Away Day

I've been meaning to go on retreat but haven't had the means. Yesterday dawned bright and sunny so I made my first visit of the year to the local lido, which is set amongst high green hills. The air smelt as fresh as if it had never been breathed before. It was a delicious day, made all the better by the realisation that I'd forgotten my phone. I relaxed into a true retreat. In the Present.

I begin my day with a lot of breath-holding so that I can gaze at the pattern of shining ripples on the bottom of the pool. The shallow end is home to tiny children being encouraged to practise leaping into the unknown - yet always landing in the nurturing arms of their mothers.

After an hour of blissful (and Factor 30- protected) sun-bathed swimming, I make my way to the grass by the side of the pool and enjoy watching people splash and just Be. We are a small community of escapees from the Rat-race.

I leave and go on to Castleton, a favourite of mine. A ruined castle sits high on a hill above the entrances to caves, a sparkling river, numerous sheep and ducks, and a picturesque village with plenty of provision for the hungry tourist.

Sitting at a table on the pavement I watch as women lead tiny horses along, teachers lead slightly bigger children along, and walkers amble happily towards their lunch. I fall into a conversation with an elderly woman whom I'll call Mary; I don't ask her name, it would break the spell of her lilting Devon accent and the rhythm of her tales of life. The gist of what she says is, "Find out who you are, go and be that person, and be happy!" She sounds to have had a hard life but has skipped happily into widowhood and now travels the world - wherever takes her fancy. Lithuania, Russia, China, "And one of those Vampire Castles!" She regrets having taken forty years to realise she has a brain, but is now getting on with using it.

A lively crocodile of ten year olds makes its way past, a teacher rather ominously holding an enormous number of wooden swords. Are they going to re-enact some battle by the river? Or has he had to confiscate them? In calm and weary, well-rehearsed words he says, "Yer in't'middle o't'ROAD Mason - yer doing wrong." I am impressed at the delivery of such judgement. So is Mason, for he quietly finds his place on the pavement. The children and their noise disappear around the corner, and the day closes around them as though they had never been there.

The sun continues to bake the village. A woman emerges from a car in a long-sleeved, leopardskin mini dress. She must be roasting, despite her long bare legs, which draw the gaze of every man in sight. A group of Germans discuss first where the Men have gone, then where the Women have gone. Those who are presumably neither find a table and resignedly sip coffee as they wait.

After lunch I'm not sure what to do, so I sit on a wall and write. Write this, in fact, as well as jotting down snippets which will some day germinate and grow into poetry.

I think about Mary. Was she some kind of messenger? I'm thinking hard at the moment about the role of ambivalence in my life. I hope to meet someone else who might shed a little more light. Mary advocates the single life and lots of travel. I know for sure... I do know... that I don't want to work behind closed doors for the rest of my life. Is it possible to find some other way? A compromise perhaps, where I work part time for other people, and make the time to write during the rest of the week?

I decide to find some water - I love to sit and contemplate its noise, its movement, the light-play on the surface... A small stream runs by the car park; I stand and gaze at the unthinking beauty of the scene, and a tree leans across to hold my hand, its leaves brushing my fingers.

I think about how my father would have loved it here, and feel the familiar pang of regret that I simply don't know what my mother would have thought of it. My love of such places is surely the fusion of their lives and psyches? Perhaps not. I have no idea whether I brought a new 'me' to my experience of the world, or if I tread the traces of others. It troubles me, this easy connection with my father and not my mother. I feel the need to carry something of her forward into the world, even though I'm aware that the traits I ascribe to her may be pure projection.

I walk on, and come to a burial ground - a place of real peace and solitude. I read the gravestones, weep at one, and ponder our frailty as I often do. Why should I waste my life doing work I don't believe in? The answer - for me - has to be that I shouldn't.

As I walk back through the village a strange synchronicity occurs. Yesterday I went with a friend to a place many miles from where we live, and met a woman known to both of us, a former teacher. We shared a coffee and many memories and I asked after her cousin, whom I'd also known. I hadn't seen either of them for about 5 years. "Oh, she's happily retired and globe-trotting!" came the reply.

