Today my friend Vicki wrote to me from Bellingham. Things had been going wrong; specifically, electronic things. She had been patiently dealing with them, replacing her method of internet access and adjusting to the new one. Then she sat down to do what she wanted — write me a lovely long email about the thoughts and ideas that interest us both — only to discover, when she tried to send it, that her account storage capacity had been exceeded. Still patiently, she deleted some things she could manage without; but came back to re-send only to discover her email had vanished without trace. By this time Vicki was feeling a little less patient, and what's more she had other tasks requiring her attention. Promising to come back later, she said:
"Practicing the presence of God, like Brother Lawrence did, and like Brother Michael, the infirmarian obviously does, is harder than it sounds. My spirit is not at peace as I ponder rewriting those thoughts I had articulated over a period of about an hour."
My simple instinct was to sympathise and agree; but to my surprise, because I haven't heard from him in a while, Brother Michael had something to say about that. I couldn't see him, which was disappointing because I'd like to have spent a while chilling out in St Alcuins' infirmary with him, but I know what he thought. Talking to these fourteenth-century monks is a little like talking to cats. The words just appear in your mind. You have to trust them.
And he said this.
"Please to tell Vicki this small something about peace and practising the presence of God.
"Here, we are taught how to practice peace and offer it to others. It's in how we walk, how we sit, how we gather and disperse, how we eat; externally like that, it's a discipline we learn — mortifying the eyes and giving one another preference and so on. It's easier in some situations than others of course, and it can be tiring in the early days, but it becomes a reflexive habit in the end, so that you almost forget how to do things any other way.
"But obviously that's just the outside of it. What's happening inside? There can be turmoil, a sense of injustice, irritation — that can be pronounced, even intense — or disappointment or just flat weariness. All of those; and none of them resemble peace. And then there's the frustration Vicki experienced, when patience has been applied repeatedly, and the work has been done faithfully, and even still it all goes wrong.
"You must — please, please — pass on to Vicki that I am not as saintly as she thinks I am. Some days I am absolutely seething and the best I can do is not slam an ointment jar down onto the counter so hard I would break it, not say something so unkind and mean to one of our old men that I would leave him wounded to a degree it would be hard to mend later. The external discipline of peace we practice is my friend here; it allows me to stop short of doing something I could not undo and would bitterly regret.
"But what about practising the presence of God? Well, happily for me, God is practicing being present as well. At times when my sense of peace seems to have left the building, and the fountain of life within me seems to have unaccountably got blocked by wet leaves, so there is nothing left inside me worth sharing with another living being, God is still there. I know he is, because this has happened to me so often I've lost count.
"I turn to him then, my Good Shepherd, and say the only prayer of which I am capable in that moment — 'HELP!' And you know what? He always does. If things are really dire, I sometimes have to say it two or three times, which is not a bad thing because it helps re-orientate my attention towards him.
"The crucial thing — but please, I know your friend Vicki is a faithful believer, so I hope I'm not patronising her, I honestly don't mean to — the key to it all is that God is not the product of our practice, if you see what I mean. His presence with me and in me is not dependent on me; he initiates, he stands at the door and knocks, he leaves the ninety and nine on the hillside and comes to look for me.
"It only takes a moment. I don't even have to close my eyes or take a deep breath. In fact it would probably better I didn't, because that would give whoever I was with a distinct clue that they were annoying the hell out of me. All it takes is to recognise that I have run dry, and send a desperate plea for help. And God is with me."
I listen to this, and I say to him, "Thank you. Two things. One is that about three hundred years on from your time we had a famous battle in England called the Battle of Edgehill. In it, the Major General of the Infantry was Jacob Astley — Baron Astley of Reading. On the morning of the battle, he prayed: 'O Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.' And then he said, 'March on, boys!'
"And the other thing was something that happened to me years ago when I was involved in a bit of a battle of my own — a church battle. Before I had to go into battle I phoned a friend. A phone... oh, well, I won't go into exactly what a phone is right now. What I mean is that my friend was neither with me nor (as it turned out) at home; I left a message for him, telling him about it and asking him to pray. And when I came home from the difficult thing I had to do, he had in turn left me a message, very simple. He just said 'I'm with you.' "
Brother Michael listens to this. "That's exactly it, " he says. "And would you kindly let your friend Vicki know that the angels of God, and I — Brother Michael — and all of us here at St Alcuins, we are on the other end of the line, out of sight, but we are with her."
