Most countries in the world, and certainly Britain, would grind to a halt if it were not for the unpaid army of volunteers working in all kinds of sectors.

Permanent and part-time carers, staff in charity shops, school governors, hospital befrienders, those running clubs for the handicapped, the long-suffering souls serving on committees trying to gain funding for all manner of good causes – this list only scrapes the surface of those who volunteer to make our community better and safer to live in.

So I was really pleased to see a call for a new bank (public) holiday to be declared to in Britain to celebrate their efforts and encourage more people to give up their time. I hope it happens.

At the risk of sounding irredeemably cheesy, I know from my own experience that you get back far more than you put in. This really is community in its widest sense.

This week’s collection is about nourishment. From our first moments of life when we are breastfed (or not) nourishment is bound up for us in issues of comfort, sensuality, connection.

In the West, we eat far more than we should, we eat meat from animals raised in appalling conditions and vegetables and grains smothered with chemicals. In other countries people starve. (Well in fact in Western countries poor people go hungry as well, just not on the same apocalyptic scale.)

Our religions are bound up in rituals and laws around food: what we can and can’t eat and drink, breaking bread together. When we share food with true friends, it is a sacramental act, whether intended that way or not. One of the most beautiful aspects of Jewish observance is the day-to-day and cyclical observation of faith in the home though food and ritual. As Christians, we have largely lost that.

Anyway, enough of what I think, let’s move on to the treasures I’ve found this week.

Christine writes movingly about Africa and includes a wonderful recipe. I am determined to make this dish although I will probably substitute pork or tofu as I don’t eat chicken.

One of my guilty habits is really good quality coffee. There are lots of issues around the growing of coffee – fair trade, land use etc. I’ve recently found a specialist blog called Coffee and Conservation and this post about sustainable coffee is well worth reading.

And a good cup of coffee would go really well with Milton’s new breakfast invention, Pineapple Cornbread. I have to try that one.

For our main course, perhaps we should try the salmon and cous cous recipe that Jo at Soul Food has adapted. Sounds wonderful.

There’s a really funny scene in Sleepless in Seattle where the newly-dating-again Tom Hanks thinks “Tiramisu” is some new sexual technique that’s going to be expected of him. You’ll be happy to hear that this wonderful example at The Traveller’s Lunchbox is of Tiramisu, not technique.

I was doing some random surfing for recipes and found il Cavoletto di bruxelles. I have absolutely no idea what any of it actually says, but isn’t the whole website completely stunningly gorgeous? Only someone based in Rome could make the horrible brussels sprout look cool.

And finally, one of my favourite comfort foods is lasagne. I found this video on YouTube that hits the mark. Have a blessed week, everyone.

I found a beautiful online meditation today at Towonda’s Window.

Being an old-fashioned meditator, the computerised variations don’t normally engage me. But this did, I found it extremely moving. Click the graphic below to start.

I’ve waited some time to post this.

A few weeks ago, several of us wrote on the position of women in the Christian church. There was heated debate in some blogs; I heard bitterness and fear as well as love and understanding. People were hurt.

I find it so very, very sad that those of us coming from different spaces in the Christian church can be so divided by words, even the interpretation of words in our own sacred literature.

Marge Piercy’s poem Learning to Read looks at the power of words as marks on paper. It is quite a long poem and in these excerpts I have tried to capture Piercy’s childhood experience of unlocking the power of the “black scribbles” only to find with a shock that words written in another language (when she grabs the haggadah to read at the seder meal) became incomprehensible:

…Secrets were locked in those

black scribbles on white, magic
to open the sky and the earth.

…At school I grabbed words like toys
I had been denied. Finally I
could read, me. I read every sign

from the car. On journeys I read
maps. I read every cereal box
and can, spelling out the hard words.
All printing was sacred.

At the seder I sat down at the table,
selfimportant, adult on my cushion.
I was no longer the youngest child
but the smartest. When the haggadah

was to be passed across me,
I grabbed it, roaring confidence.
But the squiggles, the scratches
were back. Not a letter

waved to me. I was blinded again.

Sometimes it feels to me that those of us who have different views of our Christian lives and how they should be lived are actually speaking different languages. Our own language is naturally precious to us. But how do we learn to understand and appreciate the language of others? Even if we do not speak, say, French, we acknowledge its validity as a language that has arisen with a people and a culture. How do we translate that to our religious beliefs? How do we learn the language of loving debate and shared experience?

