Dear Joanna: You Look Okay (TW: Eating Disorders)

Trigger Warning: In this letter I talk about body confidence and eating disorders. 

Dear Joanna,

Of all the letters I'm going to write to you, this one seemed like the most important, because it was so important to you for so long. 

At the moment you are thirteen and one of the tallest girls in your year. You are what they call an 'early bloomer' - people often thought that you were a year 9 student when you were only in year 7, which you kind of liked. Your problem is that although you are as tall, and sometimes as mature, as someone in their mid-teens, you still have a child's body shape. You have puppy fat, with big apple cheeks, wide arms, and a stomach that sticks out, especially when you slump, which you have a habit of doing. 

Around this point, you start to realise that some of the other girls in your year look a bit different from you. They have proper breasts and hips, and boys fancy them - and no-one fancies you (that you are aware of. Actually, a few boys do, but they don't tell you till much later!). You become increasingly self-conscious. Around this point you start wearing baggy clothes to hide your shape, and moaning to your friends about how fat you are. Then you discover the scales. 

The record of how much you weigh is scattered about in your diary. The day you tip from nine stone into ten, I remember, is particularly dismal. I remember, around fifteen or so, having to listen to a boy in your class moaning about how he weighed nine stone; you sat there, hating him, but hating yourself more. I remember your joy after you had flu for a few weeks and your cheeks hollowed out a little. I still pinch my cheeks, trying to decide if they're any chubbier than they were the week before.

During the summer before you turn fourteen, you decide to take action. Whilst you're off school, you make your own breakfast and lunch, and as you get up after your parents have gone to work, it's not hard to hide it when you start skipping meals. You have to eat dinner because you eat as a family, but soon you're surviving the rest of the day on an apple and water. You weigh yourself obsessively. The weight is not coming off. After about two weeks of your secret diet, the whole family goes to visit your grandparents, where your Grandma cooks a beautiful roast lunch. You force yourself to eat it, dreading the weight you'll put on. When it gets to pudding, you refuse to eat it, and at Grandma and Granddad's, pudding is not optional. You almost cry. 'I can't do it.' Mum takes you outside and tells you that she'd rather that you were obese than that you had an eating disorder. You talk for a while, then go in, and eat pudding.

Of course, it doesn't end there, even though you do start eating breakfast again after that week. A few months later a girl who starved herself to death is in the news. She weighed under 5 stone, and you looked at her and thought, 'I wish I was as strong willed as her. She went a bit too far - I could stop before I kill myself.' I think you knew that anorexia doesn't work that way, but you convinced yourself that being anorexic meant that you were in charge of your body, not destroying yourself. I can still see that photo of the dead girl. You could see every bone in her body.

At the time, you thought the thing that was stopping you was your lack of will power, and you hated yourself for it, but the real thing that stopped you was your faith, and your family. In God you found the certainty that even though, in your eyes, you were fat and ugly, you were loved and your life had a purpose. It didn't matter what you looked like as long as your were living for him. You were also scared of hurting your family, especially your parents, and so you fought against all the stupid urges, and they supported you, as they still do and always will. 

Of course, you still compare yourself to other girls, and feel large. The honest truth is that you're not skinny, and you never will be - you have a large bone structure, and natural curves, and that's okay. Most women look like you, and most men are alright with that - and the ones that aren't are not worth your time! After a few years your weight stabilises and you slowly get your adult figure, and you'll feel a lot more confident in your body. One of your worst fears was that you'd keep on ballooning into Joanna the Inflatable Girl, a female Dudley Dursley, and it doesn't happen; at 20, you're roughly the national average. You stop growing at 5"5 too, so don't worry about towering over people - you actually spend a surprising amount of time feeling short...

Here are some things I want to tell you.

Firstly, one of the secrets to looking good like those confident girls in your year, is believing in yourself and your body. Wear clothes that make you feel happy and confident, hold your head up high, and believe in yourself. When I look back over my teenage years there's a clear dividing line between the places where I was confident, and had plenty of friends, and the places where I hid and was an onlooker, on the outside. The more you act as if you believe in yourself, the more other people will too. 

Secondly, you need to wash your hair more. Grease is SO not attractive. At thirteen you're hitting the hormones badly. Don't stress - you'll survive it, and one day, you will have a pimple free face. Mostly. 

Thirdly, stop weighing yourself. Instead of concentrating on all the bits of your body you dislike and how much they weigh, try and look at yourself as a whole. Remind yourself of the things you like about yourself: you have nice eyes, your hair is getting really long, you look good in your new jeans. 

