Under the cloud

It’s been one of those weeks.

I saw the dark cloud approaching, hovering on the horizon, probably about ten days ago. I spotted it and I ignored it.

For some reason, I thought that denial might work – this time.

And as the cloud approached, I remained naively optimistic. It will be different this time. I can do this. I can win this battle.

I started feeling slightly disconnected – from those around me, from conversations, from life. And I still carried on thinking I would be ok.

Then. Then – the crash. Unable to get out of bed. Unable to answer my phone. Unable to connect – with anyone, anything.

The cloud had enveloped me. I could no longer deny its presence. I could not fight, I had no resources or strength. Nothing.

I felt so sad. Overwhelmed by disappointment. A sense of loss. A sadness at the world we live in, at the suffering of those I love. A sadness and a questioning – of the path I am on, the world I occupy.

I could no longer see, enveloped by blackness. Bleakness.

I have been under the cloud before. And it is horrible. Awful. It is lonely, isolating, enveloping, all-consuming.

No-one should ever have to live under the cloud.

And today? Today, the cloud is still there but there are some rays of light too.

So please don’t worry. I write these words not to alarm anyone, but in the pursuit of honesty and truth. Of vulnerability.

For I spend many years pretending I was strong. And I am not.

I cannot do this on my own.

And I cannot pretend anymore. It’s been one of those weeks.

Moving up, moving down

I often hear talk, amongst Christians, of the desire to “be countercultural”, articulating an attempt to live differently in a world that is, in the West at least, marked by individualism, independence and financial aspiration.

And yet, the more I think about it, the more clearly I see: how little difference there is – in terms of every-day, nitty-gritty living – between those of faith and those of none.

For many middle-class Christians have embraced a middle-class faith.

A faith that allows for upward mobility, financial security and “confort zone living”.

A faith that, it would seem, talks about “going the extra mile” – yet rarely leads to worn out shoes.

A faith that ticks the “giving box” through impersonal direct debits, and avoids the command to “give away an extra coat”.

A faith exhibiting a reluctance to give-til-it-hurts.

A faith that has failed to truly cross the boundaries of wealth, class and background – so the rich get richer, the poor stay poor and we inhabit two separate worlds.

I write this not to judge, but as a confession. An admission that I, a fully signed-up Christian, am comfortable  in my comfort zone. I make choices that benefit me (and those I love) and I get caught up – day by day, week by week – in an aspirational, “upwards” mindset – bigger salary, bigger house, bigger cupboards. More. More. More.

Recently, though, my hubster and I made a different choice. You could, I guess, call it a “downward decision”. We had to move house – and so we left our lovely home with a big garden and moved into our friend’s spare room. We stepped off the up escalator and started exploring a different path. We are students of an alternative trail.

I know that some of our friends find it weird. After all – who would choose shared space instead of privacy? Which married couple would move in with others, except in an emergency? In a country obsessed with land ownership, why would anyone aspire to “shared space” over “my space”?

Then, this morning, I read these words:

“The rampant individualism of Western society is a relatively new thing, and its emptiness is increasingly evident … We are wealthy and lonely…”

We are lonely. We live in a world that is more “connected” than ever before. Facebook, Twitter, email, texting, BBM. Instant access to others. And – if the phone doesn’t buzz or beep – instant loneliness.

We are wealthy. And the more money we have, the more we isolate ourselves from others.

We are strangers. We bump into others, for we share the same public space, yet we rarely know each other’s names.

We are upwardly mobile, educated, financially secure and full of aspiration. We are middle-class Christians.

And we are missing out.

Missing out on the wonder of hearing the life-stories of those with journeys very different to ours, and the indescribable joy of the friendships that can emerge. Missing out on the laughter, and tears, of living-entwined-lives, and not solely with “people like us”. Missing out on the reward and challenge inherent in a risky “no” to cultural norms and a “yes” to downward mobility.

A guy called Shane Claiborne said, “we live in community and among the suffering because it is what we are made for”.

I love that. For it is truly counter-cultural. And it doesn’t sound very middle-class to me.

Who am I? Where am I? Part II

What did the clever man think? He liked it.

And I liked that he liked it. It felt redemptive somehow. Redemptive – yet confusing.

