After a long break: explaining the next sequence of posts

I write this blog in the full knowledge that it's rarely accessed right now other than by me.  One or two friends know about it but I've done nothing to draw the world's attention to it; that may change.  I may eventually draw the material into some sort of book or at least presentation when the saga is over, whenever however it may end.  For now, it's just here for me; but in case anyone does stumble across it, or to those I ask to visit the site, I need to say this.

I went on holiday in June, after which life became interestingly hectic on several fronts and I stopped blogging.  I just couldn't make the time.  Meanwhile a great deal of relevant stuff has happened, especially with regard to my dad's situation, and I'm already reading earlier posts with a kind of disbelief that he functioned as well as he did so recently.  It's different now, as you'll see, and I need - to repeat, mostly for myself at this stage - to bring the story up to date (and by the time I've done that it will have moved on some more, I've no doubt).

The posts that I'm - hopefully - going to start publishing may or may not be in chronological sequence for a while; they will draw on correspondence and conversations that may go back several months; I may need to interrupt the flow as the situation develops.  There is a story I need to tell; I can't promise that the chapters will follow in logical order, in fact I can virtually guarantee that they won't.   Sorry about that!

Of all the people to find God - and why now?

Like a lot of liberal Christians, I'm highly tickled by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett and their ilk, writers who can never leave off having a go at religion.  Their neat cynicism is such a refreshing change from the pious and usually ignorant waffle that gets disgorged from your average pulpit on a Sunday - though not when I'm in it of course :)  Adams, to whom I came first, always struck me as more of an agnostic than he cared to admit or perhaps was even aware.  Self-professed atheist he might be, but if there was nothing in this God stuff why couldn't he leave it alone?  Religious speculation punctuates the Hitchhiker books; the first Dirk Gently story surely exposes Adams' own anxieties about the afterlife or absence thereof through the Gordon Way character who is  killed but doesn't know what to do next, while in the inferior sequel Norse gods are central to the plot.

I suspect that history will pronounce Pratchett's literary achievement to be greater than Adams' as it manifestly is in terms of bulk: the Discworld man has continued to publish his chronicles of Discworld at reliably regular intervals, never hindered by the writer's block that plagued Adams.  Nonetheless it was Adams who blazed the trail, creating a market for comic, philosophically adult, fantasy fiction; and Pratchett, like his forerunner, also delighted in mocking religion while at the same time drawing heavily on it for themes and character traits.

 

One assumed that Pratchett would take his scepticism with him to the grave.  Not so.

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

More, Terry, more: that's the authentic voice of contemporary scepticism, and your books are full of it.  However, the article (published by the Daily Mail in June 2008) continues more earnestly.

But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should.

It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this.

He goes on to describe what is technically known as the oceanic experience (I've had one, they are sublime and unforgettable, no more mockable than Mozart or Leonardo: they feel like brief intimations of that utter, transcendent perfection otherwise known as heaven)

what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa?

More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?

Me, actually - the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.

It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.

If you don't find that moving you are reading the wrong blog.  I'd want to discuss that penultimate sentence with Pratchett: the oceanic experience doesn't "require" formal worship - my own was certainly not Christocentric in content, more pagan in the strict sense (but then I love the natural world) - but it may draw worship from you, you want to mark your thankfulness for the occurrence.  And what it "rewards" is not so much intelligence as openness to possibility.  But my graver concern is that while he's been playing with religious questions all his life, he only gets a religious experience after he's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's: and of course any form of dementia, even in its mildest stages, can alter perception.  The possibility that it's some kind of psychic abberration has to be registered.

The sceptic in me wonders if the oceanic experience is not some kind of release mechanism, universal in humans, the brain's way of coping with certain varieties of stress.  Being told that you have dementia might be overwhelming but Pratchett, with more books yet to write, needs the sense that "all will be well" in order not to give up - so his brain generates it for him. I'm seeing a parallel with the way in which, when you're faced with a situation that calls for extreme bravery, the body floods with adrenalin of which one consequence is that you don't back off just because something you are doing (e.g. rescuing someone from a fire) is causing you great pain and distress.  You don't feel it until the danger has passed, then it hurts.  Hey, I've got a degenerative condition, I'm losing my mind here, I'm going to die.  Cue reassuring experience from brain - don't worry, it will be fine in the end.  So I can still function, for a while.

It's odd that I, an ordained Christian minister, find myself challenging a sceptic's apparent "conversion" on the grounds it may have a purely psychological basis.  What I'm not challenging is Pratchett's reference to  "an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking."  That there is such an order gets close to one of the central convictions in my faith; which I would lose if Stephen Hawking, or whoever, convinced me that they had grasped it.

I'm not holding my breath.   Hawking is a genius, but then so was Newton, who could write with honest humility:

I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me

Pratchett would get that.  I'm not sure that Hawking does.

Chucking the carers out

Dad's getting paranoid.  The beefed up care plan was agreed, but of course he's forgotten that.   So now he has extra people coming to see him and he doesn't know who they are.  Nice people, trained in caring, able to win the trust of older people, that's hopefully why they're in this line of work... it couldn't be that it was this or bust, turn this one down and we stop your benefits, sunshine, could it?

Well, in the case of Edgar, you have to wonder.  I thought at first it was a shrewd move on the part of the agency to involve an older man in the care team, someone closer to Dad in both age and gender who would find it easy to establish rapport.  But what gave Edgar an advantage through being male and old, he forfeited by being, it would seem, unsuited for his job.  He sounds, piecing together the accounts of both the cleaner and neighbour, like a grumpy old beggar with no real empathy and lacking basic people skills... even known to eff and blind in Dad's hearing.  I can cope with fruity language, have been known to use it myself, anything but conform to the stereotype of the pious vicar whose eyebrows twitch at the slightest deviation from BBC newsreader English, but Dad wouldn't like it - he's more pious in that regard than me.  Or just more conventional.  Anyway, for whatever reason, Dad has now taken against Edgar and won't let him in the house.  From what I hear, I'm not sure I'd want Edgar in mine.

But think of the double precedent that sets.  First, Dad has formed a dislike of a male person with responsibility for his care.  So, males responsible for his care are people he can permit himself to dislike; but given his mental infirmity, that begins to colour his perception and memories of other male care figures who have been kind to him, with whom he has got on well.  He now recalls them through the lens of his encounters with Edgar: "oh I didn't like that doctor very much" he has said of one particular consultant.  Bollocks, Dad (he wouldn't use that word either): you got on with him fine, but you're hearing "male doctor" and remembering Edgar.

Second, if it's OK to chuck male carers out of the house, who's to say it's not OK to chuck out female ones?  and that's started to happen, as of today (October 25)  He's refused entry to lovely little Yvonne, had her in tears even.  Why?  Well, because Yvonne had said that she was coming instead of Zoe, had taken over from her and he wasn't having that.  It wasn't true, of course but Dad is - as I'm sure I shall keep saying - making up reality as he goes along.  What's become different quite recently is that it's a reality that makes him wary and suspicious, drawing on a side of his character that's always been on the lookout for con artists and cowboys.  He's not in a good place right now.

Dad has needs he's not aware of.  He doesn't wash properly, gets his clean and mucky clothes mixed up, isn't eating anything like a balanced diet ... he has his pride and won't be told, which is understandable, but even if he admits his carers it's not going to do much good if he won't let them do any caring.  I'm glad that daily contact is being made, but the plan needs to have a bit more oomph if it's going to work.