Back in the Sunday Age with a faith piece

My reasons for being a Christian have never had much to do with what might happen after death; rather, my faith helps me live in this present life.

How does it do that? The portrait of Jesus in the Gospels attracts and compels me – that is the kind of human I most want to be. The relationship I have with God through prayer and meditation is a daily reality and the source of anything I manage to do lovingly. The Christian community I am committed to helps me to try and live a little more like Jesus did. Nowhere, in any of that, is the thought of some kind of eternal reward. If God is perfect love, as I believe, then whatever does or doesn’t happen after we die will be okay.

But I do sometimes ponder what might happen to our souls, our essence, after physical death. If there is something good after death – and my faith prompts me to suspect there is – I wonder if it will be like the very best idea of home.

A friend of mine who is gravely ill with cancer recently wrote of his deep joy at being allowed home for a fortnight between treatments. My husband is often away for work; when he gets back, there is a sense of deep relief at being home. If we are lucky, home is where we love to be after travels, no matter how exciting; after a long, hard day; after an awkward dinner party. It is where we can be utterly ourselves, accepted, comfortable and able to drop the masks that are often part of social living.

I’ve lived in two different countries, so I’m never exactly sure where home is. My dad and one son live in another hemisphere, so I am always separated from somewhere and someone I love deeply.  In my faith-informed imagination, ‘heaven’ will be a place that brings all my homes together in completeness – the places I feel I belong and all the people I love, including those who have gone before me. In ‘heaven’, I will have time to be with all these people, and the complications that prevented us from being truly loving with each other will no longer exist.

Most of all, in ‘heaven’, I will be more completely at home with God. I ‘talk’ to God every day of my life, but am constantly frustrated by God’s apparent inaccessibility. After I die, I yearn to be close to God in a way that is impossible this side of death.

‘Nostalgia’ is used to refer to a longing for the past, often an idealised one. The Greek root of the word includes the word for homecoming. I’m no linguist, but I wonder if there is a word to describe the longing for the complete home that lies in the future.  For now the word that will have to do is ‘faith’.

A week in parallel lives

Story-teller Julie Perrin*, who is a dear friend of mine, recently returned from a six-week course in Cape Town, South Africa. There she worked alongside a man who had been a political prisoner in Robben Island Prison for 20 years. She had worked out the parallel time-lines of their lives. She was starting primary school; he was incarcerated in Robben Island. She finished school, went to university and traveled the world; he was still there. She fell in love, got married, traveled around Australia; he was still in goal.

Thinking like this is salutary and humbling, and it is the way my mind has been working this week, as shocking images of murdered children in Syria have dominated the world’s media.

You’d expect it to be would be impossible to think about anything else. But of course, I have. Here in suburban Melbourne my life continues on its pleasant course and I barely know what to do with the juxtaposition of the joys, petty irritations and indulgent quandaries that fill my days, with the shattering grief, anger and bewilderment that so many parents in Houla must be experiencing.

This week for me included the following things:

My husband has been in Arnhem Land, discussing theology with the Indigenous people there.

I’ve been getting excited about the overseas trip we have planned for later in the year.

I have spoken to my kids, who live all over Victoria and the world, but none of them are likely to be murdered by paramilitaries.

I had a lovely, long skype conversation with my Dad and step-mum.

I learnt that a friend with cancer has found a bone marrow donor that matches perfectly; this may well save his life.

I have sat in near silence with another friend who has a potentially serious health concern.

Things at work have been weirdly quiet, and I have alternated between panic that I have forgotten to do something really important, guilt, boredom and madly organizing and tidying every file – hard copy and electronic – to within an inch of its life.

I bought the softest, coziest new dressing gown to replace the one I blogged about a while back here. When I put it on, I feel as if I am wrapped in a big, cream teddy bear. I reflected that if this one lasts as long as its predecessor, I will be 74 by the time it hits the rag bag.

I went to Rock the Ballet with my younger daughter and her boyfriend’s mum and laughed, gasped and clapped my hands sore at the pumping music and wild acrobatic antics of six guys and one girl – perfect specimens of athletic humanity. (How can I become completely absorbed in two hours of dance when children in Syria are being slaughtered?)

I had two excellent coffees out and great home cooked food in.

I went to a great discussion group at my church.

I had myotherapy that helped ease my chronic back and neck pain considerably.

I had meals, laughs and soulful conversation with two of my three closest girlfriends.

I curled up in bed with a hot water bottle and read delicious books.

My husband flew back from Arnhem Land weary but safe, and I am anticipating the rare pleasure of having him home for a few days. 

It’s not the first time I have blogged about this strange thing that happens most weeks for people who are aware of some of the carnage that is going on in the world and are simultaneously cognizant of their own good fortune. I wrote on this topic just after the tsunami in Japan, in March of last year here.

