Musings on a Monday

Monday 11^th December

A chilly, wet, windy Monday morning, with a pile of laundry to do. After three years without one, I am so glad for our tumble dryer! The William and Shadow braved the elements and had a short walk to the village recycling bins with our bag of plastic, tin, and glass, and the birds are being blown to and fro as they peck at the fat balls and sunflower seeds on the feeder. The William then becomes busy putting up more pictures, including my huge image of a Buddha, and a prayer image given to William by his friend Sarah, given to her by a monk during her trekking holiday in Nepal, wearing William's his extreme cold weather gear. I make a Chinese-style mushroom soup (which turns out a bit too chillie-fied!) and baked spiced oranges and figs drizzled with maple syrup & topped with toasted pecans, which are yummy.

I have begun my annual re-reading of Rosamunde Pilcher's marvellous novel 'Winter Solstice' and this wintry day has put me in mind of the opening of one of my favourite poems: 'Midwinter spring is its own season, sempiternal, though sodden towards sundown'. It's certainly sodden here! The poem is 'Little Gidding' by T.S.Eliot, one of his Four Quartets, first published in 1945.

Forty years ago (really? how can it be so long?) I went with my friend and former university chaplain John Cooke to visit Little Gidding, which is a village about 30 miles from Cambridge. Back in 1626 Nicholas Ferrar and his family founded a lay religious community, the Community of Christ the Sower, there, based on adherence to Christian worship according to the Book of Common Prayer and the Catholic heritage of the Church of England. That original community existed for about thirty years, and although it was denounced by Puritans as Arminian heresy, it attracted visitors, including King Charles I, who, having been there twice previously, sought refuge with the community after the Royalist defeat at the Battle of Naseby.

In the mid 19^th century, at around the time of the Catholic Revival, or Oxford Movement, Little Gidding featured in a popular historical novel 'John Inglesant' by Joseph Henry Shorthouse, and interest in the Little Gidding Community revived.

Alan Maycock founded The Society of the Friends of Little Gidding in 1946, with the support of T.S.Eliot who had visited in 1936 and whose 'Four Quartets' had just been published. There is more about Alan Maycock here, with a moving recollection by his widow Enid:

http://www.littlegiddingchurch.org.uk/lgchtmlfiles/lgpeople5maycocks.html

From the 1970s – the time when John and I visited – until 1998 it was home to a new Community of Christ the Sower, led by Robert van der Weyer, and based in the former farmhouse and adjacent buildings. I remember the rather chilly chapel and sleeping on a camp bed in the dormitory-style accommodation over the barn!

Below are extracts of Eliot's poem, and there's more information (well worth a look) about Ferrar and the present day Community of Christ the Sower (who still use the Little Gidding Prayer book that Robert authored) now based at St. Mary Magdalene's Retreat in Yreka, California:

http://www.stmarymagdalenes.org/christthesower.htm

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

If you came this way,

Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city -
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid...

Of weather and poetry...

After a day or so of rain, today dawned clear and bright, and I've spent a lovely morning in the garden, hacking back the ronces (brambles) and bracken at the southern end where we plan to create a small parking place and entrance into what will, eventually, become our little orchard.

I do enjoy being out in the fresh air, although it's also great to come back into a warm house, with our new stove now in situ and working well. I've had to forgo my intention to continue gardening this afternoon however: taking Shadow for his main walk after lunch we were caught in a hail storm, speckling his coat with white ice dots. I know I was reading Shelley's poem 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit' this morning, but not that sort of hail! :-) But even the hail storm was off-set by a full rainbow arching against the dark sky.

Being part of such a beautiful landscape, with its rolling hills, huge skies, morning mists, and ever-changing clouds, made me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem God's Grandeur:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

and all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

and wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

there lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

and though the last lights off the black West went

oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs - 

because the Holy Ghost over the bent

world broods with warn breast and with ah! bright wings.

I'm a big fan of Manley Hopkins, although these days he wouldn't get away with his use of the words 'men' and 'man' to mean people: but of course he was writing according to the customs of his own time, and the slightly jarring off-notes they create are vastly off-set by the genius of his imagery.

I think I first became consciously aware of such linguist niceties and changing social & theological  mores back in the 80s, and, while training for the ministry, particularly valued the work of a fellow URC minister and writer Brian Wren. His book 'What language shall I borrow' counter-balanced, for me, the stridency of feminist theology at the time. I have been very happy to include his great hymn 'Bring Many Names' in various acts of worship, and his poem/hymn 'Who Is She' captures the heart of what I am only now beginning to study in greater depth.

