Today, my youngest child starts school, and I can’t quite pin down the feeling circling in the pit of my stomach. It feels a little like anxiety mixed in with excitement; an anticipation of a newfound freedom, letting go of the past, the nervous sense of moving into a new adventure. In there too is regret at the wishing away I’ve done over the past four years.

I’ve wished away the nappies and the night-time feeds and wake-ups, the sleep deprivation, the frustrating hours spent rocking and cuddling and burping. I’ve wished away the mountain of paraphernalia that accompanies baby and toddler life. Most of all I’ve wished away the nursery fees. And now all of this is gone as my littlest leaves behind the baby years and starts his new adventure. And all of a sudden, I want to rewind the clock and bring all of it back. To relive the divine softness of baby skin folds, the feeling of soothing my son in the middle of the night when he’s woken crying for me. I want to bring back the feeling of a chubby hand in mine, the wide-eyed delight at bubbles and ladybirds.

Sociologist Berger says that a mother’s love for their child is one of the ‘signals of transcendence’ in societies that claim to be secular. For him, this transcendence is best illustrated in a mother’s words to her child: ‘everything is alright’. In the early years of mothering, for ‘everything to be alright’ feels dependent on you, but mothering into your child’s adulthood perhaps requires us trusting increasingly that ‘everything will be alright’ even when you’re not the one holding them close, when they have to work it out on their own.

Our baby is starting the settling in period for school, and I have spent the past few weeks complaining about how long it is. The slow build-up over two weeks towards a full day at school. Ninety minutes, then two hours, then a morning etc. He has spent most of his life in full-time childcare. He’ll be fine. But maybe it’s me that needs the space and time to mark this transition. The slow letting go.

When my first son started school, I was on maternity leave – my youngest son only a few months old. So pushing the pram to the school gates in those days felt less like an ending. While my eldest was taking steps towards independence, I had another baby with whom I was embarking upon the early years journey. Now, when my youngest walks into his classroom, I think I’ll feel…alone?

Perhaps parenting is a series of moments of letting go. Perhaps the anxiety I feel is the dread I feel about the day when my children will eventually leave home. Leaving my husband and I with the quiet and peace that we so crave. No clattering of train tracks and children’s toys, no tantrums and sibling quarrels, no incessant questions [“If I fart in space, will I keep moving forever and never stop?] I know I’ll miss all this when it’s gone. Wiser, older parents have told me this all along, but I didn’t believe them.

When I first read these words from Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, about the pain of separation as children grow, I felt devastated by the prospect of it. In the middle of the chaos of mothering my young children, I felt sadness at the thought of one day feeling them slip away from me, into adulthood. She writes:

“Parents, she thought, learned to survive touching their children less and less… The occasional embrace, a head leaned for just a moment on your shoulder, when what you really wanted more than anything was to press them to you and hold them so tight you fused together and could never be taken apart. It was like training yourself to live on the smell of an apple alone, when what you really wanted was to devour it, to sink your teeth into it and consume it, seeds, core, and all.’”

Perhaps motherhood is learning to live - very slowly and tentatively - on the smell of the apple.

Who marks the mother?

Motherhood is full of moments that need marking in some way, rituals to denote the crossing of thresholds: the joyous ones and the bittersweet. Pregnancy is full of moments of ritual: the first baby scan, the passing through trimesters, the baby shower. There are moments of ritual for the baby, too: christenings and milestone cards. But there is much less to mark the bewildering beauty of matrescence for mothers after they have given birth. Our research at Theos suggests more could be done around the eight-week postnatal medical checks women have in the UK, when they have more of a sense of the profound psychological, physical and spiritual change of motherhood. There is even less for those moments that come in the years afterwards.

Earlier this year, we held a Theos event entitled Making a Mother: Sacred Rituals for Modern Motherhood and as we prepared to begin, we discussed the need for rituals for the profound transition of becoming a mother – such as a version of the Churching of Women, found in the Book of Common Prayer. But I also think we need liturgies for the everyday moments of motherhood, the tiny indications that signify a gradual letting go.

