Through a glass darkly...?

Someone asked me recently about my interest in Tarot and Astrology. I suppose for someone who was a deeply committed, Evangelical Christian it is a slightly odd path I've trodden, although I know many who have gone the reverse route. Indeed, I used to pray for people to be 'delivered' from belief in the Occult, oblivious to the fact that I believed some pretty strange things myself, such as having a God who came to heel (and heal), Words of Knowledge, Prophecy, etc. But more of that in a moment.

As I've said before somewhere on here, I became a Christian from a very non-Churchy background. I read tea-leaves as a child (fairly accurately sometimes) and believed absolutely that I was from a 'psychic' family. I had a dramatic conversion and renounced all that side of things. I was now in a Flagship Evangelical Church, and it took me a few years to discover the contemplative Christianity which in fact was my more natural habitat. I had come to faith in a small attic room, with a candle and a crucifix and silence. As a ten year old, that was instinctive to me. As a new Christian it was all Noise and Halleujahs, which I also enjoyed but which I now realise never quite fitted who I really was. As the last child in a very noisy family, I somehow had a strong sense of the Numinous which I retain to this day.

I eventually came under the influence of the Charismatic Church, and began to experience what are known as the Gifts of the Holy Spirit - speaking in tongues, having prophetic visions, healing, Words of Knowledge, etc... There was a very strong anti-Occult teaching around, and certainly Tarot/Astrology were considered Satanic. (Which was ironic really. I realised many years later that the Charismatic Church does all the things which Psychics do, but as it's in the name of Jesus that's okay.)

Anyway I was a fully paid-up member, with many experiences of accurate Words of Knowledge, a few prophetic visions and even a couple of healings as part of my Christian experience. I had yet to discover Mother Julian of Norwich and her amazing metaphysical visions, which remain dear to my heart to this day.

In the Eighties, my Ex went on a course paid for by the Church, which was an exploration of Myers-Briggs personality typing. He came back very enthused and explained it all to me. I felt there was some incongruity which I couldn't quite put my finger on... it wasn't for a few years that I realised there was very little difference between the cold reading of Astrology and the prescriptive practice of Myers Briggs. I've been 'typed' several times and nobody is ever quite sure whether I'm INFJ or ENFJ - but they are happy to tell me all about who I really am, based on a label - just like Astrology. Yet this was accepted by the Church although it has a far shorter pedigree. There seemed to be a dichotomy between the spiritual and the secular, and it was okay for Spiritual people to use secular means to predict how people might behave in certain circumstances. Interesting.

I must say here, I do believe that Sun Sign Astrology is ridiculous. I think I share a birthday (not the year though) with Cameron Diaz. So what? However, when you have had the experience of someone looking at your birthchart, asking about your deep love of religion, whether you've finished writing the book and telling you that you almost died at birth, it does sort of impress. All these, of course, can be clever cold-reading guesses, but even so it makes you think.

I don't believe in predicting the future. Not particularly because the Christian God forbids it, but because it rules out free will. I think we can spot trends in our lives, and for me that's where the Tarot is interesting, I know very little about it, but I have been fascinated for years by archetypes. Jung used the Tarot not to predict, but to make sense of the personalities he was working with, As far as I'm concerned, it's a shortcut for stimulating self-awareness. It works for me.

I'm the kind of person who is drawn to what at one time I'd have called Mumbo-jumbo. It doesn't mean I believe it all, but it does mean that I've grown past the point of needing to Be Right and Know The Truth. I increasingly suspect Truth is not as easily pigeon-holed as I once thought. When I became a Christian (having told the Sunday School teacher that I was FAR too intellectual for that rubbish, when I was 12 - cringe...) I decided God would be my working hypothesis unless or until I knew differently. And there came a point decades later when suddenly it didn't quite work for me. By 'it' I mean The Church. God, I take as a given. I still love liturgy and the thought of the link to generations of worshippers - it's just that I hate what I see in the Church today and I simply don't believe that Jesus would have encouraged the judgmental, self-seeking practices of some. That's not to say I'm any better, just that for now I choose not to keep their company.

