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9 October 2023

6 min read

The thin place family-making creates

Fixing a broken adoption system leads to a 'thin place' – one where family-making transcend traumas. Belle Tindall meets Tarn Bright of Home For Good.

Belle Tindall

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

Three young children run away into the distance down across a field of long grass.

Towards a thin place.

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash.

‘The thin place’ is one of those wonderfully old terms; fifth century old, to be exact. It’s what Celtic Christians labelled the precise places where it felt as though this world and another would meet. Those places were thin because the atmosphere they provided made it appear as though there was very little separation between humanity and the divine. The seen and the unseen, residing in particularly close proximity.

Being Welsh, I have a soft spot for anything remotely ‘celtish’. Being a lover of anything enchanting, I swoon at such a beautiful notion. Being a Christian, I happen to believe that thin places are real.

Here’s the interesting thing though, when the Celts used this phrase, it was pertaining to a geographical area – a Welsh waterfall, an Irish woodland, a Scottish Loch (sorry England, I’m sure your Anglo-Saxons were just as appreciative of you). But when Tarn Bright, the CEO of Home for Good, used this phrase just last week, it was when talking about the UK’s care system.

Quite the unexpected twist, isn’t it?

But you need to spend approximately three minutes in Tarn’s presence to agree with her. In fact, whenever I find myself chatting to anyone from Home for Good, an organisation that is intent on ‘finding a home for every child that needs one’, I find myself in a very thin place indeed.

As a way of explaining myself (and Tarn), allow me to briefly turn my attention to just one of the things that make Christianity ever so slightly odd: the Christian God is a family. I know, I know - it’s intricate, it’s complicated, it’s paradoxical, but it’s absolutely core to the way Christians perceive… well…. everything.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit – the Holy Trinity. All distinct, all one, all God. If I were NT Wright or Jane Williams, perhaps I would feel confident enough to explain this thoroughly. But I’m not, so I won’t. Instead, I’m hoping that you’ll take my word for it, follow my (or rather, Tarn’s) line of argument, and seek out the details later.

Deal? Deal.

So, here we all are acknowledging that Christianity has a family as God, that there has been relationship from the very beginning of time. And so, it follows that Christianity also hinges on a family-making-God, one who ‘sets the lonely in families’, to borrow a phrase. Hence, the thin place. Tarn’s profound thinking is that when we, as humans, put families together, there’s very little separation between us and the God who has always been determined to do the very same thing. If those families are formed biologically – wonderful. If a family is put together through a combination of circumstance and choice – that is just as legitimate and just as thin.

I struggle to think of a more beautiful thought.

Blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children.

While I could expend thousands of words waxing-lyrical about such things, I’d be remiss to not tell you anything of Home for Good aside from its somewhat sacred (in my over-emotional opinion) nature. Let’s take it from the beginning.

Home for Good was thought up nearly ten years ago, at a garden party hosted in a vicarage; one flowing with Pimms and finger sandwiches. While the setting may be charmingly quaint, the content of the meeting was of the utmost seriousness. Desperate shortage of foster carers and adoptive parents in the UK was making headline news, and several Christian leaders, many of whom were foster carers or adoptive parents themselves, committed to work together to raise the profile of fostering and adoption within the UK Church.

And so, Home for Good was born.

You see, a child will enter the UK care system every fifteen minutes, there are more children in the care system right now than ever before. Each and every one of those children has intrinsic worth and value, all of them have experienced loss and trauma, many have suffered abuse or neglect. The reality is that there just aren’t enough carers to ensure that these children have somewhere stable to call home. It’s one of those vast and painful realities we find hard to digest. And yet, Home for Good not only acknowledges the tragedy, it tackles it head-on.

Active in all four UK nations, Home for Good is working to find a home for every single child: through fostering, adopting and supported lodgings.

You may be asking yourself where on earth they’re finding these homes.

Well, they’re finding them in the fifty thousand churches across the UK. Not ‘churches’ as in the grand (or perhaps not so grand) building next to your favourite coffee shop, but ‘Church’ as in the tens of millions of people who flow in and out of those buildings. We’re talking the people, not the places. Home for Good practically equip, support and train those who want to invite children into their families, while also mobilising churches to be welcoming and understanding places for these families to be. Because, if we are thinking of family as in ‘nuclear family’; that all important two adults to two-point-five children ratio, we are thinking too rigidly. And, contrary to popular belief, we are not thinking along very Christian lines either.

It struck me, while speaking with Tarn, that the work that Home for Good do is also thin in another way: the space between profound pain and immense joy is, and perhaps always will be, very thin indeed. For example, Tarn told me a story of five siblings who were in very real risk of losing each other. There seemed to be very little hope of finding a stable home for all five of them, as there simply aren’t enough carers who are able to take on siblings. And once separated, even if only intended to be a temporary measure, the chances of those siblings living together again are practically non-existent. It’s hard to fathom looking straight into such huge pain on such little faces. That’s the type of pain that, if we’re honest, we’d like to pretend doesn’t exist. But it does. And it’s in closer proximity than we allow ourselves to realise. But then, blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children. This isn’t a story of rescue, Tarn will stand for no such thing, rather it is a story of family-making. The type that Tarn, with her own beloved adopted sons, knows well.

Unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’.

As well as working on a local level, Home for Good have built up an immense influence on a national level. Since Tarn’s been the CEO, she has worked with (all seven) Children’s Ministers in Westminster. As she subsequently observes, the system is not of conscious design. Rather, it consists of a conglomeration of reactive policy ‘add-ons’. Although there are people devotedly working within the system who are intent on doing the best for children, it is deeply and undeniably stretched. What’s more, inputting into the ‘once in a lifetime’ independent review, Tarn and her team were able to explain how unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’. Somewhere along the line, we have stopped asking ‘what the child’s heart needs’. And yet, Tarn notes that how we treat our children now will directly affect how our world works in a generation’s time.

