Sacramental stories – childlessness

Gillian Straine: You’re listening to the GoHealth podcast. 

The GoHealth Podcast seeks to explore stories, how people have found healing and how we can learn from them from their stories of human flourishing, some ordinary, some extraordinary. 

I’m Gillian Straine, and I run the Guild of Health and Saint Raphael.  

Lucyann has had a really interesting career so far. 

She is a trained midwife, a Church of England priest, an academic and has been a Hospice chaplain in her time. She’s also the chair of the Guild of Health and St. Raphael and so Lucyann and I have known each other for over 5 years now. 

So ah full disclosure, this is not the first time we’ve met, right Lucyann? 

Lucyann Ashdown: Absolutely Gillian. 

Gillian Straine: So welcome to the podcast and what we do on the podcast is we try to tell our stories about what has made us who we are. But first of all, can you just tell everyone a bit more about your journey? I’ve done the headlines. I wonder if you could fill in the gaps with how you got to where you are today. 

Lucyann Ashdown: Well, from quite a young age I had a desire to either teach or be a health professional. And  I think the health professional bit came because when I was about six I nearly died, I had had to be hospitalised with peritonitis and I was in a long time and the nurse that took my stitches out was really, really lovely and I think they just inspired me but I didn’t realise at the time that that was a conscious thing. But there was a real kindness to the way that they were with me, as well as giving me really good care and saving my life. 

So I went into nursing and really loved the midwifery stint and I think what appealed to me was that it was about a normal life event. It wasn’t about trying to cure people. Wonderful though that is or making people better and that’s all great too. For me, there’s something about the people who were doing a Plus the person I went out with, I did along placement with a community midwife and she was she was right at the heart of her community. And she’d been there for years. People knew her, you know someone would have a baby and she’d know the grandchild of the woman and so on. 

And that really appealed. And then around the time when I applied, there was quite a controversial case. So that kind of…where a woman consultant was being taken to court by her colleagues for being very, in my view, for being very woman centred, so I chose to train there, because I thought that would be a really interesting place to work and, and that really woke me up I think to kind of issues of health and inequality and injustice, particularly for women, but also for wider issues around society and so I really really enjoyed being a home birth midwife and working kind of in the NHS and independently and did a bit of teaching right from the word go and one of my tutors encouraged me to teach. She thought I had a bit of gift for it. So kind of as a fledgling newly qualified midwife. I was doing all sorts of parent education and then teaching colleagues and I and I really loved it, it was just a really enjoyable and good reflective space. I enjoyed that aspect of it and then and then came my own inability to have children. 

That made it quite hard to continue with practice. I’d get home, you know, after sort of 24 hours up and I’d be, you know, as one is when one’s tired. A bit overwrought from being exhausted, but also just aware that I was really raw. So I went into teaching full time in the University, which was really great and learned that you learn so much. You know students are such a resource, they teach you so much. 

And during that time…you know my faith has always been important to me and I grew up in a Christian community. Where the reason that the people who looked after me did what they did was because they thought that was part of their faith service and that I think that has been through me like a stick of rock with me hardly noticing. I was aware that the kind of areas of faith and spirit and health were beginning more to be more separated out and that didn’t sit with me because for me internally they were integrated. And so, as part of my own journey to think about what would I do with the energy that I would have put into mothering? And what do I do with this kind of desire to offer holistic, integrated care. 

My husband James was thinking about ordination and we were going together to explore that and I kind of went in my own right to explore and then I kind of came away thinking well no, that’s a bit scary being a public God person, maybe I’ll leave that for a bit. And then, as happens, you know, I got…I kind of had this internal nagging until I did something about it, so eventually was ordained in 2008 and then whilst I was working in my first incumbency, which was in an area where there was a very high age profile I was working with a lot of people who were on their way to death.  

