On the feast of St Joseph

The solemnity of St Joseph trumps Lent. No purple today; it is not Tuesday of the fourth week of Lent. (In our diocese we observed the solemnity of St Cuthbert, our patron, yesterday.) it is the feast day of St Joseph. His feast day is important enough that it has been translated, as it fell on Lætare Sunday this year.

And it should be given such special attention. ‘When Joseph woke up [from the dream in which the angel of the Lord appeared to him to say that the child in Mary’s womb was conceived by the Holy Spirit] he did what the angel of the Lord had told him to do’–that is, to marry her anyway (Matthew 1.20-21, 24).

Joseph copies God–not that Mary had been unfaithful like Israel with the Golden Calf, or like Hosea’s wife, but in appearance. For how many would have believed Joseph at the time? Whom would he tell, anyway? We are never told that he reported the dream to anyone, though it is a safe bet that he told Mary. Perhaps Mary repeated it to Elizabeth. After all, Elizabeth knew that Mary’s baby was no ordinary child.

To the rest, the world outside, how must it have looked? Either Joseph had known his betrothed before their marriage, or someone else had. I don’t imagine that anyone’s first guess would have been conception by the Holy Spirit. Only after the birth of Jesus did the angels spread the news that Isaiah’s prophecy–which the angel had called to Joseph’s mind–had been fulfilled. Only then did the wise ones rejoice to see the promised child.

But Joseph believed, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. Rightly does Bernardino of Siena (Sermon 2, on St Joseph: Opera 7, 16. 27-30) suggest we append St Joseph to the litany of the faithful in Hebrews 11. By faith Joseph took Mary to be his wife, trusting the words of the angel of the Lord that Mary’s child would save his people from their sins.

So it is not surprising that Joseph’s foster-child, after being found in the temple by his anxious parents, ‘went down with them and came to Nazareth and lived under their authority’ (Luke 2.51). Like (foster-)father, like son. Elsewhere in Hebrews, we read that Jesus learned obedience: Jesus, the Incarnate Word of Almighty God, who, as God, owed obedience to no one. Yet he learned obedience from two people whose obedience is celebrated in the Church this week: Joseph and Mary. Today we read that Joseph ‘did what the angel of the Lord told him to do’; on Saturday we celebrate the moment Joesph’s betrothed said to the angel: ‘Let it be to me according to your word’ (Luke 1.38).

Mary and Joseph trusted what God’s messengers said to them, and they are our spiritual parents as we have been incorporated into Christ. So we should, as members of the Son they nurtured, honour them as the commandment teaches: ‘Honour thy mother and father.’ Rightly do we celebrate them, righty do these two solemnities interrupt our penance during Lent. The solemnities of St Joseph and of the Annunciation point to the great feast of the Nativity, in which we celebrate the birth of the One born to save his people from their sins by his obedience, even unto death on a cross.

The intermingling of sorrow and joy is the pattern of Christian life. We are pulled from the gloom represented by the purple cloth in the midst of Lent, and we mourn on the solemnities of the martyrs–St Stephen and the Holy Innocents at Christmas and St Mark, St Philip and St James at Easter–during times of celebration. This pattern reminds us that we are living in the time between the dawn of salvation and its consummation. And so we wait in gloom but not in despair; we wait in joyful expectation even as we do penance, for the One who has died is risen, and will come again in glory.

St Joseph, pray for us!

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Quis ascendet in montem Domini / aut quis stabit in loco sancto suo? Innocens manibus et mundo corde / qui non levavit ad vana animam suam, nec iuravit in dolum. Ps 23 [24]: 3-4

Notam fac mihi viam, in qua ambulam/ quia ad te levavi animam meam. Ps 142 [143]: 8

