"My Jesus I Love Thee" 250 Voice Mass Choir at Hyderabad

I love this hymn and I love this recording of it.

It's one of several hymns and songs that I learned when I first knew Jesus.

My Jesus, I love Thee, I know Thou art mine;
For Thee all the follies of sin I resign;
My gracious Redeemer, my Saviour art Thou;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

I love Thee because Thou hast first loved me,
And purchased my pardon on Calvary’s tree;
I love Thee for wearing the thorns on Thy brow;
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

I’ll love Thee in life, I will love Thee in death,
And praise Thee as long as Thou lendest me breath;
And say when the death dew lies cold on my brow,
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

In mansions of glory and endless delight,
I’ll ever adore Thee in heaven so bright;
I’ll sing with the glittering crown on my brow,
If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, ’tis now.

3. (William R. Featherston 1864)

Hollington

 The place I live now is called Hollington.

The red dot shows our house.

It used to have a pretty front garden, like this —

— but when our tenants (who lived there before us) had a joy-rider smash into their car and ruin it at 2am one night, we turned the garden into a parking lot (reminds me of Joni Mitchell) to keep their car safe. So now it keeps ours safe too.

Hollington is mostly a large housing estate that was settled into a country village on the edge of Hastings in the 1930s for London overspill people. Our house was built in 1937, a mock-Tudor style very typical of that era of architecture. It's one of those things where you never notice how many similar houses there are in the local area until you live in one yourself. What we in our household (Tony and me) think of as the Morris Minor effect — you don't notice them at all, then you get one and suddenly they seem to be everywhere. Though not now, of course. Morris Minors are very vintage cars nowadays. These days we have a little red Smart Car. It's smarter than I am, actually. I need everything set permanently to auto, and I even struggled to get the fuel. cap off to re-fuel it, but the man from the garage helped me. Pleasingly, the emojis on the internet include this for their image of a car: 🚗 🚘. Yep; that's our car! 

But I digress.

I had no aspirations to live in Hollington. It has a reputation as a rough neighbourhood like Shady Lane where the weasels lived (if you ever read Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit books when you were small).

I don't mind rough neighbourhoods. Some of the people there are rough diamonds, others merely flint all the way through, but they are neither better nor worse than the more well-to-do — which are likewise a muddle of diamonds and flint, but polished.

Even so I had no high hopes of it being a great place to live, but it has taken me by surprise.

The people here are friendly and kind. If I go for a walk in the evening, there are often people out with their dogs who enjoy to stop and chat (both the dogs and the humans). When the dustcart has been by to collect the garbage, if my neighbour is going out to her car she'll bring my wheelie bin back for me, right up to the house not just at the edge of the path, as well as her own.

When our kitchen sink was being repaired and the water and electricity were turned off, our neighbour the other side said to come to them if we needed anything — and he meant it, too.

Today I had the car parked on the front yard while I carried in the groceries, and when I went out to get a pack of bottled water (6 big bottles), a young man passing by with his dog stopped to ask if it was too heavy for me and if I needed him to carry it in to the house.

That's the kind of neighbourhood it is. A place of quiet kindness.

When we moved here, from a house that backed on to a long strip of parkland full of trees and wild animals and birds, I was sad to be going somewhere with just roads and houses. But — but but but! — I hadn't grasped that right behind our house runs the Hollington Stream, where the streams from higher ground flow down, and trees grow along the banks. If you click on this aerial view, can you see how if I come out of our house (red dot) and turn right and keep going right until I'm round the back, I have a lovely evening walk alongside the stream with its trees and green spaces? Can you trace on the picture the little path that runs along the greensward and goes under the trees, from right at the end of Coventry Road where we live? That stream with its trees will always be there, because you can't build on it. 

❤️

There's a verse in the psalms that I remember worded from the Book of Common Prayer (we always sang the psalms at Evensong back in the day), which says, "My lot is fallen in a fair ground." (Psalm 16.6)

And so it has. Hollington turns out to be characterised by loving-kindness, and trees, and a stream, and what more could you want?

Cloud bread

 Today, for the first time ever, I made some cloud bread, which came out well.

Not only is it the first time I made cloud bread, it's actually the first time in years I made anything from a recipe at all. I don't get past basic ingredients as a general rule.