Fourthly, stop reading calorie information on labels. Eating healthily means thinking about the balance of food you eat over the entire day, not just restricting yourself from eating anything with more than 150 calories. 

Let me tell you about the turning point, so you have something to look forward to. 

Age fifteen, you go to Florence with your family and visit the Uffizi, which is a very famous and beautiful art museum. Walking around in quiet awe, you notice that the women in the pictures aren't the stick thin women you've looked up to for years. At Titian's Venus of Urbino and Botticelli's Birth of Venus you stare at the female nudes, comparing their rounded forms with your own, and you have a revelation. Once upon a time, beauty meant having curves, having a figure. These women have breasts and hips; their stomachs stick out, their arms are wide. And yet the artists chose them for the women who were the epitome of all beauty: Mary, the Virgin Mother and most holy of all women, and Venus, the goddess of love. Compared to them, the models and ideals of the 21st century seem insubstantial: these women have lasted and will last long after the 'thigh-gap' or 'visible ribs' goes out of fashion. Over the years this will become a point of consolation for you: when you look at yourself and see fat and hate your curves, you will force yourself to think of these girls, and tell yourself that you are a Renaissance woman, and that is beautiful. 

Lastly, I want to tell you that you're happy with your body now, but that wouldn't be true. You are still self-conscious, and sometimes you let it get to you. Last December, when you were struggling with your workload and general health, you stopped eating properly for around two weeks, and lost at least 6 pounds, if not more - and you were happy about it. It's easier to hate yourself rather than doing something proactive to improve your health, and sometimes you give in to those feelings. It is getting better though. You are happier with your body, in general, and you do try to exercise a little more, and eat healthier (most of the time...). There are ups and downs. Mostly you eat what you want, and don't care, but sometimes, like this morning, drinking a glass of milk feels like pouring a glass of fat onto your hips. Maintaining the balance between a healthy consciousness of your health and an unhealthy obsession is tough, but it gets better.

Most importantly, you understand that the old adage 'it's what's inside that counts' really is true. You have friends who love you for who you are and wouldn't care less if you had blue skin and horns, and who you love in the same way. Work on who you are inside, and the outside will take care of itself. Nice people have their own kind of magnetism; they light up rooms; people are attracted to their personality. Faces grow to suit their owners. In the end, your body is just a tool you use for moving your spirit around. Remember that, and look after it, but who you are inside will always be more important. 

Joanna

P.S. You look good today. 

Fear and Hope

One of the greatest blessings in my life are my friends. I get to spend my life with the kind of people who make a room brighter just by being there. The kind of people whose first response is always kindness and tolerance, who dream about doing brilliant things, who listen to the world and want to explore it. And being around these kind of people makes me want to be a better person, to deserve the love I receive from them and be able to try and return it.

Then the news is full of anger and violence and pain. Distorted people, blurring away from the cameras, fists in the air. We stand for ourselves. Not them. Out. An eye for an eye. 

And they seem to think hate is good. One EDL member was asked on twitter what the difference between the neo-Nazi's, KKK and the EDL is (by and anti-EDL protester). His response: 

"easy to prove [that the EDL are different from the other groups] ..the Kkk hate black people nazis hated the jews and the edl hate muslims.....the only connection is hate ...so"

The only connection is hate, he said. And that's okay, of course, because it's not the Jews. Not black people. And not white people either.

But I'm lucky. I was always loved and taught to love. Trying to be loving is easy. So I try to understand. Hate begets hate; people who are hurt lash back. I don't like the EDL or the BNP or  UKIP. I hate what they stand for; everything about them repels me, and as a white British Christian I'd like to distance myself and everything I stand for from everything they claim to stand for, and the associations they make with white, British nationality, and even Christianity. 

But it is tempting to hate them sometimes. To sneer. To slap back, violent protest against violent protest, swearword for swearword. I'm a guardian reading leftie; of course I'd like to shout at Farage or Griffin. I'd love to tell Tommy Robinson where he can stuff his Britain. 

