Put Me With Whom You Will

I read the other day - I can no longer remember where - something about how strange are the things that make the active mind think deeply.  Wherever it came from, today I endorse its truth.  My title this week was called to mind in just such a moment of deep thought.  It comes from John Wesley's Covenant Prayer, which forms part of an annual service in the Methodist Church, and is also used in other individual congregations across the Christian world, often in an annual setting.  For the benefit of those who may be unaware of this text, I quote it in full at the end of this piece.

I reflected today on the fact that, for the past six weeks or so, I have spent a couple of hours each Friday afternoon in the company of a certain young man who had volunteered to help at the charitable institution where for the last two years and more - Covid permitting - I have spent two days a week.  It was decided that his love of computers could best be utilised working alongside me scanning books and DVDs for sale on line to raise funds for our operation.  

On the first few occasions his father accompanied him.  Having readily understood the brief outline that I have given to all who have been presented to me in that position, dad then explained to his son, in terms he knew would be understood, what was required of him.  He then sat back, ostensibly reading his newspaper, but with his eye constantly on what the young man was doing, nudging him gently back onto the right course if his enthusiasm led him astray.

I don't know what the young man's problem is; suffice to say that his behaviour is not 'normal' (whatever that might mean), and at the outset I was very much discomforted by his strangeness and tended to deal with his father.  I felt uneasy at this, knowing that it followed the classic 'does he take sugar?' example of talking to the pusher of the wheelchair rather than to the person in it.  Gradually, however, I learned by watching and listening to his father how to deal with the situation.  Then came the day when, with due warning, the father was unable to be present.  I was forced to face up to my own reservations and hesitations.  While I admit to being glad that it was only for two hours in the week, for the most part these times have passed without incident.  

The whole concept of two people performing as a team a job that can, with mental co-ordination, be achieved more efficiently by one has upset me right from the start, and I've made no secret of the fact that I prefer to work alone for that reason.  So much depends on each 'partner' understanding the whole process, being aware of what the other is doing, and the pair contriving to work at the same speed so as to achieve a smooth operation.  On occasions I've been partnered with someone with whom this has been the case and harmony was the result; equally, at other times this has clearly not happened and alternative measures have been employed to overcome this problem. 

While musing on these circumstances today, it occurs to me that I have learned from these weekly 'trials'.  First and foremost, I suppose, comes tolerance.  I have accepted someone who is clearly different from me, not just physically - he's about a third of my age and almost a foot taller - but mentally too.  This has been difficult, but I have acknowledged that, since the required standards haven't always been met, I've had to re-plan my afternoon to allow for a time of 'tidying up' once this young man has departed.  I've learned where it was appropriate to offer correction, how much this was successful and, as a result, where I have had to tailor my own strategies in order to accommodate any deficiency in that regard.

Perhaps more importantly, I've been reminded that I'm not the only person in my little world and that I don't always get my own way in life!  While not done exactly the way I would do it, what he has achieved has been just as valuable for the cause as my efforts.  I have been humbled and feel better for it.

Wesley's Covenant Prayer:

“I am no longer my own, but yours.  Put me to what you will, put me with whom you will.  Put me to doing.  Put me to suffering.  Let me be put to work for you, or set aside for you.  Praised for you, or criticized for you.  Let me be full.  Let me be empty.  Let me have all things.  Let me have nothing.  I freely and fully surrender all things to your glory and service.  And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, You are mine and I am yours.  So be it.  And the covenant which I have made on Earth, let it be ratified in Heaven.  Amen.”

A Memory Miscellany

 "Off to town with half-a-crown, to buy a jar of honey ..."

When I got up this morning, I decided to write about the dream I'd just had but now, having been to town and returned (without honey after spending well over a hundred times a half-a-crown), the memory of it has evaporated.  Instead, I'll share a few other memories that haven't gone away.

Two of the few groups I follow on Facebook relate to memories of the past.  One recently featured a short series of long posts narrating a walk along a specific bus route that the writer travelled regularly in his boyhood.  At one point he described the experience of accompanying his mother into a hardware shop, saying that he no longer remembered much about the shop itself 'apart from the smell and the wooden floor'.  My own memory was triggered, and I recalled a similar shop in my hometown.  The smell - a mixture of paraffin and machine oil, although I couldn't identify it at that age - and the echo of the wooden floorboards on the hollow of the cellar underneath came very quickly to mind.

