Elizabeth Oldfield speaks to Clover Stroud. 25/01/2023
Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, and the people behind the positions in our public conversations. In this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with Clover Stroud, who’s a journalist and bestselling author of three memoirs. When she was 16, her mother had a riding accident that put her in a coma. And although Clover’s mother did eventually wake up, she was profoundly brain–damaged for the rest of her life. She lived another 22 years. Then, in 2019, Clover lost now her sister who had experienced that early trauma alongside her. Understandably then, we spoke a lot about grief, about God, about creativity, and about horses. There are some reflections from me at the end, and I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Clover Stroud’s response
Okay, Clover, I am going to ask you: what is the opposite of a gentle opening question? There is no small talk, there’s no chitchat, there’s no “what you had for breakfast” because I’m terrible at small talk. But I have the impression that you are too, and I mean that as a compliment. So I hope you’re gonna be okay to go deep, fast.
Clover Stroud
Definitely.
Elizabeth
The way I want to frame what is sacred to you is with as much space as you need. It came to me early. I was beginning to think about things as a as a way of understanding each other better, as getting beyond the things that we disagree on or our positions in public life. But getting to the kind of deep values and principles that drive us, which we don’t get much space to talk about, I don’t think. And we try and bracket out kind of family and loved ones because they’re sacred to everyone, I think. And just let bubble up the thing that we have maybe tried to live by or… Another test that sometimes helps is, if someone offered you money to give this thing up, you would feel quite insulted. You would feel quite offended, because it’s not a kind of instrumental, you know, just like “maximising comfort and convenience” kind of thing. It’s something deeper than that. Having given you some, but not many, parameters and a very difficult question, what maybe comes to mind?
Clover Stroud
It’s interesting. I mean, it’s such an interesting question. It’s such an important question. And it’s such an interesting way to kind of know one another as well or attempt to know one another. But when you were talking, I was thinking about different things. And I have been thinking in the last few days, aware that we’re going to have this conversation, about what is sacred. But when you were talking then, I felt some kind of emotion rising inside me. In fact, I felt myself for a second close to tears, because I was thinking about my relationship with various things in my life: emotions, stuff that matters to me, which, together, come together as something sacred, I suppose. And when I think about what that is, for me, what is really sacred – what allows me, enables me, encourages me to live my life in a way that I feel is true – is the thing that I grew up with, which was a kind of sense of the importance of bravery and honesty. And those things come into my life in the form of poetry and horses, and they are… For me, my relationship with horses is something which I’ve tried to kind of resist, I’ve tried to move away from, but it has a sort of spiritual place in my life. And it’s profoundly linked to my relationship with my mother and my sister and my childhood. My mother and my sister are both dead. My sister died three years ago, and my mom died in 2013 after a very, very long illness where she had brain damage from a riding accident. But we grew up with horses and ponies, not in a kind of smart way, not a kind of show jumping or… But just little muddy ponies out in the countryside. And for me, where I’m sitting here, I can see out into the field outside my house, there’s a muddy pony out in the field there, surprise, surprise. And horses kind of represent a link to my mother, and my sister. And I know that family is supposed to be outside of this, but they’re important because of the fact of both those people being dead. And my relationship with them in an ongoing way – the way that I kind of bring them into my life and honour them, and have a spiritual relationship with them – is through the way that I feel about the horses that I have out in the field, which are all kinds of quite scruffy, heavy cobs. And when I’m with them, then I feel something which feels sacred to me and feels profoundly important. And it also feels really deeply linked to my relationship with poetry, which is… I mean, I totally think that is a divine relationship: our relationship with words, our relationship with the kind of language that, for me, was there in my childhood, and was a very rich and informative and kind of integral part of my childhood. The poet that formed that more than anybody else is T.S. Eliot, and the way that he writes about belief, and the human spirit, and kind of what it means to struggle and what it means to be alive, and how difficult and beautiful and appalling it is to be a human. And so for me, I cannot think about horses without thinking about my dead mother and sister, and my relationship with T.S. Eliot, and my relationship with God. And all of those things come together. So I don’t know if I’m allowed, in answer to your question, for that to be too many different elements of the sacred, what is sacred to me coming together, but they are a very profoundly important kind of alchemical mix of something entirely magical for me and entirely sacred, certainly.
Spirituality and horses
Elizabeth
Yeah. You’re very much allowed. There’s one thing I wanted to pick up on what you said about horses as this deeply spiritual thread in your life that you’ve tried to resist or that you know, it sounds like there’s a complicated relationship that kind of wants to ask: why? Why would you try and resist that?
Clover Stroud
Because they bring a great deal of inconvenience into my life.
