The Murmuration by Grace Pengelly: Belief

befriending our mortality

Grace Pengelly — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 09:47:24 GMT

Barbie enters her existential era.

Hello there,

Thanks for choosing to read this newsletter. For those of you getting this for the first time, welcome. My name is Grace Pengelly: I’m a writer, editor and new(ish) parent. I hit send on The Murmuration every other Thursday, writing on culture, books and (invariably), my life. My wonderful paid subscribers also receive Golden Hour, a weekly newsletter where I review cool things (like Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans) or share a little bit about my creative practice. If you’ve been receiving The Murmuration for a while now and want to show your support, then do consider upgrading from a free to paid subscription. Thank you.

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Giving birth has made me think deeply about death. The visceral, mind-altering act of bringing new life into the world feels intimately connected to the fact that I will die. I guess there’s nothing like four days of labour and an episiotomy to make you contemplate the precarious nature of human existence.

I am already about six years older than my mother was when she gave birth to me. And so I feel like I am crossing these thresholds where I am experiencing the same ages and milestones as her—the passage of human time suddenly feels very short. My days, like yours, and hers, are numbered.

Until I gave birth my mortality was not something I gave much thought to. During my twenties, I ~~lived through~~ survived a pandemic, but because of my age and ethnicity I don’t think I ever really considered that COVID would be the way I would die. It became clear relatively early on that the people who were dying were the elderly and middle-aged with pre-existing health conditions. Not people like me. Would I have felt in possession of such invincibility if I was black or disabled? I doubt it.

In a somewhat unlikely turn of events, I am currently working with two people who are living with terminal cancer. They are both in the unusual position of knowing that they are dying and feeling that there are things that they would like to do before the end of their life. The pair are remarkably thoughtful about the imminent prospect of their death. Needless to say, it is a privilege to be working alongside both of them at this point of their lives.

Earlier this week I read about the campaigner Kris Hallenga’s decision to have a living funeral—or a FUNeral, as she aptly put it. Kris is 37 and living with breast cancer. The theme was ‘You Only Die Once’, and guests were invited to wear an outfit that they loved but never got to wear in normal life. Dawn French did her Vicar of Dibley bit, and Kris was able to hear her friends and family give what I’m sure were incredibly moving speeches about what she meant to them. Kris’s coffin was also at the event, surrounded by felt tips and an invitation for people to doodle something onto it.

I have been struck by the choices a growing number of people like Kris are making concerning the final month(s) of their lives. Whilst a FUNeral might strike some of you as a bizarre thing to do, living funerals can help dying people communicate something urgent about their experience of death to the wider world.

Describing the day of her living funeral Kris wrote that:

I’ve never felt love like it. I’ve never felt joy like it. I’ve never felt such kinship with mortality. I’ve never felt so alive.

Living funerals? 10/10 would recommend.
Exploring your impermanence? A gateway to appreciation of life.

At new years eve (always a philosophical time of the year!) one of my friends explained that he thought about death almost every day, which blew my mind. I don’t think he meant this in a morose sense, but rather was trying to articulate that death was something he tried to keep in mind. Unlike most of us who happen to be in good health, death isn’t something he tries to ignore.

I understand why so many of us panic when we think about death, or perhaps the fact that our loved ones are going to die. It’s natural to worry about harm that affects those people we care most deeply for. But I have taken comfort in the advice of end-of-life practitioners like the palliative care specialist Dr. Kathryn Mannix, who explains that for the vast majority of people death is not painful or something to be afraid of. It is a natural process which will unfold on a particular day in a particular moment in time.

There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookmarks astride our lives; one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious.
Dr. Kathryn Mannix

The fact that we die is so often portrayed as a human failure. Something to be battled and fought against.

Could we instead choose to befriend our mortality, and express gratitude for the clarifying role that it plays in our life?

What would befriending your mortality look like for you?

I’d love to hear some of the things you’d like at your living FUNeral in the comments below.

is phone addiction a sin?

