Shakespeare Service

Shakespeare in and on Love

Introit: excerpt from Shakespeare In Love theme by Stephen Warbeck (under fair/religious use)

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/shakespeare-in-and-on-love

Welcome to Between The Stools on 28^th April 2024. This week is the 460^th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, and the 408^th of his death. He may have been born and died on the same day – 23^rd April, which is the festival of England’s patron saint. Although George was Persian and didn’t visit this country, Shakespeare’s being connected to the dragonslayer’s day is significant because Will has become a national secular saint and our key cultural export, wound into patriotism. But we don’t know Shakespeare’s birthday for certain: one of the few facts that is established is his christening on 26^th April, from whence his birth is deduced.

Last autumn was the 400^th anniversary of his first portfolio’s publication (after his death).

This year is the 25^th anniversary of the film Shakespeare In Love being released in Britain.

And it’ll be Queen Dench’s 90^th, who starred in the film (and many Shakespeare productions).

Shakespeare in Love is a fictional fun romp through late Elizabethan London. Broodingly handsome Shakespeare is established as a writer, but he’s lost his mojo. His employer badly needs a good finished play to placate his money lenders. Will finds a muse in a disguised thespian who is betrothed to a rich, unpleasant stranger. The film is the writing and performing of Romeo and Juliet, where life and art converge in the manner of another play – Twelfth Night.

I clearly recall seeing it – and my reaction. It may surprise you – or not. This will be a no holds Bard look at the esteemed poet through the lens of film, our focus for this Year of Wonders.

Prayer

I’ve not chosen Shakespeare today because I think that we cannot look at story without him. (Shakespeare was a poet and playwright, and this is a year for screen). I’m not choosing him because he is my favourite, or that the movie Shakespeare In Love is a favourite. I’ve felt guided towards some films and television for this year that I don’t like, and I have always struggled with Shakespeare. I even wrote a provocative blog post some years ago, decrying him. I entitled it “Shakespeare Is Stupid”. And my reaction to a friend, wallowing in the sad end of Shakespeare In Love, was my first use of the f word: “He shouldn’t have fucked her in the first place!” I snapped impatiently, causing her to step in a puddle in shock at my language.

Some might already be shocked and ill-inclined to continue listening, or toward me. The first thing I would like us to consider is why we feel that there is only one opinion allowed on Shakespeare – at least to be aired publicly, if you want to be considered intelligent or cultural or taken seriously. (I am an author with 3 literary degrees). Why has this one man who died over four centuries ago become a god, the god, of literature, and put on such a pedestal? His writing spanned only about 20 years – are we to say that English writing reached its zenith in a score?

When people – usually actors and academics – say that Shakespeare is the greatest writer ever, at least in English, can they really claim to know all the writers that have been, before or since?

I’d like us to consider that. If any listeners are from another culture, and you have a Shakespeare equivalent (or one you consider greater), I would love to hear about him or her.

Not all writers are given equal airing for us to be able to discover and compare, and few come with such a train of gravitas and glory as this one.

Shakespeare is hard not to know about. I’m wondering how his rise came about. (Some of it does seem connected to empire and export, and Victorian poets). Why is he better known than contemporaries Christopher Marlowe or Ben Johnson? Why is he better known to the general public than the classical authors, or sometimes even the biblical ones?

We’ll pause to note that the best known English language Bible was issued during his lifetime, in 1611. Both are called wonderful literature which has influenced our language. I am not a proponent of the King James Bible, which wasn’t ‘authorised’, especially by God. I wonder about the extent of royal support and sense of ‘authorisation’ of Shakespeare’s work and status.

Considering there are few established facts on William Shakespeare, like many we considered in our History Year, quite a tourist industry has been created about him on pseudo truths.

Stratford Upon Avon in the west midlands is a town given to Shakespeare. I wonder what it’s like to live there? I read my guidebook thoughtfully, noting that the town’s many fine buildings are all spoken of in regard to the Bard. It’s called essential England, but I can think of many Tudor or older towns here (to be essential something, it cannot be unique). There are five 16^th C houses to visit, all with Shakespearean connections – I still have my ticket. But the associations are not certain. Is his birthplace really such? They claim the guildhall as his grammar school, although we’ve no record of Shakespeare’s education, which has given rise to some theories I’ll come to. Stratford has a particularly fine late mediaeval parish church, but I had only seen his monument in it; I was shocked that its West country style roof and unusual carved stone arcades are left out of guides, yes even church books. It has become a mausoleum to him and stop on a secular ‘pilgrimage’. The town is dominated by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and its live arts seem to be predominantly if not exclusively the 38* plays of He Who Died in 1616. [*There seems to be argument over authorship and thus number]

It is convenient that this pretty town has nothing and no-one else to vie with the Bard – not like nearby Warwick and Kenilworth who have significant castles and tales of long established throne-steering families; it isn’t the administrative or industrial centre like cathedral city Coventry (with the earlier Godiva legend); at around 30,000 inhabitants, Stratford is controllable, and thus ensurable that this market and river town remains an example of what we like to export as Middle England. Its chief product: William.

A place for Shakespeare has been carved out in central London, a huge old city with many alumni jostling for public attention. Shakespeare has regained a waterside and thus ringside seat in the area known for its world class-reaching arts institutions. Since 1997, the rebuilt Globe Theatre has joined the dozens of London’s theatreland, along the well-walked walkway that tourists and locals alike promenade. A second, year round, venue in late 17^th century style complements the Globe and its exhibition. The timber and thatch almost circle is easily the most recognisable and appealing building on South Bank. If it was for anyone else, would our safety conscious fire service and council allow such a structure again, when they were banned after the Fire of [do note the number] 1666?

Shakespeare benefits from constant repetition, a further ploy of his marketing campaign. I think I can assert that he’s an annual fixture for most theatres, not only in Britain but on other English speaking stages. He has long been compulsory on school curricula, from GCSE/O level (England’s 16 year old exams) for all students, and on A level (18 year old) and first degree English Literature courses. Thus one has to wait until masters or more to study literature without him.

Shakespeare in Love made a 40 minute featurette for schools. The key cast read their pre-set lines about how important Shakespeare is and how he is manageable to read. The film had twenty-odd year old leads – generally considered attractive; some characters were middle aged, yet there’s attempt to involve teens in a story that over here got a 15 rating for the sex and language. In short, it wasn’t school material but they tried to bring in school pupils anyway, and made the broad headed 50 year into a doe-eyed sensitive hunk of not yet 30. Think of how making it available to schools would enhance sales and lend to further marketing materials.

If you make a Shakespeare movie, you have definite possibilities.

—-Music from Stephen Warbeck’s original score – you may wish to ponder the below —-

I want us to pause and think about how we met Shakespeare – assuming we do have some kind of acquaintance. Were you, like me, made to study him in your teens? I wonder about our lessons, and wish we’d seen a performance before struggling to read him aloud to our bashful nascent peers. I was traumatised – as was family, we still recall it – by Roman Polanski’s 1971 Macbeth. Speaking of films unsuitable for young people and class viewing, this was too gory and upsetting to show us, and I dislike this notion that such content is cool and appealing. I note too that Roman has been the subject of abuse charges, and wonder if wonder if he’d still be shown in today’s Me Too cancel climate. Abuse comes up again in our considering Shakespeare in Love.

The first performance I saw of Shakespeare was Ray Fearon and Juliet Aubrey in The Tempest; this was the third Shakespeare play I studied but the first that I saw on stage. What I recall from night that is not something to put in an essay (I’m not sure it’s right here – I tell you in the audio).

Let me know your first Shakespeare encounter.

I tried to understand how other people like Shakespeare, if they genuinely do, and looked up stories of early and seminal encounter. I noted that noted Shakespeare actors Kenneth Branagh and Juliet Stevenson both had early powerful teen theatre experiences. In 2022, Juliet wrote for The Sunday Times that we should cancel two of his plays and update others. Her reasoning for the first was misogyny and anti-Semitism. I wasn’t able to read the whole article since the Times website makes you sign up and pay to read, which is their loss. But the next year, she was narrating a BBC mini series extolling Shakespeare!

Let’s think for a moment on that: that the British cultural export (other than the Royals) would be propounded by the official and original British Broadcasting Corporation.

Before considering this film and briefly some others, I want to consider how intimidating Shakespeare is: in dense verse, he is from another time that we (most of us) are not used to. There is a promise of greatness for you if you obtain this part (or the right to perform it), but you join the ghostly voices, like Hamlet’s father, of all those esteemed actors and directors whose very greatness is predicated on their superlative interpretations. Like quantum physics, there’s a sense that if you think it’s easy, you’re not understanding it. Like enlightenment, only a few attain mastery in this world. [Hear my snort]

–Excerpt from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet: Introduction to Romeo by Craig Armstrong–

Researching this, I sampled as many Shakespeare adaptations as I could: Prospero’s Books by Peter Greenaway, the naked experimental meditation; Julie Tamar’s 2010 female Prospero (Helen Mirren); Toyah in punky arty Derek Jarman’s take on The Tempest. I’ve seen the 90s Branagh canon and those American high school updates as well as the animated Lion King. Shakespeare has been converted to an alternative Third Reich Britain, a modern police station, the 1960s jazz scene, outer space, and homoerotic road trip. Several of these I had seen already; some I knew quite well. I enjoyed best those versions that did something innovative; perhaps Looking For Richard stands out (which I described last year) as a three in one commentary, making of documentary, and the abridged actual play (Richard III).

What interested me most was the line used by Derek Jarman to bring Toyah Willcox into his very unusual 1979 Tempest. He said that he saw this late Shakespearean work as having secret knowledge which the masses weren’t meant to know. I have been trying to find out what! If you know, please tell me as the BFI (Globe neighbour and keeper of the film) isn’t revealing it. Jarman was interested in John Dee, the Elizabethan astrologer and alchemist and (like others) believed that the character of Prospero related to him.

I also asked for the opinion of those I spoke to during this period. A published writer and lover of classics openly stated she dislikes Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet especially. I liked one friend’s take: Romeo and Juliet is not a love story, but shows how feuds can kill what you love. These typically passionate young teens may have soon moved on with their love if is controversy hadn’t egged them into tragedy. Yet I repeatedly hear Romeo and Juliet called our greatest love story by He Who Understood Humans Best.

For me, the greatest love story involves a man 2000 years ago – we thought about him last time. (How inappropriate that this service has ended up being almost twice the length!)

