Article
Books
Change
Mental Health
5 min read

Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.
The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.
Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.  

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.  

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.  

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?  

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.  

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week. 

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.  

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.  

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.  

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. 

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.  

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time. 

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time. 

Interview
Care
Change
Community
Masculinity
5 min read

There’s a simple solution to society’s lost boys

Mentoring the fatherless helps and heals

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A teenager slumped against a sofa plays a video game
Zach Wear on Unsplash .

What if nearly every major social pathology could be halted upstream? What if there was evidence to suggest that they commonly flow from one singular factor? What would we do – would we sit back and wait for the State to intervene, pointing to where we know the problem is beginning? Or would we wade up that stream ourselves, and start damning up the current?  

Richard Kay and Robert Mansel Lewis have chosen the latter option. They are the founders of Chapter2, a charity that offers mentoring for boys aged seven to 16. And they have identified fatherlessness as the factor that is linked to many major social pathologies to be found in Western society today. 

Earlier this year, the Centre for Social Justice brought out a report called Lost Boys. It found that2.5 million children in the UK do not live with a father figure, and that just under half of young Britons grow up with one biological parent, more often than not their mother.; 

Back in 2013, the numbers were strikingly higher in low-income areas, with 65 per cent of children aged 12–16 in the bottom 20 per cent of income households not living with both birth parents – this was 26 per cent higher than in better-off households. What’s more, when children were aged three, the chance of them being in the bottom income quintile was 21 per cent if their parents were married, and a massive 81 per cent if they were in lone-parent families.  

So, we can already see a clear line drawn between fatherlessness and poverty,. Chapter2 (informed by the work of psychologist, Stephen Baskerville) also point out that fatherlessness is linked to alcohol abuse, drug abuse, truancy in school, incarceration, and mental health difficulties – all among young boys, in particular.  

There’s a smorgasbord of factors and influences that are making it increasingly complex to be a ‘healthy’ and ‘happy’ man right now. “You don’t even need to put the word ‘toxic’ in front of ‘masculinity’ anymore, Kay points out. “It’s just assumed. If we need to ask what healthy masculinity is, people really don’t know.” 

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in a coffee shop with ‘boys will be... what we teach them to be’ emblazoned on the side of it. It feels as though multiple destructive forces are making a beeline for young men right now, and we’re panicking. We’re manically trying to halt a fast and violent flow - but what if we waded upstream? 

That’s what Kay and his colleagues are trying to do. The charity’s mission is to  

bring good men into the lives of young boys who are living without a father. These men – all volunteers (?) - are committed to being there for the long term (two years, minimum) and to build a trusted friendship. That’s it: the beginning, middle, and end of the mission.  

I was struck by the radical simplicity of it. Young boys get referred to Chapter2 through social services, schools, and by family members or guardians – they told me that referrals have never been something they’ve had to work hard to gather. Which is pretty heart breaking in itself. 

The reality is, the fatherlessness crisis isn’t going to be solved by State-led intervention, and nor should it be. The solution lies in community living as it should do. It can be helped by the smashing down of hyper-individualism and the dismantling of our obsession with the nuclear family. It can be eased by reminding ourselves that it really does take a village to raise a child. Oh, and that we’re the village. When we spoke, Kay talked about his initial reluctance to found a charity that does this work, weary that it somehow relieves us all of our responsibility to live wide-open lives. Chapter2 is working toward a world in which the mentoring of young, fatherless, boys is normal, not a last resort.  

I like that. 

The longevity of Chapter2’s goal is pretty counter-cultural, isn’t it? We’re a commitment-phobic-culture. That’s pretty anti-love-your-neighbour, right? But the only way to respond to the wound of abandonment is by showing up – relentlessly, consistently, self-sacrificially. It’s the art of staying – come what may.  

I was told that this takes the boys a little getting used to; that Kay and Mansel Lewis warn the men they’re training that there will come a point when the boys will try and push them away, assuming they’ll leave sooner or later and feeling more comfortable having that happen on their own terms. It’s a symptom of the abandonment wound, I guess. But the men stay, and the boys begin to trust them.  

And here’s the other biggie for Chapter2: there’s no agenda. No goals. No solutions. No fixing. Just presence - consistent presence.  

Again, I was struck by how foreign that must feel to the boys. Everybody else in their life needs and wants something from them – better school attendance, better behaviour at home, less trouble with the police – and rightly so. But the Chapter2 mentors are only interested in the boys’ company and trust. They’re not trying to fix them, they’re just trying to know them – if there are no measurable changes, they’ll still show up. Zero conditions.  

The poet, rapper, author, and pastor, Joshua Luke Smith, often talks about a father as being someone who will  

‘bind up your wounds and catch you when you fall’,  

because that that’s what every young man needs – someone to care enough to do those two things. Because hurt people tend to hurt people. So, wounds need to be bound before they become ‘an excuse to wound others’. Again, it’s all very upstream, don’t you think? It’s very Chapter2-esque.  

One Chapter2 mentor recently received a Father’s Day card from a boy he’d built up a relationship with. Another young boy who’d been arrested twenty or so times in twelve months eventually realised, thanks to his mentor, that it’s not worth getting into trouble. His mentor, he said, ‘is someone he can trust, he’s consistent and he knows he cares about him’.  

This is community living as it ought to. Is this also the solution to the pandemic of fatherlessness?  

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. 
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?
 
Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief