Someone dear to me has been feeding from a trough of environmental despair. S/he knows the science rather too well- the degrees of warming, the predicted tipping points, the posisbilities (or probabilities) of ecosystem collapse. At times this knowledge becomes a clarion call for action, but faced with something so huge, so seemingly unassailable, it also leads them down towards a place where everything seems pointless.

This eperience is far from unique. There is even a name for it – climate trauma.

“I don’t know of a single scientist that’s not having an emotional reaction to what is being lost,” said award-winning biologist Camille Parmesan in a National Wildlife Federation report. “Some of these people have been studying a particular reef or a particular bird or a particular mammal for 40 to 50 years and to start seeing it die off is a very hard thing.”

From here.

For people like me – non scientists whose thinking about climate change is driven most commonly by guilt and distraction – the whole debate can be so confusing and troubling as to be best ignored. What else can we do anyway?

Also, old lefties like me can struggle to fit climate change in to our old left/right dichotomies. Sure, the right wing tend towards sceptisim on this issue, but the dualistic right and wrong is harder to chart because human-scale victim and oppressors are harder to identify. Climate justice has been a harder concept to champion, or at least it seems so to me.

At times, it seems that the only actions we can take – and any relevant choices we can make – are all consumer driven. We choose to buy a different kind of car, or a tin of salmon with an impressive-sounding label, or refuse a plastic wrapped fruit in favour of one without. But we still consume. Our lifestyle makes at best only very small adjustments to the overconsumption that characterises the western world, and drives the very change we are trying to buy our way out of. No amount of beach cleaning or community gardening is going to change that, right?

So what can I say to my friend to encourage him to keep going?

What can I do myself that will make any difference whatsoever?

It seems to me that activism is one route open to us. Get involved in direct protest action or awareness raising of some kind. Shout loud and make people in power sit up and notice. Chain yourself to petrol pumps and handcuff yourself to trees.

But this kind of direct action may at best be something possible to you for only a season in your life, even when given the priority it deserves. Activists burn out, have families and need to make a living. Some kind of post-activist normality will eventually have assert itself, and if we are to hold on to any integrity, this new normality cannot be like the old one.

So how do we seek to live with passion, love and integrity? What does a good life look like in our present broken context? What needs to change, and where do I start?

All of which brings me back to the title of this piece. Lifestyle or beliefs.

Many of us have been making changes to our lifestyles for years. Often these micro-changes seem tokenistic in the way described above. It is easy (perhaps too easy) to dismiss them as the conscience-easing activities of the comfortable middle classes. We all know that the transformative changes necessary in our lifestyles require far more radical action. That is not to say that our efforts mean nothing however. Even knowing that an individual choice to eat less meat (for example) will make no difference to a global phenomenon, it is an individual step worth taking. More than this, our individual actions might connect with others to form chains of influence. This is not nothing, but neither is it enough.

The ancient Jain religion teaches a version of ahisma (or harmlessness) in which it is not just people who have souls, but also animals, trees, plants and even rocks. Out of this should then flow a radical empathy with all things, to which are owed the same respect that we might give to fellow humans. This is one of the stories told in Karen Armstrong’s new book ‘Sacred Nature’, in which she says that ‘recycling and political protests are not enough. Her call is towards a new world view – one that learns from the ancient spiritual traditions and practices that we have largely forgotten.

This from here.

Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change, explaining the impacts on our world and the measures we need to take to avert catastrophe. But Armstrong’s book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet, and to stop polluting it. For this to happen we need to reconnect with the myths and even the rituals of ancient spiritual traditions that have the power to awaken our primal emotional bonds to nature and reveal our “utter dependence” on it.

The spiritual tradition I grew from has much to learn. We have been slow indeed to grasp the spiritual aspects of climate change – in fact, climate change skeptisim has often been heard from Christian pulpits.

However, there are many rich strands of Christianity that have direct relevance. I can give no greater recommendation than to point you towards Richard Rohr’s book The Universal Christ. Drawing from his own Fransiscan roots, Rohr paints a picture of the Christ as ‘another name for everything’. In a previous post, I tried to describe this in this way;

Jesus stepped into human history, but he was always the Christ.