But we're trying to be better than that. And again I'm reminded how blessed I am. There's the Hope Not Hate movement, the mosque which opened its doors to the EDL, the good, sensible people who stand up to point out that extremists don't stand for the majority, who rebut mad nonsense with calmly-stated facts. A terrifying amount of people are trying to make hate the norm in this country - in this world - but more are responding with hope and peace. When the EDL protest, when the terrorists bomb towns or blow up cars, when rockets fly over walls instead of over our one planet, there are people who light candles, who pull children out of the wrecked buildings, who hold talks. John Green, in his video response to the Boston Bombings, called these people the helpers:

'If you look at those videos [the Boston bombing clips] you see two extraordinary things [...] all these flags lined up together, none higher than any other... those 96 flags of people running the Boston marathon are side by side because they stand for a larger us, an us sharing a human endeavour that doesn't require a 'them'. And the flags aren't blown over by the explosion, but within seconds some of those flags do come down. They come down when people, onlookers, first responders tear down the barricades to get to the injured. 'Look for the helpers', the great Mr Rogers said about tragedy, 'You will always find people who are helping.'  [...] Think I'm cool living in a world with flags, but I am most proud to live in a world where no flag flies above any other. There are people who don't want to live in that world [...]  but I know that we are not going to give it up. And I know that we can always look in hope to the helpers, and endeavour to be among them.'

John Green,  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2X1gA5apcU, April 16th 2013

I don't think I can put it better than that. 

J.R.

And so, to Mass

If you'd rather not read all this, but are interested in praying/being prayed for, please skip to the bottom! 

If you'd told me, a month ago, that I would become a part of the Catholic community at university, I would have laughed at you. Maybe, I would have said, but that's not my thing. I mean, it's nice to go once a year, for old times sake, but I'm a Protestant. A member of the URC church. I'm going to find a URC church somewhere in Norwich, first Sunday, and I'm going to enjoy being a dissenter for a bit. Also, I'm going to join the Socialists. (Yeah...that didn't happen. I've never met people who so strongly resembled zombies before...)

The problem with that plan was that it seems God has his own plan for my life. Sometimes I doubt that God is doing things in my life, because it's easy to doubt when you think you have everything sorted, and you're in control. Yet this week has shown me, more than ever, that God is helping me out and guiding me. If this new path hadn't been so surprising, I might not have noticed it. How many times has God done this for me, I wonder? Corny as it might be, I've spent the last few days thinking back to that 'Footsteps in the Sand' poem, and wondering if right now, God is carrying me. I'm trying to manage so many different things, learning to run my own life for the first time, and I have a thousand things to organise and worry about, yet I feel strangely content, even peaceful.It's illogical; I am always worried and stressed. It only makes sense in the knowledge that God is helping me out massively at the moment, carrying me and all the baggage that comes with being a new university student so that I can cope. Tonight's homily (sermon/talk) in Mass was on thankfulness, and tonight, I feel like I understand how much I have to be thankful for. I'm just not sure I have the words to express it.

But I've kept you waiting to hear about this surprise, the sudden new direction God seems to be sending you on. 

I may be going back to Catholicism. 

I say may because, as I'm finding is usual for plans the Big Man's had a hand in, it is almost impossible to predict what is going to happen next. This might just be a temporary thing to help me get through the first few weeks of university. It might be forever. All I can do is trust and hope.

But why should this be so surprising? I've already told you that I'm a member or the URC - the United Reformed Church - but my relationship with denominations has been a complicated one. As an adult Christian, I've found my place in liberal, free church Protestantism, but when I was brought up ecumenically. I was baptised jointly in the Catholic Church, and the Church of England, in a shared service, and brought up as an equal member of both churches. Incidentally, I understand mine was the first baptism of this kind, ever. They're not common; my parents and the Association of Interchurch Families (AIF) worked really hard to bring it about and make it feasible. People still disbelieve me when I explain it, but it's true. To add to the complication, when I was fourteen I was confirmed through our Local Ecumenical Partnership, becoming a full member of the Church of England (or, the Anglian communion), the Methodist Church, the Baptist Church, and the United Reformed Church, a move which effectively annulled my baptismal membership of the Catholic Church. Then a year ago, I moved to my local United Reformed Church and became a local member there, and in that Church community I believe I have found where I belong. When I moved there I was spiritually tired. I needed to receive rather than give for a while, and I know God guided me there for a reason. They've encouraged me and supported me in my faith and my personal life, and helped me slowly become an active part of the church again, helping out with an early morning toddler service. 

To cut through the religious jargon: Some churches get on and some don't. They believe in most of the same things, but belonging to more than one is often considered paradoxical, because of their minute differences. Some of us ignore these differences and do it anyway. One of my friends called me 'a mongrel of religion'...I think that sums it up accurately.

So why, after effectively removing myself from the Catholic Church years ago in my early teens am I once again wrestling with it? My relationship with the Catholic church has not been easy. As a child, I thought that Mass was boring, because it had no Sunday school, and this led to my desire to quit Mass as soon as I could, only attending when I was forced to go. I was still a regular church goer, attending protestant services on Sunday morning, so until now I never thought of it as 'leaving church'. I never understood why young people drop out of church till now, thinking retrospectively. I don't blame myself; Mass is not designed for children! 

