The Laundry

Nobody grows old,
We just crease and fold,
Like the laundry.
           (Stephen Duffy)

Dear Holly,

I went and saw my Dad (your granddad) the other night after work. As usual he fussed over and around me, asking me all those questions that parents always ask their offspring. You know the sort of thing, was I feeling well, was I eating enough, was I getting enough sleep? You’d think I was still ten the way he carries on. But he only does it ‘cause he loves me.
Now here’s the thing, Granddad is really tiny and really old. Another eleven years and he will be a hundred! He still sees me as a young man because compared to him I am. But I know that to somebody of your age I am really old, because compared to you I am.

Now think on this, to a five year old you are all grown up! Frightening isn’t it? You have been pensioned off before even becoming a teenager. (Do they still have teenagers?)

The truth is, that apart from his aches and pains, my father feels about life almost exactly the way that you do. The bit inside us, our spirit or soul, whatever you want to call it, never grows old. Your mum still loves the things that she loved when she was young, as do I. The only bit that ages is the body that we are given to walk around in. And so it is that one day we simply come to the point were we just don’t need our bodies any longer.

Now at this point I should make it clear that there are any number of different schools of thought as to what happens next. So take your pick. Some say that we simply cease to be, whilst others acknowledge some form of higher power with an accompanying after life. As for me, well, all I can tell you is, we fly. No, this is not a drug infomercial. At my moment of crisis, when the surgical team were doing their very damndest to get me breathing again, to keep me alive, I was elsewhere, swimming or flying, I really don’t know which.

Now we have to put all this in perspective. I had just had three invasive operations in as many days, I was totally off my tits on drugs, and apart from waking up for thirty seconds or so (I surmise) to discover that I couldn’t breath at all, I was pretty much out of it. So why do I believe that it really happened? Why cannot I just accept the fact that it was a failing man’s fevered hallucination?

The answer lies in the word parochial. What a bloody splendid word that is. Parochial. It just sort of rolls of the tongue doesn’t it? As English as Mothering Sunday.
The Bloomsbury defines the word parochial as meaning; ‘concerned only with narrow local concerns without any regard for more general or wider issues,’ and (whoops) derived from the French ‘parocialis’. Bum!

Anyway that just about sums me up. I am completely, absolutely, totally and unrepentantly parochial. We are talking here about a chap who is sublimely happy to be driving a country bus for a living. I have never felt the need to go gallivanting off in search of pastures new. I have always felt the pull of the rolling downs of Oxfordshire and Wiltshire rather than the rolling plains of America. The Mediterranean is just fine and dandy but I would rather be strolling, fish and chips in hand, along the front at Pool harbour. Finally, I do not find the cosmopolitan bustle and crush of airports, connecting pick-ups and the resultant hotels etc, in anyway appealing. If I want that sort of environment I can just go and sit in my car on the M25 in the rush hour. Listen, even my dreams are small and unremarkable. Like I said, parochial.

Well, (to get back to the point) this experience was about as far from parochial as it gets, well, except perhaps for just one little point which I’ll return to in just a moment. This place that I went to, this inner or outer space or whatever it was, was huge. And I don’t mean like the dome of St. Paul’s is huge, I mean the hugeness that is in fact forever. Vast incalculable vistas of space, with a mind numbingly massive column of glass or liquid that stretched away for as far as the eye could see into the darts, dots and winks of a light from unfathomable reaches. Oh, and did I mention beautiful? Perfectly, silently, wonderfully beautiful. I was aware that I was being gently shepherded, both by the wall itself, which was totally aware of me, and something which I sensed was, in some way, much bigger, but unseen, off to my right. I wanted to stay there forever.

And here is that little parochial bit I was coming to, it was as familiar as the path home, in fact I think it was exactly that. Why? Simply because, a) we all know what the path home feels like – and this was it, and b) I remembered it from the last time I was there, even down to knowing when that was. Yes I know it had none of the trappings that conventionality demanded of it. Connelly’s Bee Gee Jesus and the light at the end of the tunnel were both notable by their absence, and I guess it must have been St. Peter’s day off because he was also a no show. No, all I can tell you was that it was right, all so right, and so natural.

