Friday, 28 February 2020
Hillsong, Satan, and Dabhar. The Wonder and Variety of Creative Energy
Facebook often recommends some weird treat videos. The latest is a YouTube post by a Christian with some very definite views complaining Hillsong churches are run by the Illuminati and Satanists.
He says "If you ever want to see a picture of what Hell looks like, go to a Hillsong Easter special service." He says a lot more. It's all a bit nuts but a form of nuts given respectability and a label of sanity by being framed within a culturally acceptable religious system, albeit one of the more odd forms of it.
As I say, Facebook recommendations are a treat.
He shows part of last year's Easter special event in London. I admit that I, an atheist ex-Christian, was moved by it. Incredible staging and creativity in a dramatic presentation of the crucifixion. Yes, it was pretty horrible. But crucifixion isn't exactly fluffy bunnies and choccy eggs. Any preachers out there are welcome to quote me on that one in their sermons, because there are no fluffy bunnies at all in the Biblical account of Jesus' death. Nobody can say I'm heretical on that point!
Later he shows part of previous shows. He claims he's known for years that Hillsong is Satanic. He's not left Hillsong though meaning that this faithful Christian has spent years intentionally being part of something he believed to be wildly unchristian. For me the funniest moment came in a dramatic recreation of the story of Jesus' trial before Pontius Pilate. The crowd below were shouting "Crucify Him!" just as the story relates. Even the most extreme biblical fundamentalist wouldn't have a problem with those words being used in that context. Because they're in the book. The maker of this video had another interpretation of this aspect of an impressive Easter special. For him, when the crowd shouted "Crucify Him!" it implied that Hillsong hated Jesus and wanted Jesus dead. I confess I burst out laughing. For me, it was simple the trial story, exactly as written, interestingly and creatively retold.
It won't encourage me to head up Westgate Road to Hillsong on Sunday, even for the cool songs and dry ice machines. As an ex-Christian who was damaged by the "gospel of Jesus Christ" and as a transgender lesbian, Hillsong wouldn't be an ideal environment to nurture my safety. But kudos to them for being a church that embraces creativity in big ways as part of their worship and service to their god. I know it's done as a tool of conversion and as a show to hold onto the "yoof" and that better stagecraft doesn't imply greater truth but without a fabulous outpouring of creativity, God is even more dead than the one Nietzsche said we'd killed.
Even John chapter 1 - in the beginning was the Word. That can be translated as "creative energy" ... creative energy was made flesh. Word is "Dabhar" which is dynamic, passionate, compassionate, moving, a verb as much as a noun. This is Christ as possibility, as adaptable as water poured, as the best of Rembrandt and Pollock, Michelangelo and Hepworth, Josquin and Gaga, as the moments when the artist is swept and washed completely by participation in creation.
Christ the Word, the Dabhar is Christ as rainbow, Christ as the anointing in which we all share by virtue of our rich humanity, Christ as the freedom to write, paint, sculpt, dance, to laugh and weep in stunned wonder at performance, waterfalls, mountains, or the moon under Jupiter. It's Christ as a biblical word painting expressing the way, truth, life, and bold rainbow paradoxes we all are beneath the veneer of events, traumas, damages, and tiredness, that we too are anointed with the most brilliant of fire. It's a Christ who says we are and that we can. It's the Christ beyond joy, the miniature big bang that's inside us with potential to say "Let there be light" wherever we walk or to be hidden away, with or without intention.
It's the metaphorical Christ I am when words flow and the metaphorical Christ I cannot yet express when I can hardly hold a pencil without panic. Dabhar is freedom to experiment, to get it wrong, to enjoy the path to expression even when we lack the words, the skill, the complex musicianship. It's the excitement of solos at the Albert Hall and of our first struggled notes. Christ the Word is the Christ of being fully human and nurturing the freedom of others to bear their fully humanity. Dabhar is the essence of creative radical acceptance, set in perpetual motion through a word.
We were that we were. We will be that we will be.
So faith that is of the "divine" must have its root in creative energy, the same root that so many of my friends have in their lives regardless of theism, atheism, pantheism, "whatevertheism" or nontheism and regardless of the metaphorical language they use to describe the sense of wonder and awe they have at the very possibility of life.
There is a view known as theopraxy which states that God is the good we do. I don't have a word for a view stating that God is also the creativity we express and encourage. I like both of these non-contradictory views though.
So Facebook granted me a double treat of showing me creative expression and one of the wackier Christians. I granted myself indulgence in this very autistic special interest I still have years after walking away from churches and from the close to death doctrines I believed - which wouldn't sit comfortably with those John chapter 1 paragraphs.
Thursday, 27 February 2020
Reclaiming Our Hope and Power In Mental Health Despair
I've been following a large UK mental health group on Facebook recently and I notice something:
About a third of the posts are people saying they have no hope because they're not receiving "services" from the NHS.
Another third are people saying they are receiving "services" but aren't sorted out by "services" so have no hope.
The other third are about other things.
Three possible things needed to alleviate this Catch-22 of mental health despair. All of them are needed:
A. Sort out the services. Obviously there are too many problems with staffing levels, funding, waiting lists and everything else. It has to be recognised though that even with overwhelmingly massive funding increases there still wouldn't be enough services to deal with all the pain in our society
B. Societal change. The most difficult of the three possibilities Given that most mental health distress arises from societal issues, complex and simple, and from direct trauma we need governmental policies and societal changes that seek to minimise those causes, thus decreasing the mental health crisis our society is experiencing. Our government, by continuing to make political choices for poverty and inequality, isn't doing that.
C. Teach people that services and the medical model aren't necessarily the way and that handing such power and responsibility to others is usually not a good thing. Empower people. Teach them their own autonomy and strength, their innate worth and meaning. Grant them the space for radical self acceptance. Sometimes services are geared to that, through forms of psychology not psychiatry, sometimes not. It's very hard to learn to cope with yourself while yourself is powerfully masked or crushed by drugs as it is in the words of many in that group. It's also hard to do while experiencing mental health distress. However, it can be done, given much patience and determination.
I'm worried that so many people are taught, repeatedly, that hope is to be found only through psych services and that they invest so much in hope in those services, hope that's very often ruined, leaving them with nothing. It's as if psychiatry is the new Jesus and has become prophet, priest and king for these people. The medical model has too often stopped being just a model and become a religion, sometimes with fundamentalist adherents. As a religion it may have more powerful bread and wine in its drugs but in many ways it offers less than the communities inspired by the old gods.
