Epiblog for Easter Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Somehow, we have stumbled through the morass to Easter, and for Debbie at least, a well-deserved break. The weather has turned better, as well. Unsurprising, I suppose, given that the calendar at least tells me we are past the Equinox, and we have just put the clocks forward to British Summer Time, but given the weird, topsy-turvy nature of the climate at the moment, I wouldn’t be that surprised if it snowed.  Anyway, the snowdrops are hanging on and the daffodils are nodding nicely.

The birds and the squirrels are also busy about their business, and we have now had the ceremonial opening of the door to the cat flap in what used to be Colin’s kitchen, so Matilda may now come and go as she pleases.  In winter, we keep it shut and she goes in and out of the conservatory door, on request. Mainly because if it’s left open on cold winter days, the wind that started life in Siberia, blasted the Urals, howled across the Great North German Plain, picked up a bit of moisture as it crossed the North Sea, and eventually reached Huddersfield, howls through the cat-flap and whistles round my ankles, giving me frostbite.

Not that Matilda has materially altered her lifestyle to take advantage of her new-found freedom, although she did make an unusual (for her) foray into the newly-cleared bits of the front garden, sniffing and exploring as she went.  Misty Muttkins and Zak, meanwhile, have benefited from the fact that Deb is now on holiday, to the extent of doing an 18-mile walk on Friday and an 11-mile walk yesterday, up Wessenden. The latter was curtailed by the sudden deterioration of the weather, including horizontal hailstones, which led to all three of them jogging the last mile and a half back to the van.

As for me, I have been attempting to tie up loose ends. I currently have more loose ends than a Ned Sherrin tribute act, so it’s not a small job. Crowle Street Kids, We’ll Take The String Road, and The Bow of Barnsdale have all seen some work done on them this week. In addition, in what is laughingly described as my spare time, I have received and potted out the first of this year’s herbs (a task made half an hour longer than it should have been because the UK Mail courier just dumped the box outside the door, blocking my wheelchair ramp, and buggered off without knocking or ringing the bell).

I’ve also carried on my campaign of writing letters to charities who number among their patrons Tory MPs who voted to cut ESA by £30 per week, to point out that they are being used for self-promotion by people who really do not share their aims and ambitions, and what do they intend to do about this anomaly? My petition, meanwhile, is languishing at about 1100 signatures, so if I am going to do anything to get to the 10,000 mark where the government is obliged to respond, I need to so some self-promotion of my own! I’ve also started a massive spreadsheet of all the jobs which need doing to the house, and although it is a daunting list, it does at least give us something to focus on. Just looking at it makes me feel tired, though, and I can’t actually do any of it, just project-manage!  Oh well, they also serve who only brew the tea. 

Obviously the whole week in the wider world has been dominated by the news filtering through from Brussels of the latest terrorist outrages there.  The law of unintended consequences meant that this overshadowed, and obliterated in the media, the news which would undoubtedly have otherwise dominated the air waves, of the continuing savage in-fighting in the Tory party about Europe, and the fact that people are starting to question the competence of the “Chancer” of the Exchequer, George Osborne.  By the end of the week, he was hanging on by his fingernails, having done several U-turns, and his budget had more holes than a moth-fancier’s vest, but once more the little weasel managed to get away with it. Just.

It is all starting to unravel, though. Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, failed spectacularly to interpret a graph she was shown on Newsnight, and was heckled and mocked in song when she tried to address the NUT conference. Questions are still being asked about Iain Duncan Smith’s sudden departure and the dubious motives behind it; his successor has been revealed as one of the “pray-away-the-gay” brigade, who believes people with same-sex tendencies can be “cured” by this method, and Cameron himself has done a bunk to Lanzarote. I don’t blame him for wanting to get away from Boris Johnson. If I were in his situation, I would be thinking of somewhere much further away from the poisonous haystack of hate, a man who would undoubtedly crack a joke as he watched the guards herd the partisans into a cattle-truck.

America’s version of Johnson, Forrest Trump, felt the need to comment on the events in Brussels to the effect that “Belgium is a city that needs to get its act together”, a sentence which shows he has as much grasp of geography as George W Bush and should therefore do very well, and that the answer to Belgium’s terrorist problems was “more waterboarding”.  It’s a very depressing thought that the only person who now has a prayer of stopping this man is Hillary bloody Roddam Clinton.

I have no words to describe the people who caused the explosions in Brussels. Well, I do have words, but they certainly aren’t fit for a mixed audience on Easter Sunday. Mindless medieval deluded murdering bastards doesn’t even come close. If there is a hell, I hope they went straight there, and were met and welcomed by 72 demons. Each.  Seeking to find out why they did it, would, of course, be viewed in some quarters as also seeking to excuse or somehow mitigate the action, when in fact it is nothing of the sort. I can seek to understand the psychological flaws, the greed for power, and the mean, penny-pinching self-serving “I’m alright, Jack” cocktail that made Margaret Thatcher wage war on the working classes, and still be bitterly opposed to it.

