Archive for March 2008
aversion therapy
It’s time I got over my aversion to Christians talking excitedly about Bono. The truth is that I worry that we’re getting too sycophantic, that we’re simply outsourcing our activism or that we’re admiring him more for his celebrity than his faith-in-action.
But I just saw this clip. And I felt stirred. So I’m sharing it.
‘True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom…’
Amen to that.
if simon cowell’s worked out the truth…
…then surely there’s hope for this world? Read the story here about how he’s still buzzing form his first philanthropic-high.
He’s right. There’s something about giving stuff away that brings out the flavors in life.
time to become…
These days there’s much less than I can define. In the three weeks since I lost my mother and became a 35-year-old orphan, the oldest one left of my blood-line, I have found myself lost in experience like a new pilot in dense cloud. I’m like a student that joins a school mid-way through the term, at the wrong time of year, wearing new clothes having left a new house far away from his old home.
Every day is different in this new world. And I’m OK with that. It’s time to soak it up – not just bottle, label and write it all down.
Yet This last weekend something happened – something that joined the dots and lit up just a little of the path ahead. And I think I want to try and write about it…
*
Being in a room with people far cleverer than myself used to bother me when I was a boy. But over the 48 hours I loved staring up at the insight and intellect that left vapour trails way above my head. As my church gathered with the team from this place, we learnt a little of what it might mean to live a better life because of, rather than in spite of, pain, suffering and sadness. We learnt about community and connection, about the art of living life in view of others.
My brain not being what it was I spent much of the first few hours in confusion, struggling to translate the words. Then came the exercises, the conversations and the swift break in the clouds as some truths about my life emerged: that my loss is not just a loss, but also a chance for some things to be different in the future; that these feelings of being alone are not just new, but ancient feelings that I resisted in times past; that my days are not capable of being only either good or bad – but fully alive to everything going on in and around me.
The last point has hit me the hardest. I remember something that happened to me less than 24 hours after I kissed my mum’s cooling forehead and closed her eyes. I was walking across a field with my daughter. The sky was clear, the grass stroked by the breeze, my daughter running – so full of delight in the fullness of life. It floored me. I wept for the complete beauty of the experience, the fact that it was so alive and indescribably full. For a few minutes I felt this and then I wondered why I was crying about something so polar-opposite to grief. I told myself that in fact I was most likely crying because I was missing my mum, and the tears started to come from another source.
I was right about missing her. I do, more than I could have imagined. But I was right about the life of it all – about the power of so beautiful an experience. Somehow death has turned up the contrast and brightness, leaving life bolder, and – yes – even better.
I never saw suffering as an indication of the absence of God, nor did I see it as the worst thing that could ever happen. But at best I could only ever get it down to the status of chronic inconvenience, a thorn in the flesh that would be better out than in. Yet now it seems as though I might be seeing it differently. Perhaps all this might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
*
“It’s time to become a man, Craig.”
I didn’t really grasp them when she said these words to me. But now I think that perhaps my mum was spot on as she used some of her last breaths to form these words. Now they’ve become a motto I choose to live by – a compass for the future. It’s time to feel it all, not retreating in fear but allowing life’s elements to prove, strengthen, brighten, grow and graft me to others.
One last point. I always liked the line in James 1:2 that tells us to ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.’ And that’s the way I always thought of it – as an instruction, a gentle reminder to reframe the hard times into something positive rather than negative. But let’s forget that particular dualism for now, and instead consider this; perhaps this is more a statement of fact than intention.
Just as labour’s pains give way to life, so too do life’s pains open the door to something more meaningful, more powerful, more… alive. It’s hard to avoid the cliché here, but somehow I’m convinced that just as my mum’s fullest experience of faith came in the days before she died (and believe me, that’s saying something), our losses have the potential – if we choose to take up the challenge and stumble along their path – to be among the greatest things that ever happen to us.
