Epiblog for the Feast of St John of God

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Even busier than last week, and full of sad tasks, which have had to be fitted in around what passes for normal life.  The weather started out unkind and finished clement, with the temperatures on the rise and some actual warmth in the sunlight for a change. It has (at least for the moment) stopped hailstoning. 

While the weather was busy doing its pieces earlier in the week, we did have some quite spectacular hailstorms, with hailstones the size of frozen peas bouncing up off the decking. They came on very suddenly, as well – one minute, poor little Matilda was sitting on the decking basking in a bit of pale sunshine, then the skies darkened and bang! down it came, sending her scuttling for the door.

She’s not had a good week, to be honest. On the same day (I think it was Thursday) she was the victim of two cat-astrophes, only one of which was her fault. That was when she fell off the settee.  She’d been hard, fast asleep, under the influence of the stove, which I had cranked up to counteract the cold draughts that infest this house. At some point she awoke and decided to jump off the settee, but managed to get her claw caught in her little woolly blanket and was unable to free it in time before gravity took hold and she landed like a sack of spuds on the carpet.  She got up, shook herself, then walked into the conservatory and sat down on the mat there, and gave herself the most thorough wash, with a slightly injured air of “of course, I meant to do that, all along.”

Then, later in the same day, she went to the door of the conservatory and asked to be let out, so I trundled over and opened it for her, and she started doing that dithering in or out thing that cats do so well, of rubbing her chin on the edge of the door, two legs outside, two still inside, and sniffing the air. Misty, meanwhile, must’ve heard me unlatch the door from her recumbent position on the settee in Colin’s front room, and came barrelling through, on a mission, to get to the garden or bust. I don’t know if she actually trod on Matilda because it all happened too fast, but either way she was barged out of the way and scuttled back between the wheels of my wheelchair, into the house. When Misty had come back in, I went in search of Matilda and found her curled up on her settee in Colin’s. Making sure that no permanent harm had been done, I gave her a handful of cat treats and she rewarded me with a baleful glare.

She’s not very good at cat stuff, generally, apart from sleeping and eating, the poor old bagpuss that she is. Yesterday, when the sun actually was quite warm on the decking, she was lying out there like lamb on salad, washing herself and occasionally purring, wedged between two planters, while the blackbirds came and went only five feet away, emptying the dish of stale brown bread I had but out for them. Once or twice, Matilda looked vaguely interested, and swished her tail, but even as I watched, she would lose the plot and go back to licking her own stomach, or scratching behind her ear with her back foot.  It was obviously too much trouble to go hunting prey, when not twenty feet away was a warm bed and a food dish that magically refills itself on demand.

Because it was a fine day on Friday, and because (for a variety of reasons) Debbie was up and about earlier than normal, she decided to take Misty and Zak over to Dove Stones, and they ended up doing a 13-mile walk. All through the winter, especially during the firework season, Misty has been walking on the lead, attached to Debbie by a length of dyneema and clipped on by a karabiner. It was such a nice day on Friday, that Debbie felt like doing a bit of a scramble, so, at the foot of the rocks actually on top of Dove Stones, she unclipped Misty and told her to stay there with Zak, while she climbed up to the top.  Having reached her goal, Debbie looked down to see Misty legging it, off back in the direction from which they had come.  Shouting was no good, so Debbie had to do a rapid descent, and then, back at ground level, round up Zak, who, good boy that he is, had obeyed orders and waited patiently, and then set off in pursuit of Misty.

Debbie was hoping that Misty would have stopped at the river bank to wait for them, but in fact when they got there, Misty was actually in the river, lying down and cooling off, and showed no immediate sign of wanting to resume taking part in the walkies. She did eventually allow herself to be coaxed out without Debbie having to wade in and get her, but it was apparently a close-run thing. So she came back home in disgrace, at least until it was time to break out the dog-treats.

The coming of warmer weather has once more led to Deb thinking about getting away in the camper van. Because her last class now ends on a Thursday lunchtime, theoretically it would be possible to set off on a Thursday afternoon and not have to get back until Sunday lunchtime. Theoretically. In practice, however, it would require energy levels and a degree of organisation hitherto unknown. We shall see. I’d actually like to see the mountains of the Lake District again, even if we got no further than that.

