Doing it for Wool Lady

I was shopping a few weeks ago for some cheap craft materials, and took a whole pile of things up to the till. Each item was only a pound or two, and the whole bill was less than £10. After I had paid, I thought it actually seemed a bit too good to be true, so checked the receipt - sure enough the cashier had missed some wool off . Woohoo, a freebie!


No, I thought, do the right thing and go and pay for it.


It's only worth a couple of quid, I thought next. What's the point? And she'll think I'm really strange going back to pay for such a low cost item. I hate it when people think I'm strange.


But the right thing is to pay for it so I'd better go and do it, I thought, a bit begrudgingly. Ok, God, I'll do it for you, I said in my head.


No, said a thought that popped into my head unbid, You're not doing it for me. You're doing it for her.


I took the item back and paid for it, and she did look at me a bit funny.


Since then, I keep thinking about what happened, and the sudden thought I had: You're doing it for her.


Over the past three or four years, I've felt out of sorts with the faith that I have been raised in, and the explanations I've heard for what it is I'm meant to believe in. One of the big things for me is the separation of humankind and God that seems to be lurking in the background all the time. I'm increasingly convinced that we've got this wrong, and lost touch with a vital part of our spirituality.



I'm convinced that the message that Jesus taught, is that God dwells in humanity, and makes his home here. And not just with the good people, the church people or the religious ones, but all of us. After all, he's the God who called himself 'Emanuel' (meaning 'God with us'.) Isn't the message of the incarnation that he's a God in human skin, with human bones and human blood, just like….


...everyone?

We so love to divide and separate and sort things into categories. It gives us a sense of control in an uncontrollable world. Jesus taught against this sort of thinking when he said about God's presence, 'You won't be able to say, 'Here it is!' or 'It's over there!' For the Kingdom of God is within you." 

I've been taught to immediately apply some divisive thinking to that piece of teaching: "Ah yes, he's talking to Christians, of course. The presence of God is definitely within Christians. But not anyone else, we all know that. That's the problem." Except that when Jesus was alive, there weren't any Christians, so whoever he was saying that to, it definitely wasn't a church-goer. So Jesus is telling someone who has never stepped foot in a church or prayed a special prayer, that God's presence is 'within you.'

One of Jesus's earliest followers described the spiritual journey as one in which we increasingly discover and live out of our truest, deepest selves. He said that our true selves reflect the reality found in God, and so we need to move beyond the division and separation that we involve ourselves in, because 'here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.' It's a new way of seeing. A unifying, pulling-together-rather-than-separating kind of seeing. 

This man, Paul, went around blowing conventional seeing and thinking out of the water. It was controversial. In his day, it was the Jews who thought they had something other people (the Gentiles) didn't have. In my circles, we Christians have been taught that it's us who have exclusive access to the presence of God living within us. (Which means we then feel the need to go round telling everyone else what they have to do to get what we think only we have got. Which is stressful.) But Paul went out of his way to dismantle this kind of thinking. 'There's a mystery! It's been hidden from previous generations, but now we can see it clearly! God has wanted to make known the glory of the riches of this mystery among the gentiles (i.e., among everyone, ever. Let me just restate that - the beautiful, glorious, mystery is among the 'gentiles'. That's everyone.) And the mystery is this: CHRIST IS IN YOU.' 

Woohoo, woohoo!!!! Christ is in you!!! Whoever you are, wherever you are, Christ is in you! The suffering, compassionate, tender, patient, loving, beautiful, powerful, gentle, wise, ageless, life-giving, thirst-quenching, tear-drying, spirit-lifting one is within you! Just say yes to what already is, and what always has been true. That's all that's needed. He wants to show you how to live in his ways, which are all just different ways of being Love. Listen, and he'll show you. 


When I think like this, some of the other stuff Jesus said starts to make more sense. He said that when I finally meet my maker he will say 'well done' for the time I went to visit him in prison. What? But God, when did I visit you in prison? Well, when you went to visit Llewelyn that time, actually that was me, because I am Christ within Llewelyn. (And it means he might also say, I was hungry and you ignored me - where were you?)


If God identifies himself with people, then when I love people, I love God. Or to put it a different way, if I want to love God, I have to love people. If I want to serve God, then I have to serve people. If I want to know God, I have to know people.


