I was running a Workers’ Educational Association course for women who were at home with small children and had lost their sense of identity. We were doing confidence-building and assertiveness training, but it wasn’t enough. Many of the women needed relationship work and something deeper and more personal; so I started training as a therapist, initially with Relate.
I joined the Inter Diocesan Counselling Service when I retired from my job as head of professional practice at Relationships Scotland, in Edinburgh. At that stage, we were all volunteers, though professionally trained, and I was attracted by the fact that the service was set up specifically to support clergy and their families, because I wanted to work with the impact of faith issues on people’s lives.
It turned out to be the most enriching group I have ever been part of, because of the calibre of the counsellors and their honesty and warmth.
We counsel clergy and their families and licensed lay ministers in the five north-western dioceses of the Church of England, and online in the Isle of Man. It is a free counselling service, funded by grants from the participating dioceses, and was originally set up in 1985 to offer relationship counselling for clergy couples.
I think clergy are now being asked to do an impossible job — often being required to run up to ten parishes, as well as meeting unrealistic mission targets. The result is a constant sense of failure, and intense pressure on couple and family relationships, as well as a loss of the pastoral vocation they once had.
It would be wonderful if the Church led the way and showed the world what a really humane working environment looked like, instead of being focused on numbers and targets. It is such a missed opportunity.
The most effective intervention is somebody to talk to, who will listen without judgement and help you process what is happening to you, so that you can change the things that are oppressing you. Preferably, that person has the skills to look at the roots of past damage as well as the systems that are impacting on you now.
I loved the rhythm and sound of words from a young age — memorised poems, bits of Shakespeare, psalms, etc. — and instinctively wrote poems and stories as a way of understanding myself and others. It was mostly through reading and writing poetry that I found my way to God when I was 17 — though music and mountains also played a big part.
I didn’t get anything published until The Winter is Past (1995), which described my five years in an Anglican convent, and how I met and eventually married my husband, previously the abbot of a Benedictine monastery. This was a book I felt driven to write — not least because I had a thousand letters from David, as well as diaries and poems from both of us.
My latest book is called Silence Interrupted, and is a murder story set in a convent. It describes what happens in a closed, silent community, under the vow of obedience, when a narcissistic person becomes the Superior and wields absolute power. I thought I was writing a light cosy crime novel, using all my detailed knowledge of convent life; but it turned into something much darker, seeming to rise up from my unconscious like Banquo’s ghost.
I think I was trying to work out for myself how a life of such beauty and dedication could go so horribly wrong. But I also wrote it for those survivors of abuse I knew personally, who had never received justice.
Writing for me is sometimes therapy — my murder story was definitely cathartic — but I think it is basically a core part of who I am. I am never more myself than when I am absorbed in finding the arc of a story or the perfect word to complete a poem. Sometimes, I think that writing and contemplative prayer come from the same place, and, when they really take off, it is like the moment when a humming top starts to sing.
I grew up in the ’60s in a northern industrial town, close to Liverpool, in a big family where the music of the Beatles was the backdrop to our lives. My dad was a church organist and played the piano by ear; so classical music was also a big presence. I used to do my homework to the likes of Beethoven, Sibelius, and Elgar.
Like my three siblings, I went to the local grammar school, which I loved, not least because we had a great English teacher, who took us to plays in Liverpool and Manchester, and influenced me to apply for Oxford to study English.
After graduation, I spent a year teaching English in Finland, which shook up my narrow view of the world and began a long love affair with the place and the people.
On returning, I was looking for something meaningful to do with my life. I tried a law course, then a spell in the film library at Oxfam HQ in Oxford, before finally falling for the romance of the dedicated life at an Anglican convent in the city.
I don’t think I had any idea what I was letting myself in for, but it certainly taught me to stop running away from myself and learn to love silence, as well as the beauty of plainsong and incense.
Eventually, I struggled with the vows and the loss of a future, and left, marrying David three years later and going on to have two sons. We moved first to parishes in Lancashire and then to Cumbria, where I taught English as well as courses for women, before training as a therapist. En route, I managed to fit in an MA in feminist theology, and feminist literary theory, both of which sharpened up my thinking a great deal.
I didn’t publish my second book till 2018: It is Solved by Walking, a novel which revolves around decoding a journal of sandplay therapy to discover a family secret.
These days, we live in a rural bit of Cumbria, where I continue to do some part-time counselling and supervising, and volunteer in our local Fairtrade shop. I have been a member of a book group for 35 years; so that keeps me up to date. Silence Interrupted was only published this year; so I am trying to be patient while I wait for the next one to emerge.
I am fascinated by the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken pots are mended with glue and powdered gold so that the cracks are celebrated rather than hidden. I think there may be another crime story in there, where the detective’s scars are crucial to the solving of the murder and the healing of the survivors. Death and resurrection?
Christmas only really begins for me when all the family have arrived, and we have been to the carol service at Carlisle Cathedral on Christmas Eve. The next day, it’s the traditional Christmas dinner, with presents round the tree and friends dropping in for a drink. Boxing Day is either serious hospitality, or a walk round Lake Ullswater. I try to recreate the magic of childhood Christmases in every way I can, but there is always the nagging sense of people who have nothing, or less than nothing. I don’t have the answer to that.
The relentless pounding of Gaza and Ukraine makes me angry — and now Lebanon — that nobody seems able to stop.
I’m happiest when I see people I love, or have worked with, living from their true selves. It is like a pottery bowl that rings when you flick it.
The energy and creativity of young people gives me hope for the future: what Dylan Thomas calls “the green fuse that drives the flower”.
I pray for world peace, of course, but, in personal terms, I think it all comes down to kindness. Action not words. Starting with me.
There is a simple, bare church near Taizé where God seemed very close when I was there over 40 years ago, a really thin place. Harder to decide who I would like to be locked in with, but I think it would be Thomas Merton, and I would ask him how he managed to find such peace on his own in that hermitage.
Helen Weston was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.