Being free and connected

It's miraculous! ... Is it? Literally?  At my Oxford college in 1985 there was a young man who was almost convinced about Christianity, but he said he'd only become a Christian if we could convince him that the stuff that Jesus did in the Bible, the healings and miracles, were still happening. We really believed that they were, at least we'd read stories about them happening in California, and we fully expected them to start happening around us too. It was just a matter of time, praying enough, maybe fasting too. It felt like an exciting time to be a Christian, in the 80s, with prophecies of revival and a buzz of anticipation around 'signs and wonders', supernatural interventions that we believed and fully expected to see.  A weirdly blonde Jewish girl being healed by an Aryan Jesus Hope starts to fade and the energy dissipates when promises aren't fulfilled. But every few years there was a fresh wave of excitement about some new teaching or stories of outbreaks...

When I was 13, I went to Ely cathedral to get the Holy Spirit inserted into me by the bishop.  This, I was told, was what would happen at my confirmation. I might experience something. This sounded reasonable, as God coming to live in me, one might expect, could cause a bit of a tremor at least. But, disappointingly, I felt nothing apart from mild pleasure about being the centre of attention in my family, and being given a box set of 'The Messiah' on LPs. Apparently this was OK too, and I could trust that God had fulfilled the contract set up by the Church of England. Forward to my late teens, and I was a good Christian girl, going to church and youth group regularly, trying to read the Bible and pray, and definitely planning to 'keep myself pure' until I married. My uncle had given me a postcard with this instruction captioning a white rose, which I had pinned on my mirror to remind me.  But I was still missing any fuzzy frisson of feelings, a tangible sense of God wit...

What happens when we die? Last night I watched a couple of episodes of 'The Good Place', a surreal Netflix comedy about the afterlife. The idea is that all your deeds will be scored and totted up. Good people, people who achieve high scores for ethical acts in their lives (example scores in the picture), get to live in a virtual reality paradise, while the vast majority of people end up in The Bad Place, where they will be eternally tortured. It is a very silly story but contains an interesting look at moral philosophy as well as the basic Heaven / Hell binary which, for many people, is the core of Christianity. My first idea of heaven was probably a happy, sunshiny, fluffy clouds sort of place with angels. I liked this idea as a child, and believed that 'good' people would go to heaven, though I remember wondering exactly what I had to do to be 'good'. As a parent, I heard a conversation between father and child in a toyshop: Child: 'Daddy can I have that p...

Without Christianity, can't you just do anything you like? This is said, in a very worried, even panicky tone by many Christian friends. My brother said something similar to me last year, and I think he was really concerned for me, and for society. On my friend's blog comments , her son replied to me similarly: 'I don’t know your full situation, but from what you say, it sounds like you are living secular life well in lots of ways ... I do worry about the implications of society of stripping away God because most people will not pursue a good life in the way you are attempting to. I’d personally be with Nietzsche or Solomon – meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless and am not sure I’d see the compulsion to act rightly or even think that the sentence ‘I am doing a good deed’ would have any meaning. I’m sure social pressure would carry me into conformity most of the time, but why live with integrity at the moments that it is costly to do so? Be interested to hear ...

The last four years have been a time of radical change for me. In January 2018 I was a married, middle-class working woman, living in Winchester (a beautiful, ancient but smug city in Hampshire, England), enjoying a busy social life of book clubs, choir and running groups. My life had been much the same for decades. Four years on, I'm living in rural France, building a permaculture food forest garden and an eco-community with my partner, Richard. It is the daily life of a peasant: digging, planting, weeding, tending, harvesting, cooking. You can see more pictures on our  PermaculturePlus  Instagram page. I left my excellent and rewarding job as a Psychology teacher and author, my community, and my home. I moved three times, and lived for three months in my campervan.  But the most drastic changes have been in my worldview and my belief system. I had been a committed Evangelical Christian since the age of 16, seeing the world through the lens of a God-story, in which my mi...