Military glory
STANDING in Lambeth Palace Library in December, alongside my dad and my husband, was one of my proudest moments. My book God Is Not a White Man: And other revelations was a finalist in the Michael Ramsey Prize. Although I didn’t win, I couldn’t help but feel a surreal pride as I pictured my childhood self in Nigeria, and remembered all the times when I felt completely inadequate, or out of place, during theology lectures.
I also felt out of place last month as I stood addressing 17 new generals of the British Army at Sandhurst. We had been invited to talk about Theos’s perspectives on the changing religious demographics in the UK. I wasn’t expecting the Chaplain General to hold up my book and recommend it to the generals before I spoke. Another surreal moment.
Pushing the envelope
EACH year, I set myself a reading goal. Each year, I fail. But this year has got off to a flying start. I’m devouring books and audio books — never wasting an opportunity to read a few pages.
Books are piled high at my bedside; books greet me on my desk at work. I optimistically carry round at least three at a time in my new Mary Poppins-style backpack. It’s a roll-top and so, unlike my previous bag which definitely had a limit, and whose zip kept breaking because I stuffed too much into it, this one will — surely — never break under the strain of the contents of my life. I previously wrote about the spine of my bullet journal breaking for similar reasons (Diary, 18 August 2023). It seems I have yet to learn my lesson.
Anyway, I’ve realised that the reason that I am reading so many books is because I am supposed to be writing my own. The deadline for the delivery of my manuscript is looming, and perhaps I am finding comfort — and some inspiration — in other people’s words. Or perhaps it is a classic form of procrastination.
Joined-up thinking
IT WAS not merely because of my reading target that I instituted the first Reading Week at Theos. We cleared the diary and made space to read books individually, and spent a team day discussing three texts: Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination; Luke Bretherton’s newest, A Primer in Christian Ethics; and, alongside those, Acts 17. All helped us to think through how we as a Christian think tank engage in culture creatively, winsomely, and wisely.
St Paul, in Athens, is engaging with a culture that is “very religious”, seeking God in different ways. One of the things that I love about this passage is the sense of connectivity. Paul speaks about a God who made the whole world and everything in it, and in whom we — all of us — live and move, and have our being.
Don’t judge a book. . .
DURING our Reading Week, I was sitting on a busy commuter train home, reading Motherhood and God by the Roman Catholic journalist and theologian Margaret Hebblethwaite. I couldn’t put it down. I sensed a profound connection to it.
Hebblethwaite wrote the book in 1984 — the year I was born — and yet I deeply resonated with her theological perspective on being a parent. I have been writing similar words in my own forthcoming book.
Despite being enthralled by Hebblethwaite’s, I was somewhat self-conscious about the very 1980s front cover. Yet, a few minutes before I was going to get off the train, the woman next to me struck up a conversation about it. She confessed that she had been reading over my shoulder, as she too had an interest in being a Christian and a mother. She, too, was both. After a quick exchange, we swapped numbers, and, in the past few weeks, have spoken regularly, introduced our families — four sons and two husbands between us — and gone to the cinema together.
The similarities are striking — we live a few minutes from each other, and yet we had never met but were drawn together over a book published four decades earlier. I’ve written previously about my fascination with divine encounters — or, as they are more generally described, coincidences. It is in moments like these that I feel a sense of profound connectivity, both to God and to other people; this sense of connection that I read about in Paul’s words in Acts 17.
The world feels a little less random and full of threat and catastrophe when you meet a kindred spirit on the train; when you are reminded that, in God, all things hold together.
Life begins
BY THE time you read this, I will be 40. In recent weeks, I’ve found myself calculating how many days I have left of my thirties. I’m pleased that the dread that I felt about turning 30 has not followed me as I begin this new decade.
I’m thankful for so much: for getting to do a job I love, for being surrounded by people I love — my family, my church community, and my friends. My birthday celebrations this year will yet again have multiple parts, but I am enjoying planning the main celebration, in which I will bring together lots of friends, whom I’ve met in different walks of life: schoolfriends, university friends, ex-colleagues, strangers who have become friends by complete coincidence. We’ll be gathering for afternoon tea by the Globe Theatre.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s quote from Richard II is fitting here: “I count myself in nothing else so happy, as in a soul remembering my good friends.” Happy birthday to me.
Chine McDonald is a writer, broadcaster, and director of Theos.