Fr Gerard W Hughes

God’s grace and Calvinism revisited

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As I wrote in my conversion story, I realised that the greatest challenge in my life would be receiving and responding to God’s love.

The Calvinist God

I grew up with a Calvinist God, an angry, intolerant figure who was going to send many of us to hell no matter what if we hadn’t made it onto the list of Elect. After being brought up with a weekly diet of hell, fire and judgement sermons, it was hard for me to believe in God’s love.

This kind of fear was certainly not limited to a Calvinist upbringing. In God of Surprises, Fr Gerard Hughes writes about the Catholic version, comparing religious instruction to a small child being taken to see their Great-Uncle George whom supposedly loves them. Before they leave, however, he shows them the furnace in the cellar and threatens to throw them in if they don’t visit every week.

In the church I was brought up in, only people who had been shown by God that they were among the Elect were considered to be saved. The other people, no matter how devout they were and how much they tried to live good lives, were going to go to Hell. In other words, there was nothing you could do to decide your salvation.

This led to despair. It also led to people not taking part in the Lord’s supper as they felt they weren’t worthy.

I was recently digging around in The Statistical Accounts of Scotland online, which, despite their dry name, are actually fascinating accounts written by ministers on all aspects of their parishioners’ lives. In a report in1845, the Rev Archibald Clerk wrote:

The majority of the people have been brought to regard the Sacraments, especially the Lord’s supper, with horror which causes almost all of them to avoid partaking of it

So, the feeling that we weren’t worthy to receive God’s grace through the Lord’s supper was not a new thing.

How can I trust God?

It’s taken me a long time and many years in exile from the church to even begin to unravel the tangle of love and fear, duty and punishment. When I was drawn back to Christianity and began attending a Catholic church, I felt like a someone who has survived an abusive relationship and is trying to build another one. How could I trust God? How could I believe in His love? How could I believe that He wanted anything good for me? Wouldn’t I be better trying to eke out whatever good I could get out of life on my own?

I also still felt that if I made mistakes or drifted away from God, I had to grovel, beg and persuade God to forgive me. Things had moved on from my perception of God when I was a Calvinist, but not a lot. In my new understanding, God would listen, but would still only grudgingly forgive if I managed to be sufficiently penitent.

Now, I am beginning to see something different. When I ask for God’s forgiveness, it isn’t about changing God’s mind, getting Him to give me another chance or persuading Him that I might have a good bone in me and be worth a bit of love.

No, it’s about healing, healing of the hurt part of me which can’t believe in God’s grace, healing of the part of me that is so twisted and curled in on itself that it is unable to receive the love that God always offers.

God’s grace

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I am beginning to understand my helplessness. I can’t save myself. That may seem like a truism. Haven’t I always been told, no matter what flavour of church I’ve been in, that Jesus saves?

But have I really taken that to heart? Haven’t I tried to ‘earn’ my salvation, by being good, keeping the ten commandments, helping people, respecting the law? As a Catholic, haven’t I sometimes let myself think that I somehow ‘deserve’ salvation by going to Mass regularly? When I’ve slipped up, haven’t I seen the Sacrament of Reconciliation as something I do to make things okay with God again.

Only now am I beginning to understand that I can’t by my own power do anything to heal myself and overcome my faults. All I can do is receive God’s grace and God’s healing. When I ask for forgiveness, whether alone in prayer, or through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, it’s about healing the barriers to receiving God’s love and grace, including my own refusal to accept it.

Calvinism revisited

When I look again at the verses which were quoted to back up Calvinism, I see now that it’s all about grace:

Thus he chose us in Christ before the world was made to be holy and faultless before him in love, marking us out for himself beforehand, to be adopted sons, through Jesus Christ. Such was his purpose and good pleasure, to the praise of the glory of his grace, his free gift to us in the Beloved, in whom, through his blood, we gain our freedom, the forgiveness of our sins. (Ephesians 1: 4-7)

The Calvinists almost got it right. So close, and yet so far. They understood that salvation is God’s free gift, that there’s nothing we can do to earn it or add to it. But in teaching that it was wrong to ask God for mercy and salvation, they made a grave and damaging error. We can’t do anything to add or take away from God’s salvation, but it does require an important step on our part: ACCEPTANCE.

