We had a great time, I was a bit nervous as I hadn't done group work for maybe 8 years but I enjoyed myself. I felt I was getting as much from these warm, intelligent and thoughtful women as I was giving, and so I offered to do some more work with them on a kind of charitable basis - we hadn't worked out the details. I did a couple of individual lessons and was planning to do another group session, with just the 3 nuns, when all this tumour malarky started. So, the lessons have stopped pro tem as I can't plan anything at the moment, and as I have said elsewhere, I'm really fatigued.
But, I’m wondering about the nuns. I’ve been puzzling about them from the off. Why me? Why now? OK, the rational answer is the Sr Teresa has back ache, she’s tall and spends a lot of time standing, kneeling and sitting in a badly designed office chair. Sr Camilla has come across the technique before, I’m the only player in town, so it obvious why me, why now. I can’t believe it’s that mechanistic though.
I used to be a god botherer when I was young, but I don’t think I really thought too deeply about the spiritual message. I was hooked by the political message of lets all just be friends and be kind to each other. Nothing wrong in that. I also loved the whole chanting, singing, rhythm of traditional CofE services. I have a brother who is into the happy clappy stuff, but I loved the slow, ancient pace of the old fashioned liturgy. It made me feel safe. But my feelings had everything to do with man-made majesty and mystery and nothing to do with heaven and hell, or the meaning of life.
When I stop and think, I don’t even know if I understand what spirituality actually means. A belief in something outside yourself? Trust in something bigger and better? A path to some vague sort of 'goodness'? I’m buggered if I know. Religion I understand, a worldview, a set of rules and a creed of some sort. I'm sorry but Catholicism has always seemed to me to be synonymous with bigotry: to embody the stupid, knee jerk, rules-based theology that brings us despots, wars, poverty, and ignorance which I think inevitably follows from blind obedience by the many to the few (or the one) who clearly, being human, will be flawed. But the nuns seem to be intelligent, thoughtful, humble, committed, and kind. They have clearly and willingly given their lives over to to serve their religion and their god. I don’t get it, and it nags at me.
Have they come into my life to lure me back to Christianity? Or to bring me some comfort because they will light a candle for me? Is it ordinary human kindness they offer or does it have a different dimension?
Maybe, just maybe, it's me who's the bigoted one. I've always been politically a soft hearted lefty, and one of many hideous aspects of the left is a tendency to condemn the reasonably good for its failure to be completely perfect. So, the left happily tears apart age old political institutions because although they work well, they're not inclusive. It lets small children rot in care homes because although there's good adoptive parents out there, they're the wrong size or colour or have imperfect views on, say, gay marriage. Maybe I'm falling into the same trap of judging the Catholic church by looking at its evident failings and closing my mind to the possibility of these being mitigated by the inherent goodness of the majority of the people involved.
It's very confusing. I don't want to be the kind of person who has a death bed conversion though - how weak willed is that? I need to think these things out and come to understand myself better. How on earth do I even start?
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