And I’d always thought that if I stop being a midwife, I might quite like to do Hospice care. And that’s interesting ’cause I’m before midwifery was professionalized the local women and handy women as they were called, would be called on to greet the newborns. Help women give birth and to lay out the dead. So it feels like there is a kind of historical pattern there somewhere and I happened to be talking to a friend of mine about something completely different. She had no idea I was thinking about hospice and she said or did you know this job was going at this hospice and I said oh no. So applied and really loved it. 

I mean it’s demanding, it’s challenging, but it is also really rewarding and it’s an enormous privilege. And it sounds a bit cliché and it’s hard to articulate well, but there are resonances between the birth death journey, both have, both have a mirror of each other in them as well. There’s lots of loss when you change roles and become a parent and there’s lots of potential for discovering new things and reconnecting with life in a different way when you’re on the journey to dying. And obviously that’s not always true for everybody, so I don’t want to make it sound saccharine. 

So that’s the sort of potted history. 

Gillian Straine: It’s a fascinating thing to me to be somebody who’s being, I don’t even know if this is a word, but an ‘alongsider’  

Lucyann Ashdown: Yeah 

Gillian Straine: You’re alongside folk giving birth, alongside folk dying. You’ve been alongside folk teaching and you haven’t mentioned you’re trained in supervision 

Lucyann Ashdown: Oh yeah.  

Gillian Straine: So alongside professional development as well, because often then birth and death, particularly modern society people keep them completely far apart and or, and sort of make up myths about them. You know birth is supposed to be in a pink and fluffy and lovely. The reality is quite different for many people and death we don’t talk about. But you as an individual…what was that word you used woman, woman kind of folk women who used to do this? 

Lucyann Ashdown: Yeah, the handywomen yes, yeah yeah. 

Gillian Straine: Can you say more about the parallels between the two and what you’ve learnt? 

Lucyann Ashdown: Well, it’s interesting, what you said about pink and fluffy and then we don’t talk about it because interestingly, both of them, in a way would have been at the heart of our communities. You know, historically, people would have grown up being around birth and feeding and being around death and dying. You know quite often and in some places it still happens, you know the coffin would have been in the house for a week or more, and I mean, in fact a friend of mine after her husband died decided she was going to go into business with hiring coffins that have fridges so that if people wanted to have their loved ones in their houses for longer, especially in the summer, they could. 

But so there was that sort of sense of them both being at the heart of what we did and what we knew, and there’s a one of my favourite writers, Philip Arias in his book, Western Attitudes to dying, or something like I might have got that wrong, western attitudes to death. He talks about how we think we have tamed death by taking it out of the home and putting it into a hospital or hospice, but actually what we’ve done is terrify ourselves. And there’s a similar thing with with birth, because we know that, for example, postnatal depression is often higher when women, and this is increasingly the norm anyway, when women haven’t got any…they may potentially had a career, given birth, haven’t got the networks. You know they might, they might be very competent people, but they just don’t have the networks or the support around them for that transition.  

And we would have been globally but also, like you know in in our own nation we’ve been much better at having a communal wisdom about transition in a way that we don’t now, so we are more anxious and we reach for technological solutions. And also there would have been there would not have been a split between understanding a life in the spirit and a life in the body. They would have gone together and you know there would have been really heroic deaths.  I’m not glorifying them, but they would have, people would have thought about things like that, and even now in in palliative care we might talk about a good death. But that’s not always a good death if you’re the one on the receiving [end]…you know the bereaved. It might have been peaceful, they might not been agitated, but you’ll still bereft. So how is that good? You know, and a good birth might mean, or the woman did it how she wanted, and, and yet may still be shocked by the kind of power and trauma of the event. So I think there are kind of parallels in that sense for me. 

And also in the way that that both of them challenge us really challenge us to think about where we’re at. I mean, one of my things I used to notice in supporting women giving birth Is that there was a real opening for both them and for the partner, a real opening [to think about] where am I with the planet You know, people often then thought about where food was coming from. What this meant for people all over the world. So there was a kind of connection that went and I used to call, it was really generative. It wasn’t just about giving birth, there was something phenomenologically generative about it as well. And you saw people birthing themselves not just as parents, but something often came to the fore that probably, I suspect, wouldn’t have been evoked. And also with dying. 