Sometimes I wish Brother Michael could have the benefit of all these hundreds of years of the history of the faith. I say to him: "Centuries on from where you are now, there was a great man of God called John Wesley. He preached until he was in his eighties, he was still preaching a fortnight before he died. And then he finally ran out of strength. He was in bed, his life ebbing, and he told his family gathered round him that he loved them. And then — the very last words he spoke on this earth — he said, 'The best of all is, God is with us.' "
Brother Michael's face lights up with a smile, but at this point in our conversation he absolutely had to get on, because I'd interrupted him right in the middle of his morning chores, which didn't seem to annoy him; though, thinking about what he'd said to me, I do wonder. Anyway, he said he simply must get on with his work or there'd be mayhem. But he told me to give Vicki a hug from him (and it didn't seem the moment to explain she lives hundred of miles away and the Atlantic Ocean is in the way), and said for her to hang on to the certainty that God is practising being present even when she can't hold up her end.
He looked at me and laughed. "March on, boys!" he said.
I recently discovered a YouTube channel that I absolutely love.
Here's the video where he explains what he's doing.
I loved these two videos! So good. And yes, both of them resonated indeed. Been there!
I wrote this down, read it through, thought about it overnight, read it again in the morning, published it, then unpublished it, thinking it sounded like a bit of an ain't-it-awful rant in which I hadn't managed to sharpen up what I wanted to say into something worthwhile. Then I saw the video I've put at the bottom, and thought at least that was worth saying. So here you are — pick out what resonates, leave the rest.
When I finished school, just before my eighteenth birthday, I stayed at home for my sister's wedding that summer, then I left. I loved my home and my mother, the village where we lived, but I had a road of my own to travel.
Until that time, since I was fifteen, I had worked various evening and weekend and school holiday (US 'vacation') jobs to give me some income of my own; I bought my own clothes and books and anything else I wanted, and put some money in savings. My jobs were in a supermarket and in care homes — one of them run by nuns.
Then I moved down to Devon, where I lived with some monks. They had a farm and a couple of cottages with a vegetable garden, and they ran the post office. In its small back garden was a caravan in a cabbage patch. They made the post office garage/shed into a chapel.
I lived in the caravan, helped with the cooking, milked the cow and made butter, helped take the produce from the garden to Bideford market to sell, helped with the post office remittance and served in the little village shop that contained the post office, and helped take care of the children from poor urban homes who came for country holidays and stayed at the farm.
It wasn't a paid job, just voluntary, so I lived on my savings until I moved on from there and went back to working for the nuns, living in their nurses' home until it was time to go to university in York.
After a year in university accommodation I became part of a nascent community —intentional. interdenominational, Christian. Father Fabian Cowper, an Ampleforth monk, was our chaplain.
I married not long before the community disintegrated, and moved down to Hastings where I raised my family. I was heavily involved with the Methodist church and the Ashburnham Stable Family (a Christian group devoted to revival in East Sussex), and later became first a preacher and then a minister. I spent my time with people in hospice care, men in prison, and with the faith communities where I preached and taught; and I was raising my children and writing books.
Looking back on all those years, I notice something.
I didn't have to think all that much about what I had or what I wore or how to occupy myself, because my life was full of people — and also animals and growing a garden, and the life of the mind associated with preaching and teaching and writing.
Thinking back to my mother's life, I saw a similar pattern. Born in 1927, she grew up on a Yorkshire farm that employed live-in horse-men, and housed German prisoners of war, and had a variety of other men associated with the farm work coming and going (mechanics, shepherds, men buying grain, pigeon fanciers, all sorts). So she had people all around her.
Later, when she got married and had a family of her own, she worked to create a property portfolio that included her own home. She spent every hour caring for her home, working in the garden, raising sheep and tending hens and processing the food she grew (or raised) for the winter.
Our possessions were very few.
When I left the monks in Devon I had a suitcase of belongings and some geraniums.
In my childhood, the ornaments in our home were mementos from my father's travels from around the world. My mother had two blouses, a cardigan, one skirt, one pair of trousers as her main everyday wear kit. We had very little. The only holidays we ever had were trips to Yorkshire to see our relatives.
As my mother grew old, having made money buying and selling houses, she began to acquire stuff and go on cruises and weekends away in hotels. I thought it was because she'd accumulated wealth and could afford it now. Obviously there was something in that, but now I think it was not the main driver of her choices.
For myself, I've noticed that in the last couple of decades I've spent a lot more money on things. I've never had much space for possessions to accumulate because of living in shared accommodation, so a pattern developed of acquiring then ditching belongings.