I'm also saddened by it as I see the writings of people every single day who aren't coping at all well and I know they are not in a position to hear "you can become your own teacher and wisdom" because that's a difficult conclusion to reach even when you're not in severe mental health distress. Saddened as people I will never meet struggle, often struggle to stay alive. I know that struggle too well.
Most of them though want to hear that the NHS will cure them and I couldn't give that assurance even if NHS services were ideal and even if I knew they'd benefit from the worthwhile skills gained in trauma therapy or DBT or whatever else they are on a massive waiting list to receive.
I can give space in which it's okay to be hurting. I can give assurance that a person, underneath pain, is beautiful. I can give assurance that a person has undiscovered power and wisdom. I can, very fallibly, encourage a person that they're much stronger than they think and can navigate to their own answers. Not my answers. Not an "expert's" answers. Their answers. I can provide cups of tea too!
But I can and will never assurance that anyone else can remove their distress. I find too often that this is the assurance people want, not to learn that they're amazing beings who can become free.
While we may all need some help, in the end we have to remove our distress ourselves, sometimes by changing our lives often by acceptance rather than divorce. Sometimes we cannot remove the source of our distress. We just have to radically accept and in that place, paradoxically, there's often a greater chance of change.
In the end, healing and recovery are primarily from within. We've been conditioned to sell our hope and power to others. To reclaim hope and power is hard. But it is possible.
As for me, I'm still reclaiming. I'm not all the way yet and perhaps the learning will never end. The struggles are still there and heaven knows I'd still qualify for a range of psychiatric diagnoses! It is possible though.
It is all possible.
It is all achievable.
Within the confines and restrictions of the external world we can truly be free within our own minds, just as Victor Frankl, the Stoics and so many others discovered and proclaimed long before I ever wrote my first annoying Facebook or blog post.
About a third of the posts are people saying they have no hope because they're not receiving "services" from the NHS.
Another third are people saying they are receiving "services" but aren't sorted out by "services" so have no hope.
The other third are about other things.
Three possible things needed to alleviate this Catch-22 of mental health despair. All of them are needed:
A. Sort out the services. Obviously there are too many problems with staffing levels, funding, waiting lists and everything else. It has to be recognised though that even with overwhelmingly massive funding increases there still wouldn't be enough services to deal with all the pain in our society
B. Societal change. The most difficult of the three possibilities Given that most mental health distress arises from societal issues, complex and simple, and from direct trauma we need governmental policies and societal changes that seek to minimise those causes, thus decreasing the mental health crisis our society is experiencing. Our government, by continuing to make political choices for poverty and inequality, isn't doing that.
C. Teach people that services and the medical model aren't necessarily the way and that handing such power and responsibility to others is usually not a good thing. Empower people. Teach them their own autonomy and strength, their innate worth and meaning. Grant them the space for radical self acceptance. Sometimes services are geared to that, through forms of psychology not psychiatry, sometimes not. It's very hard to learn to cope with yourself while yourself is powerfully masked or crushed by drugs as it is in the words of many in that group. It's also hard to do while experiencing mental health distress. However, it can be done, given much patience and determination.
I'm worried that so many people are taught, repeatedly, that hope is to be found only through psych services and that they invest so much in hope in those services, hope that's very often ruined, leaving them with nothing. It's as if psychiatry is the new Jesus and has become prophet, priest and king for these people. The medical model has too often stopped being just a model and become a religion, sometimes with fundamentalist adherents. As a religion it may have more powerful bread and wine in its drugs but in many ways it offers less than the communities inspired by the old gods.
I'm also saddened by it as I see the writings of people every single day who aren't coping at all well and I know they are not in a position to hear "you can become your own teacher and wisdom" because that's a difficult conclusion to reach even when you're not in severe mental health distress. Saddened as people I will never meet struggle, often struggle to stay alive. I know that struggle too well.
Most of them though want to hear that the NHS will cure them and I couldn't give that assurance even if NHS services were ideal and even if I knew they'd benefit from the worthwhile skills gained in trauma therapy or DBT or whatever else they are on a massive waiting list to receive.
I can give space in which it's okay to be hurting. I can give assurance that a person, underneath pain, is beautiful. I can give assurance that a person has undiscovered power and wisdom. I can, very fallibly, encourage a person that they're much stronger than they think and can navigate to their own answers. Not my answers. Not an "expert's" answers. Their answers. I can provide cups of tea too!
But I can and will never assurance that anyone else can remove their distress. I find too often that this is the assurance people want, not to learn that they're amazing beings who can become free.
While we may all need some help, in the end we have to remove our distress ourselves, sometimes by changing our lives often by acceptance rather than divorce. Sometimes we cannot remove the source of our distress. We just have to radically accept and in that place, paradoxically, there's often a greater chance of change.
In the end, healing and recovery are primarily from within. We've been conditioned to sell our hope and power to others. To reclaim hope and power is hard. But it is possible.
As for me, I'm still reclaiming. I'm not all the way yet and perhaps the learning will never end. The struggles are still there and heaven knows I'd still qualify for a range of psychiatric diagnoses! It is possible though.
It is all possible.
It is all achievable.
Within the confines and restrictions of the external world we can truly be free within our own minds, just as Victor Frankl, the Stoics and so many others discovered and proclaimed long before I ever wrote my first annoying Facebook or blog post.
Sunday, 23 February 2020
Mental Health Distress. You Are Your Own Teacher And Healer.
I'm amazed most days by the changes in the last year, the acceptance and even comfort with DID, and the plans that are being put into place.
One year ago today I posted something that included this:
"I've been less desperately suicidal today. Only said out loud that I want to die half a dozen times. That counts as a very good day."
A year on, that would count as far worse than the very bad days.
Moral: When your mental health distress reaches a level at which you can't see hope, can't see answers, can't see that things can ever be better, struggle to make a list of one positive, and conclude that death would be better, you need to seek more objective evidence.
Because hope is still there. Answers are there. Things can be better. And there are always positives. Just like the sun still shines at night and, on a cloudy day, life still shines.
Keep going though it's sometimes ridiculously hard to get through a week, a day, an hour. You are a powerful being with light inside you, deserving of compassion, and though it may be staggeringly difficult you can triumph and bask in sunlight again. It's even better, because metaphorical sunscreen isn't going to be needed!
I nearly died several times last year. So close. But I didn't. In retrospect, staying alive was a much better choice. There is always a choice. Always. Sometimes it feels like there isn't but there is. Always.
