This is the third installment of “Fables and Reflections”

Fable Three is called “Opening to the Stranger.” It explores our relationship with the unfamiliar or unusual, with whatever seems new or strange.

The first and second installments (see earlier posts below) provided links to an Introduction, Fable One, Fable Two and Anchorite poems.

Each piece takes just a few minutes to read. There are 16  Fables in all and I shall post them here every three weeks or so. The  series is, in effect, a report back from a working life spent at a fraught frontier, one of Society’s fault-lines. They share learning and seek to offer guidance on how to survive and navigate and make real and creative human connection across division, shadow and frontier.

If anyone finds value or virtue in these Fables and Reflections, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply link them to the blog, or, alternatively,  I am happy to send them out as email attachments to people who ask for them, and am already doing that.  I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail to anyone who would prefer to read the pieces that way.  Just send me your address.

This is the second installment of “Fables and Reflections”

It consists of Fable Two and Anchorite poems.

The first installment (below) provided links to an Introduction and Fable One.

Each piece takes just a few minutes to read. There are 16  in all and I shall post them here every three weeks or so. The  series is, in effect, a report back from a working life spent at a fraught frontier, one of Society’s fault-lines. They share learning and seek to offer guidance on how to survive and navigate and make real and beneficial human connection, where connection can be difficult.

Fable Two, “Dame Marjorie’s Dream,” suggests ways you can tell truth from falsehood, the healing from the harmful. In the process it tells a story about  Dame Julian of Norwich, an anchoress of the fourteenth century. That is why I have added the set of poems, in case anyone would like to read them. Called “Anchorite Poems”, I think they are really about old age. And though suggested by Dame Julian and her time,  I think they were actually inspired the late Elizabeth Bewick, whom I knew and loved.

Elizabeth Bewick was a published poet who lived in Hyde, on the edge of Winchester.  While being typically English in some ways, she was also very much her own person, transcending cultural influence ; she was a shrewd and even rather intimidating loner, while being at the same time a kindly and active member of her local quiet community, surrounded by old walls of fervent, anxious, yet settled faith.  On her 90th birthday, in the local church hall, on a beautiful day, I named her Dame Elizabeth of Hyde.

If anyone finds value or virtue in these Fables and Reflections, please send word of them to people you know who you think might want to read them. You could simply link them to the blog, or, alternatively,  I am happy to send them out as email attachments to people who ask for them, and am already doing that.  I would also be happy to send hard copy versions by surface mail to anyone who would prefer to read the pieces that way.  Just send me your address.

I am uploading with this post the first installment of  “Fables and Reflections,” a collection of short prose pieces which I wrote over a period of around three months in Greece.  Future uploads will consist of just one Fable each. But this first post has two attachments, first the collection’s Introduction and second Fable One. Click on the link words. Exclusive of the Introduction, there will be sixteen fables in all.

As a series, “Fables and Reflections” varies in approach. Some of the pieces are essentially metaphor, allegory, parable, fable ; others are written more directly as discussion papers. They explore, among other things, the place and meaning of social responsibility and social inclusion, and the  skills required to make  and keep healing human connection,   in a Society otherwise much engaged in transition-fever, aggressive fundamentalism, material acquisiton, denial.

I believe this collection of pieces is relevant,  especially to people working/struggling along frontiers within Society where the need to connect, and to have skill in doing so, are especially important.

For various reasons my “publication” strategy will be to put up the fables here one at a time  and later perhaps on the site of a small charity I run called “Hyphen-21”. They’ll go up fortnightly.  At the same time I shall send them out as email attachments to people who have said beforehand they’d be interested. If anyone would prefer to have them sent in hard copy by surface mail, I would be willing to do that too. Just contact me and give me your address.

The Fables vary in length, but I would say on average that each takes approximately ten minutes to read. If you have them in hard copy, you could read each one over a cup of tea, a half pint, a glass of wine, whatever you fancy.

Fable 1, “The Door which Strangely Opens,” offers some thoughts on endurance and right action.

If you think that “Fables and Reflections” has any merit or value, please pass  the collection on, or recommend this site,  to anyone else you think might be interested.

Best wishes

Rogan Wolf

Someone I knew well died this Spring. Her death (from breast cancer) came twenty years after she was first diagnosed. But almost until the end, she refused to accept that death was pending. In her bed at home, she acknowledged the truth only a few hours before she stopped breathing, thereby making honest communication with her loved ones only briefly possible.

Until those final hours, she had believed that acknowledging the fact that the disease was a mortal one might in itself kill her. She felt that anyone who talked to her about death was introducing negativity into her system,  threatening her life, weakening her hope. Words which acknowledged the disease seemed almost more dangerous to her than the disease itself. She felt that her survival depended on refusing to resign herself and, by extension, that she could actually keep herself alive through the sheer positive power of her denial. She insisted on more time. “I am not a statistic“, she would say. “I shall stand aside.“ Another ten years would do. That round figure in the mind would take from death any power it might have had to lean across her every day and skin cell, causing her heart to plunge to the depths whenever she returned to consciousness in the early mornings, or her fingers to search every few hours through the scarred surfaces of her body, for further signs of the spread of doom.

That resolution of hers made me think of Lazarus.

Jesus Christ, maybe under pressure from Mary and Martha, his good friends, brought their brother Lazarus back from the dead.

The heart lifts. Here’s a happy ending. A pale figure emerges from the tomb to screams of joy. He’s back. Life is cheated of its rules. Loss and pain are pushed back.

But who is this man who has returned to us ? How can he be the man we knew ?

Christ has probably fixed things so that the parts of Lazarus that had decomposed are more or less back in place and reasonably hygienic once again. But he can’t fix the fact that Lazarus now knows how it is to die. That is beyond even Christ to change or undo. Lazarus has crossed the frontier that separates the living from the dead. He got through, leaving everyone else behind. We don’t know how it was for him, but he knows, or half-knows. Perhaps he’ll tell us, or half tell us. Perhaps he won’t want to.

And the story hasn’t ended at all. In a while – and the Gospels don’t tell us when – Lazarus will have to die a second time. By now, Christ himself will be dead and will be sitting alongside His Father, the Creator. So this second time, there will be no return trip. Will Lazarus be sorry ? Or glad ?

Was he glad that first time, having made the exit which everyone dreads so utterly, to be forced back into the blinding light, for the temporary relief of his sisters, only to have to go through the whole business again, a short while later ?

Did he dance out of the tomb, wagging his fingers, saying Hi guys, I’m back, let’s
party ! – now I have a second chance to live awhile, (but also the obligation again to
die ?)

We aren’t told how Lazarus lived his second wind and second death – in that new time granted him – how much more joy he experienced, how much more pain, how much human value there was in that meagre period of extra time made possible millennia ago.

Nor are we told about those crowds who followed Christ around, saying, Save me Lord, Heal me Lord, Bid me Rise up and Walk. We have to assume that He was only able to “rescue”a few of them. How did the majority feel ? Did they blame Him for failing to put things right for them ? Or did they blame themselves ? Or their Carers for failing to push them forward hard enough, or in the right way? What sort of lives did they lead, devoid of that interlude, that stay of execution, which Christ might have delivered to them ? In what spirit did they die ?

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Rogan Wolf