Seeking to understand why this happened is important, because even at this late stage, when we are so far off the beaten track that we are in danger of sinking into the grimpen mire forever, there might just, still be a way back.  I remember the days when there were only about twelve “Islamic” fundamentalists in the whole world. They lived in a set of caves in Tora Bora and spent most of their time chewing their own beards and arguing about the meaning of the Haddith, and whether it really was 72 virgins or 72 sultanas, something which I, too, would probably want qualified before I started to strap on a suicide vest.

Then came 9/11, and specifically, the West’s reaction to 9/11. There was no attempt there, either, to explain or understand why, and take informed action to gain revenge.  With George W Bush in charge, that was probably inevitable. If they had just stopped at invading Afghanistan, that would have been understandable, as a response, but  it would still have undermined international law and the will of the UN. What made it much worse, however, was the decision to then invade Iraq, instead of just letting Saddam Hussein’s regime implode.  The fact that there were no WMD, and the whole thing was a political sham, concocted by Bush and Blair was not lost on the thousands of people who subsequently flocked to join Al-Qaida. The subsequent misguided interventions in Libya, Egypt, and the attempts to meddle in the Syrian civil war have compounded this an hundredfold.  Now, most of the Middle East is in flames, and every nutter east of the Euphrates (and a good many west of the Euphrates, if it comes to that) is queuing up to blow themselves to bits, and to take as many of us with them as they can.

The people who let off these bombs want the hate to continue. They have absolutely no other aim. Their crackpot organisation peddles death by cherry-picking bits of their creed which seem to promote Jihad and ignores all others. They have waxed fat by being indulged by some of the states surrounding Syria, who have found it convenient for one reason or another to ignore them – Turkey, for instance, is quite happy to see ISIS killing the Kurds, because it saves them the job.  They have also waxed fat because their numbers have swelled exponentially by our actions as their recruiting-sergeant.

And, of course, every time something like this happens, there are the inevitable calls for revenge, which only ratchets the cycle of violence up another few gears. Even if we in the UK put our entire public spaces into lockdown with armed police and troops on every corner, even if we sacrificed the last few remaining shreds of our civil liberties to surveillance and snooping, you still wouldn’t stop these people. Closing the borders is a naïve response in a situation where home-grown terrorists such as the 7/7 bombers can be recruited, groomed and supplied from outside the UK.

It is not only the official knee-jerk responses which ISIS are hoping to provoke. They must have rubbed their hands with glee at the news reports of 40 year old Glasgow shopkeeper Asad Shah being killed in the street outside his shop. They must have chortled at the thought of the Muslims being abused on the bus and asked to justify the Brussels outrage – they must have rocked with mirth at the Twitterstorms that erupted condemning ordinary Muslims for something which they do not have the power to change, however much they want to. And they do want to.  Imagine if the Westboro Baptist Church took over the Church of England and started beheading people for getting the flower rota wrong or serving dry sherry instead of sweet.  And imagine further if the Westboro Baptist Church was the only voice of “Christianity” that the media ever listened to, and your own words of rage and condemnation at the appropriation of your faith, to justify outrageous acts which are several nautical miles away from being “Islamic” or even “religious”, in any sense of the word you or I would understand, were ignored, excluded or twisted by the media to make it seem as though you said something else entirely.

One thing is for sure, though, the Brussels bombings will have made it even more certain that Britain will vote to leave the EU and Cameron will lose the referendum, and his job.  Those who hate refugees, and would like to see them and their children die, such as Katie Hopkins, were quick to jump on the bandwagon and claim that the terrorist outrages were part of the refugee crisis, before it emerged that the bombers had been living in Belgium for some time, and hadn’t just blown in from the Macedonian border.  But an attack like the ones in Brussels is all grist to the mill for the “let ‘em sink” lobby.  There is no doubt, by the way, that ISIS are seeking to exploit the refugee crisis which we have created for their own ends, which is yet another reason why there needs to be a chain of proper screening and reception centres for legitimate refugees all along the trail from Syria to western Europe, a properly-managed process of integration done on a pan-European basis. Apart from anything else, if these safe havens were created and known to those fleeing the Syrian war, then you might be more justified in drawing conclusions about the refugees who didn’t seek the help freely offered. The state of chaos at the moment, though, is meat and drink to the likes of ISIS.   Also of course, ending the Syrian war would stem the flow somewhat, but that still leaves the problem of people who were born here, lived here all their lives, and are now sufficiently radicalised/deluded (delete as applicable) as to want to cause mayhem on home soil.