The translation of ‘levavit ad vana animam suam’ I usually read renders it, ‘desires not worthless things’. So I have always thought of this quality—of the one who does not desire them—as a kind of non-distraction by useless stuff: trinkets, frippery, junk. But Psalm 142 puts it in a different light. ‘Ad te [Domini] levavi animam meam’: ‘to you [Lord] I lift up my soul’. If the soul is meant (as of course it is) to be ‘lifted up’ to God, then ‘levavit ad vana animam suam’—[having] lifted up the soul to worthless things—is nothing short of idolatry. It is not simply distraction by shiny trinkets but displacing the proper object of the soul’s desire: God. Then these are not just any worthless things. Whether or not the things mentioned are idols crafted of wood or stone, once the soul has been lifted up to them, they become idols. For that is what idolatry is: putting something else in the place of God. Compared to God, anything we desire is vain, useless. That is, nothing we desire will satisfy our soul. So the psalmist longs for God like a person in a desert yearns for water. Only God can quench that thirst. So the psalmist calls on God when his heart is numb within him. Only God saves all those who are crushed in spirit. To expect things—any things—to heal a broken heart or satisfy a thirsty soul is to try to fill a cracked jar with water: vain.

Idolatry is not a sin because God gets angry at being replaced, as if we are thereby depriving God of some necessary accolades. Idolatry is a sin because it stops us calling on God in the day of trouble, which is our only hope of rescue. And it isn’t only things that appear worthless that can be idols, of course. The most pious-seeming sacrifices can become idols if they are not offered up to God with a humble and grateful heart. All the burnt offerings continually before God (in Psalm 49 [50]) are worthless compared to ‘a sacrifice of thanksgiving’. God does not need the things we offer up. God lacks nothing: ‘if I were hungry, I would not tell you’ (Psalm 49[50]. 12). No: what God asks is this: ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me’ (v. 15).

All the practices of abstinence, fasting and almsgiving, prayer and penance, can become idols if we do them out of a desire for anything but God. The lack of food on days of fasting is a tiny taste of the ‘day of trouble’—a self-induced lack to train the soul for the real thing: a hunger we have not chosen and cannot satisfy; an emptiness not of our own making.

How will my soul know what to do in the day of trouble? Practice, practice, practice: ad te levavi animam meam, ad te levavi animam meam. In all the small wants that irk me during Lent, let me lift up my soul to the One who alone can satisfy.

Deo gratias.

Under covid’s spell

For the past ten days, I have been living in the peculiar, hazy world the virus has created for me. This is not a complaint: I know, even as I struggle to walk upstairs, that I have nothing to complain about. Getting up the stairs means I can breathe, and breathing is good. Breathing is something I have always taken for granted before. Now I am grateful for it. Grateful I can climb the stairs; grateful I don’t need oxygen; grateful I have a family around me; and grateful, of course, for the vaccine (second shot late spring), which seems to be protecting me from the worst the virus can do.

In this peculiar and hazy world, I cannot do all the things I usually do. In fact, I can do very few of them. Even writing this is tiring. I never dreamt that lifting my hands to type (on my iPad, sitting in my bed) would be tiring. But it is. Reading is a challenge. The Monday crossword took twice as long as I expected. I move slowly, when I move at all, and it takes some doing just to get going.

I suspect that I am treading the territory of a country that has temporary residents (as I hope to be this time) and permanent residents (which I may be one day, God willing, if I live long enough to wear myself out). I hope that I will be changed for the better by my visit. I know slowing down is good for me, though this isn’t the way I would have chosen to do it.

And that’s it. That’s all I can write today. In your charity, dear reader, would you pray for me, that I am changed for the better? Let me know if I can pray for you. After all, I’m not doing much else these days. ❤️

notes from the darkness

I’m staring at the pages I’m supposed to be editing. Nothing is getting through. The words are stuck somehow, stuck to the page in a way that stops me picking them up, and putting them into my mind. It’s not the page’s fault, nor the author’s. It’s my mind, blocking everything out. Maybe it’s full. I know my head hurts, but it doesn’t hurt quite enough for me to get up from the chair, go to the kitchen, and reach for the paracetamol. Not yet, anyway.