Through him, all things were made, and have their being. He is both beginning and end. Through him all things are held together. He is the essence that lives in all creatures.

He is the unity of all things that we partially sense when the sunset fades into starlight.

He is love, light.

Through him all things are being made new, always, for all time.

And what of us? We are like him because he is the life within us. ALL of us, not just the chosen frozen few. Even the most dissolute, hardened, poisoned and venomous specimens of humanity, because even though we are like tombs in which the Christ is dead, he has this trick of coming back from the dead, remember.

The Christ, in the human form of Jesus, gave us the Sermon on the mount, in which he told us over and over again to love one another, particularly the poor and the broken, the weak and the stumbling. The Christ, in the human form of Jesus, excluded no one from his love. He became angry at those who sought to do so in the name of religion and he said ‘Follow me.”

The eternal, cosmic Christ, loves things by becoming them.

In this way, everything that we see and touch – everything of rock or fur or feathers; everything that smiles or weeps; everything that grows leaves or feathers; everything that hides in pools or in a twist in the stream or the tide – all these things are by their very nature, the Christ.

If we look, we will see him. That is what he longs for us to do. If we see him then everything changes, right? That climate change thing? The mass extinctions? The poverty? The racism? The sexism? The exclusion and dividing up into good and bad, in and out, saved and unsaved?

Remember that trick he does in making things new, even when everything seems too late? Even when the tomb is closed and the funeral party has ended?

Far from being subject to logical legalism, the Christ is much more interested in restoration- you could say, restorative justice. He seeks to connect us again to our own deep humanity, which is where he waits for us, at the core of our being.

Christ-who-was-also-Jesus calls us to participate with him in the great divide dance. It is remarkably close and remarkably ordinary.

What might this do to what I beleive? What statements can I make about this belief? Why does it matter?

Back in 2019 I wrote this as my own statement of beleif. I think I still stand on it. I hope it is shaping my lifestyle in both big and small ways. It is all I am, and all I can do.

I believe in the Christ, through whom all things have their being. He came into history as a brown-skinned man with the heart of a woman, but he is so much more than that; he is the very essence of all things and the glue that holds it all together.

Other cultures know him by other names.

He calls us to follow the way of love, which means looking for him in the most unlikely places; in the eyes of our enemies for example, or in a tangle of endangered forest.

He is particularly to be found in all that is beautiful and all that is broken.

He is also to be found in ourselves.

I have just realised that the last three posts on this blog have been tree-centric. This was in no way deliberate, so must say something about where I am at I suppose.

I live amongst trees. Up the hill, they are mostly commercial spruce and larch, but downwards, it is mostly old oak trees, with a smattering of birch and our small orchard of apples, pears, nuts and soft fruit. In do not take this privilege for granted.

Many years ago, I was driving a friend from London up through Argyll and pointed out a beautiful copper beech tree- the sort that must have been planted as a specimen tree a couple of hundred years ago, and now has the shape and beauty that those who planted it could only imagine.

Look said, in over-excited tones, that is my favourite tree.

My friend, who is inclined towards the larconic, glanced at me with confusion, and after a while said I don’t think I have ever met anyone with a favourite tree before.

I felt a little stung, like some kind of yokel with too much straw behind my ears, but then reflected that he probably had a favourite bus shelter, or a favourite railway arch. He is from London after all. I, however, live amongst the remnants of the great Argyll rainforest and in this I am richly blessed (although there is this one bus shelter I remember fondly…)

Trees, or so we are told, have healing powers. Check out this old post examining the psychologically restorative powers of wilderness (and how it even helps our concentration and attentiveness towards random tasks.)

Then there is all that forest bathing stuff, which turns out not to be a new fad, but rather an ancient Japanese meditiative practice known as shinrin yoku in which we are encouraged to be amongst trees, observe nature and breathe deeply.

Trees do something else though, which we are only just beginning to appreciate. They are the mothers of soil. These benign giants are the shelter beneath which life can be lived. They remind us of the long view; of how change that matters is not measured only in human lifetimes.

