Slowly but surely

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.

The containers just visible behind the chair will be picked up on Wednesday by the wonderful Anglo Doorstep Collections who, with maximum efficiency, courtesy and cheerfulness, come to remove — entirely free — the accumulation of impedimenta from our lives.

The house-calming bug has seized other family members too. Tomorrow — Tuesday — when I go to visit Hebe and Alice in their already beautiful and orderly home, there awaits an impressive hoard of Stuff To Go, ready to be added to my own remaining bits and pieces for collection.

Good, eh? 😃

I have worked on my clothing, reducing both the number of items and the colour palette, so that everything goes with everything else and layers can be added or removed according to the requirements of the weather.

Something I have not kept in my wardrobe — this rather surprised me — is a winter coat or jacket. I have 2 fleece gilets, and I find that in winter if I wear warm underwear, a long-sleeved shirt, a thick sweater, a gilet over the top, warm trousers and woolly socks and boots, plus gloves and a hat, I am warm enough either indoors without the heating on, or going outside. I have kept a packable rain mac, because wet weather is a different conversation — but I have disposed of my umbrella because I never use it. Hastings is a coastal town, almost always breezy; only people who have aspirations to emulate Mary Poppins bother with umbrellas.

Our kitchen is (we think) much improved.

The addition of a beautiful tray to the loathsome splashback in that eye-catching shade of Evil Green, made it look less worse. And just so you know, the tiles weren't our fault either. Oh — but maybe you love them?

The inbuilt cupboards are badly designed. The doors were huge but made of chipboard and hung on standard hinges. It doesn't take a genius to intuit that as a result they all sagged, however patiently often they were re-hung. So we took them off and I like it better.

The beady-eyed observer may note that there is a cup distressingly absent from that bottom shelf. When everything is washed up and put away, it looks like this.

Just at the moment the cup is employed in His Nibs's study, where he had a mug of tea to sustain him in the gruelling endeavours of writing fiction.

Naturally, I didn't go in — he's working — but if you peer closely you can see the missing cup perched within easy reach on top of the printer.

What else can I show you? The entranceway is calm and empty.

It looks through to the kitchen...

... and gives access to the living room...

... and what is now the dining room — the back sitting room, where we love looking out over the garden as we eat our meal together and chat about life, the universe and everything.

That's all I have to show you because what I cannot show you is what isn't there. The bags and boxes of things Anglo Doorstep Collections have kindly removed, and little things like the collection of earrings my granddaughter took to add to her own jewellery box, or big items like the pieces of furniture given away on the Hastings Give and Takery and Hastings Freegle.

But then there was the digital calming. Some while ago I came off Facebook, but kept an account with no friends there, to access medical advice and the said Hastings Give and Takery. But I found Facebook to have become so toxic an environment that I no longer wanted to be there at all, so I deleted my 'Ann Collins' account, my last presence there.

And then I moved on to sorting out my email, working through the multi-thousand-email archive accumulated since 2009, deleting or archiving offline (and not in the Cloud either). 

I got rid of WhatsApp in favour of the privacy-focused Signal, and I'm in process of slowly swapping out my Gmail for Proton. I cleared out all the tentacles of Google Chrome wound round the bowels of my computer.

I deleted just about everything I had stored in the Cloud, and Instagram.

I've kept Pinterest, and I left my YouTube channel up, because it has useful things there — the vlogs from The Campfire Church, and the recordings of a couple of my stories, and some family recordings of songs.

I have a smartphone, but it's ancient and won't take most up-to-date apps; and anyway I only ever use it as an occasional hotspot if our internet goes on the blink, or for secure access verification.

I de-registered my Kindle e-reader, and that'll be put on Freegle in a day or two.

Everything feels calmer and simpler — working in the kitchen is easy; I hadn't noticed before how annoying it felt when the surfaces were cluttered and the cupboards full.

The second closet in my bedroom still houses my charging station (my lamps are cordless, and I have more than one TENS machine, and of course my phone has to be charged), and our stash of store-cupboard food and our toolbox and camping-gas stove for times when there's an electricity outage. I like to keep things simple, but I also like to be prepared — not obsessively so, but just a few cans and jars in hand and some longlife milk and packets of tea, that kind of thing.

