It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. I can scarcely believe it’s a fortnight since
we left Arran. In some ways, I can close my
eyes and think myself back there in an instant, then at other times, it seems
like a distant memory from another life. Such are the vagaries of human
recall. I have very little news of any
consequence to report this week, because I have had my head down, working,
getting caught up on my enormous self-created backlog. I’m now at the stage
where if it weren’t for the trees in the way, I could see the wood at the end
of the tunnel, or something. It wasn’t helped by the accountants asking me for
a whole heap of additional stuff which took me ages to get together. I wouldn’t
mind having to provide this level of detail (under the threat of being fined
for non-compliance by HMRCE and Companies House) if it was applied with the
same rigour across the board. To MPs, for instance.
Anyway, don’t get me started, or we will be here all night.
Let’s talk about something non-controversial, at least for a while. The weather
has been dull as the proverbial ditchwater all week, and it looks, today, as I
type this, as though we’re heading into the first of the usual equinoctial
storms, as gales and rain appear to be heading down from the North. Matilda has
been distinctly unimpressed, on the mornings when I have opened the
conservatory door for her to go out on to the decking, and she has been almost
splatted on the head by a massive drip of rainwater from the guttering. Like
every other cat we’ve ever had, she thinks I am personally responsible for the
weather, and complains long and loud to me that she is no longer able to spend
most of the day round the corner, in front of the garage, in her little garden
suntrap where she curled up for hours on end, this summer.
I think Misty, meanwhile, is still confused by the fact that
someone seems to have stolen her beach, and she can no longer go out and play
“stones” first thing in the mornings. She has, however, had the compensation of
some long, blustery walks up Castle Hill, or through the woods to the quarry,
or, yesterday, along the canal bank to Milnsbridge, where she managed somehow
to fall in the canal and had to be fished out by Debbie. We don’t have a very
good track record with that stretch of canal. The first time Zak saw it, it was
covered in a film of green algae, and he thought it was just a continuation of
the grass, and kept on running. He was quite surprised, to say the least. Misty seems to be settling back into a
routine, anyway, which can only be a good thing, though she still does have the
odd aberration: the other night, instead of following Debbie upstairs to bed,
she jumped on the end of my bed, the other end of which was already occupied by
Matilda, and a Mexican standoff ensued, which Debbie had to referee. She, and
Matilda, were very impressed, as you can imagine.
Debbie’s been girding her “lions” ready for the start of
teaching proper, which all kicks off from tomorrow, but unfortunately the game
of playing academic sillybuggers has already begun, in that she was asked to
cover a class last Monday, spent all of Sunday preparing for it, and then got
there to find it had been cancelled! Dear Mr Arse, allow me to introduce you to
Mr Elbow. I was tempted to type things
can only get better, but I resent giving Dr Brian Cox the oxygen of publicity.
I know you are all dying to know the outcome of the
imbroglio over the camper van, so I will keep you in suspenders no longer. At
the time I was writing last week’s Epiblog, it was all over the garage floor in
pieces, and there was some doubt – some considerable doubt, actually – about
whether those pieces would ever go back together again. It was definitely in
the “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men territory”. Fortunately, during
the week, a solution did eventually present itself. Owing to the kindness of others, and
negotiations with the garage, we arrived at a compromise, whereby it was agreed
that the urgent problem with fitting a new end housing would be tackled
straight away, and the other problems they had discovered, some of which they
admitted were to do with stuff they had fixed previously, would be re-done by
them, at a later date, on a pro-bono basis.
This meant that we could (just) afford to pay the still
rather eye-watering bill for the repair that was absolutely and immediately
necessary, and keep the camper on the road. So all was well – sort of, anyway,
until the garage man came round to collect the cheque, and Misty,
misunderstanding his friendly hand reaching out to pat her on the head, gave
him a “collie dog nip” on his left knee! Argh! I apologised fulsomely, and,
luckily, he was very good about it. The fact that I’d just handed him an
humungous cheque probably sweetened the situation somewhat, but even so, Misty…
Actually, you can’t really blame the dog. If I’d been through some of the
things she’s probably been through, I’d want to rip the throat out of every
representative of the species responsible, never mind give them a sharp nip on
the patella. It’s probably my fault - I should have told her to go on her
beddies and stay there, but she was wandering round, sniffing him, and wagging
her tail, good as gold, until he made the fatal mistake of a sudden gesture. No
doubt the next garage bill will include a charge for a pair of trousers. And/or
possibly a new leg.
