Books in waiting

The next two books of The Hawk & The Dove series will be out in February, and are up for pre-order on Amazon now.

The Breath of Peace is the one I published privately for a while, during the change-over of this series between my US and UK publishers. The Beautiful Thread is all new.

The Beautiful Thread is a consideration of kindness as the heart of Gospel practice. Here’s an extract from the story (Abbot John is addressing  the community in Chapter) ~

The next day dawned sparkling and unclouded. Keeping close to the solid, imposing wall of the church, noting that the small door had indeed been left ajar, William found his hiding place, from where he could hear remarkably clearly – the brethren shuffling in, the reading from Benedict’s rule, and then the abbot’s voice, steady and firm, carrying conviction but, William thought, entirely devoid of joy.

‘My brothers, there’s something I want to say to you. Not very polished. Only what’s been on my mind. Something about suffering.

‘You might think a man like me has not suffered enough to deserve an opinion, and if so you’d possibly be right. My life so far has been, by comparison with many others, easy. I was never destitute, nor subject to the cruelty of human violence. Even so, I have occasionally descended into hopelessness.

‘When the example of holy suffering is held before us – Christ on the cross, or the holy martyrs – the word ‘noble’ seems to apply. So, we give thanks for ‘the noble army of martyrs’. Sawn in two, torn to pieces by lions, stoned to death . . . giving thanks to God, and holding their heads high in courage. Noble.

‘Well, I’ve never been anything like that, I’m not noble at all. The worst wild animal that’s ripped into my viscera has been the profoundest sense of inadequacy you can imagine. To be a failure, as a monk, as a disciple, as a man. Sometimes I’ve thought. Painful. So very painful.

‘In this, the hardest, most terrifying thing, left me in free-fall, has been a feeling of absolute pointlessness – that it was all for nothing. Not noble, but not even useful, not directed or channeled into any worthwhile endeavor. Only the result of being human, being alive. Pointless.

‘When I reflect on this, a picture of Christ on the cross comes to mind – ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ It seems even he encountered that terrible state of meaninglessness, where what you thought it was all for simply evaporates. And then, his words, ‘I am thirsty.’ The unadorned human condition, taken down below the embellishment of values, beneath the complication of mission, without the dignity of significance. Just thirsty.

‘Obviously, there are no options beyond living through such times. If I look at myself and see no achievement worth mentioning, see only one great big immoveable disappointment of a man, aspiration deflates.

‘But my job here is not to share around a council of despair. That wouldn’t be very helpful, would it? So gazing into it bleakly, I have to pull out of it something to place into your hands – your hearts – because you trusted me. You made me your abbot, and that means it’s my job to come up with something. I hope I’m not speaking too frankly. As you can probably tell, I haven’t prepared this.”

Tom raised his head and looked across the room at his abbot, concern in his face. This didn’t sound too good. But John, his hands held loosely in his lap within the big sleeves of his habit, sitting quietly straight, did not meet anyone’s gaze. His eyes seemed to see nothing.

‘And I prayed, “Help me, Jesus,” as I so often do. It’s never let me down, you see, that prayer; never once. “Oh, help me, Jesus.”

‘And what came to mind was two thoughts that have threaded through the last few weeks, for one reason and another. I’m sorry; I’m not putting this well, am I? Anyway: the first is, that whatever’s going on in my own life – whether my faith is soaring and I’m overflowing with inspiration, or whether I’m in despair; whether others look up to me or I am disregarded, of no account – whatever – I have the option to be kind. It’s a small thing, you would think, would you not, to be kind? Well, it is in the sense that you don’t have to be rich or important, or very bright, to be kind. Even a little child can be kind. Even a dog. But it’s no small thing to be on the receiving end of kindness. And the withholding of simple kindness is a root of bitterness and the seed of war; it causes the most terrible suffering. To look without compassion on another’s life; to be unkind. Making the choice to be kind prays “Thy kingdom come,” even when you feel past praying and past caring.