I wrote back then of the ways in which we can respond.  But really, I am no closer to knowing what to do with this awareness that is painful and yet, inevitably, helpless and with a guilty undercurrent of gratitude these unspeakable things are not happening here.  Some weeks, all you can say is that, despite so much beauty, creativity and love, it is an unjust world, with a lot of brutal people in it. For many, life is as nasty, brutish and short as when Thomas Hobbes first coined the phrase to describe human life in 1651. 

*Julie’s website is www.tellingwords.com.au  

Dance like nobody's watching

What’s that old saying? Dance like nobody’s watching?

Some of my earliest memories involved doing just this. My sister went to boarding school when she was six and I was three, which left me, to all intents and purposes, an only child. Back then, our music consisted of reel-to-reel tapes – big ones that you had to wind on by hand – and loving relatives in Australia would record classical concerts onto these and mail them out to India. While my parents were working, or in another part of the house, I would put these on, and, to the strains of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler, Brahms, Haydn or Chopin, I danced.

I wore one of Mum’s dresses – fifties frocks – that for me were floor sweeping ball gowns. My hair was short; I pinned an old cloth nappy (not that there were any other sort back then) over my head to create an illusion of long, lustrous locks. Then, belle of the ball as I doubtless felt I was, I swooped and glided across the cool concrete floor, lost in my own little world. Once I remember becoming aware that my mum was quietly watching me, holding very still and smiling. 

Of course there were years when I danced in public. As a teenager I rocked the night away to Madder Lake (remember 12 LB Toothbrush? Goodbye Lollipop?), to Skyhooks and Sherbet, to Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs.

When we moved to the country and my kids were little, once they were all in bed, if my husband was at a meeting, the records went on, the curtains were drawn, and I jived around the house. Dancing with nobody looking. They were good years, but hard work, and the dance let my spirit fly. There was a lightness in my chest, an excitement, an elation, as I flew around the house to John Fogarty and early Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Rodriguez, Tom Petty and Joe Jackson.

I’ve kept doing this over the years, and now that our nest is almost empty, I can indulge my passion for audience-free dancing more easily. Except that middle age has intervened and since a torn cartilage and knee surgery a few months ago, I cannot risk anything with twists and turns and sudden movements. Prudently, I stick to walking in straight lines.

Not long after I’d had my injury, we were at a wedding of Tongan friends. I watched those crazy Tongans, no warm up or consumption of alcohol or dim lights required, just jumping up and dancing the minute the music started, all of them, from little kids to seriously old ladies, and I nursed my sore knee and felt a pang, felt stuffy and boring and old.

There’s a kind of ecstasy (in the traditional sense of the word) about dancing. Speed and physical movement and wild music setting your heart alight. The Sufis know this, with their whirling dervishes who attain spiritual heights through dance. I’ve always been a sit still and pray person myself, but I can imagine how it works.

Maybe one day I will get back to dancing, increasing age notwithstanding. Or maybe not. But I have the memories of it to make me smile. Memories starting with a small girl in her mum’s dress with a nappy pinned to her head, dancing to Brahms and Mozart in a high ceilinged room. 

Fast track to compassion

Sometimes I think of myself as a book addict. At the library, I am like a kid in a candy shop. I go to pick up one particular book I have reserved, and I walk out staggering under kilos of volumes that I simply cannot resist. No matter how sternly I remind myself that I will have to carry them home and back again, that my bedside table is already groaning under a weight of books it will take me weeks to get through, I leave with more books than I intended. It’s as though something in me fears that when I come back next fortnight, all the books I want will have disappeared, and I need to grab them now. One of the most luxurious, bountiful and delicious things in the world is my awareness that I will never run out of wonderful things to read.

Not just an addict; I’m a chain reader too. Chain smokers light up a fresh (if you can use that word in relation to tobacco) cigarette with the fag end of their last; I put one book down and search desperately for what my next indulgence can be.

Last night, however, I finished a book and felt so soulful, so humbled, so utterly absorbed in the world of the story that I had to simply go to bed and lie quietly till sleep claimed me. It would have felt blasphemous to do anything else.

All that I am by Australian author Anna Funder has rightly been lauded as a masterpiece. It tells the story – new to me – of a small group of Germans between the world wars who could see what would happen if the Nazis came to power and tried to stop them. In the 1930s they were forced to flee to England, where they continued to try and raise awareness of the threat Hitler posed to the whole civilized world. They took great risks to do so and were largely ignored. With the benefit of hindsight, it is a heartbreaking read, reminding me of how subtle and insidious evil can be.

It is fiction; loosely based on real characters but largely invented by Funder herself. It brings to life the stories of two of the women in the Resistance, although it was their men who craved and received the limelight. As well as the narrative of those tumultuous and terrifying times, there is an intimate story of friends and lovers, trust and betrayal. It is a novel with everything.

I couldn’t resist scribbling down quotes from All that I am. Here is one:

‘The girl sits down at the table, side-on to me. Clara Bergdorf has been working with me for five weeks. She is a rare soul, with whom silences of whole minutes are calm. The time is neither empty, nor full of anticipatory pressure. It expands. It makes room for things to return, to fill my empty heart.’