So, for the moment at least, I think I'm done with the sorting and clearing. I'd accumulated a lot, and it feels better without it — more spacious, more peaceful.

My next task is in a quite different category.

In former years, I had so many people in my life. I still do, but they're mostly online because that's where my life mostly is now. I miss the friendliness and companionship of someone to chat with, to drink tea with. Yes, I miss that a lot.

I see Tony every day, of course, and we enjoy one another's company. A couple of times a week I see other members of my family just for a chat and a catch-up.

I have just begun to go to Wednesday night Compline online with David and Martin, which is lovely.

But I miss church fellowship, and the physical companionship of friends and neighbours. Life in the 21st century is very very different from life in the 20th century.

So my next task is figuring out how to find that again. My money helps keep my little family afloat (and feed Clarence, who is a bottomless pit when it comes to Snack Pockets and Felix soup) as well as cover my own responsibilities, so I can't do anything where you have to pay — and that includes church, where the fundraising efforts seem to have escalated from assiduous to voracious. Plus woke socialism seems to be all over the UK church like a bad attack of chicken pox; I'm looking more for what C.S.Lewis called Mere Christianity.

In my ideal world, I'd like there to be a small housechurch with no overheads and a competent guitarist — and why not? That could happen, for sure. 

But I will pray into it and move towards it, and see what gives in the way ahead. 

Maybe I'll see you there.

*        *        *

And just in case for you — as it does for me — the heading of this blog post keeps bringing a song to mind, here's Ben and Rose singing Slowly But Surely, just for your happiness. ❤️

The wood and the trees

 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.

And you? Are you a complicater or a simplifier? Are your sympathies with Mary or Martha? Do you find household clutter friendly or exhausting? What helps you establish your priority? Maybe you only ever went into the wood in the first place to enjoy looking at the trees.

I came here to say all this with a definite idea in mind and a point to make. I'm not at all sure that I have. The more I thought about it the more complex it seemed to be.

I suppose what I mean is like this — I've just finished my mahoosive digital clearout, going through all my emails deciding what to delete and what to archive offline. One of the last few I came upon was this note from 2011, sent to me in 2011 from someone who'd read my book In Celebration of Simplicity (now out of print).

Even the thought of living more simply and minimalistically made her feel better!

"This is not for me."

 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?

Compline on Wednesdays 9pm UK time

I'm delighted to see that David Towns of Monastic Retreats is offering the opportunity to join in saying Compline together every Wednesday evening at 9pm UK time (GMT +1, otherwise known at BST).

There are two ways to join in.

You can go through the page on the Monastic Retreats website here, with the advantage of having the words given on the page for you to follow, or you can go in via the YouTube channel here.

If you want to see what it will be like, here is last week's YouTube video:

David belongs to the Church of England, so I think they'll be following the C of E form of Compline, which is here — you could have the words open on a separate tab to help you follow along.

If you're not in the UK, rather than attempting Compline at one o'clock in the morning or whatever it will be where you are, perhaps the best thing to do might be to join in with the previous week's YouTube video when it's your region's 9pm on Wednesday?

What a welcome initiative! I am very much looking forward to joining in this Wednesday (22nd July) — which will be tomorrow evening when I post this but will probably be this evening by the time you read it. 

Providence, freedom, security

 At one time (nearly fifty years ago) I had a certain amount to do with the Carmelites at Ware in Hertfordshire. I remember vividly an occasion when one of the sisters there said to me — laughing — that they were supposed to live in holy poverty, but they consistently experienced difficulties with that because they lived so simply and frugally that they kept accumulating money.

That, right there, is a key.

In the shelves on my room, I have 2 calligraphies by Thich Nhat Hanh — also a monk (but Buddhist, not Catholic) who lived in simplicity, frugality and recollection.

His calligraphy that I have as stickers on my pencil case says STABILITY and FREEDOM.