Elizabeth
It’s bloody hard work,
Clover Stroud
Bloody hard work; muddy, you know, dangerous. I know they’re dangerous. I mean, Mum had this accident when I was 16 and she was in a coma for several months. She was on her horse, and then when she woke up, she was profoundly mentally and physically disabled. And I think it’s interesting that Nell and I – my sister Nell who died of cancer in 2019 – both 100% went towards horses after that. We didn’t retreat from them. And people said, “oh”, you know, “I find that so strange that you want to go and ride still”. But riding, and being around horses, being in the English landscape actually. Particularly that for me, the English landscape, it is rather like a description from T.S. Eliot actually from ‘Little Gidding’ when he’s describing the kind of ‘hedges white with May’ and the sort of English… He describes a landscape which is the one which is really similar to the place where Nell and I grew up, which was a village in Wiltshire that was low lying, it had dark black hedges and green fields. Very, very kind of muddy wet fields, and ditches with beautiful kingcups in them and fields of artilleries. And even just talking about that, actually, I find it really painful talking about it because it reminds me of Mum so much, reminds me of Nell so much. And horses are a presence, always, as a kind of something ancient. I mean, I think there’s something ancient about horses. I think there’s something eternal, I think there’s something incredibly obviously very powerful. They’re incredibly beautiful. And they are there. I can see horses – I can see Mum and Nell in this landscape and I can see the horses walking around behind us. And I suppose I have tried to get away from them because of the inconvenience I have to, you know, I have to live in… I’m married to someone who has no interest in horses at all or has never been around horses until he met me. And he is a very wonderful person and he totally has embraced the fact that I love them, but he has no interest in them. So, within your relationship, horses then become this sort of thing, slightly, which is quite difficult to manage. And in a way, if we lived in a city – and I sometimes feel my life would be so much more convenient and easy if I lived in a city – but it would make no sense to me spiritually as well. That kind of connection to this landscape and to the animals is so important, but it is… I suppose I’ve tried to get away from them because of a… they’re dangerous. Mum, you know, Mum had this terrible accident but it totally didn’t stop me. You know, shortly afterwards, I was riding out for a racehorse trainer. I went off to Texas and ended up riding in rodeos. I’ve rode a lot in the Caucasus Mountains, in Russia. I’ve taken myself with horses to a perilous place and I’m really interested by the way that that place of peril that we can get to in life, and how exciting it is as well, and how life–affirming it is, whilst at the same time being quite close to a sense of extreme danger – potentially death, you know, based on my mother’s experiences. But when I’m away from them, I just feel… You know, I had a period when I was living in Oxford in my 20s and my early 30s, and I was a single mother, I had two children, and, you know, it was difficult. I was supporting them completely on my own. But I ended up buying this little black and white pony and finding some allotments. I used to keep them behind these allotments, and it costs 10 pounds a week. And I thought, okay, I can spend 10 pounds a week on this pony. So even like in the most inconvenient circumstances, I found myself bringing them into life because I want the children – I have got five children – I want my children as well to have a relationship with them so much. And it’s strange because my kids are not really into them in the same way that I am. But then they didn’t know my mother. And for me, they are a link to my mom. They’re really powerful. And I feel as if I didn’t have them, I’d almost be betraying that kind of… I don’t know, I feel like would lose hold of some kind of spiritual connection to Nell and Mum if I didn’t have horses.
Grappling with grief
Elizabeth
Yeah. Clover, I wanted to ask you this at the beginning and I got distracted by talking about our mutual friend. I’m aware that you are right in anniversary season, that December is… Your mom and your sister died around this time of year. And I normally do a kind of pastoral check with guests because as I’m reading and listening to you a lot, I’m thinking that you’re kind of repeatedly going back into grief and talking about grief. So I just wanted to check how you are doing today. And if there’s ways that I can make this as life–giving as possible and not leave you feeling wrung out.
