Half-Term at Haydon: Isaac comes to stay

In other news, our 6 year old grandson Isaac has spent half-term with his grandparents here in Haydon Bridge. You’ll forgive me for laying aside the serious stuff I usually blog about. He has gone home today and we are missing him. The house is suddenly very quiet again.

It was an important week for him and for us. These were his first ever nights away from his parents. Would he lose his nerve about it at the last minute? Would he be overcome with homesickness while he was here? Would he cope with Halloween without his friends and neighbours to trick or treat? Would he sleep and eat properly? How would we fill the time? These were grown-up anxieties of course, not his. But they made us realise how out of practice we were at caring full-time for a youngster. It was as much a rite of passage for us as for him.

When I went to Leeds to pick him up, I knew I needn’t have worried. He was up for this great adventure. We spent most of the train journey talking about railways. He has obsessed about railways ever since he was a toddler. We looked at images of Mallard and Flying Scotsman in his steam loco magazine. We looked out for “Opa’s Train” on the East Coast Main Line (i.e. the Class 91 electric loco 91114 named Durham Cathedral which has my name on the cab door). He was quiet for a bit while he ate his sandwiches. I wondered what he was thinking about? The memory of saying goodbye to his parents and little sister perhaps? Or the prospect of being special for the week, having the undivided attention of his Nana and Opa?

We’ve had a great week. There was Shaun of the Sheep - Farmageddon at the Forum Cinema. The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle provided interactive Roman history and railwayana. We visited no fewer than three soft play centres - at Carlisle, Haltwhistle and Hexham. Isaac is confident and good at socialising, so he quickly finds friends to play with at these places. And it’s reading time for us adults. He came to the Oxfam book shop where I volunteer and enjoyed the novel sight of my struggling with the till to process his purchases (which included DVDs chosen for his sister and cousin: I was touched by his kindness, even if he looked expectantly at us to find the cash).

What else? We watched You Tube movies of Thomas and Friends and of sophisticated trains created out of Lego - another favourite activity of his). I read him Ronald Dahl’s Witches at bedtime, suitable literature for Halloween week (a funny, intriguing book - but a bit on the misogynistic side, I thought). He has a wicked sense of humour. Irony is going to be his forte one day, I think. He dressed up for Halloween, put a pumpkin in the window and enjoyed the comings and goings on the street. The level crossing in sight of our house was a reliable source of pleasure (thank you, Northern Rail and the RealTime Trains app). He was out of bed by dawn each morning, but we set him up with croissants and juice, and he was fine. We asked him for feedback on the week (quality of accommodation, meals, entertainment etc., with the options “good”, “very good” and “fantastic”). We did all right on the whole.

One of the nicest moments was at a soft play. A young parent came up to us and said, “That’s such a lovely polite boy you have there. You don’t often see behaviour like that these days.” This took us by surprise, not because it isn’t true (it is) but because it was unsolicited. That’s a big tribute to his own parents, of course, our daughter and her husband. And it made me realise how respectful Isaac was being during his time with us. He is no goody two-shoes, thank God, but he does say please and thank you, and at 6 o’clock in the morning bothers to knock on the bedroom door with “I’m sorry to wake you up but...”. Winsome. Endearing. Delightful.

We are lucky enough to be enjoying a retirement in which we have time to give our three colourful, talented, much-loved grandchildren Gabriel, Maddy and Isaac. As most grandparents discover, this is somewhat different from the memory of caring for our own children when they were at that age. The responsibility is bounded for one thing: there comes a time when you have to give your grandchildren back to their parents, and this affects the quality of the time we spend with them. Then there’s the fact that grandparents are at an altogether different life-stage from where we were when our children were young.

Then (and I’m aware this is a middle-class-professional’s perception), family time was heavily contested by the demands of the day job. My children are candid about how difficult I found it to be truly present to them when they were growing up. I wish I had been better at it. I really do. Grandchildren are not given to us as a second chance to make a better job of it - they are human beings in their own right who are growing up in a world in many respects very different from the one in which we tried to be good enough parents thirty or forty years ago. Our children have to bear the consequences of the mistakes we made in our parenting, and we have to live with the memory. The miracle is that mostly, they survive and flourish, despite as well as because of us. And that they seem able to forgive us.

But grandchildren do offer us the opportunity to reprise what should have been among the best experiences of our lives if we have been entrusted with the gift of children. For now, with the wisdom of years, we can try to give back something of what we have so abundantly received, and continue to receive, from those who love us. This came home to me not so much when we were enjoying outings or engaging in projects but in the quotidian uneventfulness of ordinary time: moments when we were content simply to be together whether it was at mealtimes, walking along to the village shops or reading to him at bedtime. Gone was that feeling I remembered so well that there was always something else I ought to be doing: a list of admin jobs to be tackled, a meeting to get to, parishioners to visit, sermons to write.

“What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin in his enigmatic poem. “They are to be happy in. Where we live but days?” It would be easy to project on to our grandchildren a kind of prelapsarian innocence and happiness that in adulthood we realise is lost to us. Was it ever like that? Even the best childhood is not without its shadows and its pain. Maybe our grandchildren can help us reconnect with our own childhood, not the rhapsodic dreamlike fantasy but the more ambivalent reality where the troubles of growing up are as keenly felt as the joy of being alive?