As a young teenager, I became conscious of the divisions between the Catholic church and the protestant churches. Issues like the ordination of women became important to me, and I realised that the little theology I'd worked out for myself fitted on the Protestant side of things. Within a year or two, I became and angry teenage ex-Catholic. I was angry. How could they be so stupid, and so obviously wrong? I wanted to correct everyone who had made the mistake of being Catholic. I was rude, and it stills hurts me to think of the nasty things I said to good Catholics at the time, at school and in my family. The teenage brain is not programmed for empathy, according to the BBC news, and I was in that respect typical.

But alongside all this burgeoning teenage angst, I was trying to find an adult faith of my own, working things out. A few months after my confirmation, at 14 years old, I had an experience that changed how I think and understand God forever.

I won't go into details here. Let's simply say that I had a private experience of the numinous. I told people at the time and I was ridiculed, which I perfectly understand, so I'm saving that event for my own prayers, and encouragement when I'm struggling. Strangely enough, it happened in a little URC chapel, downstairs from the conference house I'd been staying in (On a Methodist course...). I think this is important. Maybe it's a coincidence, but I'm wondering now if God is saying to me, you can find me in the United Reformed Church. By which I don't mean that the URC has a monopoly on God, but that I specifically am meant to be a URC member. 

At the same time, I was at a Catholic school, and enjoying being the one person who refuses to say the Hail Mary in class. Small rebellions are the source of endless pleasure as a teenager! 

Yet the last few years, things have begun to change. Having identified everything I dislike about the Catholic Church, and more importantly, found a place where I can be comfortable and develop on my own faith, I've begun to find my attitude to the Catholic Church changing. It started with a supportive priest, the realisation that going to Mass with my school and taking communion with them was important to me, and a grudging respect for Catholic moral authority. I'm not sure I agree with everything the Vatican says, or the contents of the Catholic Church Catechism, but more and more I find myself respecting the moral teachings of the church, with its sound, loving ground, and turning to it for guidance. After all, it is the bedrock of a third of the world's population, and the morality of the western legal system. You have to respect something that has commanded that degree of authority. 

But it's more than respect, more than acceptance of our differences. At Mass, I find a reverence for God, a sheer state of adoration, that is rare in any other denomination. (Although I think my home church do it pretty well!). There are times when I want to be quiet, to reach out to God in my heart, and to think on how wonderful and awesome he is, and this is so apparent in the majesty of the Mass service. Catholicism, at heart, is simply beautiful. You can criticise it's teachings or policies however much you like, but the beauty is always there, shining through. 

And Mass on campus is something special. For the first time, I'm going to Mass with a group of energised young Catholics who care about their faith, and we have an excellent priest who preaches the most brilliant sermons. I've been twice and loved it, coming back feeling more in touch with God from each one. I've also made it to an ecumenical church once, and tried but failed to make it to a URC church this morning, so it's not just laziness that draws me back to the on campus service. Even when I find a protestant church of my own, I'm going to stay a Mass goer, which I suppose will make me a two-service a day girl... Don't bash me with your bibles or anything, right? 

From one angle, it sounds like the Prodigal Son story, but the truth is that whilst I am returning to the security of my childhood church, the church which has come to mean safety and reassurance to me, I'm not renouncing anything I've done since, or going backwards. On the contrary, to grow in my adult faith I need to belong to a church which is nearer to my particular beliefs, and in which I can participate fully - hopefully a United Reformed Church, although I'm open to any of the denominations I belong to! But I'm glad to have made my peace with the Catholic Church, and I think there's more to come from our brief encounter. God is doing something, sending me to Mass at the very time when I'm attempting to make a new start in my life. I look forward to finding out what it is, and trust that God knows, as always, what he's doing.

Your prayers for me at this time would be greatly appreciated, and I'd love to respond in kind. I remember to pray far less often that I should, so having names would be a wonderful thing. If you'd like me to pray for you/exchange prayers, leave your name as a comment, or tweet/DM me @corybantically, or if you have me on facebook, private message me!

Thanks for putting up with my ramblings about the interior working about the Christian church. Leave any questions in the comments and I'll try and explain more clearly :) 

God bless!

J.R. x 

A short-ish update (You know me...)

