People have been asking a lot
lately about my new novel, The Caretaker.
It is very (hesitation) religious, they say.
As though I am not allowed
(or perhaps, not qualified) to write about God, because usually I write
about…other things: hard-men of repute, alcoholic brothers, paedophile priests,
I create visceral theatre and challenging film where the social edit is spared
and four letter words are used as terms of endearment.
People presume that you
cannot find much of God in these dark places. Personally I find nothing but God here; in the cracks, in the
vulnerabilities, in those delicious human fractures – that’s where the light
gets in.
As a writer, actually as a
human being, people struggle to know where I fit.
I struggle to know where I
fit.
I have no exact category. I
write books, plays, films, articles, I teach, I direct, I mentor, and I skive
quite a lot. I enjoy what Eric Fromme would call a spontaneous life. I love
being me. Spontaneity makes living in the world enjoyable but, I have to say,
it makes me very hard to sell in the market place; I am a nightmare for agents,
PR people and television commissioners.
When people hear the word
religion they automatically read dogma,
they presume you are either socks-and-sandals, hiding from the world behind
layers of old scripture, or you are a fundamentalist, a jihadist who wants to
make war with the world; same scripture, different interpretation.
God is a hard sell.
The word religion comes from
the Latin re-ligare, it means to
re-align, man to man, man to his source.From this perspective I am
religious.
And Jihad derives from the
Arabic, it means to struggle, the
greater Jihad is the struggle with the self, where we go to war with false
perception and limiting core beliefs. It seems I am a jihadist too;
perhaps a reluctant jihadist because like most people I don’t want to suffer
even though I innately know that there is no growth in comfort. And that is the nature of
this book, The Caretaker. It is a fable about a man that seeks strength without
struggle; he flirts with power but takes no reasonability for the office of
power.
The Caretaker is a book about
me. It is a book about me being
bone-tired of listening to me and my own narcissistic whinging. I was going
through a very selfish, self-pitying stage in my life, nothing came quickly
enough, nothing seemed big enough or easy enough. I was constantly looking for
wealth without work, growth without discomfort and skills without
apprenticeship. I didn’t know how or where or why I had become so detached from
my Logos, but purpose was lacking in my life, and as a consequence everything
was an effort. I found myself complaining all the time about my lot and how,
compared with others, it didn’t seem like I had much.
It was not true of course, I
had breath in my lungs, there was bread on the table and I had as much
opportunity as the next man, but at the time I couldn’t see it, I didn’t know
how blessed I was, just to be alive. Embarrassed by my
ingratitude, I decided to send an apology into the ether, a confession, a
declaration of my many digressions. I asked (whoever was listening) please show me things as they are.
I was shown. I have to say it was a shock. It was jarring to look in the
mirror and see the reflection of a fat, greedy, self-pitying man looking back
at me. I couldn’t believe how ungrateful I had become and how easily,
especially when I was surrounded on all sides by such luxury, such love. I was (am) married to the
girl of my dreams, living in a house and making a living. I was the most
blessed man I knew, and yet I still wanted more, without offering even a bead
of sweat in exchange or word of thanks in return. I was practically living in
the lap of luxury (I had running water!) and bemoaning my lack. I felt ashamed
at how narrow minded I’d become, and how…lazy.
How had I become so very lazy?
The answer landed in my mind
as quickly as the question had been asked: I had fallen into (what sages of old
called) the forgetting. If we don’t remind ourselves
on a regular basis of what we have, what we have will be taken from us, or at
least hidden behind layers of false ego and twisted belief.
I realised in my moment of
clarity that gratitude was a key, it opened the door to potential, and if
gratitude was lacking, it locked the same door tightly shut. So I wrote what became known
as The Enlightenment Prayer http://www.thecaretaker.co.uk something I could read every day to remind
myself not to forget how much I had and how blessed I was, and to stop asking
for things that I was not ready for yet. I was always asking for
things that I was not ready for yet.
The prayer organically grew
and became a short novel, written in parabolic form, and infused with the
intuited wisdom of the ages.
The prayer began with the words:
Lord!
God Almighty (The Universe)
A word
if you don’t mind.
A word
about me.
Actually,
more precisely, a word about me and my specious requests.
It is a
muscular prayer. It demands that I take charge of my own life. It insists that
the world cannot be changed, but I can, and in changing me, the world will
change. It is a prayer that I read and listen to every time I lose my way; it
kicks me up the backside when I fall into apathy or self-pity and forget to
honour my suffering. It reminds me that growth is in struggle. Not the usual wrastle with outside forces, they
are an easy distraction, rather the perennial struggle where I lean into the
sharp edges and fight the only enemy worth my effort; myself.
