Mental distress

I had come to a full-stop - been diagnosed with clinical depression, and put on medication. I was 56, two years into what was to be my last ministry post combining a priest-in-charge with a prison chaplaincy. I had worked as an Anglican priest for nearly thirty years. On one of his infrequent visits (he dropped in a couple of times, having phoned to say he wouldn't be staying long as he was on his way to another appointment) the area bishop remarked with surprise that there was no way that he could tell that I was not well. I seemed to be perfectly normal.


Well, what was I meant to do? Make it easier for him? Act the part of one in mental distress? But my distress was real. The fact that I was not sitting in the corner, huddled up for protection, or staring vacantly into the middle distance, was, I would have thought, a good thing for him as well as me.

People are often unwittingly insensitive to those in mental pain. As a time-served insomniac, I wish I had a mogadon for every time that a person with whom I've shared this personal problem has thoughtlessly replied, "You know, I always sleep like a log. I'm off the moment my head touches the pillow." I mean you wouldn't say to a victim of blindness, on first being apprised of their affliction, "You know, I can see perfectly well with both eyes." Would you?

Or imagine saying to the bereaved parent of an eighteen year old killed in a road accident, "You know, I wouldn't be able to tell by looking at you that you were even slightly upset." Yet here was my professional Father in God, as I stood on the edge of an emotional and vocational abyss, telling me how good I was at hiding my true feelings. As if I needed him to tell me. As if that wasn't a big part of the problem.

If someone has a physical disease like cancer or Alzheimer's they will rightly, with a bit of luck,
a) be showered with sympathy
b) receive unconditional support, or be seen as deserving such support, and
c) be told how brave they are even when they reject such accolades because, as John Diamond insisted, cowards get cancer too.
It is very different, sometimes the complete opposite, with emotional pain.

There is little acknowledgement that emotional pain may be intractable (a malignant sadness) and that what is most helpful is the solidarity without judgement of someone who cares enough to want to understand.

From Fantasy to Faith

I have so far here, here, here, here, here, and here looked at the way that D Z Phillips has explored some of the central issues concerning religion through twentieth-century literature.

We have discussed the view that, at this stage of civilisation, we should have put aside the childishness of religion. We have begun to look at what might take its place once we have emptied heaven. One possibility is art. But could it be that we are not as self-sufficient as we think? Is religion simply one of those charitable untruths we need to get through life?

In the next few postings I shall review Phillips' analysis of religion and morality.

Apology for an Unbeliever

Writing about the relationship between Thomas Merton and the artist-craftsman Victor Hammer, Beth describes Hammer as "what some people call an “unbeliever”. Though he was Catholic by birth, he distrusted the Church and no longer practiced his faith within the context of Church. He died in July 1967, refusing the Sacraments.

Merton referred to Victor as “a very believing ‘unbeliever’” – one whose distrust of Church is part of a deeper belief - and it was compassion for him, in part, that prompted the essay “Apology for an Unbeliever”. Here is an excerpt from that essay:

"At this point I am making a public renunciation, in my own name at least, of all tactical, clerical, apologetic designs upon the sincerity of your unbelief. . . I think this apology is demanded by the respect I have for my own faith. If I, as a Christian, believe that my first duty is to love and respect my fellow in his personal frailty and perplexity, in his own unique hazard and need for trust, then I think that the refusal to let him alone, to entrust him to God and his conscience, and the insistence on rejecting them as persons until they agree with me, is simply a sign that my own faith is inadequate.

"My own peculiar task in my Church and in my world has been that of the solitary explorer who, instead of jumping on all the latest bandwagons at once, is bound to search the existential depths of faith in its silences, its ambiguities, and in those certainties which lie deeper than the bottom of anxiety. In these depths there are no easy answers, no pat solutions to anything. It is a kind of submarine life in which faith sometimes mysteriously takes on the aspect of doubt, when, in fact, one has to doubt and reject conventional and superstitious surrogates that have taken the place of faith. On this level, the division between believer and unbeliever ceases to be so crystal clear. It is not that some are all right and others all wrong: all are bound to seek in honest perplexity. Everybody is an unbeliever more or less."
- From "Apologies to an Unbeliever" by Thomas Merton

I have long felt that the important conversation that Christians have to initiate is across the line between belief and unbelief. But first we have to discern that line. We need to know how deeply it cleaves our own souls.

The End is Nigh

Patrick Barkham in the Guardian draws our attention to those soothsayers who warn that the year 2012, with the London Olympics, may well be our last. According to some predictions 21st December of that year is a day of doom. Others say it will simply see the destruction of this shoddy world and its replacement with something shinier.

Shinier? How I just hate shiny. I'm a matt man myself.

Queen in shock Rushdie beheading

The only answer.

Expresso Tales

John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford, reviews this book by Alexander McCall Smith in today's Church Times. He calls it "a life-affirming book . . . it has an innocence and emotional wisdom about it . . . like a soap opera."

Smith, he continues, "combines social comment and philosophy with light comedy, and has a feel for narrative and characterisation. He is a practising Episcopalian, and I think the values of his faith come through. In the end people get their just deserts."

But isn't a belief in "just deserts" the very opposite of religious faith? If we're all going to get what's coming to us, what difference can God make?

It's a living

A vicar and his wife were having drinks in the lobby of the theatre. A blonde walked past wearing an evening gown that looked as thought it must have been sprayed on.
She smiled and blushed, "Well, hello there, Father," and kept going.
After a moment's pause, the vicar looked at his wife and said, "Don't worry dear, that's just a young lady I know professionally."
His wife raised an eyebrow.
"Hers or Yours ?"

Bernard Manning

I feel the loss of Bernard Manning. In a way I knew him. Not personally, but you could not grow up as I did in Ardwick, Manchester, with any awareness of the life and humour and guts of the place, without being acquainted with many of Bernard's kindred spirits.

We were more a Ken Dodd household ourselves, though not at all because we were squeamish. My father would have shared the values and politics of the Embassy Club without himself being a member. He worked too hard to have much of a social life but I dare say he recycled a few of Bernard's jokes. Both of these men made me laugh.

There's a fitting tribute at Harry's Place which includes this reminder.

"Those who defend Manning often mention his tireless charity work. Unlike some other celebrities who earned regular plaudits for giving their time free of charge – sacrifices invariably accompanied by fat expense claims for hotels and travel - Manning never took a penny for his efforts. Indeed, he was better known for marking his pro bono appearances with sizable, personal donations of his own. No fanfare, no kudos. There are countless stories of audience members at one of his gigs receiving lifts home in his limo and his bankrolling of numerous community projects - youth clubs, local football teams, etc. – is common knowledge around the north west."

Blackmail, Misery and Cheating

Patricia McKeever, whom he describes as the internet Torquemada of Scottish Catholic gaydom, comes in for a stern word today from David Aaronovitch. Most of it is well directed at Scottish Catholicism but there is a wider relevance.

"Let’s not make this just about Catholics. There are all kinds of people who, for religious or cultural reasons, wish to see greater social control over what women, homosexuals and youngsters are allowed to do. They would like the rules on divorce tightened, the morning-after Pill discouraged, women to wear modest headscarves so that their hair doesn’t drive men wild with misplaced sexual desire. They want clear and stringent rules on what people may and may not do. They forget that, from Saudi Arabia to TV evangelism, such illiberalism always runs on the black hypocrisy of cheating husbands, punished women, blackmail, misery and self-slaughter."

Diagnosing Lear

Anthony Daniels reflects on attempts to explain what was wrong with King Lear.

As usual with Shakespeare, it's like looking in a mirror.

The Passionate Sceptic

As an earnest young Christian I was excited and amused by the writings of Bertrand Russell. Another young man, whom I had been asked to see by the Manchester Samaritans, introduced me to them. I had volunteered to befriend Samaritan clients and Glyn was one of them. He had been brought to the brink of suicide by appalling family circumstances, which his father had escaped by hanging himself. Russell was one of Glyn's intellectual heroes and we spent much of our time together discussing some of his more accessible essays and ideas.

As part of his polemic against Christianity Russell somewhere tells of a conversation he had with a Christian missionary recently returned from an evangelistic trip to China. Russell explored with him the logic of evangelism. According to this missionary the heathen had a right to hear the gospel, and he had a corresponding duty to preach it. Those who heard and believed would be saved to enjoy eternal bliss in the nearer presence of the Lord. Conversely, those who heard but rejected the missionary's message would be rejected by God, and go to hell. Russell enquired about the fate of those who had simply never heard the saving truth. What would become of them, eternally speaking? The evangelist assured him that those who 'died not knowing' would not be condemned by God but judged mercifully.