The other truth that soon comes to us is that, like man, no tree is an island alone to itself. It lives in community.

We entered a competition piece at a ceramics exhibition that tried to describe this relational nature of trees. It contrasted two trees, one on top of each other, seperated by prespex as if in a mirror or an hourglass, and used the two ‘hermaneutic’ poems from this post. I really liked it, but sadly, no prizes this time…

Some of the greatest joys of my post-career career have involved the sharing of poetry with small groups of people. Poets are solitary beasts mostly, skulking around in the shadows, so when we can share our secrets with others and find common meanings, this is something special indeed.

Yesterday was a case in point. A small group of people gathered in a church hall, sharing stories of grief and loss, through the mediums of laughter, tears and poetry. What a wonderful thing to be part of.

One of the simple exercises we used was to walk in the woods nearby and find a tree, then imagine that tree speaking to us with kindness. What people wrote reduced us all to tears.

Outside the doors of the old Kirk stands a gnarled old sycamore tree. It looks older than the stone building it shelters, and despite the timeless impression, I vaguely remembered that sycamores are not native to this country, perhaps being introduced by the Romans, or some time in the middle ages- no-one knows for sure. They must have offered some kind of commodity that was appreciated, even though they have been villified as invasive species ever since.

I stood beneath this venerable benign giant and wrote this;

.

Old friend

.

Like you, I was not born here

But here, we put down our roots

Just outside the church door

Looking inwards

Looking upwards

.

Let’s compare scars

Look at mine

I will cover yours

.

Listen as I whisper

You are loved

You are loved

You are loved

Today, we took a tree from the world.

We did not do it lightly, or without justification, but it feels highly significant.

The tree in question was an oak, of uncertain age, but most likely it was growing long before the first world war. It had a long straight stem and an uneven canopy, possibly from damage some time when it was young. It has been framed in our window ever since we moved here- a sheltering friend not just to our house, but to red squirrels and siskins.

Over the last couple of years it seemed to us that it had taken on a slight tilt- but like all things in the real world it was difficult to tell, because nothing natural is in a straight line except the far horizon (and even that is curved when you look from height.) Eventually, given the proximity to our neighbours, we decided that we needed to get it checked out, and the arborist delivered an unwelcome verdict.

The trunk was hollowed out with rot, and the good wood left was affected by a kind of fungus that would soon bring the old girl down. So down she had to come.

It feels like a great beast is gone, as if some fat fool shot and killed a lion or a great white rhino.

But so it should feel like that. I feel more than ever before in my life that any future we humans have on this planet depends on our ability to remember our connection with all manner of living things. This being so, any decision to break this connection can not be taken lightly. Our lives have already placed us at such disadvantage, so that when confronted with this disconnection at close hand we surely have to look up and take notice?

There is another side to this story that also speaks of disconnection. The potential high value target of our potentially falling tree is the house neighbours with whom we have become disconnected. There is a long and winding story here, which I will not recount as who wants to hear such things? No-one comes out well from such stories, which always have two sides. Suffice it to say that the decision to pay a tree surgeon a lot of money to cut down this tree for the benefit of our neighbours was not without irony. Like I said, it is all about connection and when we break this, there are consequences.

In cutting down this tree, I speak soft words of regret. I promise to plant again in the hope that the future contains brand new oak trees.

In relation to our neighbours, I speak softly and do not seek escalation or justification. I hold Michaela who is hurting and try to get her to let it go, let it go.

Because sometimes trees must fall.

Today I went in to Glasgow to lead a session at a poetry writing group at Kibble Palace, in the Botanical Gardens. I very much enjoyed it. A lovely group of people, all of whom write beautifully, so much so that I felt like a fraud being asked to ‘lead’ them. I hope that I might yet connect with them again.

I set a couple of writing tasks, one of which involved taking some time to walk out in to the park and write sometihng from the perspective of an object or plant that they encountered. People wrote as fish, as park benches and, of course, as trees.