You know, I’m always humbled by watching carers, so it’s making feel a bit tearful, people who think they can’t do another day, another hour and they do and they stay and they find resources of love like they didn’t know they had, and again it evokes different things in people. 

I remember one woman I accompanied, she stands out in my mind and probably always will.  She had been a head teacher and had just retired and got a diagnosis and was dying very fast and she was so muscular. She was like a marathon runner and she was delving deep into into her spirit and wanted to get everything right in herself and with her relationships so that she could die. Having tied up her loose ends, if you like. 

And as a result of that a core member of her family needed to see me because he wanted to confess something because he felt that he needed to do it for her as well as himself. He couldn’t let her die with that unfinished business in his own life, which she knew nothing about. But again, there’s that sense of what does life mean in the in the in the light of death? And also bereavement sends us on such an incredible journey of evaluation and distilling, distilling of what matters. 

 Gillian Straine: I’m really struck listening to you describe and tell stories to illustrate both your experience of birth and of people dying, and I certainly especially the best stories I when I was pregnant the only person that ever told me the truth was an academic. He had four children, [we were having our] first child and asked oh…what’s it like? What’s it like? And he just said it’s apocalyptic? 

He’s the only one that got close to the experience as far as I was concerned. We sort of sweep the real experiences under the carpet, so I think it’s so important to bring those stories out for our general health. But I was struck there, so you’re telling these stories about birth and death, I was struck by your language of these are moments of transition for the person as well as the spectators or people around it. The generative [experience], birth is not just getting a baby, but your whole vision of the world changes. Your description of carers as finding resources of love and people finding reconciliation while they’re dying.  

So transition, generative, love and reconciliation. These are all words I use all the time when I talk about the healing ministry. Can you tell me more about how all this beautifully sweeps up…and you’re, you’re the chair of a healing charity and leading us through a transition of our own as well. So what does healing mean to you? 

Lucyann Ashdown: Well, as you know, that’s a big one, isn’t it? 

Well, it’s fascinating because I’ve I’m we’re doing this recording just after the wonderful lecture by Ruth Harvey that Dennis Duncan and in my in my early career I did think that I had a call to healing the healing ministry. And as I’ve got older, I’ve kind of let that go,  I think, partly, I just thought that feels a bit arrogant. But actually something about her talk reconnected me with that, and I think partly because when you work in the kind of paid health professions, it’s easy to think that you’re not part of healing. I don’t know why that is. That’s nuts, I know, but there you go. 

I think well, certainly for me, although I do believe in it and I saw it when I was younger that it can mean cure and it can. There can be miracles. I think it’s so much more subtle than that. Often it can be a relationship that’s been broken, becoming some way towards healing. It might be completely healed. It might be a bridge to healing it, maybe reconnecting with yourself. It may be a deep acceptance of where you are in your illness, in your parenting, in your health, and I suppose the word I like, biblically I like shalom, I like that kind of wellbeing, which for me is not the absence of illness or or suffering. I think it’s perfectly possible to have wellbeing, to have a deep sense of shalom, peace and value in the midst of immense suffering and that this segways  into another story, stories are great, aren’t they? 

I remember going to see a really lovely man in a carehome in Essex, and it was, it was amazing. All of the care staff were coming and going and telling their stories because he prayed for everybody in the care home. So I went to see him as an end of life visit, not imminent, but you know, kind of pending in the next few months and we had a chat about what was going on with him and then it was reciprocal. 

What can I pray for, for you? 

And I find that deeply challenging, you know, and I had to do the kind of shift in me, OK, do I just kind of like keep the professional boundary, and I thought that’s dishonoring. Now obviously I didn’t over disclose or anything like that, but it was obvious to me that this man was  expressing a calling and he was he was providing peace, healing, solace to those staff. It was, it was profound. 