God is outside of time and I am in it. And here is the paradox. God is omnipotent, and yet He has limited Himself, taken on human nature, made Himself vulnerable. In giving us free will, He has allowed us to receive or to refuse Him, not just once and for all, but continually. In every moment of every day, He’s there waiting for us to turn Godwards.

I’ll give Julian of Norwich the last word:

This is his meaning: that we should see what he does and pray that it should be done … It is our Lord’s will that, whatever he plans to do, we should pray for it, either in particular or in general. The joy and delight it gives him, and the thanks and glory we shall be given because of it, pass all understanding – in my sight.

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Plunged into the night

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I’ve taken the title of this post from a quote by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, from his book “Between man and man”. I wrote it down many years ago when I was questioning the strict religious faith in which I had been brought up.

In the signs of life which happen to us we are addressed. Who speaks?

It would not avail us to give for reply the word “god” if we did not give it out of that decisive hour of personal existence when we had to forget everything we imagined we knew of god, when we dared to keep nothing handed down or learned or self-contrived, no shred of knowledge and we were plunged into the night.

When I left home to go to university, I questioned everything and dared to keep nothing. As I danced to R.E.M.’s song ‘Losing my religion’, I thought, that’s me (yes, I know that’s not what it’s about). All the certainties of the religion I was brought up with where slipping away like sand through my fingers.

The other song which spoke to me was ‘Every River’ by the Scottish band Runrig:

You ask me to believe in magic
Expect me to commit suicide of the heart
And you ask me to play this game without question
Raising the stakes on this shotgun roulette

The church demanded unquestioning belief and I couldn’t do that. It was like trying to believe in magic. If I had forced myself to suppress my doubts and questions, I would have killed a part of myself.

I lost my faith, not for an hour or days, but years. I’ve described some of that process in these four posts: Don’t go to church …, I took a scunner to churches, Do we need to be born again? Sent into Exile.

Even though I had no religious faith, Martin’s Buber’s words held out the possibility that one day I, too, would be able to answer, god, to the questions of life.

‘God of Surprises’ by the Jesuit priest Gerard W. Hughes also gave hope that I could eventually go beyond the questions and doubts without reverting to unquestioning belief. He devotes a chapter to discussing the stages of religious development: infancy, adolescence and maturity, and argues that all are necessary.

In the stage of infancy, our senses are involved: smell, sight, sound, taste, feeling, and this is also important in worship. When we are children, we like clear rules and boundaries. We aren’t able to understand grey areas and complex issues. Rules and clear teaching are also necessary in faith, but there is a danger that we may get stuck there. When this happens, our religion can become separated from our experience of life.

In order to integrate religion with our life experience and reach a holistic understanding, we need to question. This is the adolescent or critical phase of religious development. Hughes writes that God is present in all things and that there is no issue, however complex, which falls outside the scope of religious inquiry.

He warns that when a church doesn’t allow questioning and exploration, ‘There will be a disharmony between the teaching of the Church and our everyday life, and the teaching presented will split off and become a part of our consciousness which has nothing to do with the rest of our human experience. A church isolated from our human experience can only survive as long as it can succeed in forbidding its adherents to ask questions and think for themselves.’

These words summarise my experience of church as a child and adolescent. My questions could not be contained within the church setting, and as a consequence, I left.

I still believed that there was a God, but I rejected Christianity with a bitterness which was related to the way my questions had been suppressed. Sometimes I even longed for God, but I knew that I could not go beyond this stage by myself. Moving on required some kind of grace.

Gerard Hughes describes the third stage in religious development as the mystical element, where we encounter God not through external rules or intellectual reasoning, but through our inner thoughts and feelings. He emphasises that elements of all three stages are crucial for religious maturity.

I became caught in the adolescent or critical stage for many years. I would have described myself as an agnostic who leant towards a belief in God. I didn’t make much of an effort to move beyond this stage. Sometimes, it takes crisis for us to turn back to God and try prayer again.

How I changed from criticising and kicking back against religion to being to turn to God is a mystery, a matter of grace. If I go back to Runrig’s song ‘Every River’, the next verse says:

But you came to me like the ways of children
Simple as breathing, easy as air
Now the years hold no fears, like the wind they pass over
Loved, forgiven, washed, saved

It speaks of the mystery of faith: going through questioning to a child’s trust with an adult’s understanding.

PS – I had a pretty difficult week, but managed to look at some other blogs and am going to try to keep on reading other peoples’ stories.