It's now under a week until I leave for university. Facebook and Twitter are humming with university posts. Many of my friends moved in this weekend, so today's speciality has been pictures of beautifully decorated university rooms. I have some plans for my own room: I have two rolls of 'Poetry on the Underground' posters, one of my cosy IKEA rag rugs, and a box of multi-coloured, flower-shaped fairy lights. 

(By the way - where does the phrase 'fairy lights' come from? Is it old? I like it. It makes the fire-risks and all that seem a lot less realistic)

Half of my belongings are now in bags and boxes ready to travel. This has not been an easy process. I am a hoarder. I invest deep stored emotions in everything I won. Throwing things away for me is like being Voldemort and throwing away your Horcruxes. Still, the process proceeds, and this move is becoming more and more real. At the same time, we are preparing to move house as a family, and my long suffering Dad has just painted my new room in the exact specification of red-y orange I demanded, a sort of Heinz tomato soup colour. I have decided that I do not feel at home without my orange walls, so although I shall have to survive without them at university, I'm glad that for at least the next few years there will be somewhere familiar, and orange, for me to return to. For some strange reason, other people do not seem to appreciate the radiance of my orange walls. Each to their own.

So what is, or where is home? Moving to our fifth house, it's a question that's ceased to both me. Around the age of thirteen, and living in my least favourite house, I took to reading with great care the property sections of the newspapers, and grading the houses based on whether I'd live there or not, and preference. My ideal house had at least six bedrooms, looked beautiful, ideally included a study, pool and attic conversion, and sat in the middle of a sprawling landscape garden, stables optional. It was a vindictive, childish way of hinting at my parents that what they'd provided wasn't good enough, and it makes me wince to think back to it. Thirteen is a difficult age. But then we moved to our current house, and I turned fourteen, and stopped reading the property section. The worst thing you can do is long for things you can't have, especially whopping great grade-II listed mansions. 

Our family has two mottoes when it comes to 'home'. Firstly, and most importantly, home is where your family is. Secondly, home is where you make it. It could be a flat in Cornwall, a castle in Yorkshire, a suburban semi in London, but as long as we were all there, safe and sound, it could become home for us. More than that, 'home' isn't the building, or the locality: it's where we find ourselves in each other, where we belong. This makes 'homelessness' worse: not only are you without the physical comfort of a shelter, you loose the sense of belonging attached to shared living and to an extent, property ownership. Alden Nowlan, a wonderful Canadian poet, ends his poem 'He sits down on the floor of a School for the Retarded*' with these wonderful lines: 

'It's what we all want, in the end, to be held, merely to be held, to be kissed (not necessarily with the lips, for every touching is a kind of kiss.)  

Yet, it's what we all want, in the end, not to be worshipped, not to be admired, not to be famous, not to be feared, not even to be loved, but simply to be held.  

She hugs me now, this retarded woman, and I hug her. We are brother and sister, father and daughter, mother and son, husband and wife. We are lovers. We are two human beings huddled together for a little while by the fire in the Ice Age, two thousand years ago.'

These lines never fail to bring me reassurance and comfort. If you're interested in reading the full poem, I found it online here. The Selected Poems of Alden Nowlan was one of the first poetry books I ever bought myself, so it's very dear to my heart :') 

So my physical home is changing drastically, splitting into my university home and my 'base', with my family, but I'm not loosing anything. In fact, I think I'm gaining more than I'll miss. I really love my home here, in my little town, but not one but two new homes offers me the chance for a complete, fresh start. The chance to live the adult life I've been dreaming of and become the person I aspire to be, starting again with a clean slate. Besides which, I am completely in love with Norwich, and I can't wait to live there. The first time I stepped onto the campus I had an instinctual feeling that this was where I am meant to be, and God's been so good to me, guiding me this far. I honestly doubted I'd get there, but I shouldn't have. He's got me under his wing. I think I'll be okay. 

So next time I update this blog - unless I get really bored during the rest of the week - I will be somewhere new! I love the idea of a new landscape and a different setting to work in, with new inspirations, a different atmosphere. (I promise not to use the word 'new' again now, okay!) 

As always, thank you for your patience, your time, and your forgiveness for my enthusiasm for the semi-colon, hyphen, and bracket. 

Until then, God bless.

J.R. x 

* Retarded - This was written in 1982, so no offence meant. 

Look - No glasses!

I've moved fractionally up the seriousness scale since my last post, to 'I'm taking myself seriously, but it's not really important'. 