It turned out that on his mission to China the evangelist had preached to a thousand people of whom a hundred had converted to Christianity. Russell sadly concluded that by dispelling the ignorance of his audience he had in effect delivered a hundred of them to heaven, whilst consigning nine hundred to hell. Hardly a proud achievement!

It was this kind of cold but necessary analysis that led me to question the entire basis of evangelical religion from the outset.

Later on in my Christian education I came across an even more disturbing illustration of the logic of salvation, this time as it applies to children. I heard of a primitive tribe, I think it was in South America, though factual accuracy is a bit beside the point, where new mothers, believing that children who die are guaranteed the status of angels in the world to come, figured that the kindest act was to kill their offspring, literally bash their brains out, in infancy rather than run the risk of losing them to Godless ways later. It occurred to me that such an act would be a powerful combination of child-sacrifice and a mother's self-sacrifice, as by acting to secure the child's eternal happiness the mother would be forfeiting her own - an act of supreme selflessness. The logic and morality is impeccable, but it exposes starkly the destructive and life-negating nature of all ulterior religion. Ultimately, it leads to infanticide.

I sometimes think . . .

. . . that my life is based on a true story.

Retirement

I was in the chemist's shop, waiting for a prescription. An oldish woman came in for something or other, said she wasn't in a hurry, because, "well you're not when you're retired, you've got all day."

Then she added, with a frightening absence of logic, "I sometimes wonder how I ever found time to go to work."

I wondered what the connection between these statements could be. Perhaps her own weariness.

Beyond caring, for logic at least.

Discrimination

WE WOULD RATHER DO BUSINESS
WITH
1000 AL QAEDA TERRORISTS
THAN
WITH ONE SINGLE
AMERICAN

This sign was prominently displayed in the window of a business in Philadelphia.

You may ask what kind of business would dare post such a sign?

Answer: A Funeral Home

(Who said morticians have no sense of humour?)

Charitable Untruths

What are we left with After Empty Heaven?

Philip Larkin is widely regarded as an honest poet. Yet a collection of essays by his admirers to celebrate his sixtieth birthday included the titles, "Nothing to be Said" and "Like Something Almost Being Said".

In a poem called Myxomatosis, Larkin is confronted by a rabbit in a trap. He kills it quickly with his stick. 'I'm glad I can't explain', he writes. It is a mark of his honesty. Explanations, religious or otherwise, which offer large, sweeping, answers to the ills and misfortunes of life, are a deception. What we have had too much of, is not the imperfections of life, which are real, but the delusion of false expectations, timeless essences, transcendental absolutes.

Larkin famously expressed his alienation from the whole of human life in the line 'Man hands on misery to man.' His bleakness is not to be consoled by the false promises of religion. He believes that there are no absolutes, religious or otherwise. Love, 'that much mentioned brilliance', is to him a puzzling phenomenon, one from which he feels excluded.

An important aspect of Larkin's writing is the pain and suffering caused by the limitations of human life, not least death, 'the anaesthetic from which none come round.' He does not find an answer to his fear of the void either in permissiveness or rejection of religion. There is an ache in the soul. As Hamm says in Beckett's Endgame,'You're on earth; there's no cure for that'.Larkin insists on the truth gently. 'Our almost instinct almost true:/ What will survive of us is love.' Unsentimental charity is to him the most valuable quality.

He describes a church as 'a serious house on serious earth' that 'never can be obsolete,/ Since someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious'. But, says DZP, there are religious perspectives of a kind that Larkin seems unaware of, which ask the believer, as forcefully as Larkin does, to die to the desire for compensation.

After Empty Heaven

Some people think that emptying heaven of the gods may have created a dangerous void, a dangerous interregnum, and that without religion as a stabilising factor public morality might break down. The poet Wallace Stevens is mindful of this, but his hope is that poetry will address this new situation. Out of this poetic music Stevens hopes new possibilities of union and accord will emerge - 'in which being there together is enough.'

But, DZP asks, can poetry take the place of empty heaven? Can salvation be found in art when religion fails? Denis Potter (see Priests of Our Time) attacked the efforts often made in the name of religion to bandage the injuries of life. Such religion is couched in the language of false consolation, for religion is not the bandage but the wound, a wound caused by the longing for some kind of perfection, for something more than the merely human.

People have often thought of this world as a place of exile, and they long for a somewhere else, a better place. In Pennies from Heaven, Arthur thinks there must be somewhere where the songs are true, but his longing cannot transcend sentimentality. In Blue Remembered Hills the longing is for the supposed lost innocence of childhood which turns out to be no more than nostalgia. Such innocence is a myth. Our sins are indeed original. When one of the children is burnt alive, the others deny any knowledge or responsibility concerning it.

Nostalgia can paralyse us in the present. A longing for a better place beyond the rainbow can actually deepen human wounds. The expectation that we will be compensated somehow, somewhere, sometime, goes deep with us. We feel that something must turn up, to rectify matters, to balance the books. It's as if there is a higher perspective which will make everything right in the end. This transcendental superstition has dream-like quality which places it beyond disproof. It is a wounding illusion, because the only boat that awaits us is Death; a boat which has no compensating cargo.

Priests of Our Time

DZP looks next at the way that religions can cut us off from being human in the very attempt to make sense of human life. (see Emptying Heaven)

For Wallace Stevens, once we have emptied heaven of the gods, the sky will seem friendlier, just part of the human story and human science. The God above the sky, if he existed, would be responsible for what happens to mankind and therefore guilty of the most monstrous crime, the unalleviated sufferings of his creatures.

In Denis Potter's 'Follow the Yellow Brick Road' Jack Black comes to the conclusion that we are all in a dirty play, written by an author who has put filthy words into our mouths. The psychiatrist tells him there is no need to walk around burdened with a sense of disgust. With the help of Megabrium 2000 years a go at least one wild man would have stuck to carpentry. Disgust is a purely medical phenomenon. Jack cannot accept this rationalisation and longs for purity. But what kind? The kind we see in the simple immediacy of TV commercials. These commercials blind us to the realities, but then so do religious stories of a happy land, far, far away, a new and improved pie in the sky.
In 'Joe's Ark' the bleak, matter of fact realism of a dying girl is extremely powerful compared with the religious illusions on offer.
In 'Brimstone and Treacle' the yellow brick road of religion turns out to be a road to revulsion. A suffering girl, reduced to the status of a vegetable, is raped by a young man who persuades her mother that the suffering of her daughter is given meaning by the great love it has called forth in him. Some philosophers of religion argue that God allows people to suffer so that others may have the opportunity to develop morally in helping them.
In these three dramas religion is criticised for dividing man off from the realities of life, from common decencies.

Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts is a male advice column writer. He considers the job a joke until he finds that some of his correspondents are taking him seriously. He comes to believe that Christ is the answer but wants to keep away from 'the Christ business'. In him we see our own struggles to mediate religious sense.
Some critics see Miss Lonelyhearts as an exposure by West of the illusion religion necessarily is; that the love of God and man which Miss L seeks is impossible. But it is the features editor, Shrike, who mocks the religious vulgarities and the alternatives on offer viz a Thoreau-like celebration of the soil, a Gauguin-like retreat to the South Seas, an aesthetic hedonism, for all ignore the realities of human affliction and seek to impose a false order on human life. The desperate character of Shrike's cynicism reveals a longing for something more, something different.
Others see the novel as an unqualified celebration of religion, identifying the Christ complex with genuine faith. But for West Miss L is not a prophet in our age, but a product of our age. Yet others see in Miss L a holy fool in industrial America where success, money and power conspire to cast out love, freeze the heart, and dull sensibility. They confuse religious zeal with psychoneurosis. They miss the point that West's Miss L is a priest of our time who has a religious experience.

Just as Flannery O'Connor said that the South was not Christ-centred but Christ-haunted, so Miss L has not so much a belief in Christ as a Christ complex. His life can be seen as a series of botched sacrifices. The romantic cleft between word and action runs all through his life, and that of other characters, though in Miss L it takes a religious form. The trouble with him, the trouble with all of us, is that we have no outer life, only an inner one. His religious complex is unmediated in the detail of human life. He wants to get to Christ directly, without the patient mediation of salvation in the detail of human life. Instant salvation is still peddled and magical solutions still offered, thus Miss Lonelyhearts remains a portrait of a priest of our our time.

One man and his dog

Here's one for MadPriest, and other petophiles.