Like The Tempest and other plays, the love in Romeo and Juliet is rather daft. You see someone you are drawn to, you spout sonnets at or about them, you lose some sleep…and perhaps you dance or the other kind of tango. And then, they are somehow unobtainable. You mop brows, whine and opine, and depending what sort of play it is, you either get back together or you die/part. The latter is seen as deliciously, movingly tragic and thus more romantic and worthy.

I think that whether or not Shakespeare himself believed in such love, his work has been used to perpetuate what I see as a travesty and fallacy of it. It was what I was warned against as a young teen: this heady stuff isn’t what lasting relationships are based on. David Hawkins wrote of the energetic frequencies of our emotions in his Map of Consciousness; the kind of romantic love that Shakespeare depicts is extremely low… [more in audio] It is aiming for higher states and ways of communicating that has made me especially critical of Shakespeare.

He also delineates our darkest emotions, such as hate, rage and the desire for revenge; you might argue that these are deliberately exaggerated for the stage, but statements about Shakespeare’s superlative understanding of the human condition suggest that consuming jealousy and plots to avenge are normative, even if more suppressed in real life. I see the work of Shakespeare that I know as demonstrating base and coarse human feeling and behaviour. Much of his work contains horror and violence – Macbeth and Titus Andronicus especially – which has been freely shown in film adaptations; he may be supposedly universal but is not a universal rating.

There is also abuse in his work: Prospero is controlling of his spirit-slave, his ‘monster’ slave, his daughter and her suitor; and in Branagh’s Hamlet, he grabs Kate Winslet’s face and slams her against mirrors. Their friendship has lasted thirty years, but I wonder why such misogynistic violence is seen as part of a great performance and why it is considered part of love or even a tolerable facet of melt down. (Was this added by Branagh to his adaptation?…)

Then there’s the whole concept of The Taming of The Shrew, which Juliet Stevenson objected to, the ‘shrew’ being a certain kind of woman, subjugated and manipulated for entertainment.

The stories present as normative unpleasant and negligent activities. The priest in Romeo and Juliet is incredibly irresponsible with his sleeping draft plan; the apothecary is immoral because his wish for a fuller purse allows him to be the instrument of the death of two young people. In Shakespeare in Love, the person playing the apothecary (how hilarious, he can’t say it when drunk, not) is the torturing money lender, Mr Fennyman. This act opens the film; torturing for debts is held up to be funny and by implication, acceptable. This same character is seemingly moved, and thus redeemed, by theatre. It also presents as amusing that a person is publicly physically exposed by the Master of the Revels to humiliate and inculpate him/her. Again, there is no critique or punishment in the film for a major offence and trauma… [More in audio]

Then there is the offence and trauma in the making of this film, regarding Gwyneth Paltrow and the Oscars (not for the several famous male actors; not Mr-Triple-Surname titular lead).

A YouTube video by Cody of “Be Kind Rewind” (and a 2017 Vanity Fair article) shows how the now disgraced Weinsteins marketed heavily to ensure awards for their film company Miramax; how the voters (members of academy) were flooded and feted to ensure nominations (invited to parties, sent lots of mailshots and films clips). Note how these brothers were always thanked in speeches. Then Harvey’s abuse was made public. I look at Gwyneth’s emotional Oscar speech differently now we know what she endured to get it; it is known that she was one of his many victims. Weinstein made her a swift to rise poster girl in the latter 90s. Shakespeare in Love was set against Elizabeth (and created a 2 horse race for best actress) and the gory war film (focussed on US troops) Saving Private Ryan. Now why would that be an Oscar favourite, and seen by some as more worthy? I’ve commented before on there being themes and ideas to promote via the glory of receiving a little statuette. It creates a tier of extra worthy films and film makers.

I wonder if Shakespeare’s legacy began in a similar way?

00 (Another snatch of Craig Armstrong, also under fair use) 00

Shakespeare has been the means of obscuring our history. It isn’t just Ricardians who are upset with his influential depiction. I also see Richard III as being very negative about ‘deformity’. Shakespeare really has not only demonised this king, but put into our heads that physical disfigurement is an outer sign of moral depravity and an evil heart; and early on, Richard says that he doesn’t expect romantic love due to his ailments. It’s implied that he’s ugly to behold (‘not courting an amorous looking glass’) and thus gives the idea that ‘hunchbacks’ and people with cricked spines don’t get or can’t expect passion – only arranged political marriages. [No!!]

—-0000—-

I really resented Shakespeare In Love because I was told it was full of clever in-jokes that most of us won’t get. Listening to the DVD extras, I actually think that the filmmakers wished to make an inclusive and accessible Shakespearean story.

One aspect of Shakespeare’s myth that I do approve of is that he seemingly didn’t go to university and perhaps even not grammar school. He was not from a titled family. Good. But this has led to speculation that the person we esteem as genius cannot be William of Stratford; some blue blooded suitably educated person must be the real author, and there was a cover or mix up. I hate the snobbery and prejudice behind that supposition…[More in audio]. If we know few facts about Shakespeare, and there are 7 mystery years of his life, doesn’t this weaken the argument that he cannot have known things or been places?

One critic, with blue blood, sees Shakespeare as secretly against the establishment. I had read him as being part of it, which is another reason to dislike and reject him, but the notion that his works are subversive is far more interesting, and are perhaps actually against the very monarch commissioning his plays. One sees Queen Dench in Shakespeare In Love quite differently if Claire Asquith’s work is right. She is not alone in positing such a theory.

(After I recorded this, I watched more about that queen and what her, and certain earls, role might have been in using the stage for propaganda. I’m still not convinced by the 17^th Earl of Oxford theory but something rings true about ‘Shakespeare’ being a secretive steering device).

Kenneth Branagh

Gwneth Spinneth

Queen Dench and cast

If you’re wondering why I say Queen Dench, it is because of Adam and Joe’s brilliant toy take off. At the turn of the millennium in their Channel 4 comedy series, Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish used cuddly toys to recreate mini versions of current films – their Toytanic is another favourite. Shakesbeare in Love casts a duck in Gwyneth’s role – “Gwyneth Spinneth” as she removes the bandages to hide her bosoms – and she stars in Romeo and Juliet Bravo. This 1980s police drama about women in the force brilliantly captures the women in a man’s world theme of the film. Adam and Joe laugh at the poetry and sex – basically, writing and the other verb are one and the same. They write lines about thy walkie talkie and ungloved hands, and leave Gwyneth getting her beak stuck in the Sliding Doors of a London tube train – another recent role. Queen Dench is what they call Dame Judi’s Elizabeth I. I’ve referred to her as such since, affectionately. I consider Judi a national treasure. (I intend to honour her on December 9^th).

https://www.youtube.com › watch?v=3lkvX7Um7ww

—-More music from Warbeck’s score—-

Concluding thoughts on Shakespeare in and on Love (read, fornication)

At the heart of this film, which some feel is of its time, is a wager: could a play show real love? Despite Queen Dench’s verdict, the answer resoundingly for me regarding this one is NO.

Gwyneth’s Viola is in love with poetry; she’s fetishizing it. The poetry she quotes is moon verse (ie, mooning) – not especially deep or romantic. She spouts about 4 lines before Shakespeare chases her as a boy all the way home. They have 3 weeks shagging time before mum and dad get back and the arranged Wessex wedding takes place. It’s a quite immature love, more suitable for teens…just what I was warned against as a pubescent. Shakespeare’s love (like in The Tempest) has a test, but there’s no real communication or living together. Unlike others, I do not see Romeo and Juliet as twin flames (although their death did stop a family feud) – there’s just not the spiritual calling and inner work or mission – not that all love has to be compared to this notion…which I am also wary of. Romeo and Juliet die after days: for me, love endures over time and possibly place, with many challenges, including forgiveness.

I think that Juliet’s nurse shows greater love than the star-crossed fornicators.

——0000——

I think that like the Beatles, a champion was raised early in the genre. Pop music really only began in the 1950s and 60s, and we’ve looked at Elvis and Lennon being chosen from those decades as already the best of all time. Although plays are centuries older than Shakespeare – the ancient Greeks wrote them and there were mediaeval mystery plays – professional play making and theatres were just being established in the late Elizabethan era. Again, an early champion was chosen from that first harvest.

Shakespeare is much like our popular movies and Shakespeare In Love is no exception. Cameron’s Titanic was pitched as ‘Romeo and Juliet on a boat’; and the sweeping attempt to include almost all emotions and facets of entertainment was very Shakespearean – just without the ponderous poetry. I was researching another sermon just before I switched gear for this one, and felt that teen spirit, rivalry, jealously, plotting and regular fights and jokes were present in a contemporary American story as much as the circa 1600 stage.

What is different about Shakespeare is that his language is opaque. There seems to be a line between the adepts who claim to understand him, and the plebs of the mosh pit who weren’t offered seats. This division also applies to those who read code into his pentameter.

Thinking about the Plague and its affect on theatre, having lived through the covid period [which I critique], I wonder about what the authorities really worried about regarding theatre, and why they wanted to close them down. We’re told that the puritans especially didn’t approve of these iniquitous places, but I wonder if that is spin. Theatre took workers from their stations; there was a reason for employers to want the theatres shut. Theatre allowed people to mingle and to hear new ideas, different from the pulpit.

I note how little God and Christian office(r)s are mentioned in Shakespeare. Was he in fact secular (All Is True depicts mature Shakespeare as being in danger of church non attendance fines) or trying to please the widening spiritual landscape of his audience? It’s assumed he, like the establishment, was Protestant, but I’ve also read that his work had code for Catholics. In his era, Nonconformists began rising – he mentions the followers of Robert Browne (rudely) but the first Baptists had met by the time he died. There were also some Arabs and Jews possibly.

Did Shakespeare feel it safer to largely keep religion out of his work?

Conclusion: Is Shakespeare still relevant to an ascending world?

I’m wondering if we will start to seek very different stories as we mature. Shakespeare’s tales seem to be so full of darker, lower emotions, but the language and honours given him presents them as higher. How often would we say that Shakespearean characters have congruent conversations, or achieve deep and profound personal growth? He has famously obsessive loves on world stages, in all senses – “the triple pillar transformed into a strumpet’s fool”, who ends with sword falling and his partner by my favourite stage direction: “Applies asp to bosom”. Antony and Cleopatra are another set of famous suicides.

