Epiblog for the Feast of St Macarius of Jerusalem

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  A week in which some achievements have finally been achieved, but more of that later. The weather, sadly, is deteriorating even as I type, and more snow is on the way, according to both the Look North Weatherman and Harry Gration’s dentist, as a consequence of which, given their uncanny accuracy at forecasting the weather, I expect to be wearing sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt by this time next week.  I do have a sinking feeling, (matched by a sinking thermometer) that this time, however, they may just have got it right. What was it the late, great Robert Zimmerframe said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”

The good (or at least the better) weather departed at the same time as our house guests. Little Holly and her mum went home on Tuesday morning, minus the cardboard farm I had made for her, which had to be packed up and posted on because it was too big and too fragile to be taken on the train.

The farm itself proved to be a great success, out of all proportion both to the cost and quality of the materials and the time spent in its construction. It is a self-contained empirical proof of the maxim that any kid would rather play with the box than the contents.

In honour of the farm, on Monday night, after we’d taken all of the animals out of the slots and re-arranged them several times, we both then sang “Down in the Meadow Where the Moo-Cows Poo” and “All The Little Chickens in the Garden” – well, actually, I sang them, while Holly hopped from foot to foot dancing and giggling, and shouted “AGAIN!” each time I reached the end of the song.  Then she discovered that if she tugged on the end of my beard while I was singing, I would stop in mid-song and bleat like a goat, so the evening rather descended into informality from that point onwards, and became even more unstructured.

It was fun unleashing my inner three year old for a couple of days and the house seemed very quiet  and still without little Holly this week. Still, at least Zak can snore in his chair unmolested and with no further danger of having his fur rubbed into bald patches from repeated fierce cuddling.  Holly seemed a very accepting kid, and I hope she has gone back home with the idea that there is nothing wrong with a scruffy house where people bool around on a set of wheels and dogs have their own dedicated armchairs, and I hope she enjoyed her stay in a house where there are not only owls, but also maybe dragons, living in the woods out the back.

The birds also live in the woods, and have been flocking round in ever greater numbers for the bread I’ve been chucking out on the decking. I felt like a latter-day St Francis of Assisi, as described by Fr Mark Elvins in his article for The Ark: 

One day when Francis was making a trip through the Spoleto valley he came across a great number of birds of various kinds, namely doves, crows, jackdaws and others all congregated in a tree.  Upon seeing them Francis ran eagerly towards them and the birds waited expectantly for him.  Francis greeted them in his customary manner and they were not the least disturbed by his presence.  Francis then with great joy humbly begged the birds to listen to the word of God.  He addressed them as follows:

My brothers, birds, you should praise your creator very much and always love him; he gave you feathers to clothe you, wings so that you can fly, and whatever else was necessary for you.  God made you noble among his creatures, and he gave you a home in the purity of the air: though you neither sow nor reap, he nevertheless protects and governs you without any solicitude on your part.

The birds then began rejoicing, in a wonderful way according to their nature and they stretched their necks, extended their wings and gazed at Francis, who went close and touched them.  He then blessed them and gave them permission to fly away. 

Except that in our case they don’t immediately fly away, they stay and put on a performance for Matilda to watch through the conservatory door. Matilda, when not watching the birds, has relished the return to what passes for normality, having now got to the stage where most mornings she sits and waits for me to transfer off the bed and into the wheelchair, so that she can then jump up and curl round in a ball on the cat bed I have just constructed for her on top of the duvet. Not that she’d ever want to put me under pressure, I’m sure.  It reminds me of (I think it was) George Orwell, in Down and Out in Paris and London, where he writes about the beds in the lodging house and as one person got out of bed to go to work, another who had been working all night climbed into the bed they’d vacated.

The stupid thing is that Matilda doesn’t seem to have worked out yet that if she jumped onto (and into) the bed while I was still in residence, we’d both be much warmer! She’s the only cat we’ve ever had that doesn’t seem to want to invade the bed. With all of the others, the issue was keeping them out!

Another one who’s been invading her bed this week is Debbie. Not necessarily out of choice,  more because she in turn has been invaded by some sort of foul bug or infection that she’s been battling against.  The trouble is that when you get so run down,  you are prey for any microbe that feels like having a go. And given that she’s exposed to a wide variety of microbes via the student population of Kirklees during any working week, I guess it was inevitable sooner or later that a foul lergy would get her. 

As I write, she has more or less cured herself of it by not really eating or drinking anything, and sleeping for an inordinate amount of time: on Friday afternoon she finally surfaced at 2.pm, and I quoted scripture at her - “And the dead arose, and showed themselves to many!” for which I received the customary two-fingered benediction. [My curiosity was piqued, actually, and I did go and look up the phrase, and discovered I was paraphrasing Matthew 27-53, describing the dead getting up and walking around after Jesus’s resurrection].

