Catholic

Is God Bonkers?

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I wrote this blog post several months ago just after the events described in the post. I didn’t post it because I was just so exhausted. If you read the post, you’ll understand why. And then I got busy. And then there were other priorities.

So here we are. I give you the question, Is God Bonkers?

That’s the thought which was going through my head recently, or if I’m really honest with myself it was more like, God is bonkers.

I had been dreading Lent this year, not knowing what to give up or how to mark it. Due to various food sensitivities it seemed like I was already giving up all of the usual suspects like coffee and alcohol and even sugar. What more could I do? Finally, the thought came to me and it seemed to fit: this year, I’ll give up anxiety.

I notice that I have a tendency, like many people, to talk about anxiety as if it belongs to me. ‘My anxiety went through the roof when such and such happened’, I might say. Perhaps this is because it has become such an ingrained part of me that it feels like a limb or an arm, something attached to me which makes itself felt at regular intervals. How could I give it up? Did I have any control over it?

I decided that if I got anxious about something, I would do what I could, say a prayer and let go. Sounds simple doesn’t it. Probably as simple as riding a bike when you are four years old and see all your friends mastering this feat of balance, but when you try it you fall off again and again and again.

My decision to give up anxiety was severely tested on Ash Wednesday when a neighbour came round to complain about something which one of my children may or may not have been involved in. I stayed calm, but over the next week or two my anxiety rose as I heard rumours and counter rumours and did not know where the truth lay.

Anxiety creeps up gradually. I can recognise worry when my mind frets and comes back again and again to an issue and I can make a conscious decision to take my mind off the hamster wheel of worry. What I call anxiety is something goes on at a deeper level over which I have less control. I begin to feel helpless and as if everything is going wrong and can’t be righted and it’s all my fault in some way even though I can’t see how I can possibly do anything about it.

Despite trying to pray and even trying to let go, I had reached this point about ten days into Lent when I went to Mass and said to God, I simply can’t do any more.

That night I felt that we managed to actually have a relaxing evening as a family for the first time in a while and that the bad feelings between us dissipated. I went to bed feeling peaceful. The next morning, my son woke me by thumping on the bedroom door. Half asleep, I heard my husband get up and then yell that there was a flood.

When I came downstairs, the kitchen ceiling was caving in due to water flowing into it from the room above. Well, it wasn’t quite how I had envisaged my weekend but after a few minutes of panic, we managed to find the lever to turn off the water and began phoning plumbers. It’s very difficult to get hold of a plumber on a Saturday morning, but eventually we got hold of someone.

Next, I stupidly turned on the kitchen light to see if the electrics were working and got an electric shock. Fortunately, I was wearing rubber soled shoes. Note to self: never touch a socket if you’ve had a flood!

When the plumber arrived, he pointed to the huge sag in the kitchen ceiling and said, “That’s not a good sign.”

“I’m desperate for a cup of tea,” my husband said, and I realised that I could do with a cup, too. Since there was no electricity, I thought I was quite clever heating the water up on the gas stove. I had just got it boiling when the plumber climbed up a ladder and said, “I’ll see if I can let some of the water out of the ceiling.”

He poked the ceiling with a screwdriver and water began pouring down bringing with it chunks of plaster. I managed to leap back from the stove just as a large chunk dropped on top of it. Now I had had two narrow escapes.

As the day went on it became clear that the house was becoming uninhabitable. An electrician arrived, took the cover off the light switch (by now the electricity was off at the mains) and a stream of water poured out of the socket. No wonder I had got an electric shock.

As a result, of all these problems, we had to move out of our house into a temporary place for a week. Even though I now had lots of practical challenges to deal with, I found myself out of the uncomfortable situation in our street with all the rumours and counter rumours and settled in a quiet, peaceful place in another part of town. Perhaps it was an answer to prayer? If so, then the only thought which came to mind was, God is bonkers. Flooding our house to solve a problem with the neighbours seemed like total overkill.

I thought of a large man, clumsily handling a tiny kitten in a well-meaning way but accidentally hurting it, but then I thought that’s not quite the right image. God doesn’t make mistakes. So, the next image which came to me was of a large person holding a kitten firmly so that it couldn’t wriggle or scratch or possibly leap out of the person’s arms and hurt itself. I don’t know why the kitten was being held like this. Possibly it needed a vaccination, or maybe it just needed to calm down.

So I am like the kitten, in a situation where I don’t have much choice or much wriggle room, but I hope and trust that I am in God’s arms.

Looking back on what I have written here I do feel like I was looked after. We had intense disruption for a week and then everything was sorted although it was a while before my body caught up with the idea that the house was more or less back to normal.

When what you know as normal comes to a halt

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(When it is 4 degrees C outside and blowing a gale, these seeds are an act of faith that things will get better)

Over the last week, what we think of as our normal life has come to a halt due to coronavirus. As things changed at an accelerated pace, I had a sick, dislocated feeling which was horribly familiar.

