1968: The Year I Came of Age

It's fifty years ago this week that the second French Revolution didn't quite happen. May 1968 is remembered as the month when students brought France to a standstill. Their protests caught on across the nation and beyond. That month felt as though it could be a watershed in the political and social life of Europe.

Those caught up in the événements came to be called soixante-huitards, 1968-ers. Perhaps I can just about lay claim to that title. I was in France in the first half of 1968 between leaving school and going to university. It was a long way from Paris to the orphanage where I was working in southern France. In the rural uplands of the Ardèche, beautiful but impoverished, what went on in the capital felt like another world. It was only when working people started striking in solidarity that it began to feel real. I recall cycling over the main line from Paris to Marseille. With no trains running, the tracks were already rusting over. That's when it hit me that it doesn't take much to bring normal life to a halt.

I was born in 1950, and had my eighteenth birthday in France (a big rite of passage, your first birthday alone in a strange land). I was not quite an adult because the age of legal majority in the UK was only reduced to eighteen on 1 January 1970. Technically I became a grown up at an Adrian Mole kind of age, nineteen and three quarters. Nevertheless, looking back fifty years I see how formative those months in France were, this threshold between childhood and adulthood. It was the first time I had lived away from home. I had left school. I was financially independent (earning the princely sum of ten new francs a week - but with full board and lodging, there was not a lot to spend your money on in this deep countryside). I was speaking a foreign language. I was walking tall. Not yet legally adult, but then not not-adult either.

In that liminal place, I obscurely admired the students at Nanterre who, protesting against being policed by the university authorities, claimed the right to have sex with their partners in their own bedrooms. To me as a devout evangelical Christian, this seemed not so much to be about sex (God forbid!) as taking responsibility for their own lives as grown-up human beings. This was precisely the personal path I was navigating myself. I now know of course, how the events of May 1968 were a confused concatenation of ideals and causes, some ideals more noble than others, some causes lost from the outset. Historians will argue about that for decades. But that they coalesced around a generalised dis-ease with hierarchical rule and authoritarian control is a plausible reading of that spring. The Fifth Republic certainly felt the shock-waves: it was never closer to the brink of collapse than it was in May and June 1968. And maybe postwar France came of age - or thought it did - as a result.

I was a late developer when it came to political awareness. The "never had it so good" days of the late 50s and early 60s didn't encourage radical questioning among most middle-class baby-boomer kids. I'd briefly woken up to the reality of world events in 1962 with the Cuba Missile Crisis. But in my teenage years, my conversion to conservative evangelical Christianity took over my life. Politics took a back seat and never got anywhere near the front of my consciousness. (When I was visiting schools in connection with the EU Referendum campaign two years ago, I was heartened to find how politically engaged so many teenage students are today compared with then.).

But in France in the spring of 1968, politics was impossible to ignore. Which was important at that stage of my personal development. A few months later I went up to Oxford. The spirit of Nanterre was alive and well that first academic year. The Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students (ORSS) famously besieged All Souls College in protest against the privileged academic life symbolised by its emblematic plum pudding. In my college (Balliol), ORSS students daubed the senior common room with revolutionary slogans in red paint to mark a visit by Ted Heath. They marched along Broad Street carrying placards demanding "Prove there are no files!" which provided the agenda for a tutorial on linguistic philosophy I was having with Anthony Kenny at the time.

It was a long time ago. But in important ways that era influenced me. I was not altogether conscious of it at the time - far from it. But more and more as I look back, I realise how formative the late 1960s were when "revolution" was the metaphor being claimed in so many areas of life and endeavour: politics, theology, education, art and culture. It wasn't so much a case of "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" as Wordsworth said of his own revolutionary times. But I couldn't fail to warm to the soixante-huitard mantra, "Be realistic. Ask for the impossible!" with its blend of radical questioning and witty sense of paradox. 1968 in France had its ugly side. But in its best moments it had a lightness of touch as well.