Our grandchildren are not there to heal our memories. But to be truly present to them, cherish them for the human beings they already are, love them as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, learn how to listen and laugh and cry with them - all this is profoundly healing. It would be wrong to indulge the purple prose. It’s fatally easy to sentimentalise when writing about children. So I won’t pretend we haven’t worked hard this half-term, that there weren’t challenges we had to face. But I think I’ve glimpsed in a new way how life is pure gift. Growing old and becoming grandparents has a lot to commend it. “I love you so much” Isaac whispered when the time came to say goodbye. Heart speaking to heart when the words ran out.

It meant a lot that his parents entrusted him to us for these days away. God willing there will be many more weeks like this one for Isaac, and in time, for Maddy and Gabe. Meanwhile, we shall get used to the quiet once again. And look forward to catching up on our sleep.

Advent Jottings: fear, tenderness and hope

It's been a strange Advent for us here in Haydon Bridge. Our first Advent in retirement was always going to be a bit different after 40 years of ministry. Factor in the birth of a grandchild and a deluge that flooded our home within a few days and the season has become something of a drama.

Our village and personal crises have made me think in fresh ways about what Advent means. A 'crisis', literally, is a 'judgment'. Along with death, hell and heaven, judgment is one of Advent's great words, the second of the traditional four last things. It's easy to think of it as meaning that challenges and ordeals are sent as a judgment upon us. Well, maybe they are. I don't mean in the simplistic sense that they are somehow deserved: Storm Desmond and the floods it caused are not about punishment or retribution. Absolutely not, any more than Job's ordeals or Jesus's suffering were the result of any wrong they had committed. 

But any crisis that hurts is a judgment on us in that it puts us under scrutiny, at least to ourselves and before God. It questions our attitude to life, our resilience, the strength of our hope. How will we respond? With self-pity and self-absorption: 'why has this happened to me?' Or with patience and perseverance: 'life is tough, and yes, unfair, but we are going to remain expectant and endure to the end by the grace of God'? The sheer volume of kindness and generosity the floods have released in this village have to me been wonderful signs of this gift of expectancy and endurance. They may not always have been linked to explicit faith in God's purpose. But they have been there. 

These clues about 'crisis' and how we respond to it belong to the heart of Advent. This season tests our belief in the grace of God and the ultimate goodness of things by offering to us the possibility of hope. I have often said in a lifetime of preaching that hope is the gift Christianity brings to an often despairing world. If we can only stay with the season long enough, it has a way of lifting our sights and stretching our horizons from the dismal prospect of endless human calamity to the larger vision of God's eternal heart of love. It does this, not by escaping the reality of crisis (as Christmas commercials want us to do) but by setting it within the big story of God's wise and loving purposes. 

This is where the birth of our granddaughter has been a glimpse of light in dark times. Madeleine was born in the first week of Advent and a few days later we had gone to meet her for the first time. That was the day before the flood. I always think that a newborn child recreates the image of the holy family. She was lying peacefully in her mother's arms, her exquisite face conveying a quality I can only describe as a kind of radiance. Her father and brother Isaac were proud and happy, and so were her grandparents. (Sorry about the descent into cliché: it would need a Thomas Traherne to do it justice.) 

Her memory was an important stabilising presence in the difficult days of flood that followed. But in conversation with my wife, and with our parish priest, I now see how it has helped illuminate Advent and Christmas, at least for me. In the middle of 'crisis', beset by fear and anxiety, this 'little tiny child' has been able to evoke tenderness and love. Her birth has been quietly redemptive. It has spoken of a present and a future that are full of the kind of trustful hope that puts human dread in its proper place. In the end, nothing could matter more than this miracle happening in human hearts and lives, our capacity to love and be loved and to glimpse in a baby's face something of that fourth and last Advent word, 'heaven'.

For me, the flood and the baby have seamlessly linked Advent to Christmas. It's not a case of lurching from the last things to the nativity, from crisis to consolation at the winter solstice. Rather, it's about seeing each in the light of the other. In asking us to prepare spiritually for Christmas, Advent, with its desire and longing is telling us about how love lies at the very centre of our destiny which is the focus of the last things. At Christmas we behold this holy Child as the ground of our being who moves the sun and the stars, the Alpha and the Omega, 'immensity contracted in a span'. He is the centre of all our hungers and hopes, and not only ours but the world's. 

Perhaps we wouldn't have recognised these hungers and hopes for what they are but for this precious birth. His coming, in answer to our Advent cry Veni Immanuel brings to our race the good news that we are loved. And it also evokes from us our own capacity to feel pity for a helpless infant, and because of that, to be tender towards God and love him in return. Is this why he had to come to us as a vulnerable baby? Pity, tenderness and love have a way of lighting up how we are with our fellow human beings, as our village has shown so abundantly in recent days. In humanity's capacity to be tender, in our ability to feel and to care lies the world's future. And in our human crisis, in the all too familiar world of cruelty and pain into which Jesus was born, that's the best discovery we could make. 

