A Lot Like Eve

by Joanna Jepson

  I had watched as she peered, almost pleadingly, at the herbs and briefly patted the girdle that hung around the grey tunic cloaking her.

  Now as I walked past the rows of foliage on my way to bed I thought about her and her search for wholeness again. In my room I tore out a piece of notepaper and scrawled across it:

  Joy! Need to talk about nettles and healing. Want to do some stealth talking in the raspberry patch tomorrow a.m.?

  I pushed it under her door.

  Tucked into my book at the breakfast table the next morning was a note.

  Sure! How about stealth nettle farming on top floor this afternoon? 2 p.m.

  The top floor was clear of inhabitants at that time of day and we talked freely. Joy introduced me to the herbs and their healing properties and again I asked, “But do they work?”, hastily adding that they certainly seemed to have done so.

  “Well, I think they help. I think they calm the inflammation for sure.”

  “I loved what you said before about growing these to participate in your healing.”

  “Yes, I think that’s it. They definitely do have a physiological effect but there’s also something about getting back to my body that is so important for me.”

  I could see the capital letters forming the question in my mind: WHY? I THOUGHT NUNS WERE ABOUT TRANSCENDING THEIR BODIES?

  But I stayed quiet in the hope that she would say more.

  “I think this inflammation and tension, or whatever it is, is my body’s way of telling me something’s wrong … that I’m stuck up here in my mind. So much of what we’re about here is to do with prayers and words and spirit. We’re saturated in it, to be honest. It feels like a struggle for me to be in touch with my physical energy; to be at home and whole within my body too.”

  Her face wrinkled up into the gentlest frown but she smiled as she spoke, as if she knew how ridiculous it was for a contemplative nun to be frustrated by all the praying she had to do.

  “What bothers you most? I mean, is it the celibacy?” I had to ask.

  “No, no, that feels very life-giving still.” She paused and touched the skin around her jaw as she pondered.

  “No, I think it’s the feeling of unwholeness with my body, I find it so hard to accept my body and that shows itself in my relationship with food and then my skin … my skin flares up horribly and, oh I don’t know, it’s so silly that I care.”

  She began to laugh off her words as if they contained too much nonsense, but I wasn’t about to let her walk away from this internal wrestling match; I needed to know all about it.

  “Then I guess the nettles are immensely healing … they remind you that you do care and that your body is important … that you are prepared to listen to it.”

  Joy nodded as she continued, “You know, recently I’ve begun just putting my hands on my chin and on my stomach as a way of making peace with myself, like I am almost affirming and blessing the part of me that is so sore and unacceptable …”

  I thought of my photograph, the picture of my fourteen-year-old self, that I kept with me in my own small healing ritual.

  “And in breathing too; meditating and focusing on my breath – that has become such a vital way of feeling whole again. Did you know that there’s a Hebrew tradition where they believe that just breathing is saying the name of God? As if it’s our most primal prayer and humans have been designed to say it and live by it: just breathing the name of God.”

  “That is so beautiful.” I thought about the years I’d spent contriving together the right religious buzzwords to make the most impressive and right-on prayers, and I felt drained. Yet Joy hadn’t had anything like this in her background and I was intrigued by what experiences might have brought her here.

  “Where do you think this dis-ease comes from? I mean, it’s not like you are surrounded by copies of Hello and repeats of Beverley Hills 90210 … so what is it? How can it be that even here in a Welsh convent women can still feel they are not right in their own bodies?”

  She laughed at the impossibility of it. “I know, you’d think this would be the one place we women could come and feel all right. But it’s no escape … it just makes these realities more felt.”

  “Even nuns seem to follow in Eve’s footsteps. It seems to be mapped out for us just like it was for her: that being a woman and all that that entails is painful and vulnerable, even if it’s life-giving! We can’t escape it – not even here. One way or another all of us get tangled in the same story; whether it’s fawning subservience or not loving our bodies or hiding our authentic self for the sake of other people’s good opinion.”

  Novice Joy’s eyebrows were raised in recognition.

  “I mean, men have their own stuff too. But women – well, it doesn’t matter if we’re nuns, or mothers, or eight, or seventy-eight …”

  She finished my sentence: “… the Eden story repeats itself in so many ways and lives.”

  There was quiet between us for a moment.

  “You know what I’m beginning to think?” I leant back against the window, unfolding my arms and resting back on them. “I think that when we trip over these inequalities and injustices and inauthenticities it’s a wake-up call; our chance to see that it wasn’t meant to be like this. These things are our reminder to get up, to name what’s fragmented and twisted, and begin looking in new places for wholeness – with ourselves and with each other.”

  Joy nodded briskly. “Yes, I think you’re right … it’s like Julian of Norwich said, ‘There’s our fall and there’s the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.’”

  I thought about my falls and scrapes: the religion, the efforts, the bids for control and perfection, the judgements and the pretences. How they had wracked me, and how I, in turn, had hurt others with them too. And looking back across the years I began to see how this trail of fig leaves and fractured things became part of the call; drawing me on in search of healing, reunion and love.