Habits of simplicity, frugality, minimalism, however you choose to style it or call it, lead to that — stability and freedom — but I prefer to think of it as security and freedom.

I think this is why there is such a strong emphasis on it in the New Testament. Jesus was born into a race of people whose lives had forever been uncertain, reliant on the providence of God. The place he was born was under Roman occupation, and Joseph had to take him out of the country to Egypt for a while to dodge the violence of King Herod. 

This tells me a lot about Joseph. He was resilient, cautious, provident, and watchful; and he paid attention to his dreams, listened to the voice of God. We can learn how to live from Joseph. His habits led to security and freedom.

Since the Second World War, we have made a slow journey away from cautious providence towards consumerist materialism that has left many of us in debt and drowning in an accumulation of possessions. Many of us live from one pay check to the next, not able to see how to get out of that into security and freedom, and with the psychological muscle to do so significantly atrophied.

Here's a picture taken from my bedroom window of the houses of ordinary people on a Hastings hillside.

It speaks to me of the times we have lived through and the times we are moving into.

Those little homesteads are looking at bright sunshine, but behind and above them the storm clouds are gathering.

A few weeks ago I listened to a podcast by Pastor Chris Wickland, who is interested in provident habits and national life; he said that in times of adversity the people of God should not just survive, they should thrive.

That struck a chord with me. 

If you read through the New Testament — the gospels, the book of Acts, and the pastoral epistles — looking for teaching about frugality, simplicity, minimalism and providence, you'll find much food for thought.

St Paul teaches about freedom, cautioning us to be equally yoked (or as we put it nowadays, singing from the same hymn-sheet), and to think twice about entering a marriage because it brings responsibilities.

He teaches us to owe no-one anything except the debt of love, and "make it your ambition to lead a quiet life; you should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody" [1 Thess.4.11-12 NIV].

The early chapters of the book of Acts go into some depth about the habits of simplicity and generosity within the household of faith: "All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. ... God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all  that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need." [Acts 4.30-36]

This is the difference between providence and greed. Each one lived frugally and simply, not in order to get rich but in order to share and provide for one another. That's what the Carmelites at Ware were doing.

Jesus considered this in his parable of the Rich Fool [Luke 12.13-21 NIV]:

[Jesus said] “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.”

And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’

“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’

“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ 

“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

We see it all around us. People spending up to the hilt, maxed out on credit cards, accumulating possessions, needing bigger houses to make room for all their stuff. And Jesus says God thinks this is stupid.

I think it is time to review, appraise, prepare. Time for "danshari".

It's time to meditate on the path of St Joseph — capable, provident, responsive, protective, listening for the voice of God. 

I was thinking this was just in my own life, but I am wondering now if this is a wider thing than just me. Time to prepare. Time to get ourselves into a position where we are best placed to thrive, not just survive, to meet our own needs and help others who are in want. To get out of debt and free of encumbrance. Like Joseph, like the Carmelites at Ware, to walk steadily in the way of security and freedom.

What do you think?

A question that made me think

There's a YouTube channel I enjoy, called Sven's One Bag Life.

This afternoon I was watching a video on this channel, in which Sven was discussing the possibility that a one-bag lifestyle might not be as extreme as people tend to think. I'll leave his video at the bottom of this blog post in case you think you too might like to listen to what he has to say.

In the course of the video, he asked a question that I found arrestingly intriguing — so much so that I stopped listening to him for a while because I was thinking about his question.

Now, I expect that you — like me — have on various occasions been in groups of one kind or another where someone has asked what you would grab to take with you if the house was burning down.

Since the answer is obviously the kids and the pets, but if they have already got out before you then anyone in their right mind would take the keys for the car and house, their wallet with cards and ID, a warm top layer and a pair of shoes, their phone and their specs, the question is fairly redundant. Any person who stopped to gather up their wedding photo album, their mother's jewellery and their knitting project, would probably inadvertently collect their Darwin Award as well. So it's an irritating question.

But that's not what Sven asked.

He said, if you had to leave home, and had only thirty minutes to pack one bag, what would you take?

Clearly, an organisational window of thirty minutes is a very different proposition from fleeing a burning building in a panic.

