Bending before the storm - whatever your storm may be

It was clear to the occupants of the little village that a terrible storm was going to sweep down upon them, a taifung. Knowing that their fragile dwellings would be swept away, along with their lives, people ran out of the village and began tying themselves to the biggest, strong-looking trees they could find.

Except one man, who led his wife and his son into a bamboo grove and made them tie themselves to the three strongest bamboos they could see.  

Other villagers, running past them, cried out that the man was mad, they would all die, how strong is a bamboo compared to the trees on the hillside?

Night fell; the wind grew relentlessly in its power, until it roared and screamed through the village, destroying all in its path. The three bamboos were flattened to the ground, with the man and his family tied to them. They wept in terror.

Eventually, dawn broke on a scene of utter devastation.The storm had rushed on and left them. The family untied themselves from the three bamboos and looked around them, wide-eyed with horrified wonder. There was nothing of their village left standing.

Where the great trees had stood on the hillside, there were only holes in the ground, smashed branches, tree-roots....

Or:

     The Man Watching 
 

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

                           Rainer Maria Rilke trans. Robert Bly

Thanks to Annee for passing this on from Cindy Cooper to whom it was passed by her friend Rosie, and the line goes back through who knows how many others to Robert Bly, and so on back to Rilke...a community mostly unknown to itself that has thought about and felt  something profound, immediate, practical.

For anyone speaking at a funeral: doing grief, doing ceremonies part 3: conclusion

The previous post, about working as a celebrant for a family member who's died, is really a specialised subset of a much more frequent situation: being asked, or wanting to speak at a funeral, as a family member or friend. So rather than bang on about my recent experience, it might be more use and less solipsistic to make a couple of suggestions for any "civilian" thinking about talking at a funeral.

1. I'm a bit down on "ought," "should." Do you want to, that is the question - even if you're a bit nervous about it? S/he may have said s/he'd like you to speak, or the widow/er might ask you. But if it's going to work for the gathering, it needs to be what you want to do (with appropriate guidance, of course.) If you really don't think you can, or really don't want to - then best not to. You can always write something down and give to it someone (celebrant, another speaker) to read it out for you - though best not to spring it on them at the last minute.

2. Much depends on the setting, on the circumstances of the person's death, on who else is speaking, so a bit of background enquiry and thought will help.

3. Once you've thought about 1. and 2. above, just be true to your own feelings; probably best not to "put on a Sunday voice," as Joyce Grenfell wrote!

4. Having said that, if you can get a sense of the general tone of what's going to happen (funerals vary enormously in this) you will be able to avoid anything truly inappropriate. But there's no need to be mealy-mouthed.

5. Write it out, and send it to the celebrant/vicar/officiant etc, (or  if that's not possible, the undertaker.) If all speakers do that, s/he can check for overlaps, incongruities etc - though it's best to try and find out what other speakers will cover. e.g. "I don't know much about her early life, so I'll leave that to the family, but I worked alongside her for 25 years, so I'll speak mostly about that - OK?" And the bottom line is if you should be seriosuly delayed, you can stop having a coronary because you can't get to the lectern in time - the celebrant can read it out from you, as it were.

6. Try not to worry about getting upset, because: they're all on your side; there's nothing wrong with pausing for a gulp and a sniff; if the celebrant has a copy of what you're going to say, you'll have the confidence that s'/he can carry on if you completely collapse - and knowing that, you won't.

7. Read what you've written, rehearse it aloud, get inside it. This will mean that you won't have to read it out ponderously, like Orders of the Day, but can look at the people from time to time (but don't look at the front row if they are upset!) And stop your rehearsing the night before - just a quick read-through on the morning of the funeral.

8. Much depends on the setting - acoustics vary hugely. Try and get there early, see if there's a quiet minute to try out speaking from the front (lectern, pulpit, whatever). Generally, I think people need to speak a little more slowly than they think, even after they have told themselves to slow down, and a little more loudly than they think, even after they've told themselves to speak up. The gathering does want to hear you! Nerves can make you speed up - so: breathe....