I realise that many people do enjoy Shakespeare and tell me that playing him makes him enjoyable and fun. I realise that some people see great depth in his work – and I’ve not mentioned his sonnets – and have found engaging with him a transformative experience that deeply chimes with how they feel. But I’m aware that many of his plots are not original – he took from Plutarch, for example; that there is a story to his fame and that he is presented as unquestioningably a, the, genius. I think that playing him can be a vehicle for awards and acclaim and quite egotistical. I like the thought that he might be subversive. I realise that Shakespeare In Love is different to Shakespeare’s own works. But the exaggerated whispers and gestures rankle me; and I don’t see the human truths and understanding in the works that others so praise it for. (Do you think I’ve missed something?). As I’ll be saying throughout the year, I’m questioning the veracity and depth of high brow depictions of humanity, and see them as oft set against the quest for a spiritual journey.

Apart from Stephen Warbeck’s score, the aspect I do like of Shakespeare In Love is the ending.

It wasn’t the tragedy of their being parted, but that the parting brings newness and opportunity for both. I like best Viola’s walking at Holkham beach in Norfolk – near where I lived at the time – seeking a new life, informed by the brief affair she’d just experienced; how a disaster (how Titanic of the year before) saved her and gave her a fresh start. (In fact, Shakespeare In Love is Titanic in breeches). Here’s me impersonating Gwyneth, thinking on new starts, the wideness of an empty landscape, thrilling and daunting at once, finding liberation in writing and imagination. Maturity and true love comes from that beach and the unwritten next act…

Next month, we meet on Sunday 26^th May…and its theme is TBC…

There are two likely contenders at the moment (probably not the promised biblical epics)

and then it’s 23^rd June (see my last post above) for an anniversary

Thanks for joining me, blessings, and goodnight

Do reach out to me, Elspeth, on BetweenTheStools@hotmail.co.uk if you want to tell me who and how you are, and if you wish to share a different way to understand Shakespeare

Closing music: Stephen Warbeck’s “The End” from that scene of the film

(Yes, the swell makes it feel epic, romantic and worthy)

Lent 2024 2: Love

Last week, we had a well known Western (much commercialised) holiday – that of St Valentine’s. I noted that at holidays, cinemas often show the same old films: A Wonderful Life at Christmas (not our Christmas film), perhaps with The Wizard of Oz; at Mother’s Day they curate something like Bridesmaids; and on February 14th, I’ve seen more than one cinema choose Breakfast At Tiffany’s more than once.

I’ve only seen this once, over 20 years ago, and wasn’t able to again, but I did something comparable. Before I move onto that – and just how similar they are – I will share the line that stuck with me, and how appalling it is.

The A-Team’s George Peppard tells Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly that “You belong to me”. Not belong with, as we might state of a predestined soul connection, or even that our love and compatibility logically determine that we should live together from now on, but a clear statement of possession. Hence I am troubled that this 1960s movie has become not only an enduring classic but one that is regularly rolled out on this day that we focus on love, in its romantic form especially. In the source novella by Truman Capote, Holly states it in reverse: “We did belong to each other. He was mine.” (When actually, he now isn’t and won’t be).

But ‘you’re mine’ is a dubious concept, pumped from too many pop songs: Screaming Jay Hawkins’ insidiously seductive “I Put A Spell On You” repeats that ownership is linked to dark arts and blatant threats. Other songs invite the prey in question to “be mine” like those heartshaped sweets…except that the concept has nothing sweet about it.

Along with the other cringingly dangerous line from Jerry Maguire “You complete me”, films and other popular media can discharge toxic tenets about love, and other relationships.

Pretty Woman has “be mine” right at its heart, although I didn’t catch that line actually being spoken.

In an era before prostitutes were called streetworkers, and when mainstream movies of this genre could be conservative, it’s a little surprising that our heroine, Vivian, is, as she is frequently called, a hooker. Julia Roberts’ iconic early role deals with the subject without stigma or judgement, although it does contain a brief advert for ‘safe sex’ (later rebranded as ‘safer’) – more subtle than that in A Different World which got a long live audience applause for a statement. (This of course was useful to the condom industry…) More surprising is that the hero is a service user, although he doesn’t quite pick Julia’s Vivian up in the usual sense. Her job is softened by her need – and we’re reminded of those streetworkers who die in that place; he asks for directions, and gets a ride, then a ride…

Of the two leads, I object far more to Richard Gere’s Edward’s job. It is he who preys on others and – as Vivian points out – offers no service or product (unlike her). Edward’s work is not something that you seek – he seeks out you as a target, enjoying the hunt and successful killing, as this movie admits. I’m not aware that the likes of Vivienne impose on or trick clients, but Edward, a buy them up and break’em up of financially vulnerable companies, doesn’t have clients – only victims. And with this immoral industry, he has amassed great wealth.

He assumes he can buy Vivian with it, just as he expects that by hiring a posh hotel’s best room and throwing money at swanky shops that he will receive sycophantic service. Is he questioning tipping? I did.

He actually under-pays her: isn’t her $100 an hour worth rather more than his $300 for a night, therefore; and isn’t around 168 hours of her time over a week closer to $16,000 than the 3,000 he actually pays her?

He expects Vivian to conform; he replaces ‘slutty’ outfits that mark her profession out (including a wig) with those that made her blend in to his world, which is about contacts, not friends or pleasure, and showing off the status that his ill-gotten gains afford. I wasn’t convinced by his opera loving, and even less by his piano playing. That scene – presented as sexy – is all about his quiet control, not only of his bought lover, but the acquiesence of the other guests in the bar. The were asked to leave to allow them to alternatively tinkle the ivories. Get a room, I wanted to retort for them – you’ve got the best in the house – use it! The bar isn’t your space.

The opera too shows a particular kind of love – exaggerated weeping and obsession.

Edward has no thought for Vivian’s comfort – that she doesn’t have the right clothes nor will the shops that sell them treat her well; that she doesn’t know how to eat in a posh restuarant, or what to do at the opera or the racecourse. She is as much on cheap display (although it may come with a pricey tag) as she was on Hollywood Boulevard – as she sometimes remarks.

Edward tries to control Vivian by buying a new life for her of his choosing, without consulting her.

Vivian rightly walks away twice in the film, but I’m not convinced that Edward had learned enough to deserve her to have him back. His idea of an apology is a one time single line: like a delete button, that should erase the issue and Vivian should need no more from him when he’s wronged her.

Like Jane Eyre, it’s the male love interest that goes on a journey here, but I’m not convinced by the transformation.

I see that Vivian and Edward were a catalyst for one another, with (in personal development terms) Vivian offering the greater service, and he gave her funds enough to do something else with her life if she and her roommate and business partner Kit wished. She has warmed his hard heart and humanised him and stood up to him, so that he assists not annihilates a struggling company.

But like in the book of Breakfast At Tiffany’s, Edward ought to have let Vivian go and stepped back, perhaps with the hint that they could meet again. The supposedly romantic end felt added on for audience appeasement, rather than belonging to the film, or actually a satisfying story arc.

Ooh – now I discover that there was an alternative end: as “3000“, Edward leaves Vivian sobbing in the gutter with money, saying “don’t let me regret picking you up” before she gets on a bus with Kit. The story seemed to be given literally a Disney treatment, distorting the original message (re the ugly behaviour of financiers) into something that feels to me as messy as it is mushy.

And finally – the movie’s name, taken from the vacuously lyriced song by Roy Orbison. Vivian is pretty, and something the male observer would like. She’s a desirable, intoxicating plaything to enhance his life like a nice accoutrement (and perhaps be soon tossed). Richard was quite alot older than young Julia (born a generation apart) at the time: this also says: mature men can (like Pepard did to Hepburn) help themselves to young adults that they fancy, if they are wealthy and deemed charming and attractive.

Although I hoped that this film might actually critique some long held values, it seemed to end by perpetuating unhelpful myths. This story – of abuse of power via money and commodification – is not a fairytale or a shining knight rescuing a caged princess, as I’ve seen this movie called, even recently.

I hope that we’re in a time of expanding expressions of love and celebrating all its forms, and this Valentine’s story is a poor party for just one (and a bit – of friendship).

I hope that as we head towards remembering Ultimate Love at Easter that we look critically at films and TV and other sources (yes opera) and the One who threw the tables of those who abused money.

If you have any thoughts on Pretty Woman or Breakfast At Tiffany’s, let me know

Interesting facts: Richard Gere’s middle name is Tiffany and he played a gigolo in 1980 (10 years before this) although it was a crime drama – so not quite reversing the roles.

Vibrating at the speed of Love

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/vibrating-at-the-speed-of-love

Overture: More Love (my composition based on the chords of the hymn by Jude del Heirro)

Welcome to Between The Stools service for Sunday 24^th October 2021

The title is a quote from Elayne Kalila Doughty of Priestess Presence

There is no sermon today, thus no written text: it’s about music and being

Meditation and Community Chat

Music – improvised guitar and piano (NB the former gives me pain to play)

Closing prayer and remarks

Outro: Love Divine (words by Wesley, 18th C) instrumental (tune: Blaenwern by William Penfro Rowlands b1860)

played and arranged by me

and my own composition: Perfect Love (from 1 John 4:18)

Please do make yourselves known – email me (Elspeth) on betweenthestools@hotmail.co.uk

As an experiment, comments are allowed (but will be moderated first)

Whosoever (or, Mama wants in)

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/whosoever-or-mama-wants-in

This is Magdalene Sunday – the one nearest July 22^nd, which is her feast day – celebrated by many disparate faith groups. We’ll always celebrate it at Between the Stools. But this weekend is also another festival. As I chose the date and theme, I felt a subtitle strongly suggested to me: Mama Wants In. It came during a lecture of Lauri Ann Lumby, priestess, writer and teacher. And I felt Mary Magdalene, and Mother God, and my own Mother speak.

I had expected today to be another service on breaking down the world’s injustices of dying patriarchy; on the importance of the divine feminine. If I had to preach on this theme of Whosoever, I would have chosen my text as the passage in Revelation about the mark of the beast. My Whosoever would have been commending those who avoided it. I would have extended last month’s service on Judgement to remind that whosoever explicitly and implicitly supports tyranny is culpable.