A liturgy for the last breastfeed

A liturgy for the first time your child calls you ‘mum’ instead of ‘mummy’

A liturgy for the last nappy

A liturgy for the first time your child walks into school and doesn’t look back at you

A liturgy for the first time your child asks you if you are ok

A liturgy for the first time a child pours their own cereal

A liturgy for the first time your child secures their own seatbelt

A liturgy for when you say goodbye to the buggy

A liturgy for when you get rid of the car seat

A liturgy for the first time your child wipes their own bum

A liturgy for your child’s first haircut without crying

A liturgy for the first time they sing a song you’ve never heard of

A liturgy for the first time they stay up later than you

A liturgy for the last mispronunciation you didn’t know was the last mispronunciation

A liturgy for your last child’s first day of school

I think in our secular society, there is often a misunderstanding of religious ritual: a mischaracterisation of religion as all about the otherworldly. But what the Christian tradition does so well is puts framing around the very human, earthly moments, because these are sacred, too. Liturgies or other Christian traditions and rituals can knit us into a tradition that recognises and marks these moments of change and transition for ourselves, but also helps us to know that we are not the first to have gone through these things, nor will we be the last.

There are of course some liturgies like these that already exist. The Every Moment Holy series does a great job of naming these very human moments and putting words to the feelings many of us feel. Like these words from A Liturgy for Contemplating the Empty Bedroom of a Child Who Has Left Home:

“As we move into this new season,

teach me to accept with gladness

the independence that has always been

the end goal of parenting—in the knowledge

that the bond between parent and child

will not end with this letting go.”

Which liturgies of letting go would you add to the list?

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Every year at Theos we agonise over who should give our annual lecture. The list is long, the invitations nerve-racking. Occasionally we miss. A couple of years ago, I asked Mark Carney. He declined… and then became Prime Minister of Canada. Shame, we could have given him some publicity! This year, however, perhaps we should take a little more credit. Nine months ago Andy Burnham gave the Theos Annual Lecture. Today he has walked into Downing Street.

What Mr Burnham – then the Mayor of Greater Manchester, and today the UK Prime Minister – delivered at our event in October was a conversation that outlined much of what had defined much of his politics for the best part of a decade; but this time with a particular focus on the role faith played in it all, both at a practical level, but also an ethical and spiritual one. (Listen to my colleague Dr Nick Spencer, on BBC Radio 4 Sunday yesterday talking about this).

He said that the inflexibility of national governments had created a “crisis of trust” in British politics. “The world has become more complex, but the way we run things has not,” he said. “In many ways it is the same as it was in the last century, and this creates a disconnect between people and politics. People have lost trust in the ability of politics to fix things.”

Recent data from the Office for National Statistics suggest that 68 per cent of people have little or no trust in political parties, and just under 60 per cent have not much trust in government or parliament. But distrust is not across the board: the majority (70 per cent) say that they trust most people.

Similarly, polling we commissioned at Theos ahead of Mr Burnham’s lecture suggested that people were much more likely to put trust in people they knew. Some 84 per cent of respondents said that they trusted their friends and families, and 63 per cent trusted their neighbours.

Throughout the lecture and the post-lecture interview I did with him, he talked about how Westminster was broken. In the weeks leading up to the event, there had been much speculation about whether Burnham would try to make his return, challenging Starmer to the leadership of the Labour party. So I asked him why he didn’t go back to Westminster and fix it. He said that he wasn’t sure the system wanted what he was offering.

He argued that renewal would come not through ever more central direction, but through rebuilding local institutions, strengthening faith and community organisations, and creating what Pope Francis described as “a culture of encounter”. As he becomes prime minister today, to what extent might this be his governing philosophy?

Pictured: Dr Nick Spencer (senior fellow at Theos), Andy Burnham, Chine McDonald (me!), and Rev Ian Rutherford of Methodist Central Hall Manchester, which hosted the Theos annual lecture.