“And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.”

So, now I know, and much good may it do me!

I took a day off on Saturday, because I was expecting some visitors, fellow posters from the old Archers Message Board, in the morning, and in the afternoon, I was looking forward to actually doing some work on my own writing for once. Things failed to go according to plan for a variety of reasons, including Debbie still feeling ill and staying in bed til the afternoon, although that didn’t stop me receiving our visitors and their welcome cake, and brewing up two pots of English Breakfast Tea.  I was glad to see them; I’m always glad to see friends and visitors, but I was feeling a bit gloomy before they came and cheered me up, because I had logged on to Facebook when I got up and of course Facebook, in that wonderfully mindless way it has of reminding you, when I logged on, told me that "today is Tiggy Nunn's birthday"

[Which it was. We never knew her actual birthday, but we got her on March 9th 1997 and the rescue kennels said she was 'a year old', so we always took it literally and celebrated her birthday on March 9th.]

It’s strange the way our actions sometimes come back and sandbag us when we least expect it – in this case, my setting up a Facebook page for Tiggy. So I had spent some time looking at old pictures of byegone days, lamenting her loss over again, and that of Kitty, and wishing things were otherwise. The more so since all our efforts to acquire another dog to come and live with us on the settee by the stove seem doomed to end in failure. I was more than glad of the diversion of visitors.

In passing, since I am writing about dogs and Facebook, and since I decided last week to start trying to pass on the “lost dog” notices to the nearest Dog Pound rather than simply “sharing” them, I’ve been looking into some of the postings about dogs that seem to go the rounds on Facebook, concentrating on two in particular, the one about dog fighting gangs putting stickers on people’s gates to mark houses where likely dog-napping victims live and the one about Michael Anthony Burdis, who has been attempting, allegedly, to obtain dogs from shelters for the purposes of dog fighting.

It turns out the “stickers on the gate” one is a hoax, and has been going the rounds for years, having apparently originated in Perth, Western Australia.  That’s not to say that dog-fighting gangs don’t go around on the lookout for dogs to snaffle, I’m sure they do, and this week I signed, amongst others, a petition to establish an animal offenders’ register to work in the same way as the sex offenders’ register does.  Although my own preferred solution to those found guilty of animal abuse is, and remains, that whatever abuse they inflicted on the animal, should be visited in turn on them. As I’ve said before, once a few yobboes had been set on fire or dropped off the roof of a car park, I am sure cases of animal abuse would decline remarkably. 

Michael Anthony Burdis is a slightly more complex case. The warning originated from a whippet rescue centre, although they have subsequently said they didn’t issue it in that form or those words, and it seems again to have acquired a life of its own, including a picture of someone who is almost certainly not Michael Anthony Burdis.  I was especially irritated by discovering this, as I have, myself, circulated this one before, in good faith, and I wonder at the mentality of the people who fabricate these false warnings, which damage the credulity and bona fides of genuine appeals, and wonder just where and how they get off on doing this sort of thing.

But enough of this digressing. At least I have resisted the temptation, like Hilaire Belloc, to insert a digression about the inadvisability of digressing. Saturday evening saw us attempting to assemble a particular piece of flat pack furniture which had been delivered here for Granny on the assumption that, since I am here all day and every day, the courier would not be able to play “knock down ginger” and leave one of those annoying little cards saying that they’ve taken your parcel to a distribution centre in Castleford. As it happened, by a strange quirk of fate, the day it was delivered, Granny was not only here, but actually in the process of  leaving the house, having just dropped the dogs off; she opened the side door and came face to face with the courier, who was standing there holding her “flat pack organising table” in his arms.  As courier deliveries go, it was one of our more successful ones, especially as neither of them pulled the door handle off!

That was the day when Granny came in wet and bedraggled with two equally wet-and-bedraggled dogs, having been out in the misty moisty boggy smoggy foggy Holme Valley weather.  I put the kettle on, and offered her some ciabatta bread and Camembert, as a sort of interracial Euro-snack. She wasn’t that sure about the Camembert as she doesn’t normally like anything French, especially the rugby team, but a combination of curiosity and hunger overcame her. After a while she said

“This Camembert tastes of cheese.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I replied.  What she meant was it tasted mild and ordinary, and she had expected it to sear across the palate like Gorgonzola. I explained that if you wanted that from a French cheese, you had to buy that stuff that comes in a wooden box and is tied up with a piece of orange string like baler twine which is in turn secured with a dob of wax.

