A covering of feathers for the terrors of the night

How to struggle with the burden of other people's suffering.

Katherine Amphlett

Katherine is a counsellor based in the West Midlands.

Evie S. on Unsplash.

It’s one of the sad facts of life: that many of us at some point will see our parents get old and fade away. Sigh. It doesn’t matter how well prepared you are or how much you’ve thought about it before hand, the reality of a fragile mum or an exhausted dad can break your heart.

I’ve talked to my parents about this for years here and there. We’ve done lots of joking about seeing them off with a pink pill in the sherry, or ‘it’ll be a pillow for you Pa, if you’re too annoying’ – type thing. But when they left after Sunday lunch a couple of weeks ago, I had to clutch my husband. He lost his own mother last year… we’re still fluttering around the gap she’s left in our family. And now there’s my beloved olds too, looking diminished and moth eaten and moving at crepuscular speed. Ask Dad how he is these days, and he says ‘Old, dear’, and won’t elaborate further.

I can cope with this when it’s in short bursts. Visiting them for lunch or taking them out on a trip is OK and manageable, and there is still joy in family occasions. Mum’s birthday was full of love, even though she took all afternoon to open her cards and became hopelessly confused about who’d given her what.

But staying with them… that’s hard. Seeing the dust thick over the spare room; worrying about just how long that bowl of leftovers has been in the fridge. I whip about as unobtrusively as I can, scrubbing the bottom of the washing up bowl or putting their jerseys in a wash. I don’t want to be annoying – they won’t accept help and I’m not going to push – but it makes me sad. In particular I hate that my mum is in constant pain from crumbling bones, and that dementia has stolen her mind. Also, that as a consequence, Dad is irritable with her; he who has always adored her so much.

I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain.

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Since childhood, I have struggled with the burden of other people’s suffering. I sometimes wonder if I’m exaggerating when I think about how much I mind, but I don’t think I am. I can only manage if I’m really ready for it. With my counselling clients that takes the form of very firm boundaries, regular supervision, colleagues to talk to etc… but with family it’s much harder. It’s just your own naked, soft-bodied self-shrinking from all the nettles and thorns – like a hermit crab without a shell.

So when I went down to Mum and Dad’s this time, I felt the need to prepare. ‘Put on the armour of light,’ St Paul says, which sounds just the thing. I hardly slept last time, tossing and wriggling through small-hour horrors with my neck hurting and a feeling of tears not being far away. What to arm myself with though?

The answer came in the form of an ancient poem - Psalm 91. I was listening to a Premier Radio presenter who is a pastor – a big, tattooed fellow with rings in his nose and lip – and he said it was his main defence when his wife was diagnosed with cancer. So, I looked it up, and I loved it. It was all about how the Lord will cover you with his wings and keep you safe from the terrors that visit in the night and the pestilence that stalks by day, or words to that effect.

Malcolm Guite (a poet and priest whose writing I love) says you have to treat Psalm 91 with care: it was the one Satan tempted Christ within the wilderness, challenging him to throw himself from the temple roof and God would send his angels to catch him (as it says in the psalm). It’s not to be taken literally, this psalm: you can’t deliberately put yourself in harm’s way and expect to be immune because you’re a Christian, like some of the vehement anti-vaxxers around the world who think faith alone will protect them from lethal diseases. But the message is that if you put your trust in God, he won’t let you be damaged in any important or lasting way by the evils of the world.

I memorised as much of it as I could. And then when I woke in the night – inevitably – with the dread hovering over me, I kept thinking, ‘The Lord will cover thee with his feathers’. I could picture them vividly, the feathers, soft and heavy and beautifully patterned like an owl’s, and imagine I was peering out through them at Mum’s pain and muddliness and Dad’s frustration and my own fear. They were like malevolent ghosts drifting through the dark, menacing and cruel. But Mum and Dad and I, our actual selves, were curled up safely, warm and hidden with the great wings over us.

And eventually, I was able to go back to sleep.

Essay

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Morality

28 July 2023

5 min read

Oppenheimer, my father, and the bomb

One week after its release, Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster has left Luke Bretherton pondering an un-resolved disagreement with his late father and the theology of Oppenheimer's creation.

Luke Bretherton

Luke Bretherton is a Professor of Moral and Political Theology and senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

I went to see the film Oppenheimer on its opening night at my local, community run cinema in Acton in west London. It was packed. The event felt more like going to church than to the movies. The film itself is a biopic of scientist Robert J. Oppenheimer who was a pivotal figure in leading the development of nuclear weapons during World War II.