In the strange weeks in between his victory at Makerfield that paved the way for Starmer’s resignation, and Mr Burnham taking up his new role in Number 10, we’ve seen a man who wants to mark himself out as distinct from those that have come before. A man of the people. We’ve seen him sit in Cardiff city centre inviting the public to ‘ask me anything’. “When I said I was going to do politics differently, I meant it,” he said. We’ve seen him talk football and discuss his favourite music. We’ve seen him dancing to New Order’s True Faith on stage at the start of his inauguration as Labour leader. The clip of our Theos annual lecture interview we released on the day he won in Makerfield has been by far the most ‘viral’ moment I’ve been involved in. Every day since then, I’ve been met with comments from everyday people on Instagram sharing just what they think of him. Swear words and all. Some think they are talking directly to “Andy”, as if they are talking to a friend. It’s quite something.

These are just some of the vibes that suggest something different might be coming. But the proof will be in the governing. Burnham is no longer an outsider, shouting from the inside in. The buck now stops with him. As he told his (then) former colleagues in Westminster at our lecture in October: “You need to repair the damage in our communities. And you need to give devolution its chance to come up with a better way of running things.” It’s now up to him to make that happen. With news of a Number 10 north being planned, it seems he is serious about this. But time will tell.

The question isn’t simply whether Britain needs more powers devolved. It’s whether politics can become relational again.

It’s also not simply about a crisis of confidence in Westminster. It’s a clue about where legitimacy now lies. People increasingly trust those they encounter rather than institutions they rarely experience. That has profound implications for politics, but also for churches, charities and local civic organisations.

Over the past couple of years since I wrote this article on loss of trust in national institutions for the Financial Times, I’ve got closer to the work of Demos, and have been on their board for the past year. It feels like now is a critical moment for their work, which at its heart is about upgrading democracy: repairing the broken relationship between citizen and state.

Demos, alongside Kinship Works, has recently launched the Marshall Plan for Civic Life – a bold plan for civic renewal. It recognises what has been lost in Britain: the local associations, networks and clubs that held society together. The loss is felt deeply across our communities: in loneliness, poor health, isolation, polarisation, public services that can’t cope, and a “febrile politics”. “For years, we neglected community. Now, we are paying the price,” they say.

For both Andy Burnham and this Marshall Plan for Civic Life – the answer lies in the local. Manchester’s strategy has been a case study for whether this can make a difference. When the Blair government introduced the idea of elected mayors and regional assemblies more than 20 years ago, the debate was largely technocratic: it was about governance structures, efficiencies, and layers of bureaucracy. But Manchester – and other regions – have since then witnessed economic, cultural, and civic life booming.

My hope for both the next iteration of the government and organisations like Demos hoping to upgrade our democracy is that they recognise the role of faith communities locally. Up and down the country, churches and other communities have become indispensable partners in local life. Faith communities partnering or being supported by local councils are no longer met with the same suspicion they were when I emerged into the workforce two decades ago.

Andy Burnham has spent years fostering relationship with faith groups in Greater Manchester. Let’s see what difference that makes to how he sees the role of faith, and how faith groups are engaged as vital partners in the big challenges we face as a society. Because we’re going to need all the help we can get.

Photos: Zak Chowdhury/Doodledo

Watch our Theos annual lecture 2025 with Andy Burnham here.

Find out more about the Marshall Plan for Civic Life here.

Listen to Nick Spencer on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday programme here.

Read my article on Andy Burnham in the Church Times here.

Read my article on local trust in the Financial Times here.

On Tuesday morning, I was on the bus to the Theos office in Westminster. The roads were particularly slow, with cordons up as preparations were underway for the King’s Speech and the State Opening of Parliament. As we drove past the Union Jack flags erected in Parliament Square and past the gold-shimmered Houses of Parliament, I felt anxious.

There had been much speculation in the hours preceding that Prime Minister Keir Starmer would be forced to resign by the end of the day, or at least set out a timetable for his departure. Ministers had begun to resign, 80 Labour MPs had joined a list calling for him to go.

Regardless of politics, my anxiety came out of a sense of foreboding that we were about to enter yet another period of political instability. Were we ever out of it? Gone were the days when Prime Ministers lasted for years. In the past 10 years, the UK has had six prime ministers, and we will likely have a seventh by the end of the year. These are extraordinary times.

We have had enough, and we are tired.

