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.

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,