Esprit d'Escalier Or Some Ramblings About God.

"You seem like an intelligent woman," said the atheist to the vicar when they'd both come off stage. "Why don't you just use your brain and see that there's nothing."

Of course I couldn't think of a reply — at least, not one that wouldn't have been equally as arrogant — but esprit d'escalier has been working on it ever since.

In case you don't know it, esprit d'escalier means 'the inspiration of the staircase' referring to the clever replies we can all come up with once we are leaving the building and it's too late.

I know a lot — a LOT — of people don't believe in God but, trust me, your brain has nothing to do with it. That's because God does not exist. God is beyond existence. God is in the spaces between us and our thoughts.

Can I prove that? No, of course not. The whole point of faith is that it is faith. It is intangible and it lives in just those spaces. Proof lives in the physical world and nowhere else.

Possibly, oddly, I don't give a rap whether you believe me or not. That's because I have experienced God, I have known Grace, I have shared time and space with the Divine and I have waded through cosmic seas of awe adrift in the bliss of union. And I am certain that I will do the same - and more - again.

And if that's all sanctimonious wanky bollox to you, then fair enough. I believe what I believe and I know what I know and what you believe is none of my business. All I want for you is that you are happy and even that is probably grossly presumptive of me.

The trouble with using your brain about God is that what we are generally taught about God simply cannot compute in a world where we are beginning to understand the enormity of the Universe. Any conventional belief in God will seem ludicrous and the non-believer will throw the baby out with the admittedly ghastly bathwater. That's the bathwater that is willing to condemn some super-intelligent furry sound-wave in a distant galaxy to hell because it doesn't believe in some bloke who lived on Earth for 33 years and (in the words of Douglas Adams) whom we nailed to a tree because he went around saying how good it would be to be nice to people for a change.

I believe much the same as many atheists do. I don't believe in the God that they don't believe in. I can't. God is not that old man up in the sky, nor the mean bastard of many religions. God is not small or tribal.

If God Is, then God must be at least as big as the Universe which means that It is the God of every single aspect of that Universe. God can be nothing like the small God of Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other religion. Those are local interpretations (and sometimes useful, sometimes not) of a much greater Source.

This idea of hell is frankly ridiculous anyway: it's simply not sustainable. Just suppose for a moment that you actually got to heaven but someone you loved went to hell. How could you possibly experience heaven? You couldn't; you would also be in hell because your heart would be breaking.

I may do some more rambling about all that kind of stuff and why people need to believe in the idea that God wants to punish us another time...

I've long believed that Dark Matter is Spirit - and the Holy Spirit is part of God; inexplicable, ineffable, incomprehensible. We are not meant to know with our small and limited brains. But if we are lucky, we can know with our souls and, if we ever want to discover what that's like, then I think we have to learn how to find the space between us and our thoughts.

That's why I attempt to meditate every day. Even after 20 years I sometimes resist it but it is when I stop the thinking, even for a few moments, and find that space, that God can reveal Itself to me. Of course, incredible sunrises or sunsets, the sparkling night sky and moments of terror can do the same but it's nice to show up on a regular basis just to say, "I'm here; what are the miracles today?"

And if the atheist should ask me again, I'm going to have to try and compress all that into just one sentence.

Or, I could just smile and say nothing, like I did the first time.

Crucifixion.

Many years ago, my friend Rachel who's a Greek/Theology scholar amongst other things (including keeping bees which I think I admire even more) said this:

"It's not the crucifixion and the suffering that are the key, it's the death. Once you agree to die then resurrection is a done deal."

As she has a Virgo moon, she'll probably correct the sentence as I'm paraphrasing :-) but can you get the point?

I always got it intellectually but this time (with a few hiccups and still some moments of backsliding) I'm beginning to get it in my soul.

It's been somewhat of a journey because there's so much hanging on the cross to let go of, and I've just had a brilliant session with my friend and healer, Deb Rowley, which has helped, yet again. If you don't know Deb and need some help, find her here. She is the real deal.

We all get crucified — whether it's divorce, bereavement, loss of job or a health crisis or something completely different. Some of us jump off and just move on. The problem comes when we hold on to the cross for dear life because somehow that pain has become part of our identity. Possibly we get more attention and love because of the suffering or maybe we just get used to the pain.

Caroline Myss calls it 'Woundology' and she tells a story about a woman who always had to say that she couldn't do this or that because it would conflict with her incest survivors' support group. The need was to tell everyone how much she needed that group and that she was a survivor of incest. BUT the group obviously hadn't helped her move past the horrific reality of incest because she still needed to point out her 'wound' when it wasn't relevant to the conversation. She could easily have said, 'No, I can't do that date' without the additional information.

Wounds re-invent themselves too. Whatever weakened your psyche in childhood will return again and again. My classic and all-embracing wound was called 'nothing I do works' and came along because no matter what I did, I couldn't heal my mother and I wanted to, desperately.

