t need to be ’saved’, thank you very much.” I thought it was all similar to MLM sales tactics. I thought it’s good enough to live life with a clear conscience, that religion was for the broken and the insecure seeking some sort of miracle. I loved my friends who ran the gamut from atheist to Buddhist to Muslim, and the idea that they were ignorant or condemned by some self-righteous authority made me want to hurl.

There was curiosity, though — someone asked me to read The Purpose-Driven Life…I picked it up, and it started with:

“This book is dedicated to you. Before you were born, God planned this moment in your life. It is no accident that you are holding this book. God longs for you to discover the life he created you to live — here on earth, and forever in eternity.”

I read that, wanted to gag a little, and put down the book and forgot all about it.

But at the same time I was reading Howatch…a well-told story’s a different matter. I suppose A Question Of Integrity (also titled The Wonder Worker) spoke to me at that time because it was about healing, and while I was putting on a decent show of bubbliness two years back there was a lowgrade throbbing of boredom and heartache in the background (I hope that one day I can tell you the whole story, but meanwhile — alas! — my lips are sealed). Howatch’s ecclesiastical characters weren’t plaster saints, but were very real to me, with the sort of sly wit and humour I could appreciate, with struggles that were very real to me:

“Or do you think the idea’s crazy?” she says, suddenly losing her nerve. “Do you think I’m bound to fail?”

Venetia’s whole future’s at stake and I mustn’t wreck it by creating some self-centred scene. As I pray for the grace to behave as I should, I know that when people genuinely love others, they don’t cling; they don’t try to imprison them for their own use or batten on them to serve their own needs. They open the palms of their hands and they step back. They set those they love free to do what they’re called to do and be what they’re supposed to be.

I say: “Bound to fail? You? Nonsense! You’ll be enjoying yourself so much that you won’t even remember what the world “failure” means!”

“You really think I can do it?”

“I don’t just think,” I say. “I know.” I speak with absolute confidence and wind up sounding indestructibly positive. “What a long way you’ve travelled since we met last July, Venetia!” I exclaim. I’m very proud of you, and of course I wish you every happiness in your new life.”

But as I speak I’m aware of a terrible pain beginning. It’s an old pain resurrected; it’s chillingly familiar. It’s the pain I felt when my mother said there was no place for me in Paris where she’d fled with her new lover. But I musn’t think of that now. I mustn’t vent on Venetia all the rage which at my worst moments I still feel towards my mother, but how do I find the strength to control all my chaotic, unhealed emotions which are trying to muscle in on the scene and wreck it?

“There’s something I want to say.” She’s whispering and I can barely hear her. There are tears in her eyes. “I want you to know” — she stumbles but recovers — “I want you to know that I can never thank you enough for what you’ve done. You’ve redeemed what he did. You’ve played it as he should have played it all those years ago…Oh yes, Robin was wonderful, of course, and Nick too, but in the end it was you who finally rewrote the past and enabled me to believe in a future where everything was made new.”

I find I have the strength to say: “I’m glad I could help. I’m glad I was put across your path.” Then I start to get into difficulties. I try to say: “I’ve so enjoyed our pussyfoots,” but I have to grope instead for a cigarette.

“I’m sorry,” she says very rapidly, very unsteadily. “Forgive me — I’m sorry –”

But I’m all right. When the crunch comes, I’m all right. I keep thinking of that shining future and how very, very much I want her to have it. “There’s nothing to forgive,” I say, “and no need to apologise.” By this time I’ve found a cigarette but although I’m ferreting in my pockets for my lighter I can’t find it. That’s hardly surprising. It’s lying on the table, and Venetia spots it before I do.

“Here — ” she grabs the lighter. The flame flares.

“Feminist!” I growl. “Lighting other people’s cigarettes is a man’s job!”

The touch of humour helps. Laughing shakily she says have I ever thought of being exhibited in a museum as a relic. I try to laugh too and suddenly we’re just a couple of friends chatting over our pussyfoots as if nothing’s happened. But that’s an illusion. Everything’s happened, and soon it’s time to part.

Well — I wasn’t fully healed from some partings at that time, and in fact there are still some bruises even today. So that book spoke to me, and I guzzled down the other two books in the trilogy and started on the Starbridge set of ecclesiastical novels after.

It started with stories…heartbreaking stories and stories of redemption and resurrection and healing and forgiveness. In some ways all of us are perishing. There are casualties strewn across the field. The lost souls, the broken hearts, the captives.