This morning I did something I've been meaning to do for a while - try and draw my room without my glasses on. I knew this wouldn't be a great idea, as I have no artistic talent whatsoever, but the idea was to try and give you an impression of what it's like to open your eyes every morning and see the world as a giant fuzz. For those of you acquainted with the linguistics of optometry, my eyes score -4.5 and -5.5 respectively. 0 means perfect sight, -20 is no sight on the short-sighted scale, and +20 is (I presume) no sight on the long sighted scale. Basically, my eyes can't focus on objects further away from my face. It's a very common problem: I reckon, although I have no statistics, that more of us wear glasses than not. Thinking about it, I suppose in numerical terms, this means I've lost a quarter of my sight... Being short-sighted though, without any other medical conditions, isn't necessarily permanent. As the shape of your skull changes, your sight fluctuates; apparently it can improve in middle age. It can also be cured by laser eye surgery, although I believe you have to have -8.0 in each eye to have this done on the NHS. (Don't quote me - I'm speculating here!)

Since I started wearing specs just after my ninth birthday, I've become rather fond of them. I have a particularly lovely pair at the moment with green stripy sides, although the glass is beginning to look depressingly thick. People often ask me to remove my glasses and then exclaim that I look different, and stare at my face as if my nose has suddenly turned green or something equally disturbing; most of my friends have only ever known me with glasses these days. I think I look smarter in glasses, personally, although I wouldn't mind trying contacts. There are, of course, disadvantages to glasses. I have to take them off to go on rollercoasters, so I can never see the big dips coming.They fall off and break at the worst moments. They slide down your nose when you're sweaty (ew!) and you can see the rim of the glasses constantly, although after a while you become blind to this. Glasses don't cover your peripheral vision and nice frames are really expensive. All this aside, I think they're fantastic. If I'd been born in the days before glasses I wouldn't have been able to read or sew or enjoy the theatre or any of the hobbies I suppose they had in those days... It's a scary thought! Yet glasses are just one of those tiny alterations you make to your life these days, imperceptible changes for the majority of us. In all seriousness, thank God for opticians!

As promised, the picture of my bedroom without glasses:

I think it looks a little bit like impressionism. Naturally, this is because of my gift for drawing, not because the impressionist were short sighted. 

The blue blob on the wall should have been a calender. On top of my wardrobe there are two framed paintings, a Van Gogh and a Salvador Dali, a photo frame, several souvenir glass bottles of sand from the Isle of Wight, a Venetian carnival mask (Not even drawn - it's white so I couldn't see it), a glass coke bottle wearing an innocent smoothies hat, and a red table decoration from my 18th with little multicoloured 18's spilling out of it. The piles of oddments on my desk are completely obscured, the jacket on my chair vanished into it, and the pattern on my bedspread is gone. Drawing with the paper on my lap, I couldn't even see properly what I was drawing, doubling the inaccuracy of my sketch. Even so, this is in as much detail as I could see. For perspective, my room is about 4m long, and my focal point is about 15cm away from my nose... 

Drawing this was an interesting experiment, although I'm not sure it's one I'll repeat, if for nothing else than for fear of boring you all to death. 

Prizes for anyone who can guess what the other unidentifiable blobs in the picture are!

God bless 

JR x  

A Simple Faith

My shower is evidently a very inspiring place to be. I seem to think up most of my blog posts in it.

(Yes, you needed that contextual information.)

As usual, this morning, I was thinking about my frustration at A-Level R.E. It's a great subject, but it doesn't relate to my faith at all, and so I struggle with the dull critical essays which bandy around words like 'soteriology' 'replacement theology' 'eschatology' e.t.c. without ever getting to the heart of the matter. I sincerely doubt that heaven will only be open to those who can describe using key words and quotations the development of the covenant relationship between God and Man. I don't mean that we should be ignorant and never question faith, not at all; I just doubt that many people will discover their faith on page 235587395158a of Religion for Dummies. 

So I've decided to tell the story of faith in my own words here, as I'd tell it to a child or a bible scholar. I can't guarantee its theological accuracy or even state that it fits in with any particular denomination. Since I took my faith on for myself around thirteen, I've been working on this, asking God questions and trying to make sense of it all, something I'm going to be doing all my life. So this story isn't perfect, isn't complete. Please be patient. 

(When I write 'God thought' e.t.c. this is artistic liberty. I'm not trying to put words into God's mouth.)

This story has no beginning. Recently, I heard a quote from a famous writer on short stories, suggesting that when the story is finished, the start and end should be cut off. I, however, do not know how this story starts or finishes. I am not the author. I am a minor character on page 98, but I'm quite content with my little part. 