A recent post to the other of these groups - directly linked to my hometown and its surrounding area - asked about the town's experiences, if any, of enemy action during World War II.  I reported a comment made by my mother about a plane strafing a particular street, only to be contradicted by another contributor saying that it was actually a different street.  I felt that either my mother's memory (she now being long gone and unable to corroborate it), or my own of what she had said, were being challenged.  A day or so later, someone else posted in support of my offering, specifying the shopfronts that had been hit by machine-gun fire ... one of which was directly opposite the shop where my mother was working at the time.

And this is being written the day after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.  

The newspapers provide graphic images of the damage in Gaza of more than a week's bombardment and I draw a parallel between these and the familiar pictures of the London blitz of 1940/41.  I realise that the minuscule damage suffered by our small Norfolk town is off the scale compared to either of these.  

A comparison of the Norfolk so familiar to me and the Gaza strip is quite revealing.  Norfolk is just under fifteen times the size of Gaza, while its population is less than half ... and most of that is concentrated in and around the city of Norwich.  The entire length of Gaza equates in round terms to the distance between Norwich and my hometown of Diss.  It's a comparison that is almost impossible to visualise.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the claims of either side - and just a moment's research reveals that they are many and complex - the devastation of the last eleven days, along with that of the many previous outbursts of violence in this area, are not the way to find a solution.  Those who have died, and the families that remain to grieve, suffer the consequences of where they were born; the origin of the situation in which they find themselves stretches back to a time before the lives of any of them and fighting between these two twenty-first century neighbours will solve nothing.

I don't have an answer - I doubt if anyone has - but peaceful, civilized negotiation is the only way to achieve a lasting peace.

How the Years Roll Round

I decided the other week that I'd give Cadfael a rest.  For some while I had been alternating one of that series with 'something else from my shelves' for my bedtime reading, and the canon is almost exhausted, so I thought I might let it last a little longer before either I leave it for good, or begin the re-reads.

I've just picked up a book that I bought some twenty years ago, approximately fifty years after its publication and - irrespective of its content - those two facts alone prompted some ticking in my imagination.  The winter of the book's publication (January 1951) was the winter of my grandfather's death (he was buried on Boxing Day, 1950).

From time to time, as I've researched my family's history, I've been prompted to muse on the combined life-span of parents and children or, even more fantastical, grandparents and grandchildren.  My grandfather was born in 1868, and would have been ten years old when his grandfather died.  I never knew my grandfather, being less than a year old when he died.  Nevertheless, he had probably seen me, and even if not, he would certainly have been aware of the existence of his youngest grandchild.  

So, in the continuous life of these five generations, we embrace a span in excess of 220 years: my grandfather's grandfather made his appearance in the penultimate year of the eighteenth century, and here am I still ticking along into the third decade of the twenty-first.  I could have been touched by someone who, in his early years, might well have been touched by someone who had heard of the rise of Napoleon before he had been defeated at Waterloo!

So much for musing on the history of this book in my possession; what about its content?  It is already exceptional because, unusually for me, I began by reading the introduction.  The book, "The Houses in Between" by Howard Spring, had long been in the author's mind but he'd never got to grips with how he would achieve its aim until he encountered a 99-year-old early in 1947.  He realised what a lot of history she would have witnessed during her life-time, and saw that fact as the vehicle within which he could present the sort of historical novel that was in his thoughts.

So far I have only read the first chapter.  Armed as I am through my history studies, therefore, with an idea of the material to be covered, I have no concept of what experiences will be narrated by this fictitious lady.  Her earliest memory is of the pink-and-silver-clad Queen Victoria opening the Great Exhibition in what must have been an awe-inspiring building, the Crystal Palace in its original Hyde Park venue.

As the author announces in the prologue, the Prince Consort conceived it as a palace of peace, where all nations would meet in understanding; in the succeeding century there have been many instances of completely the opposite, from the colonial wars of the latter nineteenth century to the two worldwide conflicts of the last.

Imagine what delights await me at bedtime in the weeks - and probably months - to come!

The World is my Oyster

I'll readily admit that I fail to see the connection between oysters and my topic tonight ... unless you consider the Oyster Card that I shall certainly not be using in conjunction with it.  I say this for two reasons: firstly because no travel is involved and secondly that, owing to lack of its use and my failure to remember my password to re-charge it, I have long since destroyed my Oyster Card anyway.

Long before my personal involvement in the world of politics, there was a noticeable time shortly after the conclusion of the holiday season every summer when, having been 'back to work' for only a week or two, our parliament vanished again and its members upped sticks and went off to the seaside.  It was the 'Conference Season.'  Somehow, even now, the attraction of a week (or less) by the seaside, but cooped up in an auditorium for most of the time, with the associated cost of travel and accommodation, just doesn't appeal.