In peace.

I’ve already posted about my other two cats. I really AM turning into a dotty old spinster who blogs about cats. There’s no hope for me. But no, there is a poetry in the animals we share our lives with, and they have much to teach us.

Today I want to introduce you to my third cat, Jess. She doesn’t have Lucy’s jealousy or passion, nor Hazel’s elitist outlook. Jess is quite simply the most loving cat I have ever known. We’ve been besotted with each other from the first moment we met.

I’d gone to the rescue shelter and was on the point of adopting Lucy and Hazel when I saw Jess, at the back of her pen. She rushed forward. I crouched down. We made crooning noises at each other through the mesh, and I came away with three cats, not two.

She’s a big cat, the size of a small dog. She’s not exactly elegant: only one canine tooth, a skinny tail almost embarrassingly small for her body, a large round body, no matter how little she eats. She breaks all cat rules, for she is not in the least delicate in her movements. I can no longer keep breakables out, as she moves across the surfaces of furniture like a tank, destroying all in her wake. Listening to her descending the stairs I imagine I can hear strains of Colonel Hathi’s March from the Jungle Book.

She waits on the windowsill for me to come home, and bounds to the door when I arrive. We spend part of each evening curled up on the sofa together, Jess on my lap, her long heavy body stretched up on my chest. A few days ago I woke up wondering what was different and found her actually under the covers with me, her head in the curve of my shoulder, her paws stretched around me like a lover, her blissed-out furry face purring inches from mine.

I sometimes wonder if we knew each other in a past life. If I were a witch she would be my familiar. All cats are special but some cats are really special. You shouldn’t have favourites but she is my favourite:

You are my cat and I am your human.

Hilaire Belloc

We discuss what we are reading and compare our favourite authors. We absorb the beauty of their words, laugh and cry with their characters. We learn about life from between their covers.

Our imagination builds on descriptions so that the very act of reading becomes a collaboration with the writer. We give of our physical selves as we read, straining our eyes far too late into the night. The texture under our fingers, the rustle of the turning pages, the sharp smell of new books and the mustiness of old speak to our other senses. We number a few books among our dearest friends, and it never matters to us how tattered and battered they get. To us they are still beautiful and always will be.

I have started recycling some of my books. It is very difficult. Time for someone else to enjoy the pleasure, time for me to lighten my possessions. I will thank the books with which I’ve enjoyed a pleasant acquaintance and hope they find the right readers. I will sink back into my home with my old friends and we will breathe a sigh of relief together.

There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.

Jim Fiebig

Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up. We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we’re lying.
If we say No, we don’t see it,
that No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit. So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness.

By Rumi
Found at Ragamuffin Diva

I’ve been thinking a lot about kindness and unkindness recently. You see a lot of both. Let’s all try to be open enough to each other’s varying views to be “a mighty kindness”.  It isn’t easy. It’s what Christ is about.

This week, I’m concentrating on videos I’ve found.

First, follow this link to the enchanting Jonathan and his Challah-making abilities, and enjoy Maya’s new blog design along the way. (And if you haven’t ever watched Maya’s own Challah video, it’s on her home page.)

Bad Alice posts a video that I find strangely compelling, if a little too rat-infested. I had no idea who the singer was (what can I tell you, I’m way out of touch) but a little YouTube research shows her to be one Tori Amos. Now I can’t get the song out of my head. And although I’d vaguely heard of Ms Amos, I just thought she was some plastic pop princess. Well she ain’t, so I’m going to be listening to more of her stuff now.

In Milton’s moving post we find another gifted singer, the sublime k.d. lang, with her version of fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah. Milton’s post, in its brokenness, has echoes for me of Lucy’s Broken for You.

A musician called Nate has a new blog about Buddhism I’ve been reading and I like the collection of videos he has posted, especially the first one, “What about me”. Lots of food for thought there.

Antony reminds us that our attention span is getting shorter, but brings us a bit of light relief with the Pythons at their most lunatic.

And so in the same vein I’m posting below one of my own favourites, from John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers. (Not sure if the show ever made it over to my Yankee friends?) Have a great week everyone, and may all of your cars start first time.