It doesn't make sense anymore to divide and separate my world into 'things I do for God' and 'everything else'. When I took the ball of wool back to the cashier in the craft shop and paid up, it wasn't extra holy or extra special because I did it for God. It was good because it was for a human.



This is The Way that Jesus calls us to. A life spent loving people and loving God, because God is in people and people are in God.

 It's messy and unglamorous, but it's rich beyond measure.

Building sandcastles

Back in the 1980s when I was small, my two favourite girls' names were Lucy and Jennifer. So when I got a new teddy one day, I already knew what I would call it. I would combine both these names, to make the most perfect, prettiest girl's name in the whole wide world.

"Mum! Here's my new teddy. Meet (beaming with delight)... LUCIFER."

Yeah, it wasn't a go-er with my Mum.

I think my biggest boy has inherited my love of word-play. The other day he introduced me to one of his toy cars: "He's called Smackhead."

(Because he smacked his head on the skirting board, apparently.)

Which brings me onto the topic of this post, and another word that's made of two parts. I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but struggled to find a way to write it. But I'm fed up of waiting for the right words to show up, so I'm just going to go for it as best I can.

So here's the word: Reconcile.

It's made of two bits, re (back) and concile, from the latin conciliare (bring together). Do you notice that the word has a sense of space to it, of bringing something back together that had been separated? I'm just pointing it out here, because this is going to be a bit of a theme.

A couple of thousand years ago, a spiritual man wrote a letter to his friends. He was trying to explain some insights he had about God, Jesus and people, and he wrote this:

God was in Jesus, reconciling the world to himself... 

He was writing in Greek, not English, so instead of 'reconcile' he wrote katalasso. But katalasso has a similar sense of space to it: kata (down to an exact point) and allasso (to change). So its a picture in a word, of two things changing their position (there's the space theme), and coming together to an exact point, a meeting place. He was trying to describe a change in space, a change in position, that leads to a meeting 'down to an exact point' of God and humanity.

He had a further insight, and completed his sentence like this:

God was in Jesus, reconciling the world to himself... not taking account of their 'paraptomata'.

Paraptomata. (I hope all these words aren't making you dizzy). Paraptomata. It's another word that talks about space and position. It means 'to fall away, after being close beside.' He's saying that humanity has somehow changed position, moving from being close beside God, to... somewhere else. But God 'doesn't take account' of it, so wherever the somewhere else is that humanity finds itself, there's no blame attached to us being there. God is busy reconciling - bringing together God and humanity, wherever they happen to find themselves.

A while back I wrote about an abyss, and a cliff, so naturally I left things on a cliffhanger. I said that I no longer believe that God and I were ever separated. There never was an abyss between me and God. The abyss was within me.

How so?

It's my paraptomatoes you see. I have moved from being close to God, to being somewhere else. And yet the unending truth is, the Spirit of Life and I are one. He is in me, and I am in him. So how on earth can I still find myself 'no longer close beside'? By building. I build a concept of me that is devoid of God, as though we were actually separate. It's paraptomata, creating a kind of fake, separated self that stands alone, as though it's no longer close beside God. This self-build me has taken years to create. It looks like a castle, but it's made of sand. It's paraptomata. My Sand Castle Self. It's a whole way of living that's curiously oblivious to the beautiful truth. Goodness only knows why we do it.

But despite the snub, God doesn't hold a grudge. There is no blame attached. He reconciles.

If you want to know what the English word for paraptomata is, it's this: Sin.

I always thought that sin was about moral failure. Doing things that are Bad. Doing things that are Morally Wrong. It's why I hid behind a door to pray some fervent apologies at the age of 13 when I said a rude word at school, which I won't repeat. It was hardly the F-bomb, but to my mind it fell into the classification of Things That Are Bad. I was terrified. So after that, I worked out a better way. I could avoid sin by just a few careful tweaks to the odd vowel sound in my life. Like this: "Shoot, I forgot my PE kit!" See, it's kind of like saying Sh*t, but it's sin-free! What could be better! It's guilt-free cool. Sort of.