9. Take your time - it's your space and time, for a precious 3.5 minutes or however long you've got. Own it - somewhere between intimidated and cocky is where you might want to be.

10. Keep to your time allocation - it can really screw up the other speaker/s if you decide on the spur of the moment to pop in another few stories for four minutes. We don't allow enough time for crem funerals in this country - but there's not much you can do about that except stick to your time. The next family in will thank you for doing so.

11. You could always just wing it and speak not from notes or a script but straight from the heart with whatever is on your mind on the day - but I can only remember three or four people who did so in 360+ funerals.  One of those gave one of the very best tributes I've ever heard, but he is a genius. One of them was - truly dreadful. Personally, I'd write down every word. You don't have to stick rigidly to it, of course (though nb time allocation) - but it's there, in front of you.

If you do a good job for someone who mattered to you, you will feel not just relieved, but pleased and justifiably proud afterwards.

So if you've decided you'll do it - go for it! It's an honour to speak for someone you cared about, and everyone there will/should feel grateful to you.

doing grief, doing ceremonies part 2 - celebrants and the funerals of relatives

(This is a slightly more specialised post than usual, since it's about carrying out the role of funeral celebrant for someone who was close to you; if that doesn't, quite understandably, interest you, you are excused! But if you are a celebrant, it's an issue worth considering, because sooner or later....)

During my training as funeral celebrant, we were advised not to lead the funeral of family or close friends. This warning rang round my head a little, as I prepared for the funeral of a close relative last week. He had asked me, during his long final illness, to take his funeral for him, so I did. One or two friends commented that it was a big ask - so it was, and I'm very pleased he asked it.

                                                      (that's not me above, of course...)

These things helped:

1. There was a slightly longer interval than usual between his death and the funeral; I was pleased to have done a fair amount of thinking and grieving before the event. For example, his son emailed me his fairly brief eulogy in advance; I read it and started crying. Better at my desk than at the lectern. It was beautifully written and beautifully delivered on the day.

2. My relative had put up a tremendous fight during five years of illness, and his death was expected often during those five years. "You're a tough little bugger," one surgeon said to him. So he was - and a courageous one too. He was facing death calmly the night he died in his sleep, having told us a few days earlier that there was no point in being sad, he'd had a great life. (Which helped with the nature of our sadness -  it wasn't a shock.) Impossible that he isn't still here of course, but not a temporarily disabling shock. That would, I guess, have been a lot harder for me as celebrant. So if you're asked to lead a relative's funeral, just check out how the death happened, what you feel about that, how long you've had to adjust. If this doesn't sound too cold: it's a professional judgement you have to make.

3. I've taken over 360 funerals; I couldn't have done it, I think - or if I had, it would have been a horrible experience for me - if his was my third funeral. I was able to put on my professional shoes, as it were, and concentrate on the job (well, part of me, at least, could do so.) I didn't have to worry about procedural things; I knew what to do if one of the other speakers over-ran; the music was taken care of, and I remembered not to look too hard or long at the front row - grief is very catching! Let me be clear: it's not that I was worried about showing emotion, only about being able to speak clearly. We all have our feelings, but as a celebrant I know said, "you know you've got the balance wrong when the family start to comfort you rather than vice versa..."

3. The crem isn't one of those gruesome cramped pseudo-Gothic dumps that we have to put up with all too often:

                                     (Havant, since you asked)
A matter of taste, perhaps, whether you like Victorian Gothic or something emptier and determinedly modern - but I think it had a big effect on the congregation, and it certainly did on the celebrant! Calming, spacious, light, etc etc. So that helped. Excellent technology, too (webcasts, recordings, slide shows all available.)

4. My family and friends were all very supportive, and that is an invaluable reassurance and comfort.

When the curtain came across, we had one of these:

                                                          (Not this one, obviously...)
My relative had seen active service with the Royal Marines, and so they sent along a bugler in full formal dress. Whatever you may feel about the military, ranging from pacifist abhorrence to gung-ho militarism, I defy you not to find the Last Post a deeply moving sound. It was beautifully played (it isn't always, believe me..) and I had to stare very hard at the carpet when that sound rang out and the curtain came across.