A man and his dog were walking down a country road, when they were hit by a truck. Coming to, the man found he was still on the same road, but now there were a pair of pearly gates just ahead of him.
"Where is this?" he asked the white-bearded gatekeeper.
"It's heaven," came the reply. "You were both hit by a truck and killed, and that's why you're here. Come on in – but we don't allow pets, so you'll have to leave the dog."
"I don't know," replied the man. "I think I'll just carry on walking a bit further."
A mile down the road, he came across another set of pearly gates.
"Where is this?" he asked the gatekeeper.
"It's heaven," came the reply.
"But I thought heaven was a mile further back," said the man.
"No," said the gatekeeper. "That's hell. They're not very good neighbours, but at least they filter out people who would leave their best friends behind."

Food Miles

While the leaders of the world’s richest countries are discussing ways to make farmers and grocers cut down the 'food miles' of what we eat, new research seems to show that it costs a lot more energy to grow lettuce or apples in the UK, or roses in Amsterdam, during the winter than it does to import them from Spain, New Zealand, and Kenya respectively. Similarly, by using hotbeds and hothouses, you can raise good grapes in Scotland. But it costs 30 times more than growing them in France.

The truth is that as many as half our ‘food miles’ have nothing to do with importing produce from overseas. We clock them up bringing home our groceries from the supermarket.

The Creative Pause

Thanks to Prodigal Kiwis for this.

“In the dance there is a movement called the creative pause between the completion of one movement and beginning of the next.
This pause is an essential part of our process and belongs to everyday.

The creative pause is called for when the yarn is tangled, the window stuck, the project half-finished, or the friendship faltering.
In loss, in grief, in crisis, the creative pause lends itself to creative solutions.

Often we use this moment in resentment, reaction, revenge. We pull harder. We strike and strike and strike. We tug tenaciously, pound at the problem, trying to bring about an answer – any answer.
Overwhelmed by helplessness, we obscure solutions of clarity.
Then, exhausted, we are quiet.

God works in the waiting, wanting only our best, only what is right for us. Into the silence, God comes bringing peace in discomfort, confidence in confusion, trust in frustration.
Gently, child, gently, God says. Give me your loving attention and wait willingly. I will make clear your way.
Wait in confidence
and trust this creative pause.”

Paradoxically, Dorothy Rowe, an atheist psychologist, says that, in all our significant decisions and actions, the moment belongs to God.

W.M.D.

Why does nearly everyone conclude that because no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq they almost certainly didn't exist? Richard Perle (I know, American, neocon . . . but stay with me) speaking at the Hay Festival said that the only way WMD might have been found there would have been by Hans Blix or the Americans being shown precisely where they were. As he repeated, a cache of anthrax is easily 'lost' in a country like Iraq which is about as big as France.

He has a point. The IRA managed to 'lose' their weapons in Northern Ireland in spite of the fact that the police and armed forces who were looking for them had local knowledge, had been searching for many years, and had an area one-thirtieth the size of Iraq to cover.

The store of IRA weapons was never found. How was General de Chastelain able to satisfy all parties to the Good Friday Agreement that the arms had been decommissioned? He was shown where they were.

Are rights universal?

Pamela Bone joins the important debate as to whether there exist shared, universal human values or whether some people simply think so differently from the way we think that we have no business in assuming they even want our rights and freedoms.

She is in no doubt. Writing about Iran, she says:

"A society in which young, lightly clothed women and men can sit together at street cafes and discuss the sins of their government is better than a society in which they can be arrested for doing the same; a free and liberal society is better than a society that stones women for having sex outside of marriage and jails gays for existing."

Emptying Heaven

In a third chapter (see second) of 'From Fantasy to Faith' D Z Phillips turns to consider immortality. He characterizes it as a choice between science and seance. To illustrate the distinction he outlines the respective approaches of Tennyson (particularly In Memoriam) and Wallace Stevens.

Tennyson marries Darwinism and Christian faith by postulating that human development does not cease at death, but continues after it. Eliot saw In Memoriam as a religious poem not so much because of the quality of its faith but of its doubt, a religious kind of despair. In it Tennyson craves a continuance or substitute for the joys of friendship on earth. His desire for immortality is never quite for Eternal Life; his concern is for loss of man rather than for the gain of God. It is in this sense that Tennyson's lines smack more of a seance than spirituality.

Wallace Stevens sees that in an attempt to turn his departed friend into an ethereal being, Tennyson loses sight of him as he really was. In the act of creating a heaven out of our own fears, we lose sight of the earth. But Tennyson's despair is indeed a religious one. He looks to fulfil his religious desires by transcending his doubts. Stevens, however, sees the doubts as liberating us from desires we should not have in the first place. A changeless heaven is a grotesque parody of the earth we love. Coming to be and passing away is the character of human being. 'Death is the mother of beauty.' A human being who could not grow old and die would be as unattractive as an apple which could not ripen and rot. Take away change, take away death, and we take away, at the same time, what is wonderful and terrible in love and life.

For Tennyson, the contingency and finitude of things seems to rob them of their point. For Stevens it is an essential part of their wonder. Stevens is a poet of acceptance. Tennyson is not. He sees life as incomplete, and existence as a riddle. Within Steven's linguistic parameters, the completion, the order, provided by religion is illusory. For him, when we have emptied heaven, our terrors and fears will be exorcised.

A musical disgrace

Damian Thompson claims the religious high ground.

Statistics

If, as I believe, there are over 1.5 million Muslims in Britain, and a survey published in the Guardian shows that 16% of them regard suicide bombings against civilian targets as justified, a figure that rises to 35% of the under-thirties, it seems complacent in the extreme for the reporter to describe these as pockets of disaffection.

Hundreds of thousands in our small island. Some pockets!

P.S. In an article in today's Guardian, Matt Waldman of Oxfam warns that the international community is in danger of repeating in Afghanistan the mistakes made in Iraq. One of them is evidenced by the one-third of Afghans who think democracy is incompatible with Islamic values. And the other two-thirds?

Funny how we never heard these appeals on behalf of the anti-democratic minority in apartheid South Africa!

Here, there, then, and now, I'm with the majority.

Peanut Envy

Christopher Hitchens reminds us that Jimmy Carter is the man

"who, in his latest book on the Israel-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistake of Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism. If you ever feel like a good laugh, just tell yourself that things would improve if only the Israeli government would be more Orthodox. Jimmy Carter will then turn his vacantly pious glare on you, as if to say that you just don't understand what it is to have a personal savior."

He also has this to say about Carter's spiteful and cheap remarks on the retirement of Tony Blair.

"Heap insults on a guest in Washington: a thrice-elected prime minister who was the first and strongest ally of the United States on the most awful day in its recent history. A man who was prepared to risk his own career to be counted as a friend. A man who was warning against the Taliban, against Slobodan Milosevic, and against Saddam Hussein when George Bush was only the governor of Texas. Leaders like that deserve a little respect even when they are wrong—but don't expect any generosity or courtesy from the purse-mouthed preacher man from Plains, who just purely knows he was right all along, and who, when that fails, can always point to the numberless godly victories that he won over the forces of evil."

Peanut envy indeed.

Old Timer's Disease

I have Giles Fraser to thank for this. It offers some encouragement to those who are going through a similar experience. My father's last surviving sibling, at the age of 86, has been diagnosed as having Alzheimer's (or as one child called it, Old Timer's) disease. His only daughter is trying her best to do the right thing by him.

"AS THE elderly lady leaves church, she thanks me for the service. I respond by giving her a big squeeze and a kiss. As she totters off, I hear her complaining about the over- familiarity of the vicar. I chuckle: she is my Gran, who has had dementia for years, and no longer knows who I am.

"Back in her care home, she has persuaded fellow residents that she was once a nun from St Joseph's. To complement this new identity, Sister Audrey (as she calls herself) has found a remarkable silver lurex wraparound top. My family has been getting nuttier. The other week, my Mum, who is President of the local Women's Institute, started a Peter Kay "Show me the way to Amarillo" conga in the lighting department in John Lewis in Peterborough. For her, respectability and free-spiritedness battle it out, and a certain middle-English eccentricity usually wins. But for my Gran it's different. Dementia has brought about an Indian summer of happiness in what has been a tough and often unhappy life.

"Those who suffer from senile dementia often lose their worries about what other people think of them. For some, this can mean an unkempt appearance and a broader command of Anglo-Saxon than the blushing relatives ever remembered.

"But those who, like my Gran, have fought against a debilitating sense of social inferiority all their lives, are released from this dreadful burden. We hear a great deal about old people's homes being God's waiting-rooms, reeking of neglect and incontinence. But, for Sister Audrey, it may well be the place where she has finally come into her own.

"Re-clothe us in our rightful mind:' we sing. Yes, but what is our rightful mind? I met Iris Murdoch a couple of times -once after she had just given a lecture on Plato, and, years later, when she was lost and confused in the University Church in Oxford. Surely, it was the mind of the erudite don that was Iris Murdoch's "rightful mind".

