On being a NUT!

Next Thursday - 24th April 2008, my teaching union, the NUT, will strike in response to fair pay and working conditions for teachers. For the last three years pay for teachers has not increased with inflation. Teaching Unions have all expressed their concern that, outside of London (where there is a London Pay Scale), it has become increasing impossible for new teachers to the profession to finance their own accommodation and generally make ends meet. It is certainly true that the cost of living has gone through the roof. I am lucky enough to live at home by choice, but doing the sums it becomes quickly apparent that, having been teaching for 4 years, I would not be able to afford the rent and council tax on a local two bedroom flat.

This is all very worrying for teachers, but it is not unique to that profession: nurses, police officers, emergency services staff and many other council workers have suffered the same pay 'cuts' in recent years. Indeed, many of their pay deals have been considerably worse than that of teachers. 

There is something in me that is embarrassed about talking, and striking, about money. Also, the NUT is the only teaching union that has voted to strike so in many schools the staff are divided. All teaching unions have agreed that they will support the strike action; their members will not agree to cover the classes of those who are on strike. This means that schools may be forced to close.

On this occasion I do not think I agree with the reason for the strike. I realize that pay in the teaching profession is not adequate when you consider the cost of the housing market. However, most people starting out in the public sector are in the same position. I will strike next Thursday because there are more important principles at stake. I would, as a union member, want the NUT to come to my aid if I were to need them. Therefore, as in most reciprocal arrangements, I am duty bound to support the union when they ask for a show of unity. Everyone needs working unions to be strong. They play an important role in protecting the most vulnerable workers in our society. Indeed, when I look around the world and recognize areas where workers have no recourse to a professional union, I am deeply critical. 

This Thursday I will be very sad to be on strike. But, for me at least, it will be a day to recognize the importance of ensuring that working people everywhere have a voice. 

William Byrd

I have been to Lincoln Cathedral today. I think I went for two reasons, firstly tomorrow I am going back to school and will be in the rat race for the coming months, and secondly because I wanted to learn something more about William Byrd. Lincoln Cathedral was beautiful, and well worth the visit but I did not succeed to in satisfying my desire to know more about their elusive treasured musician. There was just one small plaque to honour the organist and choir master of the Cathedral between 1653 - 1672.

William Byrd lived a complicated life with a myriad of confusions and contradictions. Religious life was particularly difficult in these turbulent times. Willam Byrd remained a Catholic throughout his life, although a secret one as he served as a gentlemen of the Chapel Royal under the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I from 1572.

Byrd was popular in the Royal Court and composed music which has been used in Anglican Church worship for four centuries. But, he also harboured a faith which other people found difficult to fathom, heretical almost. Throughout his life we walked a tightrope, staying faithful to his own beliefs while doing his best to please those around him with his public persona. For me his most compelling music are his Masses for three, four and five voices. These were compositions designed to be sung in intimate settings, in private houses, where Catholic Mass could be celebrated away from prying eyes and the threat of persecution. I have only a few experiences of hearing Mass celebrated in a group of less than 5 persons, and each occasion is very special in my memory. New relationships and friendships are forged in these settings, and you never forget the faces of the people you were with, the things you prayed for and the reason there were so few of you. I can hear in this music the echoes of what it might have meant to be hidden away, but revealing to those you trust that most precious part of you, your faith. 

In his later years Byrd published Gradualia, a compendium of Catholic music for the liturgical year. This work, in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, was banned under threat of imprisonment.

The Duty of Delight

On 23rd April 2008 the diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg, will be published in America by Marquette University Press. I am excited! Dorothy Day is one of the most 'normal' holy women I have come across. She was full of contradictions having a reputation for attending daily Mass, saying the Rosary and praying the breviary and getting arrested for acts of civil disobedience.  I like her.

Day was raised in the Episcopalian Church, but in her early adult years was agnostic towards her faith. She attended the University of Illinois, but dropped out and never graduated. She moved the New York with her parents in  1916 and pursued a career as a revolutionary journalist on the Communist left wing. She had many different lovers as a young woman, became pregnant by one and underwent an illegal abortion. Shortly after this she married Berkeley Tober, but this only lasted one year. Later she lived with her lover Forster Batterham, a committed atheist, and together the couple had a daughter called Tamar in 1926, but split up in 1927. She fought bravely with loneliness and is recorded with the saying: We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.