I expect you already know what cloud bread is, but — in case you don't — it's basically a soufflé. You're meant to cook the mixture in little rounds so it comes out like rolls or biscuits, but I didn't have any liners/baking parchment to go in the air fryer, so I just greased a tin and cooked it in one flattish lump in the tin. That meant it took longer to cook, so I had to turn it over and do the other side for a while, and even then it was still more soft in the middle than it should have been, but I'd made my sausages by then so I just ate it. And it was nice.

I made it because I miss bread a lot — I eat a carnivore diet, no plants, which is gradually healing my gut (slow going though). To my surprise I don't miss vegetables whatsoever; maybe I ate enough of them in the first 60 years to last the rest of my life! I slightly miss fruit, but not as much as I thought I would. But I do miss bread with butter on it ❤️, and to a lesser extent cookies and cake. 

I have tea and coffee. They are plants (obviously) and so they do flame up my gut, but I drink them for specific reasons. Coffee is a sovereign thing for gut motility (mine is spectacularly impaired though it is slowly improving now); and tea halts oxalate dumping. 

Oxalates (I hope you're not bored, you probably know all about this) gradually gather in small armies around your body until the time comes for them to attack (gout, kidney stones etc). All the food I thought was healthy and ate loads of is full of oxalates — spinach, sweet potatoes, quinoa, rhubarb, beetroot, tea — and has been gathering strength in my body waiting to wreak vengeance on its unsuspecting host. The thing with oxalate is it doesn't dissolve (though they do say lemon juice can make it a little less like granite), it just sits there waiting for a chance to get out. Then if your diet changes to being low oxalate, your body in effect says Haha! and starts dumping it. It comes out through your ears, your skin, your eyes, your bladder, your gut, round your teeth — grit, lots of it. If you're unlucky it comes out in kidney stones. As it's very, very gritty — sharp, scratchy — it hurts a lot. And the way to arrest this tsunami of crystals making their exodus is to drink some black tea. 

Carnivore diet (plant-free — what I eat) has absolutely no oxalates in, so changing from an oxalate heavy diet to none at all triggers massive dumping that goes on a very long time — months or years. As this is wearisome and can create health issues of its own, most people who experience it drink a bit of black tea to send their body back to sequestering instead of dumping. That way you can slow it down and make the experience more gentle. Sally Norton is the person who writes about oxalates and health, she published a very informative book about it called Toxic Superfoods.

So mostly I just toss some meat in the air fryer and eat it roasted, or if it's stewing meat I cook it in the slow cooker with some home-made bone broth (I keep back the bones when I roast a chicken and boil them up into broth). But I've been thinking it would be nice to have a change, and I liked the sound of the cloud bread. 

I'm waiting for the Black Friday sales, to get a Ninja Creamie, and then I'm going to make some carnivore ice cream, which is basically just egg yolks added to cream. It sounds rather boring, doesn't it, but a lot of what's nice about ice cream is the texture, plus if you don't eat sugar your palate changes its mind about what tastes sweet.

After that I'm planning to have a go at this recipe. You can't get zero-carb cream powder in the UK, but I found some that has only 3.75% carb, which I think comes within the category of Good Enough.

I went down to the spring to get some more water today, too — we have an iron spring here in the park in Hastings, which has the most fabulous water (though we do filter it in case the water table has smuggled in non-fabulous elements) but the drain had clogged up with leaves so today it was a lake not a spring. Therefore instead I bought mineral water from Asda, but I didn't mind because the Elmhurst Spring (where their water comes from) is in the part of England where all my family — all my ancestors, most of my DNA — came from, what in ancient times was the part of West Yorkshire that was the Kingdom of Elmet. There is a sense of rightness about sometimes drinking the water from there — though obviously I prefer to get it straight from the earth in the place where I live.

+      +       +

CLOUD BREAD

To make carnivore cloud bread in an air fryer, you will use a three-ingredient mixture of eggs, cream cheese, and a binder like whey protein or crushed pork rinds. The recipe works because cloud bread is naturally grain-free and can be made without the plant-based ingredients sometimes used in keto recipes. 