For Philip Larkin, 1963 was the year (when "life was never better than...."). For me it was 1968 that was the watershed in my journey towards adulthood. To be in France and be a back-row witness of what happened there that year gave me insights that have, I think, been profoundly important for the rest of my life. It taught me (or began to) not to accept the status quo but critically to test assumptions, ask questions of people who have (or claim) authority, not be afraid of argument, go back to the sources of established political, intellectual or theological standpoints. It made me into a liberal - even if it has taken a lifetime to understand what thaword means. But I believe I glimpsed, even then, that Christian faith is fundamentally liberal in the sense of being generous, inclusive and exploratory. For it calls us not to be enslaved to entrenched positions but to become questioners of the environment we live in, as Jesus himself abundantly demonstrated. That's the kind of Christianity I've tried to practise as a disciple and as a preacher.

Which is why I'm glad - proud even - to be a Soixante-Huitard. I now recognise how much I was shaped by that liminal year. The fact that we are still talking about what happened fifty years later shows that its historical importance continues to be felt. And if I am typical, then it's not just societies that have been influenced by it, but individuals too.

Last Words from France: a rite of passage

Well, these are possibly not my last words ever from France, a country I have loved since childhood. But for the time being. This summer we went to our beloved hill-top town of Vézelay for one final visit. We have sold the little house I inherited seventeen years ago near the Basilica. Why did we decide to part with it? It seemed like the right time. In retirement it becomes necessary to simplify things.

But there's no denying the sense of loss. Not least the associations it came to acquire of peacefulness, spirituality and retreat, happy memories of family holidays, rites of passage it had been present to in our lives like the marriages of our children, the births of our grandchildren, our retirement, the breaking news of family deaths, the preparation for their funerals. When say farewell to a house you have had a long connection with (in this case, longer than any other I've known), things become charged with symbolism. To take a final cup of coffee in such familiar surrounding, switch off the lights, turn off the boiler, shut the front door, lock it for the last time, get into the car and drive away - what significance those everyday actions suddenly acquire!

I've blogged about Vézelay before. So I won't write about the landscapes of northern Burgundy, its Christian history, the golden limestone churches that adorn the villages, the wines (of course) and our life in the village. But let me say something about the Basilica where we have worshipped so often, and in particular, a carving just outside the north door that seems to me to symbolise life's transitions, not least how we let go, lay aside and travel into a new and unknown future.

The marvellous Basilica of the Madeleine that crowns the hill is one of the treasures of Romanesque architecture in Europe. It is to France what Durham Cathedral is to England, an incomparable masterpiece. In the middle ages pilgrims flocked here both to reverence the relics of Mary Magdalen (long story, that) and to set off on the Camino to Compostela. After the Revolution it been allowed to fall into decay. It was fortunate to find in Viollet le Duc a gifted young architect who set about restoring it - a major commission that brought him fame, fortune and some critical opprobrium too.

The west front was so decayed that much of it had to be completely rebuilt. So only one of the original Romanesque sculptures remains visible on the outside. But that single survivor on the south door jamb of the north portal is highly significant. It depicts Jacob struggling with the angel in the famous story in Genesis.

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?”“Jacob,” he answered. Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”  Jacob said, “Tell me your name, I pray.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”  (Genesis 32.22-30 NRSV). 

It's a mysterious story with many layers of meaning. But the symbolism of placing the sculpted capital right next to the church door helps explain it. It is clearly about travelling across a threshold, facing the risks and uncertainties of transition and liminality. Jacob is facing a journey and an encounter that he knows will be crucial in his life. He needs to be reconciled to his brother Esau from he stole both his birthright and his inheritance. He is all alone, and frightened of this imminent meeting that could prove to bring with it great suffering, even death. The awful journey through water in the dead of night, his struggle with the nameless adversary, his emerging as the sun rose with a new name to mark a new identity, and a limp to remember the ordeal - it all speaks of a rite of passage from one stage of life to the next. Interpret it as you will: Jacob facing his demons and (partially) overcoming them, or encountering God in all his numinous mystery and grace (or both of these) - it is one of the most powerful narratives in the Bible.