She gave me a clue (which I missed - duh!) when I did a talk for a society of which she was a member years ago. It was a talk on healing and afterwards someone said to her, in my hearing, 'you must be very proud of your daughter' and she replied, 'yes, the only person she can't heal is me.'

Which, come to think of it as I am now, was probably a bit of a barb too!

Anyway, it repeated and repeated in a subtle way even though I've had an amazing life, travelled round China, worked in radio and TV, written more than a dozen books, been ordained, become a professional stand-up comedian etc. etc. But there have been times when it counted when something that really should have worked simply didn't. Lots of times. That was where what Eckhart Tolle would call 'the pain body' said, 'let's make sure Maggy gets taken down a peg or two.'

So what a classic opportunity for this demon (and it is an inner demon) to come up when I was diagnosed with lymphoma: 'Gosh, look, Maggy. All your holistic and spiritual lifestyle, your teaching, your books and your ordination has led to is this, therefore, you must be the biggest fraud on the planet.' Tie that to my learned 'wound' that chemotherapy had killed Henry and we can really get some humiliation going for Maggy, can't we just?

But humiliation and humility are, oddly enough, uncomfortable bedfellows. Embrace the latter and you get off the cross. Hold the former and you'll hang there, dying but not dead, for as long as it takes.

I have a friend on Facebook (not you Mel!) who is still hanging on the cross of her lost baby. Now that's a terrible, terrible, genuine wound and at the moment she needs to reinforce it with every post. But it's more than five years ago and she's re-inflicting it on herself with every sad reference. She's crucifying herself because she daren't let go.

I think I've posted before that my ex-husband left me once but through my hurt pride I made him leave me a thousand times in my thoughts.

So my job here, is to get off the cross of not managing to heal myself holistically when so many others have; to get off the cross of chemo having killed Henry, and to get off the cross of the obsession that the doctors around him were culpable in not seeing that in time. That was then, this is now. Chemo saved my life so I can never again agree with anyone else's wounds that it's wrong or evil. I can't even blame big pharma any more - both of which are big crosses to get off, dammit!

But get off them I must. I have to say, every time, 'I don't know.' I don't know. I only know what worked for me. And I'm glad and grateful that it did. That's my resurrection.

I'm also sure that's what Jesus came to show us: not that we should be 'Christians' and worship him, but that we must follow his example so that when we are being strung up for no discernible reason whatsoever, we can have the humility to say 'so be it' and to forgive (which means 'to give up that which went before' - not to condone).

We can't get off immediately - of course we must grieve and work through the pain and the problem - and yes that can take a year or two, maybe even three. And there will probably be times forever when the original pain still kicks us. But if the wound needs to be re-expressed in virtually every conversation after a couple of years, then there simply has to be part of us holding on to the problem. Yes, you can join a campaign to make sure 'it' never happens again. But do that from a place of healing, not a place of woundology. It's much, much more powerful that way too.

That, for me, is the whole big picture behind Jesus's crucifixion and resurrection. As Dolly Parton said, 'get off the cross; somebody could use the lumber.'

While You See a Chance, Take It.

It's twenty five years ago this weekend since my first husband, Henry Barley died. We were married for one year and sixteen days and I have no regrets.

Henry married me because of a hedgehog. I married him because of the recording artist, Steve Winwood.

I had long been cunning in my resistance to marriage, while believing all along that I wanted it. That contradiction was almost certainly inspired by watching my parents’ years of mutual unhappiness and sitting at the joy-free table of Sunday lunch where, no matter how good the food (and it was, it was!) there was constant emotional indigestion in the air. With middle-class angst, too much puppy fat and enough training in not showing off to make me dull as ditchwater, I believed no one worth

having would want me. I didn’t realise that my strategy of falling in love only with those who were unavailable was also an effective defence. I can’t say the men I languished over were commitment-phobes; most of them were seriously committed — committed that is to steam engines, amateur dramatics, their own reflection or their wife.

And yet, one day, at the ripe old age of 32, I found myself in the far reaches of China, being proposed to by an ordinary, unassuming, perfectly pleasant, grey-haired man, nine years my senior, whom I’d met just seven days before. He had never even kissed me and I’d not looked at him twice — apart from asking him to lend me the money to buy a live hedgehog which someone had bought at a market and was taking home for supper. I hired a taxi to take me out into the country to release the hedgehog back in the wild and Henry offered to come with me in total amazement at what daft and soppy things this woman was prepared to do.

We were in the north east of Jilin Province to make a television documentary and he had just been out late that night to record something known as ‘wild track’ — ambient sound for editing into the film.