So the camper rumbles on, like the rest of us, into an
uncertain future. Watch this space. In fact, rumbling on has been the order of
the week. The crisis in Syria
rumbles on, and I had two separate mobile phone calls from Unicef acknowledging
my donation to their Syria
appeal this week. This is odd, because a) I didn’t recall donating and b) if I
did donate, I’d like the money to go to Syria, and not to paying some pongo
in a call centre in Droitwich to phone me up about it. I might well have texted them £3.00 in a
moment of weakness, and when I get a minute, I will check my phone. Or Deb
might have picked up my phone and done it, but either way, it’s a salutary warning.
The money you give to Unicef does not get to the people you think you are
giving it to. Ethiopiaid is another,
similar organisation. As it happens, I
do remember giving them some money. I got a mailer from them, and I printed out
my usual letter saying basically, look, we’d like to help, but at the moment
we’re a charity case ourselves, and we’re so brassic that the church mice hold
collections for us, so I’m sorry we can’t donate on this occasion. As I folded
this up to put it in the envelope to send back to them, I noticed 63p in loose
change lying around on the table, so I scooped that up and put it in the
envelope. This week, they have written me a letter thanking me for my donation
of £0.63, which is an act of crass idiocy because the postage alone will have
cost them the thick end of 50p, and by the time you add on the stationery, and
their time, they will have lost money on the deal! This is yet another reason
why these days, (or at least in the days when we were still able to give to
charity) I only gave to those causes which were small and local, and where I
knew that all or most of the money went to the cause itself, and not on
poodlefaking administration.
Talking of poodlefaking administrators, this week I also
heard back from the Press Complaints Commission about my having reported the
Daily Mail to them, for its disgusting coverage of the Philpott case [“Vile
Product of Welfare UK”, in case you’ve forgotten]. I wasn’t the only person to complain of
course, there were thousands of us. But, despite this, the PCC has ruled that (inter
alia):
The article
acknowledged the fact that Mr Philpott’s case was an extreme example, and the
Commission did not consider that the article had suggested that his conduct was
representative of welfare claimants as a whole. Whilst the Commission noted the
complainant’s position that it was unclear which of Mr Philpott’s
characteristics were being referred to in suggesting that these were
widespread, it did not consider that this had resulted in the article being
significantly inaccurate or misleading. The columnist’s view, that tens of
thousands of welfare claimants were “scroungers” and his view that these
individuals’ lifestyles constituted an abuse of the system, was clearly
distinguished as an expression of his opinion.
To be honest, I didn’t really expect much else. The head of
the PCC is Paul Dacre, who also, coincidentally, happens to be the editor of
the Daily Mail. Draw your own conclusions.
And, in the wider sense, the Daily Mail is a newspaper with which I
would not sully my arse by using it as bog-paper. But nevertheless, it would
seem that you can say what you like about whom you like, as long as you make it
clear that it’s an expression of your opinion. So the Daily Mail can write
article after article suggesting all welfare claimants are feckless scroungers
who should be made to wear yellow stars and herded into camps (and probably
will do, come election year) and as long as it’s clearly set out as a matter of
opinion, the PCC will sit on its hands and do nothing. I would, therefore, like to clearly set out
my opinion, that the journalists who draw money under false pretences by
recycling any questionable old shit that Iain Duncan-Smith cares to lob them,
should be set to work breaking rocks in a quarry till they apologise, in person
and in print, to everyone who they have traduced unfairly by association with
Philpott.
