Sunday Morning

First of all, apologies to all who are still reading my blog for the ridiculously long time since I last posted. I've been caught up in other things, mainly making music. I seem to find it hard to keep up both music and writing equally, so either one or the other tends to suffer.

I'm just back from Mary Magdelen's church. It's an eccentric church, so it doesn't surprise me that I was drawn, via various links, to that one. The priest isn't exactly run of the mill, and the congregation - well, they're a motley crue of oddballs, eccentrics, underprivileged young people and addicts.

I rarely leave church without having shed at least a few tears. It's powerful on many levels, and some of those levels are in fact a strong sense of alienation from some of what Catholicism teaches and preaches. This, combined with quite an overwhelming sense of devotion and my heart feeling moved in ways it hasn't before, makes it potent and unsettling.

I was talking to a Buddhist friend last night about Catholicism, and he was talking about his views on the Christian God. In his mind, God is a powerful force, but one which is essentially still an other power, and therefore ultimately limited. On the other hand, in Buddhism, sunyata or emptiness, the Buddhist vision of reality, transcends all dualistic notions of self and other. Therefore, the notion of a God being somehow outside of ourselves, or something/someone to worship no longer makes sense within this Buddhist framework, because there is nothing to worship and no one to 'do' the worshipping. I guess that follows then that there is no sin, no sinner, no saviour, no heaven or hell.

However, I'm not so sure about this. To be honest, I don't think I've yet met a single person who seems to have transcended this 'dualistic' state of mind. And I think inevitably, even within Buddhist thinking, non-duality, like everything else becomes a concept, one we can talk about, even debate or argue over. It can become as clear in our minds as God can be to a Christian. Buddhists have their beliefs just as Christians have their beliefs, noble beliefs, I think, by which they can structure their lives, but I personally feel it is very hard to talk about such subtleties and mysteries of reality at all, and once I get into the realms of what my friend was talking about, I'm not entirely sure how relevant it is to me at this point in my life, or how easy it is to work out.

The sense I have during Holy communion, despite not even being able to take it myself, is of a power or spirit or divinity coming through. And yes, these terms, spirit or divinity and so on are limited in a way by their language of 'otherness'. But my personal experience of what one might call God has felt profound and mysterious, in some respects even more so than any experiences I've had through meditation. I've felt such a powerful element of surrender in Catholic Mass, and of something else stepping in which does not enter through one's own will or effort, but simply by being open to it. A force of love entering oneself, and purifying all that it comes into contact with.

I have said to some of my Catholic friends that my interest and intrigue in Catholicism has nothing to do with wanting to feel like I belong or needing a sense of community with others. I've already got that in my life in so many ways. I'm not looking to have a conversion, I've already had that when I first discovered Buddhism over twenty years ago. Some Catholics have said to me that when they came to Catholicism it was a coming home, and that they find supreme comfort in it. For me, I've felt like the last thing I want from Catholicism or any other spiritual path is to 'come home'. I'm more and more wandering away from 'home', away from the places I thought were the answer, because as soon as I feel like I've arrived, like I'm home, I get comfortable and want to put my feet up and stop searching. Once I think I know the answer, generally, I'm in danger of becoming a bit blinded. However, as I kneeled in church today on that hard wooden block, and Fr Ray lifted the bread high into the air and muttered, I realised that I'm not sure that this is totally true.

When Mum had this last stroke which brought her near death and has kept her in a perpetual near death state for the last year, nothing really could touch the vastness of that situation. And I wanted Buddhism to be the thing that came along and took hold of my grief and gave me a sense of something that could meet this huge event. And I guess, in some ways it did. But really, it was, by various turns of events, Catholicism that offered itself up and somehow met that need in me for something that could hold what was happening to my Mum, to my family and to me. It wasn't dwelling on sunyata that did it, it was experiencing God in some funny convent chapel with a load of eccentric nuns, next door to the house I grew up in. It was in the feeling that came upon me when I left church one evening and was walking down my street, that I was truly loved, and that this love was greater than anything I've been able to imagine before, which made me almost fall to the ground. And when I go up to the priest and receive a blessing, when I pray, when I witness communion, I have to say, yes, I do feel comfort, a deep comfort, a comfort I never thought I needed. And it does help me to be able to get on my knees and just pray for my Mum and for my family, for myself in a sense, because I realised in Mass today - my family and I need all the help we can get at the moment. It does bring me some consolation, and I don't think that is a bad thing. In fact, I think consolation is a beautiful thing.

