Saucery in the back garden

Other people know the names of plants. Other people ‘get out there’ whenever they can to pull up a few weeds or check how their latest plant is doing. Other people look upon a trip to the garden centre or nursery as a pleasant excursion, and drive home keen to give their new leafy acquisitions a home. Other people wander outside every morning to see how their garden grows. Other people do all those things – but not me. Until now, that is.

Over the past six weeks I have found myself pouring more and more time into the back garden which I am fortunate to have. I do it very inexpertly, and with the peculiar combination of ignorance and enthusiasm with which we greet any new hobby. However, I am loving every minute of it. When I tried to explain this to a friend recently, she nodded sagely and acknowledged the value of eco-therapy. I am starting to know what she means.

Nineteen months since the death of my beloved wife, there are many reasons why I find this particular kind of therapy useful. Bereavement can be a messy and overgrown place – where precious memories disappear under the relentless march of the now. It has been therapeutic to reverse that trend as the garden starts to emerge from the weeds. 

Weekends and evenings can be the loneliest times – especially as summer evenings grow longer. Out there, though – with muscles aching and birds singing – it seems to recede a little – like the weeds. As a Christian, I love the fact that I can only do so much too. I can work out there for many hours, preparing the soil and planting new flowers – but when I go out in the morning it is God who has done the magical thing of bringing pink, white, yellow or red flowers from green plants.

As things progress, I have been looking for a way to mark out the newly rediscovered flower beds – which is where the ‘saucery’ comes in. For many years, Fiona collected cups and saucers. Back in the days when we could still make trips out together, we loved nothing more than to potter in antique or junk shops looking for pretty examples to add to the collection. As you can see below – I have decided to scour the local charity shops for odd saucers – which now form my border:

CLICK for more views of ‘Project Garden’

Hunting through the charity shops to look for them, and then kneeling on the ground to push them gently into their new soil home is proving to be a labour of love in every sense. Odd saucers are not easy to come by, as it turns out. However, help is at hand – as I shall describe in another blog post.

For now, I shall enjoy the peace and the colours in my old garden made new, and thank God for both the past and the present which I encounter there.

A long awaited moment

A few weeks ago, a little boy was colouring in church whilst his parents were busy with various jobs around the place. I stopped to ask him what he was working on, and he explained that this was the cover of a book he was going to write all about endangered species. The book had no content yet – but the cover was full of promise!

In my experience, the cover is often the last piece of the writing puzzle to fall into place.  In the case of ‘Postcards’ I could not be happier that it has been that way round.  Husband and wife team Vivian Hansen and Alejo Porras have taken time to familiarise themselves with the book.  They have accorded me the grace of walking through the landscape of grief in such a way as to understand it from my point of view. It is a curiously vulnerable thing to entrust a manuscript which has cost you so much to someone else to give it a face. I need not have worried – since it was clearly in very safe hands.

The design features a tiny, plucky tree which I encountered in Cornwall, on the last holiday Fiona and I ever took together.  Battered and bashed by the strong winds blowing in from the coast at Port Quinn, it was holding its own.  Twice I stopped to admire it, before getting my camera out on the third occasion. To see it fighting with the wind – and winning, inspired me then and inspires me now.

When the book comes out on August 2^nd, you will find other illustrations by these talented designers inside.  They will provide you with opportunities to pause and reflect as you walk through the book’s landscape.

Not long to go now – and you can pre-order it here.

If I had one hope for this book – it is that it might become a beloved companion to those who are living in the land of grief, or those who are watching someone they love pass through it. This particular postcard comes ‘with love’.

A review of ‘shadow doctor: the past awaits’ by Adrian Plass

Just over two years ago, I reviewed the first Shadow Doctor book by Adrian Plass. I admired his deft ability to scratch where Christians hate to admit they itch. I commended the author’s gently provocative language, and I warmed to the book’s subtle theology. At the time, I had only one criticism, which was that the book ‘feels rather like the first two acts of a three act play.’. In The Past Awaits, we have that third act.