  27

  Ground E

  It’s one thing to surrender yourself to the silence and love when they are surrounding you. It is something else to hold that silence and love within you when you leave and make your way back into a noisy, demanding world. Part of me felt sad that I couldn’t quite crowbar myself into a vocation to the religious life; after all, these women, and the men who lived and worked alongside them, were managing to live with the kind of mutuality and equality one might dream of. Nobody told these women that they couldn’t lead or teach or drive tractors and farm the land, or that they should get married and have babies because that’s the way it is for women. Ty Mawr was at least one place on earth in which I could see women and men being partners in making something good and truthful flourish; something beyond their own personal agendas. It was a snapshot of pre-Fall Eden, post-Fall.

  But no matter how much I tried to envisage myself in the grey tunic of a novice sister, I couldn’t push aside this knowing, this seeing myself as a priest somewhere else. I didn’t know where that somewhere else would be, only that it wasn’t going to be a geographical parish so much as a cultural one. At my selection interviews I attempted to make sense of it; at college I tried to explain it to my tutors; and eventually I had to face my Bishop and claw back some theological gravitas on hearing myself utter the words “I want to be a vicar but not in a church.” He peered at me over his spectacles. That was not the way to talk about being a priest. Only I couldn’t say anything clearer, I couldn’t sum it up because I couldn’t yet see it.

  I poured out the story of the fearful God of my childhood and how my Dad had come through for me, helping to unburden that tyranny from me. I described my failures, from my short-lived attempt at nursing to fears that my life would be less than it could be if I had a dog-collar round my neck. I talked about Joe and the guilt I felt about not having been there for him in the end; and about the convent and its silence and the things it revealed and healed. And from this heap of unfinished stories the Church discerned that I did have
a vocation. I was sent to Cambridge for another two years of theological training and told to listen carefully for where God was calling me.

  I knew how to listen. I had done it at the convent, free-falling in trust that the answers would emerge in their own time.

  But that didn’t stop me trying to short-circuit the waiting time with some good suggestions of my own. I wanted to know. I wanted to see right now what this future would look like. I wanted to be in control and make it happen.

  Nun was off the list.

  What about chaplain? That’s being a priest but not in a church.

  Schools, hospitals, prisons … they all have chaplains. Maybe I was going to be a hospital chaplain and redeem my earlier experiences. My monkey mind jumped and shouted and grabbed hold of possibilities to fill the emptiness. I grew impatient and doubtful and tried to fill the waiting time with answers of my own design rather than letting the right thing emerge and become what it would be.

  Then something did emerge. On a freezing cold night in Cambridge as I walked back to my college came a phone call from a friend working in bioethics. “I’ve got the recent abortion statistics in front of me and I had to tell you … it says that an abortion took place at 28 weeks because of a bilateral cleft lip and palate: that’s what you had, isn’t it?”

  It wasn’t what I’d had, but the surgical reconstruction I had undergone is the same as that performed on young adults with a cleft palate. I quickly did the maths: 28 weeks gestation … that’s about seven months. Babies are born at less than that and can survive.

  “A cleft lip and palate – are you sure?”

  Could that seriously be a reason to terminate? I didn’t know exactly where the law stood. I was only aware that Down’s syndrome is the most common reason for terminating a pregnancy on the grounds of abnormality. It was something that I shuddered to contemplate. But a cleft lip and palate wasn’t the same; children at my church, two of my teachers, a friend’s father; we all know people who have this condition and have had it corrected. How could it be possible to make this grounds for an abortion?

  I checked the Office for National Statistics and saw that there had been nine other abortions, also for cleft lip and palate. I rang my friend back. “There wasn’t just one, there were nine others.”

  “Yes, but that single case I told you about was after 24 weeks.”

  “At 28 weeks.”

  “Exactly; that one is legal under Ground E of the Abortion Act.”

  I went back and read up on Ground E and how an amendment to the 1967 Abortion Act had come into effect in 1991 to allow abortion up to and including birth where there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped.

  Another call to my friend: “Are you sure it was for a cleft lip and palate? Were there other reasons do you think?”

  “That’s the recorded reason, but I think it would be worth us doing some digging, Joanna.”

  So we dug. I spoke to a solicitor, the brother of a team leader at Good News Crusade, who specialized in disability and children’s rights. He was stunned at the possibility this might have happened, not just once but ten times in one year. “It’s very interesting, Joanna. In 1990, when the debate over this law was taking place, two lawyers warned of the risk that, if the amendment passed, conditions like cleft palate and club foot might become grounds for abortion. Lord Steel and Harriet Harman MP were outraged at their scaremongering and recommended these lawyers be reported to the Bar Council for suggesting such discreditable things. Now it seems they are happening.”

  Good. Someone else wanted to dig as well.

  “I think we should inform the police, let them know there’s evidence of a potential abuse of the law here.”

  “Whooaaaa … the police?”

  “Look, Joanna, are you up for this?”