Difficult news

The first time I had it was when I took my daughter for a medical appointment and I was told that she was so ill she would have to be admitted to hospital as an emergency. I stayed with her during the long wait for a hospital bed in a calm state which I now recognise as shock.

The sick feeling only hit me when a nurse ordered me home and I had to leave my daughter crying in a ward with strangers. I passed familiar things, a fast food place, a group of houses, but nothing looked right. People were laughing together outside cafés and I wondered how they could chat and laugh when the bottom had quite simply fallen out of my life.

The odds of my daughter dying from her illness were higher than the death rate for Covid-19. She pulled through after 2 months in hospital although she was still struggling with health problems eighteen months on when I received other news which changed life as I knew it.

The day started off like any other day. I got up, had breakfast, made sandwiches for the kids and switched on the radio a little after eight o’ clock. Fortunately, I didn’t catch the start of the news, because if I had, I would have heard a news item about my sister’s death. Even though she wasn’t named, there would have been enough details for me to know that it was her.

I was spared for another few minutes until I went upstairs, checked my mobile, which had been switched off at night, and found eight missed calls. I called back, hoping it was hospital, hoping there was a chance, and my mother told me my sister had taken her life.

It was all over, the terrible struggle with mental illness. I sat in the living room, terribly calm, but the dog knew I wasn’t okay. She came over and pressed herself against me and stayed like that until my husband told me I would have to pack to go to my parents.

Stopping normal

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When you get bad news, shock helps you cope in the short term. You do things you wouldn’t have though possible given the burden you are carrying, but in the long term, unless you take great care of yourself, it takes its toll.

This week, I felt shock again. Here is how it went:

Friday 13th March – We went to the meeting point early in the morning to discover that my son’s school trip had been cancelled due to concerns about coronavirus.

Sunday 15th March – I went to church, nodded to others instead of giving the sign of peace. Many older people were already staying away due to concerns about the virus.

Monday 16th March – I sent my children to school as normal, not knowing it would be the last day.

Tuesday 17th March – St. Patrick’s Day. Increasingly concerned about the coronavirus, we kept the kids off school and worked from home (we are fortunate we can do this).

Wednesday 18th March – frantically booked my daughter a flight home as her college was closing. Received news that the Catholic Church was suspending Masses whilst the Free Church of Scotland and Church of Scotland were also stopping church services.

Thursday 19th March – St. Joseph’s Day. I got up early to shop and found almost no fresh vegetables, very little bread, no toilet paper and very little canned and dried food. This was the last day of public Masses although I couldn’t go as I was looking after kids at home.

Friday 20th March – Schools across Scotland closed today. I made a long journey to meet my daughter at the airport and bring her home.

This weekend – All non-essential travel is banned. Tourists are told to stay away from the Scottish Highlands which normally relies on the tourist industry.

Monday 23rd – we are effectively in lockdown, only allowed to leave the house for essential groceries or to get exercise.

We are all suffering

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This time, we’re all suffering. I can’t go out and look at other people and think, ‘They’re okay.’ Nor can I read about others’ suffering on the other side of the world and allow myself the guilty thought, ‘At least that’s not us.’

We’re all in this together. Whatever we decided to give up for Lent pales in comparison with all the things we have to give up: freedom to go out, meet others, stop in a coffee shop, go to the library or the gym, shop for anything but food.

In his letter announcing the suspension of Masses, the Bishop asked us to say the Our Father often and meditate on what it means to say, ‘Give us our daily bread.’

I eat my food with genuine thankfulness and try not to worry about the shortages in the supermarket.

What has helped me when normal stops

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I think back to what helped when I experienced sudden and difficult changes in my life before and what I hope will help again.

  • I learnt that I am not big enough to control circumstances. I can only take one day at a time, do my wee bit and leave the rest to God..
  • When my daughter got ill, it was an absolute necessity to find some way to switch off my mind (otherwise I was always tense and worrying). I found peace through praying the rosary, as well as through meditation exercises (becoming aware of my body and my breath)
  • Doing ordinary things, such as cooking, hoovering or walking the dog, helped me feel grounded.
  • When I’m under strain and nothing feels right, I have learnt that it’s important to look after myself. Sometimes I need to do something to relax such as read a novel, watch a film, have a bath, even when it’s hard with kids to look after and a new situation to adjust to.
  • I have found out that we don’t always see God healing someone. Sometimes we are asked to be like the royal official who begged Jesus to come to Capernaum and heal his son. Instead of going to the official’s house, Jesus sent him on the long journey home, telling him that his son would live. The official had to leave Jesus in faith. I recognise myself in this story. I prayed many times that my sister would be healed and now I have to believe that she is being healed even though I will never be able to see her healed in this life.

The last thought are words from Hosea (Mass reading on Saturday 21st March).

Let us set ourselves to know the Lord; that he will come is as certain as the dawn, his judgement will rise like the light, he will come to us as showers come, like spring rains watering the earth.

 

Does grief give anything back?

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I keep thinking I will write no more blog posts, that I have nothing more to give, and then a thought snags and I have to explore it, as much for myself as anyone else.

So here goes. I want to talk about Hawking radiation.