For all intents in purposes, it starts with God. No-one except God knows how he got there, or why. Some people argue that this is an unsatisfactory start and that God ought to justify being there if we're meant to believe in him, but as yet God has not answered this question. As I said, the story is far from finished. 

After demanding angrily from God what business he has in existing in the first place, and making things so awfully complicated by doing so, the next question is 'What is God anyway?' Generally, humans like to greet each other by demanding 'Who are you?' but no-one seems to have thought of asking God this yet. They've been trying tests and writing papers on the question for years, but just asking the question never satisfies human curiosity. Humans like to poke and prod and ask questions. Again, this is not a bad thing. 

The one thing that one particular group of people have become certain of about God is that he is Love. Love, like God, is notoriously difficult to define and at some point in their lives every human attempts to do so. My own favourite definition was for some years 'God's favourite drug', a sentence that I felt embodied a suitable amount of sarcasm, naivety and fashionable faith lingo. For now, I've given up pretending to know anything about love. We all know enough, anyhow. You don't need me to tell you about it. 

The scene is thus set for the opening of the story. God is love, or at least he is very good at loving, or something like that, is existing. Nothing else does. There is silence. Peace. 

But all creatures who love need others to love them back. Contrary to human preoccupation, this whole faith-thing didn't start because we needed God. It started because God needed us. 

So God made all of Creation, and it was beautiful. Everything was good, and everything that was good came from God, and was of God. The animals loved him blindly and were part of him in their love. 

The problem was that love does not come from obedient, unswerving devotion. Real love is a choice, and God knew this, as he chose to love his creation, but they did not choose to love him. It was the love of master and servant. It was beautiful, but it was not enough. 

So God started again. He had a brilliant, radical idea. He would make people, built on his own image, with the same capacity to choose to love. He knew, with a heavy heart, that they might reject him and do terrible things to each other in their capacity for hatred, but he did it anyway. Love was worth paying the price for. 

So humanity came about, and they were beautiful. God loved them immensely, and was desperate for them to love him back. Yet as he had feared, they began to turn against him. Temptation lead them into ignorance, and even evil. Some did love him, but a good many simply forgot about him in their rush to discover the new world, and so the relationship with God was lost to humans. 

God stayed with them. He watched them develop and evolve, guiding them, walking amongst them unseen. Some glimpsed him and as the people split over continents and seas, different understandings of God appeared. Some saw his left side, some saw his right, but no-one ever saw him in his fullness. God hid himself in the good things of the world to shield their eyes, and hoped that one day, they would find him.

Time passed.

Then God has an idea. He would tell someone about him and they and their descendants would be his helpers. They would tell others about him, be teachers of the human race. Eventually, he settled for a man named Abram and his wife Sarai. At this point, God could have appeared in glory, surrounded by angels and trumpets and loudly demonstrating his power, although the poor elderly couple probably would have had heart attacks. Instead, he decided to do the most marvellous thing for them, the thing they had been longing for all their lives. Sarai had never been able to have children, and she was too old. But nothing is impossible for God, and he gave her and Abram a son, Isaac. He also chose to rename them Abraham and Sarah. If I was writing an essay I'd call this a 'symbol of their new life', but I'm not, and I'd rather just call it one of the unfathomable quirks of God. 

Abraham and Sarah became the ancestors of the Israelites, God's chosen people - chosen to tell everyone about him and his tremendous love. But not even the Israelites could believe. So God sent them prophet after prophet. He rescued them from slavery, sent them brave leaders to keep them safe, and guided them to a place where they could live in peace. However, the Israelites were just humans like us, so they disobeyed God, and frequently failed to understand him. They fought with their neighbours and kept the truth about God to themselves, so no-one else really came to faith. Who can blame them? The Christian Church has often done the same thing. It's a very human crime. 

God watched all of this and he was sad. He saw them go further away from him and make each other suffer, and it hurt him. He'd tried everything. 


Then, God had a brilliant idea. 


This is the complicated part, because now we get to the idea of 'Trinity', or, three in one. Frankly, no-one, not St Thomas Aquinas or Simon Peter or the Archbishop of Canterbury really understands how this works. God is just too big for human minds. To be limited is to be free to make mistakes, to be ourselves, to make choices and be amazed by the wonders of creation, but it does make God hard to understand. So God needed to meet humanity in a way we would understand, and to do this, he sent part of himself to earth. To demonstrate his love, he set this up as a Father/Son relationship, but in reality they're the same, two different ways of seeing God. To cap it all, God then threw in the Holy Spirit, because he knew we'd find it tough, believing in him, and he wanted to show us a way to reach him, without expecting celestial telephones to drop down whenever we want a chat. The best way I can describe it is like an iceberg. They say that only 20% of an iceberg is visible above the surface - that's the 'Son' part - and 80% is underneath, and that's the 'Father' part. Then I guess all the frozen water nearby is the Holy Spirit... perhaps I'll let that analogy drop. 


