Snakes and Ladders

Professor Abacus will be pleased that for once I have taken up one of his suggestions and bought the ladder that he recommended to me a couple of years ago. It's a tall, splayed-legged tripod ladder in aluminium, designed in Japan but imported, funnily enough, by a company in Shaftesbury. And I must say it is a delight, allowing me safely to butcher plants on a higher level than ever before. I took down a gigantic limb, which was threatening my neighbours' gardens, from the hazel you can see in this photo, and the rampaging bay has had reason to regret the purchase, too. 

St John Climacus saw the spiritual life in terms of a ladder: The Ladder of Divine Ascent was his masterwork, hence his Latin nickname. I haven't read it, so I don't know whether he includes the possibility that you might descend the ladder as well as fall off it entirely, his main concern. 

This morning I went to see Lillian, our former Lay Reader and now exercising other responsibilities including being a spiritual director. She has a depressive tendency and said that at the moment 'I go to bed rather hoping I won't wake up again'. 'I can tell you', she went on 'because I know you won't just tell me to cheer up.' Indeed I won't, because I have been feeling similar things. I wondered whether I could blame particular tasks of the day for thinking 'Oh no' the moment I woke up, but it didn't seem to dissipate once those tasks were done. Instead it seemed to be another of my periodic cloudbanks of misery and I know there's not much I can do to disperse it: I can only hope and pray that it doesn't interfere with work too much. I think I am emerging from this particular episode: certainly this morning there was a moment where, just after my absolutely lowest trough, a switch seemed to be thrown. My experience is often as sudden as that. What follows is not joy, but at least a change of direction, getting to the bottom of the snake, as it were.

This morning the switch was partly the dawning thought that some of my akedia might relate to the strange sense of living a kind of afterlife which has come on turning 50, as though I really shouldn't be here, and an accompanying purging of certain comforting habits of mind. Perhaps, I thought, this is a further bit of detachment that God is working in me (St John Climacus would approve that idea), and once it is done I will be able to understand those who are going through the same sort of withdrawal better. Then on the BBC website I happened to read about Hevrin Khalaf, a Future Syria Party activist who was butchered in the Autumn by a Turkish-backed militia. I was struck by this young woman's dogged work for a free, non-sectarian future for her country in contrast to my own exhaustion at my not-very-demanding duties. If she could carry on until they shot her, I thought, I probably can as well. 

Lillian and I agreed that being convinced of the purpose of what you're doing is helpful in avoiding akedia. The trouble is that it requires a sort of blinkeredness which in other circumstances can be a very damaging trait but which does allow those who have it to persist undaunted against adversity and actually achieve things, and possessing it is a matter of personality rather than choice.

A Return from the Cloud

My day off took me to Salisbury where I was meeting with Lady Arlen and her daughters, down in the South for a festival. Despite some confusion we successfully met at a Wetherspoons where she took some pleasure in ordering a meal-deal so cheap it would actually have cost ardent Brexiteer Tim Wetherspoon money to serve it to her. I discovered that I had managed to put an un-charged battery in my camera, meaning to record anything from the day I had to struggle with my phone. This was the only usable image, of the cloisters at the cathedral.

For several days I'd been entering an exceptionally bad mood for a variety of unreasonable reasons, laid on top of the general discombobulation of the times. On the way home on the train this sharply deepened until the thoughts passing through my mind were quite shockingly destructive and dark. I couldn't read any more and listened to music instead, looking out of the window and thinking how pointless everything seemed. Then almost instantly, as Lana del Rey's 'Cruel World' changed to Rykarda Parasol's 'Withdrawal, Feathers and All', it was gone. It wasn't actually anything to do with the music, although Parasol's output is nothing if not humanistic in comparison to the lush vapidity of del Rey's imaginative world: it was as though a switch had been flicked. I thought of S.D.'s theory that we can stray accidentally into clouds of ill-temper and then just as abruptly leave them. 

In the Cloud

It’s been a long time since I last had the experience of not wanting to get up for several mornings. I feel ashamed of it, because so many of my lovely friends battle illness and disability and my issues are petty in comparison: I know that, although it’s related to external circumstances, it’s not proportionate to them. I don’t justify the feeling, I just recognise it as a fact.