Clover Stroud
That’s very kind of you. I like to feel wrung out. I like to feel it, and I think to have a conversation about all of this stuff is, you know, it’s a real privilege. And so I do find it, um, you know, I do find it painful, and I do feel emotional talking about them. But I also know that that’s kind of fundamentally part of who I am. And actually, in a way, have always been, even predating everything that happened to them. I think, because it was the anniversary of Nell’s death last week, and it is a really loaded time, and running up to an anniversary, you do think a great deal about what you’ve been, what you were doing with those people immediately, you know, in the time before. When you were living in this exact time three years ago, however, many times years ago, it was what was happening in your relationship. And I can remember… You know, I actually remember the night before mum’s accident, which was on the 25th of November. One of the last – wasn’t the last thing because obviously she had the accident the next day. But, umm, Nell and I always felt really bad about this because the night before mum’s accident – she always went to Evensong and we grew up beside a church – and she said, “Oh, you want to come to church with us?”. And I was 16, Nell was 18, and she and my dad, Rick, would go to church and we didn’t, you know. We were just sort of being typical teenagers, and we didn’t go. And Nell and I always said after that… I was just carrying so much guilt for that, you know. How much would I… I would do anything for that now, and it was such an important thing for her as well. But it’s strange, before an anniversary, you remember little things. You know, I remember where I was standing in the doorway when I spoke to… You remember, you know… If I said to you, “what were you doing on the 25th of November 1991”, you’re not going to be able to remember it. But I’m sure you’ve got other dates which are really powerfully important to you. And it’s very strange, that kind of, you know, energetic potency that is carried onwards through the years of a memory of a specific moment. But I like talking about it. It’s important. And I like talking about you know, the transformation that comes with it as well.
Elizabeth
Yeah, I’m glad it was. Sometimes I play a little game with myself when I’m preparing to talk to people as I’m reading their work, and I’m listening to them or I’m researching what they’ve done with their life. And I try and guess what might be sacred to them. I’m trying to do some writing at the moment and I’m spending a lot of time with this phrase “fully alive”. And it felt like your when you said I like to feel things, it felt like my guess of what was sacred to you would be something around that, around really living, like really being alert in our lives and to the world. And that really came through as you were talking about poetry and courage and horses.
Growing up in the countryside
I’d love to hear a little bit more about your childhood and the way usually frame this is: you talk about the big ideas that were in your childhood, religious, or philosophical, or political. It sounds like there was a religious strand in there. So we’d love to hear more about that. Can you just sort of paint me a picture of young Clover running around with Nell and horses in the countryside?
Clover Stroud
Um, so my mother had had three children, my three older brothers and sisters from her first marriage. And she split up with her first husband and she went to live in Oxford. And I have a sort of picture of her there of being… because it was sort of relatively… I know her father. So her father was a clergyman. And he really frowned upon the fact that she had left her first husband and was getting divorced. And it was, I guess, the kind of late 60s, early 70s. And she was there with her three children, and then she met my dad a couple of years later, she met my dad, who was an undergraduate who was like 11/12 years younger than her. And he was doing English, but he was a really, really into drama. And he was like, directing and putting on lots and lots of plays. So I have this like beautiful image of him – and he sort of looks a bit like my eldest son now, he has lots of blonde curly hair – and mum being 12 years older than him with three children. So it’s quite an unconventional relationship right from the start, then. So the house was sort of full of different props that my dad was using for his student productions that he was putting on. And I remember growing up with the feeling of the colour and the texture of a dramatic life, you know, literally the life of the theatre around us when we were kids. And then when I was seven and Nell was nine, and they’d be living in Oxford and my dad was away a lot of the time – he was like directing TV shows, like he was one of the youngest people to direct Coronation Street when he was straight after university and he was doing directing TV dramas – and my mom was at home. And my three older siblings were kind of teenagers sort of starting to leave home and Nell and I were still at home, and mum… Mum had an overriding desire to move to the countryside because she wanted to have horses in her life. And so we moved when I was seven from Oxford to this village and we moved into a kind of pretty big, extremely cold, extremely threadbare but extremely beautiful house which… Mum made it really, really beautiful. But it wasn’t at all smart. It was like posters all over the walls and rush matting that was all kind of, you know, shredded, and old sofas, and loads and loads of books, and lots of animals. You know, horses, and mum had loads of chickens and ducks and peacocks and dogs. So there was a kind of feeling of abundant life all around us. And my dad was away all week working, so Nell and I had a really close relationship with mom, because we were on our own with her. And