It sure was tough, but it went well, and I felt privileged to have been able to do it for him. So following on from this experience, my entirely unasked-for advice would be: don't say no as a matter of policy, but do take time to think through whether or not you can do it well for someone so close, and do look after yourself. You have your own feelings, and yet you do have to be of use.

 

doing grief, doing ceremonies

It's commonplace, and perhaps therefore obviously true, that you can't tell the depth or nature of someone's grief from their face; grief happens in different ways.

At present we seem in the middle of a huge wave of books and journalism about grief and how to do it properly (or well, or effectively, or honestly - add your own exhortation.)

I'm really not sure how much help we need to grieve for a loss. Seems to me when it happens, we feel grief. It's not a thing, it's a process, and it fluctuates. We might need help to deal with it, if it is in danger of turning into depression or obsession, but grief is hardly a skill to be honed. "Teach Yourself Grief" would be a useless title! And yet there's a book on my shelf called "About Grief," and I'm told it's very good. I must read it sometime.

The books and essays may help people to help people who are grieving, of course.  I wonder if the welter of advice is a product of our highly individualistic culture, in which common ways of doing the big things in life have fragmented, along with religious beliefs? 

So each of us needs to grieve in our own way. But we'll do that anyway, and I guess always did even when the church had a handle on what people were supposed or expected to feel. Grief was never, I guess, a standard procedure.

I've met, in the course of my work and in my private life, a lot of grieving people, including as it were, myself. I've seen people desolate and crying out with it at a funeral - almost howling with grief; I've seen people apparently completely unmoved. I've learned to avoid comparative views, let alone judgements. I've learned, above all, to ask and to listen.

Is it the job of a funeral to help with grief? Perhaps, up to a point. It's a communal experience and one kind of goodbye, it marks off a phase in coming to terms with a death, it can help us face the impossible fact that someone no longer exists. But it's only a brief ceremony.

Funerals in this country tend to be less demonstrative than in the USA, I understand. I worked briefly with an American who at the time thought she wanted to be a celebrant, and after the first funeral she observed she said that everyone there seemed very repressed and flat. It seemed a fairly typical British crem funeral to me, and we discussed cultural differences. Each of us likes to think our responses are unique, but of course they are also culturally and socially shaped. For example, it's harder not to weep (if you think you shouldn't) when people around you are weeping.

Some funeral radicals think our British reserve at funerals is unhealthy, or unhelpful. Some more reserved people seem to feel it's shameful, letting the side down, to show much sadness at a funeral. "How's she doing?" people ask. "Well," comes the answer, which usually means she's keeping a grip on her feelings and showing little of them. Is this good, or bad? Or simply how she does her grieving?

Perhaps there's a danger here in thinking grief should be expressed or "done" in a particular way; who is any one of us to say how we should or shouldn't express ourselves in public?

We do grief, we do a funeral ceremony, each of us in our own way and each of us alone, and yet with people round us who share, we know, at least some of our feelings. So although the public nature of the event can be a burden for some, it can also be a great help and comfort. We are, after all, social animals.

"No man is an island, entire of itself...never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Strange paradox - we can't feel the particular nature of another's grief: what is more dismaying than when someone says "I know how you feel." No you don't, despite your good intentions. And yet we can share in another's grief. 

 "If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester;
Thou must be patient; we came crying hither"

We aren't all Lear or Gloucester, thank goodness; but shared grief, however it happens, is surely a powerful and helpful thing. I don't know why; why should it help, to have someone else share your pain?

It's part of our common humanity, and despite the pain - perhaps because of the pain - grief is a rich and strange thing.

Is home wherever you lay your hat?

This town was recently selected in some poll or other as one of the best places to live in the UK:

 Apparently a spirited young woman I know, who lives there, upon being informed of this over her breakfast, said (and I quote):


 "Christ. Shows how fucking awful the rest of the country must be."

