Watching over me

 There's that old joke — you must have heard it — about a pastor doing the children's talk at church, starting out with a series of questions, and encouraging the children to speak up as soon as they know the answer. Saying: "It lives in a tree . . . it eats nuts . . . it's grey . . . it has a bushy tail . . ." 

And eventually a child ventures: "Well I know the answer must be Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me."

That became part of the mythology of our household when my children were growing up, because it puts its finger so accurately on something very characteristic of church — the simplicity of straightforward truth that has to be distorted into piety on every possible occasion. And then that Emperor's Clothes moment of the joke, that looks for the pious but sees the ordinary. 

There's a lot to it.

And I've often thought, reading the Bible, that it might be fruitful just sometimes to simply look for the squirrel, if you see what I mean.

Take for instance, when Jesus says (Matt.25.29), "Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them."

If that's ever put into a sermon, it's always (understandably) to make a point. But maybe it's not a threat or a promise. Perhaps Jesus was saying that's just the way life is, that's just reality.

So my mind was wandering down this track in the course of the evening while I went for a stroll round the block — which is always a little eery where we live now, because it's a housing estate, but you never see a soul out after dark; it's all just houses, no people. Are they busy? Are they scared? Do they only go out in cars?

So anyway I was stumping along the road taking my constitutional, think about squirrels and Jesus, about figurative and literal speech, and about how I never meet any people when I go for a walk, and I thought about what that Pharisee said to Jesus, "And who is my neighbour." 

Good question, I thought, especially here in Coventry Road.

In the summer evenings I used to turn right leaving our house, and loop round to walk along by the stream, but these dark winter evenings I turn left and walk along the roadways where there are streetlights so I can see where I'm going. The second house I went by had Anita's car outside it, which surprised me a bit because I thought she'd already gone to Derby to see her grandkids, but not yet apparently. And that made me notice that the inside of me was pleased she was still here. I mean, I don't really see her or have much interaction with her (yet), but I like Anita. I like just knowing she's there, somewhere inside her house. I'm glad she's my neighbour. 

But, yes. Who is my neighbour?

That set me off thinking about these five years I've been ill, and how limiting it's been and all the pain, and how I've gradually drifted to the margins and got out of touch. But it also made me think about the numerous doctors I've seen, staring listlessly at their computers, listening to me patiently, not knowing how to help or what to do. It was all summed up by a GI doc in Brighton: "Mrs Wilcock, sometimes there just is pain."

So they were, here in my life, with their medical degrees and their consulting rooms, with their tests and machines and whatnot, and not one of them knew what to do.

But online I found people with some ideas. My best ones have been Dr Ken Berry, Dr Anthony Chaffee, Elliot Overton and Sally Norton. Those people, experts in their field, take the time to put masses of stuff online to help us figure out what the heck is wrong with us and slowly grope our way towards a solution.

I was intrigued to consider that people I'd really seen, and with whom I'd been physically present, people whose hands I'd shaken and looked into their eyes, might as well not have been there. They had nothing to offer; no diagnosis or treatment pathway, zilch. Anything I asked for (scans, antibiotics, laxatives) they let me have, because they were kind, they were willing to give anything a go. They just didn't have any ideas of their own.

But Dr Ken Berry, Dr Anthony Chaffee, Elliot Overton and Sally Norton showed me things to try and paths to take. They had constructive suggestions, they could offer hope. And they spent hour after hour after patient hour explaining online how to heal the human body of chronic non-communicable disease.

Take Elliot Overton. In the course of treating patients with dysautonomia and figuring out how to help them, he came across the efficacy of a particular form of Vitamin B1. But it wasn't made in the West and much of the documentation about it was in Japanese. So he got it translated and he set up his own lab to manufacture it. Not only that but he made a protocol that included the co-factors for it, and got everything bottled and bundled and available at low cost, supported with all the information you need to find your way with it.

That's just one example of the lengths these people go to to make us well.

And I thought about the neighbourhood and the internet, about the doctors I've seen who couldn't help and the doctors I haven't seen who could, and how those good practitioners far away, who I'll never physically meet and who don't even know I exist, nonetheless are watching over me. They are there for me and for thousands of other people like me. 

So I asked myself again, walking home through the dark, empty streets, to write this down for you who have never sat in the same room with me, whose face I have never seen — and who is my neighbour?

And I know the answer should be a squirrel, but it sure sounds like Jesus to me.