I can’t remember what the stuff is called, but when we took Alan, Deb’s social-worker charge, up to Powter Howe one summer, when we stayed in their chalet, we had a chunk of this stuff with us, and, the weather being hot, the cheese started to go critical and looked like it would spontaneously start reproducing of its own accord. Let’s just say it put the “high” into “high summer”. The smell was so indescribably bad that we decided to leave the remainder of the offending dairy product out on the table, outside on the verandah, overnight. In the morning, it had gone; only a small scrap of the wrapping paper remained.  Respect is due to whatever Cumbrian beastie snaffled it in the night. I am just so glad I wasn’t standing beside it, whatever it was, the next time it farted.

However, I digress. Yet again. The only reason Debbie even attempted to put this thing together in the state she was in, was that it was supposedly something to give her mother on Mothers’ Day,  so her mother wouldn’t have the boring chore of having to assemble it in person, and I could tell from the outset it was probably a bad idea. While we were struggling to put this damn occasional table thing together, making sure that we secured piece G to piece F with the dowels and the short bolts x 4, tightened with the Allen key, and Debbie, in her foul bilious mood, was getting more and more irate with it because none of the pieces was square or fitted together properly, and the instructions would have needed a Chinese lawyer from Philadelphia to interpret them, lo and behold, a programme on Thomas Chippendale, of all things, came on the TV, so I found myself holding two pieces of MDF at right angles while Debbie cursed and swore in one ear, with some latter-day Arthur Negus type whittling on about marquetry in my other. Eventually, Debbie won, and, with a final curse, set the finished whatnot upright on its casters, before grabbing the remote and, declaring that the only Chippendales that were of any interest to her were the ones that took their clothes off, she changed the channel to a programme about a pine marten that stole jam sandwiches. That faint whirring noise in the background, folks, is Thomas Chippendale, revolving in his immaculately dovetailed coffin.

But, anyway, to my achievements,  the lesser and the greater. Aha! I bet you thought I’d forgotten. Achievement number one was getting the plumber to come back and have another look at Colin’s boiler, which has once more started turning itself on and off at random.  He hasn’t actually been back yet – the achievement was getting in touch with him, which took several days as he wasn’t answering his mobile, which just rang out. I was beginning to think he’d moved to Spain again without telling anyone [he has “previous” in that regard.] Eventually, on Thursday, after I let it ring about 17 times, he picked up.  Fearing I’d called at a bad time, I apologised, and asked if he’d had his head down a drain or something

“No, I was picking dog-turds off my lawn.”

Ah. Right. Ooooo...kay… Anyway, that was my lesser achievement of the week. My greater one was getting Hampshire At War off to press, a book which I have been working on, one way or another, for over a decade.  It came out only 18 pages short of 500 in the end, and I hope the author and her family will be justifiably proud of her monumental achievement. Checking the index alone was a task that almost transcended the boundaries of publishing, and I speak here as a desk-top publisher who has published many, many desk tops in his time. But in the end, it was done, and the index reads, in part:

Hitler, Adolf

Hobbs, Betty

Which more or less sums the whole book up. Of course, they never met in real life, he being a Nazi megalomaniac who plunged the world into total conflict, and she being an 18-year-old firewatcher on the roof of a bakery in the Portsmouth Blitz, who, like many hundreds of thousands of others, did their bit and gave their all to stop Nazism taking over the world, but nevertheless, the Second World War was definitely a case of “when Adolf met Betty”, and probably wished he hadn’t.

I suppose I could add a third, rather minor, achievement to the two listed above. I’ve been looking around from time to time, as budget and availability allows, to see if I can replace some of the books I lost in the great camper disaster of 2012, and this week I found, and ordered, a reasonably-priced second hand copy of Sweet’s Anglo Saxon Reader on the internet.

It was strange, reading it again, looking at all those thorns, wynns and eths, reciting the sonorous opening of The Dream of the Rood, reading about  Cynewulf and Cyneheard, The Wanderer, or Aelfric’s Homily on the Life of King Oswald. The copy I bought was redolent of that smell of musty old bookshops and I had only to open it to be transported back into the tutorial room at College, being asked to translate bits of The Wanderer or The Seafarer, and arguing about whether they were truly Christian poems or bits of pagan verse with Christian sentiments grafted on. [This is the sort of thing Old English scholars argue about. I kid you not. I once got chucked out of a tutorial for maintaining that there was a Pagan reading of Gawain and the Greene Knight. And yes, I know that’s Middle English, and not Old English, but the principle’s the same.]