Keep going.
I promise there will be a day on which you rejoice and even dance because you've endured and worked and dug in with gritted teeth through overwhelming distress.
A year ago my brain was still adjusting to being off all psychiatric drugs. A year ago I'd been diagnosed with DID and was still struggling to cope with everything that meant. I'd just been told the waiting list for therapy was rather longer than I'd initially been told. And I fell apart.
I knew I'd die. Unless I worked. Every single day. Worked to live. Worked to get myself out every day, at least somewhere. I knew I'd die unless I took responsibility for myself. Worked to find some structure. Worked to radically accept DID and everything else.
Overcoming mental health distress and the effects of trauma are, in the end, our own responsibility. Not the responsibility of outside agencies, psychiatry, psychology, friends, and family though each may support in some way. Even psychiatry - which you know I have strong critical views about.
In the end we have to heal ourselves and nobody, no matter how kind or patient or wise, can do it for us. We should never offer that responsibility to another. Not a religion. Not a god. Not a doctor. Not an expert. Not a guru. Too often we're conditioned to think we have no hope until the religious or secular priest-king steps in.
Just this week I've read many posts in a mental health group in which all hope is ascribed to the God of the medical model, as if healing is impossible without the direct intervention of the expert. In the same group I've read many posts despairing that there is no hope because the expert has made things worse. "I am lost without the expert." "With the expert I am lost." And so despair increases, as it did for me and for many others.
Take back the responsibility and the power. You have them in your brilliant humanity, full of contradiction and pain, reason and relief.
In the final analysis, we are guru enough. Though we may learn much from others we have to teach ourselves. We are healer enough. Last year I took back that power for myself balancing self determination with the wisdom that no person stands alone. It's true I've listened and learned from many others but I am the agent of my mind and unless I become the active force their wisdom can't help at all. And unless I find my own wisdom I cannot be truly free.
One year ago today I posted something that included this:
"I've been less desperately suicidal today. Only said out loud that I want to die half a dozen times. That counts as a very good day."
A year on, that would count as far worse than the very bad days.
Moral: When your mental health distress reaches a level at which you can't see hope, can't see answers, can't see that things can ever be better, struggle to make a list of one positive, and conclude that death would be better, you need to seek more objective evidence.
Because hope is still there. Answers are there. Things can be better. And there are always positives. Just like the sun still shines at night and, on a cloudy day, life still shines.
Keep going though it's sometimes ridiculously hard to get through a week, a day, an hour. You are a powerful being with light inside you, deserving of compassion, and though it may be staggeringly difficult you can triumph and bask in sunlight again. It's even better, because metaphorical sunscreen isn't going to be needed!
I nearly died several times last year. So close. But I didn't. In retrospect, staying alive was a much better choice. There is always a choice. Always. Sometimes it feels like there isn't but there is. Always.
Keep going.
I promise there will be a day on which you rejoice and even dance because you've endured and worked and dug in with gritted teeth through overwhelming distress.
A year ago my brain was still adjusting to being off all psychiatric drugs. A year ago I'd been diagnosed with DID and was still struggling to cope with everything that meant. I'd just been told the waiting list for therapy was rather longer than I'd initially been told. And I fell apart.
I knew I'd die. Unless I worked. Every single day. Worked to live. Worked to get myself out every day, at least somewhere. I knew I'd die unless I took responsibility for myself. Worked to find some structure. Worked to radically accept DID and everything else.
Overcoming mental health distress and the effects of trauma are, in the end, our own responsibility. Not the responsibility of outside agencies, psychiatry, psychology, friends, and family though each may support in some way. Even psychiatry - which you know I have strong critical views about.
In the end we have to heal ourselves and nobody, no matter how kind or patient or wise, can do it for us. We should never offer that responsibility to another. Not a religion. Not a god. Not a doctor. Not an expert. Not a guru. Too often we're conditioned to think we have no hope until the religious or secular priest-king steps in.
Just this week I've read many posts in a mental health group in which all hope is ascribed to the God of the medical model, as if healing is impossible without the direct intervention of the expert. In the same group I've read many posts despairing that there is no hope because the expert has made things worse. "I am lost without the expert." "With the expert I am lost." And so despair increases, as it did for me and for many others.
Take back the responsibility and the power. You have them in your brilliant humanity, full of contradiction and pain, reason and relief.
In the final analysis, we are guru enough. Though we may learn much from others we have to teach ourselves. We are healer enough. Last year I took back that power for myself balancing self determination with the wisdom that no person stands alone. It's true I've listened and learned from many others but I am the agent of my mind and unless I become the active force their wisdom can't help at all. And unless I find my own wisdom I cannot be truly free.
I still came so close to suicide. Mental health distress isn't easy. How much of an understatement is that?!
It's not been the easiest year but it's been worth it. I stand. I live. I am glad. I am grateful. More, I learn to begin to live the enigma:
I am that I am.
It's not been the easiest year but it's been worth it. I stand. I live. I am glad. I am grateful. More, I learn to begin to live the enigma:
I am that I am.
Saturday, 22 February 2020
For Billy Graham. A Tribute. Written on the Day he Died.
Two years ago, the most famous Christian evangelist of the twentieth century died. I wrote a tribute to him.
Two years on, it's his son Franklin in the news after every arena in the UK in which he was booked to speak cancelled their bookings, citing his outspoken views on LGBT people and Islam but definitely not cancelling because of the traditional Christian salvation story he preaches. In all of this, freedom to believe and preach that version of a tale of redemption was never threatened but the safety and well-being of other people to whom hateful things are said was judged to outweigh that religious freedom.
Some Christians are very cross that Franklin Graham's arena visits were cancelled. Others were pleased and many Christians were among those who campaigned and wrote to the arenas. Graham is currently setting the wheels of legal action in process with expensive lawyers. Just like Jesus never did whenever he was challenged! Prayer to keep the arena events failed. Maybe lawyers can succeed.
This is not for Franklin Graham though. This is dedicated to Billy. It doesn't touch on his views on women, his statement that the Jews control the media, or his affection for Kim Il-Sung. It doesn't touch on his refusal to have racial segregation in his rallies as early as 1953 or his campaign against apartheid and his prison correspondence with Nelson Mandela. He was a man with good and bad qualities, much like us all.
 |
| Billy Graham. Photo taken from this excellent article. |
Tribute to one of the most successful Christian preachers of the 20th century.