The relationship between the book’s two key characters continues to deepen. The flaws in the eponymous doctor are revealed in far more depth. He is more broken and vulnerable than any reader would have suspected on their first encounter. Once again, his language is a banquet for the theological imagination, disguised as nibbles at a buffet table. Consider, for example, the description of coming to faith as ‘signing up to join Jesus behind the counter to help with other customers’.  Alternatively , there is the Shadow Doctor’s description of himself and God as being like two old friends who built a giant catapult on the edge of a cliff: ‘we go back a long way and we know when to let go‘. Finding such gems in the midst of the narrative really is like finding poetry in a telephone directory.

Anyone who wants to hold their faith up to the light and examine the interplay of light and shadow will find something of value here. Those engaged in the tricky and delicate business of pastoral care will especially recognise some of what goes on.

The one thing missing here is the element of surprise. Rather like a winner who comes through the first round of a TV talent show – you know the gag when they come back for the next round. That said, if the performance is good enough then the lack of surprise will not trouble you after the first few seconds. I suspect the the same is true here. Give the Shadow Doctor a second go and you are unlikely to be disappointed.

A review of ‘Under the rock’ by Ben Myers, now in paperback

Years ago, on a second holiday in St Cast le Guildo, Brittany, my curiosity got the better of me. I could no longer resist the pull of an information sign which directed me towards the ‘pierres sonnantes’ (‘singing stones) on the river bank. It turns out that this collection of boulders sitting on the river bank failed to live up to their legend. Tapping a stone on their mossy surface produced not the promised song, but a dull and uninteresting ‘clack’.

Benjamin Myers, on the other hand, has made his rock sing. The book’s 350 pages are what could best be described as a lyrical encounter with Scout Rock in Mytholmroyd in West Yorkshire. In the author’s company we scramble up through bracken and undergrowth, we fall headlong onto yesterday’s rubbish in the tip, and we gaze out at the darkening landscape from a shelf on the rock. The rock is at once brooding presence, cipher, landmark and home. If it is true that the author makes it sing, what is less certain is the genre of the music. Is it the warm jazz of a summer’s evening, the strident violin scratching down a sky of steel, or a half-remembered spiritual? Each reader will have to decide, and each reader will doubtless hear it differently. As a person with an interest in the journey walked, this line will be a recurring refrain for me, I think:

Walking is writing with your feet.

Nature books can be twee. Poetry books can be self-indulgent. Autobiographies of a ‘move to the country’ can shut the reader out at least as much as they let them in. This book defies all those descriptions, and whatever it is called – it made the rock sing.

Ginny the lurcher keen to read…

An Easter story

Struggling a little for a children’s talk for Easter, I came across some people this morning on Twitter who had made an Easter Garden with a biscuit as the stone from the tomb. Inspired by them, and a 3-mile walk with the dog – the following emerged. If you are looking for an idea for tomorrow – please feel free to borrow it! Happy Easter:

When Jesus was born, there was a party on heaven and earth

You might have thought that the King of Kings would spend his time  hobnobbing with the rich people.

In fact, he did not. To the poor people he was a cracker (and with Jacob in his family line too).

When they were hungry after listening to his stories, he gave them tuc to eat.

He turned water into wine (or bourbon, in this case)

The religious people, though, did not like him. The didn’t want him in their club – and got rid of him.

The poor disciples thought he had gone a wafer ever.

They could not have been more wrong – and found a lovely surprise when they came to the garden tomb on that first Easter morning.

In all this, we should not forget that right at the heart of it all – is the love of God.

A short narrative on a little man

Last week, I preached on the story of Zaccheus in Luke 19, as I have done many times before. On this particular occasion, I decided to introduce people to him through a narrative based around a special tree. Please feel free to take it and use it if it can be helpful in introducing others to this story.

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Nobody wanted it there – the Sycamore Fig tree. It never seemed to grow figs anyway, and everyone knew it would just get in the way. That was way back though – when it was just a sapling and someone could have pulled it up if they tried. Now it was old and gnarled and established.Its roots had burrowed under the road and bulged up through the dust – like an unseemly vein pushing up the skin.

