Substuck

The pen is mightier than the sword (so make sure you know which one you're wielding)

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A memoir is an invitation into another person's privacy.

Isabelle Allende

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Hi, beautiful people

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve become deeply and distressingly aware of the real-world implications of sharing my writing publicly. Even though I work incredibly hard to choose my words with (what I thought was) the deepest care and consideration, it’s become apparent that the things I say and the ways I say them can cause other people pain.

At the moment I’m sitting with that, and trying to think of ways that I can explore my life through writing and share my thoughts with others AND avoid hurting the people that I love.

I find myself utterly unable to write just now, so instead I’m spending my time mining the words of other memoirists for advice. I’m rereading books and listening to interviews with writers like Mary Karr, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Anne Lammott, Nathalie Goldberg, Glennon Doyle and Julia Cameron.

I alluded to this problem in a comment on one of Allison Deraney’s posts, and she kindly shared the link to an essay by Laura McKowen on this very subject. That inspired me to also search for advice in the words of other memoirists here on Substack , like Clover Stroud, Lindsay Johnstone, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dr Lily Dunn, Maggie Smith, Caro Giles, Leah McLaren, Cheryl Strayed, Sarah Fay and Sari Botton.

I’m drowning, but the words of all these wise women are helping me come up for air. If you have any other life jackets, do please throw them my way.

Because I can’t write and I want to stick with a schedule of publishing every Wednesday (and I already missed last week), I just did a quick search through posts from my old blog that I could use here as a place filler. I thought I’d chosen quite randomly, but maybe my subconscious was more on the case than I realised when it plucked this one from the pile.

The post was called It’s Only Words.

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Me watching my words at the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock

A few years ago, I was invited to attend a baptism ceremony in Dublin. The baby’s parents were not religious, but they knew that the Irish Catholic side of the family would be uncomfortable if the baby was denied the usual insurance against eternal damnation. They also thought, quite rightly, that a christening was as good an excuse as any to invite everyone to Dublin for a party. So the arrangements were made, the marquee for the back garden was ordered, the food and wine were planned and the godparents were appointed.

Ah yes, the godparents. Standing by the baptismal font on the day would be 1) the baby’s aunty and 2) a lovely man who’d been a great friend of the baby’s parents for many years. This man was also a great friend of mine, so I was party to the dilemma he faced in being conferred with this honour.

While my friend knew that his atheism was of no concern to the baby’s parents – they’d chosen him for his loveliness and wanted him to be a special part of their daughter’s life – he was suddenly overcome by an uncharacteristic level of superstition. What might happen to him, he wondered, if, while standing in God’s very own house, he made all sorts of declarations that he didn’t actually believe to be true?

During a Roman Catholic baptism, the parents and godparents of the baby must make three declarations – that they believe in God, that they repent of their sins and that they deny evil.

So the ironies here are interesting… Our friend didn’t believe in God, but the religious superstition which still permeated even a reasonably secular country like the UK was enough to give him the uncomfortable feeling that God might smite him for his heathen deeds if he stood in a church and said that he did.

It’s rather a muddle that organised religion has created here, wouldn’t you think?

The responses, psalms, prayers and practices of a Catholic Mass are things which I’m sure I’ll never forget; one doesn’t come out of even a happy religious upbringing without some of its residue clinging insistently. But during this baptism ceremony, the only way in which my lips moved was in smiles at my friends and slight quivering at the inevitable emotion aroused in me by big events with friends and family. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words that I knew so well. I don’t go to church anymore, and those words no longer serve me.

When we left the church, I got chatting with another lovely friend who was also brought up Catholic. During the service, she’d made the polite decision to respond to the priest and to say the prayers. She asked me why I hadn’t.

“You must remember it all,” she said, “after so many years of going to church.”

“Yes,” I said, “I remember it, but I don’t believe in those words anymore, so I won’t say them.”

“Agh,” she shrugged, “they’re only words.”

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This morning, a Jewish-Israeli man was shot dead by security guards at the Western Wall in Jerusalem because he apparently shouted, “Allahu Akbar,” which, of course, is Arabic for “God is great”.

They were only words, and still this man, who had his hands in his pockets when the guards pulled their guns on him and fired more than once, is dead.

I’m writing this a couple of hours after the story broke, when little is known about what actually happened, what the man’s motivations were in saying what he said (if indeed his words weren’t misheard), or what provoked the guards to respond so brutally. All that’s clear so far is that just a few small words escaped from the man’s lips, and because of the place where he was standing when he said them, the circumstances in which they’ve been said before, and the strength of belief and the fear and superstition that surround them, he will never say those or any other words ever again.

This is just the latest tragedy in a country which is sickeningly familiar with religious and territorially motivated tragedies, and it was only words that made it happen.

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On the night of that wonderful “welcome to the world” party in Dublin, there were pestilential winds of biblical proportions. I still remember one friend doing a hilarious Irish jig in the pouring rain while the people around him struggled to secure the moorings of the marquee.

Perhaps the wind and rain that night were signs of God’s displeasure at the fact that people had stood in his church and lied when they said that they believed in him. Or perhaps the wind and rain just happened because we were in Dublin.

Either way, while I choose not to be afraid of a potentially vengeful deity, my fear of people with guns is very well-founded.

So although, as the Bee Gees would have us believe, it’s only words, I’m going to continue to be very careful about how I use them.