Billy Graham is dead. A man of energy, zeal, passion. A man who continued to walk a path even when hated or threatened. We can all learn from these qualities.
I will say this for him: He believed what he did in the face of praise and adulation - almost worship. He continued to believe to in the face of rejection and ridicule. [And in the face of reason too.] Truly, Billy Graham did his best.
However, to you Billy I say this:
Farewell, you who believed that we all so far fallen that we deserve to burn for eternity and need bloodletting to happen before an omnipotent merciful deity could ever forgive us. Farewell you who preyed upon the insecurities of millions and convinced them that Jesus was the only way they wouldn't suffer agony for eternity. Farewell preacher of the old, old gospel horror story of plunging people into a fountain running with human blood.
Farewell, you enthusiastic bigot whose words and ways harmed so many thousands of LGBT+ people and continue to harm thousands more.
You said you thought AIDS is a judgement from God. And then back tracked when you realised your words would get you into trouble. You actively supported anti-gay legislation. Your organisation still promotes gay "cure" "therapy". You believed homosexuality to be a "sinister form of perversion."
Your children are even worse than you. You raised them to be bigots too. Jesus won't be saying "Well done good and faithful servant" about that.
Your son says that gay people are the enemy and that gay people are causing a "moral 9/11".
There's a campaign to keep your son out of our country this year. A campaign started by some Christians. Nice Christians. Faithful Christians. Strong believers. Christians who are happy to have a deep faith in Jesus but would never ever dream of thinking of any human being as an abomination or turning religious freedom into an excuse for bigotry or hatred. Not twisted up Christians like your children were raised to be.
Your daughter said that God allows events like the actual 9/11 because he is so worried about transgender people. And if we don't let transgender people go to the toilet God will protect us from storms too.
The God of your children is a scumbag. Worse. Much worse. But I am being restrained.
Farewell Billy Graham.
I hope your brand of religion dies soon. I hope every similar brand - of whatever title, God, dogma, holy book, or damnable manipulation - dies. The human race shouldn't be held back by the likes of you or such versions of spirituality any longer.
I hope if you do get to your heaven you'll be welcomed there by a posse of glitter wearing queer people who hadn't even said the Sinner's Prayer, including atheists, pagans and Muslims, and be so disgusted by it all that you walk out of paradise.
Farewell Billy Graham.
I am sad to say that I once approved of you whole heartedly. But I learned. May your children learn. May all they have convinced of their darkness learn too.
May your followers and theirs turn to the light and be healed of the scars of a gospel that taught them of their own depravity and of how much they deserved condemnation before dangling the carrot of salvation in front of them in their despair. A story of hope given to those whose hope had been stolen from them by a thief. May your followers have that stolen hope returned.
Friday, 21 February 2020
Poem - Salon, A Call to Conformity and Loss of Self
A poem free written in five minutes in a writing group, sparked from a bad photocopy of a photo of a woman getting her hair done in a 1920s salon, her head hooked up to some electric monstrosity, her face as if joy would never be possible again. It wasn't this picture but it was the same manner of heated hair curler.
I'd encourage you, should you wish, to do everything that's the opposite of every line. Be in rebellion. But if you like exuberance in your hair then go ahead and be the woman in the picture.
Or as the badge I was given yesterday while writing nonconformist words on a street front window in Gateshead town centre says, be a dissident.
I'd encourage you, should you wish, to do everything that's the opposite of every line. Be in rebellion. But if you like exuberance in your hair then go ahead and be the woman in the picture.
Or as the badge I was given yesterday while writing nonconformist words on a street front window in Gateshead town centre says, be a dissident.
Salon
Boredom, brokenness,
Painful self disgust.
A silent, submissive
Bows to a belief of
Inadequacy, ugliness.
Sunken in sin, original,
Inescapable, a tainted twisted
Image of a hateful curse.
Put on a show. Be the clown.
Mask yourself to acceptability,
To social conformity.
To a full-page colour spread
Displaying all your flaws
In the body of an airbrushed model.
Never rebel. Never exult.
Don’t be a problem.
Be just like them, fake your smile.
Fake your life. Fake your heart,
Die inside daily.
For Christ. For capitalism.
For acceptance. For the patriarchy.
For the convenience of monochrome.
Make waves only in greeting.
Even your hair is wrong.
So change it and live alone
Though surrounded by crowds.
Poem - Sweet Potato Surprise
A poem, written in ten minutes in a writing group. You know how writing sometimes takes an unexpected turn before suddenly taking another one? This is a true story of my quiet lunch at home on Tuesday. Until it becomes less true.
Sweet Potato Surprise
Lunch. Dismayed surprise.
Sweet Potato Surprise
Lunch. Dismayed surprise.
Between supermarket and home
My sweet potato ready meal transformed.
One new word appeared
One new word appeared
To spark fear into taste buds
More used to bland baked beans.
“Spicy.” Horrific
Hammer images of burning tongues
And diarrhoea.
All was well. Mildest spice
The reality. A mind relieved,
No extremist vegan vindaloo.
As I ate, stress free,
A horse walked past my window.
Bold, dark, out of place.
In Byker, walkers are
On two legs, canines off leads,
Or felines running free.
Was it real? I ran out.
Pavement. Grass. Empty. Barren
Pavement. Grass. Empty. Barren
Except for litter.
So did I hallucinate
Equine invasions? Or worse,
Equine invasions? Or worse,
A spice free burger?
My sectioning is coming.
A team of psychiatrists
Gather outside my gate.
“She’s seeing horses,
She needs Olanzapine obliteration
And Thorazine laced chicken tikka.”
Falling into psychosis.
Safe food and farm animals my delusion.
They all say it’s wrong.
This, my lunchtime reality,
Is meaningful. Listening,
I will stroke one cow
While eating another.
Prophetically condemn
The Tory government.
They are cause and effect.
Feed us with insanity and
Eat our bright future.
Thursday, 20 February 2020
I Was Born Again in Jesus Thirty Years Ago. My Biggest Mistake.
There are some who would applaud this post. There are others who would very strongly disagree. That's okay.
Thirty years ago today after I gave my life to my blessed lord and saviour Jesus Christ and was born again. I still remember how I felt afterwards, the almost overwhelming joy that I had found the truth, found the Prince of Peace, been forgiven, and had something of eternal meaning including a promise of being happy forever. Three days later I gave my heartfelt testimony of salvation in a crowded Pentecostal church in Sheffield full of young people, enthusiastic in their worship and pleased to be Christians, singing songs of praise with their hands in the air. I was absolute in my certainty that I'd made the right choice and that Jesus was my way, my truth, and my life.
