Patterns in the Chaos

TEN - Sixty

Sixty

Age is a thing that sneaks up on you while your feeling vibrant and robust. It jumps out of the shadows like a scary monster in a film – ‘Aaaaargh!’ it says, and you jump back in shock.
One day you discover that something you took for granted is not available in such voluminous quantity any more, or worse maybe, it is not available at all - and never will be again! It is that shock of grabbing a door handle to have it come off in your hand, it is hearing the news that your bank has just gone out of business. It is bereavement, a terminal illness. In practical terms it is finding yourself relating every small detail of an incident from twenty years ago but not being able to remember the point you began making by recounting it.

Age! What a strange thing. It draws you up to a lofty perspective, an altogether superior view, while at the same time it is sucking you down toward the inevitable conclusion of the matter.

Woody Allen said: ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying!’
Well who doesn’t? It is peculiar thing grafted into the spirit of man that he should live forever. An absurd thought. Yet there it is, standing like a ridiculous folly. Universal and bizarre. 

Dostoevsky once wrote about a mock execution he endured while a political prisoner: He heard the death sentence passed in the public square. 'We shall all be with Christ' he whispered instinctively to a friend beside him. 'A bit of dust' his atheist friend laconically replied.

When it comes to living forever, you either believe you will or you don’t. Or to put it another way, you either have faith or you don’t. Dostoevsky and his companion both extrapolated their future beyond the firing squad with a lashing integrity, speaking as they believed, and believing as life had proved to them. For it is a fact that you can find as ample proof for faith, as you can for faithlessness.

Which only goes to say that nobody has ‘faith’ unless something from outside has moved upon the deep of the soul to set fire to the dust he is surely composed of. For nothing from inside has the power to truly save. If you reach inside you will only find a black lifeless dust, a craving to exist without the wherewithall. It has to be something outside of you that imparts faith. Faith is a supernatural belief and it does not arrive by conjuring it up in imagination. It arrives with power, and that is its own proof.

Faith is an abiding hope in a light that is not yours. That light might at times seem no more than a small glimmer, but it becomes all the easier to see as the darkness grows darker.
Its obverse, a lack of faith, in all its many expressions, has become the illumination of our modern times: A proposition that if we can all get together, we can collectively out-shine, out-flank and eclipse any other light by the sheer combined intensity of our own. Which of course, we can do for a while. But each individual light must eventually go out and leave its owner in darkness. No matter how bright it burns, how well it has illuminated a way for others. Dostoevsky had put his faith squarely in that one light. The one that keeps on shining after the others have gone out.

Grimm Doo

I always thought I got my house because I was in an adulterous relationship with a lady; a lady who had happened to be walking past it one day, and noticed the 'For Sale' sign outside, and told me about it. That's how I thought the chain of events ran, but now I have to say like Jacob said in Genesis 28: 'Surely the Lord was in this place and I was not aware of it.'

We stood outside, me clutching the keys from the estate agent, while the 'For Sale' sign hovered in the front garden. Stepping inside we walked around it's bare, dank rooms, me thinking it would be a love nest and she - well I don't know what she thought. She was silent and pensive, lost in some other empty place.

As soon as I walked inside I knew the house was for me. The front room looked as if it had been kitted out on purpose to be a recording studio: It had pegboard tiles on the ceiling in mock suggestion of sound-proofing and a small window set into an adjoining wall which gave the impression of looking into a control room instead of the living room. Later, many people thought that I had customised it like that but in fact it was just the way I found it. Soon I had my recording equipment set up in the front room and was busy composing and recording music in my new home in Northfield.

But the lady who discovered the house? - she never came there again after that first day and our illegitimate love imploded on itself like a plutonium pit. Did I ever think the Lord could be somewhere in me getting that house with the shameful connection that led me to it? - No I definitely did not. 
And yet…

It was December 1981 when ELO played at the NEC Arena in Birmingham. The NEC was the premier local venue and each of us in the group was allowed a block of complimentary tickets for our family and friends. Among my many guests at the four shows we did was Keith Sale and his wife Dorothy. Keith Sale was the archetypal English gentleman, a man always brimming with a clean cut smile, a warm handshake, and sporting a walking stick that seemed to be of part sartorial and one part practical utility in aid of the slight limp he had from a knee injury.

It was just about one year before, at the end of 1980, that Keith had helped me obtain a mortgage for my new house. He had done this via a process of monetary magic that defied any logic I knew of: I was broke at the time and had no prospects of income. He didn't seem worried.
'Get your accountant to give me the last four years accounts' he said, 'and I'll see what I can do.'
It wasn't too long afterwards that he came on the phone to tell me he had secured a mortgage.
I was amazed, how can you get a mortgage when you don't have an income?