And in any case, who are the real scroungers? Consider the
following list:
A Chinon armchair: £331
A Manchu cabinet: £493
A pair of elephant lamps: £134.50
A Loire table: £750
A birch Camargue chair: £432
A birdcage coffee table: £238.50
A dishwasher: £454
A Range cooker: £639
A fridge-freezer: £702
A Kenwood toaster: £19.99
A cot mattress from Toys ‘R’ Us: £34.99
8 coffee spoons and cake forks, £5.95 each
These are just some of the items claimed on expenses by
Michael Gove MP, the current education secretary, who is known for
pontificating about too much being spent on welfare, and “living within our
means”. These items were claimed for his second home, using the additional
costs allowance. Then in 2006, Michael Gove bought himself a house in his
constituency at a cost of £395,000. He
charged taxpayers £13,259 for the move, plus over £500 for a night at the
Pennyhill Park Hotel and Spa. He then flipped his second home allowance to the
house in his constituency, and routinely claimed the maximum amount MPs were
entitled to claim from the Additional Costs Allowance: £22,110 in 2006-2007,
and £23,083 in 2007-2008. Further proof, if proof were needed, that we’re all
in this together, of course.
Once more I find myself teetering on the brink between
commenting on my own life and commenting on the world at large. As usual, I am
on the horns of a Dalai Lama. Which is more important, my spiritual life or the
fact that there’s suffering and injustice in the world? And what do we do about
the fact that some religions are seemingly content to womble along and ignore
the suffering and injustice on the premise that it will all be corrected in the
next world. It’s the same dilemma that currently preoccupies The Archers of all
things: do they raise £35,000 to restore the church organ, while there are
dossers sleeping rough in the bus shelter.
Not
everyone in an organised religion is content to sit on the fence and equivocate,
however. According to the BBC News
Magazine web site:
A Spanish nun has
become one of Europe's most influential
left-wing public intellectuals. This year, thousands have joined her
anti-capitalist movement, which campaigns for Catalan independence, the
reversal of public spending cuts and nationalisation of banks and energy
companies.
The nun in question is Sister Teresa Forcades, the unlikely
star of local television chat shows, plus Twitter and Facebook. The people who have signed up to the movement she started, Proces
Constituent, which has signed up around 50,000 new members alone this year, are
mainly non-believing atheists of a left-wing persuasion. Her 10-point programme
calls for:
• A government takeover of all banks, and measures to curb
financial speculation.
• An end to job cuts; fairer wages and pensions, shorter
working hours and payments to parents who stay at home.
• Genuine "participatory democracy" and steps to
curb political corruption.
• Decent housing for all, and an end to all foreclosures.
• A reversal of public spending cuts, and renationalisation
of all public services.
• An individual's right to control their own body, including
a woman's right to decide over abortion.
• "Green" economic policies and the
nationalisation of energy companies.
• An end to xenophobia, and repeal of immigration laws.
• Placing public media under democratic control, including
the internet. [I am not entirely sure I agree with her here – for me, part of the power of the internet is
that politicians have tried, and failed, to understand or control it]
• International "solidarity", Spain leaving NATO, and the abolition of armed
forces in a free Catalonia.
Sister Teresa also believes the Roman Catholic church should
be thoroughly modernised for the 21st Century including a welcome for women
priests and gay people allowed to serve openly in the church. She admires
Gandhi, and some of the policies of the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Bolivia's Evo Morales. She also
advocates the economic model of Benedictine nuns creating useful goods to sell.
I must admit, I am all in favour of the Benedictine order creating produce to
sell, especially if the produce in question is Benedictine. Needless to say,
Catholic bishops loyal to the Vatican
have been criticising her radical stances on everything from abortion to
banking, but for now at least, her own bishop at home has allowed her to
continue. We shall see.
I was interested in this story of a feisty woman going her
own way in the church because today [Sunday 15th September] is the
feast of St Catherine of Genoa.
That’s Genoa as in, “my wife went to Italy!” “Genoa?” “Of course I do,
I’m married to her!” St Catherine of Genoa
[Caterina Fieschi Adorno, 1447 –
15 September 1510] was a saint and mystic, admired for her work among the sick
and the poor, and remembered because of various writings describing both these
actions and her mystical experiences. She spent most of her life and her means
serving the sick, especially during the plague which ravaged that city in 1497
and 1501. She died in 1510.
