Words of power
“ALICE lived her life holding on to the sides”: one of Dorothy Parker’s many oh-so-cutting insults suddenly seemed to apply to me — or, rather, to my writing. My experienced novelist friend has done me the favour of reading through the typescript of my own draft novel, and counselled much more drama.
She makes me realise how close I’ve come to producing a character who is, frankly, spiritually gloopy. “This reads like the sort of meeting that would take place in a yurt in a garden in the Home Counties, led by a woman who was christened Carol, but now calls herself Shanti.”
Her comments made me laugh out loud, and then shiver at the thought that they might have appeared in a review if I hadn’t been given the chance to improve my text before publication — to let go of the sides, and let my characters fully inhabit their actions and responses. It will make for a much more readable novel. And a spiritually robust one.
To life!
EASTER will have arrived by the time this piece is published, but, as I write, Lent is still upon us, and we’re making our way slowly through days of abstinence from alcohol, which we like a lot (alcohol, not abstinence). I can’t deny the clearer head, better sleep, greater energy available for my much-needed editing. But I’m so serious. I long for the cocktail hour when we let our hair down and turn a bit silly.
During lockdown, the radio played a recording of an 80-year-old woman who, at 5.30 p.m. each day, sliced a lemon (shuck), poured the gin (glug-glug), opened a tin of tonic water (click, fizz), and clink-clinked ice into her glass. When you read this, I, too, will be making those noises. L’chaim!
Holy places
ON LAETARE SUNDAY, I had the tremendous pleasure of preaching on Julian of Norwich and the motherhood of God at St Augustine’s, Scaynes Hill. The feeling of community in that full little church was palpable. Everyone wanted to be there. Loving warmth pervaded everything. What a treat.
I can now count Norwich Cathedral, another place of great warmth, as my own community, having been made a lay canon last October. When I attended the recent installation of Liz Leaver as Canon Pastor, I got to wear my robe and process with everyone down the south aisle and round into the nave under still-visible medieval wall paintings. The cathedral community expanded into the immense past as I felt I was among the monks who had paced these same stone pavements throughout the centuries.
Greater love?
I WATCHED a man, seated with a begging bowl in our supermarket car park in the rain. Most shoppers met him with embarrassment and empty hands. Then, a woman stopped, put down her full shopping bag, unzipped her handbag, took out her purse, opened it, gave him some money, closed and replaced her purse, zipped up her handbag, and picked up her shopping again. In the rain.
The next giver was a burly chap in a Help for Heroes sweatshirt who put his hand in his pocket and cheerily delivered some small-change shrapnel. Who gave the most?
Hazard warnings
A FRIEND told me of a neighbour who had come in for a cup of coffee before driving them both to a retreat. Afterwards, she reversed out of her space into another car. “That wasn’t there when I went in,” she said.
It reminds me of a line from the late, great Tommy Cooper: “Somebody complimented me on my driving yesterday. They left a note on my car saying, ‘Parking fine’.”
Deviated IQ
I AM feeling horribly tangled in the web of sin which weaves itself around our Western industrialised lives. The plastic I use. The food I buy. The energy I consume. Even were I to become a hermit, I could not hope to live a pure life, because I would still have to eat and wash. And, anyway, it’s unneighbourly to attend solely to one’s own moral health.
The energy cost of artificial intelligence is our latest moral entanglement. Each data centre, AI factory, needs one gigawatt of energy to run. That’s enough electricity to power a large city, and it’s to produce . . . intelligence. We’ll need it, because we’re all losing ours as we scroll through three-second videos of nothing at all. Does anyone else think that the human family has gone stark staring mad?
The thing with feathers
WHERE is hope in this deeply troubled world of ours? Nick Cave said: “Hope is optimism with a broken heart,” which helps. I know it is a Christian discipline, but I’m afraid of it. Every time I have my cancer consultation for the myeloma that is expected to reactivate one day, I think I must prepare myself for the bad news by not hoping for good news. If I hope for good news, I will be devastated. Better to be devastated in advance: it won’t hurt so much.
A rabbi taught me about the two different kinds of hope in Hebrew: tikvah, which is the hope of redemption (whatever we mean by that in any circumstance — salvation, say; or humans’ serving instead of destroying the planet; or an end to war; or ongoing cancer remission), and yachel, which is the hope that is quiet and waits patiently. They are the theme of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. . . I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope (tikvah). . . Let Israel hope (yachel) in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.”
Tikvah is the impatient hope of the dawn arriving, as a watchman might feel, coming to the end of his long shift; and yachel is the patient hope that trusts that it will arrive, however delayed it seems to be.
Mystery of faith
YACHEL hope keeps the flame alive, but not with the same holding-my-breath-and-fingers-crossed-for-a-particular-outcome as tikvah. (Didn’t C. S. Lewis suggest that we will spend a lot of time in eternity thanking God for not answering our prayers?). I want to protect myself against the intense pain of dashed hope, but yachel hope —patient hope — feels to me more like the hope that is open to the surprising and the unexpected.
Redemption will take the form of that which we don’t know and can’t yet see. What will it mean for our deeply troubled world that the dawn will break — that, as Julian says, “All manner of thing will be well”?
Dance for joy
TOMMY COOPER again: “I rang up the builder. I said, ‘I want a skip outside my house.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m not stopping you.’”
Claire Gilbert is a lay canon of Norwich Cathedral, a Visiting Professor of King’s College, London, and author of I, Julian. Her book on Berhta will be published in 2027.