Ok, I was also anxious because I was a few minutes away from a call with a BBC producer, who would ask me what I wanted to do my Thought for the Day on, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the following morning. Thoughts for the Day are usually topical and need to involve an a-political, theological-but-accessible-to-people-of-all-faiths-and-none-profound-but-accessible reflection on what’s happening in the news. Oh, and all in 2mins 45 seconds.

My dilemma was that if Starmer were to resign that day, it would be tone deaf to not mention it in Thought for the Day. With a full day of meetings ahead of me, I couldn’t afford to write my Thought on one different topic (in my lunchbreak!) only for me to have to write another later on in the day. So I opted for the fudge of pivoting from Starmer’s speech at the start of the week on hope, to a wider reflection on what hope really means in these times. I also prepared an alternative opening paragraph just in case Starmer did resign (he didn’t, although that may yet be to come). It being the BBC, every word was raked over by the producer and editor, for any hint of political bias.

In my anxious state, I found a meditation on hopefulness cathartic. Wednesday also marked the launch of A Million Acts of Hope - a national invitation to celebrate the everyday acts of kindness, care and connection happening across the UK. “At a time when division can feel loud,” the organisers say, “we want to bring together all these everyday acts of hope and shine a light on the people and communities making them happen.”

The A Million Acts of Hope Week of Action (13-20 May) was timed to run over the weekend of the Unite the Kingdom rally, in which tens of thousands of people descended on London, headed up by Stephen Yaxley Lennon (Tommy Robinson).

For some, the crowds of people chanting that they wanted their country back alongside flags waving “Jesus is King” will be a hopeful sight. For others – me included – these scenes evoke in me a deep sadness. I’m reminded of growing up in south-east London in the 1980s and 1990s, terrified of the National Front and the BNP. I was 9 years old when Stephen Lawrence was killed round the corner from where I lived, and as a Black immigrant family in a predominantly white neighbourhood, it felt like there was nowhere to hide, and that we were not wanted. I feel this again now.

I find hope in the fact that there were many Christians among the crowds gathered at Unite the Kingdom rally, not the ones condoning the Islamophobia and racism (I’d like to have words with those Christians who do), but wanting to listen to the disenfranchised; to hear what would lead people to come out clad in their St George’s flags. Among them were some of my own team at Theos, braving the crowds to do some real research to find out information that might help us all navigate a more hopeful future together.

I’ve become increasingly convinced in recent years that we will get nowhere by simply shouting from the sidelines at those with whom we disagree. I feel that human encounter – if you can bear to be in the same room as someone whose views you abhor, and look them in the eye; if you can set up a listening station at a Far Right rally and see the humanity in their eyes – is the only way we’ll all get through this. Seeing each other not as enemies, but as people just trying to get through the rollercoaster. I am stubbornly convinced that humans looking each other in the eye can’t help but be drawn – even if it’s a mere smidge – towards each other.

5 things to read/watch:

1. Enjoy this humorous take on the Labour party’s psychodrama by my friend Sheyi Martins Allen

2. Check out A Million Acts of Hope

3. Read about Christians who set up a listening station at the Unite the Kingdom rally

4. Marvel at the genius of Led By Donkeys’ intervention at the Unite the Kingdom rally

5. Listen to my Thought for the Day on hope from last week’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, and/or read the script below:

Good morning,

In Monday’s speech, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer used the word ‘hope’ 14 times. He said the country would see hope reflected in government policy, and that “people need hope.”

Today, faith groups and civil society organisations have launched a week-long initiative called A Million Acts of Hope – a nationwide invitation to celebrate the everyday acts of kindness, care and connection happening across the UK to combat the growing sense of division and polarisation so many feel.

Many of us in Britain today can’t help but sense a growing hope-lessness.

Perhaps it’s long been there and it’s the ever-present drum of social media and a 24-hour news cycle that have made it feel like it’s taken root.

Politicians of all parties have long employed the language of hope in their speeches. It’s an appeal to the very human instinct to believe there’s a future state or condition that will be better in some way.