It made me think — not only of what I would take, but (crucially) what I would decide to leave behind, and why.

This is what I thought.

• I would take the small essentials that would apply to the burning building scenario — the ID, the wallet, the keys, my phone (and charger), and my spectacles.
• I would dress in my most versatile clothes and wear the shoes that work for the most situations. And I'd include a second outfit (underwear, t-shirt, trousers, sweater) plus a gilet and hat and gloves in case I got cold.
• I'd take the natural meds that keep my system working well. 
• My computer is small, neat and portable, so I'd take that (and its charger).
• I might add in my water bottle and my bedside light (it's only about the size of a shot glass or large egg cup) and charger.

If time permitted I might empty my jewellery box into a small bag and take that too.

The challenge Sven makes in his video is, why wouldn't you do that anyway? Don't wait for the house to burn down or the imperative to quit the place after thirty minutes prep.

I do have reasons. The first is that living my own home costs a great deal less than paying for accommodation and eating out. The second and related reason is that I am a fairly old lady and I well know what an expense of spirit and money goes in to reinventing oneself. At this point, if I had to start again with nothing I expect I'd come up with a plan, but I'd rather not.

Sven has no intention of living in a shop doorway or kipping on a park bench. He expects to have the benefits of an electric kettle and a bed with sheets, towels in the shower room and somewhere nice to sit down and eat his breakfast — it's just that he's opting for the footloose and fancy-free version. I am happy with the sheets, towel, kettle, bed, table and chairs I have here. My experience is that staying in a budget hotel overnight, if you are including dinner, lunch and breakfast, will probably set me back quite a bit  — £67 per night for a Travelodge room, and perhaps I could cover food with, say £30 if I bought some bits to eat in my room. Well that's £100 before I even start on travel costs. Whereas a government old age pension and writing Christian fiction gives me all I need to cover my own outgoings and Clarence the cat's, and substantially help a couple of other people, it would nowhere near cover that kind of nomadic lifestyle.

So for that reason I'll be staying where I am — not to say Sven's aspirations are unattractive.

But the takeaway for me, in my own circumstances so different from his, was twofold. Firstly, I do still have a lot of impedimenta to sift through — the toolbox, my sewing kit, my stationery box, my stash of natural meds, my physical (non-Kindle) books. I bet I could halve the contents and hardly notice the difference. And then there's the second aspect; things I treasure because they were made for me, and given to me with love. Works of art, knitwear, jewellery, even some small items of furniture.

When I make a purchase, I deliberately choose utilitarian, prosaic, budget range items, or I buy secondhand at a knock-down price. Why? Because I don't hang on to things. I use them for a while, then as life morphs and changes and makes them redundant, I pass them on. But there is a responsibility to owning something made for you by somebody who loves you. The little sets of shelves my husband made for me with care, the earrings Alice and Hebe made me from Kasumi pearls with gold findings, the bangle my youngest child used all her pocket money to buy me when she was seven, the last letter Fr. Tom Cullinan wrote me before he died. Am I going to get rid of those? You bet I'm not!

I do not cling to them, but I honour them.

And yet... there are things I notice in the life of Jesus. He said, "Whoever does not give up everything he has can never be my disciple."

And they "took him into the boat just as he was" and he fell asleep in the cushion in the stern of the boat.

And when, at Capernaum, they were incensed at his preaching and grabbed stones to throw at him, he walked calmly away through the midst of them — he was there, and then he wasn't.

All these speak to me of a life without attachments, a life with no handles, if you see what I mean. It is the place where restraint and self-sacrifice and simplicity and single-minded priority meet.

So I place a firebreak between my heart and these tokens of love I still keep. I cherish them to honour and reverence the relationship they represent; that somebody went out of their way for me, gave of their best for me, and I hold that precious indeed. But if the time ever comes (and of course, one way or another it surely will) to leave these keepsakes behind, I will walk out quietly, at peace.

And you? How do you feel about your belongings, your home, your situation in life? 

