18,000 Miles Round the Globe

I've just returned from an inspiring send-off for my good friend Robert Cleave. Robert's fulfilling a long-held ambition to cycle 18,000 miles around the world. He hopes to complete the journey over the next 18 months, doing it because he loves cycling and enjoys the adventure. He's raising money for Traidcraft and Cancer Research as he goes. You can follow his epic journey on www.robertsride18000.com. The link to his Facebook page is also there. By tonight he will be in Morocco to start the African leg of his tour.

It was threatening rain as we all arrived at Bramcote Park to say 'Godspeed'.  Among the 400+ who turned out were friends and family from all over Britain, former colleagues from Boots, Scouts and lots of folk from St Michael's Bramcote and other churches. After short speeches and a blessing by the Mayor of Broxtowe and the junior Mayor representing young people (what a great idea - well done, Broxtowe!), a ribbon was cut and Robert led a fleet of cyclists of all ages off on the symbolic first mile.

As he said himself, if you have something you've always wanted to do, don't get to the point where you can no longer do it and have to live with the regret - have a go. Even if you don't complete your challenge, you will know you tried! I can't think of anything more inspiring to do with your retirement and Robert's example has set me thinking about how I can combine some of the things I've always wanted to do into a challenging adventure for the future. We wish Robert all the best, bon voyage, safe travel, excellent health, good new friends and generous hospitality where ever he goes and a happy return with lots of stories to tell!

The other part of the challenge is of course Robert's family's. To give someone up for 18 months is quite a thing and they will be glad of your prayers, love and support.

Beyond the Night Sky - Music for Stephen Hawking

This is the music commissioned from composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad for Stephen Hawking's 75th Birthday. It's sung here by the choir of Gonville and Caius Cambridge, the college where he was a fellow for over 50 years. 

It was moving to see the familiar streets of central Cambridge crowded yesterday to say goodbye to one of the city's heroes. I lived in Cambridge for 14 years in the mid 1970's and the late 1990's and, throughout that time, Professor Stephen Hawking was a well known figure about the city. I remember the days when we used to hurry out of the evening service at Holy Trinity to get to the 8pm debate at Great Saint Mary's where he was an occasional attender, apparently interested in the intersection of science and religion though not a religious believer himself. 

I read with fascination A Brief History of Time and managed not to get completely lost until the chapter on string theory. He was somebody who made physics accessible and interesting. He inspired many through his humanity, doing small things globally to encourage young people to achieve their potential and championing the NHS and affordable, accessible university education, sometimes at cost to himself as when he turned down a knighthood.

It was impossible not to be moved by the power of his mind, by his courage and lack of self-regard and by his ability to communicate using a ready sense of humour - no mean feat through a synthesised voice. His timing was impeccable.

It seemed to me very apt that one of the readings chosen for his funeral was The Death of Socrates from Plato's Apology 40.  It was read by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and it reflects the courtesy of the atheist to the religious believer and vice versa so typified in Prof. Hawking's life.

'Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things — either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.

For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.

Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?.

What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?

Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again...

Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next.'

Translation Richard Jebb

This passage demonstrates respect for the view that there is no life beyond this life and explains why it is possible to be not just reconciled but inspired by this belief. It equally captures the joy of belief in opportunity and continued existence beyond this life so important in Christianity and other religions. And it presents us with freedom of choice.

A great life and a personality who 'broke boundaries with his mind' and boundaries not just in cosmology but of the limitations of divisions between human beings.

Celebrating Margaret Spufford: A Reflection for Holy Week

Margaret Spufford, the eminent historian, died in March. She was an academic of note and, as an historian, wrote three books for which she is well known: Contrasting Communities (a fascinating study of three Fenland villages in the seventeenth century), Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth Century England (which showed that basic education and the ability to read was more widespread in the seventeenth century than previously thought) and The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapman and Their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (about the itinerant pedlars who sold reading matter.) She was passionate about her area of scholarship and made a significant and original contribution to our understanding of the seventeenth century. She was also a Christian thinker, a Benedictine oblate and the mother of a daughter born with the rare genetic condition, cystinosis. She herself suffered a great deal of ill health throughout her life accompanied, at times, by excruciating bone pain.  Andrew Brown, in the Guardian, says, 'She was a woman quite like a saint' see Margaret Spufford loved truth, loved people, loved to laugh

Published Cambridge University ~Press

I first came across her writing when I was a staff nurse at Addenbrooke's hospital, looking after haematology patients, some of whom were undergoing bone marrow transplants. Things have improved a great deal since then but, back in the 1980's, these patients suffered a lot. One of them described the total body irradiation that, of necessity, preceded the transplant as causing a 'pain beyond pain that takes you to an indescribable, eery, twilight place.' That was the prelude to the transplant. Once the patient had been given the new cells, we waited in trepidation: infection was one great danger and also the dreaded onset of what is called 'graft versus host disease' which occurs when, instead of the patient's body rejecting the transplanted cells, the transplant rejects the host body. In the case of a bone marrow transplant, this can involve cells all over the body. The mother of one of our youngest patients was reading Margaret Spufford's book Celebration. She introduced me to it one morning over breakfast following a draining night's vigil. I found it an amazing book. I can't say that it spoke to me then of hope - the overall impression it left was rather one of darkness. But somehow the darkness was richer and kinder and inhabited by people who shared these places of dereliction. It was fundamentally honest and, as always, the telling of truth illuminates the way for others.

