You can't contain a child

You can't contain a child

Let one loose in a field

And she will run, fly

Too much life in the limbs to walk

Always the full charge

All this waiting life calls for dash and tear

Tearing to open this moment’s present

To be present to it all

Dead woman, dead woman, come alive!

So I’m playing when it happens...

Out in the spring sunshine with my girl, flat on my back on the warm trampoline after bounce-running together in a circle while singing A Thousand Years, throwing in our very own dance move actions on various words!

I don’t often play. I’m not very good at it (I’ve told myself for almost eight years). Sure: I can read bedtime stories with expression; I can go for happy walks hand in hand; I can bake with her; we can talk and talk about everything; I can watch her play. But playing myself has never been my forte.

This may sound strange, but it feels like such an effort to me. A physical effort, yes, because it usually involves crawling around on the floor, or jumping, running, dancing... moving, basically! But it’s more the mental and emotional effort that I resist expending – the effort that it takes to leave behind my o-so-serious adult world with its concerns and agendas and schedules, and just... play.

I do try... I have tried regularly for the eight years of her joy-filled, playful life. And I HAVE played – because I love her, and because I’ve felt guilty, and because I’ve wanted to be better at it. But there is always so much TRYING, so much EFFORT involved. And, however hard I TRY, it often just makes me feel tired and grumpy, and that’s not much fun for either of us.

How sad – to find it such a struggle to play.

But it goes far deeper than childrearing, this struggle.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the many different ways that I, perversely, resist the Life I profess to long for. I never really noticed this before so even seeing this strange pattern feels, though painful at times, like a gift and a sign of change on the horizon. I see now that so many of the things I do are subtly or not so subtly saying “No” to Life – to pleasure, joy, excitement, love, gratitude and delight. And because my gift of a girl is so jam-packed full of all these things, I notice my “No” most often with her, whether it’s the seemingly constant, verbalised “No” to the constant excited requests, or just my internal “No” – my fearful, or perhaps shame-filled, resistance to Life in all its Fullness.

Actually noticing this internal resistance has made me want to run into each day shouting “Yes!” to Life. And it’s made me want to play more... and laugh more... and love more... and create more:

“Art involves one in a recovery of childhood... The fear of pleasure is a deeply held political issue, and the creative person is out in front insisting that ecstasy and pleasure are what life is about--but everyone's pleasure, not one's own private pleasure.” (Matthew Fox)

I can feel it – my fear of pleasure – but I cannot comprehend it. Do I fear its power, and what it might mean or where it might take me if I follow it? Do I fear the pain and disappointment that cannot be avoided if one dives into life head first, wildly abandoned? Or is it that I feel undeserving of, or unfit for, true, deep joy? Or, in some unfathomable way, does the pointless, unproductive, childish nature of joy and play and pleasure offend my misguided ego?

If so, I want to offend my ego. It’s time to PLAY!!

So here I find myself playing outside with Amélie, being told to lie flat on my back as if dead in the centre of the trampoline, eyes closed, so that we can play ‘Dead Man’, a game I have never heard of. Thankfully, she seems to have noticed I am a woman and so changes the words that she chants as she bounces around me:

“Dead woman, dead woman, come alive!”

I lie stock still, taken aback by the profoundly prophetic nature of the words being spoken over me in play.

There are so many ways in which I have been dead, lifeless and barren; asleep, unresponsive. And these words – “out of the mouth of babes” – have the smell of the Spirit about them; they are words whispered to my very soul and words I’ve heard echoes of already in recent weeks, as I live and write and pray.

So I play dead, and I try to open my ears and heart to these words as wide as I can, and to say “Yes!” to this call:

“Dead woman, dead woman, come alive!”

And after the count to five and the final command to “Come alive,” I rise to my feet as instructed, eyes still closed, and feel around blindly for her, following her giggles and the bend of the trampoline under her feet. This, too, I know to be true: though I am blind and uncomprehending and wildly searching for the way forward into life, I have been CALLED; and Fullness of Life is beckoning me, close at hand, right at my fingertips, sometimes just out of reach but waiting, longing to be caught.