The tree was an ugly welt on the surface of the town – just like Zaccheus. Like the roots of the old tree – he had burrowed into their lives, draining all that was good and growing fat in the process. He was rarely seen in public – and hardly ever without a henchman to watch his back.

When he tried to muscle in on the town’s salvation day – nobody wanted him. He was met, instead, by a wall of unyielding backs – like armour plating to keep out an enemy. Every gap closed at his approach – every shoulder pressed to the next as if to deny him even the tiniest glimpse of the good. Even the tree bristled at his approach…but what could it do?

After his undignified climb – he lodged in its branches, like an ugly cuckoo chick in the nest of a dainty songbird. If the tree could have shaken him lose, it would have done so – but it could not. When the maker’s son stood beneath its branches, it dared not move, but stood sentinel-like, a foot soldier at attention before his master. Jesus looked up at Zaccheus (which no one had ever done” and said “I must come to your house today” – and the shame-faced tax collector began to scramble down.

As his feet touched the ground at the foot of the tree, the world went still – as if someone had sucked all the air out of it. Caught in the dappled shadows from the tree – his face was pallid and afraid – like a night creature held up by a hunter in the unaccustomed sunlight. His heart raced at the thought of the teacher coming to his home – and sank at the memory of how he had paid for the food in his larder.  Bullying and intimidation were his bread and butter – and right now he felt like he might choke on them.

Clearing his throat – and looking the crowd in the eye (which he never did) he announced that here and now he would give half of his possessions away. Not only that, he said – but to all those he had cheated he would pay back four times what he had taken. The crowd recoiled in shock, a freak breeze blew the branches to one side and his face caught the full sun. Something changed in Jericho that day – and no-one ever felt the tree was in the way again.

Inaugural presentation

Yesterday the first Fiona LIttledale Award was presented at the annual Patient Experience Network Awards. This is how it was introduced.

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My wife, Fiona Littledale, after whom this award is named, spent all her working life as an information manager.  The last ten years were as the Faculty Liaison Librarian to the Medical School of St George’s.  She loved her job, and often got a real boost when she later found herself under the care of one of her students whilst undergoing treatment.  She loved her job so much that she kept working all through 24 rounds of chemo, whenever her strength would allow. It is a measure of how much she loved it that one of the hardest days during the last year of her life was the one on which she had to leave it because she was simply too ill to go on.

For Fiona, the jewel in that job which she loved so much was to invest time in those who were already working, but who wanted to improve their skill set and deliver still better care to their patients.  She would go out of her way, often at great cost to herself, to help them pursue those studies by accessing relevant, up-to-date, peer-reviewed information.  To see one of them fly, equipped and motivated to do so – gave a lift in a life which was increasingly weighed down by cancer.

When you lose the person you love, there are many ways to remember them – and I have run the gamut of most of them. However, we really wanted to remember Fiona with an ongoing legacy which would encourage the pursuit of excellence which she held so dear.  Each year, the Fiona Littledale Award will recognise outstanding excellence in oncology nursing in a way which she would have loved.  She will forever be my bravest and best, and would be glad to have her name associated with the best in this field.

A review of ‘Everybody died so I got a dog’ by Emily Dean

As a man whose wife and best friend died 16 months ago, and who adopted a dog 13 months ago, you might feel this is the last book I ought to read.  Not only that, but ever since Fiona died, reading itself has turned on me. Those companionable moments of reading together side by side, and those lonely vigil moments of reading to the hum of the oxygen machine as she slept fitfully have conspired to put me off it. Losing myself in a book, plunging down its overgrown paths and striding across its new landscapes is a pleasure which I thought had been lost – until this one. I read this book over a period of 48 hours, captivated in a way which I thought the printed page would never do for me again. Thank you, Emily.