I did go to a regional conference a few years ago, which was only a couple of hours' drive from my home and was only a day-long affair.  And I admit that I found it interesting, with stalls representing this or that small specialised interest group demonstrating their themes, their ideas, and their programmes for the coming year.  I think I sat through one long talk in the main hall, and I attended an early group meeting aimed specifically at new members (of which I was one at the time).  Even that event, however, I don't think I'd want to repeat on an annual, let alone bi-annual basis.

So it will not surprise you, gentle reader, to learn that it was with a degree of some astonishment that I received an e-mail this morning reminding me that a Conference for which I had signed up begins tomorrow, and presenting me with the itemised programme in the 'main hall' and details of all that will be going on in the background during the course of the weekend.

Given my aforementioned reluctance to participate in such events, you must already be wondering why I should book for a conference weekend and then overlook the fact.  Two distinct factors are involved in my explanation.  Firstly comes the fact that I don't have to travel for this conference.  Thanks to the wonder that is Zoom, the main programme consists of five separate Zoom meetings, while all the peripheral addresses are all pre-recorded and will be available in the 'members' area' of the organisation's website.

The second, and more important factor is that this is the annual conference not of a political party, but of the charitable organisation that I have recently joined and which I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago.  In the two months since I responded to a news item and volunteered my services, I've discovered not only that the work that I'm actually involved with is as a member of one of a number of teams all doing much the same work in different languages and for different clients, but also that this is but one of several quite different projects that this organisation is engaged in, helping by so doing the efforts of quite a swathe of the vast Christian Missionary field.

Standing as I do on an isolated tip of just one small part of a province of a much greater nation, I feel a great desire to know more about the organisation that I have joined and these other provinces of its activities.  It's one thing to become proficient in the tasks I'm asked to do; it's quite another to have some feel for the overall scope of activity of the whole business.

So there was some shame in realising as I opened that e-mail that I had committed myself to something else tomorrow that would have wiped out at a stroke my attendance at this conference.  While I could doubtless catch up on the peripherals via the website so long as they remain there, I would have missed the 'live' Zoom events forever, and - at this point at least - I have no way of measuring how great that loss would prove to be.  In that shame, therefore, I promptly cancelled my other booking, and shall focus tomorrow on that which is far more important.

On the Other Hand

It's been a busy week, both physically and mentally ... but more of that another time.  For today, I thought I'd focus on just one tiny incident this morning and it's significance to me.

It was as I was preparing my breakfast - almost the first task every morning, after switching on the Wi-Fi hub and plugging in my phone to charge - and specifically as I poured the hot water onto the tea-bag.  This is essentially a one-hand job, since there's no need to hold the mug and the tea-bag isn't likely to make a dash for it to escape its scalding drench.  I happened to notice where my left hand was, resting over the edge of the worktop, and how it was held, totally unconsciously, in a clutching posture as if mimicking the action of the other.

This casual observation brought to mind an occasion maybe two or three years ago - possibly much longer, the way time has flown recently - when I had injured my right hand.  Whether because of a cut or a sprained wrist, that hand was hors de combat when it came to breakfast preparation.  Maybe I had still been half asleep, but I recall looking down to see that the left hand, totally unbidden by my conscious brain, had taken the jam-jar by the lid and was offering it to the right forearm to clutch it to my chest ready to open it, almost knowing instinctively that its partner would be unable to perform normally.

The more I've thought about this, the greater has been my realisation of the extent to which we focus our attention on action, what is actively going on, to the exclusion of what's happening in the background.  How often have we seen on our media screens shots of statesmen giving their press conferences at the end of auspicious meetings or talks and seen them shaking hands in a gesture of peace or co-operation?  Compare this to the amount of attention we have given to what they are doing with their left hands at that point.  Are they firmly anchored in a trouser pocket?  Are they held out to balance an insecure posture on the rostrum?  Or are they brought up to support the other hand in a warmer and more embracing grasp of their corresponding speaker's hand?  Even further in this direction - and probably not seen in a diplomatic setting - is the application of a left hand to the right shoulder of the other party.

There is a Biblical precedent for one, most undesirable, 'other-hand' activity (I'll leave it to my reader to discover it), where it's occupied in retrieving a hidden dagger and plunging it into the body of the supposed 'friend'.  I hope that this isn't an application that we would entertain!

However, there is mileage in applying in a bodily sense these thoughts of what an 'other hand' might be up to, to our current circumstances.  It could be of universal benefit if we were to open our eyes beyond what are our 'main hand' activities and realise how our 'other hand' capacity could be applied in helping those around us as we all try to cope with the challenges of daily live in this 'Covid age'.