Hawking what?

Okay, I’m back to the geeky physics stuff. Let me explain.

Grief is like a black hole

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A few week’s ago, I was thinking about how one-way communication is after someone has died. I keep thinking of things I want to tell my sister, and I do tell her. I write her letters in my diary. If I’m alone in the car, I move my bag off the front passenger seat to make room for her and talk to her out loud. I update her on what’s going on, tell her about the kids, share my worries.

I tell her all the things I would tell her if she was still alive, but she doesn’t reply. I get nothing back. I had an image of death being like a black hole that sucks in all the love I still feel for my sister, all the things I tell her in whispers and thoughts.

By definition, a black hole is an object where gravity is so strong that anything in the vicinity will be pulled into it, even light. That’s why it’s black, of course.

And death can feel like that, pulling in your energy, love and thoughts and giving nothing back.

What about Hawking radiation?

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The image seemed quite bleak and appropriate to the way I was feeling and I would have left it at that, but a quiet, inner voice asked, “What about Hawking radiation?”

Hawking radiation is a theory proposed in 1974 by Stephen Hawking, the well-known English cosmologist who was confined to a wheelchair due to motor neurone disease. After exploring the theory of black holes, he suggested that, due to quantum effects, they might not be completely black. Instead they would have a faint glow due to the emission of radiation. This radiation would cause the black hole to lose mass until it ceased to exist in a last burst of intense radiation.

Of course, this is theory. No-one has actually observed Hawking radiation and the level of radiation predicted is, in most circumstances so small that it would be very difficult to observe.

But it’s a comforting and challenging thought. A black hole seems like the ultimate symbol of grief and yet, maybe even black holes give something back.

Does grief give anything back?

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And just like a black hole, maybe grief does give something back.

My sister is no longer here to respond, but does that mean that all the love and thoughts and prayers for her are lost?

Maybe it’s like Hawking radiation. I won’t get a direct answer from my sister, but perhaps I’ll notice and appreciate something else: a robin at the bird feeder, a patch of blue sky on the shortest day of the year, my dog laying her head on my lap.

Or maybe I’ll notice that someone needs me and be able to respond to that.

What do other people think?

Another thought

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I thought I had run out of words, but I find it is important to say one or two more things.

I started this blog because I felt I would burst if I didn’t express the strange journey which brought an agnostic with an allergy to organised religion into the Catholic church. I also wanted to make contact with people who’d experienced a similar journey. Alongside this, I wanted to write well, be admired for it and have lots of people read MY blog.

I was aware of these mixed motives and struggled with them. It’s so hard to give something to God, even if, on the surface, it looks like you’re doing it for Him.

Now, the thoughts and words which bubbled up, gently insisting on being written, have almost dried up, but it wouldn’t be right to leave this blog on a note of desperation.

Devastation

When I wrote the last post, I was devastated physically, mentally and spiritually, by my sister’s suicide. I lost my closest friend. There was a continual ache in my chest. I got easily exhausted, and at least once a week, I had a day of nausea and headaches. Frequently, I just had to give up and go back to bed.

Life felt like a burden. I wasn’t going to do what my sister did, but life was a fruit that had turned dry and sour, all the goodness sucked out of it. I would just have to drag myself through whatever time was left as best I could.

Suicide bereavement

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There’s nothing redeeming about suicide. It’s a story cut off before it reaches a resolution. After a long struggle with mental illness, my sister ran out of strength and hope. She inflicted violence on herself, dying alone without the support of family. Those of us left behind have to face our own helplessness. We loved her, would have done anything to help her, but we couldn’t heal her or save her from her illness.

Suicide leaves a vacuum, an empty space which shouldn’t be there. It can very easily suck away the love, faith and hope of those left behind.

On the face of it, her long fight with the illness, our support and prayers, all came to nothing. For a long time, we carried hope like a little candle lit in our hearts, and now we have no more hope. At least not for this life.

Seeking healing

I must have still had some hope, because I managed to get to a monastery. I arrived in a state which I can only describe as having fallen off faith and hope and love.

In my rucksack, was ‘Redemption Road’, a book by the Jesuit priest, Brendan MacManus, in which he describes walking the Camino de Santiago in search of healing after losing his brother to suicide.

The book opens with a scene in which Brendan leads a retreat for young people. Even while he tries to give them a message of hope and trust, he realises that his own life has not felt right since his brother died.

I recognised myself in this and also in his description of walking the Camino. He had repeated injuries which either made walking very painful, or forced him to take time out and even skip parts of the Camino when he began to run out of time.

Life after suicide bereavement is a physical challenge. You try to keep going through exhaustion and physical pain, but you also have to recognise the times when you simply have to rest.

When I arrived at the monastery, I was in such a bad state that I worried I would pollute the place with my lack of peace.

Moving towards peace

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Fortunately, the opposite happened. The peace and prayers of the monastery began to work on me. Nothing dramatic happened, no revelations or intense experiences, but I was slowly absorbed into the peace.