We’ve also been discussing where to go on holiday, assuming we ever get there. Debbie, following the links from various Youtube videos where deep-voiced and deadly serious Americans with names like Brad Monobrow teach you survival skills and how to crap in the woods without spooking the bears, has been looking at films of Alaska. I said that if I wanted to be freezing cold and bored stiff, I could just stay at home, and that my ideal holiday involved Mediterranean sunshine and looking at ancient ruins, to which she replied that I could just stay at home and look in a mirror. So it’s probably going to be the Isle of Arran, yet again, it being one of the few spots on the globe about which we can agree.

I’ve also always fancied going to look at the Crusader castles in the Middle East, but obviously with all of the current carnage in Syria, I think I’ll have to cross that one off my bucket list for the foreseeable. Mr Cameron, God strafe him, has been pontificating about Middle Eastern terrorism again this week, in a speech where he said that non-violent extremists are just as bad as ISIS.  I assume that he meant people like Anjem Choudary, who wind up other, more gullible people, to go off and perform “radical” acts, often, as in the case of Lee Rigby, with dreadful, devastating consequences, while never themselves stepping outside the boundaries of the law.

But it you take it to its extreme, Cameron’s pronouncement is actually quite sinister. We already have legislation where just thinking about committing a terrorist atrocity can be counted as a crime, and we already have secret courts where, in some circumstances, the accused is not even allowed to know what it is that they have been accused of. If you start adding to that the possibility of criminalising someone merely for their words, you are setting a dangerous precedent. Much as I would like to see some of these radical Imams brought to account, or at least challenged, we do already have existing laws and mechanisms to carry this out, without adding yet another degree of “thought crime”.

What’s to stop the government, or any government, for that matter, deciding one day that simply disagreeing with them counts as “non-violent extremism”. I’ve written things before now where, in the heat of some particular passion, I have even mentioned that there are plenty of cobbles in Downing Street, and plenty of windows in Number 10.  I’ve written that I would like to see done to animal abusers, if caught, tried and convicted by a due process, whatever it was they did to the animal they hurt. Is that non-violent extremism? Here we all are again, another week later. First they came for the violent extremists, and I did not object, because I was not a violent extremist... and in any case, who defines “extremism”? Some of the worst injustices in our society demand, indeed cry out for, “extreme” solutions, though not violent ones. The housing shortage, for instance, can only be tackled by an extreme programme of social housing to replace the stock flogged off by Thatcher in her programme of social engineering and class war.  There is a great danger, if we are not careful, of extremism being defined as “anything which is not Tory policy”.

Cameron is desperately trying to put up any fuss and bluster that he can, of course, because there are three major areas where, electorally, he is very vulnerable. Three major lies, three enormous porkies promulgated by the Junta: the economy, the NHS, and immigration.

Cameron was goaded into making his unfulfillable promise on immigration because of the proximity of UKIP snapping at his behind. I can only assume that he looked on it as the lesser of two evils, and hoped that something would turn up. In fact, whilever we belong to the EU, there is sod all that Cameron, or UKIP, or any other politician can do about immigration, it’s just that UKIP are consistently better at manipulating the smoke and mirrors to give the impression they can, especially to people who will happily vote for them without knowing a single one of their policies.

The economy is apparently on the road to recovery, if recovery means that earnings have finally clawed their way back to where they were in 2009, and if recovery means millions of low-paid “jobs” on zero-hours contracts that have to have their wages topped up by in-work benefits; if recovery amounts to being fuelled by an unsustainable property boom initiated by George Osborne when even he finally realised that “austerity” wasn’t working. This was the government that was going to have done away with the deficit in the life of this parliament, and which now hails it as a triumph that it has been “halved”, which is also a lie, or at best, a very specific statistical interpretation to put the best gloss on things. This is the government that increased borrowing, missed all its forecasts and targets, and lost us our triple A rating.  No wonder they want to talk about anything else, or pretend Labour caused the problem in the first place.

Then we have the NHS, where Cameron lied yet again. No top down reorganisation, the NHS is safe in our hands. Yeah, right. The tooth fairy still exists, and Snow White is a virgin.  How do you feel about Santa Claus?