The sculpted capital and its story came to mean a lot to me in that final week in our house not many metres down the hill. I kept going back to it to contemplate it and photograph it (difficult to do because it stands, literally and figuratively, at the junction of light and shadow). While not comparing myself to Jacob-Israel, I recognised that even a little rite of passage like saying goodbye to a place and the home you have made there is still an ordeal to be faced up to and travelled across. I guess that it felt significant partly because saying goodbye to my working life as a priest, closing the door of the Deanery at Durham and walking away from the Cathedral and all that it stood for in my life was - still is - all very recent. Just as one bereavement triggers memories of others, so it is with saying farewell to a place and its people and the home you have made there and the friends you have got to know.

And, I have to say, getting on the ferry and leaving France behind did feel like our own personal Brexit. It wasn't of course, and still isn't now that we are back in Britain. But there's no denying that it was often on our minds during our summer on the hill. We frequently discussed it with both French and British friends, the latter mostly expats living in Burgundy, far from certain what the future after Brexit will mean for them. One of them told us about their son's recent visit to the UK in his (French) car. On parking it in a place he knows well in England (I'd better not say where), he realised that his French number plates had drawn attention to the car, and that he was being subjected to a volley of booing and hissing. Is this the generous decent country we were brought up in, the England that has shaped and nurtured us? - that was the unspoken thought. The Referendum was itself a rite of passage for Britain and for Europe, for all of us however we voted, I thought as I gazed on Jacob and the angel. And we have emerged on the other side unhealed, limping badly, more broken than we were before, not with a hope-filled sunrise to walk into but a gloomy sunset to walk away from as it gets dark.

Ah well. We are where we are, in a truly liminal place. But whatever our future in Europe, we are grateful to have glowing memories of our Burgundian adventure to bring with us. On our last day, I wrote to the Mairie and to the Jerusalem brothers and sisters whose spiritual home the Basilica is, to thank them for these wonderful years in Vézelay. It will always have a special place in our hearts. Adieu. And Deo gratias!
 

Liminal Times: a Nunc Dimittis?

The talk is all of comings and goings. Today one prime minister leaves office, another takes his place. Doors open for some and close for others. We are living in liminal times.

But this is always true of life, however little attention we normally give the thresholds we cross. Yesterday, when pundits were all over the media assessing David Cameron's stewardship as prime minister and speculating about Theresa May's, I went to London to see my ageing mother. It's been distressing to watch her suffering in the past few weeks. It began with her being urgently admitted to hospital. Then, when we and she all thought she was well enough, she went to a nursing home nearby. After a few days there was another crisis and she was back in the hospital again, on the same ward she had left the previous week. The nurses were pleased to see her back: "we so loved Dorothea" they said. It was touching. You could tell it was sincere.

She is a lot weaker than she was. Most of the time she is asleep. There is no pain and no discomfort as far as we can tell. When she is awake she is completely lucid, knows exactly where she is and why. But she and we all recognise the truth. As they say, it's simply a matter of time now.

However, yesterday something rather wonderful happened.

My daughter met me off the train: she was spending a couple of days in London in connection with her work and had taken Madeleine her 7 month daughter with her. We fought our way on to a bus (how hard life is in London when you are dependent on wheels, whether buggies or wheelchairs). It seems that Madeleine has enjoyed her time in the capital, stimulated by its bustle and activity. We got off near the hospital and walked up the hill, uncertain about what we would find. The sky was overcast and it was beginning to rain.

In the ward, my sister had already arrived. My mother was asleep and did not look likely to waken any time soon. We waited. Life went on around us. Doctors and nurses came and went. Screens were drawn round beds, then undrawn. A man was shouting in some distress down the corridor. Our granddaughter was quite content to take in the new sights and sounds and scents of a hospital ward, not having been in one since her own delivery last December.