‘Kindness, I have found, for all it is small and ordinary, has a way of leading me out of safe territory. There’s nothing like kindness for compromising righteousness and getting my religion and propriety all in a muddled knot. Kindness makes hay of many plans. But it is, I have come to believe, the currency of Christ’s kingdom, the stuff out of which new hope can be made. Where we push a sprig of it into the earth in whatever place we are, life springs anew.

‘So when all light is gone and the horrible sense of pointlessness overwhelms me, showing me my own inadequacy, I can at least make the choice to be kind; and that’s my prayer, my creed, my way of anchoring myself to Christ.

‘And the other thing – it caught my attention when someone said it to me a few days ago – is about offering the gift of happiness. That having the power to make someone happy might be seen almost as a charism. Like working miracles. Like healing.

‘In once sense, of course, you cannot make anybody happy. Each of us is responsible for developing contentment and gratitude, appreciation, as a state of mind. Happiness – we all know this – is not a destination to be reached or a goal to be achieved; it’s the choice you make, the path you tread, the attitude you embrace. And that’s no small thing, either. Happy people make the world happy, are good to be around, lift others up. Cheerfulness; it’s a kingdom thing: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always.’

‘But a friendly word, reaching out to include someone, knowing their taste in food and offering a nibble of something they enjoy – even leaving them in peace, sometimes; there are so many ways to offer ordinary every gifts of happiness.

‘So I thought, between choosing kindness and offering happiness, I could find enough to be going on with, a ladder up out of inadequacy and despair. It didn’t matter what I’d been or done, or who I was or who cared, who saw or who knew. I could still do it. The thing is, when I feel really low, vision and inspiration are beyond me. But, you know, even when almost everything seems too much to manage, perhaps I can at least try to be kind. And I thought, that could give some meaning, something worthwhile, even to the most impoverished life. Even to mine. Sort of life compost, kindness and the giving of happiness could be; something in which faith and meaning could potentially thrive. It is only a small thing – I understand that. But sometimes I have to hope it will be enough.’

His friend sounded bleak and enduring, William thought, as he concluded with complete absence of élan: ‘There’s no big scholarship there, no expositions or dissertations or any of that. It just seemed useful to me; and so I thought it might be to you, as well. Anyway, let’s keep silence a moment.’

Brussen tha galuses

My beautiful mama grew up on a farm in a small Yorkshire village. Her father left it to her brother, and my childhood school holidays often included a journey up to Yorkshire to stay with my Grandma in her bungalow – the last house in the village, beside a field of red wheat – and visits to my uncle and auntie and cousins in the old farm. I remember it so vividly; the bullocks by the field gate, their breath steaming in the winter cold, the grain pouring down the hopper into sacks in the barn, dust rising in the slanting sunbeams.

It was a busy household when my beautiful mama was a child. Her mother did the books for the farm and kept the poultry; the care of the children and the household chores were undertaken by Suzy, a kindly, round person whom I never saw out of an apron, her hair combed back into a bun. Her face was like an Albanian’s. Her husband George did the hedges and ditches.

Besides Suzy and George, there were the horsemen. They lived in the outbuildings, and my grandfather went every year to the fair to hire the horsemen for the year. As well as them, prisoners of war worked on the land. And of course there were other men – shepherds and various merchants, who came to the farm. And there were the animals – dogs, cows, hens, sheep; but no pigs that I remember.

In my beautiful mama’s childhood, the people spoke broad Yorkshire; and still today the accent is pronounced in the Yorkshire branch of our family – and I love it. My grandfather, my father’s father, knew the words of broad Yorkshire.

But many of the old phrases have gone. There’s a word, brussen, which can mean ‘very full’ – like ‘bursting’. But my beautifl mama remembers it as they word they used for doing up, or fastening, braces (US suspenders). ‘Brussen tha galuses’ meant ‘fasten your braces’, she tells me.

Nowhere else have I come across that phrase, until recently when I was reading a book by a young man who left his Amish family for life in the mainstream. He commented that the Amish word for braces/suspenders was ‘galuses’.