Thinking about all this in the last month as I have been systematically going through our home, taking it down to the minimum working kit so that we remain flexible in making choices, and the place is easy to care for as we grow old, I discerned a dynamic that I think has been at work in not only my own life but in the lives of almost everyone I know.
I have observed the rich, complex, all-hands-on-deck church communities I remember from years ago — that had morning and evening worship and many faith-centred weeknight groups and mission activities — dwindle to morning-only worship, pastors who have no time for people, and a bums-on-seats, finance-focused, numbers-based approach to church, with TV-style performance type of worship.
Neighbourliness has faded and gardens stand untended, full of weeds and junk people can't think how to dispose of. The people are inside and online. The doors are shut and they lock automatically, no longer standing open through the summer. It takes a long time to learn the names of your neighbours. When we had our local elections a few years ago, our next-door-neighbour Darren was elected as a borough councillor. In jubilation, I mentioned this to my next-door neighbour on the other side, as I saw her coming out of her house. She said: "Darren who?" Two doors away. Knew nothing about him.
As well as thriving on connection and interaction, human beings have a thirst for stimulus, variety and novelty. They now find these on the internet and by consuming 'experiences' and buying things.
My mother did this as she grew old. She transferred her lively interest in life to shopping and trips away. Driving around in her car visiting retail outlets and buying things kept her busy and happy.
And I — as my life was repeatedly uprooted by first my husband of 24 years leaving us for another family, then my second husband dying, then leaving my work and my family to relocate for a third marriage, then the onset chronic illness — became increasingly isolated.
I tried again and again to rebuild community and connection, because those are what we were made for; but it's not that easy any more, it no longer happens naturally.
And it occurs to me that a driving dynamic in modern life is the prevalence and increase of isolation and loneliness; people are easily suspicious of one another, consider each other in terms of social category not as individuals, drift apart.
As the new data centres accumulate, greedy for land and resources, already we are seeing the cost of computers and phones going up significantly. As government seeks ever increasing control, privacy/security risk driven by increased electronic surveillance handled by careless entities is steadily rising.
Homes are typically cluttered, and so are schedules. Burnout and chronic illness and neurological issues are prevalent.
When it comes to human relationship, even the word 'relationship' has come to mean 'sexual relationship', as if no other kind mattered.
It seems to me that in the near future we are going to have to find one another again, find our stimulus and novelty once more in human connection not in consuming, somehow rediscover how to sing together again (not just perform songs for money to passive consumers) and tell stories. The future, for ordinary people who value privacy, sanity and freedom, may very well once more be offline. To rediscover clarity of thought and peace of mind we will have to simplify our homes and our lives, move away from dependance on cars and computers and phones. To survive in harder times amid rising costs, habits of consumerism we hardly notice will have to be laid down.
I think change is coming, and the more simple and frugal and minimalistic are the habits we develop, the better we will thrive in the times to come.
So last night I sent the evening drinking tea and watching the British Sewing Bee with Alice and Hebe, and then the first series of Celebrity Traitors (gripping!) and then we entirely filled my tiny car with their boxes and bags of bric à brac and textiles and books, and I drove it home and left it with everything in the car as a kind of storage locker overnight ready for the Anglo Doorstep man in the morning.
It's a brilliant system — UK friends, it's well worth looking to see if they collect in your area. You book a collection a couple of weeks in advance, or they notify you if they'll be coming by your area in a week's time so you can book with shorter notice. You can choose from a selection of charities to benefit from your donation. I chose the animal charity — the RSPCA.
You start sorting and packing your donations — the sort of thing you would send to sell in a charity shop, not just rubbish — into the three categories (bric à brac, textiles, books), and label the bags/boxes ready to go.
Three days before the collection they email a reminder.
The evening before the collection they send a two-hour time slot.
You can put your things out for them, or they will knock on the door to collect (good in wet weather).
On the day they notify when the driver is on his way, giving you twenty minutes to get ready, and the email has a real-time map showing the van moving to your house.
And then bingo! It's done!
Piece by piece, category by category, I have been working on simplifying and quietening my life.
I started with my bedroom, working through to reduce the number of things so that it looks not empty but calm.
An expression my mother often used during my childhood was that someone "couldn't see the wood for the trees" — they were so distracted by detail that they lost sight of the big picture. They became confused and bogged down by minutiae.
I suppose one could say the same about that memorable encounter Jesus had at Bethany, in Lazarus's house with his sisters Mary and Martha.