"Yet, for my Gran, most of her life was characterised by a crushing nervousness and anxiety. Only now, as she looks after her fellow residents, and starts to experiment with her wardrobe, does she give some indication of the person she might have been, had she been liberated from her demons.

"I wonder: could it be, for some of us, that it's only when our schemes have all gone foggy that we are released to become the people God really wants us to be?"

Waking into the light

There are people on an island of Malaysia called Senoi who have a nonviolent culture. They talk with their children about dreams each morning. They have never had a war. Alice Miller thinks that our culture is so violent because as children we learned not to feel.

Confused?

I have spent parts of my life as,

an anti-capitalist accountant,

an anti-clerical clergyman,

a pacifist army chaplain,

a vegetarian priest in an agricultural parish,

a prison chaplain against incarceration,

and a pet-hating animal lover.

Is it any wonder that,

from time to time,

I have had 'mental-health' issues?

Mary and Joseph

I have usually found that my self-understanding as an adult is deepened by the combination of remembering and imagining that enables me to see the world as experienced by a child. Alice Miller is surprised at the reluctance of Christians to learn from the parents of Jesus.

" . . . no representative of the Church has ever, to my knowledge, admitted to the patent connection between the character of Jesus and the way he was brought up. Would it not make eminently good sense to encourage believers to follow the example of Mary and Joseph and regard their children as the children of God (which they are) rather than treating them as their own personal property?

"It is time to relinquish destructive models and to mistrust the principle of obedience. We have no need of obedient children brainwashed by their upbringing to be the ideal victims for the empty verbiage and the blandishments of terrorists and lunatic ideologists and ready to fall in with their commands, even to the extent of killing others. We need children with open eyes and ears, children prepared to protest against injustice, stupidity and ignorance with arguments and constructive action. Jesus was able to do this when he was twelve years old and the scene in the temple demonstrates eloquently that he could refuse the obedience asked of him by his parents without hurting their feelings.

"With the best will in the world we cannot truly emulate the example of Jesus. To do that we would need to have been through an entirely different kind of personal history. What we can do, as long as we really want to and are not thwarted by external authority, is to learn from the attitude displayed by Joseph and Mary. They did not need their son's obedience and they felt no urge to punish him. Only if we fear the confrontation with our own histories will we need to have power over others, and if we do that we will need more and more of it all the time. Parents want power and obedient children because they feel too weak to be true to themselves and their own feelings, too weak to admit those feelings to their children. But it is precisely this kind of honesty with our children that makes us strong. To tell the truth we do not need to have power over others. Power is something we need to spread lies, to mouth empty words and pretend they are true. It is for this that we require mindless gullibility from our children or from whole nations. And because such power can never be a substitute for the real strength of the truth, the insane logic of such a development is bound to culminate in wars and the dreadful toll of human life they invariably exact.

"It is entirely realistic to imagine that if the wisdom of well-informed experts (like Frédéric Leboyer, Michel Odent, Bessem van der Kolk and many others) were to reach a large number of parents and those parents had the support of religious authorities in following the example of Mary and Joseph, the world would be a much more peaceful, honest and rational place for our children than it is today."

Morrisey

The wise one is quoted as saying "Nobody can come up with a good argument for eating animals."

I must say, I've never heard one.

Illusion and Reality

I'm reading again this book by David Smail.

He says in the Preface that it's about the possibility of understanding the 'language' of pain. Such pain (psychological pain, emotional distress) is caused when a person is unable to abandon a fundamentally true insight into the nature of the social world in favour of a convenient illusion. Emotional distress, so understood, far from being an indication that something is wrong with the person, is far more likely to point to something wrong with his/her world.


I do notice that any attempt to attribute autism to environmental factors, to see it as rooted in the social experience of the child, is strongly resisted by the professionals. My own observation is that children on the autistic spectrum often come from peculiarly uncommunicative parents. This is not to say that the parents are to blame, or even responsible, for the child's condition. It may well be that they (the parents) are themselves 'tuning out' of painful experiences of their own.

A Room with a View

This is part of an address I gave during my time as a prison chaplain. It was based on E. M. Forster's book, A Room with a View.

"If I remember rightly the view from Forster's room is of two kinds. For one thing it's a view of the hills of Tuscany, an Italian landscape. At the same time it's another kind of view. It's a view of two people; two people who are not at first able to see what to others is most obvious, that they are falling in love. It's a room with a view.

"There is, not far from this room where you are sitting now, not far from this chapel, in this prison, a room with a view. Stictly speaking it's out of bounds to prisoners, it's off limits. In the bad old days when so-called Catholics had to be separated from so-called non-Catholics it was the Catholic vestry, where Catholic priests put on their robes and prepared to say mass. So it would have been out of bounds for me too.

"Now if you ask John, the chapel orderly, he will tell you that in many ways that old vestry is the best room in the castle, or at least in the prison. John has duties there, so he has to spend time there, though he's not complaining. The room, though small, is light and airy. There is fresh air to breathe, and when the sun shines it pierces the gloom that can so fill your mind when you are on the wrong side of these prison walls. There are moments in there when you can't help but feel more cheerful, and more full of hope.

"And it's a room with a view. Standing or sitting at the window you face east, as you are doing now. You see a picture of Lancaster east of the castle, a townscape which includes the eye catching Ashton Memorial in Williamson Park, and many other great buildings besides. So it is truly a room with a view.

"But there is another room in this castle which is also a room with a view. The surprising thing is though, that the room I'm speaking of has no windows. It's a view without windows. It's this room, this chapel, I'm talking about.

"This chapel, this windowless chapel, without an outside wall, is nevertheless a room with a view. Not a view of the outside, of landscape, townscape, buildings, but of the inside, of you and me, and what is inside you and me; who we are, who we really are, and what we could become.

"This chapel, I like to think, is a room with a view. The view is expressed in a message which is delivered here, week in, week out. The message is, You are loved. You are believed in. Your life is worth living, inside and outside. You are of value.

"Sometimes we need to be reminded of this, even if we've heard it before. And if you haven't heard it before, or believed it before, well, there's always a first time!"

Getting personal

Thanks to Lucy for tagging me. Seven random facts about me.

1. As a baby I was left in my pram outside the greengrocer's shop because my sister, who had pushed me there, was so eager to get home with the first bananas on sale since the 1939 war broke out. As she sat with our parents engorging the fruit, mum asked "Where's the baby?"

2. As a four year old I nearly killed my grandmother. She was warming her knees at the open fire when I threw a firework into the grate. It exploded. Grandma's death months later was not, I am assured, connected in any way to this incident.

3. As a favour to my first wife, after we split up I took our dead budgerigar to a taxidermist. I collected the stuffed article two weeks later. I was accompanied on both occasions by the person who was later to become my second wife.

4. In the course of a single week, I found my mother dead from a drug overdose at home, attended her burial, and got married.

5. My father worked as the caretaker of a further education college whilst in denial about his near blindness. He managed to perform all the tasks assigned to him, and more, but caused some consternation when he mistook Margaret Thatcher, on an official visit, for one of his cleaning ladies.

6. One of the things I learned from psychotherapy is the importance for me of doing less than my best and being happy with it.

7. I have shared a urinal with a former British Prime Minister - not Margaret Thatcher.

Catholic terror?

Melanie Phillips gives her reasons for thinking it a serious mistake to regard Islamist terrorism as equivalent to that of the IRA.

"The purpose of the IRA was to achieve a united Ireland; it was not to take over Britain and turn it into a Catholic state. But the jihad aims to turn Britain and the west into an Islamic state. IRA terrorism was committed in the name of Irish nationalism; Islamist terrorism is committed in the name of holy war. The Pope and the Catholic priesthood worldwide were not issuing encyclicals or sermons calling on the faithful to destroy unbelievers and install Catholicism as world government; the most influential religious authorities in the Islamic world are instructing their faithful to destroy unbelievers and install Islamic world government."

Scaremongering? Or just scary?

Down the Yellow Brick Road

In the second part of his book (see first) DZP considers the view that, having put religion aside, man must make his own rules unaided.

Religion is now it seems on the defensive. It is no longer respectable to believe in God, for man is the measure of all things. Religious belief is more likely to be equated with superstition than seen as a false hypothesis. Atheism and belief are not simply contradictory. More often, for the atheist, when someone tries to say that God exists, he is not saying something false, but something meaningless.

But how did meaningless beliefs come to have such a hold on people? One popular answer is in terms of primitive man, fearful of nature, seeking influence, by prayer and ritual, over a hostile environment. On this view religion is a childish practice which has been superseded by science. Religious believers have simply never grown up. They are like children who have gone on believing in magic.