This greatly amused me, because it seems to sum up the essence of being 17 in our times. "Teenagers" (I'm not mad about the label, but still..) often want to get away from where they were born - even if they want to keep in touch with their families, even though they may return, they want to get away.

It's actually a very pleasant town, though it suffers from too much road traffic through the town centre. It's the sort of prosperous place in which the charity shops look like real shops, and their stock is often at least as good as real shops around where I live.

It's an expensive place to live, as far as house prices go. And they do. Upwards, relentlessly. You'd think it would be a nice place in which to be brought up, and I daresay it is - a resolutely comfortable, prosperous, overwhelmingly middle-class, picturesque, reasonably safe sort of place.

And I think that's perhaps the reason for the young woman's strong feelings. She knows the rest of the world isn't like that, and she wants to get out into it. She maybe wants to feel that home will be where she hangs her hat, and see how that goes, at least for a while. Meantime, she's on the secondary school exam treadmill with which our culture is obsessed, and who wouldn't want to get the hell out of that for a while, when they can?

But then again, she's 17, and it was early-ish in the morning. She might, by this evening, be revelling in the delights of her home town.

Somehow, I doubt it. 

I bet she'll want to hit the road before she can feel that "lovely to be back here again" stuff, as opposed to the "lovely to see my family again," which one hopes will always be true for her.

I mean, what did I care about peaceful duck ponds in English country towns when I was 17?

.

 Though it looks to me like a nice place for a quiet think, these days, now I've almost reached her age numerals reversed. I might even feed the ducks, though I suspect they'd turn their bills up at anything less than organically-grown locally-baked sourdough wholemeal.

What the fire said

This is the little church up our lane. Plenty of gravestones, plenty of memento mori. The churchyard is gearing up for its full-on spring burstings of celandines and primroses, and of course some daffs too.

 What, I hope you will soon be asking, has the coming of spring to do with this photo of our kitchen stove?

 (Can't hear anyone asking very loudly yet.....so I'd better carry on whilst you're still awake.)

In my work I encounter grieving people, and I'm dealing with some ongoing sadness myself at present. Grief, when it comes, is natural, and we would do better to go through it and accept it, than try to stifle or avoid it. (nb especially British chaps...)

So how best to live with the inevitable sadness of our human mortality? How to live with the impossibility, the raging unfairness and seemingly impossible fact of our extinction (to put it bluntly.) How - why - should we "put up with" the fact that it all comes to an end?

We might say, a little piously, that living with the awareness of death in our lives enriches them, makes them vivid and real, helps us live in the moment. True. Still, and all.....

So after walking up the lane and mementoing a spot of the mori, whilst at the same time enjoying the early spring springing, I sit down by the kitchen stove. I'll just be with the fire, look at the flames and think of nothing much.

Immensely calming. The fire is busy transforming substance into energy, heat and light. Feels lovely, looks lovely, feels...right. Part of me and my life. 

It's what the sun is busy doing, every star, the entire universe. Transforming, changing. If it didn't do that, nothing - you, me, the moons of Jupiter, the cat, daffodils - nothing would exist.

So yet again, feeling the reality of constant change as what life is, helps me with accepting mortality as what life is. This isn't so much an act of will or analysis, as it is the product of a sort of meditative state, I guess. Just being with it all, on its own terms, not mine.

It all feels right. Spring, gravestones, primroses - and the fire in the stove.

 Hope spring offers you some lovely moments, as the seasons' wheel turns, wherever you are.

mindfulness and madness: Radio 4 cops out

Out of the Ordinary, Jolyon Jenkins, BBC Radio 4 Wednesday 16th March, "Mindfulness and Madness."

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0738hm2

This radio doc misses a chance to deal with an important subject: the potential that intensive meditation has to unearth or worsen existing severe mental health problems amongst a small minority of people. To give the devil, as it were, his due, this subject needs looking at, and the answer "well they probably weren't very stable in the first place" doesn't really cover it.