But as a Christian, I believe hope is something much deeper than optimism, more than a sometimes blinkered decision to always look on the bright side. When in the book of Jeremiah God speaks of giving “a hope and a future”, it’s a profound promise of what’s to come, regardless of current circumstances.

Hope itself is also active and not static. As Emily Dickinson described in her 1861 poem, it’s like a bird, a thing with feathers, that “perches in the soul” and “never stops at all”.

As a nation – and as a world – we’ve been through so much in recent years: the worsening climate crisis, a pandemic, economic instability and turbulent politics. It feels like the nation can’t catch a break, and that we are breaking apart.

But by engaging in these million acts of hope, those participating are offering an alternative narrative.

As American episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge wrote this week, stories of acts of kindness across political divides help foster hope. For her, such illustrations “arouse feelings of neighbourliness where there might otherwise be only estrangement”. The sense of us all being in this together needs to be supported “not with morality lectures but with examples”, she wrote. “Don’t tell me! Show me!”

There’s an active selflessness to these hopeful acts of kindness – the millions we see and experience every day.

A reminder that we as a nation are capable of acting beyond our own self-interest to look at the needs of those around us, to participate in hope-making.

In these turbulent times, I find hope when I encounter others who show profound kindness. I feel most hopeful when those acts come from a group I’ve been told are ‘other’ to me in some way.

None of us should put our hope in politics alone, but perhaps each of us might see the face of God in the million small kindnesses of others that together point to a hope that’s much bigger, and much more profound.

Photo by Kristina Gadeikyte Gancarz on Unsplash

Content warning: This piece includes reflections on food, fasting and disordered eating.

On Mondays and Thursdays, I starve.

I have engaged in this practice for the past year or so – limiting myself twice a week to between 500 and 800 calories. I wish I could say this was accompanied by five hours of contemplative prayer; that the denial of self and bodily cravings are an attempt to get closer to God. But this decision to follow (roughly) a 5:2 diet is for purely physical health reasons. Even to admit to this is to suggest that the body itself is in some ways ‘less’ than the spirit, the mind or the soul, when I believe the Christian faith speaks to all of the above. The incarnation necessitates flesh and limbs and tastebuds and sweat and blood and bodies.

My first fasting days were agony.

For the first time in a long time, I was letting myself experience the pangs of hunger rather than have the freedom to immediately satiate. I could fool myself into thinking that through this I was in some way joining in with the suffering Christ endured during his 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. Just as the Lord resisted the devil, I too could resist the draw of the fridge stocked full of great food. At least for a day.

But in those early days, rather than quieten the food noise, fasting made me obsessed with food. I counted down the hours until I could eat again; stopping eating as early as possible in the day to manage an 18-hour fast before breakfast and a – relief-filled – day of normal eating began.

As I have become used to the weekly hours of self-denial, I’ve felt more and more liberated on those days. To know that my body can still survive the discomfort; that life is more than food. Although I will never be one of those people who accidentally ‘forgets to have lunch’.

I have kept my twice-weekly fasting relatively secret. Mondays and Thursdays tend to be the days I work from home, so I can avoid the temptation of the office biscuit tin. I also cannot bear the Main Character energy of declaring to my colleagues as we sit together over lunch the reason why I’m refraining from food that day. It’s all so… self-indulgent.

But, is it?

A few weeks ago, I had the absolute pleasure of being interviewed by Jessica Hamel-Akré at Oxford Literary Festival, on the themes from my book Unmaking Mary: Shattering the Myth of Perfect Motherhood. Jessica and I had connected online over a year ago – our books like a magnet drawing us towards each other. Jessica’s book The Art of Not Eating is a stunning exploration of the secret history of diet culture; particularly drawing on ideas that arose during the 18^th century about women’s food refusal.

As Jessica and I chatted in the green room before our event, we dove straight in to the big ideas about motherhood and bodies and faith and culture. As Jessica spoke of the effects of pregnancy on a woman’s sense of self and her body, something clicked in me, that I had probably been too ashamed to admit before.