I was struck by the resonances with what I wrote last week
about pantheism, and about those moments when you know inexplicably that all
shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well, in the words of Juliana of
Norwich. It is this direct personal
experience of the otherness of what some might call the Almighty that seems to
be at the core of the mystical experience. Or rather not the otherness, but the
unity with the otherness, where in fact you come to the realisation that
everything is all one, and you too are part of it. Sometimes there is no place
where “you” ends and the rest of it begins, which is very like the Buddhist
concept of Satori. We’re getting into territory here where words themselves
start to break down and become less than useless, because the Tao that can be
described is not the Tao.
In the same way that the Zen writings describe people
experiencing Satori as literally shaking with fright and with beads of sweat
appearing on their brows, Catherine’s experience of God and purgatory is not
pretty, or comfortable, and not for the faint-hearted. She consistently uses the metaphor of a
refining fire, for the process of stripping away everything that prevents the
soul from uniting with what she calls God.
Sin's rust is the
hindrance, and the fire burns the rust away so that more and more the soul
opens itself up to the divine inflowing.
When gold has been
purified up to twenty-four carats, it can no longer be consumed by any fire;
not gold itself but only dross can be burnt away. Thus the divine fire works in
the soul: God holds the soul in the fire until its every imperfection is burnt
away and it is brought to perfection, as it were to the purity of twenty-four
carats, each soul however according to its own degree. When the soul has been
purified it stays wholly in God, having nothing of self in it; its being is in
God who has led this cleansed soul to Himself; it can suffer no more for
nothing is left in it to be burnt away; were it held in the fire when it has
thus been cleansed, it would feel no pain. Rather the fire of divine love would
be to it like eternal life and in no way contrary to it.
The same image of the refining fire is also used by Eliot in
Little Gidding, from Four Quartets, though his prime source
is probably Dante.
From wrong to wrong
the exasperated spirit proceeds,
Unless restored by
that refining fire
Where you must move in
measure, like a dancer.
Catherine was converted by a mystical experience during
confession on 22 March 1473; her conversion is described as an overpowering
sense of God's love for her. After this revelation occurred, she abruptly walked
out, without even finishing her confession. This, instead, marked the beginning
of her life of close union with God in prayer, without using the more common forms
of prayer such as the rosary. She began to receive Communion almost daily, a
practice extremely rare for those outside of the clergy in the Middle Ages, and
she underwent further remarkable mental and mystical experiences.
You can interpret “an overpowering sense of God’s love” to
be something akin to the oneness felt by the Zen pupil when he realises Satori.
I don’t think I have ever experienced what the Zen masters would call Satori,
in the same way as I don’t think that those moments, those times when I have
felt an increased sense of oneness with the universe have been truly mystical
experiences. Partly because you begin to realise the enormity of what you are
thinking, what you are experiencing, and then shy away from it – or at least I
do. But if ever I had the courage to continue down the road to Satori, the road
to the life-transforming mystical experience beyond which there is no return to
the old “you”, that is the path I would look to go down.
St Catherine’s mystical experiences led her to change her
life, and the lives of those around her, because she began offering unselfish
service to the sick in a hospital at Genoa,
in which her husband joined her after he, too, had been converted. He later
became a Franciscan, but she joined no religious order. He and Catherine
decided to live in the Pammatone, a large hospital in Genoa, and to dedicate themselves to works of
charity there, and she eventually became manager and treasurer of the hospital.
She died in 1510, after a prolonged illness with many days of pain and
suffering as she experienced visions and wavered between life and death. For
the last few years of her life, following the death of her husband in 1497,
Catherine, who had previously defined her relationship with God as one of
“interior inspiration”, agreed to have a spiritual advisor, in the form of one
Fr Marabotti, who compiled her Memoirs.
She was actually declared a saint on the strength of her
writings alone, especially on purgatory, as this excerpt from a 2005 paper
presented to the Renaissance Symposium at the University of Mississippi
sets out:
Purgatory,
however, was more than a doctrine for Catherine; it was also a metaphor for her
daily life. As described in her vita,
"She saw the condition of the souls in purgatory in the mirror of her
humanity and of her mind, and therefore spoke of it so clearly. She seemed to
stand on a wall separating this life from the other, that she might relate in
one what she saw suffered in the other" (ch.37). Yet this description does
not fully capture the nature of her experience of purgatory, since it does not
mention the way God, according to the vita, made a purgatory out of her body (ch.38).