My situation over the past few years - moving away from friends, settling in a new area with a very poorly child, my own injury and surgery the other year - left me the time and space for much soul-searching. I spent time in silence - the blessed silence for which Evangelicalism never seemed to leave space.

I've read a lot of Deepak Chopra. I've thought a lot about how Quantum Physics really might affect my world view. My sense that it is arrogant to dismiss all other possible world views has grown. I trust that whoever God is, my ship will come to the right harbour for me. We are all on a journey and I no longer feel the need to be the one who is most sure of the route. It seems fairly clear to me that all the 'special powers' which various parties claim as their own preserve must be fairly natural human attributes, and that we ignore them to our detriment.

As the old joke goes, "Faith, Hope, Love abide - and the greatest of these is Tongues." Love is definitely the mainspring of life as far as I'm concerned, in all its many forms, and hopefully if we seek Love, we will learn to be enabling of others rather than condemning them.

I know this can lead to Liberal namby-pambyism but I continue to search my soul, and I continue to do my best. That's all anybody - even God - can ask of me, surely?

Are we there yet??

"We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey."
(Stephen Covey/Teilhard de Chardin).

I just found this quote. I like it, though the nit-picking part of me wants to say, "I think we're both, actually." But enough with the nit-picking! I like the way he has flagged up our spirituality.

Some readers will already be wondering if they need the sick-bucket. That word 'spirituality' pushes so many buttons, doesn't it? To be clear, I'm not talking about anything imposed on us. Systems, beliefs or practices - they are all ways to manage humanity's awareness of The Numinous. What I'm interested in is where that feeling comes from.

Just as most of my gay friends were aware of their orientation well before puberty, I knew early on that I was (for want of a better word) spiritual. My family never went to church yet when I was about 9 I became aware that I wanted to learn to pray. I decided that I needed candles and a crucifix to do this - I have no idea where that came from. So I bought a tiny standing crucifix, some very small candles, shut myself away in the attic and sat absorbing the peace (I was a very troubled little girl).

My first prayer was a shining example of Science meeting Faith. I wasn't quite sure whether you were meant to leave a gap for God to answer, and it would have seemed rude to talk through Him; so I left pauses just in case - until I realised He probably wasn't going to say anything just then, when my prayer took on a fluency and urgency as I needed to get out and spare myself more embarrassment. This was it:
"God..? God... Um... I feel a bit silly... ... ... I don't know how to pray... But then, you know that already... if you're there. (Brightening) And if you aren't there, then nobody's heard this! Help me believe in you. Amen."

I blew the candles out and scurried downstairs.

I'm not sure how long I continued going to my little Chapel, as I called it - I think I'd probably got the idea from one of the 'Katy' books although the rather Roman Catholic slant was all my own. It was a place of peace for me, until one day presumably it wasn't, and I became a Lapsed Attican. I thought no more about it for a few years, until my friend asked me to join the Church Choir. This in turn exposed me to Sunday School and, having grandly told the Professor of Astrophysics who ran our class that at 12 I considered myself too intellectual to be a Christian, I eventually came to believe in the God of the Anglican Church, and had a very dramatic conversion at 14. I firmly believed that this was an answer to my prayer in the attic years before.

Now I'm going to cut a VERY long story short. It includes my realisation that there were other ways to be Christian (it was years before I realised I had become not just a Christian, but an Evangelical - and that possibly it didn't fit my spiritual personality), my involvement in the Charismatic movement, and twenty years as a Vicar's wife during which I broadcast, wrote articles for the Parish magazine and helped many people come to a faith in Jesus.

Fast forward past the divorce (amicable) and the realisation that there were other ways to be spiritual, and the excitement at escaping the confines of The Church and being able to choose what worked for me. Others who have trodden this path will know that it takes a long time to shake the conditioning, to stop feeling guilty for daring to question, and to look at what exactly was going on at conversion.

I can't shake the belief that there's Something More to life, however I no longer have any conviction that it's the God Christians have made in their own image. My very brief toe-dip into Neuro-Linguistic Programming led me to the conclusion that my dramatic conversion was indeed profoundly healing, but that it was explicable in various ways, only one of which 'proved' there was a God. I had always said, right from my arrogant Sunday School days, that God was my Working Hypothesis - that I would change my beliefs if I ever found the evidence pointed in another direction. At the time I said it, I never thought that it would, but the spirit of enquiry was genuine.

