First blog entry

Yesterday Roy and I took our first-born to the start of his gap-year.

I say first-born not out of any patriarchal significance, but because the advent of our son put his father and me through a thousand new hoops, each one a first for us as parents.  From the first push of his pram, through the terrors of his first inoculations and the magic of his first morning at pre-school, to the first pair of female teenage shoes in the pile at the front door and the choosing of GCSE’s, A-levels and Universities, we have had to guide, provide and assist in ways that were entirely new for us.  All of this intense joy and near trauma is bound up for me in the word first-born.

We had to drive from East Kent, through the Dartford Tunnel under the River Thames and back out East again into darkest Essex, where, on the tip of the marshes around the River Blackwater our son is to spend a year being a centre instructor for outdoor activities.  In the back of the car, wedged between his trombone and the door, he opened the conversation by asking me about my Greenbelt.

Now Greenbelt is an arts festival that specialises in Christians interacting with others on matters of justice, ecology and inclusion – which are all really the same thing.  It is much more than a music festival, though I fell in love with Sinead O’ Connor on the Glade stage this year and discovered Samantha Crain in the intimate setting of the Canopy and the Blue Nun bar….

My son had a vested interest in my experience of Greenbelt this year as his girlfriend had helped me to cut up nearly a thousand pieces of paper with questions on for a straw poll I wanted to conduct.  She had experienced some nervous tension at the time wondering if we would ever be ready for the taxi to take us to the train on time as I was still printing reams of paper at the last minute!  The straw poll did not actually work as it happened but it did lead to some interesting conversations that threw up some new light on my amateur attempts at research.  As I recounted these in the car, along with a round-up of the iconic debate on marriage (the subject of my research) that took place in the Hot-house venue on the first evening of the festival something rare and beautiful occurred.  My husband, my son and I had one of those conversations that does not resemble a tennis match or a queue for the microphone so much as the building of a pyramid.  As each of us added our mites (without interrupting) the insights built upon each preceding contribution so that we were examining, learning and articulating together in real time.  We weren’t producing pre-packaged thoughts of our own for an audience of two.  We were realising together and creating something new.

I was raised a fundamentalist Christian.  I didn’t know this at the time.  I just learned to love Jesus naturally because my parents so patently did so.  As I grew up I discovered that the word fundamentalist was not universally honoured as a pseudonym for a brave and convinced minority group against the world (the impression I gained of it from within) but associated with hard-heartedness, stubborn illiteracy, hypocrisy and general madness.  Now Jesus was thought of as mad, possibly even stubbornly illiterate, but I don’t think he was ever known to be hard-hearted.  The only people he had a go at were the fundamentalists of his own day, the Pharisees.  Anyway, at the time of first realising this I coped with it by deducing that my particular strand of Christianity was not full-on fundamentalist but the slightly more modern evangelical and (in the 70’s) much more modern charismatic brand of the religion.  [I use the word religion deliberately in place of the word faith – reasons for which will become apparent throughout my blogs]  This enabled me to continue thinking of myself as part of a brave and convinced minority group taking a stand against the world and the flesh and to ignore the criticisms that seemed so close to home by rolling my shoulder slightly and letting them glance off in the direction of the obviously stuck-in-the-dark-ages true blue fundamentalists such as the Brethren and others, whom I still respected as deeply sincere people but was happy that they should take the fall.  After all we can’t all be right, can we? [sarcasm]

I digress.  The point being that I speak from personal experience when I say….

Xains twisting themselves to do things that are really imposible

Sin, love for God, gratitude