God worked through the everyday, through cups of tea and trees and birdsong. After a few days, the rhythm of the Psalms and Gregorian chant soaked into me and flowed through my mind even when I wasn’t in the chapel.

I sat outdoors and read ‘Redemption Road’. I was sometimes in tears when Brendan McManus wrote about his brother Donal’s decline, or when he put down positive memories of his brother.

Towards the end of his Camino, when Brendan met a young Mexican family. He wrote ‘They reminded me of myself before suicide wreaked its devastation: how I had been similarly open and optimistic, trusting and believing. Was it just naivety about the world? Could I believe in hope again, was there some rescue after trauma, would negativity be overcome?’

I knew exactly what he meant.

Trust

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By the time I read the final pages of ‘Redemption Road’ and Fr. Brendan’s account of assisting at the Mass in Santiago Cathedral, being asked to read a prayer for the dead, and knowing that his brother was at peace, I knew that something had also shifted in me.

Through small things, walking in the woods, watching birds, I became quietly aware that God was still there and extending an invitation. I could go through the rest of my life with bitterness and suspicion, asking God why this happened to my beautiful sister after all our prayers and all her efforts to struggle with a truly horrible illness. I could continue to endlessly question what had happened to her at the moment of death or afterwards, or I could TRUST.

It sounds so simple, but it’s so hard.

You see, I’ve relied a lot on my own abilities or determination or persistence to get through life. I’ve thought there was a solution to everything given time and application. Oh, and prayer, of course. But prayer was like a dash of salt added to a dish when it was almost ready.

Suicide bereavement brought me up against my weakness and inadequacy. I had failed utterly to protect someone I loved. No matter what I do with my life, I can never make this better. Nor can I even tell myself a consoling story about my sister’s life and death. The sudden and violent manner of her death has left me feeling, quite literally, that I am left with nothing.

Every loss, every bereavement, requires trust. Perhaps suicide bereavement isn’t different in kind, just in scale.

My choice was and still is between dragging myself through life and seeing it as something meaningless or absurd, or trusting that God is still offering me the gift of life and receiving it with gratitude and trust.

After suicide bereavement, there is no longer an in-between. I have lost the ability to enjoy life ‘for its own sake’ and on my terms. Only through making a conscious effort to turn to God, can I manage the debilitating fear that another something awful is just around the corner.

Visiting the monastery, allowed me to heal and to begin to trust. The physical healing felt almost miraculous. The continual ache in my chest lifted. At times, I am quite amazed at how I have been able to do things and even start new projects. However, grief still comes, and I have to be careful to look after my physical and mental health.

Trust and turning to God is a choice which has to be made each day.

A last thought

When he came across a woman who had lost her husband to suicide, the French priest St Jean Vianney said, ‘I tell you he is saved. He is in Purgatory, and you must pray for him. Between the parapet of the bridge and the water he had time to make an act of contrition.’

I used to think of purgatory as a place of purification and suffering. Since my sister died by suicide, I can’t think of it as anything other than a field hospital where wounded souls come for healing, a place where she and other souls who have, for whatever reason, died by suicide, continue their journey into knowing God as love.

Again, I found comfort in the words of Brendan McManus in his small book ‘Surviving Suicide Bereavement. Finding life after death.’ He writes, ‘We have this black and white view: they are lost or found, in hell or in heaven. But in reality it is more like shades of grey. Maybe there is another place between heaven and hell specifically for the healing of suicide? This ’emergency care unit’, an intense healing of hurt or wounds, is where Christ works intensely to love wounded people back to wholeness.’

A grave matter?

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In the first few hours after the shock of my sister’s suicide, I was travelling to be with my parents, unable to stop weeping. I googled ‘Catholic Church suicide’ and came across articles which quoted the following passage from the Catechism:

2281 Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.

The articles were along the lines of: Suicide is a grave matter, equivalent to self-murder. It is a rejection of God’s gift of life, but taking into account other things, like mental illness, it’s possible that God might have mercy on the person who commits it.

A thread of hope, but not a shred of comfort for someone who has just experienced the incomprehensible and inexplicable pain of losing a loved one to suicide. No doubt these articles were aimed at people theoretically interested in the question, rather than families recently bereaved by suicide.

The poverty of illness

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My sister was poor in every sense of the word, suffering from a long, mental illness which she hadn’t chosen or deserved. Because of her illness, she was unable to work, and she and her family were dependent on benefits.

She was poor in spirit, pride crushed out of her by years of struggling with psychosis, an illness which bears a huge stigma. Although she fought to be well enough to take part in family life, during bad phases she was dependent on the help of others, both family and health professionals.

I am grateful for the many people who helped my sister, most of whom I will never know by name. Over the last six months of her life, the support she received was inadequate to turn the tide of her illness. During the last three weeks, she asked for help many times and didn’t get it.

In the end, my sister was so poor that she did not find a way to stay in this world. She didn’t choose to reject the gift of life. She clung on, without the help she needed, until the chaos in her mind overwhelmed her.