We shall not be overcome

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In the last week or so, I have been trying to hold onto St Therese’s image of clinging onto God. When asked to help train novices, she wrote that if she had tried to do the work in her own strength, she would have given up right away.

Returning to work

Recently I have been asking myself what it means to do things in God’s strength. The difficulties I face are so great that I sometimes wonder how I am going to keep going at all. Over the past year or so, I have been trying to start working again.

Giving birth to children, trying to juggle work and childcare, and finally giving up my career and ambitions so that I could bring up my children were huge challenges at the time. However, trying to return to the relentless routine of the workplace is also a difficult period in a woman’s life which, I think, goes largely unrecognised. One minute you are at the beck and call of small people, their needs and sicknesses, and the next you are supposed to be punctual, scrubbed clean, well-ironed and thinking about nothing but professional problems.

It is difficult enough if you are slotting back into the job you were doing before you went on maternity leave (I’ve done that too). However, if your old job is long gone and you have to retrain to do a new one, starting on the very bottom rung, the path ahead can seem impossibly difficult.

Over the last while, I have felt as if I am trying to climb Mount Everest with several kids strapped to my back and without proper equipment. I lumber slowly forwards while lithe young graduates gallop past like gazelles in super-dry clothing with tiny, ultra-lite backpacks strapped to their backs.

A long, long time ago, it feels as if it happened to someone else in a story, although it was actually not much more than a year back, I prayed about whether I should try to do this job. It felt like the right thing to do. In fact, it was the only choice which brought me peace.

It all feels too much

Now that I’m in the thick of it, I just feel confused and exhausted. The job is tiring and there’s so much to learn. Over the last week, the kids and I have all go sick, and what do you do when you have to work and there is no wider family or in-laws or out-laws (to borrow a phrase from one of my in-laws) to help out?

Sometimes it all feels too much. I have conversations with God along the lines of, “Are You sure you’ve got the right person, here? It seems like there’s so many other people out there who could do this job better than me. I keep making mistakes. Some days almost feel like an unmitigated disaster. I’m asking You for help, but all these obstacles appear in the way, including the ones made by my own inexperience.”

Keeping going

Two things keep me going. One is Gerard W. Hughe’s advice based on Ignatian spirituality. He says that in a time of desolation, you should never go back on a decision made in a time of consolation. If I’m honest with myself, I can look back on times when I did enjoy doing this work, and when I felt that I had confirmation that I was on the right path.

The other thing which keeps me putting one foot in front of the other, is the thought that it wouldn’t be faith, and I probably wouldn’t be learning much, if God magically cleared every obstacle out of my path.

I often think of the words of Julian of Norwich, the medieval anchoress who lived alone in a cell attached to St Julian’s church in Norwich.

He did not say, ‘You shall not be tempest-tossed, you shall not be work-weary, you shall not be discomforted.’ But he said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’ God wants us to heed these words so that we shall always be strong in trust, both in sorrow and in joy.

WMD

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WMD – we all know what that means. Those were the Weapons of Mass Destruction which Bush and Blair failed to find in Iraq. Around that time, I saw a sketch on Gaelic TV where two soldiers marched into a small shop in the Highlands and demanded that they hand over their WMD. The shopkeepers looked puzzled, and then one of them triumphantly lifted out a huge, black, bomb-shaped sausage and presented them with Willie’s Marag Dubh (Willie’s black pudding).

Nuclear defence

The UK has four nuclear submarines based in Scotland on the Firth of Clyde, in an area of great natural beauty. The base at Faslane is close to an inlet called Holy Loch, where St Munn, one of the first Irish saints, is meant to have landed in Scotland, and where the previous nuclear base was situated. A few days ago, British MP’s voted to renew Britain’s submarine-based nuclear defence system by a huge majority of 355. All but one of the Scottish MP’s voted against its renewal, but that’s another story.

Even though I have definite opinions on other recent issues, such as the Scottish independence referendum and the vote on leaving the European Union, I have tried to appreciate other peoples’ points of view. Well, I have often argued in a stubborn way, but afterwards, I have thought about what other people said, and have been able to understand why they have come to different conclusions from me. However, I simply cannot understand the argument for spending an unknown amount of money on weapons which could kill 100 000 people in one go.