Do you yearn to leave it all behind, to be free of the clinging of material possessions? Or do you take comfort in them? Are they, for you, like the moss and feathers the hedgerow birds use to make their nest comfortable and complete?

What would you pack in your thirty-minute bag? 

And if you did have to leave it all behind, would you rebuild as nearly the same as you could manage, or would you take the chance to make radical change?

What does freedom mean to you, and home, and belonging? Where is your identity rooted? And your happiness? To what extent do they depend on expression in material objects?

So many questions have arisen for me from Sven's one artless enquiry — what would you take in your one bag, if you were leaving in thirty minutes?

Can I live with one less?

 Josh Becker asks a genius question.

Security, surveillance and deep sadness.

 I suppose that you, like me, keep a weather eye on what's going on around you, and have observed the breathless speed with which we are being ushered into a regulated, controlled form of existence, in which everything that's not mandated is forbidden. I am dismayed by what I see unfolding around us and I should think you must be too.

I can't remember the exact details to give you chapter and verse, but I presume you will have seen the latest news from the EU parliament — the EU chat control, giving access to our private messages. This allows them to scan all private messages, within the EU, but there are also treaties with the UK so it extends beyond Europe. It gives permission for all messages to be screened and checked by social media companies, and passed on to government bodies if they think it appropriate. The carefully chosen timing of the EU vote on this optimised the chances of it passing despite its unpopularity, so it is now through and en route to become law once the EU council signs it off. It is ostensibly about child protection, but is part of the rising wave of intrusive surveillance and control. 

It will apply to a variety of platforms and providers; I don't know where the extent of its reach ends. I understand it will affect Google (so, Gmail) and Facebook and WhatsApp. Some email and messaging providers like Proton and Signal are promising privacy protection. The picture is changing and developing rapidly, it's hard to keep up with, you'll need to make your own checks and verifications.

On my Facebook page and in my blog posts and in my email there is not now, and there never has been, anything sinister or predatory, anything corrupt or underhand, anything unkind or even verbally violent. Neither I, nor any of my circle of friends and contacts, is now or ever has been inflammatory or hateful or antagonistic or cruel towards children or adults of any race or ideological affiliation.

But.

In my Gmail, going back to when I started the account around 2010, I have an absolutely massive archive of communications. People — readers of my books, or people who have heard me preach or for whom I've conducted funerals — have come to me through this blog and via my publishers and from other sources, entering private correspondence with me about their woes and troubles, their marital and other relational difficulties, their bereavement and spiritual struggles, their aspirations and fears. They have sent me their contact details so we could correspond. There have been so many that without this archive I couldn't possibly keep track of them. Someone will write to me and say, "Hi, do you remember me? I wrote to you about my husband's illness two years ago." And because I keep an electronic archive I can quickly and easily refresh my memory and pick up the conversation again.

And in the course of time, some of them have died. For instance, there was a reader of my Hawk and Dove books who over time became a friend. The last emails I had from her were first a hasty message to say she had been diagnosed with widespread cancer and she had rushed to Amazon to buy all the Hawk and Dove series so she'd have it to read in the hospital, and then second to thank me because I sent her (she was an avid crafter) a parcel of stationery crafting bits to enjoy while she was in the hospital, and then a final email from her mother to say she'd been transferred to hospice care; and then radio silence.

She was just one. I have the emails from so many friends who died, talking about their faith and their pain in terminal illness, courage shining through, and dauntless hope.

I have trans friends, gay friends, talking about their faith journey in a church context not always kind.

These people have shared the depths of their souls with me.

Regardless of how well-intentioned one might imagine the government and the moderators of social media platforms to be, this much I know: it's like Pandora's box. Once you open the lid anything can come out. Personal details can be most useful on the dark web, and can be scoured to train AI — can be used for any purpose whatever. There is no conceivable circumstance in which I would expose such sensitive correspondence from people who have trusted me to public scrutiny.

And you know what that means? I will have to go through the whole lot, thousands upon thousands of such emails, and permanently delete them. I started reading through, but after several days had to accept that there are just too many. I'm just going to have to delete them en bloc. 