One poem I thought was in Sweet, but apparently isn’t, is The Ruin, so I looked it up online, because I remembered its atmospheric opening where the poet describes the wreckage of a deserted Roman villa:

Wrætlic is þes wealstan;  wyrde gebræcon,
burgstede burston,  brosnað enta geweorc.
Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras,
hrungeat berofen,  hrim on lime,

Enta geweorc translates as “the work of giants”, which is the only frame of reference the Saxon poet had for these strange ruins littering the countryside, the roof broken, frost on the plaster, the walls crumbling.  I often feel the same way, now, looking back on things I have lived through. Apart from anything else, it’s a pretty accurate description of our house!  And also a description of my life, in many ways – the first time I read this poem, I didn’t fully appreciate the lesson it held, that I was a giant then, in my own way, and didn’t know it.  Ozymandias probably had similar delusions. In those days, I probably thought I was immortal. Being a “giant” is like being happy, you only realise what it was when it no longer applies.

There were people at College with me who did concern themselves with their place in the greater universe at large. One such was Bob, who, despite his name, claimed to be a magician. Not a rabbit out of the hat, now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t, type of magician, more a sort of flaming pentacle, athame-waving, Hebrew banishing ritual type of magician. I once asked him what he thought the meaning of life was (this was the 1970s, remember) and he replied; 

"We are all one, and we are all contained in a point of light".

I always remembered that answer, even though I didn’t understand it. Probably because I didn’t understand it. Later on, as I read about the Kabbalah myself, I realised that he was probably alluding to the idea of Ain Soph Aour, the limitless light from which the universe emanated according to Judaic mysticism. As the Gnostic Kabbalah states 

Atziluth is the first created world that comes from the Unknown which is the Ain Soph, the original seed of the universe. Atziluth, the Archetypal World, is pure deity, the Divine World related with the different elements of God in which we find Divinity related to the Tree of Life. It is the World of Divine, Splendorous, Archetypal Emanations. We have to analyze and comprehend that which is before Atziluth. Atziluth emanates from the Absolute, the Ain Soph which is the origin of Spirit and Matter. The Ain Soph is a Negative Existence, not similar to anything we (can) know. It has its existence for itself. Therefore the Tree of Life is that which exists, that which emanates from the Ain Soph.

Reading that again now, with fresh eyes, it reads as if the author is saying that the Ain Soph is what was there before the big bang, before anything emanated from anywhere. Whatever it is, it is spookily similar to Juliana of Norwich:

Also in this he showed a little thing the quantity of a hazel nut lying in the palm of my hand, as it had seemed to me, This little thing that is made that is beneath our Lady Saint Mary, God showed me as little as it had been a hazel nut, and to my understanding, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was generally answered thus, 'It is all that is made'. I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding, 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it'.

There she is, explaining the Big Bang, but in 1413 AD! Several hundred years before the Large “Hardon” Collider was even thought of. And every time I see these astonishing correspondences across time and culture between science and religion, I find myself saying, along with Newton, that if I have seen anything, it was only ever achieved by standing on the shoulders of giants, and 

I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

And so we came to Sunday, a bright, cold, windy day. I was actually spoilt for choice by a veritable plethora of saints whose feast days fall on March 10th.  I was originally leaning towards St Kessog, an early Irish missionary to Scotland, who sounds vaguely like he might have something to do with breakfast cereal and who has, apparently, an oilfield in the North Sea named after him, which must be fairly high on the “unique achievements for a saint” list. 

Then I noticed St John of Vallambrosa, who was a contender for a while: he was a Benedictine monk in Florence, who developed a fascination with Black Magic and began to study it, practising it in secret. Shades of Bob. 

Eventually he was found out and the Abbot-General ordered that he should be confined in solitude.  He took to the solitary life so well that, even though he became truly penitent and his brother monks petitioned for his return to the order, he refused, preferring to live as a hermit, and to be sustained by visions of Saint Catherine of Siena.

 

Other than that, I know nothing at all about him. I know that they get a lot of autumn leaves in Vallambrosa, mostly in the brooks, courtesy of Milton, and that on occasion they can be strewn as thick as thieves in Balham Broadway, but of St Catherine of Siena I am blissfully ignorant. Apparently she is one of the two patron saints of Italy, along with St Francis of Assisi, and wrote over 300 letters to the Pope, which probably led to him boarding up the Vatican’s letterbox.  I can’t see anything in the images of her that would particularly sustain me if I was on my own in a cave, but then none of the women I’ve ever been involved with have been particularly saintly, except perhaps in the patience department. 