I know this feeling, and I hate it. It’s my depression. My own, personal form of that thing that follows so many people around and wreaks havoc in their lives in myriad and often unpredictable ways. It never fully goes away. It lurks in the corners and hides in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to attack. I can almost imagine it, a little black monster leaping out and enveloping me like a cloud made of tar. Sticky. Everything slows down; my mind closes its shutters, and I am alone inside.

But I’ve got this peephole, I guess, or I wouldn’t be writing. I’d be under my desk sobbing, or diving into a book in an effort to escape. (Sometimes that works, but I have to overcome the little voice inside that scolds, ‘No, you must not do that. You have work to do.’ It’s not wrong, the voice, and yet probably it’s not helping.) No, the darkness hasn’t enclosed me yet. Maybe it won’t, not completely, not this time. I hope.

Did I mention that I hate this feeling? I hate it because I am not under my desk. That would be reason enough to call everything off, to say ‘I’m not very well’, to curl up somewhere more comfortable than under my desk and wait for the storm to pass. Once I am there, I have lost the distance between me and my depression: I have gone under like a swimmer in the LaBrea tar pits. But I am not there. So the little voice that says ‘You have work to do’ is winning. It’s not a big step from hating this feeling to hating myself for feeling it.

It’s like I am caught in a psychological riptide. Don’t swim against it; you’ll just wear yourself out. Then you’ll be swept out to sea (or under your desk) and drown. Swim perpendicular to the current until it stops pulling at you. Which way is that? I wonder. And will I be able to do any of this work while I’m swimming along parallel to the shore?

My back tenses up and the tears press hard, and I press back. I’m not going to win this one. I’m not going to get today back. It’s gone–count it amongst my many locust-eaten days. This is my own plague of locusts, the pest that ruins my crops. This is my old enemy, my shadow, my depression, tearing me apart by undoing my mind and at the same time telling me to work, work, work. I can’t work. If it were a person, I’d fight it viciously. I’d shout, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ But it isn’t a little black monster out there, it’s a gaping hole in here, a black hole into which sunshine and certainty vanish.

If you have never been in a storm like this, I am glad for you, and I pray you never will be. As for me, I think it’s time to head for shelter.

What I always do for Lent

It’s not really a ‘giving up’ sort of thing, but it has become essential to my Lenten practice over the last several years. Don’t laugh: it’s my choice of earrings. I wear purple or black earrings during Lent. Occasionally I allow myself plain silver ones. Very occasionally.

This may sound like a very small thing, but it has a significant effect. Because I do wear earrings every day (I know not everyone does), I remind myself every morning as I am getting ready that it is Lent. I don’t always to have a list of things I am giving up, but just being aware every day that it’s a penitential season makes a difference.

For example, let’s say I’m having a mid-morning coffee and think about a sweet snack to accompany it. Then I remember it’s Lent. I just have the coffee. Five o’clock rolls around, and a cocktail or a glass of wine might be nice. It’s been a tough day (aren’t they all, these lockdown days?). I remember it’s Lent. Maybe I’ll have some herbal tea instead.

I suppose that restricting my earring choice is like putting on the shield of self-denial, as this morning’s collect at Lauds says. Of course, I don’t practice perfect penitence just because I’m wearing purple earrings. But it does help me to stick to whatever other practice I’ve decided to adopt for Lent. That’s going to be especially helpful this year, as the main thing I am trying to give up is getting angry. (Pray for me, please!)

And, of course, wearing somber earrings for several weeks makes me that much happier to don my favourite pearls when Easter comes.

I used to like Monday, when there was school…

I opened the wine at 4pm, on the grounds that I needed it for cooking. It has been a typical Monday:

Alarm goes off at 5.30 and I hit snooze a couple of times. Eventually I sit up and start the office of readings. This will take a while, as spouse and child(ren) will wander in and talk to me from time to time. They are welcome, don’t get me wrong—especially coffee-bearing husband 😊

Sometime later (7ish), I head out for a walk. I love this part of the day. Today I made footprints in fresh snow and spotted a couple of new birds.