I cannot tell you what a grief this is to me, what a sorrow — because it's a memory bank, it's like an external hard-drive for my heart.

Once I've done this, if you have written to me about your family and your struggles, the abuse you have suffered, the heartbreaks, I won't remember; there have been too may such communications to hold them in my mind. I am so, so sorry. It means that now if you write and say, "You know what I told you about my grandson?" — well no, I won't. Because I won't be able to go back and check.

And there have been too many correspondents for me to download all the contact details and summaries of their circumstances. I couldn't track it as effectively as I could in email, and it's too big a task for me.

I have no words for how much this upsets me, or for what I think of the enormity of the political classes that in these days have our lives in their grip. 

But I just wanted to tell you, for two reasons — one because I may now no longer remember your contact details and the life circumstances you have described to me, which breaks my heart; and two because I want you to know that never, never will I permit the trust and confidence you have placed in me be betrayed in such a way. 

There is a poem called Conscientious Objector by Edna St Vincent Millay, which I believe to be in the public domain, so I can give the text of it here. It expresses how I feel at the moment.

I shall die, but 
that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; 
I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba,
business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle
while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: 
I will not give him a leg up. 

Though he flick my shoulders with his whip,
I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where 
the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;
I am not on his pay-roll. 

I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends 
nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, 
I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living,
that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city
are safe with me; never through me shall you be overcome.

Please continue to write to me, freely, as you always, have, knowing that I will delete your correspondence as soon as I've read it, or else I will save such communications offline where they cannot be read.

The busy road

 On Friday evening, Tony and I went down to the sea to walk along the promenade in the breeze as the sun was going down. The sea always brings joy to the soul, its life and power is so clear to feel, and the strength of its rhythm as wave after wave rolls in to the shingle shore.

Plus the prom is flat, and Tony's walking isn't so good these days, so it means we can have a stroll of enough length to stop our muscles turning to custard, without the added challenge of the hills that are everywhere in this coastal town.

We parked the car in the usual place (free parking there — yay!) then sauntered along as far as the spot where there's a natural end to that particular stretch, and the path slopes upward to the Next Bit. A convenient concrete planter offers a finish line and we slap our hands on it in triumph, then turn round to potter back to the car.

At this convergence of ways where we turn, another path comes up from the lower level by the actual beach, and on that evening a man was coming up it with his dog, just ahead of us.

The man was wearing tracksuit trousers, but with nothing on his top half. He was bronzed and muscular, very lean and fit, clearly someone who worked out plenty. His arms were decorated with old tattoos. His face was firm — not hard exactly but you wouldn't bother picking a fight with him. His hair was shaved right up the sides of his head, with a Mohican crest left running along the whole of the top down to the nape of his neck. 

His dog went with him rather well. It was a bull mastiff, white with random buff-coloured blotches, just as muscular and uncompromising in appearance as the man, with that lounging, rolling gait mastiffs have, swaggering alongside him up the path from the beach.

And then they reached the top.

The man bent down towards the dog, who came to see what was required. He reached for the dog's collar to attach the leash he held ready, saying gently and quietly, "You need to have this on now, because of the busy road."

❤️

Destinations and directions

 What I mean by a destination is a static condition, a plateau, the state of being where you have arrived and no longer need to press on.

What I mean by direction is a dynamic condition, a pathway, where you are travelling towards what you seek but the terrain alters as you go. There may be obstacles to go round, you may have to retrace your steps and try a different route; the direction of travel is an education of itself and a continually changing and evolving state of being.

I was mainly discipled to see the Christian faith as a destination, a fixed condition that was more like a home to live in than a road to walk along. The Bible was viewed similarly by those who taught me. 

So preachers and teachers would say "The Bible says..." or "The Bible teaches..." about such issues as authority, women in the church, marriage, parenting, financial giving, how to dress, and other similar topics of social importance.

The usual method was to take a proof text, and extrapolate from that a fixed governing principle. So, for instance, I'd receive the teaching to "Honour your father and thy mother so that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you." Or, "A woman must not wear men’s clothing, and a man must not wear women’s clothing, for whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord your God." And such texts (and many others) were referenced and quoted as abidingly true because they are in the Bible and the Bible is our book of truth.