Ingredients 

• 3 large eggs, separated
• 3 oz (90g) cream cheese, softened
• ½ teaspoon cream of tartar
• Optional seasonings: Pinch of salt, garlic powder, or Italian herbs 

Instructions 

1. Prep the batter. In a clean, dry bowl, beat the egg whites and cream of tartar with an electric mixer until stiff, fluffy peaks form.
2. Combine the ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix the egg yolks and softened cream cheese until smooth. Stir in your chosen binder and seasonings until just combined.
3. Gently fold. Carefully fold the yolk mixture into the stiff egg whites using a spatula. Be careful not to over-mix, as this will deflate the egg whites and prevent the "cloud" texture.
4. Form the bread. Preheat your air fryer to 300°F (150°C). Line your air fryer basket or tray with parchment paper. Scoop the batter into rounds, leaving some space between each one to allow for even cooking.
5. Air fry. Cook the cloud bread for 12 to 15 minutes, or until it is a captivating golden-brown colour.
6. Cool. Remove the cloud bread from the air fryer and allow it to cool slightly before serving. Letting it cool completely will help it set and achieve a more stable texture. 

Bored

Our family (me and my relatives, my husband and his, two separate clans) has more than a smattering of neurodivergence. As understanding of this and research into it has increased in the last forty or so years, we have acquired the insight and vocabulary to help us manage the various manifestations of neurodivergence in our tribe. This has been very helpful, and has considerably augmented the feeling our way instinctively that we relied on before, into a more confident management of who and what we are.

One of us — most definitely on the autistic spectrum — recently moved house. This family member has a history of rather detailed hoarding (careful curation of every letter and birthday card, every till receipt, written transcripts of every phone text message) and of marked hypersensitivity to noise, crowds, and all the usual sources of stress to the nervous system.

Other family members helping with the house move (a daunting task in this case for even the most experience and determined) reported back that the move had been effected, and the new home had a bed, a chair,  and fifty-two boxes waiting to be unpacked. And they said the one of us who had just moved said they were "bored".

This word "bored" deserves attention.

It's a word children use very often. Adults often respond crisply, impatiently, their tone warning of their lack of sympathy. I recall the educational philosopher A.S.Neill (of Summerhill School; I love his work) writing that when children — or adults — tell him they are bored, he says, "Everyone's bored until they find something to do."

I've also often read articles on creativity recommending that we should allow our children to be bored, that boredom is the compost from which ingenuity and invention sprout.

I probably agree with all that, but with the proviso that often when people say they're bored, it's not quite what they mean.

Do you know the word alexithymia? It's useful.

Alexithymia — the "a" denotes absence, the "lexi" is words, and the "thymia" is feelings. So it's when someone has no words or vocabulary for what they are feeling. Sometimes they can't even identify how they feel o even try and express it. They feel deeply, but don't really know, can't really say, what they feel. The Google AI overview puts it rather well:

Alexithymia is a personality construct characterised by difficulty identifying, describing, and processing one's own emotions. People with alexithymia have trouble differentiating between feelings and bodily sensations, and may have difficulty understanding the emotions of others. It is not a mental health disorder but is a trait that can be co-occurring with other conditions like autism, PTSD, and depression.

In our family, we have felt our way to the proposition that when children say they are "bored", sometimes they mean what it is supposed to mean (like A.S.Neill meant it), but sometimes it is the nearest familiar expression they can reach, for something they —as yet — have no vocabulary to describe; burnout, exhaustion, too much demanded of them, the flatness felt when life is altogether too much. This is familiar territory to those on the autistic spectrum.

This is how the Google bots describe autistic burnout:

Autistic burnout is a state of severe physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion resulting from chronic stress, often caused by masking and trying to meet neurotypical expectations. It is characterised by an extreme lack of energy, loss of skills, and reduced tolerance for sensory input, which can lead to an inability to manage daily tasks, more frequent meltdowns or shutdowns, and a need to withdraw socially. Recovery involves rest, reducing demands, and adjusting environmental factors, but it can be a long process.  

Do you see how, if you were a child experiencing this, you might describe yourself as "bored"?

The problem is that boredom never elicits sympathy. When people say they are bored, those on the receiving end of this observation typically respond with impatience and recommend more action, more engagement, more stimulus. But what if, when the person says they are "bored", it is an example of alexithymia, of someone who finds it hard to identify, distinguish between, and categorise, their feelings, reaching for the word they know that best fits what they are experiencing — a state of prostration that is beyond exhaustion.