Except no-one told me that sin isn't really about moral successes or failure, it's about paraptomata. It's about the building of a smaller, isolated version of you, a sandcastle you, that thinks and acts as though it's separate, and somehow forgets it is and always has been one with the beach. And yet still there's no blame attached.

I find it very difficult to write the word sin, so great is the weight of condemnation I associate with that word. I actually feel as though the word traumatised me. It was the word that was always there, between me and my obsessive-compulsive god, who insisted on regular and thorough spiritual hand-washing to get rid of every last speck of sin before he would touch me. He was a reconciling god, but a neurotic one.

There are some words that Jesus spoke that have been like a healing balm to me.

I didn't come to judge the world.

I didn't come to judge the world.

I didn't come to judge the world, I came to heal it.

Judgement has separation at it's heart. It's about separating the good from the bad. It's very black and white. It's either good or it's bad - not both. It's the ultimate addiction of humanity - to separate and categorise things. We do it to everything. Food. Emotions. Purchases. Decisions. Other people. Good. Bad. Bad. Good. And the problem is, we do attach blame. Pick anything you've put in the Bad camp and see if it doesn't have a whiff of condemnation about it. If you've ever found yourself lumped in someone else's Bad category, you'll have felt the sting of condemnation.

When I believed sin was to do with morality, it's no wonder I felt the weight of condemnation. Morality as a system relies on people making judgments. We have to judge what is good and what is bad, and then tow the line (generally for good reason, since it protects society from the worst excesses of evil). But nevertheless, the whole set-up of morality has judgment as its foundation. And where there is judgment, there is also condemnation.

But if there's one thing about God, he doesn't seem to like separating things. He seems to be more into making things whole again, or healed (whole/heal - they're the same word really). I am made of good and I am made of bad. Sometimes I do good things and sometimes I do bad things. I am both. To judge is to separate, but I can't be separated - at least not without some damage occurring. But Jesus said he didn't come to judge. He didn't come to try and forcefully separate good from bad. He didn't come to judge. To make the point he told a story about a man who owned a field of wheat, and then found a load of weeds in it. 'Argh!' shrieked his servants, 'Panic! Should we pull the weeds out master?!' Nah, he said. Let both grow together until harvest. Jesus can cope with both things - good and bad - being there. He honestly doesn't mind getting his hands dirty while he's hanging out with me - he's not OCD after all.

So, where does this leave us?

Jesus is not interested in judging me, he is interested in healing me. He is not about separating, he is about reconciling. He brings things back together. It's time for me to leave my sand castle self behind, and rediscover the deep, truest me, where God and I are one. The reconciliation is the discovery that God and I are actually in the same place, and have been all along. And it's less that I found God in me (although that is true), it's more that I found myself... in God.

And standing here, secure in the presence of my God, I can let the waves wash away the paraptomata, the sand-castle self, and the whole system of morality, and judgment and separation and condemnation.

And as I let it all slip away, that way of living is gone, and a new way of living is birthed. It will take a life-time and beyond to learn. It's the way of Truth. It's the way of Life. It's the way of Love.

PS. I bet you want to know what the rude word was.
PPS. It was 'damn'. I know, bad-ass.

It is I.

I have some words going round my brain at the moment: “It is I whom you love.” I didn’t make this phrase up; I got it from another woman. Perhaps she heard it from another woman as well. I would ask her, except that she’s been dead for 700 years. I do know that she wasn’t writing these words about herself.

It is I whom you love.

The first time I came across those words, I felt like the blood stopped flowing through my veins. Time stood still for a moment and my heart seemed to swell.

It is I whom you love.

I guess the woman who’s been dead 700 years wrote those words down because they had a similar effect on her. It was a moment when a thousand other moments come together into one, and suddenly make sense.

I had one of those other moments this week. With my husband three and a half thousand miles away, I was staying with family but feeling alone and run down. The children and I all had colds. I came down to breakfast to find presents for my middle boy, who turned three this month. And there, on top of his pile of blue and green wrapped boxes, was a MAC bag. A black MAC bag. No-one buys MAC make-up for a three year old boy. No, this present was for me. I started grinning like an idiot before I’d even opened it. It came with a lovely card from my sister, with some lovely words inside that made me want to cry. Somewhere under all the parental responsibilities and holding it together and just keeping going someone had found… me. Oh thank you, thank you! I had felt lost, but inside a black MAC bag was compassion and kindness and being known - the gift of being found.