I too chose a tree. It was a rather odd one; a highly scented tree that seemed to have two different kind of blossoms on it at once. A laburnum perhaps and something else. At first I was fascinated, wondering what miraculous wizardry or natural phenomena had formed this exotic oddity. Here it is, at distance so as not to interupt the girl sitting beneath it;

It reminded me of one of those creatures popular at Victorian freak shows; half rabit and half cat, or the woman whose legs were that of a deer or a goat.

The tree seemed to me to be a beautiful abomination.

I wrote this small sketch;

YOU decided

WE had no say in the matter

You spliced us like timber

Now our lovely limbs sway and splay

As if by clockwork

Let scent from our blossoms

Choke you

No…

No.

Let it rest on you like

A long lost memory

Of when you too

Walked the wild fields

When we were free

A few weeks ago I went with some old and new friends to a small island, for our annual ‘wildernss retreat’. These trips are very special to me, connecting me, grounding me and shaping me in ways that are sometimes only understandable in hindsight. Always I come away with things that need more thought, in the sense of things that have inspired me, or have troubled me. (The latter seem, if anything, more important.) One of the things that has stayed with me this weekend was the memory of a number of questions about hope.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I tend towards the melancholic and few of my friends would regard me as an optimist. Despite all of this, I found myself in a conversation with one of my island friends in which he seemed increasingly frustrated by what he apeared to regard as my blind, unenlighted, unrepentant desire to pursue this thing called hope. With hindsight perhaps I pushed back too hard, but he seemed committed to a gospel of nihalism that I found profoundly troubling. He spoke about it on an intellectual level and I made the mistake of replying in the same vein, forgetting that we often intellectualise deeper emotional states. I am not even saying I fully disagreed with him. After all, there is so much to feel overwhelmed by at the moment.

But this seems to me to be neither the whole truth nor a very useful lens with which to examine the world.

This song comes to mind;

Perhaps hope, when imposed or dictated in the way that I ofund myself in danger of doing, will always feel like a toxic cloud.

But I have walked this tightrope of hope and hopelessness for a long time. I am hoping to put the finishing touches to a book of poetry which charts some of this journey. This begins with the election of Trump and his pound-shop imitator this side of the Atlantic, and was then poured out into a series of protest poems about the state of the world; climate change, widening inequality, injustice, a loss of community and the rise of individualism. However, the pandemic shifted something in me. I feel those injustices as keenly as ever, but I decided that anger, unyoked from hope, achieved nothing. As we all stopped during the lockdowns, a different way seemed possible.

It is of course possible to point out that any hope for meaningful change that began during the cataclysm of the global pandemic (when we seemed to be rediscovering community and realising that collective action was not only possible, but the only way to survive) has been thwarted. Business as usual is now the name of the game, and a new war has pushed us further towards the abyss. Despite all this, I found myself writing poems of hope, like this one;

Hope

They say that hope comes

Only in the harshest times

When we need it most

I see it there in your eye

Feel it as our fingers touch

As our minds entwine

.

Inside this skin that bottles me

It moves like a liquid

Waiting for your cup

Not just the hope with feathers

But also sinew and carved stone

It is bone on bone

.

And when friends meet

Hope has breath

Hope has viral load

From ‘After the apocalypse’

Back to those conversations on the island. Because our group has (mostly) a shared faith background, even if this has taken us in very different directions, the lack of hope seemed all the more acute. Is that not what our faith is supposed to be based upon?

There is the rub, and perhaps this was the core of the debate with my friend. He is still very much within the institution of Church, frustrated at how the core messaging that Church contains still has not begun to engage with the unfolding stories that society tells itself. My impression is that this is pulling him towards his own adventure outside the institution, because if our faith has become irrellevant not only in the way the message is delivered, but in the message itsef, then how can it ever be a source of hope?

Christians talk a lot about hope, but this tends to be only the hope of being saved from the consequences of sin, and the punishment we are due for our own sinfulness waiting for those who do not heed the call to repent. There is also a hope that arises from ‘goodness’, measured mostly in seperation from the world in an enclave of holiness, but this offers no hope of the general kind, only an escape pod for a select few.

Meanwhile, the world is still warming. Rich people still get richer and poor poorer. Politicians profit from lies and corruption. The fabric of our society is threadbare and coming apart and the old Durkeim glue of religion has lost its stickyness because it has nothing coherant to say about any of this, right?