Then, after a bit of nudging, my mother opened her eyes. She saw Madeleine who was looking directly at her. There was what I can only call an epiphany, a transfiguring recognition. An old and tired face came alive with a radiant smile. There was laughter in her eyes, and the hint of tears. "How lovely" she said, "how lovely!" and gazed at the great-granddaughter she had never met till that moment. And Madeleine smiled back. It was as if the clouds had been rolled back and the sun had come out. In that recognition scene, a corner of a hospital ward seemed luminous with peace, joy and love.

So much of human life seemed to be squeezed into those few minutes. For a brief while there was a constellation of four generations in that intimate space. If Madeleine lives to my mother's age their years will have spanned nearly two centuries. "Here's your line of descent" said my daughter to her. It wasn't fanciful to see my mother's strong Jewish features traced in the baby's face. The last time we gathered round a hospital bed like this was thirty years ago when we said farewell to my grandmother, my mother's mother. She was about the same age my mother is now. My children were small. There was talk then, I recall, of passing the family likeness down the distaff side.

What was going through my mind during this Proustian experience by the bedside, this beautiful and poignant encounter between the very old and the very young, between a long life nearing its end and one that has hardly begun?

Inevitably, it was the picture painted by St Luke near the beginning of his gospel. When Joseph and Mary bring the infant Jesus to the temple to be "presented", the holy family are received by two elderly frequenters of the temple, Simeon and Anna. Who knows how old Simeon is, but Anna, we are told, is 84. Simeon gathers up the infant in his arms and blesses him. He has seen what he has lived and longed to see: the child in whom his hope and the hope of all nations rests. "Lord, now you let your servant go in peace." He can die fulfilled and - we can presume - happy. They both can - for why mention Anna at all unless she too is caught up in this meeting of age with infancy?

I don't say that it was necessarily my mother's Nunc Dimittis. Who knows? But something in my waters tells me that this was a final as well as a first meeting with her great-granddaughter, a valediction as well as a welcome. Ave atque vale. I could be wrong. I would love to be, as long as she is comfortable and free of pain and in her right mind. She has surprised us all her life, probably surprised herself for not only surviving the Nazi holocaust that should have meant extinction but living long enough to see her children's children's children. 

But it did seem that we were poised on the edge of a threshold at a profoundly liminal point in all our lives. Everything felt slowed down in one of those rare experiences when the present moment is transformed into a glowing sacrament that transcends time and place. I believe my mother felt it that way. So if this should be an end as well as a beginning, if one door is soon to close as another has just opened, I need to remember how it could not have been more beautiful, nor more filled with the presence of God. In these two cherished faces from either end of life, and in the love that flowed between them, Gerard Manley Hopkins' words became true for me:

For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father, through the features of men's faces.

My mother was right. "How lovely!"

Retirement: report from the Third Age front line.

I'll take a short break from writing blogs about the EU. This is the sixth month of my new life in retirement. When I started blogging under this new Woolgathering brand, I promised (threatened) updates from the front line of the Third Age from time to time. So here goes.

When we left Durham Cathedral in early October, it was in the afterglow of a marvellous farewell. You live off these heart-warming events for a long time: they are always with you. It was hard to leave behind such a uniquely beautiful place with its rich spirituality and wonderfully genuine community. But we landed happily across the hill in the South Tyne Valley. Haydon Bridge has proved to be a great village to retire into and become part of. We soon felt at home in a welcoming community, the parish church across the road and the lovely landscapes of Northumberland that we can walk from our own front door.

When you first retire, it's like being on holiday. You're full of expectations, keenly aware of the gift, as it feels to begin with, of lots of time to call your own. To enjoy your family, fresh air, music, books, photography, yes and social media, and not have to feel guilty about it (even if I'm tempted to) still feels like a decidedly odd feature of this new life. But I have also been aware of how tired I have felt and how long it takes to slough it off. I guess that's not surprising after forty years of working life. Others who've trodden this path before me have said it just needs time.

A colleague who came to see us recently asked if I had any "projects" in retirement. I've thought about this a lot. The almost universal advice at first was: don't make grand plans and big commitments early on. Don't make undertakings you might later want to get out of. Think carefully about what you would like to do in retirement. I've tried to do this. It's helped to keep a journal to soliloquise to and try ideas out on. I began it six months before retiring, and intend to keep it going until six months afterwards. It's a great help as I try to retire in a reflective way, and not find myself jolted roughly from one kind of life into another. Going into retirement is like coming up after a deep underwater dive. If you surface too quickly, you risk getting the bends. That as we know is highly risky.