Day converted to Catholicism, but she maintained her radical nature and committed herself to living a life in which she treated all people equally even if that meant making great sacrifices herself. 'Our faith is stronger than death, our philosophy firmer than flesh, and the spread of the Kingdom of God upon the earth is more sublime and more compelling. As for ourselves, yes, we must be meek, bear injustice, malice, rash judgment. We must turn the other cheek, give up our cloak, go a second mile.'  Day struggled with the Church, vehemently disagreed with it at times, and famously quoted Augustine's description 'she's a whore, but she's my mother.' But, her faith was her inspiration for the work that she did, and she recognized in the Church her salvation: 'Without the sacraments of the Church, I certainly do not think that I could go on.'

I think Dorothy Day is most famous for living a life radically true to her convictions and without compromise. She was notoriously stubborn to work for. She founded the Catholic Worker Movement, and gave hospitality to many of the poor and homeless who came to her in need. She wrote all her life, in newspapers and in journals, and only put her pen down a few days before her death on 29th November 1980. Having lived a life of voluntary poverty Day left no money for her funeral which was paid for by the Archdiocese of New York. 

Dorothy Day was very clear how she wanted to be remembered; 'Don't call be a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.'

The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day will be published on April 23rd 2008. It was anticipated in the lead article of The Tablet on 5th April 2008

A turn for the girly....(perhaps the worst)

New Books! I can't believe I have new books considering my current financial position. However, I have decided to go exploring on the dark side. I have never much been into anything which purports to present a feminist critique. I am not quite sure what my reluctance was, but perhaps it was just that deep uneasiness which religious women feel when confronted by the claims of modernist and post modernist feminism. Many of the more forceful and publicized feminists argue from a deeply secularized perspective through which not only man, but God is villainized. When I have consulted the work of some, Mary Butler for example, I have come away with a label - 'fembot' - the willing victim of a patriarchal society. That is not very fair. I am not a deluded creature who has accepted the construct of a patriarchal wisdom. Faith is not like that.

Tina Beattie has been writing about how prayer, revelation and mysticism have been missing from feminist theology. Without these she is frightened the feminism may reduce theology to theory. I am entranced by her work because she is seeking to understand the sacramentality of the female body. It is a work of exploration and mystery which pushes gently on the sensual symbolism of liturgy and probes how people understand the sexual dimensions of Catholic life. Sometimes she is a bit weird and wades in waters too deep and dark for me to venture into, but overall I am learning and I am entertained, engaged.

My new books then, a walk on the wild side:

Woman: New Century Theology - Tina Beattie

New Catholic Feminism: Theology and Theory - Tina Beattie

Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics - Lisa Sowle Cahill

The moving of my 'inner monk' at Easter

For me Easter is a season when it is time to change things. Sometimes I am a bit radical and change lots of things all at once, and it can make people feel uneasy. Myself and Gemma have been changing Lost Causes recently, and now the main site is all about food. We love food not because we are 'foodies' per se, but because food brings people together and celebrates life. I am always happy in the kitchen, and cooking with fresh ingredients reminds me of all the people I have to thank that I get well fed, every day. For me every meal time is practically a religious experience, and I don't think there is much wrong with that.

However, that is not what I am writing about. You guys, if you have arrived here are probably expecting to see the Stations of the Cross. As far as I have got, they are still here, where you left them. But, in the rush up to Easter I did not have time to fully think through the last part of this journey. Eastertide is not a time to meditate on the passion. It is a time of rejoicing in the resurrection. I will come back to the stations and travel again, but after this season of joy is over.

In the meantime, I have decided to blog about reading, poems, random thoughts and other Lost Causes whatnot here. I hope you don't mind. I like to think that it is just my 'inner monk' moving house in the ether.  It is all part of life's muddled up journey, after all.

