I believe in...

Twice in the last week, someone has said to me in genuine surprise, "Oh - I didn't think you prayed any more... given your beliefs."

I think what they mean is, given my LACK of belief in the Church of England God. I can see why they might say that, but I do feel more than a little surprised, even slightly insulted, that they assume my journey ended when I left the C of E.

I have only myself to blame. For many years I was the kind of Christian who believed that other people's faith wasn't the Real Thing - and now that former arrogance has rebounded, so I suppose I must welcome it as a life lesson! But... there are plenty of studies and polls which show that although churchgoing has fallen, people still count themselves as having faith in God, and many still pray. In my former Frightfully Christian days, I suppose I might not have counted prayer in extremis as really genuine - why weren't they praying at other times, I would have pondered. Whereas now it seems to me that the cry of the heartfelt is possibly the most genuine prayer around.

I have been mulling over writing a Creed - my Creed - in recent weeks. Perhaps the time has come. I've always had a problem with the Creed, particularly since knowing a very 'High Church' Anglican who told me that he wouldn't countenance taking Communion from a Woman Priest but would have no problem if a Roman Catholic were to receive it at his side. Apart from a quick conversation pointing out the holes in his theology, I left it. But it made me realise that quite possibly I shared less with those around me in Church than I had thought.

Last week I attended Communion in my friend's church. I quite often help them by making up numbers in the Choir. It's not easy because unfortunately I don't really enjoy their service or the sermons (I was brought up on huge, solid helpings of Evangelical theology, and ten minutes of tweeness leaves me as unsatisfied as a Navvy with a salad). On this recent occasion I realised that my beliefs had moved on enough for me to have to really think as we said the Creed. (As an aside, I have always deplored the practice of asking Baptism families to say the Creed, when they are attending for that day only - if it is really the bedrock of the Church's faith and teaching, how can it be treated in such a shallow way?)

Anyway we set off. I was fine with God the Father, I believe Jesus existed, am less sure about some of the rest (my knowledge of Language and Oral tradition asks for a truly stupendous miracle of total recall, if accounts were true in every detail when written down 'only' thirty years later. I used to proudly proclaim this as a proof of the New Testament's accuracy, but these days I'm far less certain).

The Holy Spirit, well I got round Him with a little semantic wriggle. But a lot of the rest, I was unable to say in all conscience (do I take it more seriously than the average Churchgoer, perhaps?) and so didn't.

The key for me (as a Linguist, it would be) is that word Semantic. My understanding of semantics helps me to see how people might make the assumption that I don't pray. THEY are talking about prayer to God (1), where (1) = 'The God commonly referred to in the context of Christianity and more particularly, the Church of England'. Whereas these days my prayers are addressed to God (2), where (2) = the Numinous, unKnowable Figure to whom I tend to address my wishes and desires; in shorthand, 'prayers'.

I'm not even sure I believe in a 'personal' God any more, and this is where I part company with many in the Church (although not ALL - I know this because of conversations I had as a Clergy wife when I spotted people who didn't believe 'properly'...)

I do believe in a life force, and I'm sorry if that is too arty farty for readers here. I see no reason why that life force cannot be your God (1) and at the same time my God (2).

What DOES intrigue me is that quite often, God (2) seems to offer me comfort which eludes those who worship God (1). They say all the right things about how God takes care of them, how He is there for them, and how His Peace passes all understanding... but when it comes to the crunch, that isn't always the case. I have known God (1) and it's true that He was wonderful at offering solace and peace - but so is God (2).

It's just the old 'Muslims don't believe in the same God as me' in slightly different clothes. I am unnerving people who thought they'd packaged me neatly into a 'Lapsed' box. I refuse to stop praying. I don't always call it prayer, out of deference to those whom I think might be offended.

I see prayer differently these days. My shopping list has been torn up. I expect no neat endings. I spend much more time listening than talking. And I accept whatever comes in, I suppose, a rather too fatalistic way for my old Church friends to be comfortable with. I no longer have to make excuses ('perhaps your God is in the toilet' I remember from the Good News Bible!) because God (2) doesn't work in quite the same way.

I'm still searching for my path through life. Well, I'm ON it, actually. I don't see any reason it should be the same as yours. Or hers. Or his. It may very well be that we are ALL projecting our own ideas onto something which doesn't even exist, and if so - what a silly thing to fall out over!

1662 and all that...

I was in a bookshop the other day, trying to think why Richard Dawkins annoys me so much.

This won't be a popular view perhaps, but it's nothing to do with what he says (some of which is eminently sensible) - it's the sloppy way he argues it. I don't think he's very good at putting his point across. It may be some misguided intent to make his ideas accessible, I don't know, but whenever I read his writing I feel as though I'm running round some mental Moebius Strip. I also really don't like the way some of my atheist friends lazily quote Dawkins rather (I suspect) than think things through for themselves.