Jesus hung out with corrupt tax collectors and prostitutes. He had the courage to touch lepers and heal those whose minds were broken by ‘evil spirits’. I can’t believe that he would prevaricate over my sister, weighing up the graveness of her sin against the severity of her illness, and maybe, just maybe, showing a glint of mercy.

I can only imagine Jesus, seeing someone so sick, broken and poor that she couldn’t find a way to go on living, reaching out his hand to give her the healing and compassion she didn’t find in this life.

I’ve had to do a lot of work to get to this stage. After digging deeper into Google, I found some resources:

A prayer for those who have taken their own life

The blog of a mother who lost her daughter to suicide

A book by Ronald Rohlheiser on suicide which helped me to believe that God shows love and compassion to people like my sister who are so broken and sick that they cannot go on living

Is suicide a grave matter?

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Have I got to a conviction of God’s mercy by bypassing the church’s teaching that suicide is a grave sin?

I know that suicide is a grave matter. After experiencing the pain and chaos of my sister’s suicide, the rifts as people look for someone or something to blame, and after seeing the shock and sorrow spread out to touch friends and even strangers who never knew my sister, I can think no other way.

But my sister was a loving, caring person, and didn’t intend to cause us pain.

She was started on a new medication, and discharged from hospital soon afterwards. Surprised by her sudden discharge, I took it as a sign that she was making rapid progress. I now know that she was discharged, not because she was better, but probably because the bed was needed for another patient. Unknown to me, my sister began making suicidal calls for help almost as soon as she was discharged. This went on until the day she took her life. There were plenty of chances for her to be readmitted to hospital, but she wasn’t.

My sister’s mind and body were worn down and almost broken by illness, treatments which didn’t work and a powerful anti-psychotic medication which was known to carry the risk of suicidal urges. If she wasn’t fully responsible, who was?

Who’s responsible?

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I started with myself, of course. It’s the typical response of suicide survivors. Why didn’t I phone more often? Why did I assume that she was better just because she was discharged? Why didn’t I know something was badly wrong? Why did I give her space instead of phoning when she didn’t respond to my messages?

My husband said, ‘Don’t do what-ifs’. The suicide bereavement helpline said, ‘It’s not your fault’.

The blame is like a hot potato. If I can’t bear to hold it, where do I fling it? Who caused this illness? The urge to blame someone can be almost overwhelming. And then I pray and see the suffering of other family members and realise, it wasn’t them. This is something which happened, and we don’t know why. If she had had cancer, we wouldn’t ask who caused it.

Who do I blame next? The National Health Service.  The second thing the suicide bereavement helpline said was, ‘It’s not the NHS’s fault either.’ That took a while to sink in. It really hurt. I wanted a scapegoat, an institution I could paint as harsh and uncaring. But these people who gave their time and energy and abilities to try to help my sister.  For a while, at least, that help was effective. When I heard that one of the mental health nurses who had cared for my sister was off work with stress, I wanted to tell her, it’s not your fault, and thank you for doing what you could.

I can’t attach blame to someone who was ill and crushed and broken, can neither hold it myself, or fling it at other people or even the organisation responsible for her care. I’ve tried throwing it at God, but I’m not getting a lot back from God on this. My sister’s death is an unhealed blister on my soul. Why didn’t you save her? Did we not pray enough, love her enough, love You enough?

Not everyone is healed in this life. I didn’t ask you to pray her back to health, but to pray her into heaven. These are the only answers I seem to catch.

An unhealed world

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In a recent Richard Rohr meditation, I found the concept I was missing:

Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless.

It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.

My sister’s illness and tragic death was a symptom of an unhealed world, a world where we burn greenhouse gases without caring about the climate, where we clear rainforest without regard for animals and plants, where we know the cost of everything and yet don’t value what really matters. We live in a society which has recently cut support to those suffering from mental and physical disabilities.

My sister lived in a world which didn’t put much value on those who were too sick to work, a society that didn’t know her smile, a little uncertain at times, but still there, that didn’t recognise the struggle she made to be with her kids, that didn’t see her talent for listening to and helping those who were also on the margins.

Decisions were made: to cut funding to mental health, to close a ward where she had made a slow journey to healing after a previous crisis, to send everyone to one overloaded hospital which was simply no longer able to cope.

This is the world I lived in, cocooned from the worst of the pain and chaos, until it breached my defences and I saw how fragile things are.

This is the world I continue to live in, without my sister, and yet for her in a way.

And my prayer changes from why did this happen to, what can I do?

Holey, Holy and Wholly

canach6 Comments

I’m writing something I never wanted to write. A short while ago, my sister, who was very precious to me, died in a tragic accident leaving behind a husband and young children. I hate to use the word suicide, because it would suggest some sort of choice on her part. I’ll never know what happened, but I know she wouldn’t have left us unless, in that moment, she felt utterly desperate.

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A death is difficult

The death of someone who should have many years ahead of them is difficult

A sudden death is difficult

A situation where someone seems to have a hand in their own death is even more difficult.

We are still in shock.