Yet, I felt that I was to do something different today. My views on Magdalene – many of which were encapsulated in last year’s service – were not to be repeated, although what I’ll say at the end will be more familiar to this community. I felt that I was to speak to a different audience in the sermon, and that the words would be given to me. They may not be my own.

As I was writing something else this week, I felt some words come to me. Last year, I dovetailed Magdalene with Wonder Woman. This weekend is the 70^th birthday of Lynda Carter who played her in the TV series. But my Mum, also Linda, was born on the same day, and she too, in her way was a Wonder Woman. (Bet you enjoyed that, Mama). We were strongly brought up to believe that any contact with those who had gone before was forbidden: I see her waggling finger and hear her pronounce ‘Witch of Endor’. Yet I have gotten used to communities where asking for spiritual guidance is literal. Don’t even evangelicals feel that sometimes, as per Acts (and Matthew 10:19), they are given the words to say? Here is such a time.

Prayer

Mum and I in Wesley’s New Room chapel in Bristol

Yes this is your good old MOTHER here, who would have been 70 this weekend if I had not entered Glory as we put it just over 11 years previously. I am reunited with other loved ones who have gone before and come after. Yes, we are all here – those who had what I’d have called the saving knowledge of the Lord on Earth, and those we would have called ‘not saved’. My earthly self would have been surprised at this – relieved perhaps, but also cheated. Relieved in that I absolutely believed in Hell as a real place that all those who did not call on the Name of the Lord would go to for eternity after death, and this meant some good people, and people whom I loved, including those in my own family. So in one way, I was glad to know that they went to no such place, and are here with me and my parents in Heaven which is as blissful as you can imagine… and you probably wouldn’t from on Earth.

But some of me, fleshly me, brought up in evangelical circles, where I remained all my 58 years, felt miffed. Why had I spent a life following God, hearing sermons at least twice a week about our need to be saved (and better yet, baptised and active church members), who endured various sacrifices for her faith…. in my 40s, my husband and I [my dear Dad, still with us] began a ministry in Romania, which was lifelong. We, like others, gave up many things, were misunderstood and criticised, and were never wealthy. We did many brave and unsung things in the service of the Lord. We tried not to push our faith onto those we helped but let them ask about our motive for doing things. We did share our faith with many and were delighted when some took it on for themselves. We were very moved when our daughters joined us in our love of the Lord, and we earnestly prayed for close family and church friends and neighbours who did not have that saving knowledge. We believed and preached that there was but ONE way to God, and one God, triune, revealed solely through Scripture. I read the Bible every day, came to consider it the only book really worth studying by the end of my life, and saw it as God-breathed inspired literature on which to base my life. I would have told you most assuredly and waggled my finger like my good Mother who went before that the Bible clearly teaches that there is sin and judgement; God is mercy but also righteousness. There are the just and the unjust, the sheep and the goats, the chosen and those who reject God, the believers, and the unbelievers, the wheat and the chaff. No-one comes to the Father except by Me, Jesus clearly said John 14:6. Jesus will come again in glory to judge – not the quick and the dead, as the Anglicans I somewhat disapproved of, and the Catholics I most certainly did, would say. But yes, He is coming, and as I would listen with my dear daughter Elspeth (put ‘dear’, it’s what I said – all my children are), slippers sliding off my feet as I waved them to the record player, ‘The King IS Coming…. and praise God, He’s coming for ME!’ (But not necessarily you). You need to heed the challenges of the Gospel in your lifetime to ensure that He is. I didn’t want to think too hard about where the goats, the chaff, those not of the Elect went on their rather broad road to destruction.

I struggled with Calvinism [thanks – I needed a new paragraph, Mum] and the sense that God called some and not others, that some would be ‘drawn to Yourself’ and some would be cast forever in the lake of fire along with Satan and all those wicked devils who tempted us like Screwtape and Wormwood. (I enjoyed CS Lewis very much, and recall Shadowlands about his life, poignantly as my Mum left the world through cancer, like his wife did; 16 years later, I would be leaving the world in the same way). I believed him that pain was God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world from the nursery… but I wasn’t sure that some were not roused. Did God just know who would come to Him? I decided that He must, in His wisdom and prescience, and would not turn away anyone who wanted to come. I knew dear Christians, who had been devout and active for many years, who still wrangled with this doctrine. Might they not be one of the Elect? Might the Lord, on the day of Judgement that we so feared, actually turn to them, as per Matthew 25, and say: Away from me, evildoers, I never knew you?

When in my youth, we had to bring a verse to Sunday school. I chose “I will not sit in a congregation of evildoers” and having recited Psalm 26:5, I would slide up the polished pews away from the class. I was naughty then, and example of one who knew the Bible, thanks to my lifelong attendance and the teaching of my parents, but would not be saved on that dread day. I was schooled that a good Christian girl would not have misused Scripture in that way and behaved so in Bible class, and I might be extra punished in the next world for doing so.

That was an amusing aside to demonstrate the strong belief we had in casting off the wicked, in segregating, as our denomination had, not only from the established church (like my daughter, I give that no capitals), but from our parent denomination. We sat at the other end of the village and were careful about ecumenical events, especially where there were catholics concerned. My parents moved close to a catholic church but the alley along it was as near as we got. We did not know the congregation there, we had our own. At some points in my life, I would have said that these neighbours would not have joined us in Heaven.

However… unbeknown to some, at Bible College  – an evangelical one, of course – I and some others snuck off to see a White Father. Yes, the very high Catholic priest. We got into trouble and I wrote a satirical poem in my neat cursive fountain pen about what I found. So when my daughter came to me 20 years later confessing something similar, I was less shocked and more sympathetic that she expected.

During the latter course of my life, I met many people who were good, and often faithful, but who didn’t share mine. In Romania, we encountered many Orthodox Christians, as that is the dominant church out there. I found myself having to be broader than previously, and living up to the maxim on the side of the lorry that started it all: sharing the love of Jesus. It wasn’t the judgment or the doctrine of Jesus, or even the truth or will, but the love.

I’m sad to admit that much of the teaching I was brought up with did not focus on love. I recall telling my daughter that I believed that Love was the ultimate message of the Gospel, but I felt slightly furtive in doing so. God’s attributes are holy, righteous, intangible, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal. The Good News of the Bible had to be taken in conjunction with bad news. You had to admit that you are a sinner, that you are unworthy, that you have offended Almighty God who made you and died for you (Jesus and God of course being one and the same). Without asking humbly for his mercy and forgiveness, and starting a new life with Him as your Guide, you earned the eternal punishment of rebellion and unbelief. Unbelief, I would have said when I was wearing those slippers, is the worst sin, the ultimate offence to God’s holy nostrils.

I hated liberalism. I hated woolly theology. I hated ‘all roads lead to God, all faiths are equally valid’. I did cede that some other faiths might contain true believers, and I stated my respect for the Dalai Lama – but I would not have prefaced him ‘his holiness’ – I won’t even write that in capitals – and there were other so-called ‘reverends’ who got that title off an American distance course, who I did not rate. I can recall their names but I won’t write them here. New agey types, blasphemers and misleaders, I’d have called them. They were not likely to be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life, as I hoped mine was. Did I not have Fanny Crosby’s ‘blessed assurance’ that Jesus was mine, and I his, and that He would be waiting for me, holding out His hand, as I breathed my last, as I had so clearly felt when my Mum died in my arms? Well, that is what happened, although so did some other things which surprised me.

I didn’t get to preach whilst on Earth. I loved to research and would spend the sermon scuttling through my Bible, faster than the preacher, looking up cross references to the text. In that way, I often made up my own sermon, using the preaching as a springboard for my own enquiry. I sometimes was frustrated by the speed and thought of the actual preacher. I did teach Bible Class – the teenagers – for a  while, and this gave me much pleasure. One mother withdrew her son at age 16 because of the verse ‘I suffer a woman not to teach a man’ (1 Tim 2:12). I didn’t agree – I’m not sure the young man in question would have – but this is what I was up against. Women could teach other women, such as at the Ladies’ Bright Hour afternoon fellowship which my mother’s age group attended. Or I could do a brief epilogue at the middle aged outreach event, following flower arranging or another craft which I felt lacking in ability for. I hated too the sports of my youth that were the main activity when we weren’t singing, praying or Bible reading. Naturally, I liked the last. I was a Mary, but spent much time as a Martha (Luke 10:38-42). I yearned to be at the feet of Jesus, discussing his Word, but women were expected to be pushing hostess trolleys into the kitchen. They were not allowed to be deacons, and certainly not pastors. One gentleman allowed me his seminary notes, which I fell on with relish. But another pastor creased his forehead in rage at my questioning him. He did not believe women could assert Job 12:2 with any veracity. Women had very particular roles in our background. We were helpmeets, supporters, bouncing children on our knees, or with a can of polish in our hands. We were considered less intelligent, certainly intellectually, by men and often chose men who were mentally our superior. Happily, this was not how my marriage worked, and my dear husband loved me for not being that kind of woman.

Thus, in all my years of church attendance, regularly, despite my brood of children, my various studies, work, and charity work (yes, my son, I have recalled what you called me), I was never allowed to do the thing I really wanted to, and if I’m honest – humility, despite being encouraged was not really my strong point in many ways – I felt I was talented at. My exegesis and exposition didn’t find much of an audience in SB circles.

I did say that if I were able to preach, my sermon would be called ‘Whosever’. My text – we very much had to have those – would be John 3:16: the Bible in a nutshell. We were taught it as tots and encouraged to be able to recite it. More than the 23^rd Psalm, this was the one piece of scripture we were expected to all know: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whosoever believeth in Him might not perish, but have eternal life.”

And the word I wanted to zoom in on, like those Playschool windows, was WHOSOEVER.

But I wonder whilst on Earth, I might have put a proviso on that. Why did we have missions and missionaries if we were all coming anyway? I would have reminded that verse 17 goes on to say that we would have been condemned. Again, good news and bad news entwined. You were going to perish…but now you’re not. Because of God’s divine condescension – all His work, His idea. And we condescended too – to those who are marginalised, allowing them to share in His bounty, united in our undeserving, although perhaps a little proud that we had been magnanimous enough to see this and holy enough to be sufficiently humbled.