If faith should affect all of my life rather than being compartmentalised into a wee box labelled ‘Open only on Sunday’, then it has to affect political opinions and decisions. I have wanted to keep politics out of this blog, but I feel that if I don’t find some way to say I am against nuclear defence, then I am quietly giving my assent.

Gerard W. Hughes was a Jesuit priest and writer who wrote a great deal about the split spirituality which has led to many Christians seeing nuclear weapons and ‘just’ war as a means to preserve peace. In the book ‘God in all things’, he said that if someone who supported nuclear defence, really allowed God into their prayer to make them aware of their actual thinking, it might go something like this:

Dear Lord, inspire our scientists that they may invent yet more lethal weaponry (so that our deterrent may prove even more effective). Protect us from any unfortunate accident in its testing (lest it destroy us and our own cities rather than our enemies). Bless our economy that we may put these weapons into plentiful production (otherwise we cannot deter). Have a special care of the hungry, the homeless, the sick, and the aged of our own land and of other lands until such time as our defence commitments allow us to contribute a little more to these worthy purposes. Strengthen our leaders in a strong defence policy. Drive out from our midst any who by thought, word or deed undermine our national security, and grant us the protection of nuclear weaponry now and forever.

Letting go of my own defences

It’s strong stuff, a bit like a modern version of Robert Burn’s ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ where Holy Willie, an elder in the kirk, praises his own holiness, skirts over his sins, and asks God to blast his enemy’s cabbage and potatoes!  However, lest I become complacent and congratulate myself for being against nuclear defence, I should consider what Gerard W. Hughes says a little later in the same book:

It would be wonderful if we could overcome the dangers of pollution and global warming and if all nuclear weapons could be destroyed…. But we would not be secure until we had tackled and eradicated the roots of our own violence, hatred and aggression. Holiness is about this eradication. Holiness is like a light that uncovers our pretence and our hypocrisy.

I might not be able to do much about the decision to build a new nuclear defence system. However, I can ask God for help to bring peace into my own little patch. I can ask God to show me my own hypocrisy, and the areas in my life where I am aggressive or prejudiced. True peace is painful, because it involves letting go of fear, becoming vulnerable and being open to others. Before we are ready to get rid of our huge systems of nuclear deterrence, we might have to build peace one person at a time.

Clash of two kingdoms

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I wanted to use this blog to write about my own personal journey towards Catholicism and how I dealt with some of the issues which presented themselves. However, I’ve recently found myself writing about other things, such as struggles with doubt.

I also want to be honest. I don’t want to put up a post about how I dealt with Catholic teaching on Mary, even if I’ve already drafted something, if I’m feeling, as I do right now, that I’m having issues with trust. It’s easy to lie when I see people, to put on a brave face, and tell everyone I’m fine, and, if I’m in church, to dab the dampness from my eyes just before the sign of peace and shake hands and smile as if I feel perfectly peaceful inside.

What I find difficult, and what I really don’t want to do, is to lie when I’m writing and say that everything is going well when it isn’t. That’s why I’ve decided to write a bit about the problems I’m having at the moment with trust. It will help me to capture the thoughts whizzing around my head and, who knows, it might help someone else who’s going through something similar.

Until recently, I thought that I was the only one, or one of only a few people, who struggled with trusting God. When I became Catholic, one of my in-laws gave me a very helpful little book called Doorway to Faith which has made the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) a lot more accessible. On each page it takes a section of the Catechism, comments on it, and gives a short prayer linked to the comments. With the help of this wee book, I realised that I had read swathes of the Catechism (I gave up around page 250) without understanding what it was about. For instance, I failed to appreciate CCC 397:

Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. All subsequent sin would be disobedience towards God and lack of trust in his goodness.

Okay, I think that means that I’m alone when I have problems with trust.

My own lack of trust has two aspects. The first is a lack of belief in God’s goodness. I’ve been calling this ‘attacks of a bad image of God’, but I think it is also linked with a bad image of self. When I doubt that God loves me, this is usually associated with the feeling that I’m unlovable. I’m not going to go into my bad images of God, but they’re usually associated with me being some sort of unattractive squishy creature like a worm or a beetle which fully deserves to be crushed, but which God might decide to spare even though he finds it quite unsavoury. I can no longer remember how much of this was spelt out by the minister, and how much was supplied by my own imagination as a child. However, I imagine that other people struggle with bad images of God for many different reasons.