The human cry for God is, on this view, like a child's cry in the dark, a desire for comfort from 'somewhere over the rainbow'. Primitive man creates a 'something over the rainbow' to fulfil his unfulfilled wishes - a product of projection (Feuerbach). But we must remember Dorothy's last words in 'The Wizard of Oz', "There's no place like home."

In the story the Wizard himself turns out to be a fraud, the Scarecrow is shown to have a brain, the Tin Man a heart, and the lion to have had courage all along. The message appears to be that we must develop our own abilities and not look for supernatural help. Whatever its harsh realities, Kansas is at least real, whereas Oz is pure fantasy.

"There's no place like home" could be the motto of atheistic humanism. Instead of the Yellow Brick Road we must follow the way of human science and philosophy to bring us back to this our one and only world. We must learn to live as Freud's 'honest smallholders', cultivating our plot in such a way that it supports us.

Peckham's Lost

In what he describes as "the most fearless piece of reportage I've heard in a long while", Edward Wickham commends Winifred Robinson of BBC Radio 4 for her report on one of Britain's most deprived areas.

The climax was an interview with Tony, the father of Adrian Thomas, who was last year imprisoned for leading the gang that abducted, tortured, and murdered Mary Ann Lenehan. Adrian is the youngest of Tony's four sons, each of whom has a different mother.

"Why did Tony have Adrian when he had failed his other three boys? Because a woman he had been dating for three weeks asked him for a baby. "Why do some people bring children into the world with less thought than getting a pet?" asked Ms Robinson. Tony was starting to get riled, but she didn't let up. "But you must have known about contraception." These things happen, said Tony blithely. "They don't happen to me," came the retort."

"It was tremendous stuff. So careful are we not to judge (at least publicly) the lifestyle of others - particularly those from non-white, non-middle-class backgrounds - that I half wondered whether Ms Robinson was breaking some kind of broadcasting code. Nor did she let up when describing the kids at the local school drop-out centre as showing symptoms of "arrested development", behaving like toddlers who have not learned how to deal with the disappointment of having their whims frustrated."

"A boy made excuses - "They're not polite to me" - for not respecting his teachers. "Aren't you supposed to be polite to them?" came Auntie Winifred's unanswerable reply."

The Interpretation of Murder

A novel with this title by Jed Rubenfeld won a British Book Award for Best Read 2007.

It's opening lines are worth pondering.

"There is no mystery to happiness.

Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same, To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

For myself, I have always chosen meaning."

Do we need religion?

Or should we by now have put aside such childishness?

From time to time I'd like to share some of the books I am reading or have read. If any reader wishes to respond with comments or criticism I would really welcome that.

I have referred already to the philosopher D. Z. Phillips. In the Introduction to his book "From Fantasy To Faith", to which he gives the title "Marches of Vocabulary", DZP asks us to consider Psalm 139.

"Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well."

What such passages take for granted is the inescapable reality of God. Notice that there is no appeal to the evidence for God's existence; no attempt to prove it. The movement of thought is not from the world to God, but from God to the world. The world is seen from the start as God's world.

But this, observes DZP, is not the world we live in. It's not our world; nor has it been for a long time. Since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment religious belief has been looked on as a conjecture, a hypothesis, a case of weighing probabilities, a matter of calculation. Our problem now is not how to escape from God but how to find him.

It may be important simply to recognise the difficulty we have in speaking confidently about religious belief. In our struggle to mediate religious sense what are we to make of religious claims to offer an abiding sense, the same yesterday, today and forever? How is that sense to be related to past, present and future? We are tempted to look for a religious sense which transcends the contingency of the world, its coming to be and passing away, a kind of religious experience which is complete, timeless, immune to any threat from surrounding change. Yet the content of religious belief has to be expressed in a language, and language itself is not static but forever changing. At a time of extremely rapid change, when materialistic optimism has come to a dead-end, what kind of sense does religion have? What might hope, love or faith amount to?

One answer is offered by T. S. Eliot in East Coker "The faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting". But the waiting is not without style. There must be an appreciation of what is at stake. Religious meanings cannot be secured by self-authenticating moments of intuition, immune from their surroundings, however uplifting. Connections have to be shown between the richness of religious tradition and the particularity of the present. Sometimes we can do little more than to hold on to the regularity of religious observance - "we are only undefeated/Because we have gone on trying."(TSE: The Dry Salvages). We have to struggle, in our own day, to find what an authentic religious voice might be. The voice must be our own. "For last year's words belong to last year's language/And next year's words await another voice"

Right and Wrong

I've always enjoyed talking to children. As a parish priest I preferred the informality of school assembly to preaching in the church.

I remember one day the topic was shouting, and being shouted at. I told the kids how I hate being shouted at myself. Some of them weren't listening, so I raised my voice. Well, sometimes you just have to!

A week earlier I'd been to see Disney's "The Lion King" at the cinema. In it, the one thing above all which signifies the lion-cub's rise to seniority is the sound of his voice. From a rather tame-sounding, high-pitched growl, it grows to a deafening, and terrifying, roar. He achieves full power, full "King of the Jungle" status, by his ability to frighten others, and command attention, through the very loudness of his voice.

As those children knew only too well, grown-ups are nearly always bigger and stronger and cleverer than little ones. And they can shout louder too! Might isn't always right, as we say, but it certainly helps when making yourself heard. So I asked the children, 'Why?'

Why do people shout? Why do grown-ups shout? Why do teachers shout? And, because I saw the head teacher was present, why does your head teacher shout?

Some of the children - the older ones - said that often people shout to make themselves heard, because they are not being listened to. Others, about the same age, with a bit of encouragement from me, used their imaginations and offered such replies as, "Our teacher shouts at us because he's just had a row with his wife", or "because he's got out of bed the wrong side (or late)", or even "because he had to get out of bed at all", or "because he forgot to mark our homework."

In one way and another they were able to see that sometimes at least people raise their voices, express their anger and annoyance, for reasons of their own, because of things that are going on in their lives, for which you and I are not even remotely responsible; things indeed which have nothing to do with us at all.

But there were many children; I would guess most children; indeed I would say all of the youngest children; who spoke with one (loud) voice, and one answer between them. "Why does teacher shout at you?" "Teacher shouts because we're naughty. Teacher shouts because we have done something wrong."

It brought to my mind all those dire warnings of the trouble in store for us if we do not reverse recent liberal trends and give our children clear teaching on the difference between right and wrong. Evidently these children had learned the difference at a very early age. Not only did they know right from wrong, they also knew where they stood, which was mostly in the wrong. If teacher shouts, it must be my fault!

God the Father to resign this week.

This from NewBiscuit.

The Lord God Almighty, perhaps the most important leader in the universe, is expected to announce his resignation later this week according to a statement issued this morning. ‘God the Father will be making a formal announcement regarding his long-term plans on Thursday’ said the office of the omnipotent creator, fuelling widespread speculation that he will be stepping down in July. His successor is widely tipped to be Jesus Christ, the Jewish second-in-command and current next-door neighbour in the Trinity.

God the Father has been a popular figure for many centuries, but in recent years has come under heavy criticism for his inability to stop wars, failure to prevent rampant homophobia among his followers and his old-fashioned dress sense. Many believers now feel a change at the top is the only way to revive Trinitarian monotheism.

‘I think Jesus will do a great job’ said the Father, finally endorsing his successor and long-standing rival. ‘For the last two thousand years he’s being doing important work in soteriology , whatever that is, and I’m sure he’ll get used to handling real power eventually.’

Leading spiritual figures from across the religious spectrum lined up to praise the Father and his legacy. ‘He did some really good stuff,’ said the Devil, ‘particularly in the early years with all that ‘creation from nothing’ business. Speaking as the official Leader of the Opposition, I shall miss our sparring matches. And remember the way he gave me Job to play with while he worked out how to hide the dinosaur bones?’

Jesus is unlikely to face a leadership challenge as the Holy Spirit declared last week he was quite happy to continue influencing people indirectly, though there are rumblings of discontent from the outer reaches of Heaven. ‘Why should we only get three leaders to choose from?’ said Saint Eutychymius, the fourth century Palestinian martyr. ‘There are myriad saints up here with leadership qualities. How about a woman for a change?’ But whether Jesus can raise the Trinity’s popularity back the heady days of the twelfth century levels remains to be seen. ‘You’ll see real changes’ said a spokesman. ‘The son is very much his own man. Except for being one and the same.’

Not alone

David Smail, a clinical psychologist and writer, has learned from his experience of thousands of clients that:


1. Absolutely everybody wants to be liked.

2. Everyone feels different inside (less confident, less able etc.) from how they infer other people to feel.

3. Few honest and courageous people who have achieved anything of real value in life do not feel a fraud much of the time.