But I was still very resistant (see part I: the screaming) I believed very firmly that Christianity could not possibly be maintained by thoughtful, intelligent people, at least not people so thoughtful and intelligent as myself. Surely, Christianity was for well-meaning and sometimes not-so-well-meaning people with substandard educations and a streak of intellectual fear bordering on dishonesty. But I learnt of and got to know people who were indisputably my intellectual superiors who believed that Jesus was Lord, and had died of their sins.

So that escape was closed off. I’d to stop to consider if it was true — if there is a God. If Jesus was who he said he was. That we are all saved by unmerited, undeserved grace. No one lives up to what God wants of him: not the most sinful, evil person in the world, and not the most moral, virtuous person in the world.

I went on to read the New Testament, various Christian texts by Timothy Radcliffe (my favourite!) and Rowan Williams.

Somehow, as I read, Christ became real to me as a figure of health — not someone foaming at the mouth with religiosity. Someone on the side of the suffering, the abused and exploited. Wherever humanity was broken, Jesus restored it. His followers served — I saw it in my heroes like Paul Brand:

“I have often written of bad doses of faith I got here and there. Truly I believe that God brought Paul Brand into my life of that I could take all the time in the world to examine one human being and learn what God had in mind with the whole creation experiment. No one has affected my faith more. You only need to meet one saint to believe, and I had the inestimable privilege of spending leisurely hours on visits, trips and phone conversations picking apart a saint piece by piece. He stood up to scrutiny.”

The doctrine of the Trinity challenged me to rid my love and friendships of all that is dominating, patronising, selfish or exploitative.

TBC…

From a friend’s Taboo game…description for the word “kidnap”

A: Rich man! Rich man’s son! Woman! Take money! Take money! Give money!!
B: MARRIAGE!

*

C’s facebook update: It isn’t normal to know what we want.It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement. Abraham Marslow
D: I want a burger and fries.

L CALLED from Hong Kong and we had a good chat. I told her how these jobless months have helped re-draw the paradigms and buttresses of my inner world…

I’m having a quiet Christmas this year, and it’s the best ever, for I’ve learnt that I don’t need always need to be jumping through hoops, be on the go, accumulating interesting experiences, improving myself, busy Achieving. I am the sort of person who’s totally geared towards neurotic Achievement with a capital A. I had to learn languages, travel to all the countries in S-E Asia, identify each state on the continent of Africa, read all the Graham Greene & Great Russian books, half kill myself completing projects long before their deadlines and so on, otherwise I would be a complete Failure with a capital F. I couldn’t seem to enjoy anything unless I’m Achieving. Everything has to be strategised and mulled over.

Even after quitting my job I had to clock in X amount of hours of volunteer work, take charge of this project and that, improve my Chinese handwriting, learn Malay, draw up and implement detailed plans of travel and exploration, go through a gazillion chess games and Learn From Them. I had to fill up my days with lunch meetings and dinner parties and meeting this friend and that. Puddling happily through life not knowing whether I’m Arthur or Martha? No! I can’t do that! I need to have Goals and meet deadlines.

But you know what? I spent the last couple of months in a mundane fashion instead of travelling as I’d planned to various East Asian capitals. I have nothing interesting to post for my Facebook status. I don’t always need to be Funny with Interesting Stories. I’m no longer tiring myself out or fretting over worries or wanting to appear happening. Blessed peace!

*

A: Where are you going?
B: It’s a sort of retreat. I’ll tell you about it later.
A: What fun! Will you be asked to beat yourself with twigs?

*

It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty founder was a child himself.

– Charles Dickens

Had a great time beating on a drum last night. :) I’d been the sort who’d roll my eyes and look for an escape route — but I was happily singing along with all the rest. And it’s odd how paths cross…& how God works with us and through us even when we’re not aware of it.

A: I was a Christian when I was younger.
B: What happened?
A: Then I entered into the Age of Reason.

MY GOD, I thought with an increasing sense of dread, I don’t want to be a religious nutcase! So I was screaming internally when I came to believe in God and Christ, very slowly and very reluctantly, after long reflection on my many doubts and objections.

No, no, no, no, no…This is all wrong, I told myself. I felt no need for salvation by a fantastic physical resurrection of Christ. I’m content marking “no religious preference” in check boxes. Secular universities and institutions are my friends. I fancy myself an intellectual. As an agnostic I was fine with my community-oriented, already-concerned-with-social-justice sort of life. I don’t alienate friends by forcing religion down their throats. I respect and understand those who have deep doubts about traditional religious doctrines — I’m one of them myself. I am a sceptic, a critic, I am a thinking person. I’m interested in the rise and wane of secular scepticism and religious faith in an detached academic way — I don’t want to turn into some irrational crusader. I can’t be a Christian: I’m not an anti-science lunatic; I believe in evolution and dinosaurs and the fossil record.