During both my pregnancies, I suffered from hyperemesis – throwing up several times a day – for pretty much the duration of the nine months, right up until the days I gave birth to my boys. For those months, I survived on very little food: a cup of soup here, some ramen there. During my second pregnancy, the only thing I could eat was lettuce, tuna and sweetcorn mayo sandwiches from Subway. One afternoon during that time, we travelled to St Andrews in Scotland for a speaking engagement I was undertaking. Before I left, I checked whether there was a Subway in town. When we arrived, we promptly drove there, and I ended up crying at the counter when they said they had run out sweetcorn.

In the early days of my second pregnancy, I was taking part in an online literary festival and being interviewed by Dr Rowan Williams about my book God Is Not a White Man. I felt so unbelievably ill that I wasn’t sure I would get through it. Somehow I did – after a quick trip to the bathroom just beforehand. As soon as we were finished, I crawled from my office to my husband downstairs, who drove me to A&E. There the doctors looked at me with faux sympathy and told me this was just what pregnancy was. It will pass, they said. I wanted to die.

I hated food. Food was the enemy. This felt a special kind of weird to me as someone who was raised in a Nigerian household where food is at the centre of how we celebrate, how we give thanks for new life, how we get married, how we mark death. Food – big, bottomless bowls of great, delicious food – is how we show love, how we welcome strangers and old friends. There can never be too much food. Instead of asking how we are, we’re asked whether we have eaten.

But in those moments, food became unbearable. I knew I needed food for my baby and I to survive, but the nausea and vomiting was unending. It felt that, in every way, I was – to quote Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born: “allergic to pregnancy”.

I have written elsewhere (in Unmaking Mary and in Theologies from the Inside Out: Critical Conceptions of Pregnancy and Childbirth) about how women’s experiences of hyperemesis gives insight into the theological idea of Christ’s kenosis:

“It was while I was staring into the bottom of a toilet bowl that I saw the face of Jesus and recognised the concept of sacrifice and also what it meant for Mary to bear God in her womb – for her organs to be displaced to grow the God-child; for her body to change in irrevocable ways. Here, the theological concept of kenosis – Christ emptying himself out on the cross for the sake of humankind – began to take on new meaning for me; here, in what Laura Fabrycky describes as the ‘nearly self-obliterating sacrifices’ of motherhood.”

I realised in talking to Jessica that day that when I talk about ‘my’ hyperemesis, I talk about how terrible it was, how awful it was to survive without food. But in the conversation, on the oft-discussed body image issues and eating disorders that swirled in the air during my teenage years, I realised that maybe when it came to my pregnancy sickness, I was… proud?

I remember watching The Karen Carpenter Story as a child, which details the singer’s rise to fame and the associated eating disorder that eventually led to her death. I remember thinking that I wasn’t the type of person strong enough to refrain from food to the point of dying. I didn’t have it in me, and in some perverted way, I felt that I wasn’t… good enough. Such was the undercurrent of positivity around disordered eating in the 80s and 90s. We all knew that Princess Diana had an eating disorder and that she was also beautiful.

During my pregnancies I joined the club of people – mystics and saints and pop stars and models and princesses - who did not eat. And here I realised something uncomfortable: that part of me was proud. That I could not eat because my body rejected any food I ate was beside the point. As the pounds fell off and my baby bump grew, I started to revel in people’s compliments: you look really well, they said. That’s because I can’t eat, I replied.

For Jessica Hamel-Akré, the history of women’s fasting and food refusal cannot be extricated from the ways in which women were - and are - seen in general. The denial of food was a denial of self, and a denial of that most dangerous of things: a woman’s desire. Restraint and control, a turning away from the carnal and earthly desire was a requirement of a life devoted to God. I’ve always associated “self-control” - one of the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5) – as relating to food. A controlled self controls their eating. A controlled self can say no to delicious things (Biscoff spread, pasta, buttered toast, chocolate, fried chicken, jollof rice) in service to a higher power.

Women have done this for centuries. In The Art of Not Eating, Jessica tells the story of Hester Ann Rogers, who detailed her own severe abstinence from food in An Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers, published in in 1794 – a year before her death at the age of 39.

