the wrong way round

Steps walked: 9,470.

Furthest point travelled to: One mile – North Middlesex Hospital.

Face to face non-household interactions: Over a dozen (two funerals and the hospital).

Track of the day: ‘The Bunker’ - Beirut.

 

Tonight’s prayer with the CCU team at the start of their shift:

 

As you will be a blessing tonight

to those in your care,

and those outside the walls of this hospital

who will be praying for them;

so may you know yourselves

prayed for,

and valued,

and loved.

Amen.

 

And then they pointed out that I was wearing my protective mask the wrong way round.

Our NHS Heroes.

Steps walked: 3,994.

Furthest point travelled to: Couple of hundred yards – corner shop.

Face to face non-household interactions: 1.

Track of the day: ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ – Tina Turner.

              At the risk of being a bit like a dog with a bone, I’ve been thinking about masks some more.

   It all started when I realised that we were on the cusp of running out of milk. Heading down the road to our corner-shop, it belatedly occurred to me that I was heading towards the sort of relatively confined space where I might be asked to wear a mask. As things turned out, on this occasion I was able to get milk, bread and Merlot without covering up, but I guess it’s only a matter of time.

          As I write this, my boys are watching a cartoon called ‘The Justice League’; it’s all about superheroes, and as we all know, superheroes like to wear masks. Just like their Dad before them, when my boys are playing their games, it’s not unknown for them to tie a towel around their neck to form a makeshift cape, and to don some sort of mask, to mark their transition to superhero-dom.

             If the boys remain interested in the worlds of Marvel and DC Comics as they grow up, they’ll discover that many of these powerful and complicated comic-book heroes also wear metaphorical masks; nobody must know their true identity, their powers must remain hidden from the world at large. Weirdly, I find myself thinking of all those Gospel accounts of Jesus adjuring people not to tell others what they’d seen of His miraculous power, what they knew of Who He truly was – the Messianic secret, a kind of mask.

            And from that Galilean Jewish healer we can leap forward two millennia to those who work in the healing professions today. We hear a lot at the moment about our ‘NHS heroes’. I always feel slightly ambivalent about describing anyone as a hero; sometimes when we mark people out as heroes we rather distance them, separate them off from the rest of us, and make it that little bit harder for them to be quite like us. Our conventional image of heroes, formed in childhood, is of people who don’t get tired, who don’t feel fear, who don’t get anxious, or depressed, or just plain angry; sometimes telling people that they’re heroes, can make it that little bit harder for them to acknowledge that they’re also human, with frailties like ours.

 For me, those people in the NHS and across a wide range of other fields of service right now, are deeply human people, doing greatly heroic deeds. And a lot of the people working heroically tonight in my local hospital will spend much of their shift wearing masks.

              This morning one of the boys ran into my study waving a piece of A4 paper and clutching some small paper squares: ‘I’ve invented a board game.’ Given the choice between playing his game for a while or trying to understand a lot of paperwork from OFCOM about our wireless microphones, I opted to play. This was a good choice, as the game proved to be an inspired metaphor for coming out of lockdown. The rules changed regularly, and paradoxically, the more rules we were given, the less clear it was what the rules actually were.

Let Their Wonder Flourish.

Steps walked: 3,902.

Furthest point travelled to: 0.

Face to face non-household interactions: 0.

Track of the day: ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ – Keith Jarrett.

              Learning to be a teacher has been one of the rare pleasures of this time of isolation. To begin with I tried, fairly faithfully, to follow the material that the school had sent, but it was difficult. Regularly being pulled in all sorts of different directions, I wasn’t able to keep ‘on top’ of the work that the school was sending me, which meant that I consistently failed to offer the boys an even moderately coherent pattern to their learning.

              However, the more time we spent together, the more it became apparent where they were very able (James is in the middle of writing his first (I believe) novel; Barnaby devours and retains information at a remarkable rate) and where they could do with a bit more encouragement and focus. So, through a process of trial and error, we’ve come to a place where their structured learning time is largely devoted to those areas where they most need a bit of help. Its not been an entirely painless process, but together we’ve been getting there. Maths with one of the boys has gone from seeing him stare silently out of the window with tear-filled while I sat opposite him adrift in my own sense of failure, to watching him literally jump and skip on the spot as he answers questions.

              We’ve also been working on their transferable skills. Some days I’ll give them reams of information on a subject they’ve chosen (modern piracy, white tigers, and rather worryingly, poisonous plants of the UK), and their job is to prepare a short, interesting presentation on the topic; that has been a lot of fun. Yesterday I thought we might take a little look at algebra; it helped that the teaching was disguised as code-breaking, which was bound to pique the interest of two boys fascinated by spies, secret agents, and hidden treasure. The day ended with them grumbling that I wasn’t producing new puzzles fast enough for them.

 

              One of the things I’m called to be as a parish priest is a teacher. On reflection, I realise it’s one of the areas of my calling which I’ve particularly enjoyed, and one where I’ve had a lot to learn over the years. Way back when, I decided to start writing our Lent Courses for All Saints. Copying the format of the books we’d tended to use in the past, they took the model of 5 minutes of this, followed by 15 minutes of that, and then 10 minutes for the next thing, and so on. Year by year I’ve written less and less, and the structure has become simpler and ever simpler. People have so much within them already, its just about offering them opportunities to let their wonder flourish.