Phew! And I thought it was only me.

Happiness

In today's Guardian, Madeleine Bunting addresses some of the questions that have emerged recently in the science/faith debate.

"The durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking, one of Britain's most eminent evolutionary psychologists acknowledged to me recently. Scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed - the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date? Does religion still have an important role in human well being? In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits - the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on."

This is not in line with all available research by any means. A study of religiosity and happiness in 2000, using the Francis Scale and the Depression-Happiness Scale, found no significant correlation between the two measures.

But what if the opposite were the case? What if religious belief was shown to be associated with unhappiness, depression and ill-health? It might make an evolutionary explanation of religion more difficult, impossible even. But perhaps that's because faith is not about advantage or explanation. Christian faith embraces a way of the cross, a way of dying to self. It isn't supposed to 'work' or make you happy in the way that the latest therapy might. Nor does it explain the world in the way that many scientists propose.

Job, Jesus, and Simone Weil. Religious geniuses? Yes. Happy bunnies? I don't think so.

Miller's Laws

First Law of Offspring Ingratitude

People who don't understand genetics attribute their personal failings to the inane role models offered by their parents.

Second Law of Offspring Ingratitude

People who do understand genetics attribute their personal failings to the inane mate-choice decisions made by their parents.

A.D.H.D.

Sometimes known as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Perform the following experiment:

Go and find a medical practitioner.
Ask how many kids they have seen that they genuinely felt (as opposed to the hundreds whom they will have diagnosed simply to get the parent out of the room) had ADHD from a family which made them take regular outdoor exercise, fed them a healthy diet, insisted on good manners at all times, sent them to bed at a sensible hour, and refused to indulge their every whim.

Now count the fingers on one hand and let me know which number is greater.

A book for men

I recently read 'Father Joe' by Tony Hendra. It was a poignant account of a kind of holy life that touches many people by staying put. I think though that the Washington Post reviewer put his finger rather tellingly on what might be a weakness in the way that the story is told. "It is a book for men who think of themselves as trapped, misunderstood geniuses, so it should sell well."

Charity. Cold or hot?

I have just donated £20 to a charity. The appeal literature informs me that with that amount of money surgeons will be able to repair the cleft lips or palates of two children that would otherwise have blighted their lives forever. I am glad to help, but does this mean that, were I to choose instead to spend £20 on a visit to the theatre, I would be putting my own pleasure before the desperate need of another? Casts a bit of a shadow over what's left of my nightlife!

That VAT gets everywhere

News from one of my favourite accountancy firms Grant Thornton.

Lap dancers will be required to pay VAT on their earnings after a judge ruled in favour of Spearmint Rhino at the high court.
The self-styled gentlemen's clubs firm was appealing against a VAT tribunal that said Spearmint Rhino should pick up the tab for tax payments on money earned by dancers.
Mr Justice Mann ruled today however that the services on offer were ultimately provided by the dancers and not the club.
"A member of the public pays £8 for admission and on entering goes into an area in which he or she may drink, socialise, eat and watch partially-clad women dancing on a podium," he said.
"At any one time there are between 20 and 140 young women available to provide the entertainment services in issue in these proceedings.
"The judge went on to say it was a "very forced construction of events" that led to lap dancers being considered as contracted agents for the club.
Customers at Spearmint Rhino clubs in Britain can pay up to £250 for an hour-long one-on-one chat with dancers.

An empty bed

I find this by Andrew Sullivan almost unbearably moving.

The decision of any hostile family member to challenge the legal rights of a same-sex partner can be particularly brutal.

I remember a story told by a friend during the plague years. He was visiting a dying friend in hospital and a couple of beds down the ward from his friend, the curtains were drawn around a patient. From behind the curtains, he could hear a man softly singing a show-tune. "Well, at least that guy's keeping his spirits up," my friend remarked. "Actually," his dying friend replied, "the man in that bed died this morning and was taken away by his family. That's his boyfriend. The family won't let him go to the funeral or ever see his spouse's body again. They've kicked him out of their apartment. It wasn't his name on the lease. So he's just sitting there, singing their favorite song to an empty bed. It's the last time he'll get that close to his husband. The nurses didn't have the heart to tell him to leave yet. He's been there for hours.

You want to know why some of us feel so strongly about this? Remember that scene. We will - for ever. Civil marriage rights are indispensable. Gay people are second-class citizens and second-class human beings until we have them.

Good losers

Sometimes things seem important enough to note before thinking them through or considering the implications.
For example:
We are all sooner or later going to lose everything we have and are forever. What life offers us is a never-to-be-repeated chance to become good losers. What we do next, after becoming aware of this, defines our spirituality.
. . . Or so it seems to me.

Going nowhere

I am increasingly suspicious of forms of spirituality that want to take me somewhere, on some kind of journey. Human growth and personal development may have its place but I have the feeling that Ann Faraday is on to something here.

All my thoughts, hopes and fears about the future have changed radically since I fell asleep one night in October 1985 and woke next morning without a self. I don't know what happened to it, but it never returned.

This should have been an occasion for some regret, since I quite liked myself - a self born long ago when I first discovered that other people didn't automatically share my private inner space and couldn't intrude upon it without my permission. Since then I'd worked hard on myself to make it a good one, mainly by praying to God to remove the bad thoughts and feelings surrounding it. I soon came to think in terms of my Higher self and lower self - and hoped that God would always love me and forgive me so long as I at least aspired towards the Higher and abjured the lower. The Higher Self, I decided, was probably my soul which would eventually unite with God and live happily ever after.

So it came as somewhat of a surprise in later life to learn that the Soul is not to be sought in the heavens but in the depths of the psyche, especially in the lower or shadow part which I'd tried to disown. Through psychotherapy and dream-work, I discovered that far from diminishing myself, all those buried fears, guilts and weaknesses brought a welcome softness and subtlety to life. In fact they led me on to even deeper archetypal encounters which expanded the boundaries of self into the greater collective psyche of humankind.

What had begun as a journey of purification had become one of completion or individuation, and I looked forward to attaining what Jung called Wholeness, the Self or God before too long; all I needed, or so I thought, were just a few finishing touches.

In the meantime, in true Human Potential fashion, I was furthering all this growth by 'taking care of' and 'looking after' whichever self I happened to be into at the time. I no longer berated myself for making mistakes and was usually able to say "no" without feeling guilty. All things considered, including many years of meditation practice, I rated myself at around 3.5 on the Transpersonal Ladder of Enlightenment.

It was at this point in my imagined psycho-spiritual development that I lost myself. To compound the irony, before going to sleep that night in October 1985, I'd actually done a 'self-remembering' exercise for precisely the opposite purpose - to centre my energies in such a firm and clear sense of self that it would continue into the dreaming process instead of getting lost in it, thereby giving me a lucid dream in which I was aware of dreaming. I went off dutifully repeating the words "I am, I am, I am, ...", a la Sri Ramana Maharshi, and was more than a little astonished to awaken some hours later, laughing because the pundits had got it wrong: the truth was much more like "I am not." I was emerging from a state of consciousness without any I or self at all, a state that can only be described as pure consciousness. I can't even say I experienced it, because there was no experiencer and nothing to experience.

And far from being a matter of regret, this loss of self came as a distinct relief. In fact when bits and pieces of my old identity - hopes, fears, goals, memories, spiritual aspirations and all the rest - began to recollect as I awoke, I tried to fight them off, in much the same way, perhaps, as the reluctant survivors of Near-Death Experiences resist the return to life's little boxes. But unlike those survivors, I brought back no blissful sense of divine presence or of a mission to accomplish, nor even intimations of immortality - just a total inner and outer Empty-ness which has remained ever since.

This may not sound like a happy state of affairs to a psychotherapist, who would probably see in it evidence of a mid-life crisis or incipient psychosis. But it is far more interesting than that. I experience this Empty-ness as a boundless arena in which life continually manifests and plays, rising and falling, constantly changing, always changing and therefore ever new. Sometimes I feel I could sit forever, knowing myself as not only a fluid manifestation of life within the arena, but also as the Empty-ness which holds it. If this is psychosis, everyone should have one, and the world would be a far more serene place for it.

. . . as a psychologist, my hopes are something like this:

I would challenge the ancient creed that developing a strong self-sense is essential in rearing children with adequate strength for living. Surely it is possible to encourage them to find a fluid identity within the constantly-changing play of life, not seeking permanence of any kind, particularly that of self. Perhaps we could even teach them to see and enjoy themselves as unique 'nonentities', instead of separate hidebound selves obsessed with survival.