And so I think there is something in the core of sense making, meaning making and purpose that can be deeply healing, and that doesn’t mean that you have to be fit and active and out there making it happen. It’s about kind of knowing deep in your being you know in for me that that you are loved valued. 

And and that can happen in a variety of settings can’t it, so it can obviously and does and needs to be the absence of illness for some people. Or certainly I mean you know, for example, cancer treatments these days. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? People are living so much longer. I mean, it doesn’t come without…it’s not necessarily without great anxiety or whatever but e have got so good at helping people to reach a different level of of life and living so I think it’s so multi layered and I think it’s tied up with creation as well. For me I suppose when I read what the Bible says about salvation it’s always about healing and it’s always all of it. 

It’s people, animals, plants, you know the rivers I can’t, I can’t separate them out and that’s why I love that awareness that I saw of of women saying, oh, you know what I’m going to feed my baby and how does that impact the planet? And what about other nations and other people having babies and those sort of [questions]. 

Gillian Straine: Yeah.  

Lucyann Ashdown: It’s almost like you know the mycelium. I don’t understand it much, but I love that image of the mycelium underneath the ground, sending messages and healing and it, for me, there’s something of that. 

Gillian Straine: It’s almost like a consciousness raising isn’t it, that you suddenly felt as part of creation of what you do as matter rather than an isolated self. 

 Lucyann Ashdown: Yes! 

Gillian Straine: We’re encouraged through lots of different ways to think of ourselves… 

Lucyann Ashdown: And I suppose there’s a sort of, you know, without wanting to get all esoteric. 

Gillian Straine: Perfect. 

Lucyann Ashdown: There’s mysticism in that because there’s something about recognising that there isn’t a dualism, we are one. We’re won with our beloved divine, we are one with one another, and the planet, and, you know, we have this Celtic phrase don’t we: thin places, and I suppose, birth and death 

You have a window where you where you can kind of feel that and you can, you can feel it close. 

Gillian Straine: Oh 

Lucyann Ashdown: Uhm, yeah, I can remember so doing postnatal visits and, and thinking, ah it’s closed now, the aperture is closed and also not getting…it’s challenging not getting hooked on that being open. It is what it is and it’s living that, so I don’t know if I’ve answered your question. [LAUGHTER] 

Gillian Straine: Very cool answer and illustrates so well how the healing ministry is so much more than getting better. It’s all that, what you just said.I mean, I came across a quotation recently that said health is the strength to live, the strength to live in bodies that sometimes go wrong and it is the strength to die.  It’s a connection with the journey that we’re on. 

Lucyann Ashdown: Yeah. 

Gillian Straine: In terms of your journey, I wondered if you would be prepared to speak about what sounds like a really painful aspect of your life with being a midwife and then finding yourself unable to have children yourself, and I’m asking because I know many listeners will be maybe going through that journey or coming out the other end of that journey and and I wondered whether you can offer some wisdom and and some stories about how people can find healing broadly understood, with the hand that they’ve found themselves being dealt? 

 Lucyann Ashdown: I think if you’d asked me that that about five years ago I might not be in a good place to do that, but I think the first thing that I would say is it’s lovely to be asked. Because it’s not something that you very often get asked to talk about. It’s often a conversation stopper rather than a conversation that people want to have. Probably a bit like telling somebody that you’ve just been diagnosed. You know, it’s one of those cross the street things. 

Gillian Straine: That’s interesting though, even there, people will say ‘do you have family?’ I mean it’s part of our ‘how are you?’ conversations. Yeah, it’s one of the questions that we get… 

Lucyann Ashdown: Exactly exactly, I think in my context there’s two things that sort of came together, so I live with my hubby James is live with chronic illness and we were sort of coming to  kind of trying to find some way of living with that in the early years of our marriage and 

So I alluded to you earlier having surgery when I was six and that led on to me having a lot of problems with my ovaries. Umm, so when I was about 34/35 I ended up having I’d already had surgery on one ovary when I was 20 and then really big bit of surgery when I was 35 and I think the gyne team I think thought Oh this is fine. You know it’ll be fine. 