In Catherine's life,
purgatory manifested itself in an unusually strong antagonism between spirit and
flesh, an antagonism so great that it made her physically ill. As the vita explains, "When the spirit found
itself obliged to yield somewhat to humanity, if it had not been restrained by
a divine power, it would have reduced that body to dust, to obtain the liberty
to be entirely occupied with itself; and the body, on its side, would rather
have endured a thousand deaths than suffer so much oppression of the
spirit" (ch.38). It is not inappropriate therefore to say that Catherine
underwent her purgation in this life, rather than in the next.
So what am I saying here? Why am I so interested in this
dead Italian? We seem to have a
situation where someone had an experience of God [check] which inspired them to
do something [check] and who took their inspiration direct from a relationship
with God without the church as the intermediary [check]. In this respect, Sister Teresa Forcades is
another of the same, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t become St Teresa
Forcades one day.
We seem to have someone whose direct mystical experience of
God seemed to them to bridge this world and the other [standing on the wall,
looking over into purgatory] in a way that reminds me very strongly of some of
my own experiences, or rather, what some of my own experiences could have been
like, if I had had the courage to allow them to progress, mindful of their
implications, instead of ducking the issue:
Love bade me welcome,
yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin
As George Herbert puts it.
But what does it mean? We can’t all be mystics, surely, or it would be
like a football team with eleven wingers, all winging it. Very entertaining to
watch, for those few minutes while you have the ball at your feet, the wizard
of dribble, but who organises the midfield, the defence, and the goalkeeping?
Good old Milton
has one answer:
Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon
replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or
his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke,
they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands
at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and
ocean without rest;
They also serve who
only stand and wait."
So maybe we should be content to be one of those who only
stand and wait. Not everybody gets to the mountain top and peeps over into the
promised land. As long as the standing
and waiting doesn’t become an end in itself, and you remember why you’re
standing and what you’re waiting for, I guess.
I can’t spend all my days in a state of permanent ecstasy, I
have things to do and promises to keep. What I suppose I must do is accept the
limited glimpses I get now and again, and, in the interim, be one of those who
also serves. But is that a compromise
too far? Where do I draw the line? Would it be better if I did actually give in
to my tendencies, open up some of these metaphorical unanswered direct personal
messages from Big G and spend the rest of my days wearing a hair shirt and
raving to the sky in a cave somewhere? I complain long and loud (like Matilda about the rain) when he doesn’t
call, but when he does leave a message, it seems I’m scared of the content!
It would certainly be a very different world if we all sold
all that we had, gave it to the poor, and headed off into the wilderness, but
would it be better, or worse? Or, indeed, just different? And what about those
times when I don’t feel close to Big G, when I feel silent and morose and
bolshy? Those times when I must stand and wait.What do you do then, if you're in a cave, half way up a mountain, like St Molaise on Mullach Mor?
Still, there’s a lot of serving, and standing and waiting to
do, whatever. I noticed, during the wind and rain this afternoon, that one of
the greenhouses has now got a hole in the top, so really what it needs doing is
either re-covering or taking to bits and disposing of. I’ll add it to my list. There are dozens of these minor outdoor jobs
that need doing, battening down the hatches before winter howls through the
garden again. The weather today would
certainly have tested any pantheist. It’s hard to believe that “the world is
full of the grandeur of God” when you see your greenhouse being shredded before
your eyes.
And, as well as the minor outdoor jobs, there are some major
indoor ones, like all the books I am supposed to be working on, plus last
year’s accounts, plus the forms I still have to fill in to tell the crematorium
what I want doing with my parents’ ashes.
So that’s next week sorted, then. And at least we’re all here, Sunday
teatime, gathered round the stove, the dog steaming slightly from the rain, Matilda
snoozing, and the camper van parked outside in the driveway. I suppose we must be thankful for these small
mercies, and remember that without the humdrum, we can’t properly evaluate our
experience of the exceptional. Thank God,
I need to go and get some coal in, then.
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