Who is She, neither male nor female, 

maker of all things, only glimpsed or hinted, 

source of life and gender?

She is God, mother, sister, lover:

in her love we wake, move and grow, are daunted, 

triumph and surrender.

Who is She, mothering her people, 

teaching them to walk, lifting weary toddlers, 

bending down to feed them?

She is Love, crying in a stable, 

teaching from a boat, friendly with the lepers, 

bound for crucifixion.

Who is She, sparkle in the rapids,

coolness of the well, living power of Jesus

flowing from the scriptures?

She is Life, water, wind and laughter,

calm, yet never still, swiftly moving Spirit,

singing in the changes.

Why is She, mother of all nature,

dying to give birth, gasping yet exulting

to a new creation?

She is Hope, never tired of loving,

filling all with worth, glad of our achieving, 

lifting all to freedom.

Jottings along the road...

We leave the Pyrenees behind us and head north... 

Fields of gold, not barley but sunflowers, gradually turning their heads down to the earth and dropping their seeds... 

Blue sky and sunshine too scorching hot to sit in... 

And now howling winds, pouring rain, thunder and lightning - yes, this is still the south of France in August... 

Walks along country roads (take me home) and a huge thorn, not in the side but through the sole of my Croc and into the ball of my right foot, which The William gallantly pulled out (ow!) - blood and pain and rest for a couple of days... 

A lazy afternoon with friends: one dear ditsy lady arrives with a baby bird in a basket and is more concerned to swat flies to feed it with than eat her own lunch... 

Chateaux, including one with a month-long Moliere event... 

Yet another public holiday in this secular state - the Assumption of the BVM... 

Discovering more dishonesty from the agent &/or notaire through whom we sold The Hearth and we're just glad to have the money in the bank; and more hiccups in trying to arrange the delivery of our stuff to Karningul, but hey, what's new?... 

Another long lunch in the sun with former neighbours, catching up on news and their plans for creating gites in their barn... 

Refining our plans for our Brittany garden, which now includes an avenue of fruit and nut trees, and the transformation of an old, small garden shed into the chicken house for Big Venus, Grey Malkin, and Chickpea... 

Yet more delays in completing our purchase because the Notaire wasn't back from his holiday when he said he would be, and was then out of the office for the rest of the week: how more unprofessional can these people get?!... 

Staying in a gite in a hamlet on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere opposite an elaborate romanesque Calvaire in what was the original cemetary (now located to the more usual site at the village boundary, rather than in its heart) including not only Jesus on the cross but Mary, Queen of Heaven, foot on snake, and John the Baptist standing in a Mercurial, declamatory pose above a lamb... 

Thoughts of what Plan B will be if our purchase in Brittany does not, in fact, happen; and at the last minute, news that completion on Karningul will be tomorrow morning, although the immobilier still needs to arrange for the water to be reconnected before we can move in and camp for a week until our remover can deliver our stuff - fingers are still crossed... 

Online shopping thwarted because we have no mobile signal and so can't receive the security code... 

Temperatures in the mid-30s for the third week running... 

A minor hair cut for Shadow after he comes in from a walk with hair full of seeds... 

Scrumping a bag full of figs from a tree by the lane - delicious raw, but even more delicious baked for half an hour with dabs of butter, a drizzle of honey, and a squeeze of lemon juice...

More scrumping: bunches of black grapes from the vines in the garden where we're staying, brilliant thirst-quenchers while driving...

And at last we are over the Vilaine and in Brittany! Clouds and rain to greet us, as we head for our final Ibis in Pontivy for a night's rest before an early start to collect the key for Karningul and take possession. Fingers crossed that the electricity wasn't cut off after the vendors unhelpfully cancelled the account instead of waiting for it to be transferred into our name - same story as the water, and thanks for nothing - otherwise it'll be back to the Ibis: I can do indoor camping at a pinch, but not without water, preferably hot!...

Still no joy attempting to make online purchases, due to some fault with MC this time, although we at last have strong mobile signals, but the good news is (and we are surely due some?) that our remover will be delivering our stuff on Friday - hurrah!...

So, one short journey more and the road trip is done - never to be repeated :-)

Away we go!...