Arrive home in time for the beginning of ‘school’.

9.30ish I begin arguing with Lucy (age 9) about the reading, English and math work she has to do. Somewhere between 9.30 and 11, she does a bit of reading and a few fractions. At some point in this same period, I hear some bad news about work. It’s always bad news, and it doesn’t bear talking about. I swear I will quit (which I won’t).

Lunchtime rolls around. People eat stuff and leave a mess. I try the chutney I made yesterday from the veg I rescued from the garden. It’s pretty good. Full disclosure: there was beer with lunch. It was that sort of Monday.

Afternoon: I discover I have one more essay to mark. I can’t do that. Nor can I prepare the material for my two hours of lecturing tomorrow. I’be got Lucy doing grammar and the kitchen rota to sort out. (It begins afresh on Monday. Maybe that’s a bad idea.)

Lucy is supposed to do RE this afternoon. We watch a video about St Josephine Bakhita (pray for us!) and I manage to hold her until about 2.40. Then school is out, for her, anyway.

Next up, Anna wants to read Cat in the Hat. This is brilliant, as she’s finally starting to read—really READ. I’ve looked forward to this day since she was a book-mad toddler (she’s 19), so this is great. But the timing is bad. I’ve got this essay to mark and the lecture to prepare.

Around 4, we have to set the book aside to cook. Anna is in a cookery club, and this week we are making mince and dumplings. Thank goodness the recipe calls for wine.

That takes me to 5pm, when Anna has a zoom meeting for which my attention is required. I’m not really giving it, as I have nothing left.

Soon it will be dinner, and cleaning up, and saying goodnight to everyone. And then, when it is quiet, I might just write some notes for my lecture. Notice I don’t say ‘do some work.’ I’ve been doing that all day. It’s just that nobody who doesn’t benefit directly from that work actually gives a shit.

St Jerome Emiliani, pray for us.

St Josephine Bakhita, pray for us.

And if you’re still reading this, please pray for me.

On the feast of St Agnes

I intended to write about being a failure, to title this post something like—very straightforwardly—‘I am a failure.’ But then I came across the collect at vigils (the office of readings, to be really precise), which reminds us that God chose ‘what is weak in this world to shame the strong.’ I am not sure there is much in my particular form of weakness to shame anyone else. Yet the line made me stop and think about the relationship between weakness and failure, and that habit of God’s to choose the small and insignificant (like young Samwise Gamgee or Lucy Pevensie) to carry the day.

There are a whole array of measures against which I can count myself as having failed—the sorts of measures used to measure success in various areas of life. What does it mean to be a ‘successful’ parent? Really, I expect that true success in parenting doesn’t show up until after the parents are no longer around to appreciate it. So we settle for other measures, like our children’s achievements, whether these be on the field (or the pitch, if you prefer), or in the classroom, or in good citizenship (as it was called when I was at school). So far, I am not getting any points there. My kids are still growing up, and they’re not leading the field in any of those areas. I hope and pray that they will grow up to be content, and kind, and truthful.

Then there’s my career. I had a conversation years ago with a colleague in which we agreed that our careers had been non-traditional. For me, that means having survived at the edges of academic, on the margins of university departments, from the beginning. (Just now it looks like being squeezed out entirely—isn’t that a sign of having failed?) my colleague’s non-traditional start has recently found her photographed next to the Pope with a small group of other important people. Perhaps I should reconsider my term. Something like ‘anemic’ might be a more apt descriptor for my academic ‘career’.

So it goes. One of the very worst things that a person can do, of course, if compare herself to others. But boy do we do it a lot. Apparently one of the mums at my kids’ primary school used to keep a list of the top ten best-looking dads. It is, unfortunately, both soul-crushing and an extremely tough habit to break. Obviously I’ve failed there, too. Still succumbing to the temptation to measure my life against others’.