Hester was born an Anglican, but became a Methodist when she was around 18. Her interest in the new and radical Christian movement was accompanied by Hester “gradually [eating] less and less and pray[ing] with increased fervency”. Her previous luxuries and indulgences – romance, fashion and dancing were replaced by the “love of God”, which became her “meat and drink”. Jessica writes of Hester:

“When portrayed as a spiritual technique to discourage sinful behaviour and encourage pious self-discipline, fasting is, for Hester, meant to clarify the optic of the religious mind. She presents hunger as an anchor that keeps the body and mind firmly planted in the natural world, serving as a reminder of the limits of the human condition and the need for nourishment. By refusing food, she seeks to minimize the influence of her physical attachments to the world.”

The Art of Not Eating highlights the later move away from the association of disordered eating with spirituality and a pursuit of the divine, as post-Enlightenment thinking gave way to more secular understandings of food denial that were related more with personality and psychological explanations than spiritual ones. As Jessica writes:

“A story of not eating became a means to examine women’s inner worlds.”

Most of the women I know think constantly about what they are eating, and what they are not eating. Elder millennial women like me have been raised to know about calories, to watch what we eat, to constantly battle with the voice that tells us that if we can’t control what we eat, then we are not… good.

The pressure on women to deny our desires, our bodies, and our selves has long been associated with a spiritual purity, a piety that is becoming of ladies.

But like the eating, this is a disordered view of God. A God who loves extravagantly and abundantly, a God who welcomes us in, food noise and all.

I love Jessica’s words about her return to her Catholic faith in recent years:

“I wanted to be messy, human without justification. I didn’t want to continue presenting myself as a woman without need or as one who could explain the logics and foundations of every desire that bubbled over into action. I didn’t have to deserve God through payments of self-denial.”

God doesn’t require us to earn love through denial. God meets us in our hunger, not just in our restraint.

So … what has shaped your relationship with food, control, or self-denial?

Leave a comment

Photo by Metin Ozer on Unsplash

On Easter Saturday, I offered this reflection on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4. It’s a brief slot, but it often holds questions that stay with me well beyond the broadcast. This is one of them. You can listen to it on BBC Sounds here, or read the script below. Would love to know what you think.

Good morning,

I’m not sure I’d be capable of taking on a cosmic mission for the sake of humanity. Would you?

This is the dilemma at the heart of the book turned Hollywood blockbuster Project Hail Mary.

The film sees scientist Ryland Grace – played by Ryan Gosling – reluctantly propelled into a one-way space mission to find out what’s eating the Sun, and thereby stop the world ending in 30 years’ time. The film title Project Hail Mary comes from the term in American football in which a long, unlikely pass is made when all other options have failed. Grace – Ryland Grace – is humanity’s last hope.

In this week in which Artemis Two makes its journey into space to orbit the moon, I’m reminded of the Hollywood drama and awe-inducing rhetoric of space travel. Speaking from aboard the Orion spacecraft yesterday Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said, “Humanity has once again shown what we are capable of.”

The space hero who gives their life for others is a familiar Hollywood trope. More generally, we hail heroes who flex their muscles and run towards danger in acts of bravery and strength.

But it’s the portrayal of Ryland Grace’s lack of courage that is the most compelling moment of the film for me. When faced with the prospect of sacrificing himself by taking on the mission, he says no; that he can’t do it, that he doesn’t have it in him, that they should find someone else.

There’s a poignant moment in the gospels in which Jesus, praying in the garden of Gethsemane and knowing the painful death that is to befall him, prays to God that the cup of suffering might pass from him. This isn’t a moment of bravado, but of deep and fragile humanity.

For Christians the crucifixion of Jesus is the ultimate cosmic act for the sake of humanity. Christ accepted the cup of suffering, giving himself for the sins of the world. But at its heart this is a message not about courage and bravery, but about love.

In these turbulent times I think about whether a sacrifice might be asked of me sometime in the future and worry I wont have the courage to step up when it matters. That I’ll be found to be too scared, too safe, too self-preserving.

In a scene in Project Hail Mary an astronaut tells Ryland Grace it’s easier to make a decision to be brave when we understand it as a necessary act of love, a being brave for someone else.

Or he might have said….

“Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

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