In retrospect, walking into conservative Christianity was possibly the worst choice I've ever made but at the time it seemed right and I'd come to believe it was the only way. So praying that Sinner's Prayer and asking Jesus into my life was hardly a choice at all.
Hell or heaven? Despair or sure hope? Meaninglessness or eternal perfect meaning? Rejecting love or accepting love divine? It was a no-brainer for a vulnerable teenager. I was vulnerable too though I had a good home and wasn't ever going to be one of those "rough diamond" testimonies that get you a job on the evangelism circuit.
Thirty years ago today after I gave my life to my blessed lord and saviour Jesus Christ and was born again. I still remember how I felt afterwards, the almost overwhelming joy that I had found the truth, found the Prince of Peace, been forgiven, and had something of eternal meaning including a promise of being happy forever. Three days later I gave my heartfelt testimony of salvation in a crowded Pentecostal church in Sheffield full of young people, enthusiastic in their worship and pleased to be Christians, singing songs of praise with their hands in the air. I was absolute in my certainty that I'd made the right choice and that Jesus was my way, my truth, and my life.
In retrospect, walking into conservative Christianity was possibly the worst choice I've ever made but at the time it seemed right and I'd come to believe it was the only way. So praying that Sinner's Prayer and asking Jesus into my life was hardly a choice at all.
Hell or heaven? Despair or sure hope? Meaninglessness or eternal perfect meaning? Rejecting love or accepting love divine? It was a no-brainer for a vulnerable teenager. I was vulnerable too though I had a good home and wasn't ever going to be one of those "rough diamond" testimonies that get you a job on the evangelism circuit.
Thinking you're a monster because of your gender and developing severe mental health issues as a result of that plus trauma you've thoroughly dissociated and buried wasn't a crowd winner like if I'd been either selling sex for drugs or selling drugs to buy sex. Those were the stories that Christian crowds wanted to hear the saved talk about. You could hear the Oohs and Ahhs too if someone had been in prison.
My testimony was far less palatable. My testimony could receive Boos not Oohs. That did happen. Especially as church teaching on gender wasn't exactly accepting and since underneath everything my life wasn't full of the joy of the Lord in the way other people's seemed to be. I say seemed to be deliberately. There was a lot of acting, especially in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, by people who didn't seem to be getting as many blessings as other people and so felt guilt, shame, or rejected. In reality it was mostly that they were less suggestible but that obvious piece of psychology never made it to the sermons or the list of things we had to believe.
Over the next twenty-six years I was a part of many churches, Protestant and Catholic. Never Orthodox though I did read Orthodox works too. Jesus was my rock, my meaning, my hope, my everything. I read the Bible so many times. So many other Christian books. God was the core of my life and my identity. I was, metaphorically, totally crucified with Christ. There's a song about that Bible verse. I was a Christian and I walked by faith, the (false) assurance of things unseen. Hallelujah! By his stripes I am healed. Praise the Lord who heals all your diseases. What crap I believed!
It took more than twenty years for me to begin to disentangle myself from it all and another five before I could walk away. Several more to mostly heal from the damage. There are ways in which I'm still healing from religion, just as I'm still healing from other things.
I was broken when I went into the Church. Broken when I was baptised by a charismatic church in Sussex. More broken but able, at times, to hide it when re-baptised, or baptised properly, by the Modern Jesus Army in the Golden Marquee during one of their festivals. More broken still but strongly thinking I was finally following the right kind of Christianity when I was baptised yet again or conditionally baptised into the Catholic Church (Latin Rite).
And I was broken but beginning to find my way into freedom when I was rededicated - not baptised even though there was water poured over me - in Metropolitan Community Church, a congregation who helped me greatly, supported me, were patient with my constant doctrinal and practical questioning of my faith, and were brilliantly gentle and kind when I left them and left church and Christianity behind entirely.
I spent decades giving everything I could to the cause and life of God. Sometimes I could convince myself that he was healing me and that the joy of the Lord was my strength as I taught and was taught.
I sought better and purer ways to live for Jesus, in the Holy Spirit. Wandered round different churches. Turned Catholic after deciding it was historically more accurate, closer to what was seen in the early church.
I prayed for hours a day. Served as best I could, leaning on Jesus as my strength. Wept for the lost. Wept for myself.
I tried my best while relying on god because my best was filthy rags, to use a Bible metaphor. Apart from Christ you can do nothing. Nothing. I was that wretch, saved by grace that I deserved and I sang those hymns that wondered how God could love people. I loved the God who died for me, so infinite in mercy that he was incapable of forgiving anyone unless blood was shed. I deserved to burn for eternity. We all did. In short, I followed the religion that looked upon humanity in a worse way than any other major faith system and had a worse punishment too.
And God, beautiful redeemer, left me in pain, left me with my unhealed trauma, my mental health distress, my "evil abomination" gender and sexuality. I prayed so hard. So, so hard. I was prayed for. I was exorcised on occasion too. I was told I was doing it wrong because if I actually had faith I wouldn't have the problems. I was told to repent of depression, to repent of everything. Just trust Jesus and be happy. He commands you to be happy. Commands you to have a sound mind. One time someone I'd never met phoned me from across the country to say "I was depressed and I prayed and God took it away. So I don't see what your problem is!" The lack of compassion I sometimes met from people who just assumed I wasn't trusting and obeying properly was astounding.
It wasn't the people who added to my brokenness though. Not even the ones who would say "If you're depressed you obviously have sins to repent of." Yes, Christianity taught many of us to believe and say monstrous things. I stress it though. The people weren't the problem. The entire damn system of anti-human religion was. It's hard to fully love yourself, or even fully love and embrace others in their beautiful wonder when you're told everyone deserves punishment and that you have to die every day.
I was totally broken inside, though hiding it as much as I could, when I found that first crack that led, eventually, to being able psychologically to escape. It came in rebellion, starting a book by someone I'd been strongly told to avoid. A "false" Christian, Matthew Fox. In the mid-nineties we'd placed the blame for the "Nine O'Clock Service Scandal" firmly at the feet of Fox, who had been consulted on liturgy. So we were able to be proud and claim the sexual abuse there was his fault, not the fault of proper Christianity where such evils wouldn't happened!
I never finished the book, Original Blessing, but it was enough to give something that grew - that spirituality is always creative, evolving, and starts from the via positiva, not the via negativa at the initial core of Western Christianity. He also proposed something I absolutely believe now but which I couldn't accept at the time: That the doctrine of original sin is heinous bullshit!