Having said that, I almost fell at the first hurdle. The life described here is one of such a Bohemian nature that many would struggle to identify with it. How quickly, though, that becomes irrelevant. This is an honest, warm, engaging account of what it means to love the people you did not choose – your family. Of course, the price of love is the depth of loss – and you should brace yourself to feel it here. Emily tells it with a disarming frankness and a rawness which I found impossible to resist. There was a point where I had to leave the book for a few hours, but only because the words had stirred up some very poignant memories:

I kissed her forehead. She belonged to another world now, not mine. It was almost my sister, but not quite.

After the loss, and the loss, and the loss again comes something new and rather wonderful. I will leave Emily to introduce you to Raymond, though – as she can do it far better than I.

I started reading this book because I bumped into Emily at an event where I was trying to encourage people to talk about bereavement and loss. Our inability to do so as a nation is making some lonely people lonelier still. There will be many ways to change that, but one of them will be when authors introduce us to what loss feels like, whilst still proving that there is a life beyond it. This is a book about death which is a celebration of life. In language which you will come to recognise in the book itself, it is all a bit ‘chilled hands round steaming mug of tea’ – stings a bit at first but then warms you up so much you don’t want to put it down.

My adopted companion, Ginny, minding Emily’s book

The Annual Sue Ryder lecture, delivered on March 6th at the Houses of Parliament

Good evening. First of all – thank you for the great honour of speaking on this occasion. On November 7th 2017, my wife, Fiona died at home whilst under the care of our wonderful Sue Ryder team. The meticulous expertise and deep compassion which they brought into our home are things I shall never forget. The debt I owe to them is both indescribable and unpayable – and if tonight’s words make some small scratch on its surface, I shall be pleased.

Let me make a confession: I hate writing postcards. As a child, whenever we would travel on holiday – the responsibility for doing so would be divided up between my brother and I. One would write to Granny, one to Auntie and so on. I hated it. I would write in the biggest possible script so as to minimise the number of words required – and I am sure they were as boring to read as they were to write. Years later, travelling with children of my own – the same rules applied. Fiona and I would parcel out between us who was writing to whom. Out would come the big handwriting, and my reluctant words would fill up the page and disappear into the post-box.

So why, seven days after Fiona’s death, did I find myself coming home from a walk across the crunching, frosted grass of the cemetery, to write a postcard? It was because I felt as if I were abroad. Everything looked the same, the landmarks were still in the same places, the cars still drove on the left – and yet somehow, I had been transposed into an alien place. A shift had gone on so that the familiar became unfamiliar, the reassuring became disturbing and I didn’t belong. Like shopping in a foreign supermarket – I inadvertently bought the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong quantities. Like a stranger living abroad, I found that my calendar seemed to have different dates to those marked on other people’s. My milestones were not theirs. Like a newbie on foreign soil speaking a foreign language all day – I was exhausted by teatime…or often by lunchtime.

And so, I began to chart the experience through a series of some thirty ‘Postcards from the land of grief’. Initially they were published on my blog, and received lots of interest. Later they were featured on BBC Radio 4’s “Sunday worship” – provoking one of the biggest audience responses that programme has ever seen. A little later this year they will appear in a book, and there is every indication that there is a good appetite to read them. Other people live in this foreign land of grief too, it would seem. Their friends and family see them there, separated by an invisible border and o so far away. They want to help, but as we now know – 51% of them are afraid of saying the wrong thing.

So perhaps tonight I can read you a postcard or two – sent from that foreign land to all of you here tonight. This new research has shown that bereavement is a ‘very individual phenomenon’. As a minister of religion for 30 years, I am no stranger to death. I have been there at the bedside as a person slips away. I have been there just afterwards, with the body in bed and praying with family. I have been there to discuss the funeral. I have been there to conduct the funeral. I have been there to visit the family after it and see how they are doing. Despite all of that, my arrival in the land of grief was a rude shock:

A new topography
I am learning that the landscape of grief is a strangely unnerving place. In part its strangeness is that those things which you had thought would be familiar…are not familiar at all. Grief can turn a soft memory into an unforgiving rock face or a hairbrush into a sword to pierce the heart. Regrets, like injected foam, expand to fill the space you give them. Words spoken or heard are like an old cassette left next to a magnet – muffled by exposure to greater force.

