WED 1 NOV

I remember a poetry session in primary school. Write a poem about November. No sun. No moon.  November. It got pretty bleak pretty quickly. I actually love this time of year. Night walks around damp cold streets, indigo dusk. This time last year the idea of sleeping on our roof had just formed. I was sourcing a metal framed bed for £10 from Ebay and gathering the standard lamps to illuminate our rooftop eyrie. 

#Bombcycles. Cycles of violence. Irish MP Clare Daley says ‘A historic crime is unfolding in Gaza & the EU is in it up to its neck. MEPs sit & watch the slaughter & cannot even condemn it, calling it a "humanitarian crisis," as if it was caused by the weather.’  She cries out against the innate violence of the passive voice employed across our political and media class. A humanitarian crisis with no origin? No perpetrator? Acts of God, Force Majeure. Denying liability. Denying cause and effect. 

#Bombcycles. We prepare for the third named storm of the season coming to Western Europe with hurricane force winds.  Rupert Read, who 5 years ago co-founded Extinction Rebellion and now co-directs the Climate Majority Project, calls them by their true names: Storm Ciaran aka Storm Chevron.  Storm Babet aka Storm BP. The naming of severe storms impacting Europe began 9 years ago to aid in communication of extreme weather. To communicate their effects and not their cause.

Talking about the weather is a national tradition and obsession on these seasonal isles. Drawing on social anthropologist Kate Fox’s ‘Watching the English: The Hidden rules of English Behaviour’ there are clearly identified rules around this weather talk. We must be in agreement as this small talk acts as a form of social bonding. Countryside folklore mingled with the Christian calendar surrounded my childhood: ‘St Swithin's Day if thou dost rain, for forty days it will remain, St Swithin's Day if thou be fair, for 40 days 'twill rain nae mar”,“If Candlemas be fair and clear There’ll be two winters in one year.” A ’gleamy’ day of intermittent sunshine. A ‘foxy’ sunny freezing day. There is a whole wondrous vocabulary around the variations of weather, a connection with weather patterns and shifting seasons.

What happens when these patterns break down? Invading the chit chat that binds us. When you’re told ‘this is glorious isn’t it’ even when you’re thinking ‘we’re doomed, doomed I tell you’. When the ritualistic moaning about the rain continues even when it interrupts severe drought. When social etiquette is broken. When synapses do not connect.  Dissonance catches up. Talk about the weather but not about the climate. Talk about anything but what’s happening. Do not connect the dots to understand our weather in a global context. For heaven’s sake don’t make it political. The breakdown of continental ice sheets is not the accepted icebreaker.

And as seas and wind speeds rise our Government grant new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea whilst BP are among multiple firms awarded exploration licenses in Israel (The Times of Israel 29 Oct 2023)  or rather off the Gazan, Israel and Lebanese coastlines.  The Leviathan gas field. We’re back to scriptures again. Ancient stories justifying contemporary atrocities. From Hamas to Netanyahu. In the Book of Job the name Leviathan comes from the Hebrew Livyatan - to twist, turn, or coil. A monstrous embodiment of chaos. Narrative twisted to suit exploitation, extraction, extremism extermination.

Scriptures entranced and haunted my childhood.  A fundamentalism lurked beneath the Sunday School parables. A belief in the Word of God wherever that might take you or however that might be translated. The reply to my childhood question. “If you were Abraham and God asked you to sacrifice your child (me) would you?” Silence and a closing door.

 I try to understand the teenage me determined to study GCSE Religious Studies in a new school that didn’t offer it - in memory of the teacher who had introduced me to Buddhism, to non-violent resistance, to Schumacher’s ‘Small is Beautiful:A study of economics as if people mattered’ and who then proceeded to kill himself. 

Alongside this I had to or must have actually chosen to examine the Synoptic Gospels – the parallel accounts of the life of Jesus as told by Matthew, Mark and Luke. Proclaiming the good news. Telling the same stories but in different orders, with different details – needing to read them laterally, identifying and unravelling the literary enigma - a form of theological puzzle or fact and fiction checking considering plagiarism, evaluating sources, contemplating lost records and other forms of storytelling. A pretty complex introduction to and exercise in critical, questioning thinking.

My favourite story told by two of these and in varied form was the sermon on the mount/on the plain delivering the Beatitudes – a set of ideals focused on love and compassion –a proto manifesto for social justice often hijacked as a cloying validation of self-righteous fundamentalism. A blessing and a curse.

Blessed are the…..merciful, the poor in spirit, the pure in heart…

I had issues with blessed are the meek. My grandparents were servants – country folk come to work in the houses of the big city. This servility seemed to permeate life, consistent unquestioning respect for those in positions of power. It felt an excuse to remain subservient. I didn’t see the meek inheriting the earth, I saw them kicked off it. I did not want to submit to God’s or anyone else’s authority. My teen reading matter turned to Nietszhe and Camus, Lawrence and Sartre  – all doing their own form of eye-opening damage.

But in the church services I endured it was always the blessing that brought me home from daydreams for more than the fact it meant it was time to go home. There was the peace. ‘May peace be with you’. ‘And also with you’. Turning to strangers and offering these words and open hands.

The very word blessed has etymological origins in blood. How much more blood will be shed. How many more bloodlines eradicated as generations of family are killed in one day.  One beatitude stands out. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’  Peace making is work. Peace making is not passive. Peace is justice. Peace is not impossible. Though right now it seems it.