I wonder how it travelled? The Amish broke away from the Mennonites, who originated in Switzerland. Switzerland has both French and German. Some of the tribes populating Old England were Germanic. So I wonder if the word is very old and started from Germany, infiltrating German Swiss and Old English?

I thought perhaps it originated from England and crossed the Atlantic with the Pilgrim Fathers, finding its was into American Amish in due course. Except that the Amish are so closed and separate a society that there may not be much cross-fertilisation with the language of mainstream culture. I’m not sure.

The roots and drifts and wind-borne seeds of language intrigue and delight me. And Yorkshire, even after all these years in the alien south, still feels like home. I grew up in the south-east, but all my family were Yorkshire people. I still miss it. The northern outlook, mannerisms and attitudes are very different from those of the south.

*        *        *

Afterthought. I’m just wondering – if ‘brussen’ generally means ‘burst out of’ or ‘very full’ or ‘burst’ – perhaps my beautiful mama misunderstood what she heard. She thought it meant ‘fasten your braces’, which would imply the braces were, or had come, undone. Yorkshire humour being what it is, and given the laconic dropping of unnecessary words, maybe ‘brussen tha galuses’ impied ‘tha’s brussen tha galuses’ – ie, ‘you’ve burst out of your braces’, ie ‘they’ve come undone,’ ergo, ‘do ‘em up’?

Cart before the horse

In England we have been thinking hard about tax credit cuts in the last week or two. Our chancellor’s position (put simply and ignoring glaring anomalies like Trident and wanting to go ahead with a nuclear power station that will be the most expensive building on the planet) is that national economic security is achieved by austerity – which in practice means cutting benefits to people on low incomes who have been relying on them.

Meanwhile over in America, Obama has initiated a long overdue return to teacher-inspired, child-centred, holistic education. What other kind is there, one might ask, assuming the word ‘education’ to be correctly used.

Under the present administration in England, we are still going full steam ahead on the numbers game in education – it’s all about tests and results.

Well, there’s outcome, isn’t there; but there’s also process. As they say, the end doesn’t justify the means. The road you travel is as important as the destination – arguably more so.

The economic argument of austerity-descending-into-misery for the poor, as a means of stabilizing the economy, doesn’t hold up for a minute in any real world, but there is a definite parity between the chancellor’s drive to achieve prosperity by cutting income, and the education minister’s drive to achieve academic excellence by focusing on test results.

Such an approach is doomed to failure for the simple reason that it’s the wrong way round. Bottom line: you won’t get a harvest if you don’t sow any seeds.

It all made me think about the words of Jesus in Mark’s gospel (16:17), ‘signs shall follow them that believe’.

The order there is crucial.

There is a temptation, in Signs and Wonders circles, to drift into them that believe pursuing signs; and that doesn’t work. Once you get results-fixated disciples, you end up with neither disciples nor signs. Just anxiety and disappointment, power games, disillusionment and ultimately loss of faith.

You have to walk the path you believe and not look back, not look over your shoulder. Then the signs will follow you.

The same with the economy. If you look after the wellbeing of the people, then it will prosper all by itself.

Same with education. If you tend the wellbeing of the child, then education will happened naturally; children love to learn, they just can’t help it. When my kids were little I never checked their homework, never asked about their test results, never insisted they revise for exams. I told them it didn’t matter if they failed their exams, that passing an exam in a subject you hated could be a terrible mistake because you could end up in an occupation you didn’t like as a result. When my smallest child had trouble learning to read, I went to the school and insisted they take off all pressure and concentrate on seeing to it that she was happy and had a nice time. I said if that was impossible for them, I’d understand – I’d take her out of school.

I didn’t do this because I didn’t care if my children failed but because I wanted them to succeed. They did. They all did amazingly well. It has to be the right way round – signs following disciples, not disciples following signs. In health, in education, in economics, in the practice of our faith. Love, generosity, confidence, trust, kindness, integrity, understanding – let these lead the way and all the rest will follow.