One of the things that's become clear is that while I certainly want to be useful to the church and wider community, I don't want to spend however many years I am granted before I die simply perpetuating my working life by doing more of the same. I want to explore new involvements and learn new things. I'm especially keen to put something back into North East England, the region that has given so much to us over the years. So I'm having conversations around the place to see what possibilities there might be. We shall see. It's a discernment process, as important as it was when I first explored my vocation to ordained ministry. And at times, as unclear and as puzzling. And certainly a matter for prayer.

All this may sound as though these first few months have been placid and uneventful. Far from it. In December, our second grandchild was born, Madeleine, a sister for Isaac. Two days later we were hit by Storm Desmond. The village suffered badly as the normally benign South Tyne became a ferocious torrent tearing through peoples' homes. Our cellar was flooded to a depth of six feet, writing off the new and expensive biomass boiler we had just installed there. Without power and hot water, we were out of the house for nearly a fortnight. Wonderful neighbours who hardly knew us took us in. The support and kindness we found in the village were deeply moving. I won't pretend it didn't feel like a devastating crisis just when we had settled into our new home and were enjoying living in it. We learned then that there's no better way to arrive in a new community than to lay on a disaster. You make friends extraordinarily quickly!

Life has stabilised since then. The rains have subsided and the cellar is dry again. A new boiler is being constructed in the garage. We have got back to a rhythm of life: going across to church for weekday morning prayer, shopping in Hexham and attending evensong in the Abbey each week, frequent walks on the fell above the village, and a little further afield by Hadrian's Wall, listening to Radio 3 for most of the day other than when it's time for The Archers, meeting up with friends we're lucky enough to have nearby, and a lot of reading. (I've been working through Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire novels and loving them; currently well into The Small House at Allington with just The Last Chronicle to go. He is a great novelist and so easy to read - on which I feel another blog coming on soon.)

Meanwhile, the EU referendum has become an all-consuming agenda item. If you follow this blog, you'll know that a short time ago I launched "Christians for the EU" with its Twitter handle @Xians4EU. My hope was to stimulate thought and debate about a Christian case for the UK to stay in the European Union, something that I believe in with all my heart. It's taking up a large amount of time, and the official campaign hasn't even begun yet! But I've learned a great deal by the research I've needed to do, and have been glad that our efforts have been noticed by the national media. I couldn't have done this a year ago when I was still in office, not primarily because it might not have been appropriate to, but for the more pressing reason that I would never have found the time.

It all sounds very pleasant, I hear you say, and yes, it is. But there's this nagging question about what my life is now meant to be for. I blogged a few months ago about the dilemma of how to describe myself when people ask what it is I do. I said I didn't want to be an imperfect man (past continuous: 'I used to be a Cathedral dean'), nor an aorist man (past and done with: 'I practised as a priest in the C of E'). Maybe a perfect man (past tense with present consequences: 'I've been an ordained minister in theological education, parish and cathedrals and here's what I've become now').

But best of all, I'd like to be someone living in the present and even the future tense ('this is what I am, and what I hope to become'). I'm reticent about using the R-word because that seems to be haunted by those past tenses. As Kierkegaard said, life has to be lived forwards and understood backwards. Retirement is certainly time to seek understanding, reflect on the past and draw the threads of a life together. But it's now and tomorrow that I need to keep in view if I am to remain truly alive in any sense that matters. What, who, am I in this new stage of my life? That's the question. A writer? Speaker? Photographer? EU campaigner? Priest? Dilettante? Couch potato?

This, I guess, is an aspect of the spirituality of retirement. I said it was work in progress. But I firmly believe it is opus dei, the work of God. Liminal time at a threshold makes for strange days and mysterious ways. But "God is his own interpreter and he will make it plain".