3rd August, and our three years in the sun are up.

It's with very mixed feelings that we are leaving The Hearth and the extreme terrain, climate, and people of this remote part of the foothills of the Pyrenees.

Our furniture has been removed this morning, our sale completes tomorrow, and The William, Shadow and I are off on a road trip, wending our way northwards, until we arrive in Brittany towards the end of this month. 

We'll be pretty much off line until we're set up in our new home there, so there'll be a blog gap - but lots of news then I'm sure!

à bientôt.............

Tenterhook time

I am not a person who enjoys being on an edge, either physical or mental, but so often, in a variety of experiences over the years, I have felt taken to the very edge of a horrendous precipice before the situation has changed for the better: for example, once upon a long time ago, I was finally offered a job I could take (even though it was 105 miles from where I was then living) after six months of hunting, when I was down to £200 in my bank account and had a mortgage to keep paying. There are other examples I won't bore you with!

Today feels like we're very close to that edge again, waiting to hear whether our house purchasers have finally got their mortgage confirmed, after unexplained delays, the very existence of which we were uninformed of until last week. If they have, then our own purchase can go ahead; if not......... 
The immobilier, who is supposed to be managing our sale, said she will phone us today. It is already 13.13 and the phone has not rung, despite 13 being my best number.

So we have progressed, if you can call it that, from being on the edges of our seats to being stretched pretty much to our limits. Now I recognise that tenterhooks were employed (in the process of making woollen cloth) for the benefit of the cloth - so that it would keep its shape and size as it dried on the big frame - the tenter - but I'm not sure it's quite so beneficial for keeping us in psychological and emotional good shape, rather the reverse; and I don't subscribe to the view that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

The word 'tenter' apparently comes from the Latin tendere, meaning 'to stretch'. Stretched as we are, a bit of tenderness from the Universe wouldn't come amiss please, other than the delightful first sighting of a Zebra Swallowtail Butterfly on our buddleia bushes.

p.s. 
Two hours later: We have at last heard that our purchasers have got their mortgage. Hu-bloody-rah. However, they have to wait ten days before returning some paperwork to their bank (who knows why; apparently it's a legal requirement), and only then do the bank let our Notaire know, so that she can complete the paperwork for the sale and request the release of funds so it goes through. The upshot of which is that the earliest likely completion date has slipped by another week, to about 3rd August. But of course that won't be confirmed until about a week beforehand. I'm all for spontaneity, but such short notice, when there's so much to arrange, seems (Frankly) bizarre to me.

Oh, and by the way, The William has today received his Carte Vitale. I've long since stopped counting the years & months since our application. Everything comes to s/he who waits???....................

Let them eat gateau?

So, Bastille Day - the Fête nationale of France - commemorating both the storming of the Bastille (and the liberation of all seven of its prisoners) in 1789 and the Fête de la Fédération celebrating peace and French unity the following year. And this year the parade in Paris included U.S. troops, to mark the centenary of their joining in the First World War, and was graced by the presence of Trump... We will pass over his comment yesterday of the 'good shape' of Mme. Macron.

French holidays are a curiosity. Of the eleven public holidays, six are Christian festivals: Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, All Saints Day, and Christmas. The remaining five are New Year's Day, Labour Day, VE Day, Bastille Day, and Armistice Day.  

In an avowedly secular state, is this a case of having your cake and eating it? Lacking which, we marked the day in good Elizabeth David fashion, with an omelette and a glass of wine. Salut!

The ubiquity of lentils

We had dhal and rice for supper last evening; today I am still discovering dry red lentils where they never were before. How do they do that? I know they are said to be one of the healthiest foods we can eat, but no-one to my knowledge has addressed their escapologist tendencies. Is it just that they are small? Is it just that I am clumsy? I'm usually not: perhaps they just bring it out in me. Or is there some other subtle reason?!

p.s. Comments welcome, on this or any other post!

Of sunflowers and celebrations

Wednesday 5th July 2017

July already. The sunshine has come back to us, scorchingly hot, and the sunflowers are blooming wonderful! 

I'm harvesting seeds every day, from our poppies, nigella and honesty, so at least we'll have some colour in the new garden next year. I love self- seeding plants, although our raised beds are at the moment overwhelmed with a jungle of self-seeded tomato and pepper plants.