Metropolitan Anthony said that when he found himself in the cloud, he would open his letters and not even attempt to do anything more active (and, as his biographer Gillian Crow pointed out, that didn’t mean he actually read them); and that if he couldn’t face that, he would read; and that if he couldn’t even read, he would clean his room. I find at these times that even cleaning requires effort. At the moment I’m preparing for a party at the end of the month and want to clean the whole house more thoroughly than usual, and this afternoon intended to do one bit of my unrealistically vast kitchen: at several points in that process I had absolutely to force myself to carry on with it, the main impetus coming from the thought that I couldn’t leave it half-done. What I want to do is sleep, because sleep seems more rewarding than wakefulness.

It is of course a very quiet season in the life of Swanvale Halt parish at present and there have been times recently when I sit and think what I could usefully do next. Perhaps I ought to embrace this as an opportunity and not try to do anything in particular.

This morning would have been the annual open-air ecumenical service at Hornington, had the rain not forced a retreat into the Baptist Church. The worship songs were dull (even discounting for my disaffection, I think they genuinely were) and there was nothing to break through my mood. I did all I could to prevent my indifference hardening into cynicism. There was the opportunity to ‘receive prayer’ in a side room afterwards, and I thought I might do that: just tell whoever it was that I was bare and dry, and hope that it might be a means of God doing something with me. But when I looked through the door, the three Baptist Church members offering prayer were seated in a semicircle talking to each other. I didn’t think I could expose myself to that. I couldn’t walk all that way across the carpeted floor to that group of assessing faces (What’s he doing here?), so I went home instead. As an ordained person I’m used to brazening it out, and I couldn’t face it: what must anyone else feel like?

And so I remain in the cloud for now. It seems that when I have something liturgical to do I can pretend it’s not there – something else takes over, the Holy Spirit, perhaps. That’s a comfort. But I’m not pushing it, in case it breaks.

Black Clouds and their Dispersal

That promised upbeat post isn't coming quite yet, I fear. S.D. likes the idea of there being clouds of melancholy which sort of hang around waiting for someone to encounter them, and that you can blunder into them unawares and take some time to re-emerge. 

As sometimes happens, I was in one of these over the weekend, and arrived in church on Sunday with my mind primed for misery. There weren’t very many people around and some of the most active people in the church are away for all sorts of different reasons. Anyone under 70 was in short supply. Debbie our ordinand (‘our ordinand’ no longer, but ordained) will now be reeling around the southern suburbs of Ipswich as she gets used to her training parish, removing another enthusiastic presence from Swanvale Halt. As I was on my way down the hill I was accosted from a car by another couple: ‘we won’t be in church this morning, our grandsons are with us’. Family as rival to faith rather than partner with it. Never have I got so close as I did yesterday just to walking out in despair at our ability to have any impact even on the lives of those who are the most faithful. ‘It’s hardly uplifting to suspect that you’re merely in the business of spiritual terminal care,’ S.D. had reflected when I saw him. Of course those people matter as much as anyone does, and our hearts should be set in heaven and not on earth and its vicissitudes. We know that; ‘It doesn’t really help, though, does it?’ S.D. concluded.

I was deacon at the 10am mass, so not presiding, and as it happened not preaching either. I sat and listened to Marion our curate talking about Jeremiah 20 and how in church life we tend to cover up what we really feel, worried that it’s not appropriate. I wondered how far I could share what I felt, how far it was real, how far it was merely neurotic, and how far it would be helpful or harmful for my grimmer emotions to be let free to lash around the church. Gradually it became easier to ignore my sloshing inward negativity. The adrenalin of doing a big christening service with lots of children kicked in: at one point I was leading some prayers and opened my eyes to see a little girl in the process of knocking over the Paschal Candle, just in time for me to reach out and catch it.

This morning I sat with Zechariah the prophet and read what he had to say. ‘When you fasted and lamented in the fifth month and the seventh month for these seventy years, was it for me you fasted?’ the Lord asks the people. The answer is clearly no, which is why they end up driven out of their city and scattered abroad. But that’s not the end of the story: ‘old men and women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, and the streets shall be full of boys and girls playing. Even though it seems impossible to the remnant of my people, shall it seem impossible to me?’