In passing, I have always liked St Francis of Assisi, even though today his not his feast day, I think he deserves another mention: Fr Mark Elvins writes about him with great insight:

Francis in many ways typified the solitary hermits of the Egyptian desert who, by their prayers and penances, set out to conquer for Christ the demon-infested wilderness.   This was, in a sense, the way back to the paradise garden, for the loss of original innocence caused the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden could only be reclaimed by the restoration of innocence.  The characteristics of this original innocence were familiarity with God and dominion over all creatures.  Francis, by his long hours of prayer and penance, was assured of the forgiveness of all his sins and, like a number of penitential saints, his original innocence was restored.

Finally, though, my eye was drawn to St Macarius of Jerusalem, who died in 335AD and apparently aided St Helena in identifying the True Cross.  He became Bishop of Jerusalem in 314AD, opposed the Arian Heresy, he built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and was one of the signatories of the Council of Nicaea.  So, all in all, quite an important bloke.  Not to be confused, apparently, with St Macarius of Alexandria, which is a shame, because he sounds as though he was a lot more fun: 

When he became thirsty, God sent him a wild cow, and he drank from its milk, until he returned to his cell. One day a hyena came to him and pulled his garment. He followed her to her den, and it brought out her three young ones. He found that they were all malformed, and was amazed from the intelligence of the animal. He prayed and put his hands on them, and they were healed. The hyena disappeared for a while, and she came back with a sheep skin, which he used to sleep on until his departure.

Nor, indeed, should he be confused with Macarius of Egypt, who is known as Macarius the Greater, and is revered in the Coptic Church, again largely for living in the desert. It must have been quite confusing in the early day of Christianity when it seems you couldn’t throw half a brick without hitting a bloke called Macarius who was living in the desert as a saint and being fed by hyenas. 

The mention of the true cross has resonances for me, because one of my abiding memories is going to Holy Cross Abbey in Ireland in 1997 and standing there before a panel in the wall which contains their supposed relic of a piece of the true cross. I know, of course, that the relic now at Holy Cross is not even the original supposed piece of the Holy Cross but it does hold undeniable power. It seems that they were having trouble identifying the “real” true cross even in the time of St Helena, as apparently St Macarius had to organise a sort of “identity parade”, arranging for a seriously ill woman to be touched in turn with each of the contending objects. Only one of them cured her instantly. Given the size of the cross, getting three or four of them in her bedroom in order to carry out this bizarre ritual must have been quite problematic. 

It’s all too easy to poke fun at relics of course – if you go by the relics alone, St Giles must have had two left arms, apparently. I bet he would have given his right arm to be ambidextrous. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the chip of wood (and it is tiny, only about half an inch long) behind the glass screen of the reliquary set in the Abbey wall is transmitting something. Transmitting is really the only word to use, as well. I’ve written about it before, quite a lot, in fact, because it had such an effect on me, that rainy April in Ireland, sixteen years ago. 

The nearest I can come to describing the experience is that my immediate surroundings faded away and I was in a place full of the warmth of Mediterranean sunshine, old stone and the sounds and smells of the bazaar, all coupled with a near-indescribable sense of peace and permanence. I was in Jerusalem. It only lasted for a few seconds, but there is definitely something there. Go and see it for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Maybe there is a scientific explanation. Apparently plants that are prayed over flourish more than those left to their on devices, maybe there’s something about centuries of veneration of an object that imbues it with some sort of mystical power in its own right, some sort of talismanic effect we don’t fully understand as yet. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid, as Eliot says. 

Of course, if Bob – and Juliana of Norwich – are right, and the whole world is capable of being contained within God’s nutshell, then nowhere is actually far from anywhere, either in time or space; and suddenly we’re back to John Gribben again, and his idea that everything that always was, is and shall be is existing everywhere, for ever, and once more religion and physics collide with a resounding clang that surely even Richard Dawkins could hear. 

At the end of my journey this week, I am still not sure what I have learned except that maybe there are portals, knots in the skeins of time, moments that allow us to glimpse behind the veil. For a brief moment you can see that maybe the tree of Calvary, the true cross, the tree in the Dream of The Rood, and the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah may all be one and the same tree. Or all branches of the same tree, or something.  Or as John Donne puts it: 

We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

Of course, then the moment passes, the clouds cover the sun, it starts raining again, or snowing, and your garden looks like a sea of mud that has been blasted with shit, and you realise you’re back once again in the ruins, wondering about the work of the giants who went before. I don’t have these moments often. Maybe my last real one was sixteen years ago. But I’ve been sharing my bread with the birds. I've been waiting to be fed by hyenas. And a man told me, that from your tree, they formed the cross on Calvary. So good night, Box Elder, good night.