It is I whom you love.

Yesterday I was at a conference for Christians. I am feeling a little at odds with my religion at the moment, so this wasn’t the easiest place to be. But, we had a great barbecue with friends and cooked sausages in the sunshine while the children played with pointy sticks and ate too many donuts. After a few hours of these simple pleasures, we left. On the long walk back to the car, we adults talked. We talked about the frustrations of feeling out of sorts with our religion. It made me feel a bit alone.  And then suddenly, breaking into the sky with a roar, came the Red Arrows. “Look, boys! RED ARROWS!” If you’ve ever seen the Red Arrows loop and twist through the air over your head, you’ll know it’s an awesome sight. You just have to stop in your tracks and watch. The power, the precision and the beauty are breath taking. I really did hold my breath as they climbed in formation, then dived together as though they were falling, falling, falling, before peeling off and looping up again in big joyful red swooshes. I let the surprise and the beauty and the joy and the power wash over me and through me. I had been found again. Surprise. Beauty. Joy. Power.

It is I whom you love.

I read online a couple of months ago about a young man who was overheard by his parents, whilst on the phone to his boyfriend. They were planning how he might tell his parents that he is gay. Having heard the phone conversation, the father got there first. “The only thing I need you to plan,” he wrote, “is to bring home OJ and bread after class… I’ve known you were gay since you were six. I’ve loved you since you were born.” How can so few words carry so much tenderness, acceptance, compassion, knowing and love, and bestow so much worth? They’re just words. And yet they carry something so profoundly beautiful in them that it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Whatever it is that those words carry, it feels timeless, heavy but light, serious but smiling, tender but strong – all these qualities shimmering together. There’s something about this peculiar mix-up of characteristics that I love. It feels somehow… alive.

It is I whom you love.

The black MAC bag. The Red Arrows. A father’s note to his son. Within each of these things came something else. Something enduring, alluring, that can’t be grasped with my hands and yet can settle in my heart, stirring within me something that feels like warmth, or maybe it’s light, or maybe it’s love. I am not alone in this strange universe. My life has been interrupted by many of these moments, where something else breaks in. The moments themselves are usually unremarkable. And yet within them, is something ever so courteous and gentle, something ever so strong and safe, something ever so serious and mischievous and funny. If it had a sound I think it would be deep and musical and roaring and laughing. And as it built to a great crescendo, I would hear it most clearly: Whatever this something is, whatever is noble, courteous, true, compassionate, loving, strong, heart-stirring, life-giving, hope-building, joy-bringing, worth-bestowing, whatever draws your heart: It is I. It is all I. It is I whom you love.

Back in the Dark Ages a woman living in solitude heard a whisper in her soul and wrote it down. Seven hundred years on, those same words linger in my mind too. Who is the I who first breathed those words? This becomes my quest: To know the I who speaks them, through sunsets and dewdrops and mercy and births and deaths and kindness in the face of evil and sacrifice in the face of suffering and stories of romance and science and art and letters from fathers and Red Arrows and a gift of make-up. I have heard the whisper and the gentle knocking on the door of my life.

So yes, come in, you whom I love. 

Love, Life and Tantrums

When my boy gets tired, he becomes inflexible, like many of us do. So I shouldn't have chosen a day when he was tired to announce that he would be wearing new swimming trunks to his lesson that day. All hell broke loose. Screaming, shouting, tears, snot, gagging - the full works. After he calmed down and put on the new trunks, we set off for the pool. There was another tantrum in the changing room about taking his shoes off. And then over the putting on of the swimming cap, which strains our relationship on the best of days. More snot and flailing limbs, whilst other children politely lined up for the lesson.  

As I walked him round to the poolside and handed him into the care of his teacher, the signs were not looking good. The little crumpled brow, the hands drawn nervously up to his chest, the little stutter in his feet, as though they half had a mind of their own and were trying to get back to the changing rooms. I did my best stern face and told him to pull himself together and get on with it. I am weary of having to do this, I thought, to deal with his tantrums and stubbornness. 

