The Wind Blows

When I was a little girl I asked Jesus into my heart. ‘Come in today, come in to stay, come into my heart, Lord Jesus.’ What was that all about? How could a grown Jewish rabbi enter the cardiovascular system of a ten-year-old?

Religious belief is a funny thing. You embrace it long before you understand it and when you’re old enough to subject faith to reason you can never quite escape the feeling of safety and certainty that comes with childlike conviction. Nor should you want to. In a world of horror and mayhem and chaos and collapse, physical and political, it’s important to have a refuge.

I now understand that it’s not Jesus who visits the believer but it is the other one, his invisible self or spirit, known as the Holy Ghost who indwells. He’s harder to tie down and Christians have been arguing about when and where and how and to whom he comes for years.

What would life be like without metaphor? The Holy Spirit is at once dove, fire, water and wind and like all of these will not be tamed. He is who he is and cannot be constrained or contained by denominations or creeds. I love his mystery and his invitation to come and join him in the great romance of the Trinity.

I was out walking this morning, hood up against the breeze blowing briskly on the cusp of spring. I decided to try not to think and just listen. The wind picked up as I strode to higher ground and it ‘druthered’ through the trees – mostly the evergreen pines where there is enough foliage to offer some resistance and produce the swirl and swish of air fighting to be free. When I turned the corner onto the Ballyrogan Road it blew fiercer and harder, licking my chin with its sharp tongue. In one place the trunk of a palm tree had been snapped in two leaving the top upended on the road like an ice cream cone. It was good to get the winter cobwebs cleared.

I have a friend who is into things spiritual and she told me about a funny incident that took place this week. She is a teacher in a local primary school and one day after school Harry, the caretaker, stopped at the door of her room and asked her if she’d been burning incense. She said no and he described a smell he’d noticed as he passed her room – an aroma, a perfume, a scent… My friend could think of nothing and wondered if it might perhaps be the Holy Spirit so she proceeded to expound some biblical truths to the janitor about how God’s presence can manifest itself in surprising ways. Harry was content, if a little bemused.

It was as she was packing up her bag to leave that my friend caught sight of some wooden sticks poking out of her pencil pot. She had brought them from home to use in her craft lesson but they had been sitting in a sweet-smelling oil diffuser all over Christmas and were still impregnated with the perfume. Not the Holy Spirit after all then! She giggled all the way home and was still laughing at herself hours later.

No harm came to Harry because faith is ridiculous and often the believer looks foolish, but joy and passion are infectious. As for my friend – she has learned that the ‘fragrance of life’ is not in her room, but in her.

‘The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.’

This is my Song (an extract)

Joy hated Sundays. She knew it was supposed to be a day of rest because God took a break after six days creating the world. But with her father being a professional Christian he was busier than God and there was no rest for him or the family. They were always up early, despite protestations that it wasn’t a school day. Her father was usually boiling eggs – a Sunday treat, and the only one at that. Throughout the day there were to be no ball games, riding bikes, listening to the radio (they didn’t have a television) or practising the piano. If they wanted to read it was Sunday books only.

No sooner had the soldiers of white toast been scoffed, than Joy and her two sisters were shoehorned into stiff Sunday clothes and marched to morning Sunday school at Oldpark Parish church. There they sat in circular classes according to age, with a teacher in charge of each group. They sang songs about Jesus owning the cattle on a thousand hills and then they had the lesson. They heard a Bible story, often illustrated by flannelgraphs – felt figures which stuck, or more often didn’t stick, onto a green baize cloth draped over a square piece of hardwood.

Joy's favourite was a picture of a chasm in which prowled a hungry-looking tiger. There was no bridge to get across until Jesus came and made a way to escape the clutching claws of the wild beast. There was homework too – passages of Scripture to learn and recite. Joy was good at this, because she went to elocution lessons, but some of the other children squirmed uncomfortably when it came to their turn. They stuttered though the first verse and then tailed off, looking at their shiny patent feet. It was worse than school and although no punishment was meted out for failure, the sense of shame and embarrassment was chastisement enough.