I don’t want to speak in tongues. I also don’t want to sing songs with Pentecostal hand-gestures. And what *is* this about conversations with God and hearing the promptings of the Holy Ghost…As my favourite TV doctor House said, “If you talk to God you’re religious, if he talks back you’re insane.” I don’t want to imagine I hear God’s voice and end up in IMH.

So I’d always thought Christianity was the faith of deluded nutcases…and I also thought it was boring and irrelevant. Friends invited me to Bible study groups but the sessions made me roll my eyes and stop listening when the “Jesus business” came in. “Now, now,” I thought. “Just be reasonable.” I thought services were tedious. “Purity” and “reverence” seemed like sanctimonious claptrap to me. I’d also thought cynically that many people went to church for social benefits. It’s such a middle-class thing, you go there and sing songs and beam unthinkingly and find a girlfriend/boyfriend and make business associates and go around shaking hands and laying hands on this and that. Of course everybody feels good. They’re brainwashed sheep, I scoffed.

So my doubts are very stubborn…But something was niggling in me that made me go on despite being convinced that Christians were misguided at best. Yes, I had doubts about my doubts. (I did my degrees in Stream of Babble, and Brooding Introspection.)

Why are we here? What’s right and wrong? What are the most important things we should be doing? If Christianity’s true, I thought…but how do you begin to go about answering this age-old question: “What is truth?”

We will never have hard, final, conclusive proof of God’s existence or of his non-existence. But we do have clues. And each of us has to take the sum total of those clues and decide what we believe about God.

So I’d drawn up an extensive reading list two years back, when Laifong, my friend at work handed me a Susan Howatch book and got me curious about faith again. I got in touch with a former colleague Vanessa, and attended Alpha at St George’s and met the loveliest folk. But I was still set upon “saving” myself from looniness. I was convinced the whole of Revelations in the Bible, for instance, was written by someone on drugs. And Paul put my hackles up for he seemed like a misogynist. I refused to be a bizarre Bible literalist.

How can you claim that you have the One Truth? Doesn’t religion divide us internationally and at home? It’s a strong tendency to create strife and stereotypes and caricatures. Can’t we confine religion to the private realm? Can’t we focus on what’s common among religions?

It all gave me a massive headache.

TBC…

“I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.

‘We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,’
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.”

- Oliver Herford

*

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.”

- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ring Out, Wild Bells

*

“Give me the end of the year an’ its fun
When most of the plannin’ an’ toilin’ is done;
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest,
Let me sit down with the ones I love best,
Hear the old voices still ringin’ with song,
See the old faces unblemished by wrong,
See the old table with all of its chairs
An’ I’ll put soul in my Thanksgivin’ prayers.”
- Edgar A. Guest, Thanksgiving

*

“So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive,
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - Listen!!
All the long echoes sing the same delight,
This shortest day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, fest, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!!”
- Susan Cooper, The Shortest Day

*

My mother’s menu consisted of two choices:
Take it or leave it.
- Buddy Hackett

READING about bookish youngsters in Ursula Le Guin’s Western Shore series (titles above). “Three things that, seeking increase, strengthen soul: love, learning liberty.” I love her characters, and she’s brilliant at creating whole societies, and her prose is lean and poetic. Poets and bards are makers, and there’s the power of words. Heartbreaking dialogue too, with great sympathy and imagination. The young Melle in Book 3 is such a sweetheart!

“We’ve crossed the first of the two great rivers we have to cross. This is the land of Bendile.”

“The hero Hamneda had to swim across a river when he was wounded, didn’t he?”

I can’t say how much that touched me. It wasn’t that she’d learned the story of Hamneda from me. It was that she thought of him, that he was familiar to her mind and heart as he was to mine. We had a common language, this child and I, a language I hadn’t spoken with anyone else since I left my own childhood in Etra.

*

Christmas is here, and it’s about renewal and life and forgiveness…miracles and birth.

Speaking of which, I’d a very good birthday which brought me back into church again, and since then I’ve just been reading and thinking and walking instead of being out frenetically socialising. This year has been of change and break-ups and things spiralling out of control, and it left me bruised for a bit, and I need time alone to heal with my old friends — books and stories and poetry.

It’s been a long journey, and I now believe in God and Christ despite many issues I don’t agree with about Christianity, and am learning to trust Him. There’s no sudden moment of epiphany, it just came through books and conversation and prayer.

I think we’re all placed on earth to do something…Sometimes we have to start something new and live with uncertainty, not knowing if we have done the right thing.