I might be wrong, but I think when our family member — having gone through the hoarder's nightmare of a house move — said they were bored, they may actually have meant "overwhelmed".

Neurodivergent people sometimes need those who are close to them to be skilled enough to read between the lines.

 

Statistics

 Most of the statistics I look at — or the opinions resulting from statistical evidence — are to do with health or national politics.

When it comes to health, I'm particularly interested in the rôle of diet, since one way or another we do actually have to eat.

I've found it puzzling to see how doctors — proper doctors with degrees and a keen interest in metabolic health, high profile doctors with huge followings — profoundly disagree when it comes to diet. Every way of eating from vegan to carnivore has a cohort of high-profile doctors with huge followings passionately expounding their point of view and backing it up by statistics.

I've listened carefully, tried things out, made comparisons, followed logic, and made my own choices in the end. But it's made me wary of statistics. Yes, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics." So it would seem.

An illustration of the tangled web you can weave with statistics is found in a new set of statistics recently emerging from the statistical swamp about Hastings — the place where I live.

I first came to Hastings when I was nineteen, and I've lived here on and off since I was twenty-two (with brief spells of time living away during my years as a Methodist minister). I'm now sixty-eight, so I've had the opportunity to get to know Hastings well. A lot of poor people live here, and it's something of a sink town. Indeed, I came to live here for that very reason; the houses were a lot cheaper in Hastings than in the surrounding area, so our first family home was here even though my husband's job was twenty-six miles away. 

When my children were teenagers they began to notice the phenomenon that you could be dressed appropriately in Hastings, thinking you looked quite elegant and smart, but if you went on a day out, shopping or to visit relatives, you quickly realised that outside Hastings you looked eccentric or shabby.

It's a poor town. The roads are in bits, the place is full of drug dealers, the council is annually brought to the brink of bankruptcy trying to cope with all the homeless people. But it's also true that kids play out in the streets and women walk home alone at night, and it's a kindly, neighbourly place taken all round.

So I found this recent set of statistics intriguing.

Here's a map of England shaded according to social deprivation. Dark is deprived, light is prosperous,

You see that tiny dark dot down on the south coast, over to the right (east) as you look at the map? That's Hastings. You'll have to click on the image to make Hastings big enough to see.

The images I'm posting are just screen-shots, but where I saw the map originally (it's in this article) it was interactive, so you could check out the place where you live. I hovered on Hastings and it brought up this.

Intrigued, I looked to see the statistics for the area where Hastings is set — Hastings and Rother (the Rother is actually a river that gives its name to the area).

But what are the implications of that? Hastings is "highly deprived", outstandingly so, and deprivation usually goes hand in hand with crime, yet in a recent presentation by Hastings police to members of the borough council, I heard (from my husband who is a councillor and was at the presentation) that the police say crime is down in Hastings and (I'm paraphrasing) everything is lovely.

So I looked up the statistics and found this.

The crime rate is 132% of the national average — mostly made up of violent crime, sexual assault and robberies! Wow! That sounds dangerous. Further searches brought up an agreement that Hastings is the most dangerous place in a wide area. Here's a representative example result from a locksmith.

But my searches also brought up the result that Hastings is the safest major town in East Sussex — as well as being the most dangerous. What? Yes, that's what they say.

A resident sheds a little light, on Reddit (I agree).

Baffled by the statistical evidence that Hastings is simultaneously the safest major town in East Sussex and the most dangerous place in the local area, I asked the Google bots how both these things could be true.

They said this.

So, what they're saying is that compared with other major towns in the area, Hastings is very safe, but since there aren't that many major towns in East Sussex, it's farming country with a lot of little villages and small market towns, if you compare Hastings with the Sussex hamlets and villages, it's comparatively unsafe. All that tells us, I suspect, is that urban locations are usually more dangerous than country villages, which is not astonishing — especially as the houses in the country villages cost a lot more, so the residents have more comfortable and well-ordered lives.

But just to double-check, I asked the Google bots again this morning if Hastings really is the safest place in East Sussex. And they said this.

So Google searches have told me — all based on statistics — that Hastings both is and is not the safest place in East Sussex, that it is the most dangerous place in East Sussex but also the safest major town.