What should I do with that which has been salvaged? Plucked out of the dark and brought into the light? For that is how it felt – as though part of me long locked away was being released, allowed to re-emerge. “The failure” may not, after all, be the end.

Can failures be rescued, re-imagined, resurrected? What can we do with the remnants?

In Mozambique, several years ago, I visited a rubbish dump known locally as the bocarria. There lived the scavengers, those who made a living from others’ waste. Those who were so poor, so desperate, that the unwanted remnants – discarded by fellow human beings – became their livelihood.

These entrepreneurial rescuers knew instinctively that worthless things may actually be deeply valuable. That life is often found amongst waste, that hope often dwells in unusual places – and can be buried within a smelly, forsaken mountain of shit.

Many of us in the West never get anywhere near the shit. We live complacent, comfortable, there-is-always-enough (or there-is-always-too-much) lives. We throw away that which is valuable – both literally and metaphorically – because it’s easier, more convenient, than salvaging from the rubbish. We put the rubbish in the bin automatically, and we lock our failures in the cupboard in the same way. We discard that which may, sometimes, need to be salvaged.

And so we miss out. On redemption. On hope-restoration. On real-life resurrection.

We miss out because salvaging is hard work and costly. Painful. It takes time. And it rubs your hands (and heart) raw.

I – like many – often make the easy choice: sanitized living – clean, safe and predictable. I prefer order to mess. Hygienic surfaces to those strewn with waste. And yet, occasionally, in the midst of my need-for-order, the unexpected occurs. Scavenging – whilst terrifying and confusing – becomes the best choice. And so I choose it. And there, if only for a brief moment, is the sweet aroma of redemption.

Who am I? Where am I?

It’s been a long time since I put fingers to keys here. I am not sure why. I have been busy – yes. I have been away on a work trip – yes. I have been seeking, but not really finding, inspiration – yes. But these things have happened before and it hasn’t kept me away from the blog. This time it has.

And yet now, as I sit here, there is so much that I want to write and I don’t know where to begin. There is too much I’d like to say and yet I don’t know how to say it. The words were, for a while, inaccesssible; now they are competing for my attention. I don’t know which ones to choose first.

Maybe I will begin at the end and work backwards.

I am in the US at the moment on a work trip. I have been here for two weeks and I love it! I have met some incredible people – people who have chosen a different path and live on the periphery. People who keep me awake at night as I try to absorb the conversations we have had. People who are very “ordinary” and, in so being, somehow become extraordinary.

Last night, I was chatting with two of these people, two new friends. Both are academics – one a professor in post-modern philosophy, the other completing her masters in reconciliation, trauma and gender. I found that, as I talked about my days in academia – from 2003 until 2008, whilst I studied for my Ph D – a dormant part of me was resurrected again. A part of me that is usually shelved. part of Becca that tends to stay in a cupboard, in darkness, away from the light. Yet as we spoke – and we had much in common – this neglected part came into focus once again.

My Ph D was – at the time – the most important thing in my life. I saw it as a springboard to great things. Not academia but action. I spent five years thinking about street children in South Africa and the daily abuses of their human rights and, by the end, I couldn’t wait to get my hands dirty. So I went to the frontline, to the streets of South Africa, and dirtied my clean, library-sanitised hands, mind and body. I put the Ph D on a shelf and left the library for good.

When I came back from South Africa a few months later – deflated, exhausted and broken – I wondered why I had bothered. With the Ph D. With the move to SA. With the hours, weeks, years of thinking, planning and dreaming. It had all gone terribly wrong. I had failed. Completely and utterly.

My attempts, a few months later, to find a publisher for my Ph D were similarly impotent. They weren’t interested. I thought I had something to say, something to contribute, but these “experts” did not agree. And so I gave up.

Gave up being an academic. Gave up trying to work on the frontline.

So, what about marriage?

I am going to begin this post with a caveat (that means I feel a bit nervous writing this one!) – I write this blog as honestly as I can. I don’t ever claim to be “right”. In fact, I could be “wrong”.

So, if you massively disagree with me on this post – that is ok. We don’t have to agree on everything. I don’t want to offend, but also I don’t want to say nothing – for fear of offence. So, here goes…

Gay marriage. What do you think? This issue seems incredibly divisive right now – with people passionately defending both sides of the debate. Some getting very angry about it. Others being more gracious.