But Jenkins blows it.

He starts off with two poor souls who suffered very badly - because they went on a ten-day intensive silent retreat. This sort of experience is totally unsuitable for beginners, and in any case is not usualy what people mean by "mindfulness meditation," which
usually refers to the model developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in Massachussets, and further developed in this country by centres such as those at the universities of Oxford, Bangor and Exeter. Typically, it offers an eight-week course, and follow-up sessions if you can get to them.

(If you want to know more about a ten-day vipassana retreat - personally, I wouldn't go near it! - read Tim Park's excellent book "Teach Us To Sit Still.") 

Responsible mindfulness centres and teachers will always warn you about possibly upsetting consequences to the work, and suggest that serious, deep-seated and unresolved mental difficulties should be addressed through different therapies. On the eight-week course I took, a second experienced staff member was on hand to offer guidance and support if people became upset. 

For retreats, mindfulness centres make it plain which suit first-time retreatants (usually a three-day guided and supported retreat) and which longer ones are only open to experienced retreatants.

Jenkins talked to an interesting man who referred to the full Buddhist Therevada approach to managing the disorientating, or re-orienting, effect on one's sense of self that meditation can bring about. But a chance was missed to discuss the idea that in our culture meditation might suffer from not having a cultural and spiritual context to support  it, and perhaps that is why a few people maybe at risk from mental distress if they learn to meditate and then are left on their own.

Jenkins tried to discredit mindfulness meditation by linking it to the more extreme examples of weirdness demonstrated by some transcendental meditation adherents in the 1970s and 80s (yogic flying, and the belief that meditators could change crime rates for a week in Liverpool...and the Maharishi's political party fiasco.) Interesting, and quite fun, but nothing to do with mindfulness meditation.

(I do know people who feel they have benefitted a lot from TM; needless to say, Jenkins didn't talk to any such people.)

A researcher from Coventry University talked about scientific research which to his satisfaction demonstrated that meditation did not demonstrate any advantages over other relaxation methods and anti-stress procedures. That doesn't actually seem to me a reason not to do it if it suits you. "Other brands are available." 

The researcher also said an interesting thing, with regard to claims about meditation as mental training. I too find that an unhelpful term; meditation is a lot more than, and other than, training. But he went on to say "the brain is not a muscle." Indeed it isn't, and wise meditation teachers don't pretend it's that sort of training.

Except that there is a sense in which the brain might respond to repetitive training like biceps to gym work. David Eagleman's TV doc "The Brain" referred to London cabbies doing the knowledge. 

 He showed us that such intensive absorption of knowledge, and development of decision-making skills based on detailed information, over three years, actually does cause a small area of the brain to get  larger. The guy from Coventry allowed nothing for brain plasticity and the long-term effects of meditation.

Mr Coventry University said that meditation, even the more-or-less secularised Buddhist form we call mindfulness, answers a widespread need for something esoteric, spiritual, apart from ordinary life, now that so many of us don't go near a church or a temple. Seems obviously true to me; then he said that "the ideology of mindfulness meditation goes back to the 1960s."

It goes back 2500 years earlier than that. Shall we play sitar music in the background, suggesting that meditation is a hangover from the era of acid trips and turning on, shall we? Or shall we make a grown-up, useful radio programme?

OK, there is something troubling, and occasionally irritating, about the fashion for mindfulness, and sometimes its benefits may be over-hyped. If it isn't done "properly," thoroughly, sensibly, it can be risky for a small minority of people. But all Jenkins really wanted to do was trash it. He talked to no-one who claimed benefits from it, he allowed nothing for what you could call the subjectively-reported value of it.

He hardly addressed the important issues around meditation and mental health suggested by his sensationalist title. He relied on three personal stories, which troubling though they were, are no replacement for some facts and figures, and a real examination of the issue. A cheap, humourless and disappointing cop-out.

For a more amusing attack on mindfulness, try the new Ladybird book!