Caught up in our own particular circumstances, it’s hard to see beyond them. This time of the purging of the Church, which still has to give up its desire for power and success, means it’s a surprise anyone still wants to come to church at all. We have fasted for entirely the wrong things. But this is the long story of God’s people, and this oscillation, this wave, moves through the narrative again and again. The remnant turns again to God, and things change. Our call is, as it always is, to persist.

How This Stuff Sometimes Works

I wake up with an unfocused but clear sense of dread which very swiftly turns into pointlessness and waste and could threaten to go disablingly deep. I recognise this kind of thing. It usually, though not always, gets dispersed by my early morning devotions. I reflect that the last time I felt this was on the Sunday when I was doing the talk at the Family Service, and on this occasion it coincides with a Messy Church day - and Messy Church days are always dominated by Messy Church, now matter what else you might or might not be doing. So I try to work out what's causing the ennui - or akedia, speaking spiritually.

Is it simply having many things to do and no time for my own things? Is it having things to do that I find especially taxing, that don't fall neatly within my comfort zone - and dealing with children always means that? Or is it something more significant? The other element that links Messy Church and Family Services is that the stakes are high in each. There's no guarantee how many people will come, and no guarantee that what I've prepared for the services in question will work. It could be fantastic, or it could be disastrous. I realise that the service I like best and get most out of is the little Tuesday morning mass where attendance varies from 3 to 12, and which, because we hold it in an intimate side chapel, works no matter whether you're at the bottom of that range or the top. The atmosphere is always prayerful, quiet, and devoted, and of course it's the mass which you'd have to work quite hard to muck up.

But exactly what do I have invested in the less structured, more risky services? Why do I feel there are high stakes? It occurs to me that I'm deriving too much sense of self-validation from 'success', from getting positive feedback, from numbers ('the sin of multitudinism', as Il Rettore used to call it). I'm resting too much of my sense of achievement on events such as this working. Of course one has to pay attention to what's getting people into a place where they can encounter God and what isn't, but in the nature of churches these things will wax and wane with time.

Every morning I try to read a few Bible verses. This occasion it was the turn of the Third Letter of St John. 'I have no greater joy than this', says the holy apostle, 'to hear that my children are walking in the truth'. It's perfectly right to be thankful and satisfied in a good piece of work, including a sermon, a talk, or a service. But the point of any of them is that they open a space where individual souls can meet God, a far more nebulous business which is not under our control. The only spiritual life which I am directly capable of influencing is mine, and that's a hard enough matter: and, while taking all legitimate satisfaction in doing good work, joy must come from seeing people grow in faith, and self-validation isn't even something I should be considering. Instead the wellspring of who I am needs to be the inner silence where I meet God, nothing else.

Inside and Out

The readings for this morning’s Mass were from Job 3, in which poor Job curses the day of his birth – ‘Why offer life to those who are bitter of heart?’ he cries – and Mark 9, in which Jesus berates his disciples for offering to call down fire on the Samaritan village that won’t let them stay. In my little homily I talked about suicidal feelings and not judging people by the circumstances of the moment.

On the way home I was crossing the railway line and was puzzled to see a woman standing on the track talking into a phone: unusual thing to do. As I passed she called me back and offered the phone out to me. On the other end was a police receptionist, and in the course of talking to her and the woman I worked out without too much trouble that she’d had a couple of drinks and was threatening to throw herself under the next train, as her sister had a few months ago. There wasn’t going to be a next train, however, because the signalman had already held all the trains further along the line. I kept her talking until the police arrived (in two cars and a van) and bundled her off to the local mental hospital. Of course she called me every name she could think of, but then if you’re genuinely determined on offing yourself you don’t tell anyone about it. I have to say the (all young male) coppers handled it superbly as far as I could tell, very clearly following an established procedure for such incidents. It was a strange synchronicity of the world inside the church and the world outside, and I suppose that had I not been dressed in clerical gear the woman would never have stopped me.

Spotting Providence

The last little while has been unusually depressing for me (and not just for me), and I have yet to unpick it all. A lot of it is to do with my selfish avoidance of trouble and sorrow, and the inability to do anything about a certain amount of it. And so yesterday morning I said to the Boss, 'give me something'.