But now, after 11 years of Glory? Not that we have years as such here. Those around me include the churches I turned from – yes, Catholics are here, and Hindus, as I suspected. And even those liberal New Agers! But in droves, not pockets, as predicted. It’s so different here that I can’t really explain, and feel I should not, yet. I felt on Earth that it was important to proclaim, despite Calvin’s alleged tenets (I’m aware that the TULIP acrostic is neo-Calvin), that if we called, we were chosen and God would answer, positively. Now I realise that the mode of His calling is wider, His mercy is wider, than I had seen when a farmer’s wife. I realised that I was a grumbling labourer in the parable of Matthew 20:1-16 – not in terms of time, but in terms of: surely you won’t pay them the wages promised us? For despite the attack of those ‘faith by works’ churches, such as our established cousins, I felt that I, we, as True Believers had earned our place in heaven. We had toiled via our self abnegation (I’m proud of that word!), our hard work in the local church, the community, the mission field. Our sacrifice and our difference had bought our way as much as the fountain of Christ’s blood… what a gory image that hymn paints!

I know now that Jesus isn’t in the business of buying. Debts are a human invention, appended to God. And when we believed in Grace, really believed in true GRACE, we knew that we need do nothing. Not – yes but I must rush my head off, doing errands, paperwork, taking phonecalls, studying, giving things up to show God that I might be a little bit worthy. I don’t roll – Children, you will enjoy this image – as a hog in muck in my own destitution before a holy God who wants to abase me before he’ll tell me how much he loves me. I do not write ‘he’ in capitals, because that is not God, not the God I am with now.

Yes, this has been long – but not by the standards of services I was brought up with! And I have waited rather long to say all this. I wanted to say that I understand lots of things differently now that I am in Glory, and that WHOSOEVER wasn’t lots of contrite people, asterisk, who had to fit the mould that I did – although often I seeped out. A God, who like one of my heroes of the faith, Joni Eareckson, gave us rubies, hardly won with bloody knuckles. [pronounced Johnny – I forgot].

I always liked the hymn My God, I love Thee (by Francis Xavier, translated by Edward Caswall, 1846) which said, would we love God if it wasn’t for avoiding punishment and gratitude for what He did for us in Jesus, but to just love Him, for Him? I assure you it is how God loves us.

As you live in times of fear, you are tempted to obey to avoid punishment or perishing, or owe a debt to those who you are told have given sacrifices to serve you. Some of you have done so as your Christian duty. I can tell you that debt and duty are not part of knowing God.

This is an extraordinary time and we in Glory watch over you with great care and interest, rallying for you to come through. We know that you already have, just as we know that our Lord already has. No, I’ve not done the skilful biblical exposition I wanted and could have – may I come again? – but I felt that sharing was more important than teaching at this time.

I can tell you that the ‘perish’ part – I think of a cartoon of my children’s day – is misconstrued. Perhaps I will set a little homework. Look again: does v16 really suggest that Jesus said we were going to perish if we don’t contract with the Holy Trinity? Would that be so loving?

I close with another passage. In Matthew 12:46-50 Jesus is asked: “Who are my mother and brothers?” And He answered: “Whoever does the will of He who sent me”. This is your ‘whosoever’. This is not only those whose name is written in the Lamb’s Book Of Life, but the people you will be sharing eternity with. It might be a good idea to start getting along now, avoiding the division to which you are being incited, and standing FIRM in TRUTH.

Yes, Mama wants in – I do, but also our God has a maternal side. I always liked the Mama Chook image in Luke 13:34, but now I understand that it was less of a picture and more a description of God’s nature. Your Mum longs to gather her chicks under her wing – do not be scattered. My wings are broad and my nest has many roosts.

With great love to you all, your one and only MOTHER, Mama Chook, etc…

 wants you to know she ensures that the candle of hope never extinguishes.

————

I believe that the one and only MOTHER – the Great Mother – also wants us to know that she and the angels and our loved ones are right with us, always, and here when we ask.

She’d also like me to remind you of 1 John 4 vs 7 and 16. Another ‘whosoever’.

————–

Why no music this month – there will be next.

Invite to listen to Gounod’s St Cecilia’s Mass… holding a few moments of silence.

Now a few words of my own to the community:

My first novel Parallel Spirals is 5 years old, and felt that I was to choose that day because of her. I now learn that was the year that the pope changed Magdalene’s status. I will choose another auspicious time for the sequel, and you – and I – will make sense of the timing.

I’m aware of the differences between what I spoke and how I would normally talk; my Mum’s beliefs and mine. I don’t think I’d have told my Mum that I think the Trinity is a four leafed Clover, and that the fourth leaf has her day so close to Mum’s.

It’s a full and a blue moon – Mum loved blue; but Magdalene’s colour is red and I felt a clash between my Mum’s earthly understanding of God with her male pronouns and my own, especially on this day. But I see this as a purple time – the balance and blend of divine male and female. We’ll be hearing from the other Mother Mary – the blue one – in November.

I am often hearing of more awakening, getting closer to a breakthrough, and I heard the reason why it didn’t happen around Christmas, as so many of us hoped – as I had publicly. Not only were many yet asleep, but the forces of darkness did something unexpected. I thought that God was meant to be omnipotent and omniscient, but I decided that She must extend freewill to higher beings. The darkness seemed to have posited that if the forces of Light tried to remove them, the world would be endangered. Hence, the liberation was not possible at that point, and a slower method needed to be used. Much progress has been made and the dark forces are flailing as they know they have lost and look duckier by the minute.

This is a time for the voice of Mother who has not yet been really heard, to speak to us all.

Thank you – love and blessings, and go well.

Back on 8^th August for Lion’s gate – Mum was lioness.

Loving Judas: a sermon for Spy Wednesday 2021

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools

https://shows.acast.com/between-the-stools/episodes/loving-judas-a-sermon-for-spy-wednesday-2021

It’s our birthday: Easter marks the beginning of Between the Stools, one year ago.

I planned to mark this date but didn’t know it would fall on this day in Holy Week. In the story of Jesus, Wednesday isn’t mentioned, but Catholic tradition calls it ‘Spy Wednesday’, when Judas Iscariot agrees to betray Jesus. As I did table turning in a previous year, I wanted to focus on a different day in Holy Week.

This is a positive view of Judas, a radical one, and sometimes, a personal one. I realised that this theme allowed me to express what I had already hoped to – at the end of this piece.

The horror of Holy Week isn’t that Judas’ actions led to the arrest, trial, and horrible execution of Jesus, his friend and master. It is that a friend and follower gave Jesus away.

I suspect that we all have experience of betrayal. Not necessarily of being dobbed in, or with life threatening consequences, but of the aberration of our trust. Perhaps it’s the heartbreak at the core of betrayal which is more commonly experienced. It could be lying, or stealing; it could be the breaching of our understanding in a relationship. I thought you loved me. I thought you were my friend. I thought I and my secrets were safe with you. I thought you were supporting me. I thought we were committed to… I thought I mattered to you. Betrayal can be broad. It means that someone you thought was onside, isn’t. They’ve left. They’ve put something or someone else first. In Judas’s case, it was a temporary new loyalty to the chief priests in exchange for money. We may not understand what motivated the person who hurt us – just as I don’t see why, from the biblical gospel narratives, why Judas behaved as he did. In fact, the narratives don’t really tie up. I knew that I needed to seek deeper and wider for answers.

As I did, I could see several strands to take, which flowed away from each other.

Even if Jesus had escaped, or vanquished his foes (I love that phrase) – which of course, he did – or if he had won the trial, or been rescued, Judas’ part would have been the same.

In law, the conspiracy to commit is as seen as badly as actually carrying out a crime. The plotting doesn’t have to come to fruition. Judas was a cog in the wheel – he didn’t hammer in a nail. But his cog turned others – without him, the machinations towards Jesus’ death could not have turned.

Judas seemed to understand this – at least, in Matthew’s gospel. Judas didn’t need arrest, conviction and courts to tell him what he’d done. He didn’t wait for revenge or to be found out. Although he returned the money, he decided that the price he had to pay back for the silver he acquired was his own life. And as his friend was hung up to die, so was he. Notice that Judas died first, without finding out if his cog had turned the machine all the way.

I think on our attitude towards those who commit terrible things and when we are tempted to say: they deserve death. What does this say about us? This will form the topic of my June service; but I want us to think on our need for punishment. What of restoration rather than revenge? Is what Judas did forgivable?

I am sad that Judas wasn’t reinstated and redeemed, but I believe he was forgiven.

Is anything beyond God’s love? Of course not.

Perhaps the truth is – does it seem to be beyond ours?

I was moved by John Inge’s sermon at Ely Cathedral: that the harrowing of hell was Jesus looking for his friend Judas. But that assumes the existence of hell, and that Judas went there. Note that this tradition comes from one of Peter’s epistles.

Compare Judas with Peter: Jesus says that Satan is interested in both of them, but whereas Peter will be sifted as wheat and come through, it would be better for Judas not to be born. Peter was reinstated publicly, given the keys, made first bishop and has many churches named after him. The fewer churches called St Jude are dedicated to the other disciple of that name, who wrote a miserable little letter beloved of harsh tract writers, and is patron of the police. Judas Iscariot isn’t patron of anything and I’ve never come across anything dedicated to him… although I have heard him channelled by new agers. I’ll come back to that. I will also come back to the Biblical narratives and how skewed they are towards Peter, and how little we hear of Judas.

I want to take a moment to consider the end of Judas’ life. I believe it wasn’t the only thing he could have done – if he did take his own life, as we’ll see.

I’m probably going to do a full service or even series on suicide. I am writing a novel on it.

I feel very strongly about it, and have deep concerns about the ‘prevention’ movement and how indicating feeling like this can entrap into a dangerous mental health system with its limited perspectives and understanding and amelioration. Prevention is a broken system that wants to fix by control rather than love, listening, attention…giving a life worth living.

I want to say to anyone listening who may be considering this:

There is always another way; it is never the must-do life path; we are meant to overcome the obstacle that makes us feel so hopeless.

I know of someone who died less than a year ago who was tempted to take their life. He had been involved in Vietnam. When he realised what he had been part of orchestrating, he felt so sickened with himself and the suffering he caused, and the cause he had furthered, that he wanted to die. He planned to in such a way that would speak out against the system he had worked for. But then he felt that his greater challenge was to keep living in the knowledge of what he had done, and to expose the system. This he did for some decades.

Paul in the Bible could have taken his life over the persecutions he presided over as Saul. He had been part of executing believers. Instead, he worked with the very movement that he had tried to stamp out.

I would like to pray for those feeling suicidal and those bereaved from suicide.