If I can’t believe that God really loves me, it is hard for me to believe that he has my best interests at heart and this brings me to the next aspect, the struggle between two kingdoms. I have my own ideas about how my life should be run, thank you very much, and when God seems to have other plans, I become frustrated, disappointed, depressed and angry.

My dog often thinks she knows best. She barks at strangers, tries to chase cars and bolts off in her own direction so fast that my back jerks painfully when she gets to the end of the lead. I’ve been trying to train her and our relationship is a lot better when she recognises that I’m in charge, not her, and that she’ll be rewarded if she’s patient. However, there are still difficult, frustrating days when she thinks she’s the leader. On these days, I wonder if this is what God feels like, when he deals with me.

Recently it’s been difficult to pray, the gulf apparently uncrossable. After she’s been told off or done something she knows she shouldn’t, my dog slinks reluctantly towards me, head down. I feel like that. There are times when I don’t even want to try praying. I want my kingdom, not God’s, even if it is a dry, barren place ruled by a depressed despot who wants everyone else to be as unhappy as herself.

I’ll give the last words again to Fr. Gerard W. Hughes. From ‘Cry of Wonder’, a glimpse of what could be:

I want my life to be a song, in tune, in harmony with God, with all humanity with all creation and with my whole inner self. I have no desire to be the songwriter, the conductor, or to control the whole choir and orchestra.

What about other people?

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I am going to try to tackle a subject which, after confession, presented one of the biggest challenges when I thought about become Catholic. It’s also been a challenge to write about and this blog post has been re-drafted many times over the past few weeks. Unlike Confession, this isn’t a particularly Catholic problem or even a Christian problem. I think I would have had difficulties no matter which religion I was thinking of following.

For close to twenty years, I had as little to do with formal religion as possible. Whatever the rights and wrongs are of this decision, I undoubtedly learnt much from my experience of being outside the church. Apart from a flirtation with atheism which lasted only a few months, I never stopped believing in God although there were periods when I slipped into agnosticism and concluded that God was unknown and unknowable.

Over time, even though I practised no religion, I often felt that I was touched by God through encounters with other people. Sometimes these were people whose lives crossed mine directly and sometimes they were people I read about who had done something remarkable to help others or overcome great difficulties. Not all of them were Christians and many of them were not religious.

After my first and second pregnancy, I suffered persistent health problems and started to practise yoga, meditation and Tai Chi, although not all at the same time. This helped my body to heal, but also helped me, until then a stressed type A personality, to achieve a more balanced and peaceful state of mind. When I concentrated on my breathing, I also became aware of God in me and around me. However, I avoided churches and anything to do with Christianity until I was faced with a difficult situation and it seemed I could do nothing but pray.

Despite the fact that I came to Mass, I had absolutely no intention of ever again making a formal commitment to any religion until I quite suddenly experienced what might be described as a call to become Catholic. This delighted, terrified and confused me. However, I worried that being Catholic involved believing that Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists were outside the limits of God’s mercy, and that even my Protestant family and friends were on paths which led to a spiritual dead end.

If the answer to any of the above questions was ‘yes’, then I was quite clear what my response to Catholicism would be. To borrow a phrase from our recent referendum campaign, I was going to say, ‘No Thanks.’

I had recognised God at work in my life when I was still firmly planted in the Protestant church. After I decided to have nothing to do with churches, I gradually realised that that didn’t change the fact that God was still there, quietly working in my life. Therefore I would be dishonest if I signed up for a religion which forced me to believe that everyone outside it was on a path to hell.

This question particularly affected me because I was brought up in a church which had branched off many times from other churches since the Reformation, each new group believing that they were right and that the prospects of the previous group, as far as salvation was concerned, were at best precarious. We were very suspicious of other Protestant groups, complaining that they did not keep the Sabbath day or that they held only one church service on Sunday. Catholics were probably seen as being at least as bad as pagans, and probably worse since they had corrupted Christianity.

I was very wary about committing myself to a religion if that meant not recognising God at work in the life of another, unless they fulfilled all the conditions which I or my religious group had devised about what God’s work should look like.

When I began asking Father K about Catholicism, he said he would give me a copy of the catechism to help me with my questions. Fine, I thought, remembering the booklet-sized Shorter Catechism which I had learnt off by heart as a child. When Father K, presented me with a black book thicker than the Bible, I thought he was winding me up. Did he really expect me to get through it? I haven’t read it all cover to cover, but it has been useful.