I heard him come in at about 9pm and took him a mug of cocoa, because I was nice, that’s all. I’d have done it for any of the crew. It was sub-zero outside; there was no heating in the hostel and I’d travelled in China for long enough in the 1980s to know that sachets of hot chocolate were a survival aid, not a luxury. You could activate them with the constantly-present thermos of hot water left in every room for the ubiquitous tea.

I didn’t fancy Henry a bit, that honour was currently reserved for the (married of course) production manager.

 Politely, I knocked on his door and waited.

He opened it, looked understandably surprised; accepted the metal mug and asked me in.

I went, diffidently. He asked me some questions about myself and indicated that I should sit down so I perched politely on the end of the single bed.

He said ‘thank you for the cocoa.’ And then said something weird that my brain threw into the trash bin before it could be presented to my consciousness. Something about the rest of his life.

I said, ‘What?’

‘I’m asking you to marry me,’ he said.

In north-east China in 1988, there were no mobile phones, no email, no social networks, not even normal telephones which I could have used to bolster up my defences by phoning a friend. I was as far out of my comfort zone as I possibly could be, filming a TV documentary with a herd of strangers who expected me to know what I was doing when I didn’t. I was cold, tired, terrified, disorientated, lost, lonely and out of barriers.

So I said, ‘Perhaps.’ That was because I was nice. It seemed rude to say ‘You must be out of your tiny mind!’ to someone who was either being very kind or who genuinely was out of their tiny mind.

‘Excuse me, I have to go now,’ I added, politely and got up.

He nodded, smiled and opened the door for me.

Yes, I did look back down the corridor when I got to my room to see if he was watching me. He wasn’t.

I didn’t have any experience of marriage proposals and I was more perplexed than anything. I slept perfectly well until about 6am and then was wide-awake for no obvious reason. It wasn’t the light; that morning was dull and overcast. It wasn’t the birdsong; you don’t get birdsong when the local population has eaten all the birds. I had politely eaten sparrows on many previous visits to China though I never managed to cope with sucking the out their brains bit which was, according to my interpreter, a delicacy.

It was murky and cold so I clambered into every layer of clothing I could find and went out, as bulky as the Michelin Man, for a walk in the birches and aspens of Jilin Province. We were filming at a forestry railway at Shan He Tung and staying in temporary rooms that the lumbermen and railwaymen used while they were chopping trees, replanting and extending the line. There was no town nearby so supper and breakfast had been brought up with us on the narrow gauge train; it was a wonderful excuse for our hosts to banquet and drink though we had all (at my warning) been very careful not to drink much of the firewater they call Mau Tai which could blow half your brain out without a detonator.

It was only very early autumn but already the trees were mottled with gold and we were high enough for the sun to be rising across the valley below me. It was not going to be a particularly dramatic sunrise; there was too much cloud and the sky was dull grey rather than silver. I walked, my mind full of that day’s filming and whether, as a first-time documentary director, I would be able to continue to fool the rest of the crew that I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t thinking about Henry’s proposal — in the cold light of day, that was plainly ridiculous. But I did have my Walkman on, mostly because the aforementioned lack of birdsong was rather depressing.

Once I was warm enough, I stopped walking and sat down on a log to watch the dawn. I changed the cassette and the introduction to the first track of the often-listened-to Arc of a Diver by Steve Winwood began to sound in my headphones.

I put the previous cassette in the pocket of my anorak. And, as I did, I kid you not; a tiny sunbeam broke from the dark clouds and flowed across the fingers holding the cassette recorder. As I looked down at the unexpected warmth, it began to expand, widening until the light shone right into my eyes, making me screen them with my hand.

I stood up, the better to see the emerging dawn and, as I did, Steve began to sing:

‘Stand up in a clear blue morning, until you see what can be. Alone in a cold day dawning, are you still free? Can it be?

‘When some cold tomorrow finds you; when some sad old dream reminds you; how the endless road unwinds you. While you see a chance take it. Find romance, fake it. Because it's all on you.’

‘It’s not a clear, blue morning,’ said the critic. ‘You couldn’t be that stupid!’ it added as my thoughts turned to Henry Barley, still asleep in the basic accommodation below. But I knew, I knew that Nemesis had found me. I knew that I would go back down that hill and say ‘yes’ to marriage to a man I barely knew and certainly didn’t love. It was time. It was time to surrender: to learn how to love a real human being and to learn how to be loved in return.

Henry died one year and six days after our wedding — on 16th February 1990. It was a wonderful time for the first six months and a terrible time for the second after he received a terminal diagnosis. Those last months, a time when we were still falling in love, were gruelling as he suffered with malignant melanoma and finally died from chemotherapy. But even so, I have no regrets. I learnt how to love and be loved and, when I was ready was able to be loved again. And I was able to be there for the last year of a wonderful man's life to make sure that it was filled with love and as much happiness as possible. 

Here's Steve's song in full on YouTube.