It is the story of Spufford's daughter, Bridget. From the first year of her life, she endured an illness which caused her a great deal of pain and fear. The book tells the story of how both she and her immediate family found a way to live with Bridget's suffering that allowed for meaningful life to emerge, indeed a life that reached moments of profound joy and creativity. It's probably one of the most realistic descriptions of living with pain and what that does to you that I have ever read. She finds no easy answers, no relief for periods of suffering, no place to go to avoid the inevitable repeated return of the pain; yet she finds a way of being and a purposefulness that allow her and Bridget, not only to live their lives, but to be imaginative, hopeful, amazingly productive and to enjoy times of relative remission. There is never any sense, though, that the good times somehow 'make up' for the bad times or that they make the bad times easier to bear. That is false and those who have endured great pain recognise the merest whiff of this kind of falsity. Spufford's thesis is that your pain makes you who you are and shapes your life but not that it is of itself good; quite the reverse: extreme pain is a form of evil and we deny this at our peril. You cannot make something that is an evil into a good, you can only live your life as if the evil will ultimately not extinguish the good. These are the tiny daily moments of resurrection. 

Published Cambridge University Press

It's not a book to 'cheer you up'. I think that those who have not actually suffered great pain are often a little disappointed by it. Certainly anyone who is looking for answers will be. But those who have suffered a great deal find in the reading of it the recognition and comfort of truth telling. I suffered from endometriosis which causes excruciating abdominal pain such that you would gladly accept anything to put you out of the pain while it lasts. Doctors scratch their heads and disagree about the diagnosis while prescribing drugs that scarcely begin to touch the pain. It has to be one of the very few conditions that make the menopause a cause for celebration! Spufford's book helped me, not because it gave me any answers or solutions for all this pointless pain, but because it demonstrated that someone else could live their life with bouts of untreatable pain and make practical sense of a life blighted by it. At no point does she make light of pain or deny its ability to corrode and destroy, but she demonstrates a way of being that allows you to live through and round the pain to great effect. She shows how a personality can develop and flourish in spite of the constant debilitating set backs. You need this kind of faith to live through prolonged pain and also to be present to those who suffer pain. I will be for ever grateful for the resource her thinking became for me over the years both in helping me live through my own pain and in nursing others. 

Spufford's approach to suffering reminds me of Job's story. In the Book of Job, we are introduced to someone else beset by pain - physical, social, spiritual. In this case the story sets the situation up in terms of Satan persuading God to allow Job to be tested. Will his faith hold? What we learn from the 42 chapters that follow is that the philosopher's approach to suffering is useless. To ask the question 'why?' does not move the sufferer on one jot and, in fact, increases their mental anguish and leads to self pity and outrage at the injustice of their situation. Job ultimately breaks through to a place where the 'how', 'how can I live my life?' takes centre stage. For Job this involves a total surrender to the fact that he is God's creature and will not understand the counsels and ways of the creator. The key for Job is, I think, the point at which he begins to realise that faith to accept what life brings and live or perhaps simply to exist God-wards does not have to be corroded by the experiences that have been thrown at him: that decision rests with him. This is the point from which bitterness and outrage begin to fall away; this is the seedbed of the human spirit's ability to choose to respond more affirmatively to good than to evil. It isn't quite hope, but it is vigour, it is life in spite all the odds, it is resurrection. As Spufford showed so clearly in her book and, much more, in her life this is the place from which meaning and celebration emanate. 

A wonderful woman who joins the company of those who have influenced my life very much for good. Deo gratias   

In Memoriam John Taverner

The two twentieth century British composers who have had the most profound effect on me are William Mathias and John Taverner. So it was with great sadness that I read of the  death of Sir John, last week. The power of pieces like Ultimos Ritos, Apocalypse, the Celtic Requiem and Eis Thanaton to evoke that which is beyond, connecting us to the source of life, is remarkable. Taverner himself said, 'There is nothing easy about achieving simplicity' and his music is an embodiment of that simple truth. Deceptively effortless and somehow in time and tune with both the rolling spheres and the breath of the sleeping infant, it takes us to a place where the boundaries of self and the world beyond touch, through the exquisite use of finely disciplined sound, rhythm and timbre. He said that writing music became, for him, ultimately an act of prayer, something that brought him into the presence of God.

It was a poignant and remarkably apt co-incidence that Taverner's last public appearance was on a radio programme whose subject was the light that religious art throws on the experience of approaching death. Andrew Marr's Radio 4 programme Start the Week posed the question, 'Why is it that religious poetry and music are found to appeal to those who would not describe themselves as religious when they gaze on the spectre of their own mortality?' I listened because I was interested in the question. Afterwards, I was glad I had glimpsed, briefly, the wisdom of one whose music speaks of eternity and who was himself, unsuspected at the time, so close to death.

Often, in the hospice where I work, people who would not describe themselves as religious nevertheless find that the stories, poetry and language of religion give them a space in which they can dare (or sometimes bear) to explore what approaching death might mean. Music, too, can be more than a solace - a medium through which they can expand their vision and horizons, exploring what has held life together thus far and the thread that connects life to the possibility of something more than we sense in our bodies in the here and now. The piece which does this par excellence for me is Bach's chorale Come Sweet Death as performed by Accentus. In performance, the voices stretch each chord beyond, almost, what is tolerable -  the wait for the resolution of each dissonance brings you closer and closer to the place where the boundaries between what is known and what is unknown yet undeniably present blur...well you just have to listen for yourself really! The chorale is sung here by an un-named choir and is first performed straight through here

John Taverner's music has a similar kind of appeal, if that is the right word. It conveys us to places where it is not only possible but desirable to ask the ultimate questions about existence. And then it takes you further into the uncharted territory where, for odd moments, the boundaries between time and timelessness are blurred and you are brought to a place were you are almost no longer conscious of your own existence. It is this quality that marks him out as one of Britain's great composers and also which explains why he himself became frustrated with more conventional forms of music which he felt did not convey spiritual truth in this way.