My train of thought led me onto pondering why the Church annoys me so much these days, and a phrase popped into my head - something John Sentamu (the Archbishop of York) said the other day: "Being a leader is not only about being courageous and determined; it is about being part of an effective team."

Like so much of what Bishop John says, this is very true and yet - it depressed me to read it. I had no idea why, so I took some time later in the day to think about it.

And this led me to an important realisation about how I see the Church of England. As I sat and thought, I remembered being taught many things about Leadership decades ago. Back then, leadership (in the Church context) was about 'Taking time to listen to God'. After all, Jesus could hardly have said at times that he was part of an effective team. They were on occasion a rubbish team, who only really got it together after he'd gone. It didn't stop him being a leader.

A memory flashed into my mind of my ex-husband coming in from a clergy training day many, many years ago and venting his frustration at it all. "They're giving us MANAGEMENT training!" he spluttered indignantly. "It's all very well, but if we lose our vision of the Church as a spiritual organisation, we are going to end up with all the problems which big companies have."

How prescient. As we went on, we discovered that there was less and less room for 'Being Still and Knowing' in clergy life. It was increasingly about meetings, budgets, finance committees... in fact we were great at fund-raising, I discovered a real flair for it - but I never quite lost the feeling that in some way we were running counter to the true gist of the Gospel.

I'm not stupid. I know that in effect the C of E is a giant business. Therein lies its spiritual downfall, like so many religions and insitutions before it. I went forward to ABM (the Church's Selection process for clergy) and was turned down (so I was told) because I appeared to be 'too much of a people person'. I consoled myself with the thought that Jesus probably wouldn't have got through either.

I began to lose patience with it all as I watched an institution which largely preached against the dangers of Astrology and the like, turn to Myers Briggs profiling to choose its clergy; there was a rumour that introverts were far more likely to be appointed. I suppose they were more malleable?

Anyway perhaps I was unlucky with my timing. If I'd been a decade earlier or later I might not have had the feeling of watching something precious go downhill. I know enough Church history to know that this isn't a unique time in history, but I truly despair as I see the Church desperately manouevring to 'get down there' with whichever element of society they are trying to draw in. Where's the USP?

I was drawn to the Church through the early morning Prayer Book service at the age of 13. I've also led worship in the pub style, loved it at the time, and see nothing wrong with both co-existing. But the 'pub-style' church were astoundingly bad at welcoming the people my Ex and I brought along from our local pub. He always said that many churches with good 'foreign mission giving' were pursuing an active foreign policy, paying others to do what they weren't prepared to do themselves.

I know this isn't the case in larger, flagship churches and indeed in many others - but I think 'The Church' has ignored to its own detriment the fact that systems and methods simply don't replace a genuine urge to share the love of Jesus because you just can't help it.

I'm not in that place any more. I just try to extend love to people, because - well for all sorts of reasons, but basically as a fellow human. There was, you see, no place for me any more in a church which sought to put me in a box, refused my offer of deeper involvement, turned away the truly needy until they were a bit cleaner...

I grant that I could have been in a different place at a different time and had another experience entirely. It was unfortunate that after two decades of being known for encouraging hospitality in our congregations, the several churches I attended after my divorce happened to be places where nobody spoke to me. One of them had Alpha posters (don't get me STARTED!) all over but I assumed as I hadn't been invited, I didn't count as a statistic by just turning up. Whatever - nobody spoke to me there, either.

My point, though, is this: I WANTED to find a church. I WANTED to be involved. I had a lot to offer. Whatever systems are in place, they are probably letting down hundreds, even thousands of people who truly would like to explore their spirituality.

I don't even count myself a Christian any more. I can't because there is no place for me to be one. And I actually don't want to be, not if it means having to conform to this awful, watered-down form of Being. It's sad but to be very honest I feel as though I've escaped from a cult; my daughter said the same.

I'm aware that my feelings are my own - that there are many arguments for what the Church is getting right. It hurts me to see my beloved nephew so worried because I can't in all conscience say the things he wants to hear about my faith.

Has the Church failed me? Have I failed it? I have to believe that I am on my own spiritual journey and that things which have happened to me have been for a reason - to make me ME. I look back at all the people I led to Christ (a lot!) and wonder what they believe now, if they are still glad I did, if they are tussling with the feeling something's not right, or the guilt of wondering if they are beyond the Hebrews 11 pale.

I'll keep you posted!

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?

The meaning of life...

You may realise from my previous writings that I am running at Midlife head-on to find some answers. Technically I may be past midlife, I don't know, but then I've known people who have died in their teens so I don't let those labels worry me any more.

This morning I was watching a spider swaying outside my window, web invisible, and it struck me as a powerful metaphor for my past couple of years. As my belief in Synchronicity has grown, so has my need to Stop and Be. A spider does what it can to create the circumstances for provision, and then just sits and waits. I could unpack this more, but I suspect it may apply differently to everyone so I'm leaving it there.