What I take away from this brief foray into statistics about something where I actually have substantial personal experience, is that statistics are useful for politicians or to win an argument, but of little or no use in navigating my way through life. Personal experience is better.

I suspect you are not surprised.

All Hallows Eve

Tomorrow is Hallowe'en, and I have mixed feelings about it.

When I was a child, it just wasn't a Thing. We sang For All the Saints at church, and other than that it went unremarked.

By the time I'd grown up and got children of my own, England had adopted America's Trick or Treat tradition, with costumes and children going from house to house. At that time I was adamantly opposed to it, and wanted nothing whatever to do with anything celebrating and death and the demonic, ghosts and witchcraft.

Then at some point I saw a TV programme about Temple Grandin, an autistic woman made famous by Oliver Sacks chronicling in one of his books her work as a designer of abattoirs that reduced stress for animals to be slaughtered. The TV interview with her was done in the days approaching Hallowe'en. Temple Grandin had no children of her own, but she remark with joyful anticipation, "The children are coming!" — and that made me see Hallowe'en differently. She completely bypassed all the disturbing and sinister spiritual shadows, and went straight to a consideration of little children coming to her home in hope of being given sweets; which she looked forward to doing, with delight. This changed my outlook; I thought her approach felt healthy and sane, and adopted the same way of looking at it.

For a few years I carved pumpkin lanterns, some with a smiley face and some with a cross cut unto them. Some years I made up bags of sweets and included a little leaflet I'd written, saying to children to remember if ever they are afraid of any kind of darkness, that Jesus is the light of the world, and you only have to call out to him and he will help you.

More recently (I'm not over-keen on pumpkin) I moved on to just a couple of light-up artificial pumpkins in the window, and a few tubs of sweets to offer to children who called at our house.

But in the last two years my approach changed again. I came to the realisation that I find Hallowe'en immensely stressful. Sitting for several hours in readiness to answer knocks at the door — frequent but unscheduled and unpredictable — caused me such tension and anxiety that I found it exhausting (yes, I am on the autistic spectrum and flourish in predictable routine). The women we lived with before we moved shared the same sense of it being stressful, so the last couple of years we just turned out the lights at the front of the house and pretended to be out.

Four years of illness and pain have left me less resilient and more used to solitude. This summer, our house move has involved many days of tradesmen working here, each of these days requiring many hours of being on duty like a receptionist, ready to leap up and respond every time they stood at the door and shouted for attention. I found this so exhausting it left me flattened. It was like an extra illness of its own. And I realised the other day that on the back of this I am dreading Hallowe'en. 

Enquiring of neighbours, we have discovered that Hallowe'en is big in our neighbourhood — a lot of families with little kids live here. I have bought tubs of sweets (I think sweets are pretty much poison, but hey, I don't want to be a kill-joy), and acquired a light-up pumpkin to go in the window; but I'm conscious of having to steel myself to face a whole evening of random unpredictable callers knocking on the door and having to leap up and rush in response to open up and offer sweets, while my nervous system is progressively shredded.

I just don't want to.

I'll be glad when it's over.

But I don't object. No ghouls, no ghosts, no death's heads, just sweets and a smiley pumpkin and some window clings saying "Happy Hallowe'en". 

What John Martyn's song said — "I don't want to know about evil; I only want to know about love."

 

Chronic illness and the Rife frequencies

 I think several friends who come by here face the daily challenges of chronic illness.

Of course you may have a good and trusted practitioner to whom you can turn, and of course if you have physical symptoms then the responsible thing to do is get them thoroughly checked out.

But like many of us (especially since the interventions that began in 2021), you may have strong physical symptoms that defy diagnosis no matter how many scans, blood tests, stool/urine tests, etc etc you may undergo to find the problem.

Perhaps, like me, you have identified a healing pathway for yourself, because you are working with zero effective help from the usual practitioners, but are not yet all the way there and are living with significant and intrusive levels of pain — which in turn create tiredness, stiffness, and all the usual spin-off problems.

If that's you, have you had a go with the Rife frequencies? I find them remarkably helpful.