it was, you know, it was the 1980s. And when you look back at that time, it feels, well, it feels like a different– I mean, it does, it is a completely different world in so many ways. But I did– I do have a kind of memory of the homemade nature of it, and the feeling of Halloween parties where we would make all the costumes and do apple bobbing and a kind of messy, quite threadbare but extremely beautiful, extremely emotionally rich childhood. And I was very, very, very profoundly loved by my mother who absolutely adored me. And I know, I mean, that is my kind of memory is this kind of extreme love that I had for my mom and that she had for me, and I think it was quite unusual that, you know, when I was 16 when the accident happened, I hadn’t had a massive kind of normal teenage bust–up with her. I was still really, really, really close to her. And she encouraged, and as did my dad as well, in Nell and myself a feeling that we could kind of live our lives on our own terms. That we could be the people, the women, that we wanted to be. And that sort of bravery, something that horses do give you as a child as this like independence and bravery, they allow you to escape from your parents into worlds where you have a relationship with another being that is much bigger and stronger and more powerful than you. But which takes you into fields and takes you into a place of kind of muddiness and perils sometimes. And Nell and I spent a lot of time riding on our own and going through this incredible woodland near where we lived, riding – and also actually where I live now. I live about half an hour from where I grew up, but it’s some near the Ridgeway near the mountains in Oxfordshire. And so it’s a big, beautiful, open ancient landscape, which is kind of covered with standing stones and chalk horses. And we used to come and ride here as well. And so there was a feeling of sort of freedom and art, but there was also – she wasn’t like completely bohemian as well. She minded a lot about things like, you know, good manners and education and she did mind about us going to church. That was a really big part of our childhood, certainly. The house that we grew up in was right next door to the village church, so I would sit in my bedroom, and there was a big wall between the church and our garden, and every Wednesday there was bell–ringing. And the feeling of being in a church and mum doing the church flowers. A sort of small village church. And, you know, sitting through endless services as a child is a very, very strong memory for me. And one that at times, I really, you know… I can remember my confirmation really clearly. I remember the shoes that I wore for my confirmation. I can remember the feeling of a sense of kind of growing up, I suppose. And growing into a new stage of my life. I can remember going to christenings, I can remember the Evensong on a Sunday night, although I bitterly regret that last one that I didn’t go to. But the feeling of believing in God and believing in the goodness of God was a really, really powerful strand through my childhood that I’m still trying to kind of understand, I suppose. Not really understand, but hold on to, actually, to kind of feel… I mean, I feel it, absolutely. But sometimes, I have a kind of yearning to be in that place again, and to be in the kind of safe sense of childhood and belief that came with it. And obviously, adult life is so much more complex, you know, and nuanced. And we look back on our childhoods as a place of… Well, I look back on what I was lucky to have such a happy childhood and looking back on my childhood is a place of, kind of real beauty and serenity, and this feeling of intense love that mum wrapped around us is how I remember it. And I suppose the thing that I’m continually yearning for, reaching for, trying to recreate, trying to re–find, trying to re–feel, you know, I think it’s that’s what you’re trying to do. You can’t buy it, can you. You’re trying to feel it again, you’re trying to create it again in some way.
Elizabeth
Yeah. You write so beautifully. The word that I wrote down repeatedly, as I was preparing for today was “wild”. And obviously it’s in the titles of two of your books, of you’re kind of 20s adventures with horses in dangerous places. And then your wild and sleepless nights writing about motherhood, which I so appreciated, something less saccharin as a as a depiction of motherhood. But I wanted to kind of dig in with you about that word, it particularly in relationship to God and to spirituality. Because what I think… This is a very poorly formed series of thoughts rather than a question, so forgive me while I grasp on my way to something.
Faith is a lot like creativity
What I really appreciated in your writing is you’re trying all the way through to be honest about what it feels like to be a human and to lose the people that we love, and just the pain of being a person and what it means to mother. And you’re so honest about spirituality and belief as a thread in amongst that, that kind of slides in and out of focus. But the way you write about it feels closest to my experience, which is of something quite wild, you know, that we’re not very good about talking about religion in this country. And when we do, it sounds safe, right? It sounds nice. It sounds domesticated, and suburban, and institutional. And, you know, more “tea, vicar and cucumber sandwiches”. So, I was so delighted to have something of the rawness and the wildness of what I feel when I’m kind of seeking to connect with the Divine come through in your writing. And I just wanted to say, just ask you, if you could talk more about it, and say there is full permission here, because I think not in all settings… It’s a bit like grief, isn’t it? Not everyone knows what to do when you want to talk about God, or you want to talk about the Divine. It makes us uncomfortable.