What does all this have to do with St Agnes? Just this: her main claim to fame is having died well for her faith. She was only 12. She hadn’t had a chance to do anything else—no academic achievement, no successful family of career, no works of service. Just a love of God and a willingness to give her life for what she believed. We usually think of martyrdom as the high bar. But I don’t think it is, necessarily. The living sacrifice to which all Christians are called is the long, drawn-out version of St Agnes’ martyrdom.

Bearing all the petty insults and inconveniences, and all the unpleasant people, and all the disappointments that will never be noticed by anyone may be harder than the once-and-for-all death at the executioner’s hands. At least I think it is for me, and I suspect I am not alone in this. So my prayer today is for all those who feel like they’ve failed, like their work or their lives don’t make a difference, for all those who are living hidden lives faithfully and will, in the words of George Eliot, ‘rest in unvisited tombs.’

St Agnes, pray for us!

A meditation for the feast of the Immaculate Conception

I hope it goes without saying that I’m thinking about the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It’s an old doctrine, hundreds of years older than its ex cathedra proclamation in 1854.

It occurred to me this morning, reading the couple of paragraphs offered by universalis, that being free from original sin didn’t just allow Mary to say ‘Yes’, but to say ‘Yes’ without selfish motives. The remark that sparked this reflection was not central, and I had forgotten it by the time I picked up my pen. But it was like a window being opened and letting in a draught, or the smell of a neighbour’s bacon cooking. In my imagination, the main barrier to saying ‘Yes’ to God is fear. After all, it is what the Angel Gabriel said to Mary: ‘Do not be afraid’; ‘Noli timere‘. It is also what Jesus said to Simon Peter in the boat full of fish: ‘Do not be afraid.’ Yet fear is not the only potential obstacle to Mary’s faithful yes–that is, if she were tainted by original sin. A faithful yes might also be spoiled by pride, by a calculation of what she might gain by it.

What a great bargaining position to be in! ‘Well’, she might say, ‘see what I have done for you, God…’ Talk about the opportunity for guilt-tripping your offspring. And when your son is God, imagine the power you might have as a parent. No, fear is not the only sin from which Mary needed to be free. Its partner in selfishness, pride, would have been equally disastrous. She might have said yes for the wrong reasons.

But she didn’t. She didn’t because of the mystery we celebrate today: her Immaculate Conception. If Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane shows us what a human will looks like in perfect cooperation with God, Mary shows us what it looks like to live without sin. It’s not what we think, I expect. It certainly isn’t what I think of when I dream of a life without sin. Sure, she ponders in her heart the remarkable experience of his birth and the days that followed; together with her husband, she took the baby to be presented at the temple, as the law required. The Holy Family made the trip to Jerusalem in the company of the faithful. And then, she scolds her son for staying behind without a word to his parents. She felt that worry and hurt so common to parents. She intervened to save a couple’s marriage feast–as the gospel reading for vigils today reminds us. Mary was the life and soul of that party, for certain–not the holier-than-thou sort of person I’d associate with the words ‘without sin’. And the one who said yes to God didn’t take no for an answer from him. ‘Do whatever he tells you’, she said to the servants.

So also she says to us: ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ I’d like to think that the reward for doing so is ‘the best wine.’ But it seems unlikely that the servants had a chance to savour it. What they did get was a front-row seat at our Lord’s first miracle. I’m not sure what that means for me today, but I’d like to find out.

Hail Mary, full of grace…

Deo gratias.

A meditation for the beginning of Advent

Advent is a time of preparation. But how shall I prepare? How do I make myself ready to welcome the Holy Infant when he comes? ‘Let it be done unto me according to your word,’ says Mary. Dangerous words: inviting Almighty God to enter in, to do his will in us, through us, is a very serious business indeed. I wonder whether Mary knew what she was getting herself into. I imagine not: her special nature meant freedom to say yes, not foreknowledge of the consequences of her assent. Would she still have said yes if she knew how much it would hurt? I suppose, if she knew the whole story, she would have seen from the outset that it was worth it. And it is difficult to imagine how much a child’s rejection will hurt before you have even become pregnant.