And it was a really fascinating thing because it also set up quite a lot of ambivalence in me because I think sometimes, particularly if you’re thoughtful and you think about it. And I know, I looked after women who wrote a book, Kate Mosse, not the model, wrote a book called ‘Becoming a mother’ and she talked about talking to women about the decision and often people don’t make a decision You know it’s a kind of non-decision decision. And and I remember because I’d kind of been the eldest and because of our circumstances had felt very responsible for my siblings. There was a part of me that didn’t know if I could do parenting again, but in a different context, and I remember talking to one of the locum GP’s and I knew him from working at the hospital and I said, I just don’t know whether I want to do infertility treatment and I told him why and he said My sister felt like that. 

That was so amazing. No judgment, he just really heard me. But what it did was it set up a really huge process of bereavement that I think went in the acute phase of it for me. I knew I was passionate but I didn’t kind of realise quite how passionate until I went on that journey and it lasted about 17 years and it raised all sorts of questions. Was I really a woman? Now I I felt like lost my identity as a midwife at the same time because I couldn’t, I couldn’t stay in the work easily. And I it was what I knew, people told me I was good at it, I loved it. So it felt like there was a kind of wrenching of a huge part of life that was really difficult to come to terms with. 

I learnt that  I was very hard on myself in my grief. I learned a lot about who I am and the thing that I found most difficult was it didn’t really feel like a grief, so later via Gateway women and Jody Day, bless her, I went to a Reignite weekend. And I learned about disenfranchised grief, if a society doesn’t recognise something as grief it is very difficult for you to accommodate your own grief. That was huge. I mean, I don’t know, I think I got a lot more out of that weekend, but that was the thing that really helped enormously, and also listening to other women’s stories and knowing that you weren’t alone. 

And that it was happening to women very young and women much older. You know that we’re still trying to come to terms with this. So there was a long journey of thinking about it, it sent me on a real journey about what do I believe about death and life and life after death. Do I believe in life after death? You know all the questions that people that I work with in pallative care are asking all the time, what did I think about burial, cremation? Was my life worth anything anymore? You know that really came hard and fast like a kind of, I think the image that comes to mind is as though I was under under Niagara Falls and I just couldn’t even breathe with the pain and loss of it. 

And then I think I’ve always been somebody who’s been quite embodied and who likes to run and walk and eat well. And and I think you know, I became aware that although I still did that, my tendency to care for myself well was reduced by the and that we know that about grief. You know that that’s what happens. So it caused me to question everything. About who I was and how I understood the world and work. And then also one of my favorite times of the year had always been Advent and I felt like I lived that story regularly in my life, you know, like I was doing at that with people, every time I did a journey to birth and all of a sudden I just found it really painful. All this talking about babies and miraculous ones, you know, virgin births and people having babies at 100 and so there was a kind of it, it changed my relationship to Scripture. Yeah, so it was tectonic. 

Gillian Straine: And has huge questioning of or reassessing of your whole identity, past and future, and where you are now. 

Lucyann Ashdown: Yeah 

 Gillian Straine: And if you could wave a magic wand, I mean we don’t have magic wand at the Guild of Health Raphael, but you know what changes at a societal level and then let’s talk about the church at the church level. What practical things do people list? What would you demand we change to make it easier for people who are struggling with childlessness, or living with that and also the church, what could we do better? 

Lucyann Ashdown: Well, one of the things that I know is being campaigned for is that childless, childless people are given space in a kind of HR law so that you’re not the one that always does the half term working if you are the childless one, for example. So things like that where we make assumptions about who’s available to do things, so the term pronatalism comes in and it’s a bit like going on holiday and there are different surcharges, so that sort of thing. 