The news today, Easter Sunday, which should be a day of hope, renewal and resurrection, makes grim reading. Tony Blair has said that using British ground troops is the only way to defeat ISIS militarily. There is so much wrong with that statement that it would take another, second, Epiblog, to nail it all. Defeating ISIS militarily is no use at all if the next day someone from Slough sets off a bomb at, say, St Pancras station.  And in any case, for every one of them you kill, a hundred more spring up in their place.  And why British ground troops in particular, when there are other, much nearer, countries, some of them armed by us anyway, in our continuing mission to turn the middle east into a battleground, who could take on the burden. God save us from armchair warriors who want to fight to the last drop of someone else’s blood. Blair should also pause to reflect that we beat the Irish rebels “militarily” in the Easter Rising in Dublin, 100 years ago this weekend, shot all their leaders, and we then carried on fighting the “defeated” rebels for the next century, near enough.

Cameron, meanwhile (or someone writing on his behalf and claiming to be him) has an article in the papers saying that Britain is a Christian country and should stand up for Christian values. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I would take Cameron’s pronouncements on “Christian values” more seriously if he sold all he has, and gave it to the poor. I could write for a long time on how Mr Cameron and his cronies have been responsible for the erosion and destruction of some of those Christian values he claims to hold so dear: love, mercy, compassion. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” is a core Christian value, but it doesn’t seem to apply when “thy neighbour” is an orphan Afghan refugee child incarcerated in the shit and filth of the camps at Calais.  Cameron could do well to read, learn, mark and inwardly digest the story of the Good Samaritan.  Then go, thou, and do likewise.

Anyway, it is perhaps uncharitable to be so cynical about Mr Cameron on Easter Sunday. Maybe (a chilling thought) he really means it, and he is trying his best. I have attempted, once again, to reflect on Easter, and its meaning for me, and to be honest, I am no nearer. But then again, I am no further away. Easter has neither confirmed nor denied by beliefs, such as they are, poor fledglings sheltering from the storm of the world.  I am not a Biblical scholar, but from my own reading and attempting to follow the various skeins of thought, I do believe, I think, in the existence of the historical Jesus and the story of his crucifixion under Pilate. But whether or not he was the son of God, or God incarnate, is another story. I’m also aware, of course, having read The Golden Bough at an early age, of the similarity of the story of Christ’s resurrection with other death-and-resurrection religions across the middle east in ancient times.  As I have said before, it could even be that all of these are re-tellings  at several removes, of one Ur-event, the original of which has been lost and is now only reflected in these scattered fragments.

Notwithstanding that the historical Jesus probably existed, did he rise from the dead, and if he did, did it have any significance for the rest of us? If not, then we have been living a 2000-year delusion, albeit one which has produced some of the most sublime and beautiful art known to humankind – and also some of the most savage and cruel wars. No-one can prove it either way, which makes it simply a matter of faith. You are saying, in effect, I know this to be true, but I have no way of knowing how I know it to be true, or of explaining it. This may be derided as unscientific, but since when did that actually mean anything? Science is constantly evolving, and we now possess masses of knowledge about all sorts of things that we didn’t know two, or three hundred years ago. Who is to say that in future, the assertion that inside all of us is a spark of the uncorrupted divine and that our spiritual quest is to find it, and follow it back to its source, will not be scientifically proven? And if it is, will it make it any the less awesome?

On Good Friday, a sombre day as always, I made a point of reading the two texts I try and read every Easter – Goodfriday 1613, Riding Westward by John Donne, and the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem, The Dream of the Rood, which tells the story of the crucifixion from the point of view of the cross.  Both are astonishing works of poetry, not least because of the time they were written. We think of the Anglo-Saxons as blundering around in hairy smocks and sandals, quaffing mead and living in mud huts, but the sophistication embodied in the idea of telling the story of Christ’s death by using the voice of the cross itself gives the lie to this straight away. And Donne’s dazzling use of imagery of the spheres, the poles, and playing with the notion of facing and turning away from God, is a tour de force of his “metaphysical” skill.

I can only speak personally here, but I’ve always found them to be much more “useful” as contemplative texts than the straightforward Bible story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection. Sometimes you can communicate something via poetry that has an extra dimension, that just doesn’t fit into prose, however flowery or well-known. T S  Eliot’s assertion, channelling Juliana of Norwich, that “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well” makes no sense whatsoever when you take it out of the context of Little Gidding. Clearly we live in a world where all shall not be well. I shall not even be well, at least not in this body, with its wonky genes and its slow decaying. And yet, read in the context of the poem, it is strangely comforting.

I am, to a certain extent, going round in circles here. Treading a winding stair I have trodden many times before. Maybe it would help me to understand if I just made a simple, bald, statement of what I have come to believe, this Easter time,  and leave it at that.