In the first few days of shock and tears, I found myself thinking of two things: my sister in her wedding dress absolutely beaming and happy. This came back to me today with the story of Jesus and the wedding feast at Cana. If she had any faith, my sister kept it to herself and at the same time practised love and kindness to others. I am hoping that she is now experiencing God’s love and mercy.

A totally inappropriate joke

The other thing I thought of seemed totally inappropriate. It was a sectarian joke I heard when I was a child. Although things have got better in recent years, Scotland is a country with a Catholic-Protestant divide. Catholics and Protestants go to different schools and when I was a kid, I didn’t meet many Catholics. It’s easier to tell jokes about a group of people if you don’t know any of them personally.

Anyway, this joke kept going through my head, even though it is totally tasteless and wouldn’t be told now after recent terrorist attacks on places of worship. But I’m going to have to tell it to explain what I was thinking about it. It goes like this:

Question: Why did the priest bring a gun to church?

Answer: to make his people holey.

Okay, the joke could have been told about a minister or some other kind of religious leader, but because I grew up in Protestant Scotland, we made it a Catholic joke.

At first, I couldn’t understand why I was thinking about such a tasteless joke after losing my sister, until I went to Mass and began to understand.

I felt as if I was full of holes, as if God had shot holes in my tough exterior, or allowed circumstances to shoot holes in me. I couldn’t stop crying on Baptism Sunday, as if all the holes were letting in, not just pain, but also God’s love. The pain of my sister’s sudden death was flowing through me, as well as the thoughts of all the love that had been between us. But love could flow out of me much more easily, too, through all these holes blown in my defenses.

And there was so much to give comfort: The spirit of Lord Yahweh is on me for Yahweh has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the news to the afflicted, to soothe the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, release to those in prison, to proclaim a year of favour from Yahweh and a day of vengeance for our God, to comfort all who mourn, Isaiah 61:1-2.

It’s impossible to explain these first few days: the pain, the feeling that you are falling, and that yet even as you fall you know that you won’t fall forever, that there is something there: God, ground, love, to hold you up. I almost understood why Flannery O’ Connor’s short stories have the possibility of God’s grace being brought into peoples’ lives through what seems to be an irredeemable disaster or unkindness.

In these first few days, I prayed that I wouldn’t forget what I learnt from being holey, and that I would be able to trust and give myself wholly to God. And maybe that’s what it means to be holy.

Silence

The strange thing is that it was easier to trust God in these first few days, when I was blown into pieces and had absolutely no choice but to ask Him to help me through the next day, next hour, next second.

Now, maybe I’m trying to rebuild the holes, repair the defences as best as I can, even shoot a few missiles in God’s direction: why me, why her, why us? Why couldn’t You heal her? You heal other people, after all? Why was there this perfect storm which led to her death, so many little things done differently might have had another outcome … But I can’t go there. I’ll lose what’s left if I do.

The hardest thing today is the silence. There’s the silence of my sister. Even when I talk to her in my head or write down my thoughts in my diary, she doesn’t answer.

There’s the silence of others. After the initial whirl of emails and texts and facebook messages and people saying how sorry they are, it tails off, as it had to eventually. I’m sitting at home alone, trying to think of anything but what’s happened and finding I can’t.

There’s my own silence. I can’t talk about what happened. It’s very difficult, even to other people closely affected. We say something, the same thing, over and over, pain bouncing back and forth between us like a hot potato which no-one can bear to hold for long.

The most difficult silence to bear is the one I go into when my weary mind can’t take any more words or thoughts about what is, will be or might have been, when I just breathe and try to be aware of … what? Is God in the silence? Often I don’t feel a Presence. Sometimes I don’t find words to pray, and it hurts more than anything else what happens in this silence. I tell God how I feel and cry. Maybe it’s a healing hurt.

I need to end now, just with the thought that all I can ask for is blind trust. It’s so hard to let go of my beautiful sister and accept that I can’t do any more for her on this earth.

Fire

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When I woke up today, You appeared to me as fire.

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What should I call You?

Father

Are You not three and yet one?

Look more closely, at the flames that grow, leap out and fall back, my Son. See the light and feel the heat that comes from me, my Spirit.

But aren’t You the eternal and unchangeable One? How can You grow and leap and dance like a fire and yet never change?

I am still One, always One, burning in a never-ending dance.

I feel uncomfortable seeing You as a fire. It is always moving and changing shape. I thought You were the same yesterday, today and forever.

Watch for a while. It is still there, the same fire, even if the flames are in constant motion. Look at my creation. Plants grow and die back in the autumn, rocks weather, continents move, stars grow brighter and then dimmer. Even ice sheets lose ice in the summer and grow again in the winter. Why do You think that unchangeable means a thing that is frozen and static?

I don’t know. I just feel a bit uncomfortable thinking of You as being in motion. Maybe I want to You to be something set hard and unmoving so that my mind has a chance of one day grasping what You are.

(Laughter) You know that understanding me is impossible. Come closer, little one.

I can’t. I’m frightened.

What are you afraid of?

How can You ask that? Isn’t it obvious? You burn with flames that are hotter than the sun. If I come close, I will be utterly consumed, turned into heat and light without even leaving a cinder.

