Autobiographical introduction.
Alive
I was born in Glasgow on 27th of March 1949 at 9am on Mothering Sunday.
My mother often spoke of looking out of the window from the bungalow and seeing the daffodils in the garden. The bright yellow flowers had opened up to the light that same morning. She took that as an omen.
I weighed over 12lbs (5,5kg) at birth. She told me it was an easy birth. I don’t remember it. I had no choice.
Being alive is an extraordinary mystery. Being aware of this is not simply a thought. It is a feeling. I’ve had this humbling amazement in me since my early childhood. That was long before I read Sartre’s “Nausea” when I was 19 years old.
Education
For as long as I can recall education systems have intrigued me.
My primary schooling was in Scotstoun in Glasgow. I started a year early because my mother was urgently needed in post-war Scotland. She was a physics teacher. They were in short supply just after the war. For the next twenty years all my peers were older than me. At the time I barely noticed. Only later did I understand how human development unfolds in stages — and how often I lagged a little behind.
Both my parents were teachers. We were relatively comfortable. My school, St Paul’s in Whiteinch served families living in deep poverty. They resided in red sandstone tenements with shared toilets. We would play in the rubble which still lay from the bombing of the Clyde shipyards.
I became bilingual: one language at home, another — broad Glaswegian — at school. I learnt it quickly.
I soon picked up the most common word in my friends’ sentences. Then, I carved it into our elegant wooden mantelpiece at home. With no chalk available, I used something sharp. My father noticed. Very gently, he said the mantelpiece was not for carving. Then he looked at the letters — F-U-K — and added, “You’ve missed out a ‘C’.” He was an English teacher. Spelling mattered.
For seven years I lived in two worlds, economically oceans apart. I spoke of neither to the other. My parents had asked me not to.
I remain grateful for that education. Experience, I learned early, is our best teacher.
Formation
At eleven I was sent to a Jesuit college. At seventeen, in 1966, I joined the Jesuit novitiate, giving up a place to study mathematics at Glasgow University.
For nine years I lived the traditional Jesuit formation: contemplative prayer, philosophy, theology — and relentless questioning. It shaped me profoundly.
I made the full thirty-day silent retreat. I followed the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The text is a demanding medieval training manual. It is not a book to be read. I was immersed.
Jesuit life opened the world of academia to me: Oxford, London, Chichester, Middlesbrough.
Education — its power and its limits — will be a recurring theme in this blog.
Faith, Family, Love is the final introductory post. It contains biographical clips from 2000 to now.
I’ve been wondering over the years what happened to you. I thought of you today and googled you and found you! It’s a pleasure to be in contact. Greetings from Córdoba, Argentina
Hello Joss, so good to hear from you. A real surprise. I’m living in Spain now. I knew you were in Argentina because there was a time when I needed some translation done into Spanish and I think you did it for me. I can’t remember but I do know that I tracked you down at that point.
How are you? I expect that you’re ageing very well. I on the other hand I’m not ageing too well. My memory is going very quickly and this is why I’m wanting to write a bit of this blog. Mainly for my grandchildren. I now have seven and there’s another one in the way.
Putting this blog together is a way of keeping my mind active in a positive way.
I look back at our Campion Hall times and think that really we lived through some of the most wonderful times of change and positive change for humanity at that time, at least in our Western world. I have fond memories of playing chess with your father in Barmouth.
I’m really pretty bad at communicating and replying.
I’m good at welcoming people if they turn up in my doorstep.
Has your theology evolved over the years? I’m going around asking people if they still believe in an afterlife and as you’ll see in the blog, I’ll post photographs of sculptures in the churches here in Spain depicting people in hell. That sort of hell was meant to control us. It didn’t work in your case nor in mine.
On the other hand, I think that the spiritual part of our nature is not so well understood these days or even sought after in this terribly material world.
On one of my caminos, I determined to try and work out or listen to what the basic message of Christianity could be and came to the conclusion that basically it was somewhere around the sermon and the mount or the accounts of it that the only single certain message of Jesus. The man was to to love everyone and take care of those who are worse off than ourselves. He was a fanatic about that.
That message lingered for a while in the early church and one day I went to mass in my little village in Spain and the gospel or the epistle was that bit about The early Christian community in which they all brought which the the things that they had in excess and gave them in so that no one was needy. When I came out of the church and went down to the bar the priests came up and sat down with some people and I said to him what did he think about that. It was a theme that had been interesting me for some time and I’d looked it up. The passage from Paul I suppose and the first replies on the old Google search engine were all from creatures in the USA who said that it was valid in Jesus time but not in our time. The parish priest who comes from El Salvador because Spain doesn’t produce any priests anymore. Said exactly the same thing to me. Well I’ve lived with very little and it really does simplify life enormously. It also awakens a type of spirituality which is not at all dependant on any Doctrine. I gave up believing in beliefs long time ago and also in having projects because I liked major projects.
Of course that stance is all a hangover from the Jesuits. Well not necessarily from the Jesuits but certainly from the spiritual exercises. Thanks for getting in touch. That’s really kind of you. Don’t hold your breath too much blog posts. I’m really slow but you’ll see in the old raft of corks site that there are some stories about my walking life.
Hasta la próxima!
Hello John
Good to be in touch.
Write to me at jossheywood@gmail.com so we can continue more privately. And we can share WhatsApp numbers that way.
Hoping to hear from you ,
Joss