Once I got up into the gallery, I was not impressed with what I saw. There was my boy, stubbornly refusing to get into the pool. Feelings of mortification set in. Each time his teacher tried to coax him in, my boy turned his back on her with dramatic flair, and chose to sit facing the wall, knees pressed up against his chest and head down. My mortification turned into exasperation, and then after a further 25 minutes, into anger. I started mentally rehearsing how I would greet him afterwards: Would it be silent disapproval? Let him feel the burning of my anger in the silence of the car ride home? Or the "Get. Into. The. Car...NOW!" routine - with disgust written all over my face and in my tone. I was so angry I wanted to say mean things, words I would have meant in the moment but sorely regretted later. 

I begged God to help me - 'Help me! I want to be compassionate to this boy, but I can't! I want to hurt him, so he will get a taste of my anger and share in the shame he is causing me. And yet deeper still I don't, I don't. Please don't let me hurt him. I gave birth to this child, I love him. Please God, you are going to have to literally put some words into my mouth to speak to him. If you don't I will pour out a torrent of hurtful, angry words on him, and he will be wounded. Please, give me the words to say to him.'

As I watched on, my boy finally made it into the pool. He did a couple of lengths of backstroke, bobbing around as though he's in the Dead Sea, propped up as he is with his 8 armbands (he's nervous of sinking - we're trying to get it down to 6). The lesson over, I went to meet him, unsure about what was going to come out of my mouth, or what look would be on my face.

I wrapped the towel round him and lifted him onto the bench, and my mouth said:

"What do you think I should say to you?"

He looked at me and beamed. "Oh Mummy, I think you should say, 'Well done!'", said my boy.

I think I only managed to say, "Why?"

"Because I got into the pool even though I really really really didn't want to." And he looked up at me, his face full of pride.

For 25 minutes my little boy had been doing battle with his emotions, and after all that time he won. He overcame, and got into the pool. He had experienced a tremendous victory. And for 25 minutes, I had been fuming, with angry words swirling around in my mind about how he was being pathetic and ridiculous. I thought I knew what was going on, but my boy had just opened a door for me into his heart and mind, and shown me what was really there. 

So, "Yes", I said, "you did. You got into the pool even though you really, really, really didn't want to. Well done." 

"Mummy", he said at bedtime, "You made me happy to today. You said kind words." I felt like my heart might implode. I knew he had expected me to be angry. 

The incident opened my eyes to something. I had forgotten how much each human heart longs for another to share in its emotions, just to be there side by side, without judgement. It made me want to do this again, to just sit with my boy and feel what he is feeling, before I start teaching and problem-solving. What a profoundly beautiful thing, for the experienced adult to relinquish the position of power and 'knowing', and to go down to the level of a child, following the lead of an inexperienced little person. 

Why does this stir me so deeply? Because I experienced something that afternoon that led to love and led to life. There is something paradoxical and topsy turvy about the big powerful ones who know, being led by the little, weak ones who don't know, just sitting and feeling what they feel. Not asserting, dominating, judging; not an insistence on their own way, but listening, empathising, being fully available. 

I know I am close to the ways of God when I get ambushed by a topsy turvy way of doing things. After all, this is a God who likes to be found in earth, not heaven. A God who hides but calls out unceasingly. A God who would rather camp out with people than live alone in palaces in the sky. A God who won't be drawn to engage in strong-armed, domineering tactics of power, but instead sits with us, listening, refusing to judge. Like my boy, we thought he was going to be angry with us, but he wasn't. We thought he was going to judge us, but he didn't - he brought life and love instead. He doesn't steam roll over life, but dwells within it, like yeast in a dough: Rising, rising, rising, bringing life and love from the inside, wherever we will let it, like in the boiling hot changing room of a swimming pool, on a Thursday afternoon. 

The day I stopped believing

If you go to the back of a church, you may well find a little pamphlet with a picture of a man standing on the edge of an abyss. Not because the service will leave you wanting to jump off a cliff (although some have left me pretty close), but because the abyss-man picture is an attempt at explaining the mystery of faith. In these pictures, there are usually two cliffs, with helpful labels on each cliff reading MAN and GOD.

Something like this:

(God gets the chair, because he's... God.)