Happy Christmas (when it comes)!

The Floods: what I am learning

Famously, the flood is an age-old image of change. It's (forgive the allusion) a watershed; there is life before and life after. Whether it's the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Book of Genesis, The Mill on the Floss or The Nine Taylors, there is a sense of an ending, an antediluvian era that is swept away. What follows the flood will not be the same as it was before. This will be true for us, I think, here in Haydon Bridge where we have come to retire. Its waters, breaking their bounds so promiscuously in this riverine community, have touched us actually and symbolically. How could we not be changed as a result, at least in some ways?

I recall blogging about the terrible floods on the Somerset Levels two years ago. Then, I was a sympathetic bystander living hundreds of miles away, trying to enter into an experience that was not mine. Now it has become our own. I never expected that two months after moving into our home in Northumberland, we would be so suddenly ambushed by the colossal (and frightening) quantities of water that swept down from the North Pennines and inundated our village and other communities in the Tyne Valley. This was not quite how we had envisaged these first weeks of retirement in the run-up to Christmas. 'How do you make God laugh? You tell him of your future plans' quipped Woody Allen. That's become true for us in the past days. Our lives have been wrenched into directions we had not anticipated. 

Not that it was anything like as bad for us as it's been for others. If you read last week's blog, you'll know that the water in the cellar crept up the steps almost to ground level, but not quite. Others have seen their homes flooded for the second time in a decade. We went to visit one of them, a church member who lives on the other side of the bridge. Her house had the river rushing through it to dado height. She and her husband will not be back in it for six months. The roar of a dozen dehumidifiers were a noisy comment on the extent of their inundation. Over in Cumbria, as you know, it is worse still. Our hearts ache for the people we see on TV or read about in the papers.

There's an irony about Burswell House being flooded. It's probably named after a collier ship called the Burswell that was built on Tyneside. It went down in the North Sea in the 1880s. Our house was built the following decade, and was lived in by the pit manager at the nearby Bardon Mill colliery. After the ship had gone to its watery grave, its name was memorialised, either because the pit had a connection with it, or the manager had a personal link to someone on board. Burswell House has shipped a lot of water below, but she is still afloat, and her crew have lived to tell the tale. But there's another irony too, in that these dramas have been happening while the climate change talks have been taking place in Paris. Our biomass boiler and its supply of wood pellets, drowned by the flood, was our little commitment to living more ethically for the sake of the environment. Now it's the environment itself that has dramatically seen it off. But inspired by Paris, we hope to install another biomass, this time in a location where it is well above the water table.

It's easy, when you are hit by disaster, to let it fill your head and suppress everything else that matters, perhaps matters much more in the grand scheme of things. I am trying to stay present to what is happening in our world, to the lives and concerns of this community, and to our own family. On the day the storm rushed down on us, we were in Leeds meeting our new granddaughter for the first time. She is a perfect little baby and is bringing tidings of joy to her parents who have loved her into life, to Isaac her elder brother and to all of us who celebrate her coming. The memory of her beautiful, delicate, peaceful face has calmed and sustained me during this past week. 

And there is much else that is thoroughly good on our very doorstep. I'm learning that there is no better way of arriving in a new community than to engineer a big crisis. I said something about this in my last blog. People in our street, in the village, in the church community have been marvellous. We have been staying with generous neighbours two doors away, invited out for meals, been offered help, put in touch with those with specialist skills of many kinds. I spoke on local radio about this. I highlighted the role of the fire crews who have been on duty round the clock since the weekend. No tribute is adequate to do justice to their role in this and every other community affected. After this, the idea that our local fire station could be axed because of County Council cuts is, if you'll forgive another turn of phrase, dead in the water. For the good of West Tynedale, it's essential that we keep it. 

The significance of all this happening in Advent has not been lost on me as I have lain awake pondering it in recent nights. Traditionally in this season, we reflect on death, judgment, hell and heaven and try to regain the long view of things, God's view, in the light of the end towards which the cosmos is travelling. All four of these awesome realities have been present in my thoughts this Advent in ways more vivid than I've known before; present if not in my direct experience, then through the symbolism of what we have lived through. It's essential, when trouble strikes, to maintain a larger perspective. Local19th century Haydon Bridge artist John Martin, the famous painter of huge apocalyptic canvasses such as 'Sodom and Gomorrah' and 'The Great Day of His Wrath' would have risen to the occasion and helped us. His signature was the towering storm cloud and flash of lightning. His are paintings with a religious message that asks, as Advent asks, what is truly permanent in life? What is of enduring value? What survives the storm and deluge, actual or metaphorical? What ultimately matters? 

So our personal Advent and run-up to Christmas has included a flood and the birth of a baby, symbols of judgment and redemption, calamity and hope. Writ large, this is the daily experience of a world that is both beautiful and tragic. So there is plenty of scope for a rich spirituality of the season that comes directly out of our shared lived experience. Meanwhile, 'postmen go from house to house'. Trains rumble over the level crossing. Children saunter past the study window on their way to school. The church clock chimes the hours five minutes late. The dramas of life get played out and the season of Advent unfurls; yet ordinary time goes on. It's the way of things. God's way.