What is it about sex that gets people so worked up? Particularly, it seems, those in the church. A friend of mine was told he couldn’t marry his fiancee in a church as she was divorced – so she would have to “repent publicly” before her wedding. They chose not to. For she had nothing to apologise for – young love had simply fizzled out. She wasn’t usually a church-goer but liked the idea of a church wedding. Is that really a crime?

Gay sex gets people even more worked up. Makes people angry. Livid. Moving beyond all the “is it natural?” debate, surely the more important question to ask the angry is: why are you so angry? Is it really moral piety? Are you really so blameless yourself? So happy (and qualified) to throw the first stone?

Why do same-sex relationships make some people so angry? An interesting article recently in the Times, by Matthew Parrish (himself a gay man) talked about a spectrum of sexuality. The polar opposites we use to box people in (“gay” or “straight”) are, he claims, a social construction. Humanity is far more messy. Which means the right/wrong dichotomy becomes harder to justify. Life is, after all, too messy to fit into neat boxes (we all know that by now, surely). Do people get angry because it touches on an insecurity or pain deep inside them – the issue maybe being in the eye of the beholder rather than the accused? Do people get angry because they are living along a “them” v. “us” divide? It is, after all, easier to dislike (or even hate) “them” if they remain “the other”. Once “they” are closer to “you” (as friend, colleague or relative) such black-and-white loathing is harder to sustain.

If gay marriage is only understood in terms of “them”, it remains an academic issue (even if it is dressed up in moral clothing). Once it is closer to home, it once again becomes messy/grey/harder to outright condemn.

So this is my question: is it really so bad if two people want to make a lifelong partnership official? If they want to publicly commit to each other, should they be excluded? Is it more “moral” to exclude or to embrace?

I write this as a Christian – who believes in the importance of marriage and tries to live my life in line with what I read in the Bible. I wouldn’t call myself a “liberal”, but neither am I a fundamentalist (sometimes it feels like life would be more straightforward if I was!). I often wrestle deeply with what it means to live a life of faith and hope in that I cannot see. I have doubts. And questions. And sometimes it seems there are no easy answers.

I find it hard to reconcile faith in a God of love and generosity with the attitude I see around me in many churches – a “morality” seemingly based on superiority and judgment. I find it hard to stomach some of the venom directed at those who are for gay marriage. It seems like hatred, not love. And that sits uncomfortably with me. For me, Jesus was a radical, an unconventional Messiah who shattered most expectations and frequently offended the “holy ones”. He didn’t like religious rules. He loved the unloved and embraced the broken and needy. He didn’t create petitions to “witness” to truth, instead he loved prostitutes, the mentally ill and the outcasts. And he often healed them in the process (but not always – another conundrum!).

Jesus seemed to accept people as they were. He didn’t bring easy answers. He seemed instead to generate more questions. And confusion.

And this is why I am a Christian – because faith is not about ticking boxes or living separate from the world. For Jesus did neither. I believe in a radical, loving, generous, outrageous, extravagant Messiah. One who embraced the misunderstood/the different/the outcast and asks me to do the same.

So I cannot, in integrity, sign any petition “against gay marriage”. Nor would I want to. I cannot stand on my moral perch and condemn. That would be ridiculous.

And I hope that, whatever the outcome, the church – this time – stops thinking in terms of “them” and “us”. And – this time – chooses love over hate.

The oxymoron of “Christian celebrity”

This is a timely, thought-provoking, full-of-truth post by Alan Hirsch. It uses some long words but it is worth wading through them, because he is challenging a taboo here, and it is a much-needed challenge:

“Christian celebrity, especially in that ideological, primadonna-ish, spin-loaded,  cult of self that it embodies, distorts what Jesus essentially stands for.” I love this sentence!

I have long felt uncomfortable with the disparity between the life Jesus lived (humble, anti-status) and the way some leaders in the church live (seemingly status-driven, more-special-than-everyone-else, “set-apart”-but-not-in-a-good-way). This is failure (and-not-in-a-good-way). A failure of priorities. A failure to remember that the Christian way is not about self but the transcendent, beautiful Other.

