inspiration
The serious challenge for 2025
I might have mentioned before that each year, alongside all my other reading, I try to tackle one big issue in an effort to better understand the foundations of Christianity, and to challenge the beliefs and notions I’ve inherited or picked up in my long life. Topics to date include things like inspiration; the place of doubt versus certainty; questions about homosexuality; the role of women in the church. It’s been a sobering and humbling experience, and driven a coach and horses through some cherished ideas along the way. But I like to think I’m now more honest and humble about what I believe and how I live/ought to live.
So, this year my thinking has led me to explore who the real Jesus was, and why it matters. Many things suggest to me that the church has developed its own pictures and stories, and each culture and generation and new wave of scholars has overlaid them with yet more layers of interpretation. But who was the person known as Jesus of Nazareth in the Middle East in the first century AD, and what was he like, and is he indeed someone I want to follow, and if so, what should that look like? And as before, I’m very very aware that what I discover might require me to change my personal world-view and religious stance. And might indeed upset some people who have certain expectations of me.
Three weeks in and I’m feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of literature on the subject, ranging from the way-out bizarre, through the well-worth-delving-into, to the totally-out-of-my-depth-erudite! So, in an effort to save my sanity I’ve drawn up a plan for all the different aspects of Jesus’ life I want to examine, and marshalled the stack of books I want to read on the topic into some kind of order (sample shown above).
Back to it!
Sublime to ridiculous
Diary of a Mad Mother-to-Be? Hello?!
I don’t think I would ever have picked it up had I not been feeling mentally overloaded from some pretty heavy duty research on the subject of inspiration – yep, sorry, I still haven’t got to the bottom of this issue yet. But I have now finished – Yeaaahhh!!! – the pile of books I’d accrued, and I’ve got a pretty daunting set of notes. I’ve also produced a fair old stash of knitting for refugees which helped me stay focused as I read. Next step is to try to make sense of this mass of material – which may or may not be coherent. Time will tell. 
Suffice to say the subject’s not as straightforward as I was led to believe in my youth.
Anyway, I really, really needed some light relief, so Laura Wolf‘s fresh and funny diary of a young woman, Amy, who’s recently taken on a rather third rate job writing high quality drivel promoting some pretty iffy minor celebrities, fitted the bill.
Amy and husband, Stephen, have been happily married for a couple of years. He’s set up a rather unstable computer business and they’re living in a very cramped flat with Amy’s sister camping on the sofa in their living room. So life isn’t exactly plain sailing.
Then Amy has a eureka moment and decides to have a baby.
Either we’re having a baby or getting a cat. And since our lease says no pets, I guess it’s a baby!
Her world is turned upside down. Even conceiving isn’t the doddle she’s been led to believe it would be – teenagers manage to do it all the time, don’t they?! Not so Amy. She turns to the pregnancy guide Baby How, Baby Now, and starts to chart everything. She’s determined to be a model mum-to-be. As a compulsive list-maker she catalogues the 63 tasks she needs to accomplish before she gives birth. Who knew you needed quite so much equipment? What’s a layette when it’s at home? And what exactly is a Kegel exercise? She acquires information and advice from assorted sources, both welcome and unsolicited, but nothing really prepares her for the reality. Who knew that sushi and aspirin would be off-limits? Who knew that certain smells – broccoli?! – would become acutely obnoxious? Since when did Joe Public feel perfectly entitled to pat pregnant bumps without even seeking permission? She compiles another list of things no one ever warned her about. It grows steadily as the months pass. Assorted colourful friends and relations flit in and out of her pregnancy sending her moods on helter skelters.
It’s fun, it’s light-hearted, it’s feel-good, and it did the trick. Equilibrium restored. I shall return to ‘inspiration’ with renewed energy and hopefully a better grace! Thank you, Laura Wolf.
Reflections
James McConnachie, the editor of our professional journal, The Author, summed up my feelings exactly in the latest Summer edition:
Many authors I know have been struggling of late with feelings of triviality or even irrelevance. First it was Covid. Then Putin, with his murderous war in Europe. How can authors justify what we do while our colleagues in the east – authors, journalists and artists, alongside a population of 40 million people – are fleeing their homes? When they are starving in basements? When they are being shot and shelled?
But through the articles chosen for this special point in history, he goes on to demonstrate that the work of poets and writers has the capacity to invent a language to express
anger, pain,grief, longing, gratitude and hope; making sense of the broken, mutilated world; affirming life,
and to underline the importance of culture in the lives of individuals and countries, in explaining who we are and where we belong – all beautifully illustrated with contributions from Ukraine’s own poets, illustrators and writers.
The whole ethos of our journal is to be a place where light is brought into deeper places, rather than generating dissension or inflaming tempers by reacting to contentious divisive issues. As the editor says himself:
‘I am determined that every issue of The Author should offer inspiration as well as instruction.’
This edition, more perhaps than most, highlights that lovely approach.
McConnachie also asks the question: How can authors approach topics that invite polarisation? and that is exactly the question I’m asking myself in preparing the ground for my own next novel … on abortion. I think … I hope … Maybe …