Joy always wondered why they weren’t allowed to ask questions. She had loads: If Jews didn’t eat pork, why was there a herd of pigs nearby for Jesus to send the demons into? On the Sunday before Christmas, when they sang, ‘Away in a manger’ one bold, bad girl asked the Sunday school superintendent how Mary and Joseph got pregnant when they weren’t married. Mr Burch shuffled on the platform and fiddled with the Church Army badge in the lapel of his second best jacket. The best was kept for weddings and funerals. He muttered something about an angel and a dream but Joy knew in her heart that there was mystery here and it was probably rude.

On the whole, Joy liked Jesus. Her parents were addicts and scoured the Belfast Telegraph for more and more meetings to attend, especially special missions for children. No matter what the denomination or venue, the formula was the same: lots of community singing followed by a rousing talk and an appeal. One such event was held in the local Free Methodist hall and hosted by Child Evangelism Fellowship. It was mid week and Joy was tired from learning spellings in preparation for Miss McIlroy’s Friday test. If you did well, you got to sit near the back of the room. The seating arrangement was changed after the test every week and the dunces who scored the lowest marks were moved nearer to the front. The goal was to get to the very back of the room next to the radiator and near the door. A crate containing tiny glass bottles of milk was plonked down there every day and if you were clever and quick you could snatch one before it curdled in the heat.

Joy didn’t want to go to the meeting – it was always a battle with her, and the family usually ended up hot and bothered with their eldest daughter pouting selfishly. Although she stood dutifully for the singing, in her heart she was still sitting down with arms firmly folded. Her uncooperative moods didn’t last long though because even at the tender age of ten she was a devotee of the well-constructed sermon. She could see it was an art form and one which she practised herself at every opportunity. This time it was the gospel in a nutshell. Plastered onto a board was a huge picture of a nutshell large enough to contain several kernels of truth. These poked out from the shell and the speaker extracted them one at a time and expounded their meaning. When displayed together the phrases made up a verse from the Bible which declared that God loved the world so much he sent his son down from heaven, where he’d been perfectly happy, to be crucified on a hill far away and if you could just believe that this was a good thing for a loving father to kill his son then you could live forever, not like Jesus because he died hammered onto a wooden cross with blood on his head from the crown made of thorns and the hole in his side where the soldiers stabbed him. Simple!

Joy's parents smiled down at her beatifically, apparently oblivious to the irony that their offspring weren’t allowed television because it might damage them and yet they were subjected to this horrific story of injustice, suffering, pain and torture on a weekly basis. It was too horrible to be believed and yet Joy did believe – every word of it. This Jesus didn’t die for long. It was all right in the end because when his friends came looking for the body it wasn’t there. He was standing in the garden with holes in his hands wearing a white dress and gazing up to heaven where the angels had a special seat for him and a hero’s welcome. The pianist was playing softly in the background as the speaker asked if anyone wanted to go to heaven and meet Jesus.

Joy wanted to very much. She knew she was a sinner because she heard that she was every week. Sin was second nature to her – first nature according to the preacher – and she wanted to wear a white dress and feel clean. She was always being naughty. Once she and Eleanor were playing boyfriends and girlfriends and Eleanor kissed her on the lips. Joy had also kissed a boy on the lips when he promised to buy her a bag of butter balls from the corner shop near the school back gates. Then there was that time when Eleanor made her take off all her clothes in her neighbour’s garage and the two of them marched round while the big boys in their street stared at them. They promised to give her loads of comics but her parents arrived and took her home where her father smacked her on the bottom. She never did get the comics. She really wanted to be good but it was too hard. She started to cry. Maybe Jesus could help. She made up her mind and gingerly raised her hand. The singer sang, ‘I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back.’

One of this week’s spellings was hallelujah – H A L L E L U J A H.

Selves

At the beginning of a lesson with Year 12 a boy greeted me with, “Can I ask you a rhetorical question, Miss?” I replied that he could but said that naturally he wouldn’t expect an answer. He nodded and looked at me. I looked back at him, waiting for the question. It didn’t come. Finally, with a smirk he said, “That was it. That was the question.”