We now only have two weeks to go before the removal man & van come to take away all our stuff - and we still don't have confirmed dates for completion of either the sale or the purchase: talk about going to the edge! As a forward planner I find this difficult: is it an exercise in trust, faith, and patience, or in sheer bloody-minded determination that it will happen?

William is doing sterling work, sorting out transfers of utilities, mail re-direction, and booking a couple of Ibis hotels to lodge at for at least the first weekend of homelessness, one in Rochefort, the other back in Pontivy, where we stayed while house hunting. Much more tiring than one might expect, doing all these things in a second language and according to unfamiliar systems.

But this hiatus has given us the opportunity to have two very useful conversations.

The first was about The Future. Having completed our Three Year Plan of time in the sun, and conscious that we're both now in our 60s, we've now come up with a Ten Year Plan. Well done us! And it's simply this: to enjoy our new home in Brittany for at least ten years (no surprise there!) and then minimalise our possessions, sell up, move into rented accommodation (somewhere near the coast would be nice) and enjoy using whatever money we get from the sale (minus rent & basics of course) while not having to think about who to leave anything to. It's genius. 

The second conversation started with my encouraging The William, once we're unpacked, to get on with some research he's been wanting to do for a long time, but not had the energy or support to progress. The working title of it is 'Peter, Paul, and Mary' - and no, it's not about the folk/pop group of the 1960s! But the upshot of the conversation was that The William is now encouraging me to get on with my work as a liturgist (which sounds a bit posh, but isn't) and complete my series of simple, domestic celebrations to mark the turning year, natural as well as traditional/ecclesiastical. So I am. And a very nice break from packing boxes it is too!

Watch this space (or the one above it) for the first of the series, which is for the celebration of Lammas on 1st August. 

Good news and grandmothers

Hurrah for Boaty McBoatface! The marvellously named yellow submarine has successfully completed its first mission in the Antarctic, and thereby gives us, at last, a piece of news to make us smile!

As you may remember, the name was overwhelmingly the most popular in a 2016 poll for the name of a new polar research ship. Sadly the name finally chosen by the National Environmental Research Council was the RRS Sir David Attenborough, which had come fifth in the poll. Worthy, but not fun; childish, some might say, and indeed have said. But what's wrong with childish, or, more properly, child-like?

I've just been re-reading a book that was deliberately written not for children, but for "the child-like of any age" - and sometimes I think you have to turn to older people to find that quality! The book is The Princess and the Goblin, by the Scottish author, poet, and Congregational church minister, George McDonald (a fascinating man - look him up on Wiki! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald ). I found it by happenstance the other day on my Kindle. My own paperback copy, and its sequel The Princess and Curdie, were given to me a long time ago, when I was still at Junior School, by my maternal grandmother, but they have long since disappeared from my book shelves. I'm glad to say that the other books she gave me, however, have travelled everywhere with me, although increasingly battered. They are the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis, which compete with Rosamund Pilcher's Winter Solstice as my must-have Desert Island Discs book!

There is a richness in these so-called 'children's' books that endures, and they introduced me to the realm of what is now called High Fantasy, which I still enjoy today.

The grandmother who gave them to me was a painter, weaver, and linguist: she taught herself Mandarin when her son went to China in the 1950s, and learnt Russian, as far as I know just for interest's sake, when she was in her 70s. She had a great collection of rather battered hats. And she also passed on to me a love of the music of Bob Dylan, who I first heard by listening to her collection of EPs, including Blowing in the Wind, Corinna Corinna, and Tambourine Man. I loved them - which my poor parents no doubt regretted when I later took up playing the guitar and singing!

In case you're wondering, I have fond memories of my paternal grandmother too, not least of her long long white hair, rolled into a bun at the nape of her neck, the humbugs she kept in a tin in her sideboard, which I used to suck while sitting underneath her big square table, covered with a green velvet cloth with bobbles round the edges (the table, not me!), on our weekly Sunday afternoon visits, and for the cockle shells she edged her flower beds with. They made me smile too!

Church – what, why, where, when, who?

Once upon a time, in fact when I was sixteen and being prepared, in a somewhat perfunctory fashion, for church membership, I asked a question, quite a big question: What is the church for? 

At the time, this was perhaps somewhat bound up with a corrolarative question: What has the church got to offer me? I think I now know the answer to the second question (which is yet another story!) but the first one remained hanging unanswered in the airy spaces of my mind, despite some perambulations into the realms of religious-politcal thought a few years ago while studying for an MA in Applied Theology – what else does one do in one's mid-50s after all!