So why do I still feel hope and where do I see it? What am I hoping for? These are difficult questions to answer, which is why I grapple with them in poetry. However, I sense in myself and in the wider society a hunger for a different kind of spirituality that I think is starting to emerge. Partly this is a consequence of the large numbers of church leavers who are still striving to live out a meaningful faith journey, but also because we are all of us spiritual beings, seeking meaning and truth despite all the distraction.

I think we might characterise this emerging spirituality in two main ways;

1. Non duality, by which I mean a rejection of the old in/out, good/bad, sacred/profane, saved/unsaved dichotomies for something more fluid and generous.
2. Connectedness and the one-ness of all things. The Christ who is another name for everything. The source and substance of every created thing who live and move and have their being in him.

Of course, I have no evidence to support these ideas other than my own flawed perceptions, but if I am right, I think the emergence of this spirituality is the source of a new hope. For the first time in the post modern age, we have a story to live by that directy engages with the challenges of our times.

• Sectarianism and hard inflexible doctrines
• The ‘problem’ of the other, particularly the black other, or the Muslim other
• Plurality and difference
• Climate change
• Poverty and inequality
• Individualism
• Our place in the natural world

Perhaps this all seems like incoherant rambling to you, and you may be right, but I will have one more go. I mentioned earlier that I can only make sense of much of this through poetry, so I will re-post a poem in which I was reaching towards these same conclusions.

The great Becoming

.

How small we made you.

How constrained by our constraints;

We wore you like a lapel badge,

Pocketed you like a personal passport, then

Raised you at our borders like a flag.

We locked you in the pages of

Our Book, then threw away the key.

.

But how we worshipped you.

How we pointed at you with steeples.

You asked us to follow you, to

Give away our second shirts, but instead

We made a million icons, each one framed in gold.

We swayed and raised our egos, singing love songs-

Not to you, but to idealised versions of ourselves.

.

How is it that still, you love things by becoming them?

How was it that this brown-skinned man with the heart of a woman

Took upon herself another name for everything, so we could

Encounter her in all these beautiful things and bleed with her when she

Lies broken? And just when all seems lost, she whispers still;

See, I am making all things new.

Even you.

I am just preparing some things for our annual ‘wilderness retreat’, which is this weekend. This is a thing that I have been doing with friends for more years than I care to remember- we charter a boat and spend a few days on a deserted Scottish island. It is usually a wonderful combination of the sacred and the very profane- time in silence and time in uproarous laughter around a fireside- incidentally there are a couple of spaces free on the boat if anyone wants to jump in last minute and join us. (Drop me a message for more details.)

One of the things I find really useful about these weekends is that they make me stop and take stock- both over the weekend, but also in the prep for them. I always try hard to listen a take a reading of my perceptions of what feels important spiritually both personally and more broadly. When we commit ourselves to this work, it often seems to me that we discover (or perhaps we are gifted) a space in which oxygen seems richer and we breathe more deeply for a while.

As part of this I listened to this podcast, which seemed to have a lot of echoes with my own journey at the moment- the importance of wilderness to our spiritual journeys being one of the obvious themes.

However, there were other resonances too; to do with a shifting of the central assumptions that have long unperpinned western Christianity towards (and this is my summary) two main things;

1. Non dualism- a rejection of old simple certainties and a move towards a more fluid both/and approach to doctine
2. Connection/one-ness- a return, or a rediscovery, of the interconnectedness of all things.

I could say so much more about this, but suffice it to say that one point in the podcast helped me see this more clearly. Victoria Loorz makes a point about the greek word Logos, usually translated in the Bible as ‘the word’. The most famous use of this translation is the magnificent searing beginning to the gospel of John;

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome^[a] it.

Loorz suggests that the translation is problematic, and that Logos is often used in a much broader sense. It is used sometimes to suggest things like- plan, presence, reason, or conversation. It is this latter word that opens us up towards what I think might be a new slice of resurrection. If you read the passage above and insert ‘conversation’ for ‘word’ or ‘him’ this starts to illustrate the point.