You can get actual Rife frequency generators, like this one, but for me that is (at present) both too complicated and too expensive to consider. Having your own generator like that — provided you can figure out how to use it successfully — is the most powerful way to administer frequency treatments, but on Youtube, for free, you can administer them aurally, which is not as powerful but good enough to make an impressive difference.

The ones I go to are this channel and this one. I have a playlist that lasts all night, and if the pain is bad I just go to bed with my ear-buds in and let the frequencies roll in while I sleep. 

Not only does it help reduce pain, but it eases my whole body, so that, instead of a solid clump of pain, my body is just loose and easy, just itself, albeit with areas of pain still within it.

In case you have never heard of the Rife frequencies and don't know what I mean at all, there's an explanation here and here.

Riot Women and The Spectator. A journey of the mind.

 The last five years have been among the strangest in my life. Isolated by the illness (defying diagnosis) that has dogged me since the beginning of 2022, I have been startled by the rapidity with which my life dwindled away to nothing. That of itself is another story of its own, potentially worth considering and discussing — but what triggered these thoughts today was the attendant isolation.

As for so many older people, many of my friends — the loyal ones, the understanding ones, the ones to whom I could always turn — have died. Writing (even from an isolated situation) has of course brought me numerous new friends; however not only are those far-flung, overseas for the most part, but some of those have died too, and they were not old. It's the time we're passing through; it's all part of the crumbling away of the familiar world we knew. It has been very lonely.

Amidst it all — and I cannot write about this because I have nothing good to say — I have been so bitterly disappointed by the church. Some of the alienation and isolation has been to do with that; but I've learned a great deal from it. Today's pastors, it seems, are Ezekiel 34 shepherds.

Part of the whole psycho-spiritual odyssey has been a re-evaluation of my political views. My outlook is more or less as it has been all my life, but around me the political tribes and emphases have shifted and changed, so that when I look at the left-leaning movements that once were fellow travellers, I am dismayed by what they have become. I won't go into why, because I don't want to start a political argument, just set a context.

Much alone, then, and often lonely and bored but interested in current affairs and the world of ideas, I have spent hours and hours exploring contemporary political thinking, and to my surprise found myself nowadays better in harmony with the centre right (that our UK government and media unjustly lump together with the far right), that somewhat nostalgic political cast of thinking, yearning for the way things were. Like the poetry of Rupert Brooke, perhaps:

    Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
    And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
    Deep meadows yet, for to forget
    The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
    Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
    And is there honey still for tea?

Feeling my way to those who expressed what I was searching for, I liked Douglas Murray, and Rory Stuart, and warmed to the much reviled Jacob Rees Mogg (unjustly smeared as holding all kinds of ideas he never professed), and I became interested in the work of Roger Scruton.

Exploring these thinkers — new to me, for I had swum in other seas hitherto), I spent yesterday evening watching a YouTube interview from a few years ago (pre-pandemic) with Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton. Though I like both thinkers, I found the conversation a little shallow and self-congratulatory, not as good as I had hoped and expected. But in the course of it I learned that Douglas Murray is/was (not sure if he still is) an editor for The Spectator. I had heard of that journal (but never read it) and, while browsing among the publications on display at the supermarket recently, thought it looked interesting.

So I looked up The Spectator online, to see what they had to offer. 

The first article to catch my eye was this scathing review by David James, of Sally Wainwright's Riot Women recently aired on the BBC.

Sally Wainwright is a superb writer, one of the best in our generation. Her characterisation and power of observation and insight are astonishingly good. Riot Women is a tour de force; it is magnificent. I find not one false note in it. It has a standing ovation from me.

So I want to go through some of what David James has to say about it.

He says: 

"Picture the scene: five middle-aged male actors playing rockstars are lolling about on sofas in a recording studio. In front of them is an attractive young female producer; the men start making obscene gestures behind her about her bottom, sniggering and giggling like schoolboys, one sticks out his tongue through his fingers, intimating what he would like to do to her. Such a scene, if it was ever commissioned, would no doubt have been left on the cutting-room floor. It would be seen as puerile, sexist and outdated. Well, it was commissioned, and by the BBC, and is being broadcast this month in the final episode of Riot Women. Everything is accurate in my description except for one detail: those men are actually middle-aged women, and the target of their offensive behaviour is a man."

The thing is, he's got it wrong. I strongly suspect he has not watched all the episodes — only the first and last perhaps? — and he's got the wrong end of the stick.