Clover Stroud
No, definitely. It’s so interesting, because it’s sort of… I feel a certain anxiety about getting it right or wrong, or being able to explain what I really mean. To explain what I’m feeling or trying to feel. And also because my faith, my belief, has changed, changes. It goes through different shapes, it goes through different times. It goes through different rituals, that I also feel kind of slightly scared by it in some way or another. I want to feel it and at times I do feel it. It’s almost like creativity, you know. Creativity is something that comes and goes. It’s not always there, it doesn’t always like show up when you show up at the page to be present to it. It’s something that is kind of nebulous and you’re kind of I’m trying to hold on to these threads, which are blowing away from me in the wind. And I think that that is the way that I think and feel about my kind of my belief in God and my faith. Which is that it is absolutely there, but it’s also linked to me being a human being. Like, it’s linked so much to my kind of human frailties. And maybe that’s the whole point. And I suppose that’s what I mean by like, you worry about getting it wrong. Am I articulating what faith is in the right way? But I know that when I am feeling my faith, when I’m feeling my belief, when I’m feeling something spiritual, it is like a kind of feeling of something utterly, utterly human, I suppose. And therefore it encompasses all of my failings and my fears and my desires. And I suppose one of the things also that kind of worries me is that I don’t think I’m very good at my… you know, I don’t practice it enough. I don’t go to church enough, I don’t pray enough. And it’s always like, “I want to know how to do that more”. And of course, just like writing, you know, you do it by doing it. You do it by… I don’t think you can be taught these things. You do it by turning up and being there, being alive to your creativity or being alive to your faith. And I do feel as though creativity and faith, there is something in some way in that they’re linked there is a kind of Divine sense of them being something bigger and other, outside my life, which I cannot really understand. I cannot describe what God looks like. Nobody can describe what God looks like. I was talking with my children about that. I remember talking with a priest about that, and him saying, “you cannot describe God because if you described God then he wouldn’t exist, he is beyond human comprehension”. And in a way, I suppose, I feel about the creative spirit as well: there is, in the same kind of way, it is something sort of beyond comprehension, in the same way that God is beyond comprehension. And then I wonder whether they are… When we’re talking about God, and faith, are we talking about an absolute belief in the human spirit? And in a way, I think creativity is about an absolute belief in the human spirit as well. And I have found myself in the last… So my kind of belief, I suppose… I went to church a lot as a child, and then I was kind of, as a teenager, less so, and then mum had her accident. And then I really didn’t go to church. And I felt angry with the idea that there was anything divine. Because of course, I questioned something so horrific, and it was so horrifying, watching what happened to Mum. It was so… I think if she died, I would have been able to manifest my belief. I would have been able to believe in God in a more… in a cleaner and clearer way. But because there was this sense for 22 years. I had a sense of “where has your spirit gone”? You know, “what has happened to you, Mum? Because you’re still alive here on this earth, and yet you can’t walk, you can’t talk, you don’t know who I am. You don’t know anything that’s happening to me. You don’t understand when I bring my babies in? So where is your spirit? Where is it?” You know, where is it gone to? And if there is a God is her spirit with you, God? Or is it here trapped on Earth? And I think it really made me question everything about my faith and actually question. And then… it was so difficult to comprehend what was going on to her. And it was such an overriding permanent state of trauma that I was living within, that I couldn’t… You know, I couldn’t comprehend. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened. Dealing with severe brain damage if somebody you really, really love and then watching your entire world, and their world, completely destroyed by it and family life destroyed, and the place of safety and security and love, that home that abundant, safe, beautiful place where God had been a really big part of it as well, because it’s all gone in the most horrifying way. I didn’t know… I didn’t find going to church at all consoling. I felt furious with it actually, really furious. But then, I had two children in my 20s. And I married somebody who was a Catholic. And he wasn’t really a practising Catholic, but we got married in a Catholic Church and his family were all practising. And it was very important that we had got married in the Catholic Church. And I found myself drawn in to going to Mass, and I had these two little children, and I sent them to a Catholic school. And they started going to Mass, and their conversations about faith and about the kind of rituals of faith that were going on in school were at a really difficult time in my life, because my marriage was very short. And I split up with my husband, who was an alcoholic in my late 20s. And I had two really young children to look after on totally on my own. And I started going to Mass with the children and I found something in the Catholic Church, which I had struggled… maybe not known how to look for and not found as a result, when I went to the place that was familiar, which was a kind of the rural Church of England village church. When I went into those churches, I almost felt as though my relationship with mom and what happened to her in her spirit had become so confusing – because of her brain damage and her ongoing life and death – that I didn’t know whether she or God existed within that space. And when I went into the Catholic Church, I felt a kind of really deeply humbling extraordinary loss of myself, and loss of my trauma, and loss of my sense of this searching and horror of “where have you gone Mum”, and “where’s your spirit and what’s happened”. And I felt quite overwhelmed in a really, really beautiful way by it. And I love going to Mass and I loved hearing the children talking about what it was doing in their lives. And it was strange, because when I got married for the second time, I carried on going to Mass but I wasn’t allowed to go up for communion because I had been divorced. And I remember some people saying, “oh, that’s ridiculous”, you know, “your faith is your faith”. But I did, and I do, you know, respect that as part of part of the Church, something that I didn’t really understand. But I have found – because I also converted to Catholicism about six years ago, I’ve been going go to church in Oxford – and I just realised that my desire to be there, my desire to be present with God and present with this kind of, like, huge relief of the loss of my ego and my anxiety and my trauma I felt when I went, you know, into this church, and that really surprised you know… That that was extraordinary. It was an extraordinary beautiful feeling that I cannot comprehend.