————–

I want to spend time on the biblical account of Judas. He is not the only one of that name: a twin disciple and brother of Jesus are also so-monikered. There are 5 Judases in the New Testament. But this is the Judas we’re most aware of, even if we don’t know the Bible well. 

We only have the calling story of about half of the disciples. In every synoptic gospel, we are told that a core 12 were picked from among Jesus’ followers, after these named ones, and some chapters after Jesus has begun his ministry. It is here that Judas’ name appears in a list – always at the end. He is one of the few in Jesus’ life who has a surname – Iscariot – and in John, we know his father’s name (Simon). But in each list, and in John 6 (the ‘to whom shall we go?’ speech) Judas’s name is appended with the fact that he was the betrayer, even though this is early in the narrative. John calls him a devil. Like Miss Jean Brodie, we are told of the perfidy of the protagonist, long before it arises in the plot.

Three of the gospels are silent about Judas until Holy Week. John gives us a little anecdote in an incident which all the others record: when Jesus is anointed by a ‘sinful’ woman, on the Friday before Good Friday – although Luke seems to tell the same story much earlier, in ch 8 (his Holy Week starts in ch 22) and John seems to change the host. The disciples grumble against the woman’s waste of expensive perfume en masse. Their dialogue is rarely given to individuals, except Peter. John tells us that the remark is Judas’s. John also says that Judas is the money bag keeper, but that he helps himself to it. John – or the writer of the gospel bearing that name – claims to have an insight into Judas’ heart. Interesting that the supposedly last gospel to be written, long after the events it tells, is the one who has retained a window into a man’s soul. John says that Judas doesn’t complain about the expense because he cared about the poor, but (somewhat irrationally) because he is a thief. John reminds us that Judas is the betrayer-to-be. John does not have the next piece.

Somewhat suddenly, in a tiny scene soon after, we are told that Judas agrees to betray Jesus. This is the event of today, Wednesday of Holy Week. Jesus predicts his betrayal to his disciples; concurrently, Matthew reports that the priests are plotting against him. We don’t fully know why, from that passage. Matthew and Mark say that the priests don’t want it to be in what will become Holy Week, which was an important Jewish festival, because they fear that the many pilgrims in Jerusalem will cause a riot. Yet, this is just when they do carry out the plot. Luke also mentions finding a crowd-free time, although not it being the Feast.

As with Anne Boleyn, when created, the execution of the plot is swift. This is even faster.

Then Judas, without any apparent reference to these priests, whom he seems not to know, goes to them voluntarily and makes a bargain for 30 pieces of silver. Matthew has him ask the priests: what will you give me? Mark and Luke suggest that the offering is from the priests, which Judas accepts. We’re told he begins watching for a time to hand Jesus over – which comes in less than 48 hours.

At the Last Supper on the next evening, that time comes. It’s strange to me that this story, made in all Christian denominations as a key, if not weekly, part of their worship, has two other elements which do not seem appropriate to the instigation of a sacrament. In Luke, there’s the argument about who’s the greatest; and in all gospels, there’s the betrayal. The Take Eat, This is My Body/Blood broken/shed for you lines come after Jesus randomly says again, ‘I tell you the truth (a kind of formula statement), one of you will betray me.’

Now, why do that? This puts fear and division among the disciples, who didn’t react when they were told a day or two ago. Is it because Jesus adds ‘woe to that man’ (Mt & Lk)? Now they ask, ‘surely not I?’ Peter is given voice for all – that he would die rather than desert, and the others agree. In John, Peter’s preferential treatment goes down a peg. Peter asks Jesus via the narrating disciple, the one who leans on Jesus’ bosom – is that John, Mary, or Lazarus? Peter needs to go via this intimate to get the question answered. In Matthew, Jesus states that it is Judas – to all the others? They don’t react. In Matthew, the bread dipping sign has already happened, but not in Mark; in John, Jesus then offers the bread to Judas.The NIV study notes suggest that this act of food sharing – a sign of friendship and safety – is not only doubly treacherous, but that Judas is given a chance not to betray Jesus. The bread is not mentioned in Luke: Jesus says that ‘the hand of he is with mine on the table’. In Matthew, Jesus calls Judas ‘friend’ – and to do what he came for (26:50). Only in John does Judas exit the Last Supper, and Jesus says to him: “Do what you must quickly.”

That’s the most curious and interesting line.

Otherwise, we don’t know that Judas has left the group. His absence from only 12 people isn’t noted, although his re-entry is the absolute catalyst for the fulfilment of Jesus’ ministry.

Every gospel tells us about the ensuing trip to the garden to keep watch, and then Judas appearing, just on cue, with an armed band of men to take Jesus. In the synoptics, Judas kisses Jesus; but in John, Jesus asks the band who they want; they say his name, and Jesus confirms that is him. So no kiss of identification needed.

This strikes me as odd – isn’t Jesus well known? He just rode into town on a donkey, feted by palms. He’s spoken to a couple of thousand at a time. His public works frightens the chief priests enough to kill him on false charges, but they don’t actually know who he is?

Each time Judas does something, or Jesus predicts what he’ll do, the gospels quote the Old Testament scripture which it fulfils.

In Mark and Luke, we don’t hear of Judas again. John leaves him with his own leaving, and the multi-layered line: ‘and it was night.’ But in Matthew 27, we have an important scene. Note that like Easter Sunday, it begins with the words ‘early in the morning.’ Is there a hint in v3 – ‘on seeing that Jesus was condemned’ – that Judas hoped the plan would be foiled? Seized with remorse, he returns to the priests and returns the money, saying that he has sinned, for the blood of an innocent man is on him. So Judas proclaims Jesus innocent, before Pilate does, and assumes the outcome of Jesus’ capture – his death. The priests, who are the really wicked people in the story, tell Judas that it is his responsibility, not theirs – even though they are the ones who plotted, willingly employed Judas to help them find Jesus, and paid a handsome sum for his services. It’s they that will try him on false charges and execute Jesus, knowing that his real threat is to their institutional power, not any guilt of a true crime. Heresy doesn’t just have to be theological, as we’re well aware.

Judas throws the money in the temple and leaves. The priests say that they legally can’t put it in the treasury as it’s blood money – is that for the blood of Jesus or the blood of Judas? So they buy a field to bury foreigners in, Matthew tells us, formerly known as the Potter’s Field; but the end of the Judas story causes it to be rechristened to the Field of Blood – which readers some decades on are meant to recognise. For this is where Judas takes his life. It seems clear that for Matthew Judas, felt compunction and his self murder was a punishment for what he did to Jesus. Matthew offers no comment, save a scriptural quote which appears to be a mismash of more than one chapter but also prophet.

Judas appears in one other biblical book – the Acts of the Apostles. As with the gospels, Peter takes a suspiciously central stage. In the first chapter, they pick a new disciple to make the numbers up, and Peter gives a speech to explain how the vacancy arose. He begins by saying that in Judas Iscariot, Scripture was fulfilled. Judas was one of them, a fellow on their mission – which sounds generous. Peter doesn’t call Judas a betrayer, but states that he ‘served as a guide for those who arrested Jesus.’ Peter’s take on the death of Judas is different. He says that with the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field, later known as Field of Blood – whereas Matthew says that the priests bought it with the money Judas chucked back at them. Peter offers an unnecessarily graphic description of Judas’ death. A commentator said that this death is in the style of those who displease God. As written, it’s a mysterious death. One does not fall in a field ‘headlong’ and burst open…  No other party is mentioned… but I wonder if it is divine retribution, or revenge of another. Judas is allowed no remorse in Acts; no returning money, no returning to the priests, no statement of Christ’s innocence.  

There is one other factor: the role and relationship of Satan and Judas. We’re twice told that Satan entered him: in Luke, it is prior to Judas’s offering himself to the high priests – this appears to be the reason for his doing so. In John, it’s at the Last Supper. For Satan to enter him at the moment of bread dipping suggests that Satan and he are separate. It also suggests that Judas needed diabolical possession to accomplish his deed – but he had initiated going to the priests without satanic assistance. Was it Satan who motivated Judas to go back to the priests with the money? Was it Satan who convicted Judas of Jesus’ innocence, or did Judas do that despite the possession? Was it Satan who brought about Judas’ demise?

 I am not saying that suicide is satanically motivated.

But then I discovered something new about Judas.

I was already noting parallels between Judas and Mary Magdalene, the only two intimates of Jesus to have surnames, which are meant to pertain to where they’re from, but others suggest that they are titles because of what they did. They get negative one line intros – Mary was possessed, Judas a traitor – and are almost silent until Holy Week, when their contribution to the Christian story is so great that they can’t be omitted. They’ve been given bad press, but they also have a recently discovered non-canonical gospel each. These are often called Gnostic, perhaps wrongly, and are fragmentary and very different from the four books in the established Bible, or much of its general tone.

In these gospels, Mary and Judas share something else: that their stories and relationship with Jesus are quite different from how Matthew, Mark, Luke and John portray him; his message to Mary and Judas clashes with the words of Paul, James and Peter.

Lauri Ann Lumby has a different take on Judas in her novel: Song of the Beloved: The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Like others, she has sought to make him other – his black curly hair and accent singling him out amongst the disciples. But for her, his otherness doesn’t motivate or explain his treachery – it is more the explanation of the treachery done to him via the false accounts of him.

Both Maries are channelled by New Age people, as is Jesus, and I’ve even seen a Saul. But never Peter, or the other disciples… except Judas.

Judas Iskariot is channelled in another language, and I’ve read the English translations by the Era of Light website. Judas looks like Jesus but with shorter hair in the graphic, dressed in white with a green cloak thrown over his shoulder, holding a staff and something gold to his chest. He’s smiling warmly, as a man comfortable with himself, and showing great love. ‘Great love’ is how Judas signs off his messages. He is positive and wise. One message implies that his earthly role was quite different to how the Bible portrays him, but also quite knowing, conscious, necessary… and that his soul is basically good.  

I have also read that Judas didn’t take his life.

It is clear to me that understanding Judas needs to be on a higher level, beyond the surface narrative that we’re presented.

Contrary to biblical accounts, in some sense, Judas and Jesus were close. They had meetings alone which therefore no other could retell. They had soul business, radical to the accepted beliefs of the world and the extant dominant religious group. There was a deep understanding of message and mission.