Reflecting on the film afterwards it brought to mind a difficult and never resolved argument with my late father. In the aftermath of watching the film, I realised I was still haunted by our dispute.

Our argument centred not on whether it was right to drop the bomb. Our argument was about whether it was Christian.

My father was 18 in 1945 when atomic bombs were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over 200,000 souls. He was conscripted into the British Army that year and stationed in India. If the war had not ended, he would have been among those deployed to invade Japan.

Our argument was not just about whether it was right to drop the bomb. It was also about whether it was Christian. My father was an ardent believer who converted to Christianity in the 1950s. His Christian commitments deeply shaped every aspect of his life and work. I followed in his footsteps, and at the time of our argument I was doing a PhD in moral philosophy and theology. In part I was trying to make sense of what it meant to be a Christian in the aftermath of events like the Holocaust and the dropping of nuclear weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events in which it seemed Christian beliefs and practices played a key part. In the film, this is marked by the stark symbolism of Oppenheimer naming the first test of the prototype nuclear weapon “Trinity” – an often used and key way in which Christian name God.

I had been learning about just war theory when the argument with my father erupted. I was having dinner with my mum and dad at their house. To give a bit of context, my father and I had a long history of sometimes bitter arguments over political matters. These began in the 1980s when I was a teenager. He thought Mrs Thatcher a hero. I did not.

I was telling them about just war theory and its history in Christian thought and practice. As with most of our arguments, we stumbled into it. I made a throwaway remark about how, in the light of just war theory, nuclear weapons were immoral and that their use in 1945 was wrong. And yes, I was probably being pompous and annoying like all those possessed of a little new knowledge and a lot of self-righteous certitude and fervour.

My dad replied with anger that I did not know what I was talking about. Didn’t I realize that if the bombs hadn’t been dropped many more would have died, including him, which meant I would not exist. Something like this argument was used in the film and was often used by Oppenheimer to justify his own involvement in developing atomic weapons.

At the time, I replied with a procedural point that nuclear weapons do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, a key distinction in determining the morality or otherwise of targets in war. To use nuclear weapons is to deliberately intend the indiscriminate killing of the innocent. This constitutes murder and not, as the euphemism has it, unintended collateral damage. I added insult to injury by declaring that my dad’s argument was also deeply unchristian as it was a version of the ends justify the means. Was it ever right to do evil even if good might be the result? This upset my father still further. For him it was personal. It was existential. The bombs saved his life. The bombs made our life possible.

The meal, like the argument, did not end well. We had both upset my mother. She banned us from ever talking politics at the family dinner table again. It was a lifetime ban.

What dawned on me was that the question of whether it was moral to possess, let alone use, nuclear weapons was also an existential question for me.

Afterwards I thought more about our row. I replayed the script in my head, trying to think of what I should have said. In my immaturity, I never thought to consider how I should have said it.

What dawned on me was that the question of whether it was moral to possess, let alone use nuclear weapons was also an existential question for me. It was a question of what kind of existence warranted anyone possessing nuclear weapons. To use the language of the Cold War of which I was a child: was it better to be red than dead? Was it better to be invaded and taken over by Communists and see capitalism abolished and the British nation subordinated to a foreign power or to deter this possibility by possessing nuclear weapons, weapons that threatened to destroy all life on this planet? In other words, was my way of life really worth the threat of nuclear annihilation. Was any way of life or ideology or commitment or abstract principle worth that? I concluded that it was not and promptly joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).

I have not attended a CND rally for many years. And what happened in 1945 is more complicated than I used to think. But I still disagree with my dad and think Oppenheimer was deeply misguided. And what happened after 1945 with the advent of the nuclear arms race is not complicated. The film portrays Oppenheimer as anticipating and trying to forestall the process of one-upmanship that developing the A-bomb and then the H-bomb set in motion. He was right to do what he could to stop the arms race, even though, as the film portrays, the authorities tried to silence and marginalize him for his efforts.

Today, if my father and I were able to have the argument again, I would approach it very differently. I hope I would be less pompous, annoying, and self-righteous. But mostly, I would be more theological. I would ask him whether he thought Jesus would drop a nuclear bomb to save a life, or whether Jesus’s own life, death, and resurrection pointed in a different direction. And then see where that conversation took us.