Some pamphlets, depending on the skill of the artist, will also show you a cross joining one cliff to the other, making a bridge for abyss-man to cross over. Look, there he goes!

This one just sticks to the basics...

...while this one involves some serious artwork:

There's a cliff picture for everyone!

I grew up seeing these kinds of images. You don't have to look too hard in a church to find them. From being small, I understood that I was that little clip-art guy, standing on the edge of a cliff, separated from my God. Yes, the explanation goes that the cross of Jesus becomes the way to find God, but at the heart of the picture is a terrible separation. Like a child who has lost its mother, a part of my heart has stayed frozen in terror. The soothing explanations that the cross has made a way, have not entirely brought me comfort. The separation anxiety has not been banished. Like childhood monsters rustling in your wardrobe at night, a fear lurks. It is the fear of being alone.

I know many Christians who remember the time they prayed a prayer, asking Jesus to come and
live in their hearts. A kind of invite for Jesus to take up tenancy in a heart-for-rent. I think I prayed a prayer like this before I even reached double figures. I also know many Christians who feel enough anxiety to have prayed this several times, 'just to make sure'. You never do know with tenants - they might not like the conditions and move out, unbeknown to you.

And so, sometime between Autumn and Spring, I became an unbeliever.

I do not believe these pamphlets any more.

Because the truth, oh the truth, the truth is beautiful. You can't stick truth in a clip-art picture, although truth may choose to be found there, if she desires. Truth makes herself known to you
in ways that only you can understand and know, like the secret-code notes we passed to each other when we were small. Truth speaks to the one-year old you, the seven-year old you, the thirty-four year old you, the sixty-two year old you. Truth has been speaking, and sometimes singing, your whole life long. Sometimes loudly, mostly quietly.

I asked God to show me where he had been my whole life. He showed me my Grandad's sausagey fingers, holding my hands and drawing invisible drawings onto my palms as he talked about geometry, and other things I didn't understand. In this man, who gave me his hands and his time, I saw God. He showed me a walk I took to a motorway bridge with the love of my life, at 19 years old. We were so in love, even a walk to a concrete bridge was full of romance. In this teenager, walking with me over scrubby fields, I saw God. He was there too. I heard the whisper of truth, that he was there all along, in these people. God made human.

And then, unexpectedly, I saw more.

In the deepest part of a human being is God. In the deepest parts of who we are, is everything that is loving, giving, good, true, marvellous, joyful, hilarious, forceful, creative, adventurous, tender,
wondering, gentle, strong, energetic, curious, alive. It is here that you swap secret-code notes with the universe, when starry nights tell you you are alive in a deeper way than you knew. We see glimpses
of this deep-self, but this part of us needs to be stirred to life, woken up, called out from under all the
dust and the dirt and the wounds and the grief. Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Spring has come!

There never was a separation between my God and I. From before the dawn of time, the Spirit of Life has been in the breath of humanity, in the breath and bones and blood of me. Not even death can separate us. How could it? We are one. There was no cliff. It was just a bad dream. In the warm light of day I see things as they really are, and fear slips away.

But I saw something else. It turned out there was a sort of abyss. But not between me and God. No. The abyss was within me.


More on that next time!

I'm bound

I've never liked the word 'religious'. It's usually applied to people by those who don't consider themselves religious, in a way that makes it clear the word isn't a compliment. Religious seems to have picked up a few negative connotations along the way - small minded, fundamentalist, boring, inhibited, outdated, judgemental. Not many people would queue up to be described like that.

But I think it's time that poor old religious shook off the dust and the dirt so we can see her at her brilliant, beautiful best.

Because hiding in the heart of religious is 'lig'. An ugly-duckling of a syllable, but we know what ugly-ducklings can become. Lig is what links religious to words like 'ligament' and 'ligature.' All three words are descendants of the latin word ligare, which means to tie, or bind together. Our ligaments tie our bones together and stop us falling apart.  Ligatures are used for tying and binding. And religion is about a kind of tying or binding.

It's a testament to the tattered reputation of religion, that when we see 'binding' at the heart of it, we shudder. Aha, we think, I knew it! Religion is a binding thing, to be got free of at all costs! For what human being would ever seek to be bound? We see prisoners being marched in line, humiliated and shackled. We see heroines tied to the train-tracks. It is not in our way to want to be bound.