Yeah, for me, I think, I think I’m, I don’t know if this is true, but I have a hunch that because I was a midwife for such a long time I have a slightly different perspective because because I spent so much of my life around that and I have so much of it inveigled into who I am still. I think the way we talk about women’s choices is really complex, because especially now where we’re talking about embryo freezing. I don’t always think we’re honest about the complexities of reproductive technology or the actual choices we have. We can’t have it all and we like to give each other the impression that we can. It’s not possible something has to give even if you’re highly high achiever and you do achieve, you know what other people might think, all of it. So I think there needs to be a bit more honest conversation about that. 

And whilst I’m not a biological reductionist I do think there is something in the biology that needs to be more honestly acknowledged around timings and all of that kind of stuff. And of course, now we’re into a very complex area, which I’m not sure I’ve got a handle on which is, you know, the whole place of gender fluidity and what and how that plays into it, I think. 

Awareness that it is an area of deep grief, for the amount of women across the world that are infertile now, especially in the Western world, is as high as it was after the First World War. So the factual information around it is quite profoundly shocking. 

And I think if churches want to have a ministry then there’s something to be done around supporting couples who would have liked to have had children, and and being really cognizant of our, we’ve got a lot of nativity type language in our stories and, and what does that mean? And I’m aware that the story of Hannah when she’s crying out to God, you know she’s treated as though she’s slightly bonkers and there, for me, there’s something there about the really visceral expression of grief and longing and yearning, and we need to be better at hearing people’s real deep distress and not sanitising it. Because I think we have a tendency to get a bit a bit sort of closing down if people are really distraught or enraged. 

I was so enraged I didn’t even I didn’t know what to do with the amount of rage in my sorrow and for me the thing I still don’t feel I’ve got my own head round, but I would like to get better at it is lament if we had much more lament in our liturgy in our culture and songs, all of that artistic expression of lament. I think I would have found that very holding both at societal level and in our churches, because it, there’s something about grief that makes you feel like your…all the colour has gone out of the world and if you’re someone who brings that news. Your asked the question and then your news is bad news or news that challenges, you know. ‘Oh gosh, not everyone might have a baby or I might get cancer or MND or whatever’ that threatens us when we hear that news,  but that is the reality of human life and it’s not just that colour or that absence, but something about being more able to hear the different inflections of life’s journey and to incorporate that in our liturgy, in our worship and just to be better at loss. 

I don’t even know what I mean when I say better at loss, but more that we incorporate it more and maybe Covid is going to be…maybe that’s one of the things that Covid will do, I don’t know, but the danger is that we get too scared and it does the opposite, but it’s probably a mixed picture. 

00:31:07 Gillian Straine 

It’s interesting because the church in terms of another whole area which is child loss and this, so both and so on. I feel the church is taking good steps in developing blue Christmas or services in Advent for people who suffered the death of child, and that’s important. So I feel that there is space for that to be expanded into a different form of grief as well.  

So there there’s been improvements, but whether or not the liturgy is any good, or if there’s spaces for those stories to be heard, it’s getting…getting in that’s the hard bit. And some, mean, it’s very interesting in developing one of our projects at the Guild is the Healthy Healing Hub project, and I was surprised, but so many of our churches were working with are asking for training for people to have tricky conversations. So know how to say, how are you or to ask how are you and be available for the answer. 

Because we’re dealing with death and a huge level uncertainty on a huge level. And really we’re being tested now as Christians I feel, do we really believe what we are preaching every Sunday? 

Lucyann Ashdown: Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s interesting. ’cause two things that you evoked in me; one is that, I think it’s two years ago when the NHS was 70, I was on my way to an event at Chelmsford Cathedral because I was working in Chelmsford Diocese as a chaplain and I was really…I was on the way there, I had an hours journey and I was just really reflecting and feeling so grateful for the fact that having trained in the NHS had given me so much. Give me my career and you know so much so much and I just went with it. My heart was open and full and I had also been, I was part of a little group that helped plan the service. There was a point in it where we heard a story of a young lad who was six who was saved and  on video they showed us him meeting his consultant, it was really moving.  At the end here was an opportunity for people to go into either of the side chapels and lay a stone and the one I went into had this young lad and his dad in it and I went to lay my stone and it hit me like a brick that actually I might not be able to have children but actually, the NHS saved my life when I was six the same age as this lad and and it is sort of shifted something for me. 