Keep in mind that the greater your commitment is to the Lord, the more the devil will try to harass you. That’s why if you are moving into a deeper level of commitment to God, or coming into a new time of deliverance and freedom, or entering into new ministry or work God is opening up for you, you can depend on your enemy trying to stop it. He will do all he can to wear you down with discouragement, sickness, confusion, guilt, strife, fear, depression, or defeat. He may try to threaten your mind, your emotions, your health, your work, your family, or your relationships. He will try to get you to give up. Even though he is not close to being as powerful as God, he attempts to make you think otherwise. He will try to gain a point of rule in your life through deception. He will try to blind you to the truth and get you to believe his lies. He will try to convince you he is winning the battle, but the truth is that he has already lost.

- A friend’s quotation from her copy of The Power Of A Praying Woman

*

For winter solstice, by John Donne –

A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day

‘Tis the year’s midnight and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk:
The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is at the next spring:
For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy,
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness:
He ruined me, and I am rebegot
Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

All others from all things draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I by love’s limbecke am the grave
Of all that’s nothing. oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drowned the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls and made us carcases.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea, plants, yea, stones detest
And love; all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the goat is run
To fetch new lust and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival
Let me prepare towards her and let me call
This hour her vigil and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

*

Dysfunctional children tend to hang around other dysfunctional children, because it is an atmosphere where acceptance is most easily found. Nothing much changes once a dysfunctional, emotionally scarred child becomes an adult. They still tend to hang around other dysfunctional, emotionally scarred adults, because that seems to be the best place where they can find acceptance for being so emotionally handicapped.

With delinquents, the louder and more hostile and violent the person, the more hurt and fear he/she’s coming out from.

DEVOURING Fables comics, I adore the series. Fables (characters from any and all manner of stories) are real. In fact, they live among us as many fled the Homelands to escape the wrath of the Adversary. Though you may be familiar with the classic fairy tales that inspired these creations, each and every one of them carries a few surprises in this series. Cover work is also beautifully done.

“If you’re going to be a storyteller, you have to tell stories. You can’t just want to tell stories, or think about maybe telling stories someday, or plan to eventually tell the story in the future, once it’s perfect. A story in your imagination is always perfect and perfectly told. But once you start to actually write it, it becomes less and less perfect with every word written. If you’re going to be a storyteller by profession you have to get used to the idea that you will spend your life ruining all of your perfect untold stories by transforming them into imperfect told stories.

When I finally pitched Fables as a series it just seemed the right time to do it. I had been shoehorning fairy tale and folklore characters and story elements into my comics for years and I guess it seemed a good time to finally admit to myself that telling stories about fairy tale and folklore characters was what I wanted to do. The rest is history (and mystery).”

- Bill Willingham.

A: I realise I’m still quite naive after all these years.
B: A, I’ve warned you time and again against following old men just because they give you sweets.

A: X’s quite high-powered.
C: So’s an electric chair. And about as pleasant.

*

What a wonderful office, complete with grassy knoll!

AT A GOOD friend’s wedding today, they’d a beautiful lighting of candles ceremony, which reminds me of one of my favourite Christian songs:

There is a candle in every soul,
some brightly burning, some dark and cold.
There is a Spirit who brings fire,
ignites a candle and makes His home….

Frustrated brother, see how he’s tried to
light his own candle some other way.
See now your sister, she’s been robbed and lied to,
still holds a candle without a flame.

*

From Kay Redfield Jameson:

Some people and words have inexplicably and savingly provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather. And at some time in your life an inner fire goes out — it then bursts into flame by an encounter with another human being — we should be grateful for these people.

*

Birthdays, Christmas…it’s not about how much or what we can buy or eat or consume. It’s about giving and gifts in the best possible sense of the words. It’s telling the story again — lives touched, lives changed, breaking of bread and pouring of wine and fellowship. What a life means, what leading a full life means.

I’ve met beautiful people this past year who embodied the best virtues of service and love and generosity, role models. I know that’s what I want in my life…

TAKING a break from non-fiction and reading Andrey Kurkov’s Death And The Penguin now, and this is from the third paragraph:

Misha had appeared chez Victor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely.

:)

Gifts!

For now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on earth;
The time of singing has come.*

GARDEN parties and dinner parties and Xmas parties galore, get-togethers and drinks and sparkliness too. It’s December, my favourite month of the year, and the season is upon us again, which means family time, overeating, last-minute gift-shopping and other time-honoured traditions. Happy holidays, everyone! :)

We spontaneously burst into song over our glasses of wine and sang bits of Joni Mitchell’s A Case Of You as my friend brought out his guitar. Then we went to google for lyrics and chords and did a whole acapella session. Wonderful!

* Someone read that aloud to me once.