As Lent – a time of reflection, abstinence and grief – draws to a close, let those of us who call ourselves Christians be honest about our complicity in the creation and sustaining of “Christian celebrity”. Let us grieve our skewed priorities.

And let us do all we can to ensure that the two words – Christian and celebrity – never belong together again.

Miraculous recovery?

It’s been quite a while since I wrote on here. I have surprised myself with my silence. The truth is – the quiet has been a combination of two facts-of-life: 1. Busyness 2. Complete dearth of inspiration.

Work has been busy – for which I am deeply grateful. Life as a freelancer is constantly unpredictable and I am very happy to have an influx of work, which will keep me busy and out of trouble for a few weeks.

Mostly – and this I suspect is the “real” reason – I just haven’t felt inspired. Haven’t known what to write about. Haven’t felt that I had anything to say. Fleeting thoughts have crossed my mind but nothing has taken root.

Until today.

This morning, I went to church. It was a lovely service. On the whole. A guest speaker and lots of happy faces. All was going swimmingly. And then the preacher mentioned Muamba. Muamba – the man who “died” (technically for 78 minutes) on a football pitch last week, and is now alive. Muamba – the sudden object of the nation’s prayers (or at least, the prayers of those on Twitter). Muamba – the “miracle”.

I must confess, however, that I did not join in with the Twitterati #prayformuamba – although I do pray quite often myself. I didn’t get overexcited about this seeming “answer to prayer”, this “miracle” – and it may well be one (or both) or these.

I couldn’t. I am not a cynic. Nor a pessimist. Quite the opposite in fact.

For me though, jumping on this bandwagon would have meant quelling the difficult questions, the deep agonising, soul-wrenching questions about unanswered prayer.

I have friends longing for a baby, who have prayed again and again for a baby, and who remain childless. And devastated.

I have experienced the darkness of  unanswered prayer in my own life. Where there are no answers to the question “why?”, no “happy endings”.

I am not the only one.

And this morning, I watched a young girl fall apart as the preacher ecstatically exclaimed the miracle of Muamba and the amazing answered prayers witnessed. She fell apart, devastated, because three years ago, she prayed – again and again – that her mum would be healed from cancer. And she wasn’t. Aged 14, she lost her mum. And now she struggles to believe in the God who didn’t hear her prayer.

For her, talk of the Muamba miracle only rubbed salt into the wound. Only compounded her question “why?” and her sense of God’s abandonment and lack of care.

Her pain – so visible and raw – was almost too much to witness. I love this girl deeply. I know how much she misses her Mum. Every day. And like everyone else, I don’t have an answer, a satisfying response.

Does this mean I don’t pray? No. Not at all. I continue to pray even when my prayers aren’t answered. At times like these, my prayers may not be very eloquent or “nice”. More rant-y and raving. At other times, more silent than spoken. At others, there are only tears.

I do believe in prayer. But I don’t like jumping on a bandwagon. A bandwagon that seems to create more questions than answers, more pain (for some) than comfort.

Is Muamba’s life a miracle? Maybe. But let’s not shove that in the face of the hurting and grieving, for like salt rubbed in a wound, the pain created runs too deep for words.

Goodbye (gone too soon)

This morning was a very sad one. One of the saddest I have ever known. It was the funeral of a baby – a baby who died two weeks before he was due to meet us all. He died before he had a chance to live. His arrival on earth was greatly anticipated, surrounded by the usual excitement of new life and the joy that a much-wanted baby brings. I cannot fathom or imagine the suffering of his dear parents at this time.

The service was beautiful. Poignant. Full of tears yet full of hope too. Hope that comes from a belief in a God who comforts those who mourn and weeps with those who weep. As I sat there, tears streaming down my cheeks, I realised that – at these times – we mourn both the present loss and our other losses too. Whether the loss of other loved ones or the loss of hope, the loss of certainty, the loss of control, the loss of an easy-to-understand life. We often fail to take time to grieve that which we have lost.

Our hearts may be aching – sore and battered by loneliness, disappointment, disillusionment – yet we “soldier on”, “putting on a brave face” and “keep going”. We tell ourselves this is for the best. We listen to our heads and ignore our hearts. We do not take time to say goodbye to the hopes and dreams that once stirred our hearts and now linger in a rarely opened box. We do not like going to funerals and so we fail to mourn these losses.