Jesus had a destiny to fulfil. He had scriptural prophecies to fulfil. Some today would call this a soul contract. Judas had one with Jesus. Jesus needed to be betrayed by someone he loved. It is a brave and strong and advanced soul who takes on such a role.

In the gospels, Judas never tells Jesus of his regret or asks for his forgiveness. Could he have done so on another level? I have come to understand that we can communicate in an otherworldly way, whether someone is speaking to us, whether we know how to contact them, or is even still in this world. And that we can have our most profound conversations that way.

I’ve come to believe in soul… I prefer agreements, rather than the harsh legalistic binding of the word ‘contract’. But I have always believed in the pre-existence of our souls, and their posthumous continuation. I think we work out a sketch plan before we come to Earth about what our soul lessons will be, who we’ll interact with, what we’ll teach and be taught in return, and what we’ll accomplish, as in fulfil rather than the Georgian drawing room sense.

Judas and Jesus had a profound plan for their lives. Judas agreed to be the person that ‘killed the man that clothed’* the spirit of Jesus, the Son of God, to fulfil that vital fulcrum in the history of humans and God. [*The Gospel of Judas]

When we are betrayed, or suffer any other kind of heartbreak, I think we’re likely to have chosen that on some level as part of our growth plan. Not consciously – and it doesn’t absolve those who hurt us from what their earthly selves do to us, nor us to them. Last Easter, I quoted Cassady Cayne who said that we are here to expand the expression of love. Our love can grow with its sifting as wheat, with the people who challenge us via posing the opposite to that which we are used to, or who we seem to be. They can be propellers to check our complacency, impellors to show up that which impairs our system, ladders which appear as snakes.

I think that many in our personal lives are catalysts and adjuncts. They take on a mantle, play a part to assist us bring out the best in us. Rather than a life plan imposed on us by God, we create it together, with God and the other souls. Like a screenplay, it can be altered – even on the day of shooting, and the cast members are always welcome to improvise. There are other plot possibilities – as I’m learning with my own. Yet I think we do come back to where we are supposed to be.

I am thinking of one who has been my greatest teacher. She has expanded my expression of love and taught me that I have more expanding to do. I am not likening anyone to Judas… but I don’t see Judas in the traditional sense any more. I see him as a brave soul with an extraordinary part at an extraordinary time, a person whose written words are few, whose real role we have to look beyond the page to understand.

So did Jesus love Judas? Yes. He called him friend, even at the moment of his treachery. I think he may have loved him as much as anyone, and yes, I believe that Jesus’ spirit went looking for Judas. I hope he found him and was reconciled. I think that they are working together now, towards the same God-given purpose.

And we can love our Judases, as on some deep soul level, I think they love us. Maybe the way they’re showing it is to fulfil that learning agreement, effected only by their apparent betrayal, withdrawal… Maybe they need our love the most, especially when they don’t yet consciously understand, when they too are not fully free.

I love mine and begin to understand the wonderful higher path that their role is leading me to. Today, I show gratitude for that.

I’ll be back at Sundown on Friday (7.12pm) and 8pm on Sunday – don’t forget we’ve put our clocks forward 1 hr here

Pray with me at home at dawn on Easter morn, your time (more after Friday’s short service)

Further services on 9^th May and 13^th June

Twin Flames – lucky, mucky, or ducky?

That was a catching and short title which really means:

What is this phenomenon? Is it real? Is it possible or necessary or desirable to find and be with your twin flame, and what is this teaching community (read: paid gurus and their fans/clients) rapidly building around it, which now seeps into women’s and lifestyle magazines?

I discovered Soul Contracts via a pair of spiritual show hosts who spoke of their own long term powerful but nonromantic connection. They knew that each other was coming into their lives before they met; and when they did meet, there was instant recognition. This couple (whose names I’ll protect) said that we can have soul contracts with all kinds of people to teach us something. Some walk with us for years; some pop in and out in a dramatic way. Some of these feel pleasant; some are traumatic.

I imagined a green room of a theatre, with actors milling about waiting their turn. They went onto the stage and enacted their parts, and then returned to the green room and hugged and laughed, even and especially when they’d yelled at each other, broken up, even done physical harm*.

[Please scroll down for the all important asterix*]

I prefer the word ‘agreement’ to ‘contract’ – I don’t believe our harsh legal obligations exist in the spiritual world: that part of ‘so below’ is an aberration of what is above. But this made sense…

In seeking out more writing on the subject – note, not advice, just people’s ideas and stories – I found the connected label: Twin Flame. At first, I felt like making a ducky noise, for this notion of your One True Partner through all lifetimes, whom you may not meet, and might have real difficulty with when you do, wasn’t very appealing or convincing. Twin Flame bloggers often assume heterosexual romantic pairings, and that you know immediately, and some suggest that your need to be together means you can split up your current pairings – or you have to let it go this time around, so you may be doomed to lesser love this lifetime (worse if you’re a Christian like me who believes – at least officially – that we go round only once).

There are online multiple choice quizzes which give you a percentage score to tell you if you’ve actually met the golden fleece of your Twin Flame, or have made a negative positive, False Flame. Might at 65% match, they only be a soulmate? Or worse, are they toxic, narcissistic, or even abusive? Have you just got an obsession? The lesser categories of misidentification – soul mate, contract, teacher, karmic debt collector – grow and overlap and contradict.

I wondered where all this assertion was coming from – on what was it based?

Plato, they claim, who taught that our souls are divided and we look for the other half. Not the first time that the woo woo community has based its teachings on someone ancient and revered. My question is – is Plato so to be trusted, or have we just been repeating him for a long time in hallowed tones? And did he really say that? Where did he get that idea from?

The Platonic reference comes from his Symposium. His character, Aristophanes, asserts that the earth was populated with four limbed, dual genitaled beings which cartwheeled about. Their power frightened the minor gods, so Zeus chopped them in two. This feels very much like a myth, not a statement of reality. It also implies that it applies to some beings, not all humans forever. It recalls the current New Age teachings of powerful hybrids who control the earth, but it didn’t convince me as the being a true or believable source for Twin theory. (One ‘avatar’ states that our twin is our soul mirror, the divine energetic counterpart, but we don’t have a human Twin).

Whereas Twin Flames are not part of mainstream Christian teaching, and I found several Christian websites speaking of Twin Flames as a devilish deception, I also found some who did see twins in the testaments. As I wrote a Christian and not so Christian defence of homosexuality, I realised that the verses I use also support Twins – as others had already seen. The very love stories I put forth as beautiful same sex couples were also very twin sounding; the verses about creation of male and female energy which suggest a split whole support the Twin theory. There are also those who describe Jesus and Mary Magdalene in Twin terms.

My gut guide does not suggest that Twin Flame teaching is entirely true. I also resist the related notion that we incarnate in each lifetime with the same soul group, so out of the trillions of souls I might mingle with – if I were to accept reincarnation – I keep going round with the same few? The twin tenet teaches that we come from far off stars – self tests are available to find out which! Some TF teachers look other worldly.

The New Age isn’t a religion of the book, so their guidance is from spirits – either the Spirit, Source, the Universe or angels or otherwise discarnate beings. I do believe in angels and spirit helpers; but my concern with much of New Age stuff is that proponents start publishing, and worse still, teaching, before they’ve really had full understanding – or checked their sources.

To ask someone ‘is this my true Twin Flame?’ is doing something that the spiritual and personal development communities speak against: giving my power away. It says that this council/counsellor can tell me what’s happening in my life, and what I should do. For quite a fee…

I believe in sharing, not teaching. Take what resonates with you.

I noted how all Twin Flame teachers think that they’ve found theirs, and their story and current situation changes what they teach. The ones who had a rough ride and time apart – “the Runner/Chaser paradigm” – tell you that this is likely for you; the ones who currently are not with their Flame tell you that the telos of the Twin journey is soul growth, not romantic bliss, and warn you that uniting with this elusive other is not always possible, or desirable.

Many of these – relationship coaches by another name – are very young, under 30. One claimed that she had 25 years experience, although she barely looked that old. So, in-uterine coaching? It’s not that youthful people can never be wise, just that one does need to have lived a bit – even if you’re an old soul – to gain wisdom, especially to dispense it. Twin Flame teachers seem oblivious to their incongruence; but nearly all sites have had something I found useful to read.

I also note that they’re wealth and law of attraction orientated. One of the sites charges ridiculous money – around 2 grand – to even be part of the community; the same for a week’s holiday (healing’s extra) or a course. Like so many spiritual entrepreneurs, this self proclaimed leader claims that her work is worth 10 times that, but she’s letting you have it for a snip. She is not alone in asserting that love and money are the same energy. I disagree [I’m sure this is a piece for another time].

Twin Flame websites veer between excessive verbiage and tiny bulleted paragraphs, often with careless mistakes (yes, I know how easy they are to make and miss). Sometimes, they rather unprofessionally criticise each other, which is a big warning sign for me.

One website, which has an expansive sounding name, makes odd recommendations about same sex twins. One person in a lesbian couple is told that they are the divine masculine and must change name, pronoun, dress, hair: one woman was told to swagger with overalls on and do DIY to feel masculine. She was reporting joyfully on this whilst the ‘transition’ was very new. A couple set off a spin off website and called the original teachers Gurus with a capital G; that they were encouraged and chosen by their gurus was the ultimate privilege and validation. Other former members commented with alarm on this and other aspects.

I’d like to respond to the ‘one of you is the man, trope which has often been aimed at gay couples. As a gay woman, I have always rejected the notion that if you’re two of the same sex, that one of you must be the opposite sex in role or energy. It perpetuates a binary dualistic view. If energy has no gender, and true love is about energy and spirit, then I wonder why these terms of divine masculine and feminine are so important, especially to a spiritual ascensionist community? It’s often said that we all have a little of each in us, and sociologists have long been breaking down the stereotypes and roles presumed of biological males and females. Who is to say that tenderness is only a female trait, and that a strong and productive woman really embodies masculinity? I do not entirely subscribe to the ying/yang paradigm, as I don’t believe in either/or. For many gay people, the qualities of your own gender are precisely the attraction. I found the pressure to change gender dangerous and wrong, and actually undermines LGBT+ people.

My guide is my intuition – the ring, not sting of truth.

I believe that there is where is God, Holy Spirit, higher self, inner wise self…speaks.

My intuition says: Don’t worry about relationship labels. Be aware that all you interact with are here for your learning and development, even and especially the most challenging, painful ones.