In this reading, we see all things as being in relationship and dependency. Held together and connected by the essence. The Great Spirit. The Christ. Space-time continuum. The Word. Love. Yahweh. Allah.

The real question here is what this might mean for us as individuals as well as our wider cultures, or even the whole created world that we are part of. It seems to me that this puts us in a very different place… perhaps you disagree, but that is OK. We are connected anyway.

Every year I have tried to write a poem for Easter. This year I struggled, and so this one is late. Here it is though;

.

Passion

1. Good Friday

We are all dying

These molecules that make us are not ours at all

They are merely borrowed, soon to be passed to another.

All that we are;

The good, the bad

The broken, the beautiful

All our dreams. Our fears.

Our glories and grubby failures

All that we see. All the songs that sing in our souls.

All that passion that pulses where we are most alive.

The anger. The love.

The moments when we stand before the great big sky and wonder…

All of this lingers just for a while in our own Gethsemenes

On the way to our good Golgothas

Because without death, how can there ever be new life?

.

• Easter Saturday

There is no meaning when even God is dead.

There is no point to anything.

There is no truth to find.

There is no hope to draw us.

There is no solution to be found.

No Messiahs.

It is always this way; change is always preceded by pointlessness and defeat.

It always begins when we are blinded by darkness.

It even follows the loss of hope, as if to remind us of our own powerlessness.

Change begins with death.

.

• Easter Sunday

Behold all things are being made new

Then they are being made new again

Then again.

In the beginning was not just the Word

But the Conversation.

In the beginning was an am-ness that held

Everything in eternal embrace

In the beginning, there was no thought of an end

There was only now, but this goes on forever

In the beginning there was you and me.

But there was also we.

In the beginning was love.

And since then there has only ever been

Love.

Love.

Love.

Love…

We watched this film last night;

It tells the story of a girl growing up in the extreme poverty of Ugandan slums who discovers a gift for chess, which becomes her way out and up. Along the way she is supported by a remarkable man who recognises her talent and then through kindness and persistence, supports her learning. In common with all such Disney stories, the story had been made ‘safe’ in all sorts of ways but it still made me cry like a drain.

As I thought about why it was upsetting me so much, I realised it was about two things; firstly it was because of the kindness it contained. Whenever I see kindness, particularly towards small ordinary people, it breaks me open. Secondly it was because of the fact that chess is not an option for most poor children. Let me say more about this.

Films like this work because Phiona, the girl at the centre of the story, has a secret superpower that allows her to transcend the poverty that she was born in to – she can play chess. The story then becomes a redemption story of the self-made kind (albeit with the aforementioned help/kindness.) Phiona succeeds because of her inate abilities and her hard work and persistence which allow her to achieve an escape simply not available to others who grew up in her community. In many ways, this is the American dream, transplanted to Africa. It is the myth of meritocracy and exceptionalism applied to a place where the lie is most cruel.

Of course some people always transcend the poverty, they are born in to through luck, through good judgement, through hard work and through giftedness. These stories of survival and prospering can be inspirational and uplifting, but are they ever liberating? Or might they actually have the very opposite effect? The problem with gifted exceptionalism is that it is… exceptional. It has no relevance whatsoever to the vast proportion of the population.

It changes nothing.

The poor stay almost exclusively poor. The middle class can feel vindicated by their own worthyness. The rich can support a few chess tournaments and welfare programmes aimed at uncovering other exceptions.

We also learn nothing about the nature of poverty, whether in Manchester or Kampala. We can continue to blame the poor for their own squalor, as if it arose from indolence. We can watch programmes like ‘Benefits Street’ safe in the assumption that these people chose their own station in life and/or lack the gumption to emerge from it.

Or we can look to Africa and claim that the starvation and subsistence living are caused by corruption/poor education/over population – despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite the long term destructive effects of imperialism and globalised resource extraction. We can do this because clearly that girl can still thrive.

Poverty is a prison, but one with escape tunnels pre-installed, allowing a steady trickle of escapees. Just enough to convince us all that it is not a prison after all. The walls of the prison are not made from concrete, but rather from impaired opportunity of the kind that starts even before we are born. (This Australian account of the effects of poverty on child development is worth reading.)