*
Well. It seems like the words aren’t so elusive after all.
will you please tame your ego?
Is this the beginning of the end of facebook? With numbers dropping in the UK it looks like we might have an exodus on our hands. Why? Well, somewhere among the chaos of different reasons that crowd like unpaired socks into an oversized bottom drawer, I think I have an idea… and an allergy.
The deal is simple: I’m finding that my ‘friends’ are not all quite what they’re cracked up to be. Not all of them, you understand. The ones I genuinely know – whose numbers are in my phonebook, whose faces are in my memory banks – they’re fine. Facebook works for us as another means of keeping in touch. OK, so some of them are a little heavy handed on the detail (08:34 Bobby is considering what sort of cereal to eat… 08:57 Bobby is liking Cheerios… 09:38 Bobby is disappointed with his electric toothbrush…), but they mean well. What I have a problem with are the handful of power-fiends, the facebook networkers whose friend list grows at a strategically significant rate. It’s the ones for whom I’m a target that I’m struggling with.
Like the guy who invited me to be his friend. I accepted, because I knew Mike vaguely and didn’t want to offend him. Then he sent me a message asking me to join his fan club. A fan club in which he was by far the most active member, and which I suspect he had a hand in creating. He immediately became an ex-friend.
Or there’s the girl whose latest communication to her hundreds of friends reports that she’s ‘just realised’ that she’s ‘carrying 3100k of technology in her bag; macbook pro, ipod, blackberry, camera’. ‘Wow’ she writes. Somehow all my replies are made up of four – rather than three letter – words.
These are the people who don’t merely presume we’re going to be interested by their updates and postings – they’re hoping that we’re going to be impressed too.
But what’s the real problem here? Shouldn’t we just get over it, allow these people their moments of self-indulgence and ego polishing. After all, it really isn’t harming anyone, is it?
I wonder whether all this bugs and irritates some of us so much because it forces us into the role of audience to their performer. But unlike a live audience, when you’re posting on the net there’s no real-time way of getting the subtle cues that come from restless buttocks or twitching fingers. It leaves those who treat it as a stage to carry on with little hint of feedback, other than the odd cheer of approval from the distracted drunk in the back.
I’ve tried. Really I have. But just the other day I was informed about the fact that Sean was just about to ’short haul it’ to ‘Nashvegas’ for ‘a coupla meetings’ with ‘da man’. Grammatical issues aside, it was all much too much. Then I got a second chance to join Mike’s Fan Club. I checked – his ability to write about himself remains as prolific as ever.
back to normal
It’s been 18 days since mum died. Today’s my first back in my old routine – down to my office after waving the kids off, working through the inbox and filling up the calendar.
It all feels familiar – like I’ve seen this routine played out countless times in a favorite film - and there’s a comfort to be found in it. But it’s all so different now. The old normal has gone. I’m going to have to get used to a new one.
The other night my wife asked me how I thought losing my mum would change me. A decade on from today I know that I could be thoroughly different – for better or for worse. I could build up defences and strategies to cope that keep the pain at bay. That would feel normal, perhaps comforting.
Or I could be another version of me, one that has been made a little bit better through this messy, unpredictable, word-stealing loss. I know what outcome I’d prefer.
Version one of this blog was soaked in themes of overcoming the selfish gene. It seems fitting that a new blog should start now, perhaps with new themes – certainly with new perspectives – and a new normal.
I suppose that’s my thought for the day – that our normals are not fixed. They’re like tectonic plates – those hulks of granite we sit on. At times they move at the same pace of our hair’s growth, at other points this bed-rock cracks and crumbles, with dramatic results. At times the changes happen quickly, at times slowly, but they never truly cease.
Is normality just the same – apparently fixed or very occasionally erupted, yet in truth constantly shifting as the worlds around it exert their own pressure? If it’s true, then I take comfort in the knowledge that this change I’m experiencing – these early days in a new normal – are part of lifetime of readjustment.