Grace Pengelly — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 11:13:05 GMT

John Holcroft/Getty Images

Hi friends,

It’s Thursday, which means another edition of The Murmuration has reached your inbox. If this is the first time you’ve heard from me in this way, then a special welcome to you—I’m so glad you are here.

Over the past couple of weeks paid subscribers have been reading about dirt and shifting baseline syndrome. It’s also been great to hear your responses to our Earth Day show and tell. Do feel free to add to that thread if you’d like.

This week I’ve been thinking about sin, or sinfulness; about what meaning it holds within our culture and whether or not it has any relevance to those of us living, working and breathing in the 21st century.

Six weeks ago a letter arrived for my husband from the Jury Summons Office. The letter informed him that he was due to attend Crown Court to undertake his civic duty as a Juror. For the past week he has been getting up at some unearthly hour in order to fulfil this obligation, making himself available to pass judgement on someone’s ethical behaviour.

Enclosed with the letter was a brief guide explaining his responsibilities. I was struck by this passage:

When a jury reaches a verdict, they are not only making a decision that affects the individual defendant, they are also making a decision that affects the communities in which they live. It is for this reason that jury service is regarded as one of the most important civic duties that anyone can be asked to perform.

As he waits to see if he is called up he overhears snippets about the kinds of cases currently going through the court. Did this man rape that woman? Did this drugs lord order people to cross the border? Was this person a drink driver?

Perhaps these are the kind of extreme examples you thought of when I first mentioned the word sin. Bad people doing bad things. Or maybe you thought of that time you saw an evangelical preacher with a bullhorn in town, informing you that we are all sinners, and that we must repent before the day of final judgement.

These days, our discussion of sin seems intimately bound up with the word judgement. Perhaps that’s why I instinctively shy away from using it in my day to day life. It feels so loaded with baggage and ripe for misinterpretation; many of my gay friends have found the term weaponised against them by people who don’t really understand what sinfulness is about.

As is often the case, it was my friend Harry who got me thinking about this subject. Not, I might add, because he leads a particularly hedonistic lifestyle, but because he offered a wise reflection on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago, referencing an interview the actress Aimee Lou Wood gave to the Guardian. She had this to say about sin:

People really fucked up that word. In its original sense, it means ‘to miss the point of human existence’. Like you’ve forgotten what life is about, like empathy, compassion, love. But egos took the word over and used it as a way to shame people, so they’re robbed of their power, like: ‘It’s a sin to be gay.’

‘Like you’ve forgotten what life is about’. This struck me as a quite beautiful way of thinking about sin, which is certainly closer to how the term was originally used in early christian communities. During the 4th century AD, Egyptian monks referred to as the ‘Desert Fathers’ started developing a model for coenobium—which translates as community living. They wanted to find ways to live together that would support their spiritual life and help them maintain good relationships with each other.

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These communities of men had been influenced by neoplatonic thought, which emphasised the importance of our desires, feelings and mind if we are trying to live in accordance with our ‘true’ nature i.e. the way God intended. They were interested in finding particular habits or practices which would help them live their life in a more spiritual way.

In 420AD, a monk called John Cassian wrote two treatises: De institutes coenobiorum and Conlationes, which distilled many of the rules that the Egyptian Desert Father’s had been following. In De institutes Cassian listed eight vices; gluttony, lust, greed, hubris, wrath, envy, listlessness and boasting. These would latterly be coopted and revised by Pope Gregory I, and eventually became more commonly known as the seven deadly sins.

What I find interesting about Cassian’s original list of vices is the emphasis placed not on the sin itself, but on the impact or consequence of that vice upon the individual and their wider community. Take the vice of acedia, which we might describe today as spiritual negligence or listlessness. For Cassian, succumbing to acedia was bad for a monk because it was about being disengaged (or disconnected) from spiritual life. Instead of focussing on their prayers and spending time with God, the monk might go and visit another brother for a chat, or go into the kitchen in order to distract himself from his own thoughts.