Given this lamentable crock of “achievements”, why aren’t Labour scoring point after point after point off the Junta at every end and turn? Probably because they are too busy trying to flog commemorative tea towels to raise funds. I kid you not. This week I had an email from the Labour Party, asking me if I want to buy one of their limited edition teatowels.

"Wow — the way our vintage election poster tea towels are being snapped up, it seems there's going to be one in every home in the country! Haven't got yours yet? Now's the time: they're strictly limited edition."

Clement Atlee said "vote Labour and we'll give you the National Health Service, education for all, and social housing to replace the homes lost to wartime bombing"

Ed Miliband says "vote Labour and we'll give you a limited edition teatowel." Jesus wept.

Other than that, it’s been a wacky old week in the political sphere, with one MP declaring an abiding belief in astrology and another one suggested that MI5 should try and recruit the next generation of spies from the members of Mumsnet. As one Mumsnet subscriber pointed out “yes, because people who can’t resist pathologically typing their every passing thought into an online message forum would obviously make great spies.” Personally, I am sceptical about the effectiveness of astrology, but then, as an Aries, I would be. Archaeologists from the York Archaeological Trust have found a 2,600-year old ossified human brain in the artefacts found in the dig of a pit in Heslington. Now they just have to return it to the UKIP voter who lost it.   

It may well belong to UKIP MEP David Coburn, who got into a fight (not literally, only verbally) with the audience on BBC TV’s Question Time programme, when he lost it after he was slow-handclapped during a debate on immigration and housing, and called the audience “bourgeois”, and “Greens”.  Those insults were really meant to sting!  Actually, he must have been having an off day, because he has previously talked about Nicola Sturgeon as having “mad scary eyes” and compared Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson to porridge.  Mind you, since when did “Green” become an insult (actually, I can answer that: probably about the same time as “left-wing” did – we’re back to labelling anyone who disagrees with the Blight Brigade as being dangerous extremists, again.

One person who would undoubtedly have been labelled as a dangerous extremist if he were around today in 21^st century Britain is St John of God, whose feast day we have arrived at, today. I should feel a specific affinity with him, because he is, amongst other things, the patron saint of booksellers. In fact, though, I often, and always, mix him up with St John of the Cross.  So, for the avoidance of any doubt, I am talking about St John of God, here, feast day March 8^th.  Unusually, March 8^th was also his birthday, in 1495, as well as the day of his death in 1550.

He was born João Duarte Cidade in the District of Évora, Portugal, and he was the son of André Cidade and Teresa Duarte, a once-prominent family that had fallen upon hard times but still retained religious faith. When he was eight, he disappeared from home, and was supposed to have been kidnapped by a visiting cleric.  According to the original sources for his hagiography, this meant that his mother died from grief following the traumatic event and his widower father joined the Franciscans.

The young St John of God then became a homeless orphan in the streets of Oropesa, a town near Toledo. He was eventually taken in by one Francisco Mayoral, and earned his keep as a shepherd caring for Mayoral’s sheep.  This arrangement lasted until he was 27 years of age, but then, under pressure from Mayoral to accept his daughter’s hand in marriage, instead, St John joined a company of footsoldiers who were fighting for Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, against the French at Fontarabia. He became embroiled in a scandal there, when it was discovered that a large store of captured treasure he was supposed to have been in charge of guarding, had been ransacked and much of it was missing. On the principle of the person who is nearest must be guilty, whether they did it or not, he was sentenced to be hanged until a more tolerant officer managed to intervene and have him pardoned.

St John then returned to the farm and to his shepherding duties, which he undertook for another four years, until he again enlisted, this time with a troop under the command of the Count of Oropesa, who was setting off to fight the Turks in Hungary. This was the start of an 18-year military career which took John all over Europe.

When the Count returned, triumphant, his forces landed in Galicia, and St John took the opportunity to go back to his home village. Learning of the fate of his parents from an aged relative, he decided to turn his back on the place, as he no longer had any ties to it. He returned to Spain and found work again as a shepherd, near to Seville. It was probably during the time he spent there, contemplating his life while camped out on the hillside with his flock, that he began to formulate his desire to go to Africa, and fulfil God’s purpose for him, as he saw it, as perhaps a martyr. In any event, he wanted to go to the Portuguese territory of Ceuta, located in what is now present-day Morocco, with a vague plan to work to free enslaved Christians in that locality.