To arrive in that land is to find yourself in a place which is both close to and distant from what you always regarded as normal:
Invisible borders

I once heard a refugee describe how the border with his home country ran just alongside his refugee camp. He could stand at the edge of the camp and gaze across at an old familiar tree in the home country – but he could not go there. The border was both invisible and impervious.

I am finding that the landscape of grief has just such a border. I can gaze across it at old familiar things. I can watch normal life unfold before my eyes, and I can stand and have a conversation with those across the border as if nothing separated us. That said – it is impossible to cross for now. When it comes down to it, they live there and I live here and nothing can be done about that. I make occasional forays into their land, and they are precious. It turns out, though, that I take the border with me. I am like a cartoon character racing to outrun an elastic band – legs whirring and arms pumping, but the snap of the elastic must bring me back as surely as night follows day.

The refugee made a new life for himself across the border. He would still gaze from time to time at the old, familiar tree – but he found others in his new home. Like the old one, they provided shade and the kind of mental landmark which makes any new place a little less strange. Today, I shall go looking for trees…

The report will demonstrate that ‘knowing support is on hand increases resilience’ and that has certainly been my experience. ‘Kindness’ is an old-fashioned word which seems to belong to an age of innocence, and yet it sustained me in those early days:

The currency of kindness

It continues to surprise, this land of grief. Its topography is so hard to read – like the shifting sands of the desert. To climb a tiny hill can feel like scaling a mountain – leaving the lungs gasping for air at the top. Once scaled – the view behind may be spectacular – but the view ahead is hidden, at least for now. Some of the valleys which look like no more than a ditch prove to have sides so steep that they all but blot out the light.

As ever with foreign travel, the currency is unfamiliar too. Money has little value. It can pay the bills and provide some distraction, but it has no real worth. After all, it could not pay any fee to prevent crossing the border into here. In this land the currency is kindness. It comes in words and actions, cards and letters, and even smiles.

I started this week by re-reading all the cards and letters which I have received. They came from every direction, in every kind of handwriting and from every age. Some were poetic, some fulsome, some brief – but all have made me richer here.

I thank God for every single one of them. Like money sent home from abroad – they have helped to sustain life in this foreign land and I am humbly grateful.

As many told the researchers, there is an awkwardness about seeking help. The version of ourselves which needs to reach out for it is one which we neither recognise nor welcome. To admit to loneliness is to admit to a form of social plague, it feels:
A cross-border confession

When I used to live in that other place, holidays to France were an annual feature. The rumble of the wheels down the ferry ramp and the first sight of a French flag fluttering over the port always brought a frisson of joy. So, too, did speaking another language. The sheer fact of speaking a different language and saying different things made me feel like a different person. I could say them ‘over there’…
I am about to write something from ‘over here’ which I could never have written ‘back there’. I could never have written it because it would have been embarrassing and awkward. I would never have written it because it would have been untrue. Nonetheless, I write it now. I am lonely. Married to Fiona for 30 years, and in love with her for longer than that, life without her by my side is shockingly different. One day last week a 24-hour period passed where my only conversations were on the phone or with a cashier at the supermarket. Mine is by no means a unique experience, and I have endured it for a far shorter time than many. All the same, it is a shock to find that it is true.

For those who are scrolling for the comments box even as they read this, I wanted to write a message or two. Firstly – thank you. Your kindness and warmth are a reflection of God’s image in the foxed mirror of humanity, and it is wonderful to see.