Martha, the story says (I'm sure you'll remember it, if not it's here) was cumbered about with many tasks and wanted Mary to come and help her. Jesus just said to leave her in peace because she'd made the better choice: “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
The many, the few, and the one. I wrote about that here, back in 2012, and here in 2019. But it's complicated, and isn't that the whole point.
An essential component of spiritual pathway is being able to step free of complication.
When it comes to Mary and Martha, you can't really blame Martha or look down on her for her choices, because she was doing what she was supposed to do. Getting supper for all those men who were listening to Jesus in the mens' part of the house was her job as a woman — and it was complicated and difficult and stressful. She naturally resented Mary, whose job it also was, but who had chosen instead to go into the mens' part of the house and do what the men were doing — sit down and listen to the teacher while someone else made their supper.
So there are gender issues involved here, it's not all about simplicity.
Even so, Jesus grew up in the same culture, but like Mary he could still see the wisdom in the priority she chose. To make that choice, she had to ignore the trees in order to obtain the vision of the wood — to set aside the endless restless detail that forever claims attention in order to focus on the bigger picture.
Something of this nature is embedded in the practice of minimalism.
Many practitioners of minimalism say that their possessions are continually shouting at them, calling to them. They really mean this, as I know because I am one of those who shares the experience. It's as though every object in the home is constantly and quietly talking. I have no other way to describe it than that, you'll either immediately know what I mean or find it baffling.
I find it useful and welcome. For instance, I forget to take my MCT oil if I don't leave the bottle on the counter. If I put it back on the shelf with the other oils and spices, its voice subsides into the confused general mutter of that shelf, but if I leave it out then I can easily recognise it saying, "Here I am. Look. Here I am. Hineni." [If you don't know that word it's explained here.]
The dynamic for me is very straightforward, that the less I have the more my environment quietens down so the better I can think and the clearer is the path to establishing my priority.
Now I'm a bit bothered about the idiom I began with, because I can't help noticing this means that if you remove the trees you'll have a better view of the wood, and that can't be right can it?
Also with Martha and Mary, there is the little matter of what would have happened if both Mary and Martha had sat down to listen to Jesus and talk theology with the men. Eventually they'd have finished listening and talking and it would have been time for supper — and then what? I don't suppose they had Deliveroo and a helpful Indian takeaway in first century Bethany.
Even so, I stick stubbornly to my point; insist upon it, even. If my possessions are kept to the bare minimum, the fewest that I can get away with and still function in the real world, and if my schedule is uncluttered and my plans are uncomplicated and my commitments are few, then I think better and choose more intelligently and prioritise more wisely.
How you dispose this in your own life depends on your circumstances.
Here's a woman talking about this with regard to how she organises and stores her clothing. She makes the interesting point that time, space and money are determinants directing your choices.
I wish I could remember where I came across this thought so I could accredit it, but in the last week I have listened to such a variety of people on a dedicated spiritual path that I cannot remember which of them said it. The best I can do is to acknowledge that it was not my own thought, and if I come across it again I'm come back and leave a note so you know who said it.
It cropped up in a YouTube video/podcast, in which the person was commenting on the by now highly toxic polarity that has taken hold of our society — people listening only to the voices of their own tribe, and attributing to those who they've categorised as enemies every imaginable kind of nastiness, including projecting their own nastiness onto them.
As a result, it has become almost impossible to have a calm and constructive conversation about ideological issues, battle lines being drawn in bold and underlined for good measure, as they are.
And this YouTuber suggested that we'd do well just now to drop any categorising of approaches as "right" or "wrong". They said that instead of saying "you're wrong" or "this is wrong", we might instead choose to say, "it's not for me."
I really love that. "Judgement is mine, saith the Lord," and if we simply say "it's not for me", we make our position clear without standing in judgement over someone else's choices.
As a way forward, I have the feeling it would import peace and calm into our discourse. I'm thinking that we should embed it into not only our conversation but also into our discipline of thought. So we might encounter evidence of someone's promiscuity or carelessness with money or addiction or vulgarity, and silently make the choice, "this is not for me."
My hunch is that it would help build our own resolve as well as refraining from condemning the other, because the words speak right into our own life as a warning, a helpful admonition, the setting of a boundary.
Conversely, when we encounter something that resonates for us, that stands out as desirable and good, instead of pronouncing it to be right we can simply acknowledge our accord: "This is for me", like Joshua, when instead of making pronouncements upon the lives of others, he simply said,
"As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." [Joshua 24.15]
What do you think?
