Thinking about a song

Two of my mother's favourite perspectives:
"Don't draw attention to yourself."
"Don't rock the boat."

She believed (still does) in slipping through the world, as Ezra Pound put it, "like a field mouse, not shaking the grass", in the Taoist ideology of find your way like water round the immovable stones in life's river bed. 

She rarely engaged in conflict, or responded to provocation, preferring to just raise her eyebrows and go her own way. She dealt with the difficulties of interaction with the human race by not entering it. She has been the archetypal cat that walks alone. She kept her own counsel, went her own way.

Yet for all that, here and there when she saw it as necessary, she stood her ground.

When I was about fifteen I watched an encounter she had with a man who came to fell a dangerous dead branch from an oak tree on our land, overhanging the road. He charged an eye-watering sum and we were chronically poor. My mother said nothing when she received his request for payment, just got out her cheque book. He (a somewhat oily type) said to her, in receipt of her cheque, "If ever you're in trouble again, just get in touch."

And she replied, "If I'm ever in trouble, I'll get out of it somehow without coming to you."

She could hold her own, when she saw fit to do so. I logged the conversation in the Useful Items section of my memory. 

When I was a little girl, about seven, she gave me a little book that I loved, called A Pocketful of Proverbs.

I knew most of the proverbs in the book already — which is itself always a delight to a child — but there was one new to me:
Of all the sayings in the world
The one to see you through
Is never trouble trouble
Until trouble troubles you.

It caught my attention, amused me because of the word play, and gave me a great deal of food for thought. One of the questions quick to my mind is, "Is that true?" I asked it of myself about the proverb. On balance, I thought it was true. Letting sleeping dragons lie is, in general, a wise rule of thumb.

But one should not be deluded that it comes without cost.

Excuse me if (yawn) you are well familiar with this word, but have you much thought about casuistry?

The definitions of it online are almost as complex and abstruse as the concept itself. 

It first caught my attention when I came across it as a young woman, in someone's (I forget whose) reference to the casuistry of the Roman Catholic Church — the overlooking of the actual application of the draconian rules (eg about contraception and celibacy) that people found impossible to keep. The priest and his 'housekeeper', for example. People finding their way like water round the blocks. People who had decided that of all the sayings in the world the one to see them through was never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you.

Casuistry occurs when pragmatism meets ideology.

I have come across it happening right now in the Methodist Church, where our Safeguarding programme has escalated almost to the level of an obsession. In Circuits where Local Preacher ongoing training has simply run into the mud and stopped, Safeguarding training is proliferating like mushrooms on dead wood.

I am all for safeguarding children and vulnerable adults from harm, and I think the best way to do it is to respect and listen to them, to include them in decision-making, and to give them the space and opportunity to be heard and to stand up for themselves. What we do instead is infantilise those who are not in power, imposing on them decisions made behind closed doors by Those Who Know Better, and imposing on them, wholesale, edicts from above.

And this is where the casuistry arises. So dense and unrealistic is the programme we have rolled out that its application is impractical. Let me give you an example.

At our recent training, we were offered the case study of a church that wanted to set up a 'Wednesday Club' serving lunches for old people, including some with dementia. We were given a list of those who would be required to run it, and asked what action would be needed (police checks, interviews, clear rôle descriptions and boundaries, and work partners) for the manager, assistant manager, minibus driver, kitchen volunteers and volunteers to chat with and serve lunch to the people for whom the club would run.

Actually, thinking of the nature and membership of our Circuit's Methodist church congregations, the answer to all of it was short and simple: no Wednesday Club, then — make your own lunch.

But the church is peopled by irenic souls who believe that of all the sayings in the world, the one to see you through, is never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you. They flow round the impracticalities like water round stones — gently acquiescing to  the draconian legislation imposed upon them, but (crucially) only very selectively applying it; thus rendering it, of course, ineffective.

A couple of decades ago I had a run-in with Methodism over this very issue. A then senior official in that denomination, having been made to apologise by a better man than himself for all the insults and lies he had flung at me, subsided rumbling, saying that I was born to rattle the cage of the Methodist Church. 

And as long as the church deals in cages, may it be so.

The big problem with the church's Safeguarding programme, is that the same people who made it necessary are running it. If it is administered with kindness, intelligence and humanity, it will make the world a safer and gentler place. But that's not the outcome of the programme, it's the outcome of kindness, intelligence and humanity. If it's run by bullies or the inept, it merely serves to magnify the scope of their influence. I've seen it ignored when it suited church leaders, and I've seen it applied to crush and exclude people when that in turn suited church leaders. The bottom line is, you cannot legislate for goodness, or institutionalise it. You can only live it.

My mother has, time and again, said to me "Don't draw attention to yourself," and, "Are you rocking the boat again, Penelope?"

Like anyone, I prefer a quiet life. But when it comes to that proverb about never troubling trouble, for me the jury's still out. I will never go looking for trouble, but when it comes to safeguarding any human being including myself, I think I prefer the approach of this song by Elvis Presley, which is also logged in the Useful Items compartment of my memory.





Though I hope in my own case, I am neither miserable nor evil; merely determined to see truth emerge.