That form of Christianity I lived, following the beliefs and practices of so many churches, gives hope but it's hope that a problem has been solved. That problem turned out to be unreal, invented, and ultimately anti-human. Original sin was only a part of that invention.
There are other forms of Christianity. Healthier forms. For decades I was warned against the heretics, not to put my salvation at peril by going near them. I'm very pleased to have met some of them, even worshiped among them while navigating myself slowly out of religion. Metropolitan Community Church (Northern Lights) in Newcastle Upon Tyne was one of the good places. Unitarians and Quakers also helped me along the way too and there are individual Christians who have incredible lives drawing from faith that's positive about humanity.
Some scars remain. Memories remain. Bible verses spring to mind often and every now and again unhealthy guilt or unhealthy religion jumps out of my head. Not because of any god of course. It's just how human brains and minds work. I still read, at times, some Christians, some theists, some for whom Jesus is still very important. They're just not the Christians and Jesus followers whose style of religion caused me and so many other people great harm. I still have my books by Matthew Fox, John Shelby Spong, Gretta Vosper, Jim Palmer, Quaker writings, and other authors too and follow some Christian writers and groups online, including ones campaigning for full acceptance and inclusion of LGBT+ people in all churches. Some of the writers I read have versions of Jesus who I'd very gladly sit and eat with just as I'd enjoy the company of my Christian friends.
Thirty years after giving myself to Jesus in the Sinner's Prayer I know this:
It was for freedom that the grace of Clare has set me free from the law of sin and death invented by religion.
And when, two years ago, six missionaries gathered round me in Sunderland and kept telling me about the sinfulness and hopelessness of people all I could do was look around and see the incredible beauty of each person who passed, often covered in pain and suffering and worry, but always fabulous grace underneath the surface waves.
I got out of religion and have worked hard to recover from it. I have no regrets about that.
I was within the Christian religion for twenty five years, mostly within unhealthy forms of it. I have regrets. Of course I do. They don't change anything. Yet they remain.
What is more important though is my future. How every day there are new choices to be made, new ways to grow both compassion and passion, new opportunities for the adventure of a less certain life, and new moments in which to enter deeper into healing and radical acceptance. The future is unpredictable but within the possibilities we can seek to receive, give and cultivate light. Within every moment we can learn to be more fully human, more fully loving, more fully creative beings. After all, that's what the Jesus without dogma would love for us to be.
My testimony was far less palatable. My testimony could receive Boos not Oohs. That did happen. Especially as church teaching on gender wasn't exactly accepting and since underneath everything my life wasn't full of the joy of the Lord in the way other people's seemed to be. I say seemed to be deliberately. There was a lot of acting, especially in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, by people who didn't seem to be getting as many blessings as other people and so felt guilt, shame, or rejected. In reality it was mostly that they were less suggestible but that obvious piece of psychology never made it to the sermons or the list of things we had to believe.
Over the next twenty-six years I was a part of many churches, Protestant and Catholic. Never Orthodox though I did read Orthodox works too. Jesus was my rock, my meaning, my hope, my everything. I read the Bible so many times. So many other Christian books. God was the core of my life and my identity. I was, metaphorically, totally crucified with Christ. There's a song about that Bible verse. I was a Christian and I walked by faith, the (false) assurance of things unseen. Hallelujah! By his stripes I am healed. Praise the Lord who heals all your diseases. What crap I believed!
It took more than twenty years for me to begin to disentangle myself from it all and another five before I could walk away. Several more to mostly heal from the damage. There are ways in which I'm still healing from religion, just as I'm still healing from other things.
I was broken when I went into the Church. Broken when I was baptised by a charismatic church in Sussex. More broken but able, at times, to hide it when re-baptised, or baptised properly, by the Modern Jesus Army in the Golden Marquee during one of their festivals. More broken still but strongly thinking I was finally following the right kind of Christianity when I was baptised yet again or conditionally baptised into the Catholic Church (Latin Rite).
And I was broken but beginning to find my way into freedom when I was rededicated - not baptised even though there was water poured over me - in Metropolitan Community Church, a congregation who helped me greatly, supported me, were patient with my constant doctrinal and practical questioning of my faith, and were brilliantly gentle and kind when I left them and left church and Christianity behind entirely.
I spent decades giving everything I could to the cause and life of God. Sometimes I could convince myself that he was healing me and that the joy of the Lord was my strength as I taught and was taught.
I sought better and purer ways to live for Jesus, in the Holy Spirit. Wandered round different churches. Turned Catholic after deciding it was historically more accurate, closer to what was seen in the early church.
I prayed for hours a day. Served as best I could, leaning on Jesus as my strength. Wept for the lost. Wept for myself.
I tried my best while relying on god because my best was filthy rags, to use a Bible metaphor. Apart from Christ you can do nothing. Nothing. I was that wretch, saved by grace that I deserved and I sang those hymns that wondered how God could love people. I loved the God who died for me, so infinite in mercy that he was incapable of forgiving anyone unless blood was shed. I deserved to burn for eternity. We all did. In short, I followed the religion that looked upon humanity in a worse way than any other major faith system and had a worse punishment too.
And God, beautiful redeemer, left me in pain, left me with my unhealed trauma, my mental health distress, my "evil abomination" gender and sexuality. I prayed so hard. So, so hard. I was prayed for. I was exorcised on occasion too. I was told I was doing it wrong because if I actually had faith I wouldn't have the problems. I was told to repent of depression, to repent of everything. Just trust Jesus and be happy. He commands you to be happy. Commands you to have a sound mind. One time someone I'd never met phoned me from across the country to say "I was depressed and I prayed and God took it away. So I don't see what your problem is!" The lack of compassion I sometimes met from people who just assumed I wasn't trusting and obeying properly was astounding.
It wasn't the people who added to my brokenness though. Not even the ones who would say "If you're depressed you obviously have sins to repent of." Yes, Christianity taught many of us to believe and say monstrous things. I stress it though. The people weren't the problem. The entire damn system of anti-human religion was. It's hard to fully love yourself, or even fully love and embrace others in their beautiful wonder when you're told everyone deserves punishment and that you have to die every day.