Nick Cave and the transcendent nature of grief
Elizabeth
Yeah, that’s very beautifully put Clover. Have you read Nick Cave’s new book, ‘Faith, Hope and Carnage’?
Clover Stroud
I have got it by my bed, actually, but I haven’t yet read it. I’m very interested by him and I love his writing. And I get his, you know, the red hand letters. And I kind of always am interested by the different things that he says about many different things. I went to him first for grief actually, after he was writing a lot about grief after, you know, his son died so tragically. His first son died, tragically. And I found the way that he wrote about him and his wife embodying grief as a way of living, I found that really helpful.
Elizabeth
He is also a guest on this series with his friend who he’s written the book with, Sean, and you remind me of each other so much. Of the things that you’re circling around the interrelationship between creativity, and grief and the Divine. I just wanted to read you a little bit. Because his intuition that grief is both the worst – you know, griefs like losing your mother or your sister or your son – are both the worst things that can happen to a human being, but also in strange ways, some sort of portal to a part of life and a part of experience that you can’t somehow get to otherwise. That there’s something transformative that connects you with human vulnerability and human preciousness. And one of the lines that stuck out to me, as he said, “It feels to me in this dark place, the idea of God feels more present or maybe more essential. It actually feels like grief and God are somehow intertwined.” And I’m just really interested in kind of… When I hear echoes of themes in different people, I’m really interested in what’s going on. And whether you think through your incredibly kind of incandescent, and beautiful and honest writing and other artists that the mood to talk more openly about grief and loss and what it means to be a human, is also somehow opening up space for people like Nick Cave to talk about God. You know, for lots of people to say, “I won’t be shamed out of these intuitions that I don’t know what to do with”. “I won’t be shamed out of these longings for there to be Love beyond us”, which I feel like for the last maybe two decades, there was quite a lot of social stigma around all of those bits of life. Does that make sense to you?
Clover Stroud
It makes total sense, and you saying it, you just think “there shouldn’t be any”. It’s so odd that there… I mean, it’s not odd. There are reasons, there are reasons for it. And there are reasons for people’s sort of, you know, doubt and anger and…
Elizabeth
Really good reasons, some of them.
Clover Stroud
Yeah, really, really good reasons. But the fact of, I will say fact, of accessing something Divine, something beyond comprehension, beyond our… You know, we couldn’t contain it. We cannot contain what belief is, really, within our physical, intellectual bodies. It’s beyond us, I think. And I don’t mean beyond us, because it is within us as well, but it’s kind of… It’s so big. It’s so big and yet also so much a kernel as well. But I think that: yes. I do think, and actually I’m also interested as well that I think that Elizabeth Gilbert talks about creativity and faith in a kind of interchangeable way as well. And I am excited by and really interested by… And this is what I saying by that. And yes, I also feel what I said a few moments ago, a kind of a fear about it as well. Because you want to take it, you want to go further with it, you want to know where it’s taking you. You want to feel it more. And sometimes there’s a fear of “will it show up for me?” You know, “what am I going to find?” Is it going to be as… I feel I’m on the cusp of something that really explains, or helps me find the kind of pain of my human existence. As a kind of salve to my human existence. But will it provide that salve? And of course, it won’t provide, you know, that salve endlessly. But it might in some ways, and I suppose there’s a fear of pressing it, of touching it, of pushing it, of trying to… One of the things I write about in this new book I’ve been writing– I’ve been trying to write about home and what the kind of spiritual, what… the way that we’re talking now is very much how I’m trying to write about home. And I talk about something which I feel really strongly, which is when I think about the house that I grew up in, where it’s really happy, this beautiful house with the ponies and, you know, the kind of threadbare beauty of it. Because when it was sold, I never saw it empty. I left before everything was… I went to live in Ireland and I left before the house was emptied. And that was two years after mom’s accident. And in my mind, I feel – I really feel – I truly feel, I truly believe that a… not a version, but like part of me, now, mum and my dad, are in that house still. And I know the house was sold a few times. I don’t want to look at it on Rightmove or anything like that, because I know, you know, it’s all been completely done up and it’s completely different. I’m sure it’s very sort of glitzy and amazing, and they’ve made it… I don’t want to see those pictures. That would be absolutely the opposite of sacred. That would be like a terrible thing to happen. I never want to go back there, I never want to see it again. Because for me, in my mind, in my heart, it’s still as it was when I was a young child, and we’re all there. And it’s this sort of place of really, really sacred safety. And I was writing about this. And I was saying in my writing– I was writing about the fact that I truly believe that, but I mustn’t test it too hard. I mustn’t try and, like, talk to Mum. I can put myself in the kitchen of that house as an eight year old child, but I mustn’t try and talk to Mum, because if I try and talk to mum there, that I’ll be, then I’ll be testing it too much and I won’t know what she’ll say. And I won’t be able to have a conversation with her as my eight–year–old self, informed by who I am now. But if I just go there and kind of sit at the table, then I can spiritually – and it feels literally and creatively – kind of connect myself to that place that was so, so important to me. And in a way, I suppose it’s a bit like faith is. I feel I don’t feel adept at it and I feel scared of testing it, in some way or another. I feel scared of trying to have that conversation, you know, trying to have the conversation with the Divine, if that’s the right way. I feel scared by it. How to communicate, how to manifest my faith, I suppose.