The scene he portrays has elements he has either missed or misunderstood.

Let me explain.

The sound engineer in question (what he describes as the producer) is already known to one of the central characters because she met him through a dating site; a man much younger than herself. She was shocked and disappointed to discover that he wanted her to engage in sexual practices she found disgusting and demeaning, and she detached from the encounter. She is taken aback to come face to face with him again (unexpectedly) when he is allocated to their band as their sound engineer.

When it is her turn to record, he goes with her into the studio (alone) but their conversation is inadvertently transmitted through to the adjacent room where the other band members are waiting their turn to record, so they overhear and thus discover the nature of the sexual liaison and her disappointment in it.

Their response is not disapproval or indignation but hilarity. When her turn to record is completed, she returns to find her friends hardly able to contain their giggles. Sitting on the sofa with them, the sound engineer having his back to them as he sits at the sound desk, she asks (mimes, gestures) what they are laughing at. Pointing at him, one of them mimes the sexual practice that he asked of her, the one which disgusted and disappointed her. But they don't judge him; indeed one of them later, generously, pronounces him attractive — they heal her embarrassment and sense of shame by letting it be something funny. It is transformed by the solidarity of friendship that rescues her from the tawdriness and indignity of the failed encounter.

In his rush to disdain and sneer, David James has completely (not partially) failed to grasp not only the dynamics but the actually plot-line. And gone to press in The Spectator slating Sally Wainwright for something that was his invention, not hers, saying erroneously, "Everything is accurate in my description except for one detail: those men are actually middle-aged women". Not so.

But I had been looking for the path the light shines on. I was looking for thinkers of integrity, and wondering if The Spectator might be worth a subscription. Truth finds us, doesn't it, if we look?

I won't be buying even one copy of The Spectator. I am not interested in disdain and contempt, nor in writers (and their editors) who make their living denigrating other writers without even doing their homework. 

I've read enough: back to the drawing board. I'll look elsewhere.

As Bertrand Russell so memorably said, "A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand."

[I am happy to use the term "man" here advisedly, in its original gender-neutral sense with its etymological derivation from the same root as the Germans got mensch. In the origins of our language, "man" meant simply "person" — the male and female of the species were represented by wer and wif; as in "werewolf" and "wife".] 

 

Scrupulosity: When Faith Feels Like Fear — Debra Peck

Do you know the work of my friend Debi Peck? 

She wrote a particularly excellent book called The Hijacked Conscience — a book about a form of OCD called religious scrupulosity — which has become a must-read resource for pastors, and is illuminating for anyone who goes to church. I am fairly certain that even if Debi's struggles aren't the same as your own, you will know a fellow-Christian who has faced the same challenges and will find her wise and kind and brave account very helpful.

Recently Debi's son Brenton has launched himself upon the unsuspecting world as a podcaster — Yay! Go, Brenton! — and the very first person he wanted to interview was his mother.

Here they are, settling down for a chat on the subject of scrupulosity — when faith feels like fear.

Listening to Lucy

Until this year I haven't spent much time thinking about polarisation. 

Our divisions, whether political or racial or religious, seemed unnecessary to me. I had a curiosity about people who were different from me, and enjoyed seeking them out when I could, to discover their point of view; but like most people I tended to swim in particular seas (ideologically) and assumed what people said was what they meant, and it all seemed fairly straightforward.

But the shifts and changes combined with the explosive acceleration of communication affecting the ideological landscape have resulted in a very different terrain from where we were before the pandemic. Truth has emerged magnificently at the same time as lies have proliferated astonishingly. It's hard to pick a way through the muddle. Everything is in such a confusion of development and emergence that it's tricky to spot the path the light shines on. It's there, of course, it just takes patience and time and spaciousness (simplicity), watching and waiting until its fragile light strengthens up into a clearly discernible thread.

Adding to the chaos is polarity. It's hard to discuss anything with somebody who holds the view that if you believe this then you must believe that. It's like getting out the hair that gets stuck in the plughole of the sink. You pull out what seemed to be just a little bit, only to find it has all kinds of accumulated crud attached to it. It has become impossible to have a perspective on any topic without it being assumed you have internalised all the rest of the ideological package.