So it is with some surprise that as I walk along to find a tea room, in this place also some miles from where I live, the cousin herself greets me with a joyful cry of recognition. It is quite a coincidence, and as such I search for meaning after she has gone.

I buy an ice cream instead of a cup of tea, wanting to sit in the warm sun. I find a bench and two sisters come to sit next to me. They tell me how they left Holland in the war and moved to Australia. The one who lives nearby still has a strong Aussie twang, the other (who lives a 14 hour flight away back in Australia) has a heavy Dutch accent. They, too, have just travelled all around Europe and highly recommend it. They, too, are man-free and happy. Like me, they are eating ice creams and enjoying the sun.

I ponder it all as I drive home. Have I just been given a glimpse of how happy I shall be in retirement, or is there some more urgent message for me here? I have met people who are relieved to be out of their former jobs and who are happy travelling and Being. Is that something I dare aim for at this stage in my life, or must I wait it out?

I recall the startling words of one of the Dutch sisters, as she suddenly leaned across and smiled at me with her piercing eyes on mine: "This place is calling you!"

And so it is - ah, but WHICH place? The geographical one, or the metaphysical?

Are we there yet??

"We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey."
(Stephen Covey/Teilhard de Chardin).

I just found this quote. I like it, though the nit-picking part of me wants to say, "I think we're both, actually." But enough with the nit-picking! I like the way he has flagged up our spirituality.

Some readers will already be wondering if they need the sick-bucket. That word 'spirituality' pushes so many buttons, doesn't it? To be clear, I'm not talking about anything imposed on us. Systems, beliefs or practices - they are all ways to manage humanity's awareness of The Numinous. What I'm interested in is where that feeling comes from.

Just as most of my gay friends were aware of their orientation well before puberty, I knew early on that I was (for want of a better word) spiritual. My family never went to church yet when I was about 9 I became aware that I wanted to learn to pray. I decided that I needed candles and a crucifix to do this - I have no idea where that came from. So I bought a tiny standing crucifix, some very small candles, shut myself away in the attic and sat absorbing the peace (I was a very troubled little girl).

My first prayer was a shining example of Science meeting Faith. I wasn't quite sure whether you were meant to leave a gap for God to answer, and it would have seemed rude to talk through Him; so I left pauses just in case - until I realised He probably wasn't going to say anything just then, when my prayer took on a fluency and urgency as I needed to get out and spare myself more embarrassment. This was it:
"God..? God... Um... I feel a bit silly... ... ... I don't know how to pray... But then, you know that already... if you're there. (Brightening) And if you aren't there, then nobody's heard this! Help me believe in you. Amen."

I blew the candles out and scurried downstairs.

I'm not sure how long I continued going to my little Chapel, as I called it - I think I'd probably got the idea from one of the 'Katy' books although the rather Roman Catholic slant was all my own. It was a place of peace for me, until one day presumably it wasn't, and I became a Lapsed Attican. I thought no more about it for a few years, until my friend asked me to join the Church Choir. This in turn exposed me to Sunday School and, having grandly told the Professor of Astrophysics who ran our class that at 12 I considered myself too intellectual to be a Christian, I eventually came to believe in the God of the Anglican Church, and had a very dramatic conversion at 14. I firmly believed that this was an answer to my prayer in the attic years before.

Now I'm going to cut a VERY long story short. It includes my realisation that there were other ways to be Christian (it was years before I realised I had become not just a Christian, but an Evangelical - and that possibly it didn't fit my spiritual personality), my involvement in the Charismatic movement, and twenty years as a Vicar's wife during which I broadcast, wrote articles for the Parish magazine and helped many people come to a faith in Jesus.

Fast forward past the divorce (amicable) and the realisation that there were other ways to be spiritual, and the excitement at escaping the confines of The Church and being able to choose what worked for me. Others who have trodden this path will know that it takes a long time to shake the conditioning, to stop feeling guilty for daring to question, and to look at what exactly was going on at conversion.

I can't shake the belief that there's Something More to life, however I no longer have any conviction that it's the God Christians have made in their own image. My very brief toe-dip into Neuro-Linguistic Programming led me to the conclusion that my dramatic conversion was indeed profoundly healing, but that it was explicable in various ways, only one of which 'proved' there was a God. I had always said, right from my arrogant Sunday School days, that God was my Working Hypothesis - that I would change my beliefs if I ever found the evidence pointed in another direction. At the time I said it, I never thought that it would, but the spirit of enquiry was genuine.