The situation with Mum is so heart-breaking on some level, it doesn't really help me ultimately to think in terms of karma, or the four noble truths, or even impermanence. To an extent it does, but the truth is, on some level I'm starting to more deeply understand what life is, what death is, and it's a fucking hard one to face, but I'm facing it. Impermanence is there at every turn. What I really need is love, a love that knows no limits, that seeps into every crack in every broken heart and eases the pain. I want my Mum to be prayed for, given consolation, a balm upon her weary forehead, and I want holiness to surround her. At the moment, going to Mass puts me in contact with a much needed sense of benevolence.

I don't see God as outside or within. I don't know if it's both or neither. It is a mystery I cannot explain. I'm happy for now to leave it like that. This mystery they call the Holy trinity, the body and the blood, crucifixion and resurrection, the wounding and the healing, this brings me comfort at a time when I thought comfort was gone forever, and that it was a luxury or privilege for those who haven't yet had to contend with the reality of death.

A history of my Religion

A couple of Saturdays ago, I went with a friend to Catholic Mass at a local Brighton church. The yearning to go there had started before Christmas, when feelings of grief over my Mum's condition peaked, and I couldn't see any real point in existence, if where it was to lead ultimately was simply dissolution, pain and death. The need for something big enough to hold this experience came to a crisis point.

What actually moved things on for me was listening to a talk by a Buddhist Order Member, Danavira, on death and dying. I sat, lights out, in my front room for two hours listening to the recording. The impact of it went directly into my veins and bones. It took on the horror, the devastation, the messiness and complexity of death, and ultimately, its utter profundity. Danavira's words were big enough to meet the immensity of my insights and emotions over what it means to live and to die, to be born and to decay.

Months earlier, in October, I walked up Snowdon with Bob, the first time I have ever hiked up a significantly large mountain. I found, in the climbing, that, having seen my Mum in hospital just days before, this was a mountain huge enough and powerful enough to take my grief, big enough even to hold Mum herself in her dying state. So tiny, I was, climbing the vast expanse of its stomach, I knew that the mountain understood and held me fast. Now, I am not speaking symbolically or poetically here when I speak of the mountain holding me, I mean it absolutely literally. I tangibly felt that presence and character of the mountain surrounding me. Because of that, all my grief and sorrow turned to amazement. That one primal, unanswerable question that I ask myself in every moment of grieving, "How come?" returned to me in the single voice of the mountain, not through words, but through a sound. It was a resonating hum, that the peaks and the valleys and the woodlands and birds and the small climbing bodies of hikers were all making. This is it. This is my answer. Everything I need is here.

I was surprised, then, when it was talking about Saints and Catholic Mass with some Catholic friends of mine that aroused such a strong feeling of yearning in me, rather than Buddhism. After over eight years of Buddhism being almost my whole world, in terms of way of life, friends, commitment and philosophy, I have drifted from it over the last few years, in order, I think, to go more deeply into my own experience of how things are and who I am, through writing, poetry and making music. Language, specifically poetry, and music, unlock realms of reality and experience I've never known before, and I can only seem to experience them through creating in this way.

And when I had what might be called mystical experiences some years ago, which totally tore down and rearranged my life, it wasn't Buddhist teaching that I felt was being revealed to me directly, but a direct and non-rational experience of healing, grace, and the presence of angels. This disturbed me greatly at the time, as it didn't fit with what I believed of reality, and not many people around me seemed to know what I was on about; only the the reiki healers, the lost shamans, the acid casualties, the people who had found God on the roadside.

I have always been attracted to the imagery of Christianity, to the blood and redemption, the wounds of Christ, the choirs of angels and the Saintly lineage. But there is more to it than that. I am drawn to the lineage of Christian mystics in the same way that I am drawn to the lineage of Nyingma cave-dwellers, or the seekers of Divine union in Sufism. The practice of direct communion with God, if you call it that, or with Reality or The Divine, if you call it that instead, feels like the truest form of practising any religion for me personally. It is helpful at times for someone to tell me about God or The Buddha or the holiness of existence, but ultimately, I have to plug into that directly myself. And that is never easy. But I relate to the convulsions and stripped back wonder of certain Saints, the fighting of demons in the mountains, the visions, revelations, hallucinations, the manifestation of stigmata, the terrible angels of beauty descending. And I relate because it feels like a world that I already live in.