Even long ago in my teenage years, the overt power and influence of the church was withering away, leaving behind a very mixed legacy, and churches have struggled to develop a renewed identity (or should that be renewable?!). At such a time as ours, with beleaguered politicians, institutional decline, and disillusioned, often apathetic, sometimes enraged, citizens, should the church return to a philanthropic role of community needs provider? Should it adopt the 'if you can't beat them, join them' approach of entrepreneurial partnership? Should it focus on a public, quasi-civic role as participant in state ceremonial? Should it strive against the odds to be a counter-cultural prophet? Should it focus on the populist appeal of simplistic evangelical rhetoric? Should it withdraw from 'the world'? And when I say 'it' I should of course say 'we'.

There is precedent for all of these, certainly, but for me none of them sit very easily with the image of a man who called people to him and talked to them about shepherds, flowers in the field, travellers along dangerous roads – not an entrepreneur, a social activist, a hermit, an academic theologian, nor, unlike our political leaders, a socio-political strategist, imposing top-down agendas of political cant and paternalism masquerading as bottom-up vision. Jesus, as far as we can tell, was a man who engaged with people wherever and whoever they were, a man who did not give straight answers to questions but told stories, stories which for the last two thousand years have somehow had the power to transform lives, to mobilise people into action, and to weave together very human self-interest with responsible altruism.

Story-telling is believed to be one of our oldest human activities. Stories are ways of making sense of experience and ideas, expressing concepts and beliefs, shaping our identity, binding people together, and enabling conversations and associations which go beyond the political jargon of 'community cohesion' and 'connectedness'. More importantly still, mutually reinforcing stories become story-fields, that is, fields of influence, creating ideas of how life is or could be, and influencing people's behaviour, acting like magnets, with a powerful pull toward seeing and behaving in one certain way rather than another.

I have written elsewhere, and at length, about such meta-narratives, and won't inflict that on you here! Suffice it to say that stories and story-fields matter more than we often give them credit for: they possess the dynamic, contextualised, motivating power which enables the process of paradigm shift, the metamorphosis from one way of thinking to another. To put it simply, to change the future, first change the story. And to change the story, what do we need but narrative leadership – in our churches as much as in our political society.

As a cleric, I am of course concerned both that we tell our story and how we tell it, and of course this evokes Jesus' particular use of parables. These were vivid, brief, powerful, and open-ended, drawing his listeners into real life, familiar, yet timeless and universal situations, and confronting them and us with the demand for a decision or a response. There are some good contemporary examples of this innovative, 'parabolic' approach: the thoughtful, provocative songs and prose writings of Sydney Carter, the often over-used, but on-the-button poems of T.S. Eliot and John Betjeman, the unconventional paintings of Stanley Spencer, the hymns of Brian Wren, and the excellent if controversial Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ. All of these tell the Christian story in ways that, without diminishing the original, nonetheless strip layers away to reveal a core that can resonate today; and they are accessible, comprehensible, without requiring the listener or viewer to sign up for anything, least of all propositional doctrine.

And there is also an example – perhaps one of many, but the only one known to and experienced by me - of an experiment not simply in telling the story but in living it out, namely the Iona Community, founded in the 1930s by a friend of my uncle Boris, the Church of Scotland minister, George McLeod. McLeod recognised that there was a deep and urgent need for clergy to find new ways of communicating and living the gospel, resulting in a scattered community which crosses the boundaries of race, gender, sexual orientation, and denominational affiliation, and which brings together work and worship, prayer and politics, the 'sacred' and the 'secular' in ways that reflect a strongly incarnational theology.

For me, the Iona Community is a model of how the Christian story can be both communicated and lived in the here and now, rather than the various no doubt well-intentioned efforts to create 'church' in new styles, or to dress it in supposedly modern clothes, aiming to reach the un-churched. Perhaps, indeed, the concept of 'church' needs if not to be thrown away, then certainly recast. What is important is not the institution it once was, nor the resources represented by church buildings, nor the documented numbers of church members, but trust in God and in each other, so that we can 'sing the Lord's song', albeit in the strange land of today, and to join in the telling of a story which can help any and all people both to heal and to enable their optimum health – physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual – regardless of who they are or what they have been. The community of faith, the household of God, is not for the favoured few, nor for those who attach this label or that to themselves or others, but for everyone who is touched by God's grace, and all those who seek to be.