A few years ago, I spent some time at an orphanage in Maputo, Mozambique. One of the projects run by the orphanage was in a local rubbish dump – a huge expanse of smouldering, stinking rubbish. A huge expanse around which homes were built, where many of the poorest people I have ever seen struggled to make a living out of other people’s rubbish – children, adults, mothers with babies strapped to their backs, teenagers. The day before I went to visit this project, one of my fellow volunteers spoke to me, “I hear you are going to the boccaria (rubbish dump) Becca. Tomorrow you will need to hold a funeral for yourself”. I didn’t really understand what he meant, I just knew it would be a heart-wrenching, life-defining experience.

And it was. Filthy, smiling children jumped on me and wouldn’t let go. Mothers with hungry children sorted through the mountain of steaming rubbish, trying to feed their hungry children, now immune to the horrendous smell. I met a teenager who had lived on the boccaria his whole life who told me that he loved reading books, especially Shakespeare (incredible). I came back to the orphanage different to when I left that morning. I understood now – I had seen and experienced something that no human being should ever see, people so poor that the crap and refuse of others had become their daily bread. Children playing in the rubbish, children who know no different.

I had seen the whites of the eyes of those living in this hellhole and I would never forget. Part of me died that day – that was why I had to hold a funeral. Innocence was lost. I felt both privileged – to have been given access to this world – and, understandably, devastated at what I now knew.

Since that time, in 2006, I haven’t held any more funerals for myself. It feels weird even writing that last sentence – perhaps the concept is so at odds with the way we live that it just sounds plain odd to make such a statement. I hate saying goodbye. I get upset watching others have to say goodbye in their grief. Yet would we inhabit a deeper, richer experience if we took some time to say goodbye to all that we have lost? Would being encouraged to say goodbye, to mourn, lead to less estrangement, depression and unhappiness in our society?

As those of us at the funeral today continue to mourn the loss of this precious child, we join countless others around the world in the shared experience of gone-too-soon bereavement. These earth-shattering deaths sit in the foreground amidst the backdrop of little deaths we face far more regularly. If we learn to mourn both the great losses and the smaller ones too, we will, I think, become those who know how to really live.

Power is expensive, but words are free

This is a really interesting article about how Cameron and the Conservatives are flailing. Interesting because it’s written by Tim Montgomerie, the man behind the Conservative Home website, whose strap-line is “the home of conservatism”. To spell it out then, if the editor of your most important pro-party political blog criticises you in a national newspaper, you are probably in trouble.

Where did the Tory party go wrong? Some would say they should never have been allowed to govern.

I, for one, did vote for them – inspired two years ago by their commitment to social justice, to the long-awaited political transformation this country needed, inspired by the new message and new faces bringing this message.

Last year, I spent quite a lot of time writing for, and working closely with, someone who is now one of the PM’s special advisers. I was “in there” for a while, or at least vicariously, and I loved it. I ended up writing this article for the Guardian in the wake of the riots, and for a while I felt close to the action. That all changed when I changed jobs a few months ago. And now, in retrospect, I am really, really glad.

Really glad I no longer have to defend ideals like the “Big Society” (I never understood what it meant – and I spent a month writing a policy paper about it!). Really glad I can distance myself from a party that is, I believe, failing – failing to do what it said it would do, failing to listen to the ordinary man and woman, failing to lead our country forward at a time of great economic instability.

For a while now, I’ve been pondering a similar thought to Tim Montgomerie  – how can people who have always known abundance ever truly understand poverty and need? How can the rich (and I mean truly rich) ever get what it is to go without, to make heart-breaking decisions and see your children suffering as a result – simply because you don’t have enough money? How far can human empathy spread?

The thing about poverty is – however compassionate and kind-hearted you might be, you can never truly understand the pain that poverty brings until you experience it yourself. The sleepness nights. The constant worry and anxiety, 24 hours a day hovering over you. The tension it brings into your relationships. The exclusion zone it creates as you watch your friends go out/buy new shoes/grab another coffee/buy healthy food for their children and know that you cannot join in.Poverty divides and isolates. It rarely unites.