Love E

X. Jesus is Stripped of His Garments

I broke with tradition and used Liguori's words below, because this station leaves very little emotional space for comment. It defies words.

What to leave for reflection here then? Liguori cries out to his Heavenly mother:

Holy Mother, pierce me through

In my heart each wound renew

of my saviour crucified.

It wouldn't be unusual for a friend to share in the sufferings of their loved one. It wouldn't be strange for a loved one to make a sacrifice for a friend. We don't allow others to take on burdens for us, and then walk away. It is normal to want to share pain. Perhaps in the Stations of the Cross Christians are reaching out to try an share the pain of Jesus who took on so much to bring them salvation.

X. Jesus is Stripped of His Garments

St. Alphonsus Liguori sometimes uses words and phrases which are too crude for my airy fairy liberal spirituality; he makes me cringe. But, it is hard to imagine the indignity of being stripped in public, particularly when your body is bruised and battered.

Liguori's words are the ones which seem to fit here, even though they are brutal, even though they make me cringe. Perhaps that is the point:

Consider how Jesus was violently stripped of his clothes by his executioners. The inner garments adhered to his lacerated flesh and the soldiers tore them off so roughly that the skin came with them. Have pity for you saviour so cruelly treated and tell him:

My innocent Jesus, by the torment you suffered in being stripped of your garments, help me to strip myself of all attachment for the things on earth that I may place all my love in you who are worthy of my love. I love you Jesus with all my heart; I am sorry for ever having offended you. Never let me offend you again. Grant that I may love you always; and then do with me what you will.

(Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be)

X. Jesus is Stripped of His Garments

Precious things.....perhaps we do not understand what is truly precious in life until we have held it. Even then, once we have held what is truly precious several times it can seem like something 'normal'. I am not a mother, but perhaps the experience which has taught me most about the vulnerabilty of precious things is the birth of my nieces and nephews. I have held them as new born and they are the most delicate, beautiful, God given gifts. As they grow they remain just as precious and just as loved. As adults we forget that people are precious, and we have to remind ourselves not to take those that we love for granted.

'The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.' Simone Weil

When I hear this quote, and think about it in the context of the stations, I remember the celebration of the eucharist which is at the heart of the Catholic faith. Perhaps this is social conditioning, but perhaps it points towards the truth. Christianity is distinctly bodily. Liturgy is filled with bodily movements and it culminates in the reception of the body of Christ. Salvation is found within the body. All this was in contrast with other religions which developed alongside Christianity, many of which demanded that people needed to escape their mortal forms to reach salvation.

The body in Christianity is central. The eucharist, our reception of the precious body and blood of Christ is the most sacred moment of our worship.

All this being the case, to see Jesus, the Son of God stripped of his Garments is shocking. Perhaps it is because indignity is intended against his body. But, whose is the indignity? Jesus has done nothing wrong to deserve this shame. Perhaps the indignity that is suffered in this scene is upon those who stripped Jesus, forever remembered as immoral. Truth be told, our bodies are dignified;it is what is done to them which has the potential to be undignified.

X. Jesus is Stripped of His Garments

The Tenth Station

Illustration: Carolyn Gates

X. Jesus is Stripped of His Garments

We adore you O Christ, and we praise you.

Because, by your holy cross, you have redeemed the world

'Then the governors soldiers took Jesus with them into the Praetorium and collected the whole cohort around him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe around him, and having twisted some thorns into a crown they put this on his head and placed a reed into his right hand. To make fun of him they knelt to him saying, 'Hail, King of the Jews!' And the spat on him and took the reed from his hand and struck him on the head with it."

Matthew 27 - 30

IX. Jesus falls for the third time

My outraged Jesus, by the weakness you suffered in going to Calvary give me enough strength to overcome all human respect and all my evil passions which have led me to despise your friendship.

My Jesus, I love you more than I love myself. I am sorry that I have offended you. Never allow me to offend you again. Grant that I may love you always and then do with me what you will.

(Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory be...)

Make me feel as you have felt

Make my soul to glow and melt

with the love of Christ, my Lord.