On the journey, he befriended an exiled Portuguese knight and his family, who were bound out from Gibraltar to the same destination, having incurred the displeasure of the King of Portugal.  On their arrival at Ceuta, however, the knight had all of his few remaining possessions stolen, and then he and all of his family fell ill. St John of God took on nursing them, and found work to provide them, and himself, with food.  His job, building fortifications, was arduous and gruelling, and seeing the harsh treatment meted out to his co-workers by people who were, nominally at any rate, Catholics like himself, damaged his faith. A local Franciscan priest advised him not to blame the church as a whole for the excesses of some of its zealots, and suggested he should return to Spain, which he did, landing again at Gibraltar.

This began a period of hand-to-mouth existence, when he spent his days helping to unload ships’ cargoes and his nights in studying books and in prayer. Eventually, his love of books led him to become an itinerant book-pedlar, wandering round the towns of Andalusia, and all the time trying to work out what God wanted him to do with the remainder of his life.  A vision at the age of 41 is supposed to have led him to Granada, where he set up a small shop selling books and tracts.

It was in that town, on January 20^th, 1537, that he happened to hear a sermon preached by John of Avila, a major spiritual leader in the area, and it proved to be both traumatic, profound, and life-changing. St John went back to his shop, tore up any secular books, and gave away the remainder of his stock. He then began wandering the streets, bewailing his past, beating himself, rending his clothes, and repenting. He became a target for ridicule and even hostility, and was taken to the area of the Royal Hospital reserved for mental patients. Unfortunately, the treatment for that sort of thing at the time was like something out of the Tory manifesto: patients were segregated, beaten, chained, and starved.  Eventually, John of Avila, who had caused the problem in the first place, came to visit St John in the hospital, and eased his pain by telling him that his suffering had now gone on for exactly the same length as Jesus’s torments in the wilderness, forty days and nights, so it was time to give it a rest.

This seems to have marked some sort of major turning-point in his life and, on his release from hospital, he immediately began nursing the poor and the sick. At first, he carried on this ministry on the streets of Grenada, but one day, impulsively, he found a house for rent, and took on the lease of what became his first hospital.  He encountered considerable distrust from people who viewed him as basically still mentally ill, but persevered, carrying his patients to the house on his back, selling wood to raise money for food, and begging for essentials such as beds, linen and medicines, such as there were in those days. He cleaned up the patients, cared for them as best he could, and mended their clothes while praying at night. Eventually, he gained the trust and support of a network of sympathetic priests and physicians who agreed with his aims and objectives.

He was able to move his hospital to an old Carmelite monastery, where he opened a homeless shelter and immediately met with criticism from the neighbours, who said he was harbouring troublemakers. Doesn’t that sound depressingly familiar? His answer to his critics was that he only knew of one bad character in the hospital – himself!  He was not above “bending” the law to achieve a pragmatic result, however, and is recorded as having taken without permission (some would say “stolen”) a cooking pot full of food to feed a group of starving people, and having re-clothed a gang of ragamuffin street urchins in new clothes bought on non-existent credit.

His patronage, as a saint, was extended from booksellers to firefighters, when he was called one day to the Royal Hospital in Granada, which was on fire. He rushed into the inferno and led patients to safety, carrying those who could not help themselves. When the building was clear of potential human victims, he returned to the blaze, this time to save beds, blankets, sheets and mattresses by throwing them out of the windows. Finally, a decision was made by the authorities to use a cannon to blow up the burning portion of the roof, to prevent the fire, which was out of control, spreading to the remainder of the building, but before this could happen, John had climbed on the roof and used an axe to chop through the burning beams to prevent the flames taking hold.  This action almost cost him his life, as he then fell through the burning roof, but somehow he emerged from the conflagration unscathed.