Ah, Mary! You know the pain mothers feel. ‘A sword will pierce your own heart’—is that not the way of motherhood? Our Lord’s first miracle, as recorded in John’s gospel, he performed at you behest, but not without resistance. ‘O woman, what have you to do with me?’ he asks, rhetorically and not very politely; ‘My hour has not yet come.’ Is that any way to speak to your Mother?

I would have rankled. ‘Don’t call me woman, son,’ I might have said, ‘I am your mother.’ It hurts when a child distances himself from his mother. I know. I’m not sure I could have simply let it slide. But she does. Ignoring his cheeky reply, she addresses the servants. ‘Do whatever he tells you,’ she says. And so unfolds the miracle of the water and the wine; Jesus saves the wedding at Cana.

Was this an ordinary interaction between Mother and Son? Did Jesus routinely speak to Mary like that—‘woman, what have you to do with me?’ It sounds so cold. For all the tenderness we find in the beginning of Luke’s gospel, and the poignant image of the pietà, there seems to be some tension in their relationship. Jesus is unapologetic when they find him in the temple. We have heard his tone at the wedding at Cana. And then there is the episode recorded in the synoptic gospels in which his mother and brothers come to find Jesus. He says, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ Were he anyone else, we would think of him as a spoiled, ungrateful son. Who disavows his own mother, allowing anyone ‘who does the will of God’ to take her place? How hurt she must have been over and over again, as he slipped away from her. ‘A sword will pierce your own heart,’ indeed.

Mary figures for us the pain in child bearing that I think is bound up with the curse in Genesis 3. The pain of loss that the pietà captures does not begin with our Lord’s passion. No, Mary’s passion is life-long. From the moment she finds she is pregnant before it is appropriate—what will she do?—until she sees him crucified, being the mother of our Lord is a path that leads through suffering. She is worried and hurt like the rest of us: being conceived without sin doesn’t make her invulnerable.

As much as she shows us the enduring pain of motherhood, she also shows us the fierce tenderness of an ideal mother’s love. However many times he rejects her, she keeps following him. When the disciples are all scattered, she remains.

All the unseen pain of motherhood, Mary brings into the light for us. Without rancour or bitterness, she never scolds—though she admonishes her wayward 12 year old. And she doesn’t complain about how cold he sometimes seems. She doesn’t regret having given herself up to be the mother of this unusual child who brings her so much grief.

Of course it wasn’t all thorns and barbs. There are many joys as well, and Mary would have known these also. But in the season of Advent, when we are surrounded by images of a young and radiant woman beaming with joy over her infant Son, we ought to remember that her discipleship, like ours, took her through hurt and loss. It is the way of the cross, on which Mary is uniquely poised to lead us.

So we should not hesitate to let our prayer this Advent be, ‘Let it be done unto me according to your word.’ We should tremble, perhaps, for there is no knowing where such a prayer will take us. But we can be sure that the Lord is there, and Mary has already made the way for us.

Deo gratias.

On disability and illness in a time of pandemic

Life finds a way. So said Michael Crichton (often) in Jurassic Park. True: and yet humans, like the misguided individual who thought raising dinosaurs from extinction was a good–and lucrative–idea, like to mess around with life. This morning I was frustrated almost to tears by the human propensity to play God, especially when disability is concerned. We want to avoid illness and disability–not just for ourselves, but for our families–whatever it costs.

Health, illness and disability. What do we expect for our lives and the lives of our children? Health. We expect health and well-being. We expect the usual range of abilities and capacities: to see, to grow, to hear, to learn, to walk and run, to feel, to think and read and write. These are all good things, and there is nothing wrong with hoping for them, even expecting them. The trouble comes when we begin to believe that we are entitled to well-being and certain forms of achievement–and so are our children (whether we have them yet or not). And we decide which limitations we will accept and which we won’t. Of course we all want to be healthy, and we want our children to be healthy, and insofar as it is up to us, we ought to do what health requires. At the moment that involves some extra caution–more frequent and thorough hand washing, avoiding public places when possible, and wearing a mask and keeping our distance when it’s not possible to stay home. (Soon, perhaps, it will also involve a vaccine–which is good and yet a symptom of the very thing that worries me so much these days.) In more ordinary circumstances we know we ought to eat healthy food, get fresh air and exercise, limit our alcohol consumption, and give up smoking. And I suppose most of us try, a good bit of the time, to do those things.

