Twisted threads

So there are two strands of thought I've been following through in recent posts — one on the last twenty years of one's life and how to live them well and land gracefully at the end, the other on anarchist church and whatever that might imply.

I've carried on thinking about both. 

A little while ago, I said I wanted to explore here the Four Accessibilities, which belongs with anarchist church preoccupations, so I thought I'd come back to that.

But at the forefront of my mind is something that belongs more with the last twenty years of life; which is that I am so tired.

Our family life has been a glorious muddle for the last couple of decades, and this has shown no sign of abating in recent times. Don't run away with the idea that we're unhappy, just somewhat chaotic.

Change has continued to run at full strength in the last year or two. Buzzfloyd and her husband have, with a lot of hard work and persistence, and great expenditure at the US end, managed to import Buzz's mother-in-law (who has fragile health) on a permanent basis, which is a relief and a success, but not without its challenges in their small row house with its two-and-a-half bedrooms, one bathroom, and now five inhabitants (three adults, two children). But that just extends the family tradition, one more variant on "No, seriously, we can do this" that has dominated our whole life.

So meanwhile in our house, we imposed a moratorium on all meetings and socialising three years back when we took in my mother for end-of-life care, and extended an invitation to another one of us to live here because her circumstances required it. That would have brought our number up to eight, which felt daunting, but happily we kept it at seven — my mother got better under the care of our excellent doctor, and was able to return to her own apartment where, two years on, she still is.

Since this summer, we moved the Badger down from his attic to the middle floor (which required carpentry plus plus to create housing for his books and clothes etc), and moved the middle floor inhabitant up to the vacated attic; and then as our temporary resident in the back sitting room got closer to acquiring her own accommodation elsewhere, her incoming domestic accoutrements swelled in quantity until we thought the house would burst. 

While all this was going on, we had the entire house swathed in scaffolding and painted in a humungously expensive preparation guaranteed to defeat the battering of coastal weather and keep it all in good nick for twenty years. So as well as the place being crammed with inhabitants, we also had decorators clog-dancing their way all round the outside at all hours of the day.

Unfortunately they neglected to do any preparation, contenting themselves with spraying paint on top of old blistering layers and even over moss! So after the scaffold came down and a whole lot of fuss was made by us, another scaffold went up — new team; made a hole in our roof front and back — and yet more decorators came. 
Then when they'd gone, a man came to re-tile our complicated Victorian mosaic front path, meaning the postie had to pick his way through the shrubs and hand mail through the window for a couple of weeks. After that, another lot of men came to put in new windows at the back of the house — and not before time; our Alice's room was freezing because she couldn't close her window for three years.

And finally, our temporary resident moved out this last week. That meant carrying a massive amount of boxes down from the attic, packing them in our cars and van, then unpacking them and carrying them up to her attic apartment in the new house. By the end we were all nearly dead and everything ached.

We love her dearly and she is most precious to us — an absolute jewel, really — but no one pretends the last two years all living together has been easy. If you doubt this, you too should try living with a trombonist who needs to practice   every   single   night.

Yesterday was the last push, and now she is ensconced in her beautiful and well-chosen new home.

And today, I felt like a zombie. Too tired to live and far too tired to die. Tiredness so insistent and tangible and assertive I almost felt sick. Tiredness that filled me up and overflowed. I walked up to the store for groceries, and moving in the fresh air eased everything a bit. But you know, one of the aspects of growing older I find most prominent is tiredness as a familiar companion. Too tired to read, too tired to socialise, too tired to structure a book — I even fall asleep watching telly. I am just so, so tired.

Last week, stressed by builders and stressed by house moving shenanigans, a fine piece of spectacular Methodist administrative ineptitude pushed me over the edge and my immune system just crashed, leaving me two days feverish and ill; just tired beyond imagining, too tired to move or get out of bed.

Sometimes I wonder about the progression of the last (next) twenty years of my life as it unfolds; I mean, how could you possibly get more tired than this? But I suppose I will. How on earth will I learn to embrace and integrate and work with it? I just don't know.

So that's Thought One.

But the second thought, about anarchist church, was looking back at some work I did at the end of the 1980s, beginning of the 90s, when the Methodist Church convened a Poverty Project to consider its response to UK poverty. The committee in question had a prestigious minister (running it), a social worker from a gritty housing estate, a member of parliament who always wore a pin-striped suit, and a sprinkling of other individuals I've now forgotten. And then there was me. I was not prestigious and had no qualifications, but I did personally know quite a lot of people in poverty, which was to be my contribution.

As we discussed and deliberated (there were a couple of other women on the team at the beginning but, apart from the ones who brought in tea and sandwiches at half time, they all left), and I canvassed opinion from the Actual Poor, something became very clear to me. The main thing people living in scary levels of poverty wanted was not so much a handout as a friend. They were very resourceful and had loads of strategies for out-foxing their circumstances, but what meant the world was someone who understood and someone to be a companion on the journey. This was also true of the people dying in the hospice, which was the other place I spent every spare hour at that time in my life.

So, as I came into pastoral ministry — rather abruptly after an epic battle (I'll tell you about that another day) over inclusive church at the end of which our minster crashed and burned and left me at the helm — I began to formulate some thoughts about what inclusivity needed. 

I came up with the Four Accessibilities. 

Which are:

1. Accessibility of worship. We had a lot of people in our congregation back then who lived with profound and challenging disability, and a lot of children. Making worship accessible included strategies like repetitive formats so that people for whom words didn't mean as much as the shape of the service could join in — and a relatively small repertoire of songs, and a sung Lord's Prayer. But also high quality music and preaching ministries, to engage the imagination and draw in those on the fringes. And inclusive language (uncommon and contentious, back then).
2. Accessibility of buildings. We ripped out pews to make space at the back, on one side for those in wheelchairs who were still coming to terms with new disability and felt shy at the front, on the other side to make a carpeted area with toys and beanbags for the littlest ones. We ripped out pews at the front to make space for wheelchairs, and for adults who could crawl and climb but not easily sit on benches to have big easy chairs. We put in disabled-access toilets and a T-loop for hard of hearing people, and got ramps for wheelchairs.
3. Accessibility of socialising. We began a rolling programme of activities — like our pantomime and our tea-dance and our Old Tyme Music Hall — which involved everyone, not on one day only but for weeks as we practised and rehearsed and learned to waltz and wrote scripts and songs and made props and costumes. There was so much laughter and ingenuity and creativity. And the key thing running through it all was that it was all-age, all-ability and everything was free. No charge. Ever. 
4. Accessibility of lifestyle. Now this was something impossible to impose, but I thought it very important and made it a non-negotiable foundational principle for myself. To have nothing that could make other people feel jealous or inferior. To choose what was simple, lowly and unpretentious. In what I ate, how I dressed, where I shopped, where I lived, what I drove, what I owned, how I furnished my home. So that nothing about me, ever, could make another person feel ashamed or inadequate. I was splendidly successful in this endeavour, became an invisible nonentity, standardly overlooked, a total nobody; and this I find both hard to bear and an absolute treasure — because one is in good company.

Well, I guess I'd better stop before you grow old and die. Those were my first stumbling steps towards anarchist church, for any of you still awake and interested in the subject.

And now I'm going to finish my day in the usual way (I expect you all do this) with some crushed raw garlic, cider vinegar, propolis and Manuka honey. This mixture gets rid of everything — bacteria, viruses, unwelcome fungi, vampires, demons . . .

G'night.