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!

I think a lot about disability. This is not just because I have an 18-year-old with Down syndrome. It is also because I have a profoundly, excruciatingly dyslexic 13-year-old and a 9-year-old whose dyslexia is less devastating.

Knowing about my struggles with dyslexic kids, a neighbour (author and educator Adam Bushnell) kindly lent me Philip Schultz’s memoir, My Dyslexia. I can see why he commented that, for Schultz, dyslexia was ‘like his superpower.’ Having overcome his dyslexia to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Schultz credits his success to the blocks to reading and writing that seemed insurmountable in his early childhood. Not in spite of his dyslexia did he achieve what he has achieved, but because of his dyslexia.

Maybe so. I don’t doubt that the struggle shaped him. But not all dyslexics are as fond of books and words as he was (and never mind the slipperiness of the definition and diagnosis of dyslexia). And–more importantly–not everyone with dyslexia has his grit. He owes much to his persistent, even indomitable, self-belief: ‘even when the entire world seemed to be ganging up on me, some persisting sense of myself argued on my behalf’. Ditto for the young scientist Schultz admired, who called her dyslexia ‘her secret weapon’. I’d say the credit goes to her consistent, pig-headed determination and sheer force of will. Dyslexia provided her with a mountain, true. Hope and courage enabled her to climb it.

The challenge that people with dyslexia face is the same, at bottom, as the challenge we all face: to ‘learn to love what is weakest and most confounding about ourselves, because and despite and in deference to what is essential about us’ (all quotations p. 117). The great challenge of his life, and mine, and my children’s, and yours, is very simple. It’s all about not giving up.

This is true whether it’s dyslexia or depression or Down syndrome (or just daily life during a pandemic) that challenges us. I almost wrote ‘afflicts’ there; I hesitated because it’s an unpopular way of thinking about disability. So negative. But affliction is exactly what Schultz describes; it’s what my son experiences; it is, if I am honest, the way I experience depression. And it is the affliction that stirs, in some of us, the gritty response that makes for success. The super power of the oyster is not the irritation provided by the grain of sand but the ability it has to smooth over that irritant until it forms a pearl.

In a sense, then, we are the most ‘disabled’ by the conditions that afflict us when we lack either the ability to recognise the grain of sand or the mountain for what it is, or we lack the hope and courage to surmount it. Most days, I would say that Anna, my 18-year-old with Down syndrome, isn’t especially ‘disabled’ by her genetic idiosyncrasy. Having thought through Schultz’s book, though, I see that’s not exactly what I mean. In terms of sheer not-being-able-to-do-stuff, Anna is always going to ‘win’ the competition for the most disabled. Yet she is not usually afflicted by her condition, and I am beginning to see why: she doesn’t see the summit. We clamber around on the slopes together, but there’s no determined ascent.

Maybe that’s why I’m still a little uncomfortable with these thoughts about mountains and overcoming. Why do some people make it to the top while others are defeated by the summit? I don’t know. I may not know much more about disability than I did before reading Schultz’s book. But I have seen in a new and crystal clear way that my kids who need to see the summit and learn to climb need grit more than any other intervention. And that is more helpful than I can say. Thanks for the loan, Adam.

At least during the pandemic, we don’t have the weekly argument about going to Mass, or the complaints that it’s boring. That doesn’t exactly comprise a silver lining, though: when we (the parents) tune in to Mass at Blackfriars (Oxford), the kids get on with other things. The 16-year-old is asleep, the 13-year-old is watching YouTube, the 9-year-old is skating around the house on her roller blades, and my eldest is listening to music and humming along. This is better than the nerf war that was going on during the Liturgy of the Word. (It may also be noted that one of the adults is asleep on the sofa during the Eucharistic Prayer and the other is writing this blog.)

Keeping the feasts and fasts while physically separated from the Church is tough. We fail a lot. And regular prayer is hard, too. I thought that one of the redeeming things about the pandemic would be the possibility of praying Compline ‘with’ the community in Kent I so enjoy visiting. But it is often impossible to follow along–we can’t understand the sung words, and the video lags. I don’t mind. The rest of the family does, and so we haven’t been joining in. Universalis has continued to be a lifeline for me. I stay connected by knowing what day it is–today is the feast of the Most Holy Trinity; were it not a Sunday, we would remember St Robert of Newminster today. When the kids are out of school, holidays are cancelled, work is squished in around lessons, and the usual schedule of activities and appointments is suspended, it is easy to get lost–hardly remembering what day of the week it is, much less the month and date. Tomorrow there will be no school run, and we won’t go to work. It will still be Monday, though: Monday of week 10 in ordinary time (or St William of York, if you observe his memorial). Liturgical time goes on, pandemic or no pandemic, lockdown or no lockdown. I am grateful for that.

And I am grateful, more grateful than ever, for communities like the Dominican friars we join for Sunday Mass and the Benedictine nuns I like to visit at Minster Abbey. A few years ago, I wrote about the nuns, reflecting that my misunderstanding of Sr Johanna revealed an important truth about the relationship of the wider Church with such communities. ‘I’ve got your back,’ I thought she said. That wasn’t what she said, but it was true. While I am here, with my family, loosely following the Sunday Mass, it is happening, just as it always has, at Blackfriars and everywhere that religious communities gather for the celebration of the Eucharist.

I would rather be there, of course. And I would rather wrestle the kids out the door of the house and into the door of St Bede’s than listen to them running up and down while I try to follow the homily. But in these strange times, it is good to know that we are the Body of Christ: we are incorporated at baptism and we members are nourished by our participation in the Eucharist. And yet, we remain joined to the Body even at this distance. The regular communion of the nuns, the monks, and the friars benefits us; we participate in a mystical way. So the act of spiritual communion that we make (thanks to the prayer given us by the friars) is real. It’s just not physical.

I think what I have been doing for the last hour, since the beginning of the Eucharistic prayer, is considering why I keep on sitting here, while Mass is going on somewhere else. While my participation in the liturgy is rather two-dimensional, involving two senses rather than the usual 5, it helps me to make the spiritual act of communion. And so I will tune in again next week.

The weekend after Easter—Easter Saturday and the Second Sunday of Easter—didn’t seem like a weekend at all. Time is like that these days. Even having virtual Mass on a Sunday and keeping to the school week doesn’t erase the sense of being in some kind of liminal time. It is almost like the strange stretch of the summer holidays when we are home and our friends are away, still on holiday somewhere. Almost. But not quite, because when you do see people out and about, you have to stand six feet away from them to have a chat, and the topics of conversation are far from the usual.

The signs of spring continue unabated. The farm smells as farm-like as ever, pungent, with mixed aromas of cow and sheep and heaps of dung for fertilizer—or so I imagine. What else could those smelly heaps be for? Some of the sheep have been shorn, and in the field along the path lambs skip (really) as the adults graze, untouched by the energy of the new generation. Their skipping time has gone.

Sometimes I feel like that: my skipping time has gone. These have not been easy days for me, though I can’t blame the dreaded virus. It’s just me, as I have always been, with ups and downs. Lately the downs have dipped into deep darkness and despair. It has occurred to me that this may be normal for me, but it is not normal. So maybe my normal can change. This is a radical thought, mind you.

But not, I think, an impossibility. And that is somewhere to start.

Deo gratias.