I’ve been reading an article about a young woman who lost both legs in the July 2005 London Tube bombings.

One element of her story struck me deeply (as it did her). After several months’ treatment and recuperation, she returned to the job she loved. The evening before the bombings, she had left on her desk a file marked “Urgent”, full of things she had to deal with the following day. It was still there on her return all those months later, exactly as she had left it. Nothing in it had been done or even started, and there had been no consequences.

How many of us spend our lives convinced that what we are doing is vital, and has to be done there and then? I think we should be asking a few more questions.

Is what we are about to do truly urgent, truly necessary, truly valuable? I suggest that if it is necessary and/or valuable, then we must go ahead with it. And if it is one or both of those things, then it may also be urgent, in which case we must do it fast.

Where we get distracted is by doing things that appear to be both necessary and urgent, but in fact are neither.

Now don’t misunderstand me, when you whittle down to necessary and/or valuable activities, you will still wind up doing some boring, repetitive stuff. Something might be necessary simply because you’ll get into trouble with your boss if you don’t do it.

And by valuable, I don’t necessarily mean “Saviour of the Universe” type valuable. Having fun is valuable (I’d venture to say it is necessary as well). Laughter is one of the most valuable activities we can undertake, for ourselves and for others!

But by engaging only in activities that are necessary and/or valuable, perhaps our daily lives can become an accompaniment to our spiritual growth, not an obstacle to it. Worth thinking about.

Lucy put up her contribution to a book meme going around. I’m not going to tag anyone else, but it would be great to hear from you if you want to join in. Here is my contribution:

How many books do you own?

I’ve begun cataloguing my books on Library Thing. I’m about two thirds of the way through and up to 700. However some of those are books I’ve read and recycled, and I’ve recorded them so as not to buy and read them again. (This has been known to happen.)

Last book I read

Actually the last book I read I didn’t finish. It was our last reading group choice: Stuart, A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters. It is the story of a homeless man, told by a volunteer who befriends him. I almost always finish whatever I’m reading but I found this book so depressing and unpleasant that I chose not to.

It’s well-written, honest, and not at all preachy or pious. About half our reading group found it very funny as well as inherently sad. In fact opinion was polarised – none of us felt neutral about the book. I began to feel my sympathy for homeless people slipping away the more I learned about them, and I felt totally exasperated by Stuart himself (as, to be fair, the author did at times).

I may have another go at the book in due course as I have a feeling it may have a message for me, just not one I can hear at the moment.

Five books that mean a lot to me

This is even more difficult than my ten favourite films, a list I mentally re-rehearse occasionally! (Currently: Godfather trilogy, Casablanca, Singin’ in the Rain, Some Like it Hot, Manhattan, Thelma & Louise, Kill Bill I&II, Baghdad Cafe, Chocolat and Road to Perdition. There, two lists for the price of one.)

Here are the books, in no particular order:

1. The Chronicles of Robin Hood, by Rosemary Sutcliffe. My big childhood favourite and my first experience of death: Maid Marian dies two thirds of the way through. I was devastated and outraged, I couldn’t believe it. I read the rest of the book expecting it somehow to be a mistake. It was utterly real to me, I lived with Robin through his grief. Reading that book was like falling into the world of those characters. It was the first time I realised fully the power of literature.
2. OK, let’s get this over with: Harry Potter – all of ‘em (so far).
3. I’m struggling to choose a single book by one of my favourite authors, Marge Piercy. I think it has to be Fly Away Home, a story where family and sexual relationships are intertwined with the main character’s reawakening to her core self and her politics. I also love Piercy’s poetry, especially The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. (OK, I know that’s cheating and I sneaked in an extra book.)
4. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. The beauty, the bravery, the haunting sadness and loss of it. (Impossible for Peter Jackson to capture completely in the film trilogy, but I thought it was a fantastic effort, and he very nearly did it.)
5. Gaining Ground, (also published as Abra) by Canadian writer Joan Barfoot. I first read this probably in my early 20s, and I find lots of echoes still. Abra is a young mother who follows an irresistible pull to abandon her family and live in the remote countryside as a hermit. Years later her now grown daughter sets out to find her. The book examines motherhood, madness, and mirrors, plus other things not beginning with ‘m’.

So that’s it from me. I also love detective fiction, especially Linda Fairstein, Harlen Coben and Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone series.