I was totally broken inside, though hiding it as much as I could, when I found that first crack that led, eventually, to being able psychologically to escape. It came in rebellion, starting a book by someone I'd been strongly told to avoid. A "false" Christian, Matthew Fox. In the mid-nineties we'd placed the blame for the "Nine O'Clock Service Scandal" firmly at the feet of Fox, who had been consulted on liturgy. So we were able to be proud and claim the sexual abuse there was his fault, not the fault of proper Christianity where such evils wouldn't happened!
I never finished the book, Original Blessing, but it was enough to give something that grew - that spirituality is always creative, evolving, and starts from the via positiva, not the via negativa at the initial core of Western Christianity. He also proposed something I absolutely believe now but which I couldn't accept at the time: That the doctrine of original sin is heinous bullshit!
That form of Christianity I lived, following the beliefs and practices of so many churches, gives hope but it's hope that a problem has been solved. That problem turned out to be unreal, invented, and ultimately anti-human. Original sin was only a part of that invention.
There are other forms of Christianity. Healthier forms. For decades I was warned against the heretics, not to put my salvation at peril by going near them. I'm very pleased to have met some of them, even worshiped among them while navigating myself slowly out of religion. Metropolitan Community Church (Northern Lights) in Newcastle Upon Tyne was one of the good places. Unitarians and Quakers also helped me along the way too and there are individual Christians who have incredible lives drawing from faith that's positive about humanity.
Some scars remain. Memories remain. Bible verses spring to mind often and every now and again unhealthy guilt or unhealthy religion jumps out of my head. Not because of any god of course. It's just how human brains and minds work. I still read, at times, some Christians, some theists, some for whom Jesus is still very important. They're just not the Christians and Jesus followers whose style of religion caused me and so many other people great harm. I still have my books by Matthew Fox, John Shelby Spong, Gretta Vosper, Jim Palmer, Quaker writings, and other authors too and follow some Christian writers and groups online, including ones campaigning for full acceptance and inclusion of LGBT+ people in all churches. Some of the writers I read have versions of Jesus who I'd very gladly sit and eat with just as I'd enjoy the company of my Christian friends.
Thirty years after giving myself to Jesus in the Sinner's Prayer I know this:
It was for freedom that the grace of Clare has set me free from the law of sin and death invented by religion.
And when, two years ago, six missionaries gathered round me in Sunderland and kept telling me about the sinfulness and hopelessness of people all I could do was look around and see the incredible beauty of each person who passed, often covered in pain and suffering and worry, but always fabulous grace underneath the surface waves.
I got out of religion and have worked hard to recover from it. I have no regrets about that.
I was within the Christian religion for twenty five years, mostly within unhealthy forms of it. I have regrets. Of course I do. They don't change anything. Yet they remain.
What is more important though is my future. How every day there are new choices to be made, new ways to grow both compassion and passion, new opportunities for the adventure of a less certain life, and new moments in which to enter deeper into healing and radical acceptance. The future is unpredictable but within the possibilities we can seek to receive, give and cultivate light. Within every moment we can learn to be more fully human, more fully loving, more fully creative beings. After all, that's what the Jesus without dogma would love for us to be.
Saturday, 15 February 2020
Born Again - A poem of Peter's Granny.
A free-written poem, in three minutes, from the prompt "Born Again" suggested in the Chilli Studios writing group.
They saved the family Bible,
Annabelle brought out her pink one-ear frayed rabbit
And Peter his treasured letter from Lord Nelson.
But granny was too frail, upstairs,
Bed ridden beyond the burning stairs.
So she died.
They shared their memories.
The way granny laughed at misfortune,
Sloppy kissed the children with twinkled eyes.
They missed her stories of pirated witches.
And in younger years, granny painted naked sailors.
She lived again.
Memory. A Fragment - a poem. c/w child sexual abuse
c/w child sexual abuse
Don't scroll past the hand if that is likely to affect you.
The hand is there for happier reasons. I'm feeling and falling in wibbly-wobbly traumery-waumery experiences today but that's only today. Eighteen months ago this weekend I took my last dose of a psychiatric drug after a careful taper from the ones I was taking. My hand is filled with no drugs but with emptiness. Emptiness is potential.
Don't scroll past the hand if that is likely to affect you.
The hand is there for happier reasons. I'm feeling and falling in wibbly-wobbly traumery-waumery experiences today but that's only today. Eighteen months ago this weekend I took my last dose of a psychiatric drug after a careful taper from the ones I was taking. My hand is filled with no drugs but with emptiness. Emptiness is potential.
Memory. A fragment.
I smell his aftershave on the back of the
I smell his aftershave on the back of the
number sixty-two bus.
Cheap seventies fashion. A stale
musk sickness.
I stretch up, pull my spine straight past posture,
Lean back into pain as he
Pulls me tight towards harm by the hair.
Unwashed tobacco breath as he
Speaks words. Bitter anger.
"Never tell." "Never tell," as he
squeezes my arm.
I feel no fear. Fear is memory,
unplaced.
Alone. Abused. Used.
Without meaning.
Without life. Without a face.
Alone, alone. We become two,
fall together
Until I can sink into the wallpaper
Patterns. Live outside stretched
scalp
In lines, curves that never move or bruise.
So I forget. As if broken
without cause.
He shaved badly today, skin harsher than eyes.
He speaks, growls, reaches down and
I depart. One with the wall in
shamed solidarity.
There I remain, flattened, ignored,
My truth steamed off before the wall came down.
He feels, rubs, groans, demands.
I become nothing, hated for what he did.
Despised for what he said I made him do.
I am safe. Hidden in the wall.
As his hands hurt me, all I thought was
“Why did they stop the piano playing?”Gratitude Diary - For Doing Well In My Exams. 100% is a Good Result!
Six months ago I had no clue that I'd be studying a course. Even less clue that I'd be studying three courses at the same time.
In the last fortnight I've taken the fifth, sixth and seventh exams since one of my alters, I don't even know who, made the suggestion that I might be able to try to take a course and that it would be okay if it all went wrong, just as it did at the start of last year when I began a course with no exams and no qualification at the end. I had to quit due to my mental health not being good enough to continue, mental health that's made it impossible even to attempt things like that for lots of years.
In September I had no real confidence about getting far with the courses without breaking down. I honestly thought I had a 50/50 chance of getting past week four but was glad to have recovered well enough at least to make the attempt.
I've done well in my studies so far.
Exam five was for the PowerPoint module of the Level 2 ECDL course. I studied for it in a fortnight but could have taken the exam in a week had I been allowed.
I scored 100%.