*

A: I am very nearly cured of happiness.
B: You are plein de merde.
A: And you are rude and will be toute seule.
B: Don’t make me repeat myself.

*

On some folk I’ve met passingly: I think of them as the varnished gangsters. Smart, on the whole, but mean, and eaten alive by resentment. They never have enough money and are bitter beyond belief behind that smooth facade. Cynical and as biting as acid and they remind me of harsh nail polish. I can be with them; but I have to strain to be with them.

They are angular, unkind, tough and cold — scary and handsomely hollow-cheeked instead of the soft and cuddly, barrel-chested and heavy-hipped. While I’m not a big fan of Romantic Heroines whose main aims are to get big sparkling diamonds on their fingers and splendid, wise, all-providing husbands to keep them in Le Creuset cookware and polka-dotted frocks, I also don’t like being with folk whose lives seem to be a minefield of professional envies and resentments.

Interesting character studies. I’m writing again, and am happy. I was talking to someone about how if we cannot write, our consciences required us to read, and improve our minds. I’m going to read Uzodinma Iweala. From The Writer’s Almanac:

Born in Washington, D.C. (1982) to Nigerian parents. He wrote Beasts of No Nation (2005) while he was going to school at Harvard. Published the year after he graduated with an English literature degree, the novel hit bookstores the week of his 23rd birthday. It was his first novel, and it garnered glowing reviews from The New York Times, The London Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker magazine, and many others. Iweala was selected as one of America’s 20 Best Young American Novelists by Granta magazine.

Beasts of No Nation is about a boy from West Africa whose father, a village schoolteacher, is killed by guerilla fighters who come to town. The boy, Agu, is forced to become a child soldier with those guerilla fighters. He narrates the brutalities of war, and his gradual embrace and enthusiasm for violence, his experiences coming of age in such conditions, his faltering belief in God, his deferred dream of becoming a doctor. The narrator’s age is never specified in the novel, but Iweala said in an interview later that he’s anywhere from 9 to 12. The child soldier ponders the promise of redemption that being a doctor holds: the chance to save lives, to possibly make amends for all of the ones he has ended.

The book is written in the first person, in an English cadenced in the idiom of Iweala’s parents’ native Nigerian languages. At the beginning, the child narrates: “I am not wanting to fight. I am not liking to hear people scream or to be looking at blood. I am not liking any of these thing.”

Uzodinma Iweala is now studying to be a doctor; he’s a student at Columbia University’s medical school.

*

Reading more Alexander McCall Smith for escapism. I like the Scotland St novels, but the Botswana ones are getting a bit tiresome with reflections such as:

“Mma Ramotswe took a mouthful of potato. It was slightly bitter in the mouth, but that was what truth was sometimes like too.”

I puked a little.

Also finished reading the newest Stephen King Under The Dome, which is some 1,000 pages long, and has a cast to match. It’s an old trope. A community is isolated — you see this from The Tempest to The Lord Of The Flies — and an element of horror is introduced. He’s a good storyteller, but this book moves, as one reviewer put it, “past the point of literary horror and into torture porn territory”. It’s apocalypse in a bottle.

*

When I read this poem I think of Bobby Fischer:

Knowing he was once a toddler—
for pity’s sake—you find it
strange, unreal, this mane of wild
grey hair, grey beard. Somehow
you know it doesn’t belong on him,
all that hair, and you don’t know
how he got to be so lost, so sick, so old.

IT WAS a rainy day and I was seated on a hard wooden bench in the bookstore, reading a book by Kasparov (interesting tidbits about competition life, otherwise oddly self-helpy — “From The Board To The Boardroom”, good lord above) with a pile of chess manuals next to me. He was walking by the atlas section and struck up a conversation with me. He had a name so Irish that it could have come out of an old dusty book of Celtic legends. He asked me out for coffee.

“Oh I think not. I am unfunny, uncomfortable and charmless.”
“That’s perfect. I’m a tittering cretin who talks about celebrity gossip.”

So we sat outside and flirted crazily. In short, it was a very nice hour. It was a very short hour as I had to be elsewhere. I don’t know if I’ll be seeing him again, but it was an entirely pleasant distraction.

Bonne nuit, mesdames et messieurs.

*

A very nice reading of Donne’s The Sunne Rising here.

WATCHED it again. And again. It’s one of my favourite movies; I love the panoramas and the sweep and the story and dreamlike imagery, the symbolism, the acting. I’ve had dreams of that landscape. That scene where she goes back to the beach and plays the piano…And Harvey Keitel…it’s a heartachingly exquisite performance here by him. It’s obvious he loves every aspect of her when he’s looking at her play.