My dear, why are you so fearful? Didn’t I appear to Moses as a fire?

Moses saw a bush that was burning, and yet didn’t burn up.

Exactly. You will burn, will think that you have lost everything, will be sure that you won’t survive, and yet you won’t be destroyed. Learn this, little one. You will have everything necessary in the moment you need it, not too soon and never a moment too late. Can you trust Me?

It is so hard. You say that I won’t be burnt up, but what will really happen if I move closer to the fire. I cannot approach You and remain unchanged, can I?

Of course not. You will melt, lose what you think is your form, become liquid.

Why must that be?

So that you will flow, become liquid, move to where I want you, fit into the mould I make for you. If you do not melt and abandon yourself to me, you will never discover what I intended you to be.

I am frightened, almost too afraid to say to You, do this. Let me be like the man who said, “I believe, please help my unbelief.” I want to abandon myself to You, I want to melt. Please help the part of me which holds back and wants to remain cool and hard and cold. That is all I can manage right now. I hope it’s enough.

That is all I need. I can make it enough.

Thank you, Father, for showing me the fire.

Solistice

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Okay, I know it’s two days past the solistice on 21st December, but it’s not far from the shortest day.

I was out looking at the trees. The evergreens look much the same all year round, but the deciduous trees are appear lifeless, branches stripped as bare as bones. If we hadn’t witnessed every year of our lives, the miracle of buds and leaves appearing again in the spring, I think we’d all be convinced that these bare trees are dead.

The thought came to me that life can be a bit like these trees. On the surface, it looks like my life is stripped back. One of my kids got ill. I’m still supporting her recovery and that has meant stopping work and losing the chance to pursue personal goals.

Sometimes I’ve felt and still can feel that there isn’t much happening in my life. I’ve tried to get back to work, but so far my attempts have failed. Maybe there’s a grace in that. Perhaps the time wasn’t right and I would have been like a tree or a flower which buds too early and is blighted by the cold weather.

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When I look at the bare trees, I know that beneath the surface lies a rich root system. Life is still there, even if it has shrunk back. The trees will bud and blossom again in the spring.

I’m trying to have faith that our own lives will expand again, that we’ll be able to blossom and become whatever God intends us to be.

There’s a rhythm to nature: autumn, winter, spring and summer, night and day, an in-breath and an out-breath. I’m impatient. I want summer to come, but even winter can be beautiful.

 

All that friction

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red ford focus vehicle driving on sand under blue daytime sky
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Today, I’m going to admit to being a geek and share some of my enthusiasm for physics. Yes, it does have some relevance for faith so please be patient.

Why don’t things keep on moving?

One of the hardest things for those new to physics to understand is Newton’s first law of motion: I’ll try to put it in plain English.

An object which is not moving will remain still while an object which is moving will continue to move at the same speed and in the same direction UNLESS an unbalanced force acts on it.

Before your eyes glaze over and you click this post shut, I’ll try to unpick this. Newton’s first law is quite extraordinary. What it says is that if something is moving, it should go on moving in the same direction and at the same speed forever UNLESS a force acts on it.

Okay, you don’t need to be an expert in physics to know that nothing goes on moving at the same speed for ever. If you kick a football, it will arc into the air, it’s speed changing, until it falls back to the earth and comes to a halt. If you drag a heavy bag across the floor, it will stop moving as soon as you stop pulling it.

However, if you were living in space, you would be able to see Newton’s first law in action. Once the space shuttle has got into space, it hurtles around the earth at a speed of 17000 miles per hour even though its engines are switched off. If you threw a ball outside your spacecraft, it would keep on moving at the same speed, basically forever, unless it bumped into something which changed its speed or direction.

Friction explained

Why do objects behave so differently in space and on earth? When we walk or drive over ground which isn’t perfectly smooth, there is a force trying to stop us moving. This force is called friction. It means that we have to keep on putting in effort to do things. If we stop tugging the case, it won’t move. If we don’t keep moving our muscles to put one leg in front of the other, we won’t get anywhere. If we stop pushing down the accelerator which keeps the engine going, our car will roll to a halt.

Sometimes it might seem tempting to wish that we lived in a world without friction. It’s easy to imagine a world where we could step on the pavement and glide down the road without any effort, or where our cars rolled along without having to burn expensive fuel.

Fancy a world without friction?

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A world without fiction would be nice, wouldn’t it? Maybe not. Think ice.

A smooth expanse of ice is the closest we get on earth to a friction-free situation. If we step on ice wearing ordinary shoes, we will glide along for a few feet but probably end up falling on our behinds. If we manage, somehow, to keep our balance, we won’t get anywhere fast as we’ll just slide around without going in the direction we want to. It’s the same with cars. No-one wants to drive over a patch of black ice as it’s likely that their car will skid out of control.

Friction might seem like an annoying waste of energy, but the truth is that we need something resisting our motion so that we keep on moving forward in the right direction. In situations when there isn’t enough friction, we need to increase it. For instance, in a snowy area, we can fit tyres with a thicker tread in the winter. I once had the opportunity to visit an underground glacier. To walk on its slick surface, I had to strap crampons over my shoes which bit into the ice creating traction.