*Not that I’m saying that we have to go through lots of pain always to grow, nor that abuse and harm is allowable under the guise of soul growth— being usable doesn’t make it excusable.*

However, if I see sites that talk of toxic, narcissists, obsessions (and have numbers in their titles: 7 signs you’ve got bad karma), I leave the page. These seem focussed on the very layer of reality that they claim to help us rise above.

I’m not going to tell people that they’ve missed the mark, are experiencing a childish crush, unhealthy obsession, are mentally ill, or are in a relationship that needs ending.

This isn’t like the Rhyme Chime from children’s TV show Chock-A-Block – you don’t get a ding yes or raspberry no answer to your connection. (How we longed for the raspberries!) It is what it is.

I ask: how does this serve our highest good? What can I learn? What can I give? Why is this situation showing up now? What do I need to cleanse, get stronger on, more focussed at?

I think that the sites which say that Twin Flames are a growth opportunity and about deepening your spiritual path are right; the ones which say that it isn’t all about romance are right. I also lean towards those which say that none of these soul connections and teachers have to be romantic. Yours can be the opposite gender to whom you’d usually fall in love with.

I loved Cassady’s statement on Twin Flame 11:11 that twins are here to expand expression of love.

They can often be taboo pairings, crossing age or cultural boundaries. Yet the portrayal I nearly always see is of young, caucasian, heterosexual models – which somewhat undermines this.

What resonated with me was that at a point of especial soul growth – perhaps as you step into a new, more committed spiritual path – that you may be drawn to this subject and meet someone who meets some Twin Flame descriptions. You may have a sense of someone whom you’ve not yet met. It can be both a great experience of love, but it can also flush out all of your hidden unhealed issues. We need the flush in order for us to become who we’re meant to become. And the flushers could be soul teachers of any kind.

I believe that it’s untrue that we only have this one Flame, this one chance of real love. It’s cruel to say that yours might not be available or incarnate. (One prominent teacher’s is not – her entire relationship is astral). It implies that whoever else you might meet will be a poor reflection, and that you cannot know great love in this realm. This can be desperate, even tempting towards giving up on this life to join your twin. It can breed dissatisfaction with your current relationship, even when you’re happy and suited. I believe if you’re seeking, that you’ll find. I know people who have had more than one extraordinary love, and I believe this is possible for all of us. There’s no upper limit in how many great loves you have; so if this twin is in a relationship with someone else or they die, there is someone else for you who is just as good. Perhaps it’ll be even more wonderful. God specialises in finding outcomes to impossible and hopeless situations.

I note that some people in special relationships are at least middle aged. Twin Flame Connection said that they’d noticed that many of their clients who were ready for this union were over 40, although I’ve come across some much younger people who claim to have found and united with their flame. Perhaps newer generations, who are seen to be an important part taking the world in a new, better direction, are more spiritually attuned. Are Twins connected to Indigo, Rainbow and Crystal Children? (I have seen some suggestion that it is). They also have access to information about Twin Flames when previous generations hadn’t heard of this phenomena. But I do think that you can’t shortcut experience and doing inner work, and I don’t think that Rainbow and Crystals are to be seen as superior to previous generations. This statement about needing to be middle aged or older makes sense to me.

I do think that being drawn to this topic is significant.

I also believe those who say that an extra flurry of attention on Twin Flames is connected to the general awakening and ascension that is happening at the moment, and that these strange times are here to facilitate that; perhaps those exploring Twin Flames and their relatives are to play a particular part.

I shan’t worry if I see 11:11 (a supposed sign that your Twin Flame is manifesting) – it’s tempting to look at the clock at the 11th hour and see if you catch it at the right minute; I shan’t worry if my life and relationships don’t match the drop down menus and numbered lists of these websites; and I’m certainly aware that all this advice is lining some people’s pockets. I’d not pay someone else to tell me if I’m ready or in the right relationship or what I should do. I am willing to explore my own issues, blocks, capacities, and explore new spiritual understandings.

I can see my relationships past and present, and that of my fictional characters, in a bigger picture light, and have gratitude and understanding, and more forbearance. I recognise the various soul teachers I’ve had, and the people I’ve had the chance to be teachers to, not that I always knew at the time. If Twin Flames are real, there are several candles who aren’t mine, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t valuable or significant lights. I recognise that this is a time of awakening to new paths and that there will be people I interact with who facilitate that, and that not all of those interactions will be comfortable. I agree that whatever labels I choose to adopt, there will be those situations and people which bring up that which I haven’t dealt with yet and need to shed to move forward. I am always given to reflecting and improving and remain open to love, in all its forms. I won’t discuss the people I’ve known publicly, but I will say that I am especially aware of teaching and expansion at present.

I’m told that today, the 11^th day of the 11^th month is a powerful portal, especially for Twins. This year, extraordinary in so many ways, has several unusual planetary conjunctions. This is one of them. So I am pleasing the Twins out there with the time and date of posting, trusting that we use this gift of divine energy well, and that we use it to expand love and awareness, for the benefit of ourselves, and the world.

The next planned sermon is 6th Dec, for the festival of the 8th and a service on 20th to mark the exciting Solstice Portal

Before kick arse, kindness

I have a spate of kick arse articles to upload and publish, one a week, on more things in our world which need the juice sucking out of them.

But as I opened my emails today, I saw two sisters in sadness.

One was about the fires in Western America, and those people who were evacuated. One such person wrote to me, asking for prayers for all affected. They are coming.

The other was a perky teacher, who reminds us that she too often feels despair. Wisdom and joy often spring from those well versed in the opposite. I’m praying for you too.

I wanted to take a moment, for both of these are people and communities whom I turn to when I need wisdom and joy, and feel despairing. I have felt connection and support, even from afar. I realise how important it is to spread joy and connection and solidarity, to uplift.

And I wanted to be someone who lifts – not just those who have lifted me – but who offers words of comfort, who engenders a sense of hope; who sometimes has words that give our craziness meaning, but sometimes, just has to sit and be with, and hold hands.

So to those especial sisters, I send my love and prayers, for practical and emotional support and strength, for seeing a way through and out. And for anyone reading this, ever, if you have fires or quakes, literal or metaphysical; if you too feel despair or fear or aloneness or overwhelm today…

Please know that you are loved. Please know that you are worth it. Know that you do have strength, and that this too will pass; that you are held by God (who comes in lady, if you prefer her that way), who holds the world and the whole universe, especially in these craziest of times.

There is a film about mental health called CrazyWise, and I think that phrase tells us that the seeming craziness from a worldly perspective is where inner widsom and knowing and growing begins – and you have taught me. But if you’re not feeling that right now, here is lots of succulent, wild love and delicious hope for every one of you.

The Samaritan and the Priests – a new updated retelling

This is an update of a mid June post, which was an updated telling for our time.

I have further reflected on the passage and think I may have worked on a mistranslation.

This is what I think, or would like to think, is the real story (note new ending):

There was a man (or woman) lying in the road, hurting and in tatters. She cried out to a priest, more than once. It took a while for the priest to stop. When the priest did, they stayed a little while and half bathed the wounds of the broken traveller. The priest tried to carry the traveller but feared that they couldn’t lift them alone. The priest also feared that the traveller expected to be carried a long distance, just by them. They were not, but it made them afraid to carry.

The priest asked other priests what the policy was on carrying. 2m was the reply, and then you need a certificate and a risk assessment. The priest had already carried the traveller longer than that, and had let the traveller slip and fall. So the priest let the traveller go and left her in the road.

The priest hurried along to join the other priests and be praised for the policy they had kept and that they had the sense not to be involved with such a ragged person with victim mentality.

The other priests said that the priest had followed the rules. It’s better to help Samaritans, for you get more kudos for that. This priest had broken bread with the person in the road, so it wasn’t as worthy as stopping for a stranger and someone who is truly ‘other’.

Instead, the priest should preach about parables and love and helping our neighbour, and hint at her own good deeds among diverse peoples, to help with Inclusive status.

The priest would not be further binding wounds themselves – that is against the Law; nor inviting into their home – even more inappropriate by priestly codes. Much better that the person lying there called the appropriate helplines for the designated systems which are set up by the Rulers to help.

Or, she could just wait, broken and starving, and without shelter, until a good Samaritan came along.

My extra canonical sources and meditations seem to say: the priest did not leave the traveller because the priest did not care. The priest loved the traveller and felt that since they’d hurt the traveller that it was better not to help, for the priest believed that she made the traveller worse. (This wasn’t true – leaving was worse). The priest was grieved by this.

The traveller also loved the priest and forgave her, for neither knew that which they did. The traveller asks that God bless the priest richly, and lead her not into further signposting.

There is a reason that I revised and reposted this today.

The Samaritan and the Priest

This is being revised and reposted for 1.50pm on Fri 7th August. It is a happier telling.

 

A loving list for lockdown loosening

Thank you to all who spread love and hope and solidarity

Thank you to all who have the courage to speak out

Thank you to all whose musical contributions have helped raise our vibrations to love – such as John Martyn’s I Don’t Know About Evil, Only Wanna Know About Love (which I play as I type)

Thank you to all those who acted unselfishly, even if I disagree with the need to stay in, or stay apart; and those who defied it – you did what you believed was right

Thank you to all those who came into work and served us – again, regardless of what the danger really is, that perhaps believing the worst, you came in anyway

Thank you to all those in enforcement who act with compassion and common sense, and have the courage to question unjust orders; thank you to those who don’t give them

Thank you to all those who have worked so hard to find solutions, whether political or medical; and to those whose solutions listened to the people you are here to help, and who refused to create or legislate anything that harms people, the planet, or the values we stand for

Thank you to all those who printed what they believed to be true, or gave the others the opportunity to hear other points of view, and did not print what powerful others told them to, inciting fear

Thank you to all who don’t report other people for breaking lockdown rules or use apps which allow for government spying

Thank you to all who are considerate of their neighbours and don’t make this time harder through selfish noise, tempting as that may have been

Thank you to all those who are lenient, especially on those who can’t pay, and even better – those who’ve started questioning the fairness of their fees during this time

Thank you to all those who have broken down boundaries, reconnected, been resilient, found creative ways to connect and allow services of all kinds to continue

Thank you to all those who call for a more equal society; thank you for those who are helping make it

And thank you to all those who read this

Love to you all