How do you tear down this prison?

What is needed is a new kind of Jubilee.

In case you are not familiar with the ancient Hebrew idea of Jubilee, it was given to the Israelites by Yaweh as a kind of reset, in which all the economic, social, cultural and environmental circumstances in the society where examined in the interests of justice and liberation. There were to be seven year ‘sabbath’ years and then every seventh sabbath would be- jubilee. There is of course much debate as to how and if this law was every applied, but whether or not it was, the idea still resonates.

What would jubilee look like in Kampala? Would it look like a chess tournament from which a gifted girl was plucked and elevated?

I think not.

We are on the cusp of what might yet become a global conflict, emerging right in the heart of a European peace and prosperous stability that we thought would be the new normal. Why did we think this? Has any century ever gone past in which wars did not significantly shape our human experience? Have we learned to let go of the dream of empire?

This sounds cynical, as if I am accepting of the nature of violence as part of normal discourse. I am not.

Rather I think that human history is characterised by a struggle between opposing ideals; altruism and aquisition and that it is our job to examine what we are as both individuals and communities in order to find a better ballance between these imperatives. This is a constant, life long thing for all of us, something which in the west is made all the more difficult by affluence and comparative ease. Our great religions know this paradox well, but it is no surprise that this aspect of their teachings has often been lost to the service of empire, leaving it to prophets and troublesome priests to raise their voices from the margins.

We see this again right now. The head of the Russian Orthodox church has justified the war, but not all his priests have followed him.

History, we are told, is told from the perespective of the victors. I would take this further and say that it is written and propogated almost exclusively from the perspective of ascendant empire. The empire builders have always needed a justifying narrative – in Putin’s case it is a load of wierd stuff about Nazification and liberating people from corruption. Meanwhile, we in the west raise our eyebrows in moral outrage and compulsively watch grainy videos of real tanks and real bombs which kill real people.

But what of our own history? In the UK there is a battle going on over this. Attempts to understand the nature of our own colonial/imperial history have been recieving a push back from the very top.

Perhaps the ‘anti-woke’ culture war are nothing more than a convenient distraction, but it is an effective strategy because the mythology that has been woven around the British Empire has such a stronghold over our sense of identitiy. When we think of British history, we think of Nelson and Spitfires and benign civilisation offered to the dark heart of Africa by missionaries like Livingstone. This indeed is history told from the perspective of the victors and the empire builders.

The lies it contains are so strong that they still seem true a hundred years after the empire has fallen- at least to us anyway. The rest of the world is not so sure. Caroline Elkins has revealed this in carefully researched detail;

What Elkins and many other historians have been able to show is that these empire excesses where not outliers, but rather violence and conquest were at the very heart of the whole British empire project. It evolved over time, shifting and becoming more sophisticated, but it was always a story of torture, subjugation and massive theft.

Legacy of Violence is a formidable piece of research that sets itself the ambition of identifying the character of British power over the course of two centuries and four continents. Elkins, perhaps minded of her previous brush with controversy, sometimes approaches her task with the meticulous doggedness of a trial lawyer rather than a storyteller in search of an audience. Examining the Boer war, the Irish war of independence, the uprisings in India, Iraq and Palestine, as well as British rule in Cyprus, Malaya and Kenya, she insists that such appalling acts as the Amritsar massacre, far from being – as Churchill argued in parliament – “an event that stands in singular and sinister isolation” were much closer to being a default position.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/13/legacy-of-violence-a-history-of-the-british-empire-by-caroline-elkins-review-the-brutal-truth-about-britains-past

Am I just the wokest person on-line?

Aparently not – this seems to be Owen Jones. And on that note, it is worth checking this out for a different perspective on woke wars, and how ludicrous it can be to try to preserve perspectives that are forever changing;

It can be hard – almost impossible – to have an honest conversation about the history of empire, but one thing is undeniable; all empires fall. No matter how desperately imperial powers try to hold on to the power and privilege they have carved out, in the end the tall towers that they build must all fall.