When I asked Father K about the Catholic church’s attitude to other religions, he told me to look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) 1257, which says that God works through His sacraments, but that he is also above them. The Catholic idea of sacraments still seemed very mysterious to me and so I kept on hunting in the catechism until I found this:

Since Christ died for all and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partakers in a way known to God, of the Paschal mystery (CCC 1260).

That was good enough for me and I took it as proof that I could join the Catholic church without having to mentally condemn all of the rest of the world’s population. I was still faced with the challenge of how I as an individual could reconcile the feeling that God is at work in all people with
a very strong and specific call to become Catholic.

I came back to the verse, “My thoughts are not your thoughts and my ways are not your ways.” God is infinite and I am finite and limited in my understanding. He may be at work throughout humanity in many different ways, but it was clear that he wanted to work in my life in a very specific way.

I’ll leave the last words on the subject to the Jesuit, Father Gerard W. Hughes, who wrote in ‘Cry of Wonder’:

Experience was beginning to teach me that perhaps God was not nearly as fussy about religious denominations as we the clergy. God was to be found in all kinds of people, manifesting Godself in the genuine love, compassion and truthfulness of their lives.

More on nits

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The writing of this blog has been interrupted by nit-eradication schemes. Don’t worry. It’s under control and you can’t catch them off the internet.

I’ve decided to be honest in this blog. That doesn’t mean that I’ll tell everything, but it means that if I’m finding things difficult as far as faith is concerned, I won’t pretend that everything is fine.

Recently I’ve hit a difficult stage. I’m picturing the spiritual journey as being like an excavation to the core of my being or to borrow a phrase from Cyprian Smith’s book ‘The Path of Paradox’, the ‘ground of the soul’. There are different layers of soil and rock, some easy to dig through and some requiring a pick-axe. In the last week or so, I’ve hit a hard rocky layer. I feel as if I can’t trust God. God seems very distant and it’s hard for me to believe in a merciful God who actually cares about what happens to me.

I was brought up with a very literal sort of faith and when I got older and doubts hit, I had no way to accommodate them. I felt like a failure for not accepting Christianity without questions and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t cut out for religion.

I now see doubt as an inevitable part of spiritual growth rather than as some kind of treachery. Right now I feel as if my doubts have taken me backwards rather than forwards, but I’ll stick to the image of the excavation and believe that I’m still going forward, slowly and painfully, working through a layer of myself which was always there, but which I’ve just become aware of.

I am reading Fr. Gerard W. Hughes’ last book, ‘Cry of Wonder’. It is in three sections, Unity, Peace and Holiness. The section on Unity has triggered a lot of thoughts which I’ll write about another time. I started reading Peace earlier this week. Recently, just by chance, while on my way to catch a train, my path crossed a Bairns not Bombs march. Bairns is Scots for children and the march was about getting rid of nuclear weapons. I felt joy that people actually cared enough to come out and make a stand.

I liked these nice feelings of joy and perhaps also the smug feeling that in supporting nuclear disarmament, I am on the side with the moral high ground. I thought that I had nothing to fear from reading about Peace. Here is what Fr. Hughes has to say about Peace in his preface:

Peace, within an individual, includes a ‘divine restlessness’, a profound discontent with what we discover around and, above all, within ourselves. Peace, in spite of our protestations of being dedicated to it, is a state against which we defend ourselves with verbal smokescreens and subtle reasoning, so subtle that we deceive ourselves, preferring violence and calling it ‘Peace’.

It wasn’t very reassuring. The next day I had one of my least peaceful days in a long time. When you live with children and an animal (I’m referring to the family pet, not my husband), you have to accept a background level of chaos and lack of outward peace in your circumstances. Usually I manage to maintain a certain amount of calmness in the face of continual mini crises, such as spilt cereal, and lost school clothes. However, the day after starting to read about peace, I reacted with anger, all day, to the usual minor irritations and frustrations, including one child bursting a plastic toy that had been filled with flour, a few minutes before we were due to leave for school. I snapped at the children and mentally cursed the designer of that particular toy as I tried to remove flour from clothes and floor.

Gerard Hughes has a point. I’ve discovered the lack of peace within myself. It’s like finding head lice in my soul. I wish that the solution was as simple as applying Hedrin.