Or how about this:

‘People often have to be alone to think or write, but being with Dora wasn’t like being with another person. We rarely made eye contact. I orbited her chair, eyed without seeing how her hair was cut soft into her nape, the gloss of it. To be with Dora was to be relieved of the burden of my self. This is the trick of creative work: it requires a slip-state of being, not unlike love. A state in which you are both most yourself and most alive and yet least sure of your own boundaries, and therefore open to everything and everyone outside of you. The two of us threw ideas and words around until we had carved a new way forward for the world – clearer and surer and nobler than had ever been done before. Then, elated, we went to bed, whatever the time of day.’ 

Funder’s novel reminded me of one reason I value reading – because it takes me into another’s head and heart, another’s world. The past is another country, another country is another country, every other person on the planet is a foreign planet to me, and there’s only one way I can visit. I would argue that reading a sensitively written book is as every bit as effective a way of broadening ones mind and heart as travel, not to mention less expensive and productive of greenhouse gases.

Reading about the terrors and restrictions of Germany as the Nazis took control made me treasure the freedoms we so often take for granted and resolve to defend those freedoms should they be threatened. It also revealed parallels between that situation and our own - boatloads of refugees from the Nazis were callously turned away from America, pretty much as happens in Australia today. 

Reading with an open heart is a fast track to compassion, which is the virtue I crave above all others. I can’t put this better than Funder herself, and here is one last, my favourite quote:

‘Imagining the life of another is an act of compassion as holy as any.’

The wonderful thing about being an introvert

The wonderful thing about being an introvert is that you don’t need anyone else to have a good time. 

In last Saturday’s arts section of The Melbourne Age, there was a review of a book by one Susan Cain, Quiet: the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. Quoting extensively from introvert Virginia Woolfe, the reviewer (and, presumably, the author) argues that Western society in this ‘era of shrill narcissism’ – I loved that – rewards extroverts. 

‘Cain believes that contemporary capitalism has mistakenly seen extroversion as the path to betterment; a road of fire-walking Anthony Robbinson-reading actors, their bleached teeth lighting the way to love, happiness and wealth. Exemplified by Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, the extrovert ideal grew alongside an industrial, urban society in which the manipulation and management of massed strangers was necessary.’ 

Despite coming from a fairly reserved family, I felt inadequate for years, on account of my deep introversion. The fact that I had no idea what this was or that I possessed it, made it no less guilt inducing.

As a small child I dreaded parties. As a teenager I went on summer holidays where I spent my time reading on deserted beaches, trying to escape the crowds of my more sociable peers. As a young wife, I felt terrible about dreading the parties my husband so enjoyed and resentful of him for coping so well with what I experienced as an ordeal.

It wasn’t till we had been together some years that we worked out that he was an extrovert and I was not. Suddenly we realised that no one was at fault here. We were just different.

As a teenager and young woman I probably came across in company as an extrovert. I was capable of projecting a bubbly personality. I can still turn this on when required – at social functions, with strangers, in front of a crowd, public speaking. And introverts often love being with other people, just not too many. One of my favourite things is having deep one to one chats over coffee, or to have two or three people for a long dinner complete with rambling, intense conversations.

But the cardinal test for extro/introversion is whether you replenish your inner resources by being with others or by yourself. 

I am such an introvert, I get tense when I have to walk past people in the street and will cross the road to avoid doing so. It’s as though there’s a force field emanating from other people that depletes me. I love travelling on my own. I love going to the movies on my own. For exercise I walk on my own – why would you sully perfectly good time alone by exercising with others? Needless to say, I have never participated in team sport by choice. If I were in gaol and they wanted to really punish me, solitary confinement would not work. They would have to put me in a room full of talkative people to really make me suffer.

When I do have to do the party thing too much, and I can do it reasonably well, it takes its toll. I feel a profound, bone-deep weariness that is beyond anything I experience from physical effort. I grow not just irritable, but downright nasty. I am in good company: speaking of Virginia Woolfe, the book review writes, ‘…this false extroversion often had a price: exhaustion, depression, illness’.

With the increased confidence of middle age, however, I am learning not only to manage, but even to rejoice in my introversion. I try to pace myself – not that this is always possible, but often it is. People actually understand the excuse of not being a party person more readily than I have given them credit for in the past. Recently I went to a do where no less than three separate people greeted me with the words, ‘Clare, what are you doing here? It’s a party!’

There are great things about being an introvert. There’s so much going on inside my head and heart that I don’t need much external stimulation. I can spend days and nights alone and be perfectly content. As long as I can sleep, walk, read and write, I am happily occupied. Even without books and a computer, I can stare out a window for a long time without getting bored. I suspect it’s much easier for introverts to be contemplatives.

Some of my best friends are extroverts. I love the way they are and the excitement and colour they bring into my life. But it’s liberating, in my middle years, to feel I am fine and have something to offer just being who I am.