In psychotherapy, I would hope for a radically new approach to those who suffer from inner emptiness. Instead of working towards filling that void with new purpose, direction and meaning, I would aim to assist sufferers to go even deeper into Empty-ness and discover its true nature. I would actively discourage all ideas of inner-journeying towards wholeness or paths to enlightenment. These serve merely to postpone happiness here and now, and they build up the self-illusion.

In the spiritual domain, I would fire all gurus and transpersonal psychologists who use stage-by-stage models of self-development ( explaining experiences like mine as fifth level transient nirvikalpa samadhi - or whatever). And I would like to see the term Self with a capital S: Self-actualisation, Self-realisation, Self-transcendence - expunged from psychological and spiritual literature, reserving the word strictly for the empirical self of everyday life. It is the whole obfuscating concept of self which needs to be transcended, for in my experience there has never really been any self to transform, actualise, realize or transcend.

In good faith

Most press attention has been paid to the fact that two of the July 7th suicide bombers had been under surveillance by MI5 as early as 18 months before the atrocity. My attention was caught even more by the evidence that two of those jailed for life yesterday were recruited to jihadi terrorism in 1999 as a reaction to what they saw and heard of the treatment of Muslims in Kashmir. As this was before 9/11, let alone the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it gives the lie to later attempts to link these events causally to the origin and spread of global terror. Perhaps we shall now be less credulous when we are told that a change of British foreign policy might help to stem the jihadist tide.

There are at present a lot of conflicting demands for more and less surveillance, the sharing and publishing of information on those being watched, or not if they turn out to be perfectly innocent bystanders, the detention of disturbed individuals who might be a danger to themselves and others, but without interfering with the liberties of those who have a right to feel disturbed, depressed or delusional without being locked up. It's all very confusing, and a reminder, when we get it wrong, of the high price we pay for freedom.

A prayer I've often used, was written by Reinhold Niebuhr.

O God, who hast bound us together in this bundle of life, give us grace to understand how our lives depend upon the courage, the industry, the honesty, and the integrity of other people; that we may be mindful of their needs, grateful for their faithfulness, and faithful in our responsibilities to them.

Ever tried?

Found this scribbled on a piece of card in my pocket. Think I owe it to Roger Royle on Wake Up To Wogan.

Ever tried?
Ever failed?
No matter.

Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

Is God Real?

Norm at Normblog quotes from article by John Meacham:

So is God real? It seems safe to say at least this much: he is real insofar as he is a force who influences human beings who believe in his existence. In his landmark Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh in 1901, the American philosopher William James quoted a Bryn Mawr colleague on the matter: "The truth of the matter can be put in this way: God is not known, he is not understood; he is used - sometimes as a meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion."

But, says Norm, 'real insofar as he is a force who influences human beings who believe in his existence' is obviously a question-begging trick: unless God actually does exist, the force that influences those who believe in his existence is not God but their belief in him. So God is either really real or he isn't real at all. There's no middle way in which God is real insofar as. As for the William James quote, I have no wish to appear disrespectful, but the same line of argument might equally be used to establish the validity of the idea of the Tooth Fairy.

My own difference with Norm here may be put in the form of a question. Why do we assume that no matter what the subject matter - trees, money, love, God - we can always draw the distinction between the real and the unreal in the same way? How would we go about distinguishing between a real and an unreal tree, money, love, God? Surely it is in the different ways in which we go about this that we come to appreciate the notions of reality involved. We do not know, free of any context, what the distinction between the real and the unreal comes to, and the context in which to consider the reality of God is the collection of beliefs and practices that we call religion.

The Art of Disappearing

A poem. I'm not sure from where.

When they say Don't I know you?

say no.

When they invite you to the party

remember what parties are like

before answering.

Someone telling you in a loud voice

they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.

If they say We should get together

say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.

You're trying to remember something

too important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a

grocery store

nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven't seen in ten years

appears at the door,

don't start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

Passover

Known to Jews as Pesach, it's a time of forgivenenss and letting go. After all, 'there is no saint who doesn't have a past, and no sinner who doesn't have a future.

The family holiday ritual meal is called the Seder.
The wicked son who mocks the Seder meal is not really wicked. After all, he has turned up.
Why were the rabbis discussing the laws of Pesach until morning? Well 'morning' in Hebrew is Shakhrit spelt: sh - kh - r - i - t - Shakhrit.
The 'sh' = the son who doesn't know how to ask. (she)
The 'kh' = the son who is wise (khacham)
The 'r' = the son who is wicked (rasha)
The 't' = the simple, pure or uncomplicated son (tam)
The extra yod? That stands for the divinity which combines them together. So 'morning' represents all the elements which go to make up a person: we are all at times unable to ask, at times wise, at times wicked and at times somewhat naive.

As Irene Lancaster says in her blog, quite an insight for a religion that some say is obsolete.

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad

Five out of six is even better. But somehow, when it comes to marriage and divorce, we don't think so. Along with many others I have been married twice, my first attempt to stay married ending in divorce. My second marriage in 1983 is still going strong and I'm sure only the old Grim Reaper will bring us down.

I believe that as many as one in three first marriages, and about a half of second marriages, end in divorce. Not nice. Divorce I mean. Especially for the kids. But the statistics are really quite impressive when you think about it. What they add up to is this; that, in spite of all the known difficulties and distractions, around five out of six people who choose to get married have within the first two attempts found a partner for life. I ask you, how many of life's other great matters do we get right, or right enough, by only our second attempt?

Actually I think it's even more surprising, given that, if you are a church member, and even more if you are/were an Anglican priest, there are so many with an active interest in your second marriage coming to grief. It's hard enough dealing with the negative feelings of those who have an interest in the previous arrangement, but when dear old Mother Church is secretly hoping that the new relationship goes belly-up to expose to the world the error of your ways, the odds against you are piled even higher.

So five out of six or thereabouts turns out to be a resounding vote of faith and confidence in God's great gift of matrimony.

Zen Judaism

This from Connexions.

If there is no self, then whose arthritis is this?

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

Drink tea and nourish life. With the first sip, joy. With the second, satisfaction. With the third, peace. With the fourth, a Danish.

Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another matter.

Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about?

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single, “Oy!”

There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. You bastard!

Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.

The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining enlightenment will be the least of your problems.

Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight, for heaven’s sake. You’ll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders.

Be patient and achieve all things. Be impatient and achieve all things faster.

To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. So you might want to see a specialist.
To practice Zen and the art of Jewish motorcycle maintenance, do the following: Get rid of the motorcycle. What on earth were you thinking?

Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. And keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of terminal illness.

The Torahs says, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” The Buddha says there is no “self”. So maybe we’re off the hook!

Playing to my strength

What I'm good at is staying home, staying in, being there, being helpful, supportive, encouraging, stimulating (I hope) and sometimes challenging to those I'm with. I don't have, want, or seem to need much of a social life or many friends. I'm particularly good with our cared-for kids because I'm interested in them, nearly always there for them, a bit of a tease, and really quite silly.

I was always there for my own kids even when 'there' was not where my kids were - a matter of great sadness at the time which I never quite get over. My kids are now in their thirties and I'm there (here) for my grandchildren.

What today?

The other day I decided I should join the Fellowship of Solitaries. No seriously. I also had another idea. To offer some time to spend with housebound people who might like to be read to by a real person rather than a talking book. I felt a glow of satisfaction at my sense of altruism.

Then a couple of hours later neither of these seemed quite such a good idea. So I abandoned them. At least for the time being.

Same Difference

I am no more clear about what autism is than ever I was. I mostly feel that it isn't anything, that it isn't even an 'it' at all; just an agreed number of items ticked on a list of the kinds of difficulties that most of us have anyway.

Having become acquainted with one or two young sufferers, I am particularly struck by how similar they are to other members of their families who are not themselves reckoned to be autistic. Their problems seem to stem, not from how different they are, but how similar.

Thomas Merton

I found these words of his today, and they moved me.

“Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. Contemplation does not feed the hungry; if does not clothe the naked…and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. But… without contemplation we cannot understand the significance of the world in which we must act. Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; we adhere to the insufficient, permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, losing sight of justice and charity, seized by the passions of the moment, and, finally, we betray Christ. Without contemplation, without the intimate, silent, secret pursuit of truth through love, our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.”

Neverland

An idea promoted last week by the Daily Telegraph was of a new club for people who are so proud that they haven't done things most other folk have, like seeing the Sound of Music, that they want to announce it to the world. The Society of People Who Have Never . . .

Before you too easily dismiss this as so much sanctimonious drivel, let me assure you that this is not necessarily the case. I myself, as one not given to sanctimony, and dwelling permanently far above the realms of drivel, have been known to list my 'nevers' with touching humility.