Questions are funny things. This week my son-in-law, working as a locum in the A&E department of a Belfast hospital, tended a patient who had a nasty cut on his chin. He was rather the worse for wear (the patient, not the doctor) and Sam was trying to engage him in conversation as he carefully stitched the wound. After giving a few grunted replies the patient felt he should at least try to enter into the dialogue and asked Sam, “So, what do you do yourself then?”

In church on Sunday, our pastor told a story about the actor, Kirk Douglas, who apparently enjoyed giving lifts to hitchhikers. One such traveller, recognising the driver as someone famous blurted out, “Do you know who you are?”

Often we know the answer to our questions, but we’re making conversation and exploring our own and other people’s thoughts and opinions. Like the inner child we haven’t quite outgrown, we are always asking “Why?” I have lots of questions - most of them, it has to be said, for God. As I get older there are more and more imponderables and fewer easy answers. When I was a university student I knew a lot more, or thought I did, than I do now. I was a passionate evangelist and loved the certainty of religious conviction. Nowadays, God seems inscrutable and mysterious. Less sure, I still love the adventure of faith, the listening and the hoping and the wondering and the waiting.

Jesus liked to ask questions. Picture the scene: a blind beggar sits by the side of the road, desperate and needy and Jesus says, "What do you want me to do?" Wasn’t it obvious? Isn’t it still? I know there are times when I’m looking for direction and God says, "What do you want?" The will to choose and decide is a precious gift which is ours to exercise every day.

I may have mentioned GM Hopkins before. I love how the poetic agonies over his faith are infused with an irrepressible joy in God’s creation. He asks the big questions but doesn’t lose heart when he cannot arrive at a definitive answer. Hopkins believed in ‘inscape’ - that everything has an essential ‘isness’ - a self which screams out a singular aspect of its Creator.

Even trees, or especially trees. In Binsey Poplars, He laments the wanton felling of a row of aspens and lambasts those who ‘hack and rack the growing green’. Their loss is described as a death and a travesty for generations to come. There is an implied suffering as the destructive strokes ‘unselve’ the beautiful scene. By destroying nature we attack its very essence, and with it impoverish our own selves. Could it be that like the flowers and birds our only purpose is to reflect the glory of I AM? Every petal and feather, like every person, is a tiny piece of God. That’s who he is or at least that’s how we can catch glimpses of a little bit of who he is. He is so vast and we are so small that we can only understand if he draws us pictures, like a parent with a palette. In As Kingfishers Catch Fire Hopkins can hear creation cry “What I do is me: for that I came.” The Forestry Commission would do well to think on that as they rush through the sale of tracts of woodland without any safeguards.

It’s not as we worry or question or debate things to death that we understand, but as we are quiet and soak in the beauty of the Creator as reflected in created things that we know, find a self and are known. And that has to be answer enough, for now.

"Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet."

Softly, softly

January – the time of new beginnings! One of the things I love about teaching English is opening a brand new book and reading from chapter one. It’s an exciting moment as I and the eager (and not so eager) pupils embark together on an adventure of discovery. And such variety! From Digory and Polly bursting into the attic where Uncle Andrew rises like a demon from the chair to Scout, Dill and Jem daring each other to touch Boo Radley’s house and, with sixth form, wondering about the mysterious Gatsby reaching out towards the green light across the bay and meeting the troubled Meursault walking behind his mother’s coffin in the raining sun. From Narnia to Maycomb, to the American Dream and Existentialism, it’s entering new worlds and knowing we will never be the same again.

I was handing back a homework essay yesterday to a Year 13 boy when I informed him that I was going to tell him something which he would never forget – something that would live on in his memory after I was dead. He was intrigued; the whole class was intrigued. I wrote the word ‘full’ on the board and explained that this is the only time that the double consonant ‘ll’ occurs at the end of a word; all other words ending in ‘ful’ have only one ‘l’ – beautiful, joyful, thankful, hopeful… By the way, did you know that there are only four words in the English language which end in ‘dous’? I’ll let you think about that.