I went out walking and it completely failed to shake the mood and thoughts. Partway along the towpath walk to town I stopped by the spring at the foot of the hill the ruined chapel sits on. One writer suggests this is a holy well dedicated to St Catherine, which I'm happy enough to run with as Catherine is my patron saint. As I looked at the sparkling water what should I spot but a goldcrest, which flitted to and fro, weighing me up and disappearing before coming back again to drink and bathe in the water, all the while checking I was behaving myself.

And then out of the blue I heard from a person I'd largely given up hope of having any contact from again, suggesting coffee. This was somebody I once hoped for rather more from, but coffee is something. Not much, but something.

A goldcrest and a text were just enough to send my mood in an upward direction and inject some hope into the grey. Just enough. God did not send the goldcrest, nor prompt my friend to contact me. That's not how it works. Rather, in the vast and incomprehensible flow of events, you make contact with and notice just those tiny happenings you need. It's not much, and I assume that God thinks I can make do with this much, and so must. It's not that he suddenly reaches in from the outside of the phenomenal world to make things happen; instead, having decided you believe in him, and having a fair idea of what he is like, you examine your own life and its events to work out what he is about. We thirst, but get just sufficient drops to keep going.

Visiting Dark Places

On Tuesday I had a disappointment: something nice that was due to happen today wasn't going to happen after all. This began a spiral of unhappy feelings which, I'm ashamed to say, went down rather a long way. I woke up on Wednesday with a lot of back pain reviving nasty fears about a repeat of my slipped disc two years ago, and pain is terribly draining: I'm full of admiration for people who cope with chronic discomfort. Wednesday was a bad, bad day, at least so far as my internal state was concerned; externally, it wasn't particularly rough or demanding and I was even able to get a few things done. By bed-time I'd begun to clamber out of the hole, and this morning I was much happier, helped by my back being almost completely fine.

What strikes me is not that akedia (for it is the familiar demon again) comes down like a black cloud but that the cloud can blow itself out apparently without any external encouragement. I desperately wanted some reassurance but didn't get any, didn't speak to any friends, didn't have any good experiences to dispel the black thoughts. Nor did religion play any role whatever. When I'm in this state no pious thoughts can break through and have any impact at all. God feels not absent, so much as irrelevant: I don't care about him or what he thinks. Religious practice, on the other hand, I think probably does a great deal - saying the Office, going through the motions. I think that probably helps, not at the time, but to generate a personality that is a bit more resistant to the demon's goads and lies. Not much, maybe, but a bit. Then when the clouds clear, I can look back and be thankful.

The Blackest of Demons

I'm reading (in fact have been since I started in Swanvale Halt) Kathleen Norris's The Noonday Demon which, so far, has proved to be the best spiritual book I've come across in a long while indeed. It deals with the affliction of the soul the desert monks called akedia; it emerged into the Western tradition as the Deadly Sin sloth, though this narrows some of its nature. It's a species of spiritual indifference, which gives rise to restlessness and dissatisfaction, and eventually rage; the 'noonday demon' because it assaulted the monks most strongly in the middle of the day, midway between the hope of morning and the restfulness of night.

The other day I was at a meeting of one of the many overlapping groups which constitute the inter-church relationships of which Swanvale Halt is part. I don't know why I felt so alienated: but for whatever reason it quickly escalated into contempt, cynicism, and anger. Every organisation needs to ask itself from time to time whether it's doing too much or having too many meetings; but this was more. All the good work being described was swamped in my mind by a spiralling mist of anger, even as I fought to combat it. As we reached the end and someone else was leading prayers I barely, barely restrained myself from grabbing a teacup and throwing it across the room. Where did such violent feelings come from?

I had something else to deal with almost immediately, thankfully involving somebody completely uninvolved with the Church. I came home and adopted a threefold strategy, of reading (that is, re-entering my comfort zone which I control and understand), of praying and having a sleep. I came to the conclusion that most of my problem, shamefully, was not being in control of the event. There is obviously a deep rupture in my makeup somewhere which is triggered by feeling exposed and powerless. The Noonday Demon is preparing me for this: laying open the genealogy of 'bad thoughts', which is what it means to battle with the powers and principalities.