  Even if I had known then what “this” would eventually become, it would have been very difficult to weigh up whether it would be worth it. I couldn’t have known how it would turn my life upside down; how it would affect my family, my future and, not least, reach the unknown woman who had gone through this abortion who, I would find out ten years later, had been under huge pressure to terminate this pregnancy. Nor would I ever know the lives and decisions it would help to change. All I knew at that point was that I was in a unique position to push for accountability: were we really a society who condoned the termination of viable human life on the grounds of such defects and flaws? Working so hard to bring about diversity and equal opportunities in every system, every network and community of our country; trying to change attitudes towards people with disabilities; removing barriers to flourishing, especially for those with physical and mental challenges: it all seemed to fall flat if we justified the termination of certain lives on the very grounds we wanted to accept.

  I thought about Ali and me and the slurs and abuse we had encountered as children; was abortion really the best that we, as reasonably evolved human beings, could come up with in response to that suffering? That it might have been better for us not to have existed than to have experienced the cruelty and ignorance of others? It seemed to be a systematic, legalized slump into fear and doubt about the value of certain lives.

  I began to reach out and ask questions. I found that governments had already started asking questions like this from an economic perspective. Questions that they addressed to mathematicians and geneticists. Questions like, If we started screening every pregnant woman, not just those over 32, for foetal disability then how much would it cost us versus how much it costs the State to care for disabled children should they be undetected and born? And I found out that the mathematicians answered Yes, it is economically effective to screen every pregnant woman and offer terminations where necessary. It will save taxpayer money. I thought of Alastair and all the NVQs in Hotel and Catering he’d achieved. I thought of him now in his workspace at Dundries Nurseries, the country’s number one videotape recycler: methodically working through a pile of 12,000 videotapes, taking apart their nineteen component pieces and saving the landfill from the careless disposal of unwanted plastic. Maybe mathematicians and geneticists were the wrong people to be making these life or death calculations. It seemed the weighing up of human life in the scales of tax bills and medical prognosis was leading to the disposal of lives – lives that would have meaning and make a contribution to our society if we were willing to acknowledge it.

  There was something inhumane about needing to demonstrate a person’s ultimate worth in terms of their contribution to the national GDP. And it overlooked the fact that, unless we are victims of a sudden tragedy, as we age we all become disabled in one way or another and have to adjust to the inconvenience and dependence and limitations it brings about. How do we prepare and rise to the challenges of disability if we make abortion on the grounds of disability a justifiable matter of course?

  I began having conversations with friends, and friends of friends. People told me how they were offered an abortion because their baby was found to have missing fingers. Another man got in touch to tell me how his mother was offered an abortion because he had been diagnosed with a club foot. My friend who had started all this arranged for me to meet a cleft palate surgeon. He talked candidly and sadly about mothers who came to him from other hospitals having been alarmed and urged to consider terminating their babies with a cleft palate diagnosis; mothers desperate for a second opinion. Mothers expecting a much-wanted baby who had now been turned into bioethicists by doctors who warned them how disfigured their child would be, and how near or far someone would have to stand from their child before seeing there was something wrong.

  I knew something of what that could be like, perhaps not as acutely, not entirely the same. But I had been that spurned child and I had also been through the same surgery. I had a voice and I wanted to use it where others had been silenced. We began to push for answers. Paul, my solicitor, set the process in motion; nothing
more than a paper trail winding its way slowly through one police in-tray after another. And life at college carried on moving steadily towards the date of my ordination.

  28

  Valentine Message

  In the Church of England the newly ordained first become curates, charged with ‘the cure of souls’ among other more down-to-earth tasks. It is an apprenticeship for the priesthood completed under the training and leadership of an experienced vicar. Most of the students in my year had got their curacies sorted out but a handful of us were still poring over the Curacy Job File that sat in the porter’s lodge and was updated with new vacancies each week.

  Jane Addis was by now living in Chester, as was Rosalind, and so in the New Year I trekked up-country to visit them. On the Sunday morning, the three of us wandered around Chester Cathedral. Its stained glass windows were stunning and hopeful even in the wan light of January and, thinking how much the warm stone reminded me of Ty Mawr, I remarked that I would love to be ordained in a cathedral like this. Which is sometimes how God sets us up because six weeks later an unexpected curacy was advertised in the Curacy Job File. It was based in Chester, in the neighbouring parish to Jane’s.

  The vicar advertising this curacy was Bob, a Scouser with a voice that boomed hymns and a laugh that rocked the earth on which he stood. His wisdom was just as deep and as resonant. I went up for a couple of weekends to meet Bob and his churchwardens and to visit the church incognito. It was a large thriving parish engaging with every imaginable aspect of the wider community. I told Bob that this was the place for me and to my relief he agreed. It was in the course of these discussions and meetings that I mentioned the legal action that I had begun.

  “The police have investigated – very superficially – and have told us the abortion forms were filled in correctly … which obviously completely misses the point. Paul, my solicitor, is looking for us to go to the High Court for a judicial review. So although it’s all gone quiet at the moment it will resurface later this year, probably after my ordination.”