The friction of daily life

All this got me thinking about the friction of daily life: all these wee household jobs which have to be done every day, your child’s moods, your spouse’s nagging, the elderly neighbour who needs a visit when you have a hundred things to organise.

And then there are the times in life when you face such huge obstacles that you hardly seem to move at all: the illness of a family member, losing a job, having to move out of your home, school or workplace bullying.

Rather than wishing these difficulties and sufferings away so that we can make rapid progress towards what we think is our goal, should we actually be grateful for them? Like real-life friction are all these apparent challenges actually the force which keeps us steady and balanced. Are they what stops us falling over or sliding off in the wrong direction? Without them, would our strength fail and our faith stagnate, just like unused muscles in a frictionless world?

I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about.

 

Being faithful in small things

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I’ve said before that being a Mum is hard. It’s not just that the job is difficult or even almost impossible (try keeping up with the cleaning and the washing with small kids). Often the most difficult part of being a mother is feeling alone and unappreciated.

I like to think that in the past women were together more, sharing daily tasks and keeping an eye out for one another’s kids. In the Highlands, women got together to finish a length of tweed, banging it against a table while they sang songs in time for their work. However, there were many other jobs which they had to do individually, such as carding the wool, dyeing, spinning and weaving.

At that time, women had few options, and many families lived in extreme poverty. Communities were close-knit, but if you were a bit different for some reason, would you have been accepted?

There’s no point looking back to some ideal which probably never existed, but it would also be fair to say that now families are living farther apart to follow opportunities for work and study, and mothers are becoming more isolated.

Becoming a Mum

Shortly before I became pregnant for the first time, I moved to a new country. After the birth of my child, I was desperately lonely and longing to get back to work after maternity leave because the only people I knew were through work. A local toddler group was a lifesaver, and I started to meet other mothers and learn the language.

The other thing about being a modern mother is that you’re expected to get back to work, as if motherhood is a blip or hiatus, something which you can manage on the side as a hobby as long as it doesn’t interfere with your real identity as a dynamic, flexible, self-motivated worker.

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Now, there’s nothing wrong with going back to work, having a break from wiping bums and cleaning up spills, and having the satisfaction of contributing to something. Returning to part-time work helped keep me sane after the birth of my first two children, especially since I didn’t have the support of a network of family and friends. The friendly childcare centre became a source of support and was also an opportunity to meet other families.

The problem is that there isn’t enough support to allow both men AND women to take time off to look after children and to be able to work part-time and still have a meaningful career. While employers have had to accept maternity leave and more recently paternity leave, it’s often an all or nothing thing. Come back full time or risk losing your position. Or, as I found out, even if you return part-time, you miss out on opportunities.

I thought I had my future sorted out

Why am I thinking about all this now? I had an exciting career. I was quite happy to give it up and be a full-time mum when number three came along. Keeping up with the housework drove me crazy, but I loved going out to toddler groups and even helped to run one.

The thing was, I left work on my terms and expected to be able to go back into the working world with all my previous experience, plus my amazing, supermum, multi-tasking skills. Once the youngest one was at school, I studied full-time and began a new career. I was incredibly busy and didn’t waste a moment, whisking through the bathroom while I ran the bath for my son, or whizzing to the supermarket while my daughter was in music lessons.

I thought I had my future sorted out. My path back from full-time motherhood was clear.

Until … well, until everything fell apart. One of my kids got seriously ill, and I had to give up any thought of working while I put all my energy into supporting my family. I was a full-time mum again, but without the support network of either family or toddler groups (although I do have a few wonderful friends).

At times it seemed like I went through two traumas: my daughter’s illness and the loss of my own sense of identity as I gave up work.

No big things to offer

Things are a little better, but I have come to the painful realisation that I have to forget about having a career. If I go back to work, it has to be a job I can go to and leave at five o’clock with no responsibilities to worry about because right now I’ve got enough to deal with at home.

I’ve been trying to get back to work but so far no opportunities have opened up. Maybe the only job or vocation God’s giving me right now is being a mother. Perhaps God values this job even if it doesn’t gain me any status, pay, honorary degrees or promotions.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Jesus’ parable about the talents in Matthew. Three servants were entrusted with money and two of them traded with it so as to make more. When their master returned, he said:

Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness. (Matt 25:21)

After talking about the servant who hid his talent instead of doing something with it, Jesus says:

For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he has. (Matt 25:29)

Offering small things

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That really spoke to me. Right now, I have no big thing like a career to offer God. I don’t have any medium sized things like jobs or courses or positions. No-one has asked me to do anything which is seen as ‘important’. Instead, I’m asked to do the dishes and clean the floor.

And so I am trying to go through the day offering these small things to God.

Dear God, I offer You the dishes I’m doing, the washing I’m putting into the machine and hanging up, the floor I’m mopping, the dinner I’m cooking, listening to my daughter, reading to my son, walking the dog …