Now, I don’t know how the God squad would view it, and frankly I don’t give a toss. I realise it would have been nice if somebody could have tossed an angel or cherubim into the mix, or even better, if a voice had come booming out of some suitably holy cloud with a message for mankind, but I’m afraid not. So yes, I was in the presence of something huge, but not frightening or in anyway judgemental. And no, I have absolutely no answers as to what any of it meant, nor do I care. That I believe it happened at all is enough.

John Tavener wrote a cracking piece of choral music entitled, ‘What God is we do not know.’ Well, I think that just about sums it up. Mankind has spent centuries shoving God into a succession of boxes, and usually for the furtherance of some political or financial necessity or another. (Hell boys, here comes another war that needs justifying – wheel him out!) God has historically ended up being corralled by the good and the great as their special preserve, that is to say being administered to by the few for the ‘good’ of the many. Well don’t blame God, after all, you get the government that you deserve.

Universally they have given him a bunch of prophets to kick around with, whilst others have saddled him with a son that I’m beginning to suspect surprised him somewhat. The fragmented faithful’s approach to the throne is demonstrably legion. Some have covered their heads to worship him whilst others have insisted on bareheaded adoration. Shoes off, shawls over, Saturday for this one, Sunday for that, fish for Friday and nothing for lent, shriven, unshaven, circumcised, creationised, God – this is so complicated.

Basically, all that this proves is that the world boasts full employment upon the largest and longest construction contract in the history of man. Because, despite claims to the contrary, it is still moving ahead and has now reached, er, biblical proportions. Given that the damn thing is now bloody huge, how come none of us can actually see the tower of Babel?

My ‘flight’ or whatever gave me one insight, and it is this. Our world is a tiny ball of mud rushing through a huge and unlimited freedom. It is our ark, our lifeboat if you like. The trouble is that we, the passengers, sometime back at the beginning of our voyage, began setting up a whole bunch of committees, all dedicated to the act of defining and redefining the Captain. Now this in itself wouldn’t have been so bad except that along the way it became acceptable to ostracise, suppress and even toss overboard those of the opposing persuasions. We have now come to the point where the boat is floundering under the weight of these countless different banners, all waving in their defiance of the other man’s stand. Well God cannot be heard above this tumult of conflicting voices, and he in fact has probably retired to the nearest celestial pub, to have a pint and wait us out.

A relationship with God does not flourish in the mire of conflicting doctrines and creeds. A million binding rules aid only those who are doing the binding – and that ain’t God. What I felt out there boiled down to simplicity, love and trust, there wasn’t a bloody rulebook in sight.

How arrogant do we have to be to blithely assume that our particular brand of God is the only valid one?
How blind do we have to be not to see that if every religion has a different set of rules, then it follows that most, if not all, of these rules have come, not by the hand of God, but from the power hungry hand of man?

Now here’s a couple of really scary thoughts. What if true communion with God involves your ability to throw away all the claptrap paraphernalia that has been steadily choking it to death for the last twenty centuries or so, thus forging a personal relationship with him based upon a freedom that admits and expresses who and what you are?

No! No! Far too inclusive. Why that would mean, not just acknowledging, but actually mixing with, and accepting strange foreigners such as derelicts, gays, estate agents, tranny’s, druggies and lesbo’s and all sorts of other women and…(please feel free to fill in your own personal phobia.)

Let’s be honest, if God were actually, physically here, we know where he would be hanging out, but (since he’s not) you and me can be found loitering well up wind, on the clean part of the temple steps. I mean we’ve all got laptops and stuff, we are all far too warm and comfy, so…
What if your moment of self-knowledge hinges upon your ability to leave the safety of your trusted little gathering, and, sans the social club, go walkabout out upon the untested sands alone?

Finally, and most importantly, what if your most far-reaching act of faith was your acknowledgment of the fact that, ‘what God is I really do not know’?
Now that wouldn’t be playing with it would it? Think about it, the landfills would be full of institutionalising books that no one needed or heeded anymore. The BBC could stop putting together those crap quasi-religious programs that are neither fish nor foul and spend the money on something a little more meaningful whilst the religious organisations, who’s first agenda was the house they had built upon God’s financial rock, would go out of business overnight.
Now that really would be doing a new thing.
Are we ready to give it a go then? Oh I see. Ah well, it was just a thought. Tea break over, everybody back to the building sight.

                                                                    Eternally yours,

Chris Wilson White.