That I had been given the gift of life and the price for that was that I couldn’t give life in a biological sense. And that that gave me a level of healing, and I think I think it’s probably ongoing, bit like grief, you know there are layers, but there’s something, and even now if I contemplate it, it blows my mind and it I can feel my heart soften. So there’s something quite profound in that and it feels very poignant when you talk about the NHS. Because this is what, we’re talking about this Covid thing isn’t it? 

When I heard about the second lockdown, the first thing that came to my mind is, how are those staff going to do this. They must be so exhausted. You know, because they’re really well trained, but we’re all like you said, how do you say how you are? We’re all really exhausted! We’re holding a much greater awareness of uncertainty than we ever consciously normally do, even though it’s always around. You know, we’re all behaving differently with our weird face masks and if you’re wearing PPE, aww every day in a hot environment, and the thing that you like to do well, which is to smile or to touch or reassure you know. And it’s all going as well as it can, but I don’t think we’re going to know for a long, long time, quite the toll it’s taken, and that that’s where my mind went is what what will be the fallout, and it will be mixed. 

I think good, bad and indifferent what we have learned, you know, I mean, amazing, isn’t it how we’ve never developed a vaccine in this kind of timeframe before – kind of a bit like war, you know accelerates things, doesn’t it? But I do really hope with all my heart that we learn the value of those people and that we learn what a gift we have from God in the way that we can be with one another with our gifts and skills. You know whether that’s science or biology or whether you’ll just have to be really good ward cleaner who knows how to have the most amazing conversations by the bedside. 

Whatever that is, that we kind of, and I know I’m not the only one, but I hope it does have a reorientating impact and that we do start to think differently and more creatively about lament and loss and death and how we can be with each other in it, because there’s a much more universal experience of it, even though it will be particularly different won’t it, but there will be a larger awareness. And there’ll be things we won’t be proud of right, like what we know about some groups being treated less equally than others and so on. 

Gillian Straine: I read, there’s a British medical Journal article that spoke recently in October 2020, about the mental health impact of Covid, and one line, though I’m not one to remember lines, but one line that stuck with me is that ‘there is no vaccine for the mental health impact of what we’re going through’ and the way you were describing it there, actually, before you even said lament, it sounded like the psalms, what we’re living through right now is one of those lament Psalms. 

Lucyann Ashdown: Yeah. 

Gillian Straine: My God, my God, why have you forsaken us? 

Lucyann Ashdown: Yeah. 

Gillian Straine: How long? 

 Lucyann Ashdown: Yes yes yes. 

Gillian Straine: How long, O Lord, how long? We read them, especially, we’re both Church of England priests. You know you have to say them every day you say O Gosh, no, not that Psalm it goes on forever. Oh Lord, I’m going to say it all again, though actually, a number of wise women in my life have been pointing me back to the Psalms. You know, I’m not saying ‘look see this will make it better’, but like this is actually describing the disorientation that we’re having right now. The need to hang on, you know where, where is the certainty in the uncertainty. Where is God? Do we plead? And one of the Psalms, I will never remember the number, but it’s one of the very repetitive psalms that basically went through the whole history of the Jews  

You know we went through the Red sea, but God saved us, we were in exile for 40 years and God saved us. We were then into this bit, but God saved us and I always thought it was a rather boring Psalm, but a friend of mine pointed to this this is the recitation of the history so they can carry on believing, well God was with us then surely he must be with us now. Not in a kind of statement of fact or here’s a historical lesson we need to know this now and what you said there, coming out of it is not going to be a quick fix. It’s not going to be sudden, we’re all in a journey now. 