Our leaders have failed to understand. If they understood surely they would not be pushing through these deeply unpopular changes to the NHS and our welfare system. Surely they would not be allowing the judiciary to lock up young people involved in riots – impressionable teenagers whose main crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Surely they would not be continuously pushing up the cost of public transport as the service received continues to decline. We have been failed. I feel duped. And it makes me angry. Angry because it feels like we – the general public – are not being listened to.

Yet words are free. I love words. I love it when words are conjoined and sculpted together in ways that give voice to those without power. It does not cost money to use our words to challenge those in power – whether here in the UK, or amongst those on the front-line of opposition in Syria, Russia or Zimbabwe, or globally amongst those campaigning to end human trafficking and the round up of kids living on the streets.

How will you use your voice today? And tomorrow? Let’s no longer allow the powerful – wherever we are in the world – to think they know what is best for those fighting to survive in the face of injustice, poverty and human greed.

Non-coping strategies

Well, it’s almost the end of January, only a few more hours until we start afresh with a new month. I am not at all sad to be moving on – I tend to struggle in January with the darkness, the cold and the short hours of sunlight. I find January a bit depressing and, if I’m going to be honest, it often finds me a bit depressed too. Sometimes it seems that no amount of good news can shift the (January) blues.

This morning, I was thinking about how so many of us only survive the harder times due to some well-tuned coping strategies. We work hard, we play hard, we eat more, drink more, eat less, drink less, we cut ourselves off from others, we attach ourselves to others, we spend more, buy more, dream more, stay in bed longer, sleep too much, struggle to sleep at all. As a race, human beings have become adept at avoiding the real issues – using these and other ways of coping with the stress, sadness and solitude. We’ve become so sophisticated at it, that many of us no longer recognise what we are doing – we deem it “normal” and carry on with our busy lives.

What are we hiding from? What is the “pain behind the problem”? What are we so afraid of? Why am I (and I can’t be the only one!) so afraid of exposing the “real me”? So intent on hiding it and covering up my fears through food/fake smiles/frivolity? It seems as though we live in a world intent on keeping the “real me” (or the true self) in the corner; somehow we think the world requires us to be busy/stressed/multi-tasking/thin/beautiful/clear-skinned/self-disciplined and able to let our hair down and party hard when needed. What are we all hiding from?

Sometimes I think that those least able to hide their pain have something to teach the rest of us. Those who have been through the gutter and managed to climb out the other side. Those who have developed “non-coping strategies”, giving them a much healthier, more balanced perspective on life. Those who have recognised their own weakness, flaws and messiness – and realised they cannot overcome them on their own.

An (ex-)alcoholic, an (ex-)addict who has found support and strength through AA or NA has thrown out his or her “coping strategy” and found a “non-coping strategy” instead – where relationships and community are vital, where a sponsor is available 24/7, where reliance on a “higher power” is critical to making it through the next day. Where days are lived not in a blur of busyness, but mindfully, thoughtfully – literally one day at a time. Where the power of temptation – and the addict’s weakness in the face of such temptation – is not seen as minimal and overlooked, but rather recognised as the behemoth it really is – and avoided at all costs. Where pain must be confronted, rather than drunk away. Where bad days lead to reflection and asking for help, rather than another drink, another bet, another (three) slices of cake. Where identity is always constructed around “the great weakness” so that the addict remains humble and contrite, rather than giving in to pride and self-sufficiency.

I would like to be less private and “independent” during my own bad days, my own darker moments. Rather than hiding away, turning to chocolate or other escape routes, I would like to call up a friend and ask for their support. I would like to constantly remember my own fallibility and need for strengthening from a higher power. I would like to face the pain head on, rather than smother it in comfort food/drink/busyness/deadlines. I would like to develop a non-coping strategy that actually works! Throwing away – onto a massive burning pyre – every single friggin’ “coping strategy” that has let me down, time and again, and so predictably, over the years.

Maybe a few of us could get together and discard our unwanted coping strategies on a huge bonfire all together – recognising the truth that we all need each other anyway. Maybe we could build a new community – not defined by success/outer beauty/achievements/serenity, but instead constructed around the human need for true love, empathy and acceptance. Surely it’s got to be better than what we’ve got right now?