The problem in our history is that as each one falls, another one rises up.

I will finish with this. One reading of the words and teaching of Jesus is to understand that it was all about empire. In the face of oppression, inequality and violence he proposed an alternative kind of empire known as ‘The Kingdom of God’. This exists not to save us after we are dead, but to propose a way of living that is extra-empire/post-empire/anti-empire. The subversive morality of this teaching got him and many of his followers in to trouble and still does.

If we are to have an honest conversation about the violence unleashed by Putin, we have to start by remembering that he follows in a long chain of exemplars, many of whom were white British.

One of the things that Graham picked up on brilliantly when he spoke at my mothers funeral is the way that her life was defined by the extreme deprivation of her childhood. I knew this of course, but my friends words helped me understand it again, almost as of for the first time. When we are too close to a thing, we do not see it clearly, as a whole. When our lives are intrinsically linked to an other, complexity and shared detail make it difficult to understand broader themes.

The day after the funeral, we made a start in clearing out things from my mothers house- I say we, but this was mosty my lovely family because I found amost every object to be loaded with shared history and deep sadness. Some of this sadness comes from the evidence everywhere that Graham was right.

The stockpiled food, constantly added to as if no amount of food would allay the fear of hunger. Dozens and dozens of containers of powdered milk. Out-of-date mountains of coffee. Scones she could never eat. Vast stockpiles of cans. A chest freezer in which every inch is stuffed with food, despite the fact that the bottom has not been reached for decades.

The clothes overfilling wardrobes, as if someone would look at what she was wearing and judge her as poor. Dozens of Clarks shoes still in boxes, because if you have good shoes you could go far.

But most of this food and these clothes were never used, and this made me unbearably sad. This was not the best that this lovely little girl could have hoped for, surely?

On the long 7 hour drive home, interrupted by a welcome stop-off to walk in a park with some old friends, we made the obligatory toilet stop at Tebay services on the upper M6. I found myself wandering around the expensive clothing shop, and (very unusually for me) expressing a desire to buy an over-priced tee shirt. Michaela quite reasonably did not encourage me and suddenly, there it was. The old feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I can only describe it well by telling another story. I have a painful memory from when I was about eight or nine of being desperate for a watch, but not just any watch, I wanted – no I really wanted – a digital watch. One of those early ones that glowed red when you pressed the button.

My mothers response to her own poverty was, on the whole, to make sure that we NEVER went without. We always had clothes (even if they were second hand or home made,) good shoes (Clarks again) and food on the table. But mum was a single mother on benefits, and even though she was incredibly, self-denyingly frugal, money would always only go so far. We simply could not have what our friends had.

So I did get a watch for Christmas; a wind-up, perfectly serviceable, sensible watch. I remember clearly trying so very hard to be grateful, biting my lip so hard that I my mouth filled with the iron-like taste of blood, but then to my shame I cried. I told her that this was not what I really, really wanted. This watch that she had saved for and carefully selected was not good enough for me. I do not remember how my mother reacted but I still have that watch, even though it does not work anymore.

Back to the tee shirt. I tried to describe to Michaela what was on my mind, and she initially felt guilty for not buying it, but I was quick to make clear that I did not want the bloomin’ overpriced thing, that that was not the point I was trying to make at all. Rather it was about two things;

Firstly, the understanding this silly little feeling gives me for my mother. When we grow up in relative poverty (or absolute poverty in her case) we never fully escape it, no matter how many things we accumulate.

Secondly, the clarity once more about how poverty impoverishes everything; our intellect, our world view, our sense of self-worth, our ability to form and sustain relationships of trust and our confidence. If you have not been poor, then it is easy to think that everyone is like you, and that the playing field it level. It is not.

I have so much to be grateful for, sitting here in my warm room in my own house in one of the most beautiful places in the world, surrounded by people I love. In many ways, I have won the life lottery.

But I am my mothers child so for me, gratefulness is a decision. It is something I have to work at and live towards.

May there be generations to come where the great promise of childhood is not shadowed by poverty, but in the meantime, let the rest of us practice in all things, compassion.