Nothing that we see is real. Modern physics confirms this. In that scenario, there could just as well be other worlds, other dimensions, which, suddenly, makes the idea of heaven a lot more believable. In fact, modern physics asserts that there definitely are such dimensions.  God is something to do with the idea of time, and the concept of being outside of time, which brings us back once again to the idea of a limitless eternal universe containing everything that is, was and ever shall be, world without end, amen, in a way I just don’t have the words or the intellectual capacity to explain.  Jesus probably existed, but if he was the “son of God” or God incarnate, and he died for me, why did God, starting out with a blank canvas at the big bang, decide to have it work out that way, when with a simple “shazam!” he could have repaired the damage of original sin at any time?  I feel we do all have a spark of the other, the divine, in us, but what this signifies, again I am at a loss to explain, other than that it is some sort of lodestone to leading a good life and aligning yourself with your spiritual destiny.  Do I believe that every word of the Bible is true and is the word of God, and a manual by which you should live your life? No, I’m afraid I don’t.

So, there you are. A poor collection for half-a-century of wondering, since those days when I used to sit on top of Granny Fenwick’s old air-raid shelter and wonder what was on the other side of the sky. Theologically unsound, possibly heretical, and vague and woolly just where it needs to be precise and scientific. These fragments have I shored against my ruin – Eliot, again.  Part of the problem is that you come to the very boundaries of language. On the one hand, it’s preposterous to claim that someone got up, took off their shroud, put their shoulder to the stone, rolled it away, and wandered off, leaving behind a couple of angels to explain the situation to any well-wishers.  But in a universe where (in certain circumstances) things can be in two places at once, and time can run backwards, is it that much more odd?  As to who he was, and how and why he did it, that, of course, is a much bigger and more un-provable question.

There is a knowledge of the feeling, though, as well as a knowledge of the intellect. I have written before about the absolute blast of what I can only call divine power that emanated from a piece of the true cross, in Holy Cross Abbey, in Ireland, when I stood before it in 1998. I had a similar epiphany in Chartres Cathedral in 1988. The intensity of both experiences has seared them into my memory. I know, intellectually,  that the “piece of the true cross” was probably nothing of the sort. The original “piece of the true cross” which had been the inspiration for the founding of the Abbey in the 1200s, vanished when the Abbey was sacked and ruined during Cromwell’s Irish campaign of the 1650s, and the one I saw was an “authenticated” relic sent from the Vatican in 1969. All very “Father Ted” and easy to make fun of.  But I was there, my friend, and you were not. I knew it by my feelings, and my only explanation is that somehow, through its time of being a focus of prayer, it had inexplicably been imbued with something which then resonated with me.

Such intensity of feeling is rare, and few and far between, and probably that’s just as well. In both cases, too, it was connected with places of pilgrimage, which is one of the reasons why I find myself to be so perpetually preoccupied with Santiago de Compostela. I seem to have strayed a long way from Easter, though, and the women in the garden looking for Jesus and finding he’d just left.  I’m not even sure now, what my point was, which is one of the reasons why, when asked on official forms for my religion these days, I tend to put “Lapsed Agnostic/Chapel of Rest”. I can’t believe in Easter for you, I can only tell you what I believe, and I’m not even very good at that.  Anyway, let’s hear it for the cross, the erstwhile Elder tree, the star of The Dream of The Rood, and an under-appreciated and necessary part of the story, if you believe it had to happen that way, as indeed is Judas, the necessary betrayer, without whom none of it would have been possible.

The Elder is traditionally both the tree from which Christ’s cross was made, and the tree on which Judas hanged himself, as in P J Kavanagh’s poem, Elder

Judas was surely a fragile man

To hang himself from this 'God's stinking tree'.

This has given rise to the folk-customs prevalent in the West Country that it is unlucky to bring Elder indoors, and that “he who burns Elder, sees the Devil”, or, as it has also been put, “He who burns Elder, skins a sheep!” Various parts of the Elder have been used historically for medicinal purposes, though, to cure everything from bronchitis to constipation, and of course, you can make wine out of its berries, so it’s not all bad.

Coming back to my beliefs, though, I believe we are in for a battering from Storm Katie tomorrow, and that Easter Monday is going to be a washout. It’s actually having quite a good attempt at blowing a hooley outside, right now. Matilda scuttled off next door at the first crack of thunder, and Deb phoned to say they had been forced back to the van by hailstones like golf balls and a thunderstorm at Wessenden, so I am expecting them back and in need of warming and drying very soon now.  When I give over writing this, I am going to put the kettle on, which is always the English response to any crisis. The extra hours of daylight next week will be welcome, even if all we do is use them to sit and look at the rain. At least Big G has done me the favour of watering in my herbs.