Speaking of new worlds, TV offers the same opportunity. This week I watched the documentary on RTE 1 about Ulster songstress of the 50s and 60s, Ruby Murray, who wowed crowds with her husky tones until her crooning career was cut short by the advent of filthy Rock n Roll and she descended into alcoholism. Her name may live on as rhyming slang for an Indian meal but she still holds the record for having five hits in the charts in a single week in March 1955.

The programme was called Ruby and the Duke and Peter Wilson (aka Duke Special) interviewed Ruby’s son and daughter and others who knew her in her heyday. Her story has been repeated so many times in the show biz/music industry: a meteoric rise to fame and success followed by a collapse into self-destruction and obscurity as the next new thing deposes the old. The highlight of the programme for me was the magical moment when Brian Kennedy sang one of Ruby’s hits, Softly, Softly accompanied by Duke on the piano. Absolutely gorgeous!

People may come and go; we will come and go, but some things are eternal – like good literature and good tunes. This is supposed to be the bleakest and darkest week of the year. Read a book or sing a song and live long.

Softly, softly come to me
Touch my lips so tenderly
Softly, softly turn the key
And open up my heart

Ever After

It’s the first day. Whatever wasn’t achieved or accomplished last year won’t be. Not now. Scary isn’t it?

It’s been great to have the family home over the holiday. Christmas for me is about key moments: my son-in-law making parsnip soup with veggies gleaned from the field beside us now scattered with the yellow trumpets which were abandoned by the farmer hurrying to keep ahead of the encroaching snow; my daughter suggesting that we pause to recount memories of granny who died this time last year; me standing in the dining room with my arms raised in worship as James Taylor sang his hauntingly beautiful version of In the Bleak Midwinter:

Heaven cannot hold him

Nor can earth sustain

Heaven and earth shall fall away

When he comes to reign

The best Christmas moment was when my youngest daughter’s boyfriend arrived on Christmas Eve with a big present for her – a pair of Hunter wellington boots. In them she strode with him up virgin white Scrabo Hill where they had their first date five and a half years ago. At the exact spot where they sat then he drew her attention to a hamper containing a champagne picnic hidden behind a rock. When she turned back in surprise he was on his knees in the snow with the perfect ring. Romantic! She is our precious ray of sunshine. We’re delighted and wish them a lifetime of love and laughter.

Getting engaged is an act of hope and optimism – like gardening. After a frozen Christmas the thaw has turned everything to mud, but at least you can dig. My husband planted a beautiful Acer Tree this week and lots of bulbs. It’s a statement that there’s life after winter.

One of my favourite presents was a copy of Seamus Heaney’s latest collection Human Chain. Through his poems he explores the natural links between husband and wife, life and death, the past and the present, then and now. We are all part of this great chain as we spill over into another year.

Sometimes when I’m really busy I disappear into a soporific state when I do what has to be done without much feeling or enjoyment. I hate that. Life is for living and loving and noticing the people and the wonder around you. I’ve just been for a jog and watched swans in flight and the Brent geese standing guard by the roadside. If we don’t pay attention we miss things. My New Year’s resolution? To keep awake.

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lasped ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.

(Seamus Heaney)

If you believe...

We had a party last night and thirty guests struggled through the snow, thunder and lightning to enjoy a sup of mulled wine with us. Ladies were wearing little black dresses and colourful wellies! My husband kept the drinks cold in the outdoor fridge.

It’s the Sunday before Christmas so in church we had the usual mixture of children dressed as shepherds, special readings and video presentations about how no one knows who Jesus is any more. Our roving reporter talked to children and asked them if they could give a gift to Jesus, what would it be?

In my lifetime I have received some absolutely amazing gifts from a husband whose language of love is wonderful surprises. There was the time he presented me with a tiny toy red helicopter and announced that we were flying over the Grand Canyon for my 50th birthday, and the time I opened the door to a smartly dressed gentleman carrying a bouquet to which were attached the keys of a mini convertible – also red. One Christmas I opened a box on which was scrawled ‘Just like the song’ and inside was a dress – yes, you guessed it, red again! People often say he looks like Chris de Burgh – so that made sense at the time.