In his book Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps For a Fulfilling Life, Abbot Christopher Jamison writes that:

Acedia involves filling up my inner space with everything other than the desire to recognise and overcome the other seven thoughts. We have an interior space, our soul, which is a space that we can fill with endless distractions and avoidance mechanisms. If we can remove some of the avoidance mechanisms then our self-awareness will grow quite naturally.

Today the language employed by self-help and productivity gurus like like Ali Abdaal can often sound uncannily similar to the language of acedia. On his Youtube channel, Abdaal offers advice and ‘hacks’ which will lead us to ‘happier, healthier and more productive lives’. The reason you are so unhappy, he seems to suggest, is because you haven’t optimised your life well enough! You are wasting your time on inefficient distractions, but by adopting this new productivity hack you can find the time to be happy again.

On a surface level this sounds plausible enough. But when we dig deeper into Abdaal’s content, it becomes clear that his brand of productivity is simply intended to create more time in your life in which to work harder and make more money. So we’re not avoiding distractions because they are bad for our soul, but because they deprive us of opportunities to make money. Hmm.

Abbot Jamison points out that

Many people immerse themselves in their work and are good at it, only to return to personal situations that they find too painful to face. The danger is that hard work and even good works become painkillers that fix the symptoms but leave the sickness untreated.

In other words, the solution to being overworked is not to do more work, but to learn how to be with yourself and your own thoughts, as painful as that might be. When we create space in our life to be alone we are left to confront the things about ourselves that we don’t like, and to deal with them. We’re left to think about the way we treat other people, like that time we ignored our friend or laughed at someone’s misfortune behind their back.

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Since having a baby I have become much more aware of the amount of time I spend on my phone, and the way in which I use it as an ‘avoidance mechanism’ whilst I am caring for her. When I’m breastfeeding I automatically find myself reaching into my back pocket and scrolling through Instagram. The (breast)feed normally takes less than ten minutes, but it seems I cannot bear the thought of being alone with my thoughts (and my daughter) for that length of time.

I suppose this is what Jamison describes as an avoidance mechanism, which I’m using in order to evade my interior world. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking that I’m ‘working’ when I’m on Twitter, but the truth is that I’m looking for that quick dopamine hit, or that moment of recognition, which serves to distract me from my life in real time.

But is it a sin? Well, in the sense that it takes me away from myself and my family and enables me to ignore my internal needs, I suppose it is a form of acedia. It’s the thing I do when I don’t want to do other things, when I’m sat on a train and want to ignore the stranger opposite me. It pulls me out of my physical community and allows me to disengage from those nagging feelings I’ve been trying to ignore.

Jamison argues that we are losing our spiritual awareness altogether, and growing up in a period of ‘collective acedia’. I’m not sure this is totally the case, as I find myself having almost daily conversations with people who are spiritually curious. But I do think we would be well advised to renegotiate our understanding of sin for the contemporary age—in a time of deep disconnection I believe it ultimately offers a path back to ourselves, and to each other.

My husband still has a week of Jury duty left, and I’m struck by the possibility that he might have to pass judgement on a drug lord who is spiritually more available to his family and loved ones than I am.

If any of you have found a way to be online and not lose yourself to it, please let me know in the comments.

Here are some of the things I’ve found helpful as I try to spend less time in front of the screen:

Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps For a Fulfilling Life by Abbot Christopher Jamison
A brilliant primer on the ideas underpinning Christian monasticism. Christopher Jamison first came to public attention for a documentary called The Monastery in which normal people spent time living according to the rules of St. Benedict.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
Jenny has a new book out this week called ‘Saving Time’, but I highly recommend her debut, which helped to kick-start a public discourse about disconnection in the attention economy.
On Connection by Kae Tempest
A long essay on the relationship between creativity and connection by the much-lauded poet and writer.

Thanks so much for reading.

Grace

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