I can learn to say an unequivocal “Yes!” to Life, because Life says an unequivocal “Yes!” to me.

My blind groping meets a warm body and generates another squeal.

And then I catch her, and we cling to each other laughing and fall down in a happy heap.

The prayers of a child

Amélie joined me today in a weekly prayer time for a friend of ours with ongoing health concerns for which longed-for hope trembles on the horizon like a newly emerged butterfly, beautiful and delicate. Jeremy and I had been going regularly before term ended, but since the holidays began it’s been difficult to get there. Today at the farmers’ market, though, we met another friend who was going to be praying later on, and she asked if Amélie would be coming along. Amélie said she would like to, and I told her she could bring some paper and pens and draw or write her prayers if she wanted, while there was silence. But all she wanted to bring was a bunch of flowers from one of the farms that come to the market – a riot of yellow and blue, green and red, and as fresh and beautiful as any bouquet you are ever likely to lay your eyes upon. These Amélie wanted to buy and give to our friend, her little heart already leaping towards her with love and compassion.

Just before we left to go and pray, Amélie was unsure if she wanted to come after all, and was worried she would be bored; I said it was totally up to her if she came or not, and that it might not be the most exciting thing she’d ever done, but that if she decided to come there was a different sort of exciting about being able to ask God to help a friend, and so in some mysterious way be part of God’s plans. In the end, she did decide to come, and it was a wonderful experience for me to explain to her in childlike language, as we went, what would happen at the prayer time and why we do it that way: that we first talk about the friend and find out what’s going on with her and what the concerns are; that we will then often wait in silence, think about her, ask for God’s help as we pray, and see if there are things or ways that we think God wants us to pray; and that people then break the silence whenever they want to pray out loud, prompted perhaps by an idea, a strong desire, a memory, a mental image. I explained to Amélie that she could also pray or sit in the silence, or pray out loud, but that as this was a time set aside for our friend and for God, that she would have to wait to say anything else that came to mind, and just take herself off to the toilet if she needed to rather than ask me. I was happy she wanted to join us, but wasn’t too sure how successful the idea would turn out to be!

But my explanations and conditions all made perfect sense to her, and once we had settled ourselves on chairs in a corner and Amélie had received an answer to her question as to what exactly was wrong with our friend, she was one of the first to pray – a simple and heartfelt plea for our friend to be well and for a good doctor and that everything be made right. Then she had great fun saying “Mmm” and “Yes” as she’d noticed I sometimes do when someone else is praying. :-) She had mentioned this beforehand and we’d explained to her that some people do this and some don’t, that it’s just a way of saying you hear and agree with the person who’s praying, and that you can also listen and want God to do something without saying anything! After saying her prayer she did some hanging upside-down from her chair, some more mmms and yeses, and some wiggling to make the leather of her chair squeak, then wandered off to the toilet as arranged… some more hanging, more wiggling and squeaking, more mmms …and in among all this she listened intently to our prayers and, two other times, jumped in with further prayers of her own: for our friend’s body to be full of peace and that there be nothing she felt she had to rush around and do; that the friend would soon be able to run and be active again, and that she’d be able to eat proper meals, not just “tiny, weeny bits of food” (I don’t quite know where she got this notion from)!

When Amélie’s wiggling and squeaking became a little more distracting, I flashed a plea to her with my eyes that she try to sit still, and she whispered, with a slightly sheepish grin, “I’m bored now”. We laughed and decided to call it a day. Our prayers had been heard. There was no need for any more words. The straightforward presence of a child had reminded us of this. Her compassion without affectation, her guileless words, and even her inability to be still, brought the irrepressible abundance of Life and Love fluttering into our midst and our minds. We and our friend were, we knew, surrounded by both the unqualified Love of a parent and the unreserved Life of a child.

“A child kicks its legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”;

and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough… It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun;

and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike: it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy;

for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

(G. K. Chesterton)

We left, bouquet clutched in eager young hands, to offer the riot of colour, fragrance and texture, the tangle of leaf, petal and pollen. The sort of flowers a butterfly aches to touch.