But then I gradually realised as I studied the Bible more, that it is essentially the book of a travelling people, not a settled and static people. Its truth does indeed abide, but it also develops. It's not so much like a building that once completed remains the same, it's more like a tree that starts as a sapling and changes in form as it matures.

So, for instance, people often say the Bible teaches that marriage is between one man and one woman for life. But that isn't quite right. The Bible has righteous and holy men in it who have many concubines and several wives, have sexual relations with their wives' slaves to procure a child for inheritance, and in no way are these scenarios presented as sinful. The teaching develops until we come to the New Testament advice that a deacon should be the husband of only one wife.

Or if we consider the Bible teaching about women not wearing men's clothes; that is taken to mean women should wear skirts and men should wear trousers — but how do we apply the rule in a time when women's trousers have come into existence? 

There are developments and transformations in the Bible; for instance there's the Binding of Isaac, which seems to me to be a way of embedding in the oral tradition (and I'm not implying the incident didn't take place) that the old Canaanite practice of child sacrifice is something we are leaving behind; or there's the occasion when Jesus's mother and brother come to claim his attention and send word that they are outside (to section him, actually) — looking round he asks who are his mother and his brothers, and avers that the gathered listeners are his mother and brothers (so much for 'honour thy father and thy mother); or there's the time in the Book of Acts when Peter has a vision from God telling him to move on from the dietary laws of the books of Moses, that it's now okay to eat as the Gentiles do. 

I (and you too, no doubt) could fill a whole book with the detail of how practice changes and develops while the underlying biblical principles hold fast, because practice walks on two feet — the abiding holy truth of scripture and the constantly evolving terrain of circumstance.

The helpful thing is to absorb and trace the journey of the people of God through the unfolding scriptural story — for instance, trace from the books of the Law teaching that a women be stoned to death for adultery clear through to Jesus putting a stop to that by saying "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." We learn from this that we start out with the revelation that adultery is something God seriously doesn't like, but we journey on to a more constructive response to it, lifting away the violence, giving people the chance to start again.

The dependable truth is in the whole story, not in the proof text. It's revealed by the path the people walk, by their direction of travel.

I was thinking once more about this question of destination versus direction today as I was listening to a man who aspires to one-bag minimalism talking on YouTube. He's not yet where he wants to be, he still has a hundred or so possessions, and it's taken him a number of years to arrive at where he is now from where he started out with a normal houseful of stuff. He wants the freedom, he wants the flexibility; and he sees that with patience and perseverance he will keep going forward, passing the milestones, always moving on with his sights set on simplicity and freedom. The destination isn't wholly clear, but the immediate next stretch of the road is.

One of the reasons I love minimalism is that it is all about freedom and choice, and I see a strong focus on freedom in the New Testament, and I see that choice is fundamental to Christian discipleship.

If you picture in your mind a child's see-saw (I think they have a different name in the US) — 

On that see-saw, in the life of every one of us, possessions sit on one side and options sit on the other. That doesn't make it wrong to have possessions, it just means that the more you have the fewer options you will have. Inevitably. Options sink down as possessions rise up; and as possessions reduce so options increase.

In my own life I have reached a place of inching slowly forward, trying to get the balance right, optimising freedom and choice without letting go of practicality.

I remember that Jesus observed, "No one can follow me unless he gives up everything he has." And I can't help noticing that owning nothing was essential to the life he lived and what he was able to achieve. At the same time, I recognise that (like all one-bag minimalist nomads) he relied on someone else having a house and offering shelter and putting food on the table for his benefit. Simon Peter's mother-in-law, for instance. Simplicity as a way of life is complex and connected — simplicity with responsibility is the direction of travel, and that passes through changing terrain. Like a tree, like a river, like anything organic and alive, it looks different in different seasons and takes on new forms as the landscape changes. Even the River Thames is somewhere a mountain spring, and a great oak nourished by its own falling leaves will use the vitality to reclothe itself at the end of the winter.