Easing life over the seams

Today, as well as the usual chores – cooking, cleaning, watering the veggies etc, I have been doing two particular things. 

The main task of the day has been to read through the 2^nd of the three novels currently with my publisher, Crossway, to prepare a ‘glossary of terms’ for the copy-editor to add in at the end.  This is necessary because the novel is set in medieval England, so some of the words in it – glebe, extern, villein, frater, reredorter for example – are not in everyday use and are likely to be unfamiliar, especially in the US where it will be published.

A long time passes between submitting a manuscript and getting it to the copy-editing stage, and several more months will pass before the time comes for it to be published.  This book, called The Hour Before Dawn, will be out in January 2012 and is part of The Hawk and the Dove series.

[The Hour Before Dawn is the one with your dedication in, Jeannie :0) ]

The second chunky task of the day was to alter three petticoats.  I was slightly changing the necks because they are a bit high.  I don’t know why but I have a particular aversion to anything tight round my throat – I can’t bear cap strings and bonnet-strings at all.  The dresses I’ve had made for me I totally love in every respect except that when the high necks pull against my throat it triggers this aversion.  So I’ve slightly enlarged the necks.  And now the petticoats show a little sometimes, so I’ve altered those too.  I am not an enthusiast for visible underwear!

The new hem to the neck passes across the shoulder seam of course, so in sewing there comes a bulky bit where the needle has to stitch through that seam twice folded as the hem crosses it, if you can imagine what I mean.   What I find is that if I am sewing fast as I cross that lumpy bit, the machine just goes mental, running on the spot and convinced it can’t do it and then seizing up completely.  To get past the hiccup it’s necessary to be sewing slow.  As a bomb disposal expert once said: “Walk towards the problem slowly” – a good maxim for anybody’s crises!

Sewing slowly I can ease the seam along, and sew the hem with no difficulty at all.

Sewing, like all manual tasks, is an opportunity for thoughts to germinate.  The Hour Before Dawn is part of a trilogy that looks at people passing through transition, struggling to understand themselves and each other and assimilate change.  Though it is set in a medieval monastery, it explores many of the life issues and family problems that modern people in the everyday world experience – forgiveness, trying to see the other person’s point of view, struggling to remain faithful to our calling, discovering what that calling might be – sometimes slowly and painfully.

It occurred to me as I was sewing and thinking about the characters in my story getting to grips with the adversities life had thrown at them, that helping each other through the traumas and difficulties which every now and then are part of ordinary life for all of us, is quite similar to easing that hem through the machine as it passes over the shoulder seam.  Life goes along smoothly for a while, and then it hits a lump.  When it does, if you go at it with all guns blazing you just bring the whole thing to a grinding halt, seize up completely.  But if you ease it along slowly and gently, mindful and careful, not rushing, going slow, you get past it ok, and come through to the other side, and things smooth out again.

That’s what I thought.

And I apologise, my friends, if it sounds like a trite diary column from a women’s magazine in the 1930s….

Actions that speak of the failure of imagination

I don’t believe in smacking, spanking, or whatever you like to call it.  I don’t believe it is the way to deal with a situation that has gone wrong.  But of my five children there was not one that didn’t get smacked sometimes, and mostly by me.  The ones that were smacked the most were not the naughtiest – they were the ones I understood the least.  If I could live my life again, and change one thing, I would like it to be the case that I never smacked any of my children – never frightened them, never was harsh or impatient with them.  But that isn’t going to happen.

Whenever I smacked my children the same root cause was in operation; I had hit a wall.  I had run out of ideas, the situation was beyond me, nothing else seemed to be working, I couldn’t think of anything else to do.  As a course of action, in the here and now, it short-circuited a few dramas; but in the deeper and more important levels it was never an improvement.

I think now, and I thought then too, that smacking/spanking is evidence of failure: to communicate, to empathise, to exercise patience, and to understand.  It is a failure of the imagination and of moral strength.

I think the same about putting Osama bin Laden to death.

I can see how we got there, I can see why it has come about, but it seems to me to be at a deeper level a symptom not of justice but of division – the failure to imagine, to understand, to redeem and to heal.

He inspired and condoned violence on a mass scale.  He hated the West and all it stands for.  A lot of the things he hated about our way of life are things I hate too, oddly enough – secularism, imperialism, the ways of Mammon.

I am sorry that it had to come to this.  Sorry that, if we find killing and violence so repulsive, we couldn’t think of anything better than killing and violence exacted in revenge.

I have no idea what kind of a man Osama bin Laden really was.  I deplored the atrocities he inspired, and I can see that this execution was inevitable.  But I believe it was inevitable not only because of the evil in him but also because of the evil in us.  Supposing, like St Paul, he had experienced a visitation from the living Jesus, and come to us to tell us so.  Would we have received him like Ananias, like Barnabas, and taken his overtures of friendship on trust, in good faith?  I doubt it.

The Old Testament seems to be full to the brim of Osama bin Ladens, visiting the wrath of God on people and slaughtering the enemies of the Lord in their thousands – yet we don’t say they were evil; we say the battle belonged to the Lord.  This violence, this interminable bloodshed!  Until we can get past the mindset of it being about whose side we’re on and reach the mindset of understanding, the manufacture of guns and bombs will always be a lucrative trade.

As much as I deplore the violence and bloodshed Al-Qaeda has perpetrated, so do I deplore the cheering crowds on the news broadcasts today.

A man who was our enemy has died an untimely, unnatural, bloody death at our hands.  It is not a matter for rejoicing, even if it had to come to this.

There is only one good way to annihilate an enemy; and that is to annihilate the enmity itself, and win him over into being a friend.

I hope this day’s work will have weakened rather than strengthened terrorist activity around the world; but even if it does, I’m sorry we had to do it this way.   I wish we could have found a better way to draw the sting of terrorism and promote the cause of peace.  

The question we are to live by is “What would Jesus have done?”  In this case, realistically, I'm not too sure what Jesus would have done – and that’s always at the heart of where things begin to go wrong.