Anyway, God sends his son to earth. As humans have proved we're not very good at recognising God, God made his son a human, born in a provincial backwater of the Roman Empire amongst the Israelites and named a rather common Hebrew name, Jesus. 


Here I could write books and books. (Although I don't need to: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have done it for me). Telling this story 2000 years later, about a man I never met in the flesh, I am almost overwhelmed by my feelings for him. Creation was brilliant, but Jesus was a master-stroke. Many humans came to respect him, even those who disbelieved his teaching, for his morality, his kindness, his love. In the three years he spent teaching, he gathered around him a small group of followers who would go on to spread his message throughout the world. But Jesus wasn't just around to spread the word. He had something else in mind, harder and more complicated to explain than anything God had ever done before. 


When asked why Jesus had to die, many Christians have come up against a massive wall. 
"We're sinners," They reply, "We have to be saved." 
"Are we sinners?" responds the atheist. "Why? And why do I owe this God anything? Personally, I think I'm quite a good person. This Jesus didn't have to die for me." 


I cannot even pretend to have a decent or full answer to this. Like I said, I'm writing a unfinished story. 


I suppose the nearest thing I have to an answer to this is that choosing God, choosing to love him means giving up everything that is not of God, all the evil thoughts, temptations, un-Godly ways of living. Humans never manages this. Through the grace of God, some of us can get pretty near - think Mother Teresa - but in the end we just can't give up our evil enough to get close to God. Life comes from God and is of God; without God, we die, far apart from him. It's the worst punishment ever. Humans have tried to imagine Hell as a representation of our worst fears, all flames and whips and chains, but the truth is Hell is worse than this. If all that is good is of God, than to reject God, or turn away from him because of our dependence on sin, means that in the next life when we should be with him and all that is good we must go where God is not, and all that is of God is absent. This is an evil of our own making, and it makes God so very, very sad. 


So God decided to break the rules.


Okay, he thought, they can't break away from sin and all that, so they're stuck with the consequences. But what if I took the consequences away? Jesus could do that. 


Although, they won't be grateful .


But I love them. I'll do it anyway. I miss them so much, and I want them home. 


So God gave Jesus a task. He, God himself, had to die, and descend into the place of unbelief, breaking its power. Then all the people would have to do is follow him out, and forget all the consequences. Jesus was a man and he was scared, but he was also a God who loved humanity, so he obeyed. And God the Father did give him the choice. Jesus chose to love, and chose to die one of the most terrible deaths ever invented. Crucifixion was an excruciatingly painful, drawn-out, public way to die, offensive to the religious beliefs of the Israelites and designed to humiliate the victim. Uncomplaining, he went to his death.


But God wasn't finished yet. 


On the third day, something happened. In the tomb where Jesus' body lay, God stirred. The son came back to life. Time was ripped open; those who had died, those who were dying, those who hadn't even gotten around to being born yet - everyone was saved, and could choose to live again with God, should they accept it. All they had to do was trust God and accept his love, and they could be forgiven anything, could escape the consequences of their prior actions, could be renewed. It was brilliant. 


Of course, nothing is so simple as just accepting love. 


"Why did you make us suffer? Was it you? You weren't there. What about the cancer? The floods? The wars? Did you do that? Why didn't you help us?"


So the questions started, and the people began to vivisect God. It got complicated, very quickly, and even the best storytellers had no proper answers.


Yet God was always there, in the confusion. He walked through hospitals, holding hands, guiding the surgeons, opening the eyes of the children, weeping with the bereaved. He sat with the soldiers, in the pubs, in the back-rows of the lecture theatres, crying for our losses and celebrating our joys. Some people said that it was a test, others that the only way to see God is also to see evil. Some spoke of a devil, the embodiment of evil, or a battle between good and evil in the world. Evil existed, they were sure, but often they forgot about all the good that existed too.


God did not give his reasons. He was proved and did-proved, loved and hated, lost and found. He waited. All the time, he still loved. 






Writing this I'm so conscious of how much I owe God, more than I could ever repay. The beauty is, I don't need to repay him. Just accept his love. My love for him is imperfect, small, flawed, but I know I am loved and one day I hope that I will be able to love him perfectly back.


God Bless & peace out x 
J x