And then I read a little of Shirley Maclaine's book 'Sage-ing with Age-ing'. I love this sentence from near the beginning: "I realize that ageing well isn't about the search for happiness, but more about quietly feeling content with what I've experienced." This is so true for me that I felt like applauding. I've just had a week away with my elder daughter, and one of the recurring themes of our conversations was about how I feel the need to differentiate between things I could revisit (eg Education) and things I'd love to do again but which aren't 'Life stage appropriate' - meaning, I'm no longer a teenager! I still yearn to do lots of things in life, but I recognise that some of them would be simply about pretending I'm not an older person. (Some are still eminently doable, however, and I intend to do them until I'm 90+ such
as the terrifying speedboat ride we went on!)

So Maclaine's words chimed with me. I seek the contentment of which St Paul spoke, I suppose. And increasingly I feel it. This doesn't mean, though, that I don't still crave adventure, because I do, and I intend to have it!

This morning my daughter and I were talking about life purpose. I increasingly suspect that we have got this all wrong. When I was a practising Christian there was a lot of talk around about 'our Extravagant God'. Well I do still believe in that God. (Not perhaps in the Church's version.) And I am therefore led to the logical (to me) conclusion that my life might just as well be about the minutiae as the Grand Scheme. Perhaps my life's purpose was fulfilled the day I spent with an elderly woman grieving her husband's death? Perhaps everything else has been incidental? Or has my life been about the biscuits I baked for the School Summer Fair... or the heart-shaped pancakes I made for a Valentine's Disco... or the woman I smiled at on the bus, or the child whose eye I caught as she was being told off... I'm sure you get my point.

We assume that our whole life has to have meaning, but if it's true that there is an inherent extravagance to Creation, then perhaps this 'making peace' with one's life, the Being Content, is about recognising that Being is more than enough. Everything else is a bonus. What do you think?

Remembrance of things past...

I've returned to this blog (my other one still exists in impoverished form) because I'm more concerned with general, rambling thoughts than with being 50 (which continues to be great!).

Lately I've been thinking a lot about religion. As in, Christianity. I was converted as a teenager into Evangelicalism (the story is all there earlier on this blog if you care to look). And from a very troubled place I came to a point of relative calm, though the legs were paddling away under the surface as I approximated to Adult Life.

A friend of mine who was an Anglican Priest for many years has just come out as 'having no faith left' and it has made me think again about my attitude to what I have left behind. It's particularly hard as an ex-Evangelical because you are taught all the Bible verses about the dangers of falling away, and even today I can remember my abject fear of doing so, and my determination never to desert Jesus.

And yet - I have. It astounds me still, after twenty years as a clergy wife and having brought countless people to faith through reasoned discussion and prayer, that I find myself in this place. But a pilgrimage can't just be abandoned when you find a comfortable roadside cafe. I always promised myself that I would never give up using my brain (which after all was presumably God-given) to question my faith, and that if I found it lacking in integrity, I would do whatever it took to remain in a place of integrity as far as was possible.

What I never expected was to feel angry. I have spent a good many years suppressing anger in my life; as a child I was prone to terrible rages which terrified me and left me hiding from the power of those emotions. Christianity enabled me to 'rise above' that - although to be fair it was my interpretation and not the Church or Bible which taught me to hide from such a large part of myself. The Bible clearly says we ARE to be angry when appropriate. I had just hidden too well from myself, and it took a few different counsellors to help me see that it was safe to be in a room with myself however I was feeling. Dampening down anger meant that I dampened down every other emotion, and I've been on a long, slow learning curve back to 'normality' (whatever that is!)

Now, I DO feel angry at how the brand of Christianity I bought into robbed me of the realisation that I possessed huge inner strength. By attributing all my successes to 'God', I externalised everything.

GOD was strong, I was weak. All loving thoughts came from God, I wasn't a loving person without him. I didn't realise how many inner resources I had until I was in my forties. Until then, I truly believed that I was nothing without God, and that everything I needed had to come from/through him. So I was able to shift all the responsibility for major decisions onto him too. "God doesn't want me to have sex..." "I have to stay in this job /relationship/place because God hasn't told me to move on..." etc.

I realise that a lot of this reflects on me, not the Church per se. However, nobody at any time encouraged this naive young (and later, older) person to move on in her view of herself, to take more responsibility, to dare to make decisions. And in fact I know many people in unhappy situations who are there 'because it's what God wants'. It couldn't possibly be the case that God might want them to take risks and be uncomfortable, to face their inner demons and admit their faults. Oh no, it's God's will that no boats are rocked.

There are those who have taken precisely the opposite approach. God has told them to go out and do daring and wonderful things. Can you imagine a Billy Graham who admitted to loving having power over people and being a public figure? Or even a St Paul who had a midlife crisis?

It is all much to ponder, and I continue to do so.