But my favourite present was two Christmases ago when he told me to close my eyes and led me through a door into my own room. My own room! I have always wanted my very own space since watching an episode of the Cosby Show. Mrs Cosby got her own room containing nothing but a phone and she chatted to her friends behind a locked door without interruption. As a busy mother of four, I often longed for a room where I could disappear, preferably without a phone, where I could read and have some me time. Well it happened! I love my room and on the wall there hangs a painting by one of our favourite artists, Paul Horten. In it a wizard dressed in a blue robe walks through deep snow towards a small two-storey house with a curved wooden door. You can’t see if it is occupied but there is a plume of blue smoke which promises a warm fire and a welcome. It’s called The Hideway and that’s what I call my room – the place where I weep, think and pray, remonstrate with myself for mistakes made and resolve to do better.

I’ll probably make my New Year’s resolutions here – no doubt the same one I made and broke last year – not to run in the corridors. I'm always in a hurry and even when I’m quiet, inside the corridors of my mind I’m still running. Today in church, our friends Nick Koch and Peter Wilson (aka Duke Special) sang Duke’s version of Silent Night. To the traditional words he added:

Here comes the noise that fills up the silence
Here come the voices who steal my peace…

It’s about to be busy – I’m going to need a hideaway when everyone gets home. That’s if they ever do. Big son, who hasn’t had great travel success this year, has given up on flying and has taken the train to Liverpool where he will board a ferry to Dublin. Long lost daughter and son-in-law are in the air between Jo’burg and Dubai and are about to discover that coming home after 18 months in Africa may not be as easy as it seems.

Snow is a theme in Horten’s work. On our 30th wedding anniversary when my husband was on tour in the US he left me another special painting. This time two children, a boy and girl hand-in-hand, trudge through a white landscape. They are passing a house and from the window the wizard is watching. The painting is called If you Believe. A very young friend told me today that it’s six sleeps till Santa. Christmas is a time to believe and hope that the adventure in the snow is not over. I love its thick silence. Perhaps it will slow us all down so that we can feel the peace.

'Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?'

By the way, guess what colour the girl in the picture is wearing?

First Times

I commanded a Year 11 boy to stand looking out of the classroom window for an entire period last week. He has recently come to the school from Australia and it was snowing! I thought it would do his heart good to watch snowflakes fall for the first time. We have been reading nature poetry from the new GCSE syllabus. It’s horrific! Gone are the Binsey Poplars and the ‘host of golden daffodils’ and in their place we have living lambs with their tongues torn out by foxes and badger baiting!

We all needed our souls restored so I read them Hopkins’ Pied Beauty – an explosion of wonder for all things ‘counter, original, spare, strange’. Like GM, we used to see nature as an expression of the Creator:

Whatever is fickle, freckled…
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Now it’s like reality TV in verse: nature in all her raw cruelty.

A year ago this month my mother fell and broke her hip leading to six weeks in hospital. She died as the old year tipped into the new. This is my first Christmas without either of my parents. I think of them often. Yesterday I travelled up north through the slush to visit my father’s elderly brother and sister. I drove past the original family farm where my grandparents raised seven sons and three daughters. It sits just shy of the majestic north coast above Whiterocks. I scrambled down the hill and walked along the beach – the sand so hard that my footprints were barely visible.

I love the sea. There’s nothing like the Atlantic for rugged beauty. During years living in a landlocked country I longed for the taste of salt on my lips and the thunder of its roar. As I walked the amazing rock structures towered above me, very like the cliffs at Dover. The tide was coming in and the eager waves licked the sand, leaving blobs of white spittle bubbling at my feet. The sea breeze on my face was icy cold – invigorating.

I pictured the young Chestnutt boys playing on the beach and digging in the sand before some went off to war to fight and the others dug for victory. I thought how the waves pounded the shoreline when my father was alive and will continue to do so when I am dead. My parents are gone and I felt small and sad. I was glad of the salt spray on my face; it mingled with the tears. Thank God for poetry.

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts for his sister at play!
O well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

Alfred Lord Tennyson