And over the years I became less and less convinced that the Church had The Truth. It wasn't just a case of seeing many good, altruistic people who worked tirelessly for the good of others with not a shred of religious faith. It was many things. I think in the end I could no longer go along with telling people that prayer 'worked' when I had to go through so many mental gymnastics to believe that.

"God ALWAYS answers, but sometimes it's 'No'."
"There is some deeper purpose to this that we don't know about."
"You need more faith." (To be fair, I always spoke out against that one).
"Prayer is a mystery."

That last one is true. But nobody ever addressed the uncomfortable truths, such as people in other religions also praying in tongues, or the fact that other faiths also prayed and ascribed answered prayer to a different god.

I set time aside to wrestle with the concept of prayer. My problem was that it was held up as something we ought to do, handing all the results over to Someone who Knew Better than us. At best it seemed feeble to spend time on something which might not get results whilst teaching people that it did. At worst, I began to see people all around me happily refusing to take responsibility for their lives:
"Well I've prayed about losing weight, but nothing's happened."
"I'm very unhappy with X but I know God wants me to stay."
"I'm waiting for God to give me the go-ahead to apply for another job."
etc, etc, etc...

Suddenly, just as I had had a blindingly dramatic conversion, I had another experience of seeing with an outsider's eyes how ridiculously naive it all seemed. A Deconversion, if you will.

Which as you can imagine, presented me with a problem. What had happened to me at 14? Well, at the time of my conversion, I was deep into self-hate. And in NLP terms, I connected to the strongest anchor imaginable. The Creator told me He loved me. If that was good enough for Him, it was good enough for me. The waves of relief and joy as I accepted myself were real enough - and they were profoundly linked with Church (I 'prayed the Prayer' in a Choir stall).

Now, I began to wonder if I hadn't given a lot of the credit to God when at least some of it ought to go to me. I had perhaps tapped into my own inner resources, but believed myself to be so powerless that I had to ascribe those resources to some external person.

Hmmm. This currently works for me - it's still a hypothesis, though. And it is hugely important to me that I don't diss others' beliefs. I quite accept that other people can believe in Christianity with full integrity - it's just that I can't any more.

As for all my Christian experiences, they weren't a bad thing in many ways - except that I had given away a lot of my own power. Not only to God, but also to the Church itself, which influenced my actions, thoughts, feelings and even (as clergy) where and how I lived. I became aware, too, that there had been a lot of 'choosing what's difficult because it's what God wants' in my life. Development or self-punishment? The jury is now out...

I still don't see religious faith as a bad thing - I doubt I'd even be here without it, I was so screwed-up as a child. But I do feel that I've been robbed of faith in myself and that's unforgivable. Wow - even typing that word was a challenge. I've been so forgiving down the years. Who would have thought it might be damaging?

Well it is. I'm currently working hard to get in touch with my anger. I know it's in there somewhere but there is a veneer of saccharine lovey-doveyness stopping me accessing it. I have a horrid suspicion, you see, that anger needs to be visible. It needs to be heard. And then it can be released. I don't know where mine is, or what it's eating away at, but I know I need to get to it and allow it to have its place in my emotional world. Lots of people lose touch with their anger, but in my case the Church buried it for me. I don't NOW see a contradiction between love and anger coexisting, but I was taught for years that they couldn't.

To get back to my original theme, I see life as a journey. Nothing original there - religions down the millennia have all used that metaphor. Spirituality is how we make that journey. I'm eclectic now - I take what works for me. I doubt I'll ever go back to Christianity in its pure form, although never say never. I do believe in the Numinous, in some kind of order to the Universe, and I'm fascinated by all the Quantum Physics stuff which seems to me to say that we're made of nothing but energy. That opens up all kinds of metaphysical possibilities...

UPDATE! November 2010 - Made it through... can feel anger now but don't feel it (hope that makes sense). And realised that the chapel idea came from Louisa Mae Alcott, when Amy is sent away to avoid catching scarlet fever,and makes a chapel in which to pray for Beth,