Sunday Stories: Call the Midwife Wisdom

Your author has been severely under the weather this last week, but comforted in her convalescence by the always welcoming sisters, nurses, and midwives of Nonnatus House.

A snapshot from the Call the Midwife 2022 Christmas Special via BBC.

Greetings fellow travelers. I hope this new year has been gentle and kind to you so far. My 2023 has gotten off to a bit of a bumpy start as I’ve been unwell since Christmas began, battling what we believe are delayed effects from the snake incident at the end of September.

I have been more or less in bed with zero energy and a lot of pain — symptoms of Lyme Disease that I haven’t had with this intensity for more than a year. My doctors expected the snake attack would trigger what’s known as a “flare” in Lyme circles, and that it could be delayed. They seem to have been correct.

Such a setback is inconvenient, discouraging, and at times, depressing. But I battle on with my limited energy, determined that the awful spiral bacteria that specialists believe I likely have had in my body since I was a child, will not get the best of me.

Work deadlines have had to be pushed. The book proposal I’ve been working on for many months remains THISCLOSE to finished, but not quite. And I’ve realized in the last days that bullying my body and beating myself up in mind and spirit isn’t doing a damn thing to make me better or the world a better place.

I’ve been reminded of these ideas in the last week as I’ve turned, as I am wont to do, especially when I cannot get out and hike and think and listen to stories while I walk, to familiar, beloved programs to lift my spirits. None does so as dependably as BBC’s long-running drama series Call the Midwife, now in its 12th series in the UK, with its most recent 2022 series about to begin airing on PBS in the United States in March. The series, which premiered in January 2012, is a period drama based, at least initially, on the real-life memoirs of Jenny Worth, a nurse midwife who worked in the impoverished Poplar neighborhood of London’s East End in the late 1950s–early ‘60s.

(The first 11 series, 2012 through 2021, are available to stream in the US on Netflix.)

Worth, who died in 2011 not long before the first adaptation of her trio of memoirs debuted on the UK small screen, worked and lived with the sisters of the Community of St. John the Divine, an Anglican nursing order of women religious. That community became the Anglican order of St. Raymond Nonnatus in the television series. (Interestingly, Nonnatus is a real saint from early 13th-century Spain. His nickname, which in translation means “not born,” was bestowed on him because he was born by Caesarean section, his mother dying in childbirth. He is a patron saint of childbirth, midwives, children, pregnant women, and priests defending the confidentiality of confession, apparently.)

With the help of a VPN, I often am able to watch the series in real-time online, and greeted the New Year with Call the Midwife’s 2022 Christmas Special. I love this tradition at the BBC, where longtime and sometimes even programs that have retired are resurrected in a holiday-themed one- (or two-) off episode. As of today’s airing of S12E2 on BBC One, a total of 98 episodes have aired, and I’ve watched all of them.

Since its inception, Vanessa Redgrave has served as narrator — the voice of Jenny Worth in her winter years, reflecting back on her tenure as a young nurse in a world changing at warp speed in the decades after the end of World War II. Each episode begins and ends with a monologue from Redgrave and on many occasions over the years, I have paused the playback of an episode to write down a quote or two. Some of them are from Worth’s memoirs, others the creations of Call the Midwife’s astute writers, and often full of spiritual wisdom and soul-solace.

Vanessa Redgrave, narrator of Call the Midwife, portrayed her onscreen character Jenny Worth as she would have appeared in 2005 in the series’ 2014 Christmas Special. Image via BBC.

So, on this Sunday, while I go back to rest (and watch a new episode online) I wanted to leave you with a few quotes from Jenny/Vanessa’s monologues that have helped me weather this latest storm. May they bring some small comfort or insight to you, too.

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The fears we have in the present often lie in the experiences we’ve had in the past….The longests paths lead into sunlight when they are paved with love. 

—Series 7, Episode 2

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Sometimes, the route to joy is indirect. Our journey home not
quite as we expected. There's no magic star to guide our steps,
no ancient prophecies to predict our way. The greatest gift is to know
that we travel not alone, but in the company of others. That there are hands
that we can reach for and hearts to keep us warm.

—Series 5, Christmas Special

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If we are lucky, we find love. If we're blessed, we understand its meaning. The bird-print kisses at the bottom of a card will not vanish like the snow but will endure.

—Series 4, Christmas Special

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We can decide to be happy, make much out of little, embrace the warmth of
our ordinary days. Life unfolds as a mystery. An enterprise whose outcome
cannot be foretold. We do not get what we expect. We stumble on cracks,
are faced with imperfection. Bonds are tested and tightened. And our landscapes shift in sunshine and in shade.

There is light. There is. Look for it. Look for it shining over your shoulder, on the past. It was light where you went once. It is light where you are now. It will be light where you will go again.

—from Series 8, Episode 3

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And one more personal note: Four years ago today, my mother-in-law, Dorothy Possley, traversed the Veil from this side into the More. The characters on Call the Midwife often remind me of her, a woman born to a very different world than the one we now inhabit. She was practical, clever, industrious, frugal, wry, and hard-working. She did not suffer fools, had the gift of making much from little, was a person for whom faith (and trust) in God was central to her life, derived great pleasure from simplicity, and who got on with it, whatever it was, no matter the circumstances. She was as tough as she was beautiful.

Dorothy’s presence is missed even as her love lives on and grows exponentially through her seven children (the eldest of whom is my lifemate) and her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, each of whom makes the world a lighter, more joy-filled place.

Dorothy Possley.

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godgrrl

A post shared by cathleen falsani 🌀 (@godgrrl)

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May we be brave and kind, never forgetting that we have not met yet everyone we will love, and we have not met yet everyone who will love us.

Much love from me,