And over the years I became less and less convinced that the Church had The Truth. It wasn't just a case of seeing many good, altruistic people who worked tirelessly for the good of others with not a shred of religious faith. It was many things. I think in the end I could no longer go along with telling people that prayer 'worked' when I had to go through so many mental gymnastics to believe that.

"God ALWAYS answers, but sometimes it's 'No'."
"There is some deeper purpose to this that we don't know about."
"You need more faith." (To be fair, I always spoke out against that one).
"Prayer is a mystery."

That last one is true. But nobody ever addressed the uncomfortable truths, such as people in other religions also praying in tongues, or the fact that other faiths also prayed and ascribed answered prayer to a different god.

I set time aside to wrestle with the concept of prayer. My problem was that it was held up as something we ought to do, handing all the results over to Someone who Knew Better than us. At best it seemed feeble to spend time on something which might not get results whilst teaching people that it did. At worst, I began to see people all around me happily refusing to take responsibility for their lives:
"Well I've prayed about losing weight, but nothing's happened."
"I'm very unhappy with X but I know God wants me to stay."
"I'm waiting for God to give me the go-ahead to apply for another job."
etc, etc, etc...

Suddenly, just as I had had a blindingly dramatic conversion, I had another experience of seeing with an outsider's eyes how ridiculously naive it all seemed. A Deconversion, if you will.

Which as you can imagine, presented me with a problem. What had happened to me at 14? Well, at the time of my conversion, I was deep into self-hate. And in NLP terms, I connected to the strongest anchor imaginable. The Creator told me He loved me. If that was good enough for Him, it was good enough for me. The waves of relief and joy as I accepted myself were real enough - and they were profoundly linked with Church (I 'prayed the Prayer' in a Choir stall).

Now, I began to wonder if I hadn't given a lot of the credit to God when at least some of it ought to go to me. I had perhaps tapped into my own inner resources, but believed myself to be so powerless that I had to ascribe those resources to some external person.

Hmmm. This currently works for me - it's still a hypothesis, though. And it is hugely important to me that I don't diss others' beliefs. I quite accept that other people can believe in Christianity with full integrity - it's just that I can't any more.

As for all my Christian experiences, they weren't a bad thing in many ways - except that I had given away a lot of my own power. Not only to God, but also to the Church itself, which influenced my actions, thoughts, feelings and even (as clergy) where and how I lived. I became aware, too, that there had been a lot of 'choosing what's difficult because it's what God wants' in my life. Development or self-punishment? The jury is now out...

I still don't see religious faith as a bad thing - I doubt I'd even be here without it, I was so screwed-up as a child. But I do feel that I've been robbed of faith in myself and that's unforgivable. Wow - even typing that word was a challenge. I've been so forgiving down the years. Who would have thought it might be damaging?

Well it is. I'm currently working hard to get in touch with my anger. I know it's in there somewhere but there is a veneer of saccharine lovey-doveyness stopping me accessing it. I have a horrid suspicion, you see, that anger needs to be visible. It needs to be heard. And then it can be released. I don't know where mine is, or what it's eating away at, but I know I need to get to it and allow it to have its place in my emotional world. Lots of people lose touch with their anger, but in my case the Church buried it for me. I don't NOW see a contradiction between love and anger coexisting, but I was taught for years that they couldn't.

To get back to my original theme, I see life as a journey. Nothing original there - religions down the millennia have all used that metaphor. Spirituality is how we make that journey. I'm eclectic now - I take what works for me. I doubt I'll ever go back to Christianity in its pure form, although never say never. I do believe in the Numinous, in some kind of order to the Universe, and I'm fascinated by all the Quantum Physics stuff which seems to me to say that we're made of nothing but energy. That opens up all kinds of metaphysical possibilities...

UPDATE! November 2010 - Made it through... can feel anger now but don't feel it (hope that makes sense). And realised that the chapel idea came from Louisa Mae Alcott, when Amy is sent away to avoid catching scarlet fever,and makes a chapel in which to pray for Beth,