Never have I bought a lottery ticket, withdrawn cash from a machine, owned a microwave, carried a mobile phone, sent a text message, smoked pot or donated blood. Not because I believe any of the aforementioned is morally wrong or that not having done them makes me more acceptable to the great God above. I just haven't got around to or wanted to do them. One day I might. But then again I might not. The reason they are on my list is that they are things that most people, as far as I can tell, have done.

I think it's about who we are, and how we define ourselves. It works the other way round, in terms of what we do and have done. For instance I have often thought that I must be one of a very small minority of vegetarian (I count this as a positive) Anglican priests, who read the Guardian, vote Labour, support Israel, and follow my local Speedway team, the Belle Vue Aces.

Not that I want to start a club or form a society. Like Groucho Marx, I don't want to belong to any group that would have people like me as a member.

Making Kendal Smile

Not, as you might think, a Cumbrian local council initiative for the forthcoming festive season. It's one of Stephen Jacobs' interests, listed in his CV for Society Guardian.

Kendal is the name of his foster grandson. It made me aware of how much of my time is spent trying to raise a smile on children's faces - and not just children.

Attention deficit

Stewart Dakers in a recent Society Guardian article (November 22) offers some useful observations about certain kinds of children in need.

Among them is Harry. Harry needs someone to help him cope with his mum who keeps cutting herself. Then there's Del, who thinks that it's his fault that his father smacks his mother, and tries to get his dad to hit him instead. Others include Lee, who needs an assessment for a statement of special educational needs, Joleen, who can't understand why her mum, who has nasty breath and gross legs, causes her so much shame, and Chardonnay, who isn't even born yet, but is suffering from the effects of the things her mum is taking to relieve the pains of pregnancy, not least that her partner finds her less attractive and is therefore boning her best mate.

"none of this lot got anything out of Children In Need. Kids like this are not easy-fix material. They are not sexy. The Celebrity Get Me Into Here egofest of the charity calendar simply does not connect. Not in the way it's meant to.
These kids are all victims of institutional adult attention deficit. Like Wayne - sorry, just one more - an angry young man because he doesn't get any attention and never has. On the few occasions his parents play with him, they look well glum until someone calls them on the mobile, and then their faces light up. They don't seem to have time for him.
Something's familiar, right? His mum and dad sound just a tad like ... exactly, all those self-regarding entertainers strutting their self-promoting stuff, their egotism and ambition obliging them to undertake a lifestyle in which attention to self radically reduces attendance on others, including family.
Children have one need above all: attention. Attention deficit is an adult incompetency, a flaw in a culture that views children as commodities - "pass the parcel" kids shuffled between separated parents, designer babies to complement the Jacuzzi, therapeutic Tamagotchis to repair relationships, cradle-candy for the fanzines, pirated "treasures" to create the ideal "rainbow" family. These are victims of institutional child abuse, and it is not a postcode problem. Single parent or double income, council flat or suburban ranch, social housing or stately home, on benefit or on a roll, all produce their share of children in need.
So next year, let's make it Grown-ups In Need: competition between CEOs trying to fill in benefit application forms; the Price Is High, in which Whitehall mandarins guess the cost of clothes; Question Time, with ministers tested on their knowledge of the systems they run; the Weakest Link, with celebrities eliminated on the basis of the time they spent with their children in the previous week.
It could have the phone-in format, with a scoreboard, but instead of money being counted it would be unanswered letters of application, delayed appeal hearings or frustrated welfare visits.
It would be the same show, with the spotlight on those who direct the damage and ration the care. Network the victims with the abusers, confront those who supervise the pain with those who experience it. Generate some bloody anger. Put childcare on trial. It would be extraordinary TV, and might just make a real difference to Wayne, Harry, Chardonnay, Del, Lee and Joleen."

When your number's up

We've just heard from a friend of ours that her husband has a ninety per cent chance of being cancer-free after a course of radio- and chemotherapy. He was recently diagnosed as suffering from prostate cancer. I wonder what it really means? - to have a ninety per cent chance? Ninety per cent of what? The only thing that's hundred per cent certain (apart from taxes) is death. Does that mean he's more likely to die than recover, or recover than die, or recover then die?

And does the ninety per cent take into account his life expectancy anyway? He's sixty-one. Is he more likely to die of old age or something else before he recovers from this particular illness?

Percentages cannot be applied comfortably, let alone accurately, to human life. We acknowledge this implicitly by omitting in a case like this any consideration of a wife's committment to her husband's survival. If asked, she might reply that it is one hundred and ten per cent! So much for mathematics.

Not such great expectations

Sadly it isn't always that expectations are pitched too high. If so then at least the more able children would be fully extended. In our experience this is not so.

A third child we look after is a boy now seven. When he first came to visit us three years ago, his behaviour was at times that of a feral child. Every boundary that was set for him he would simply charge down. Always he was running away; escaping, through doors, over walls and fences, out of bed, down the stairs. Gradually, as we grew in confidence in our handling of him, he came to trust us sufficiently to accept the boundaries we set for him. As a consequence, his time with us now (one sleep-over a week from school, and one weekend a month) is eagerly looked forward to both by him and us, and passes much too quickly. In fact we have lately begun to invite another boy to come for tea and play for a while. It's amusing to see the first child giving the other one the benefit of his experience when it comes to "the way we do things here".

The pity is that throughout the past two years of his considerable progress here, the boy's mum has continued to report the same unruly behaviour when he is at home. We have tried to pass on such simple wisdom as we possess, around matters like bedtime routine, but what this boy needs is consistency. Above all he needs to know that attrition will not always get him what he wants. For too long his mum, even with professional support, has not felt able to deliver this, although at last we are beginning to see more hopeful signs.

The greater disappointment we feel is with his school. He goes to the same special school as the nine-year-old girl but is far more advanced in his ability to socialise and communicate. We have sought to give him structure for his speech and to encourage the use of sentences. We have read with him and taught him rhymes and songs. Yet, presumably because this is not being sufficiently reinforced at school, he quickly lapses into single-word, baby language. At times he regresses so much that he is barely able to achieve the level of sentence-making and pronunciation he had reached two years ago.

A great deal of time and money is being expended through social and educational services, on each of the children I've described. But how can we optimize the advances they make?

Biting off more than she can chew

Good news about the little boy in my last posting. We have heard from his physiotherapist. She has arranged to visit him while he's with us.

Another child, a girl aged nine, also has a diagnosis of autism. She goes to a special school and once a week comes home to us on the school bus. She then sleeps over so as to give her mum and brother a much needed break. Her intelligence and ways of communicating are very specialised. More than anything she needs to feel safe and moderately understood. Hilary and I have discovered slowly where her particular wavelength is, and how to get on it. We do wonder though how some of the experiences offered to her in school can possibly be constructive.

To take one example again, it is hardly likely that she would find a visit she made recently to a local mosque the least bit meaningful. Her understanding of her own family's Christian faith is typified by her description of a crucifix as 'Jesus' on 'a cross', feeling 'sad'. Now to stretch her religious knowledge within the familiar setting of her native faith is one thing, but to challenge her powers of comprehension by introducing her to other religions is surely a case of biting off more than she can possibly chew.

Back again

Back from a short holiday, I'm hoping to give more thought to where this blog is going and what it's for.

Part of my life is spent looking after children with learning disabilities who have been placed on the autistic spectrum. So I'd like to devote some of my blog to them, to what I believe we can learn from them, and how best to help them and their parents. Today, for instance, Hilary (my wife) and I attended a review at the home of one of them, a boy aged two. He comes to us once or twice a week and usually stays the night. He has a rare neurological condition which afflicts him with, sometimes frequent, epileptic fits. His arms and legs are quite floppy but his back and trunk are strong and firm. He struggles for movement as much as he can, sits up, and tries to crawl.

It seems to me that, like many children with puzzling disabilities, he is being let down in quite basic and practical ways by the way we provide social care. One of the concerns I raised at today's meeting is that little is being done to exercise and develop the muscles that he does not instinctively use. Physical therapy on some of the more floppy parts of his body might help him to discover a use for them that his condition is obscuring. In spite of a good attendance at the meeting of social and health workers, together with his parents and three volunteer carers, it appears that physiotherapy, though requested, has not so far been accessed. We are all doing our best, but our best isn't good enough - for him. His parents are very committed to caring for him and the way he relates and responds to his mother would melt the coldest heart. But it's as if the power exercised by the state somehow disempowers these parents. They are actually lulled into a kind of abdication of responsibility for their own child, whilst a good-enough parent with a bit of power to command the resources that might help him is probably all that he needs to guarantee meaningful progress.