Elizabeth
The metaphor sort of used in my brain to myself is sort of, holding God just in the corner of my eye. Right? Because if you look straight on, like, either I might be blinded, or there might be nothing there. Like, it’s really the leap of, “can this take my weight?” It’s what my whole faith journey has been about. Like, increasing, letting what I… the language I use is, letting the love of God, like, increasingly take the weight of my life, and the weight of my pain, and the weight of my – all the rawness of being a human being – like, increasingly let that be held in the love of God. Every so often, I panic and jump off or, you know, feel like I’m free–falling, or it just slides out of focus.
Clover Stroud
Yeah, but the yearning. Do you think the yearning is… what faith is?
Elizabeth
I don’t know what… It is where all the words start to fall apart in your hands, don’t they? Yeah, that’s how Nick Cave talks about it. Like, maybe the doubt is in itself part of it? But yeah, I honestly, like… so C.S. Lewis talks about it and, for me, also writes amazingly about grief. This sense of… and it relates to home as well, this is all interconnected. That nostalgia is this like homeward, this longing for home. And we spend a lot of time thinking of longing for a home behind us. And I think you in particular really do have somewhere in your heart and in your memory, that feels like a home. But he also says, in some ways, home is ahead of us. Like, home, if we find in ourselves a desire that cannot be met in the world, when it may indicate that there is you know, something beyond the world that are longing for a sense of homecoming and encounter. And that is sometimes… it feels like someone’s like struck my heart and the note that that like the my heart tuning fork is making is sounding with something far away, right? That is disguised by the brokenness of the world. And that it’s when I sort of let myself sit with that note, then the Love of God can kind of come into focus or feel most present for me. But it’s so vulnerable and raw. The feeling is so… bitter–sweetly, so exquisitely painful, that it does take a lot of courage to let myself pursue… It’s only when I do that I do feel fully alive, that I do. feel like I’m really living. Or not only when I do, but that, you know, that sensibility, that turning towards an attention that I think is turning towards me. It’s increasingly like “this is what life is”.
Sober intoxication of the Catholic Mass
Clover Stroud
Yeah. I’ve also been interested by the link. But, so 18 months ago, I stopped drinking as well. And I think that the kind of way for me – and I stopped because I was just, I mean, for various different reasons. But one of the reasons was partly because Nell had stopped in the last two or three years of her life, because of her treatment, because of her cancer. But she also had a… she was an incredibly creative person, and her creativity became supercharged in the last two or three years of her life. And we talked a bit about the way that she felt as though, in total sobriety, there was… She said, it’s not just like not drinking for a week, or you know, it’s not the same feeling as that or even if you don’t drink for a month or whatever, it’s not like that. You’re going further and further and further with it. And she said it’s as though the kind of cobwebs are like being drawn away from your eyes more and more and more, the further you take yourself into that space of kind of total presence with your human self. And all of the kind of pain and frailties of that, and you’re not allowing yourself any time off from it in the way that drinking a bottle of red wine gives you time off from the inside of your head. Like, you are absolutely there the whole time. And I find it really difficult, and I yearn sometimes, you know, to have that kind of “mini–vacation of your mind” where you can just be drunk or just have a couple of glasses of wine, even, when you know, you’re changing the frequency in your head. And I’ve been feeling it really strongly in the last few weeks, really, of this sort of desire to journey further into my… not into my consciousness, because it’s actually getting away from my consciousness, you know, that’s what I want to get away from. And that’s when I go into a Catholic Mass why I feel this, like, loss of my consciousness, which I just find so exquisite. I love the feeling of it. And I haven’t been to Mass very much recently, because I got really frustrated taking my children to Mass, and taking my little boys to Mass, and spending the time trying to make them stop. It’s a really, really…
Elizabeth
… Spiritually deeply unsatisfying going to church with young children in the service.
