Paul Chambers

Reminds me of Pip’s first question of me (and a high Level 5 one at that) 8 years ago….”when did you become an adult?’

My answer?

When my brother had a brain haemorrhage and i realised it was ok to cry, it was ok to be broken, broken on the wheels of living; that in truth, it was a lie to be anything else….It was 1984, I was 14

and you? when did you become an adult?

I have just finished reading a remarkable little book by Rob Bell called Sex God – it deals with many a thought about sex, God, intimacy, spirituality and argues (very well) that you can’t separate these entities, that they are all in fact different sides of the same coin.

This particular story from chapter one, which has the finest title of any chapter i have come across – God Wears Lipstick – moved me to tears…

In 1945, a group of British soldiers liberated a German concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen. one of them, Lieutenant Colonel Mercin Willet Gonin DSO, wrote in his diary what they encountered:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them…

…One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it.

One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves….. [a] dysentery tank in which the remains of a child floated.

….It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not all what we wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and i don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick.

Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmorten table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At least someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. that lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Because sometimes, the difference between heaven and hell may be a bit of lipstick….

and you know, i quite like the idea of God wearing bright red lipstick…

There’s a scene in Thornton Wilder’s play “The Angel that Troubled the Waters’ where a doctor suffering from his melancholy comes to the magic pool with healing powers to be healed of his troubles and his gloom and his sadness, but the angel tells him he cannot enter. The man says, “but how can i live this way?” The Angel again says, “I’m sorry, this moment is not for you, this healing is not for you”. So the doctor again pleads, “but i have to get into the water, I cannot live this way”. And the angel replies once more, “No, this moment is not for you”. 

And he says, “How can I live this way?”

And the angel says to him, “Doctor, without your wounds, where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your lower voice tremble into the hearts of men and women, the very angels in heaven cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children of this earth as can one human broken on the wheels of living…in loves service, only wounded soldiers can serve…”