If this is not a justice issue of the most profound kind, it’s hard to imagine what is.

And so, there we have it. Home for Good, the thinnest place imaginable. The place where every child is fought for. The place where family is re-imagined. The place where I abandon every ounce of professionalism, as I put all my energy into holding back embarrassing tears. The place that is, thankfully, quite used to such reactions.

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Community

Sustainability

Wildness

12 June 2025

5 min read

What my noisy, messy crow neighbours have taught me about how to live

We can’t control nature; we just need to become more porous to it

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Meet the neighbours.

Townsend Walton on Unsplash.

Our neighbours hate our crows. I can’t blame them. The hundreds of crows that occupy the tops of the ancient pines which surround our rural manse are the noisiest and messiest residents I have ever lived near. They greet each sunrise with a din of caws and counter-caws, as if they are deeply concerned that anyone might miss this momentous daily event or the fact that it’s now happening before 5:30a.m. In nesting season, which lasts most of April and May, our car is easily identifiable in any carpark by the crusted grey spots with which the crows see fit to adorn it. Within a week of moving in, we gave up on the washing line so invitingly strung between two of the pines. Our pristine whites were too tempting a target for our crows.

I do not attend the meetings of our local community council, but I hear whispers of what transpires there. Our crows, evidently, have been a regular topic of conversation. Multiple solutions have been proffered for driving them away. All have been tried and all have failed. Our crows cling fiercely to their homes and their determination is more than a match for any human efforts. If I have the vibe of my community right, at least some of its members feel that there’s something perverse, obscene even, about a flock of birds being allowed to upset our human right to create a serene, comfortable, and convenient habitation. Our clump of houses is surrounded by a visually stunning landscape; shouldn’t the aural landscape be equally beautiful?

If my family does not mind our crows, it is because the treetop drama is just one more example of many natural encroachments on the house, some more welcome than others.

Every year we celebrate the miraculous return to our eaves of house martins, home from their intercontinental peregrinations. We look forward to another summer spent watching their acrobatics and listening to their chicks in the nests an arm’s length from our windows.

Clearing up the mess of our attic’s bats is an annual chore, one thankfully performed stoically by our church’s property convener, but there are compensations - such as the twilight shows they put on outside our living room window, performing impossible turns and reversals midair in their search for prey.

Less welcome are the massive spiders, which are a perennial presence; the slugs, which seemed to apparate onto the hall carpet all through winter, the mice, two of whom sacrificed themselves to knock our dishwasher out of action by chewing through its hose; and the wasps who built a nest the size of a telephone box in the roof space above our back bathroom.

Least fun of all has been what we call the Great Earwig Migrations, which have happened twice in our half-decade in the manse and which involve weeks of finding the little bugs under, seemingly, every object and on every surface.

When we moved into the manse, we expected challenges, the high heating bills, the leaking roof, and the isolation of the countryside. What we did not expect was the experience of porousness; the shock of realising that we had so little control over what other forms of life saw fit to share our habitation with us.

At first it felt to me perverse, obscene even, that a house, even a 120-year-old house, should be so vulnerable to incursions by animal creation. Shouldn’t our home, our space, be a haven where we can control who or what enters, who or what we feel comfortable with, and who or what we can exclude?

If I had to give a name to this expectation, maybe it would be that of the buffered home, a play on philosopher Charles Taylor’s description of the modern self as buffered. Taylor contrasts the selves we aspire to be in modernity, ones able to control and order our bodies, our space, our lives, and our relationships so that they accord with our autonomous desires and actions, with those of our premodern ancestors. Medievals and ancients assumed porosity. Bodies were subject not just to biological infection, but spiritual infections too. Projects and plans were frustrated not just by mistakes or personal failings, but by the ever-fickle whims of the goddess Fortuna. Their lives, their bodies, their homes, existed in a perpetual state of vulnerability. The threat of everything falling apart was always on the horizon.

We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security.

Modern technology has helped us tame the more unwelcome of these forces, but it has also given us an overly naive expectation that all that is inconvenient about nature can and should be gradually eliminated. This expectation frames the way we respond to worries about climate change and other creeping environmental crises. We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security. But as our ancestors might remind us, we are part of nature too, and, just as in any relationship, mutual vulnerability and sacrifice are needed if we are all going to survive. This is scary, but there are resources within Christianity - within other faiths too - to help us understand that there are benefits to affirming our vulnerability, our porosity.

My daughters love our crows. They point in wonder as the crows flood into the sky at dusk, hundreds of them making a giant circle once, then twice round the garden, before settling down for the night. When, in late May, grounded fledgings appear, bundles of feathers shocked at the sudden inhospitality of the nest, too stunned to realise they can fly home, my daughters watch over them, anxious lest the local cats take advantage of their bewilderment.

A few Sundays ago, my youngest, who struggles to stay quiet and well-behaved in Sunday School, pulled me out of church early. We sat on the church lawn staring up at the crows and soon were adapting the andante melodies of that Sunday’s hymns into imagined songs of praise that crows might sing. “No,” my youngest said, simpatico with the crows as she is, “I think they’d want something more upbeat.” And so we tried setting our own corvid-themed praise lyrics to Rosé and Bruno Mars’ song APT, while listening to the caw and counter-caw above. “Dad, how do you think God sees the world?” she asked me when we finished. I stumbled through my best theologically informed explanation of how God could be in every part of creation without being of it, before she stopped me. “I think it’s like a giant snow globe that he holds in his hands.” Watching the birds swirl around us, two stationary figures caught by the same currents of air that were sweeping them aloft, what could I do but agree?

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