My question is answered, not just in terms of a 'what' but also a 'who', and a little bit of 'how' and 'why'. To 'where' and 'when' the answer is always the same: here and now. And it only took forty-five years!

Manning the barricades?

The William and I have recently re-watched a couple of films. The first was The Way, an adaptation of Jack Hitt's book about walking the Camino de Santiago, something we would love to do, although nights in dormitories don't much appeal! It's a very good film, with the themes not only of what pilgrimage can mean these days, but also of loss, grief, and resolution. I think I got more from it this second time around, and I do recommend it.

However, I don't recommend the other film we watched, or rather three films telling one story: The Hobbit. Read the book instead!

But it was interesting (to me anyway!) that during the scene of Thorin barricading himself and his small group of followers inside the mountain, after the destruction of Lake Town and with lines of refugees heading his way for aid, what was uppermost in my mind was a post-Brexit Britain, closing its doors to outsiders. Literally outsiders. Ordinary people in need, good and bad, hard workers and slackers, of different nationalities, faiths, colours, cultures... I saw in my mind's eye the lines of people heading for the Mediterranean, piling into tiny overcrowded boats, and as like as not drowning; more lines of more people walking across Europe, to be turned away or caged inside camps within sight of their goal.

In the film, my sympathy is with Bilbo, absailing down the rocks to get to the Men and Elves, who, not entirely surprisingly, are anticipating armed struggles. Bilbo hopes to broker a deal between the various parties with the prized Arkenstone as the lure. The Arkenstone was one of the three Silmarils, in whose hearts burned the light of Valinor; but those who desired to possess them became tainted by arrogance and the lust for power.

Call them High Fantasy or fairy tales, un-Disneyfied ones rarely end happily, and I fear we're living in the reality of one now. Or am I just being pessimistic? (But where's Bilbo when you need him?)

In Limbo

More horrors and lives lost: the fire at the Grenfell Tower, the hate attack on the Finsbury Park mosque, and forest fires in Portugal. And yet here the worst we are experiencing is frustration with the vagaries of the sale/purchase process (can't book the removers until we have a date; won't have a date until the sale is confirmed; can't confirm the sale until the buyers' mortgage is confirmed; can't progress the purchase until the sale is confirmed... ) and the enervating effects of the continuing heatwave.

Yes, I do count my blessings - and hope that Sunday's victory of LREM is one of them! But Limbo – traditionally the edge of hell, a realm for un-damned sinners - is not the most comfortable place to be: we feel powerless, out of control, and therefore vulnerable.

For the pedantic such as myself, please note that Limbo and Purgatory, often muddled up, are not the same: Purgatory is the place of purification (purging) for those destined for heaven, and no-one stays there for ever, while Limbo is where we get stuck... or can we limbo dance out? If so, I shall eschew my 20 minutes of cross-training three times a week for bendy back exercises pronto, although in this heat I shall still need a good cleansing afterwards!

Mortality

June is the month when my mother died, and while I have many happy memories and remember her with love and gratitude, I also regret the missed opportunities, the conversations we didn't have. One of the few certainties in life is that whoever is born will die. Life is what happens in between, and we must make the most of it.

I believe that life begins with conception, although individual existence, in the sense of independence, doesn't happen until later, certainly not until birth, and, it could be argued, not even then. Every moment, from conception onwards, is a step towards death. Some death is what I think of as pre-mature, which we understandably seek to prevent: deaths from ill health and disease, from accidents and murder. Alternatively, death may be actively sought and enabled as a release from suffering when the prospect of continuing life would be unreasonably painful or qualitatively unacceptably poor. For myself, I hope for what I think of as a natural death – death due to age when my time-limited body and mind simply reach their use-by date and quietly stop.

But despite everyone knowing that aging and death are the natural and inevitable consequence of life, we try to stave them off. From such simple 'remedies' of diet and exercise, through commercialised concern with appearance (anti-wrinkle creams, botox, face-lifts, and so on) to the extremes of cryo-preservation, we are generally encouraged to want to live longer and to appear younger. Our youth-centric culture both compounds, and is compounded by, this negative attitude to aging and death, despite (or more likely because of) the evident demographic shift toward a predominantly elderly population, albeit marginalised and undervalued. And when I ask myself why this is, I regret to say that part of the unnatural and simply misguided vilification of age and death lies in the hands of the Christian church.

Christian theology derives very much from the teachings of the apostle Paul, and what Paul proclaimed was 'Christ crucified'. Paul believed that death was the result of human sinfulness, and that Jesus' crucifixion was a salvific event: Christ 'died for our sins' and 'was raised from the dead'. Thus those who are baptised 'into Christ Jesus' are both baptised into his death and raised with him to 'newness of life'. Without getting too tangled up in the intricacies of Pauline theology (easily done!), it is clear that, for Paul, death was something to be overcome, defeated; as the author of Revelation subsequently wrote: 'Death shall be no more'. This is the predominant theology that we have inherited, and the other side of it is the Christian eschatalogical hope: that, beyond death, there is new life of some sort. So much for Jesus' own teachings of the immanence of God's reign!

One small exception to this attitude toward death is found in the later teaching of Francis of Assisi (d.1226). Judging from his early writings, Francis had inherited Pauline negativity, but as he grew older his attitude seems to have begun to alter. In verse twelve of his Canticle of the Creatures (composed around 1224, and said by some to be adapted from Psalm 148) he wrote: 'Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no one living can escape.' While this is hardly unequivocally positive, it is at least a change, and, in the context of the whole canticle, which is rooted in humanity's fellowship with all creation, frames death as simply the liminal experience of a new beginning. In 1910, William Henry Draper, rector of a parish church at Adel, near Leeds, paraphrased Francis' Canticle for his church's Whitsuntide fesival, and verse 12 became verse 6: And thou most kind and gentle Death, Waiting to hush our latest breath (O praise Him! Alleluia!) Thou leadest home the child of God, And Christ our Lord the way hath trod. (O praise Him! Alleluia!)

Search the hymn books – and I have! - and I think you'll be hard put to find another such positive framing of death – which is why I chose it for mother's funeral eight years ago. And why, other than for the purposes of a compassionate funeral, would one want to? Simply because I think that there may be links between people's increasing preoccupation with physicality, longevity, and the staving off of death, and the decline in formal, corporate religion, notwithstanding the rise of individualistic spiritual quests.

Now, that may seem quite a jump! But look at it this way: The church, by and large, preaches a theology of the Cross, which is fundamentally futuristic: in order to secure a future 'life after death' it is necessary to accept 'salvation' through Jesus' death on the cross. All a bit 'jam tomorrow' and, to be honest, not very satisfying, not to mention the fact that we have no idea whether Jesus himself believed his death to be a salvific imperative, only that he was willing to accept what he understood to be God's will. However, there is an alternative, namely the theologies of Incarnation and Immanence – that in Jesus, God didn't die for the life of the world, but was born and lived for the life of the world – God with us. From the very little that we know of his teaching, we can confidently conclude that Jesus brought the good news that God and God's reign are not tucked away for some post-apocalypse, post-death future time, but are here and now. And so it is the here and now that the church needs to deal with.

Traditionally, the church's theology and liturgy have represented a corporate liminal space, where the divine and the human meet. But if we truly believe in Incarnation and Immanence then we must also accept that this is a false dichotemy, and should no longer promulgate the concept of any separation between these supposed two realms. What I suggest therefore is that two inter-related actions are necessary: firstly, we need to reform our theology, to plough a furrow back through centuries of Pauline and post-Pauline accretions, to return as closely as we can to Jesus' own precepts; and secondly, we need to create new liturgies, to act as experiential gateways leading us away from the Pauline drama of salvation and towards a benign framing of our mortality and a truer understanding of our creatureliness.

Hot heads and heatwaves

So, Theresa May is hanging on by her fingertips and grasping at the DUP as a prop in the hung parliament: the DUP – right wing Eurosceptic unionists, formerly led by Ian Paisley, and associated with paramilitarism, among other things: do see Matthew d'Ancona's article in this morning's Guardian: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/12/may-tories-amber-rudd-prime-minister-leadership

Meanwhile here in France, with temperatures up into the 90s (F), the young Big Mac's En Marche! trans-partisan party seems to be trouncing both socialists and conservatives as they head toward a huge majority. Good! And about time centrists and liberals counter-balance the extremism, of all sorts, that has become so dangerously dominant throughout the world. Fingers crossed for the final round of voting on Sunday.