Going to Mass that day blew my mind. The ritual blew my mind. No wonder the Spanish go to the bullfight on the Saturday and then take Communion on Sunday. The two seem inextricably entwined, to me, bullfighting and Catholicism. And the Mass spoke to parts of me that even Buddhism has not reached. It is poetry to me, amazing, cataclysmic poetry. And, if I look at it it as anything but poetry, in the biggest sense of the word, my fear is that it is also quite possibly a form of madness. In this way, I am still scared of Catholicism, rightly or wrongly, in, as one overseas friend described it, its strange rites of supernatural cannibalism. But then I have always been attracted to things that dwell in equal shares of darkness and light, and poetry did always tread those pathways between the sane and the crazily lost.

I was scared at the thought of returning to the Convent. I was scared that I would be disappointed by what I found there. I was scared that I would not be disappointed and that it would show me all I hoped for and suspected was there.

When I rang the Convent bell, an old nun came to the door and invited me in. I said to her "I used to live in the house next door, for over twenty years. But we moved out years ago." I had no idea if she was even at the Convent during that period, as I know that most of the nuns from then have either moved on or died. She smiled at me and said " Are you Clare?"

Happy New Year

Well, it's a new year and there is much to recount of the last few weeks or more of my life, much to divulge of the inner workings of my mind and soul, and many outpourings of my imagination to offer up to you all.

And of course there was Christmas, with it's strange Midnight Mass and an abundance of gingerbread and chocolate bishops, with its beautiful and sometimes difficult workings out of family love and loss, a silent New Year's Eve and my three day excursion to a fishing village by the sea in deepest darkest Yorkshire to meet with the rugged elements and a certain boyo's family.

But all this must wait, for there are more important things afoot.

Yes, Celebrity Big Brother is back! I've just finished watching it and it is as disturbing and as ludicrous as ever. Eleven 'famous' housemates have all entered the Big Bro house tonight and are now awkwardly sipping tea and failing to recognise who each other are at this very moment as I write. Yes, there are the usual boring characters - a beautiful Bollywood actress whom nobody's heard of over here, then there's Denise Somebody Or Other, whose main claim to fame is that she got kicked off the Miss United Kingdom throne of honour upon winning first prize ater it was discovered she was shagging one of the judges (who happened to be Teddy Sherringham).

However, the person I was most shocked to see in there was Ken Russell, God forbid, who took to the celebrity runway from his blacked out car with a bright red face and multi-coloured waistcoat, acting like someone on day release from the local Alzheimers' ward. He staggered along shouting gibberish at the crowd in what looked like some kind of attempt at being wacky or way out, which unfortunately just left him looking like a grey haired puffy faced old man version of most of his films - unpleasant, tedious and somewhat distasteful.

The same kind of went for Leo Sayer, who bounced his way through the crowds like a demented troll, huge white teeth flashing up at every camera. And my God, he doesn't look any different from how he did in the Seventies, and he is just as irritating in the flesh as one might suspect from hearing his songs.

The entrance of Danny Tourette, mulleted blonde haired singer from rock/'punk' band the Towers Of London looked promising as he staggered pissed out of his head up the red carpet shouting "Fuck you all!" to the entire crowd and showing them his skinny torn denimed behind. Though it was even better when he entered the house and the only person he happened to know there was Leo Sayer. "Leo!" he cried as the midget frizzy haired 70's popster swung Donny into an embrace and squealled "How're you doing boy? Berkshire, isn't it, where you're from, how's it all going there?".

But the total highlight of the evening was the final entrance, from Dirk Benedict. At this point in the proceedings he is very much my tipped favourite. He emerged from the back of a van with a huge cigar, beaming at the crowd before turning back to the van and shouting into the backseat "B.A., I'll be back soon!". Yes, it was none other than Face off the A - Team, now a middle aged screwball with an overnight bag filled only with cigars and whisky, who hates groups and team work, and who is single and wants to find a nice woman in there who isn't the age "of my daughter". Fantastic! He got a hero's reception, and quite rightly too.

It apppears that Big Brother hasn't sold itself short on the mix of B-List Celebrities and old has-been former stars, whilst throwing in a good measure of bimbos and ex boy/girl band members for good luck. And they all appear to be as mad as a bag of spanners. But adding Ken Russell is a touch of brilliance, and Dirk Benedict just perfect. Let's hope by the end of the evening everyone has worked out who Jermaine Jackson is, with his sequined jacket and shiny plasticised face, before he has to tell them.