11 Comments

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this enough, but reading these has been such a joy! I’m so grateful you’ve given us the chance to experience them.

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Thank you April :-) It's been an interesting process digging back through decades of notes... I'm really glad some of them are worth reading!

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How well I know “ the sections of sheet ice, when you have to carefully work around thin patches, avoid the open cracks, and try to keep a consistent speed and your concentration levels very high”.

Sometimes maintaining concentration requires superhuman effort and tension. And the hardest thing is maintaining a constant speed of movement when you really want to stop!!!!

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That is absolutely key at some points in life — and it's so hard!

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I still can't believe you did that snowmobiling thing!

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Me neither. But it was a hell of a thing and I'm glad I did :)

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“ Months or years of lying will leave stains on your soul that are very hard to scrub out.” I can clearly remember, as a kid in convent school, going to confession for the first time. It was vaguely terrifying, going into a little booth at the back of the church and having to fess up to the priest through a screen. I knew it was our priest, and he for darn sure knew who I was. Mortifying, as a child, to think up sins to confess because we were made to go on a weekly basis. What kid sins that much?! But I remember vividly a kindly nun taking me by the hand as I staggered weak-kneed from the confessional that first time, and whispering that my soul was now clean and white again because Jesus had scrubbed all the stains of my sins off it.

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Very odd experience to put a child through. Though weirdly only yesterday I was thinking how, for true believers — and perhaps just for people who need to articulate — confession must offer some kind of comfort.

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I think it does. And that is okay. We all get comfort from somewhere when we face challenges or confront our deeds or our mortality, and religion offers a structure for that. There is redemption in owning up to your errors and being forgiven. But it is a weird power structure, to go into a little box and fess up and have a man in robes tell you it’s all good, a few Hail Marys will seal the deal, and nobody else need ever know what you’ve confessed. That’s the bit that sticks a little, for me. How many sins were forgiven under the seal of the confessional that just…. could have used a little more light and air, and a little more genuine remorse, and maybe a few more consequences. How many sins were repeated, because ‘forgiveness’ came easy, and not from the person who had been wronged.

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Your last one is so true. The curiosity and possibility of something heavenly keeps me going, though I know full well I haven’t gone through anything hellish yet. What’s odd right now is that we all have an ongoing parasocial connection to the extremes. I don’t really know what that means. It feels like being in an experiment I don’t necessarily want to be in, but I don’t want to leave either. 

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Very true... there's an awful fascination to it, like standing outside the open door to Hell.

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