Michael Harding: I’m afraid of the sea, horses and dense woods

Every week I set out tablets in a seven-day dispenser; pills to stabilise my blood pressure and regulate the heart. My creaking limbs grow heavy with age, and the lockdown is interrupted only by trips to various hospitals for routine check-ups, so I might as well accept a daily dose of tablets as just another sign of ageing.

I was heading for town one morning when I saw a neighbour sitting on his roof, lying against the tiles as he stripped plaster off a chimney.

I opened the car window and observed that it was a fine day.

“The chimney is leaking,” he said. “The mother sits in the kitchen watching the damp come down the walls, so I have to do something.”

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Michael Harding: I have privatised my religious practice

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“Well at least you’re keeping busy,” I suggested.

Although personally I feel that being busy is over-rated. I was in the garden with clippers that afternoon pruning a rose bush, a shrub my mother brought to the house years ago. But after a few moments I fled to a bench, wrapped my winter coat around me and began brooding, because my mother had crept into my head once again and I needed to sit with her awhile.

At least I didn’t need to worry about getting her a card for Mother’s Day. In terms of mortality I’ve taken her place in the queue, ever since the day she was wrapped in the silence of a Cavan graveyard almost 10 years ago. Although during the lockdown I am regularly ambushed by a deep longing for Mother.

It all began with Julian of Norwich, an anchorite who lived in the 14th century, enclosed in a monastic cell with a cat for many years. She wrote a book in the florid devotional language of medieval Europe; a book of meditations on the sufferings of Jesus in gory details that would put a psychotherapist off his mid-morning muffin.

Mother God

But what I find enormously comforting in her work is the regular insistence on the motherliness of God. So instead of fussing with my own mother’s shrub of roses, I sat on the bench and wallowed in the motherliness of everything that was living and breathing in the garden around me.

I’m not sentimental about nature. There are always hungry dogs and foxes out there in the dark, alert for something to tear apart. Even the birds would peck the eyes out of a dead man’s head if they needed food; crows didn’t evolve long beaks for warbling lullabies. And I’ve always been fearful of nature. I was afraid of the sea, and never trusted a horse enough to ride one, and I usually avoid dense woodland.

I never actually met a wolf but I came close to eyeballing one in Mongolia many years ago. I was sharing a tent with two other men. There was a small generator, just outside the tent, buzzing through the night like a Honda 50, keeping wolves at bay.

But in the middle of the night I woke, and lay with eyes wide open, as I heard the soft footfall of a beast on the outside of the canvas tent. I pictured his sharp white teeth, and feared that if a wolf tore the canvas asunder I would be the closest flesh that lay beneath his amber eyes.

The moment typifies the uneasy relationship I’ve always endured with nature. I just can’t manage to trust the wilderness.

Reassuring thought

But the motherliness of God is a game changer – like a soothing lullaby in the night. Julian of Norwich advances not just the notion that the godhead has a feminine aspect, but that in our darkest moments there is something in the cosmos calling us to trust; as we would trust our mother.

Clearly such hope becomes stronger the darker it gets. And Julian of Norwich lived through pandemics and dark times, and perhaps in her little room she just wanted to assure herself and others that “all would be well”.

But I confess that it is comforting; as I take my tablets, as I make another journey to Outpatients, and as I view the endless flow of news about Covid in a world where nothing seems to be at all well.

Like everyone else, I want to hope. I want to defy the bleakness of lockdown and the grief that gathers around us.

So I whisper her words. “All will be well; and all manner of things shall be well.”

It makes no sense; but it’s a beautiful act of faith – in motherhood.