But the binding is not ours, it is God's. It is not a cruel and unusual punishment meted out to unworthy sinners. The binding is of our lover's heart to our own.

There is a throbbing, pulsing, life-giving energy that courses through the universe. From the moment of the big bang, the universe has been growing. Life has been forming and evolving. Not a single sunrise has ever been repeated. The dew will never settle on the fir tree outside my kitchen window in the same way twice. The endlessly renewing creativity is astonishing. The Spirit of life is everywhere I look, everywhere I touch, everywhere I taste, everywhere I hear, everywhere I smell. And the Spirit of life is within me.

I am alive because the Spirit of life is endlessly creative, creating, breathing, giving. I have never been separate from whatever, or whoever, this Spirit is, because in the Spirit of life, I live, and move, and have my being. We are bound together, the Spirit and I, bound together in a dance-hold and a lovers' embrace. From my first cry, to my final breath, I am bound together in love to the endlessly giving Spirit of life. My lover would not leave me pinned to the train-tracks.

He and I are one. He and you are one. Ligare. Religion.

A three-letter word

Because I'm a speech and language therapist, I'm also a bit of a word-geek. Or maybe it's that I'm a bit of a speech and language therapist because I'm a word-geek. I'm not sure yet. But I love words, their meanings, and discovering a word's journey through time. Take this word: Hal. It's an Old English word meaning 'whole', and being a word, it has lots to say.

Hal: 'entire, whole, unhurt, uninjured, healthy.' What a beautiful meaning to carry. It may only have three letters, but as we all know, it's not size that counts, it's what you do with it. And Hal is not only beautiful in meaning, but has also done its bit for the English language, giving us Old English words like hælþ (health) hælan (to heal) and halig (holy, sacred). 

There's another word that keeps cropping up in my thoughts: violence. 'An unjust or unwarranted exertion of force or power. Force that damages, injures or hurts.' The opposite of Hal. 

My Sunday School taught me well enough to ensure that I don't usually inflict violence on other people. I'm tempted towards violence when the cat starts humping my feet, but depending on how well I slept the night before, I usually manage self-restraint. But Sunday School didn't show me how to resist the violence I would be tempted to inflict on myself. Perhaps because that sort of violence can be subtle.

Like moths to a light, humankind is drawn to the way of violence - to think that we can become masters of our bodies, minds, sexuality, emotions, dreams, and spirituality by the exertion of force. When I see a side to my personality that I dislike, I am sorely tempted to squash it, crush it, repress it, lock it away in a dark place out of sight, like a despotic god on a power-trip. Hal on the other hand, would gently coax that side out into the bright warmth of day, and ask it why it behaves as obnoxiously /enviously /impulsively as it does. Hal would listen carefully and find the wound that needs healing. Hal would say that those unlikeable characteristics are no less part of me, no less deserving of love, and perhaps (if it were possible) be more deserving of my love, since they are really messengers of the truth - if only I would listen to their message. And as I would start to love them, I would find a greater degree of wholeness - of unity within these different parts of me. This is Hal.

When I try to separate my body from my mind, or my sexuality from my spirituality, I am in the way of violence again. When I say that I 'have' a body, rather than that I 'am' a body, I have dealt myself an injury. It makes me believe my body should be and do things according to the bidding of my mind, like any other commodity I possess. When I buy into an an economic system that turns planet Earth from my sister into my slave, and humans into units of production, I am in the way of violence. But Hal gently calls to us. Who hasn't seen a glorious dawn and felt the presence of Hal - the profound connection and wholeness that happens in that moment between the senses, soul, spirit and sunlight? These moments are sometimes even healing. The way of violence surrounds us, but so does Hal. Hal doesn't shout or raise her voice in the streets. Hal is the quiet whisper in my soul, the burning optimism that rises in the face of a glorious dawn, or a sudden rainbow. My soul can hear an invitation into the way of Hal, of wholeness, healing and one-ness.

Hal is that little word that gave us 'health', 'healing' and 'holy'. The way of Hal is the way of whole, is the way of healing, is the way of holiness, is the way of God. Hal and God - both three-lettered words.