His eventful existence eventually came to an end, however, when he caught pneumonia in a vain attempt to save the life of one of his companions, who had fallen into the swollen river in a time of flood, while trying to gather driftwood. St John of God died on his fifty-fifth birthday, March 8^th, 1550.  After his death, the informal circle of helpers, disciples and followers he had established to aid him in his work was approved by the Papacy in 1572 as the Brothers Hospitallers of St John of God, eventually becoming, over the centuries, the order that now has a presence in 53 countries worldwide, running over 300 hospitals, and with over 45,000 members.

Following his death, his body was initially buried in the Church of Our Lady of the Victories, and remained there until November 28, 1664, when the Hospitaller Brothers had his relics moved to the church of their hospital in the same city. He was canonized by Pope Alexander VIII on October 16, 1690, and a church was erected in 1757 to house his remains. On October 26, 1757, they were transferred to that church, now protected by the Knights of Saint John of God.

As you can probably tell from the amount of space I have devoted to telling his story, I have a lot of time for St John of God. I feel certain resonances with him.  My ancestors were shepherds. I, too, have spent a lot of time wandering around wondering what God meant for me to do. When I was 55, I died – or at least my old life did, in an experience every bit as transformatory as St John of God’s listening to the sermon of John of Avila.  I suppose that experience, and what arose out of it, has instilled in me a reminder not to talk myself out of doing things just because the outcome might be impractical, or embarrassing.  There are lots of little voices in our heads that tell us all sorts of reasons why it wouldn’t be a good idea to do this or that right now, better safe than sorry, wait, wait and hesitate. But these days, if I feel the need to speak, or act, I speak, or act. Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Where I do fall down, though, is in the lack of courage. Like the cowardly lion. To lead the life of someone like St John of God, as well as probably being able to drive an ambulance, you need a sort of complete and overarching courage to let go, to let go of everything, to let yourself fall backwards and trust that Big G will catch you. The sort of courage that makes you dash into a burning building, rather than running the other way. It was the same with St John’s modern day cognate, Fr. Vincent McNabb, who used to tramp round the houses of his poor parishioners in 1930s London, washing their kitchen floors for them.  That’s the bit I can’t do. Well, that, and the forgiveness.

Still, I’ve listed and enumerated my shortcomings often enough in this blog, and raking over old coals becomes tedious after a while. Maybe one day I will see something so blindingly obvious that my purpose will be revealed to me. Meanwhile, they also serve who only stand and wait, or who get the coal in, or feed the animals, or cook the stew. Or tend the sheep, I suppose.

Anyway, it’s got to be Sunday teatime again and – surprisingly – it’s still light, which shows, I guess, that spring is in the air, or on the wing, or something. Maisie’s daffodils, talking of Wordsworth, are nodding in the breeze, but they aren’t in flower yet. Snow is melting, the hail’s stopped pelting, as the song says. Next week contains Mike’s funeral, on Thursday, which will be a sad day, and there is still much to be done in terms of sorting out arrangements – not by me, but it still needs doing.  I finally found the text of the supposed Norman Nicholson poem I was looking for, which Mike’s death brought to mind: except it’s by Sidney Keyes, writing about Wordsworth.  

No room for mourning: he’s gone out
Into the noisy glen, or stands between the stones
Of the gaunt ridge, or you’ll hear his shout
Rolling among the screes, he being a boy again.
He’ll never fail nor die
And if they laid his bones
In the wet vaults or iron sarcophagi
Of fame, he’d rise at the first summer rain
And stride across the hills to seek
His rest among the broken lands and clouds.

As Sally Evans said to me, you could hardly find a better epitaph for someone who loved the great outdoors.  The Holmfirth Harriers have also posted a very kind obituary to him on their web site, which details his many athletic achievements. If the weather holds, and there is a chance of the camper van making it that far, we’ll try to get up to Walney next weekend. He liked it there, on the occasions when we took him and the dogs, and it would be a good place to contemplate, and to remember him. If I don’t manage to post a blog next Sunday, that’s probably why.  

In the meantime, Debbie has come back with the dogs, and has begun to cause chaos in the kitchen behind me, by preparing a smoothie whose ingredients include avocados, granny smith apples, kale and soya milk. She is intending to drink it herself, rather than give it to the dogs, but either way, it’s a potential disaster which needs supervising.  Wish me luck.