Clover Stroud
And, then, you know, COVID, and everything like that… And I have to admit, I have not been… But when I have occasionally been, I’ve felt such a sense of, you know, relief. Just like kind of bathing in a feeling of relief. And I’m interested by the kind of joining as well of total presence with yourself, the kind of total sobriety, and the journey of the spiritual as well. And like, where there is a kind of intersection there. So there’s like a really exciting, exquisite – almost so exquisite, that it’s quite a terrifying kind of intersection, I suppose. And then again, this fear: but maybe there is no intersection, and therefore should I– do I pursue it? Do I press it? How do I pursue it anyway? What does that mean? I didn’t know what to expect from this conversation, actually, and it’s been really incredible for me. It’s been so useful. It’s made me think so much more clearly. It’s made me feel so much. I found it incredibly, like, beautiful and really, really wonderful and really important. This has been a really important hour in my life and I’m really deeply grateful to you.
Elizabeth
Oh, I’m gonna cry again. Clever Stroud, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Clover Stroud
It’s been a joy.
Elizabeth Oldfield’s reflection on her conversation with Clover Stroud
Elizabeth
Well, look, I know I’m not supposed to have favourites – and I genuinely do end up liking almost every single guest and that includes the ones that I really, really do not expect to when I am preparing. There is something just intimate and lovely about listening to someone reflect on their deep things. But clearly, I don’t often meet anyone who’s as intense as I am, and Clover is, and it was such a joy. To hear her talk and hear her thoughts and have her share so generously and openly about her life. Her sacred values of honesty and bravery are just very inspiring things, and particularly to put them in then, kind of, the concrete terms of poetry and horses and that they show up in her life these two sources of meaning and comfort and places to anchor her life was a really… A really, a kind of beautiful entry point into our conversation. And we only covered it in quite a scattergun way, which is entirely my failure to do a nice, neat, chronological guide for you. But Clover has had quite an extraordinary life, you know, she had this very early grief and then reacted to that by going on some really quite dangerous adventures with horses, in Russia and in Mexico. And then she was a single mother, which I think is an extraordinary adventure in itself. She has five kids, which is another type of adventure. And she’s had this second absolutely gutting loss of the sister that has been so precious to her, Nell Gifford, who was the founder of Gifford Circus. And it’s really noticeable that she’s tried to metabolise, or to compost, those losses and those adventures in ways that help other people think through their own losses and their own adventures, that help them make meaning of their feelings, and particularly of grief. The thing that she returns to again and again, is this sense of grief, as either something that makes us shut down, or something that can help us live more fully and more deeply and more freely. And again, as I said, it really connects with my conversation with Nick Cave (and Shaun, actually) that grief strips away what’s unnecessary. It strips away the distractions of life and the things that present themselves to us as important but actually aren’t, and says, “Okay, so what is life about?” “How are you going to love well?” “How are you going to live this day that you have been given?” And this idea of, kind of, peril and grief as a possible portal to kind of deepening our experience of being alive. We kind of know it, but we also deny it. And it can be hard to say, because it sounds like you’re glorifying pain or suffering. Because I’m like being a typical Christian. Sort of, you know, Nietzsche’s accusation that Christians are somehow sort of sadomasochistic. That we glory in suffering. That we aren’t doing the important work of trying to remove suffering from the world, because we’re too enamoured with it. But I think I talked to my kids quite a lot about ‘Wall–E’, the film, ‘Wall–E’. If you haven’t seen it, you should see it, it’s amazing. Which is this kind of parable of what happens when humans have maximum comfort and convenience. And it’s not pretty. We become sort of brain–dead blobs, essentially, numbed out on entertainment. And it’s not that I want to glorify suffering. But given that suffering is a fact, I want to invite myself into seeing it as a doorway, and as an opening into the possibility of being more fully human. Because ‘Wall–E’ shows me that the opposite makes us less fully human, less empathetic, less compassionate, less humble, less alive. And I really appreciated how Clover spoke about faith as this thing that slides in and out of focus, and she did it a lot more eloquently than David Cameron’s classic like Magic FM in the Chilterns, you know, goes in and out of signal. (Although that phrase has been so quoted that it’s clearly memorable.) And Clover is also I think, in the Chilterns so that’s interesting. But yes, this sense of, you know, groping in the dark a bit and words coming towards you, and then falling apart in your hands. And the difficulty of talking about these experiences and these longings and these intuitions that there’s something beyond us, and something between us and something within us that we don’t have adequate language for. And I was just really grateful to her for exploring that with me.
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