Hindsight is great movie to watch. I remember, I had the house for about six months and then, just as the bills were mounting up, the job with ELO came up. From then on keeping the bills paid was no problem. Keith was to become a regular periodic visitor to my new home in Northfield, arranging insurances and dealing with all kinds of financial issues, which was his speciality.

I don't remember quite how it came about but at some point my home with its front room recording studio came to have the name 'Grimm Doo' attached to it. It was something to do with the fact the equipment was always a little less than optimum; For example, nothing was ever in stereo and that was grim for a start - according to Martin Smith. He was also convinced that the mixing desk growled at him whenever he went near it and so the name 'Grimm Doo' became enshrined into our impromptu folk lore, spelled with a double 'm' and a double 'o.'
I must have recorded over 200 songs on my 8-Track recorder and later, on a digital 16-Track at Grimm Doo. Richard Tandy, Martin and I spent many hours in that room slaving over hot recording machines and ELO even practised their stage set in there one day early in 1982.

Fast forward to April 1990 . . . 
I heard from a friend that Keith Sale had died suddenly and I went to his funeral. I had difficulty parking my car near to the big imposing church laid back across the enormous expanse of grass verge that composed one side of the road in Yardley Wood, Birmingham. There were cars parked everywhere. I walked inside the church and found it was packed tight. People were squashed into every nook and cranny of the sanctuary and looking around at the sombre faces gathered there I recognised several TV, music and sporting personalities.
Listening to the address I was amazed to discover that Keith had actually collapsed and died in that very church I was standing in, having worked there as a deacon for years. He had been a Christian all the time and I never knew it!

Fast forward again to 1996 . . . 
One day I called in at BCC, the big church in the centre of Birmingham, where Dave Woodfield had been the pastor before. 'Oh you must come and meet our new pastor' someone said. I shook hands with Brian Cole, and introduced myself.
'Dave Morgan?' he said knowingly, 'that name rings a bell. Do you live in Halesowen?'
'No!'
'Do you ever go to Halesowen?'
'No!' I replied, and then added: 'er well, I have gone there a couple of times. Only to pop in to my Building Society.'
'Hmmm' he mused, 'was it the Britannia Building Society by any chance?'
'Yes it was!'
The quizzical furrow in his brow slowly resolved into a beam of recognition.
'Ah,' he said, 'Were you by any chance anything to do with Keith Sale?'
(!!)
We sat down in his office and he told me the story - how he had been the manager of the Building Society in Halesowen when Keith had come to him with my mortgage application. The reason why my name had stuck in his mind was that he had struggled with it for days:
'It sat on my desk, I really didn't know what to do about it. There was the question of income I recall. In the end, I don't know why, but I okay'd it.'

Long Distance Serendipity
I was amazed at the slender line pulling together events over so many years. The two men who had been most instrumental in getting me my house were both followers of Christ, and one was actually moved to do something against his better instincts on my behalf, all totally unknown to me. God had looked after me when I was a two-timing tearaway running as fast as I could the other way!

But it doesn't end there. Mom died in 1996 and was buried in Robin Hood Cemetery. I visited her grave one day and I was just walking away when the inscription on a nearby headstone caught my attention:
'Keith Sale' it said, and the name sang out like it was on a billboard in Times Square.
While writing this book I felt prompted to check it out further before writing about it (to make sure it was the same man and not another Keith Sale!). And so on Sunday 18th August 2002, Mandy and I went to the cemetery to check out the dates on Keith's headstone. As we walked up there was a lady tending a grave, Keith's grave. It was Dorothy, Keith's wife who I had last met twenty-one years ago at the NEC concert. She was visiting her husbands' grave that day because it was his birthday!
I told her the story of why we were there, of how Keith had helped me get my house all those years ago, how he had engaged the help of Brian Cole, how against the weight of wisdom the venture succeeded. She knew nothing of these details and was so happy to learn about it. The Lord blessed Mandy and me, and her, in that chance meeting.

I had stumbled across another strand in the web of God's Long Distance Serendipity…
Not a revelation of some life-changing mystery, but just a simple message, like the note a lover might leave under a pillow: 'I love you!'
What can you do but smile inside and wonder.

Grimm Doo was also blessed with wonderful neighbours. John, Maizie and Pip, a theatrical family who used to present rumbustuous comedy plays together, owned the adjoining property. John and Maizie are gone now, but Pip, short for Phillip, still inhabits the house next door to Grimm Doo.
Yes now I see so many good things flowed from me being there in that house in Northfield, on the other side of town to where I grew up. And now I have to say like Jacob who was running for his life from the vengeance of the brother he had robbed and tricked, when he met with God: 'Surely God was in this situation and I was not aware of it.'