Even with the ordinary and extraordinary measures that we can take, we may still fall ill. If we manage to avoid COVID-19 (looking all the more possible if this vaccine is as good as it seems to be), we can catch cold, end up with pneumonia, break a leg, go down with norovirus, or develop cancer. Much of what comes our way in the realm of health, illness, and disability is beyond our control.

I hate that, I admit it. I am a bit of a control freak, and like a lot more order than life with four messy kids and a non-neat-freak spouse affords me. I hate it that, despite reasonable eating and exercise habits, my “fat” jeans have become my “thin” jeans and the “thin” jeans of yesteryear have long gone to some lucky person who came across them in a charity shop and could fit into them. I can’t even control the ordinary, daily-life things that I think I should.

Maybe you are better at housekeeping and staying slim than I. But the point is that there are only a very limited number of things in life that are ours to decide, and these mostly fall into the category of responses to what life throws at us. We are not masters of our destiny, we are scrapbookers, arranging the materials we’ve been given into a pattern that makes sense to us. We cannot make one hair of our heads white or black (as Jesus observed)–at least not by sheer force of will. We cannot change our height or bone structure (oh, how I wish I could make myself 5’8″ and fine-boned!), we cannot cast away our spectacles and think our way to perfect vision.

So when I heard on the radio this morning about the careful and agonised consideration that went into a fictional couple’s decision to terminate a pregnancy based on a Down syndrome risk, I thought, ‘oh, poppycock’ (or maybe something less appropriate). It’s not that, because I have a child with Down syndrome, I think nobody should terminate on that basis. I never wanted to have a child with Down syndrome–I was sure I couldn’t handle it. My strategy was to have kids before age 30 and so reduce my risk. When that plan failed, I never thought that termination was the alternative. When I was expecting my first child, at 32, it was out of my hands. And, like Nicola Enoch, who criticised the termination storyline, I’m glad that I failed to avoid having a child with Down syndrome. It’s not easy. But my daughter’s life is absolutely worth living, and it is worth everything that it has cost me to be her mum.

If there is anything that I have learned in my fifty-one years on this planet, it is that I do know with certainty what is best for me. ‘Even the wise cannot see all ends,’ as Gandalf said, and I believe I am not to be counted among the wise. Life unfolds in mysterious ways, and  however sensitively a decision to terminate a pregnancy is portrayed, it is still a decision that ends life. I don’t mean that it terminates the life of an embryo, though it does that. I mean that it interrupts life’s unfolding; such a decision is like leaving life’s crooked path and striking out into the undergrowth to right or left. ‘There are no safe paths’, as Gandalf also said, but it does not follow that we ought therefore to head out into the pathless forest. (If you know anything about Gandalf’s advice, you’ll know he insists that leaving the path is more dangerous still!)

It is simply not the case that we can leave one path that looks like it ends in disaster and make our own way to that happy ending we have dreamed for ourselves. No, as another wise character once said, ‘one often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it’ (Master Ugwe, this time). We cannot straighten life’s crooked way, and we cannot avoid every catastrophe that awaits us. Sometimes life really, really sucks. It is never, ever fair. Usually when it feels fair to us, that’s only because the balance is tipped in our favour, not because the scales are perfectly balanced.

I wish I could tell you there was a guaranteed happy ending. Nope. There’s no guarantee of that. All I can recommend is trying to find peace in the middle bit. Recycle. Love your family. Eat your vegetables. Do what you can. And don’t worry about the danger of the path. It’s probably better to stay on it. You never know when there might be giant spiders or murderous trees in the forest.