Because of all this, it is only with my husband — who has different politics, different spiritual understandings, and a different cultural outlook from mine — that I feel free to discuss these things frankly and in depth. He is very patient with me.

Then a thought occurred to me today that I found helpful. Have you read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S.Lewis)? I think you probably have. If you haven't, or read it years ago and no longer have a copy, just at the moment you can get it free on Kindle (at Amazon).

I wanted to quote you a snippet from it, but when I went back to it I realised there isn't a short part encapsulating what I was remembering. You really need to read the whole chapter (Ch.V — Back on this side of the door) , but I'll summarise and explain why I've brought it to your attention.

This is the chapter where Lucy's older brother and sister (Peter and Susan) begin to think she must have lost her mind because of the nonsense she's spouting (about the existence of Narnia — ridiculous, right?). They ask the opinion of their brother Edmund (who has also been to Narnia), but he lies about it and pretends that she is just making it up. 

Troubled, and unable to pick out truth from lies/make-believe, thinking that Lucy might actually have become a little unhinged, Peter and Susan go to ask the Professor (I've given him capitals because in a story like this a professor is a wisdom/authority archetype and I think Lewis expects us to recognise that). 

He listens to them very carefully, and then he asks them, "How do you know your sister's story is not true?"

He asks them which they would evaluate as the most reliable — the most truthful — their sister or their brother? And Peter says that up until now he'd have said "Lucy" every time. So the Professor asks the same question of Susan; and she says that she likewise would have said the same as Peter — but that what Lucy is saying couldn't be true. She admits they have been worried there could be something wrong with Lucy's mind.

The Professor says it is very clear Lucy is not mad. He says that logically there are only three possibilities: either she is mad, or telling lies, or telling the truth. He says that, since she is clearly not mad and they know she does not tell lies, they must assume she is telling the truth.

Now, in the landscape of confusion and dissension where we currently find ourselves, we have to acknowledge there is a fourth possibility: that a sane and truthful person could simply be mistaken, given the depth and breadth of muddle that surrounds us. They might be confused, might have been taken in by the propaganda of others, might later change their mind. So they might be sane and truthful, but gullible and misinformed.

Even taking that into account, I think in our present position, we should be quietly bypassing Edmund and listening to Lucy (whoever is the equivalent in your own life).

So, in picking your way through the chaos, trying to find your bearings, I'd recommend asking yourself, "Who let me down in the past? Who deceived me? Who played me? Who tried to blag me and manipulate me? Who used me?" Discount them as a reliable guide.

Then ask yourself, "Whom have I found trustworthy in the past? Who turned out to hold the wise perspective? In circumstances of conflicting narratives, who told me the truth before? Whose life and practice do I hold in esteem?" And listen to them. Listen to Lucy.

Look at the people you know, and select the ones who are wise and honourable, people of integrity, people who have sheltered others and built up something good and brought order out of chaos. Listen to their opinions. 

Of course we should pay some attention to everyone, because sometimes surprising individuals hold the luminous vision, and if we simply ignore them we could miss that. As Max Ehrmann said, "Speak your own truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story." But in general, the ones whose lives are a mess, and who rely on others and let people down, are less likely to offer you a trustworthy evaluation. As someone else said (Chuck Swindoll? James Dobson?), "If your Christianity doesn't work at home, it doesn't work: don't export it." 

And then, of course, what Susan and Peter did next was to go through the wardrobe themselves (in their case by happenstance, but we could go on purpose). They listened to Lucy and did not dismiss her (or believe her), but it was making their own exploration that changed their minds. And the same applies to us; we can do our own diligence. Listen to the voices of those you know from experience are holding the light (even if their views sound improbable or are unpalatable); then take the time to do your own exploring. Go and look. Thoroughly. Go into the territories beyond what is familiar to you, and see for yourself. Then you will be in a better position to decide what is wise, what is true.

Listen to the spiritual voices, not just the political ones. Listen to what is visionary and weigh it up against what is practical and realistic. Be cautious about adding your own voice to the cacophony. If you want to act prophetically towards bringing in the Kingdom, do so by small acts of kindness and love in your immediate circle. Roaring and waving flags is not always necessary. Sometimes holding your light steady is more effectively accomplished in quietness.

I hope that helps. Your own thoughts??