Secondly, please be assured that my loneliness is neither your problem nor your fault. You did not cause it and I do not count it as your duty to rectify it. Your attempts to distract me from it are always welcome, and the place in your heart from which they come is very dear. Please don’t be surprised, though, if I do not always accept them. The reason for my refusal has everything to do with me and nothing to do with you. Part of the collateral damage of bereavement is a wastage of the confidence muscle, if there is such a thing. That muscle which heaved body and soul up over the parapet of home has shrunk, you see. I look out over the threshold of home to a landscape filled with life, laughter, food, drink and conversation and I both move towards it and quail from it. I will learn, and the muscle will grow back, but it may take a little time.
Thirdly, please don’t let the sea-mist of sadness which sometimes rolls off me put you off from telling me about your life. I want to know. I want to hear the shrill sound of laughter and the clatter of ordinary dishes and the occasional curse! It reminds me that there is a life out there, beyond the mist – and I still belong to it.
The forthcoming report will talk about the importance of community in addressing what is essentially the individual problem of grief. I could not agree more – and I am fortunate to find myself in the midst of this painful and challenging experience with a faith community gathered around me. However, sometimes the least tolerant or understanding person within the circle surrounding the bereaved person can be …the bereaved person. I found myself too often in the company of people whom I described as Mr Shouty, Mr Angry and Mr Selfish. Between them they would rant about anything not going their way, and they would berate me for having the audacity to look up a little. Sometimes they would conspire to make even the positive things seem like negatives:
The treachery of absorption

When living away from home, and once you realise that the stay may be long term – things begin to change. You learn the language. You grow to love the food. You stop scanning the supermarket shelves for those things which you know you can’t get here anyway. In short, you learn to fit in. To do so can be quite gratifying – a successful experiment in cultural adaptation. This is not where you meant to be, and it may not have been your choice to come here – but you are making the best of it.

And then, the moment of treachery comes. You are walking through your new-found neighbourhood or talking in your new language with your new friends – when you stumble because you cannot remember the old ones. Perhaps you struggle for a word which was once so familiar on your lips and it just won’t come. You’re glad the people in that other country can’t see you now, because you would feel ashamed.

There are days now, in this land of grief – where I feel like I am starting to fit in. I recognise that single man in the mirror and do not flinch. I look at on old picture in a new space or sit in a new chair in an old room and it feels…normal. Then there are other moments where that new normal feels like a treachery to the old. It feels like the person who has studied their new language so hard that when a newspaper comes in their mother tongue, they can no longer read it. Absorption, which was such a laudable aim, feels like treachery in that moment.

To understand the bereaved person is to understand that this kind of internal conflict can go on for months, or even years, after the death. Bereavement is a deep wound with no visible scar.

If we are to make a change within this landscape of grief, then we shall all have to make adjustments, I think. Friends and family will have to embrace the joyful danger of getting it wrong for the greater good of getting it right. Employers will have to recognise that the incapacity brought about by grief may far outlast any bereavement leave they give. The bereaved themselves will have to speak a little more in the foreign tongue of this place to which they have moved. And we shall all have to recognise that the scars left by grief, like the patina on a much-loved antique – may add to our value rather than diminish it.

There’s a tree I often pass on my morning walks with the dog, and I want to leave you there this evening. At some point in its life the tree, on Greenham Common, has been all but uprooted. The main trunk now lies parallel to the ground. Springing up from it, though, is new growth – defiant and wonderful. I call it the Courage Tree – and I would like to see forests of them all across the country. Maybe with Sue Ryder’s help, we will.

An honest tale

This morning I began to preach through Paul’s second letter to the Christians in Corinth. As ever was, the sermon was written early in the week and ‘percolated’ through the remaining days. The introduction which you read below was only born last night, and judging by the response to it – it was meant to be:

“Trust God in the storm…but keep on rowing” – I used to love that Danish proverb. It was my defence against the ‘let go and let God’ brigade whom I regarded as spiritually lazy.  That  was before the greatest storm in my life broke…

My little boat was pitched and tossed around in a way I would never have thought possible, and I lost sight of the shore. I could not keep rowing , as my hands were too weak to grip the oars and my back too weary to pull against the tide. And then, something remarkable happened.

All along the shore, pinpricks of light emerged.  My sisters and brothers in God’s family came out of their houses with candles, torches, bicycle lights and anything they could find to show me that I was not so far from home after all.  Stronger, fresher, rowers pulled alongside in boats to my right and my left. I out rode the storm and I was back to the trusting God again.

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