Lucyann Ashdown: I find the Psalms really important and they’re really important in the work I do, and I think going back to something I said earlier, for me, you know they really viscerally uncomfortable at times. And I’m not condoning that, but you know, you might have smite their babies or something. 

It’s really uncomfortable for us in the West, but what that is, is that’s rage and you know, it’s not necessarily that you want that to happen, but actually when we’re really enraged when we really bereaved we can wish things that we then go ‘Oh my goodness, I didn’t even know I had it in me.’ 

To think like that and that’s  the other reason why they’re important, because we are faced then with all of who we are and there’s no escape. 

We have a very good friend who grew up in Lebanon and we go over there, you know everything is like high octane. I love it, I love it. 

You know it’s something about that kind of, in the Middle East that is allowed, that’s all out there, you know, and it’s deeply uncomfortable, but it’s how it is. 

And I suppose for me it’s a bit like you know Jesus, saying those among you without sin, cast the first stone or Ghandi saying, don’t get involved in nonviolent work with me if you don’t remember your own violence.  

And I think that’s what’s so amazing about the Psalms is that all of it’s there, isn’t it? Our despair or constant, constant repetition that actually God has been there. 

I might be getting paranoid that I’ve lost, you know he’s gone completely now, but it’s all there and we’ve got a tendency to sort of understandably…but we need to be…I think we could be a bit more  

There are Psalms we never have in the lectionary, aren’t there, as well as the ones you get, like you say: ‘Oh no, not that one again,’ which is interesting. Psalm 88 is a classic one, because there’s no resolution in it. It’s you know it’s really pit of despair stuff, but actually if that’s where you are it meets you. 

Gillian Straine: We are mid pandemic, we are mid the second lock down and just drawing drawing this to a close, you’ve had enormous experiences. You’ve been Miss Wisewoman of transition moments. What gives you hope today to carry on? Where do you place your hope? 

Lucyann Ashdown: There’s something about this moment for me, which feels it feels a bit more real than we sometimes are, and I like that, so that makes me feel hopeful because it feels like this is a real life in in the middle of it and I’m not saying that without…I don’t want to be in any way dismissive of the horrendous pain and anguish and grief and anxiety and fear that we’re all living with. 

In, you know, depending on our some circumstances, I think it…I think you know crisis is always an opportunity as well and I have seen and felt people move towards each other. They told me when I did little spell at the beginning of lockdown for six months covering an interregnum. And I ended on Harvest Sunday and I said, what has your, can you email me telling me what your Covid harvest has been to date? And without exception people talked about a distillation of what mattered, what was important. And where things that help them to connect had arisen, it’s very profound. And I, I think I echo that. 

And for me, I feel like I’m somebody who’s quite via negativa.So you know, I’m not great with words always, but there’s something in that dark place for me that I always think that’s where stuff is growing and you can’t see it. 

There’s a mixed bag there, but I have…something in me just senses some life and, and I suppose for me it’s that wonderful image of creation, of uncreated light, of the spirit hovering over what’s not yet visible. 

So there’s something, something really profound in that for me. 

Gillian Straine: You just said I’m not someone who is very good with words,  I have just recorded a podcast with you and it’s not true otherwise, ah Lucyann thank you so much for being willing to share your stories and your experience in life, it has been a profound privilege to listen to. 

You know, we’ve worked together for five years, we’ve never had this conversation, thank you so much. 

Lucyann Ashdown: No we haven’t. 

Gillian Straine: I feel, whoever listens to it, it will be of enormous value to them. So thank you for being willing to share. 

Lucyann Ashdown: Thank you for asking. 

Gillian Straine: You have been listening to the GoHealth Podcast. Our theme music is from the Song River of Life by Lofter. To continue the conversation and to find out more about the GoHealth community, go to our website gohealth.org.uk and find us also on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and there join in the conversation because together we flourish.