Exam six, on Monday night, was for the Improving Productivity module of the Level 2 ECDL course. I studied for it in a week. More accurately, I studied for it in an hour. It's meant to be the hardest module of the course. It's not.
I scored 97%, my joint lowest exam mark for the course, a mark which means that somewhere I made one error while finishing the one hour exam in eighteen minutes.
I had to laugh. The course tells you that it's good practice to go back and check your work - among other blindingly obvious things - but the exam system doesn't let you go back and check anything.
That's the level two ECDL course finished. There will be another certificate for my wall to remind me, if I'm struggling, of what is possible. Next I'll be studying the level one ECDL course. A strange order of study but it's the way the college chooses to do things. Strictly speaking the level one course isn't needed. It's a lower level qualification than the one I've just achieved. I don't have to pay to take the course though so I'm doing it. Three more exams to look forward to. They will be fine, I have no concerns.
Then came exam seven, on Tuesday night. The first module of AAT Level 2 Accounting, Bookkeeping Transactions. There are four more exam assessments in the course.
This happened, and when I saw this result on my phone I nearly gave a fist pump in the air and shouted "Yes!" very loudly. I was on a bus though and hid my joy from the other passengers.
I scored 100%.
I'm massively pleased with that. Who wouldn't be? If you score 90% for the whole course that gets you a distinction. 80% gets you a merit. 70% gets you a pass.
I'm also quite surprised. Not a single error in 120 marks? I knew that I'd absorbed the course material well but not to make even a single slip felt pretty incredible. I know how easily I make silly mistakes with things I know perfectly well. Most of us are quite good at that!
I now need to score an average 75% in the other modules to get a merit for the course. But wouldn't a distinction be a satisfying achievement? It probably won't improve my job prospects much but it would be a massive boost to my confidence going forward to seeking work and studying the level three course next academic year.
As for the Mad Studies module I'm taking at Northumbria University, there is an assessment but no exams. It's only week three but so far I don't have any of the difficulties I had with it last year causing me to start to drop out at week three. I'm also a lot more confident in the discussions and can make far more of a positive contribution to things than I could a year ago.
I am grateful for how the courses are going. I am grateful for the positive changes of the last year and those of the previous year too though both years have been tough and the changes have come mostly through hard work, accepting distress, and they are mostly nobody's fault but my own.
In the last fortnight I've taken the fifth, sixth and seventh exams since one of my alters, I don't even know who, made the suggestion that I might be able to try to take a course and that it would be okay if it all went wrong, just as it did at the start of last year when I began a course with no exams and no qualification at the end. I had to quit due to my mental health not being good enough to continue, mental health that's made it impossible even to attempt things like that for lots of years.
In September I had no real confidence about getting far with the courses without breaking down. I honestly thought I had a 50/50 chance of getting past week four but was glad to have recovered well enough at least to make the attempt.
I've done well in my studies so far.
Exam five was for the PowerPoint module of the Level 2 ECDL course. I studied for it in a fortnight but could have taken the exam in a week had I been allowed.
I scored 100%.
Exam six, on Monday night, was for the Improving Productivity module of the Level 2 ECDL course. I studied for it in a week. More accurately, I studied for it in an hour. It's meant to be the hardest module of the course. It's not.
I scored 97%, my joint lowest exam mark for the course, a mark which means that somewhere I made one error while finishing the one hour exam in eighteen minutes.
I had to laugh. The course tells you that it's good practice to go back and check your work - among other blindingly obvious things - but the exam system doesn't let you go back and check anything.
That's the level two ECDL course finished. There will be another certificate for my wall to remind me, if I'm struggling, of what is possible. Next I'll be studying the level one ECDL course. A strange order of study but it's the way the college chooses to do things. Strictly speaking the level one course isn't needed. It's a lower level qualification than the one I've just achieved. I don't have to pay to take the course though so I'm doing it. Three more exams to look forward to. They will be fine, I have no concerns.
Then came exam seven, on Tuesday night. The first module of AAT Level 2 Accounting, Bookkeeping Transactions. There are four more exam assessments in the course.
This happened, and when I saw this result on my phone I nearly gave a fist pump in the air and shouted "Yes!" very loudly. I was on a bus though and hid my joy from the other passengers.
I scored 100%.
I'm massively pleased with that. Who wouldn't be? If you score 90% for the whole course that gets you a distinction. 80% gets you a merit. 70% gets you a pass.
I'm also quite surprised. Not a single error in 120 marks? I knew that I'd absorbed the course material well but not to make even a single slip felt pretty incredible. I know how easily I make silly mistakes with things I know perfectly well. Most of us are quite good at that!
I now need to score an average 75% in the other modules to get a merit for the course. But wouldn't a distinction be a satisfying achievement? It probably won't improve my job prospects much but it would be a massive boost to my confidence going forward to seeking work and studying the level three course next academic year.
As for the Mad Studies module I'm taking at Northumbria University, there is an assessment but no exams. It's only week three but so far I don't have any of the difficulties I had with it last year causing me to start to drop out at week three. I'm also a lot more confident in the discussions and can make far more of a positive contribution to things than I could a year ago.
I am grateful for how the courses are going. I am grateful for the positive changes of the last year and those of the previous year too though both years have been tough and the changes have come mostly through hard work, accepting distress, and they are mostly nobody's fault but my own.
The Gender Recognition Act and The Two Year Wait That Lasts Five Years
The current Gender Recognition Act requires a person to live in their "chosen gender role" for two years before they can legally change gender, which must be binary. I was discussing this with my family yesterday.
For this post I'm ignoring that the phrase "chosen gender role" is pretty crappy because we don't choose our gender and what the heck is the role of a woman or man anyway? That phrase isn't just bad for transgender people. It's bad for everyone.
I'm ignoring that there is no option for people of whatever non-binary gender, that is, not just male or female. It's one of the many things that needs to change for people whose gender is not binary. As far as ID and gender goes in the UK it's legally a case of "No X Please, We're British."
It's the two years I want to talk about. Now, you might say that waiting two years after legally changing your name isn't that long to wait when, for the most part, getting a gender recognition certificate doesn't affect your day to day life and the choices you make. In some ways it does affect people's day to day lives depending in part on who they are and what they enjoy doing. I'm ignoring that too.
What I'm not ignoring is that the two year period is now a completely meaningless timescale. That's because in order to apply for gender recognition one of the things you need is a letter or form from a psychiatrist with a specialty in gender dysphoria. As if a highly paid consultant psychiatrist is the best person to confirm what tends to be bloody obvious to people with no wage or specialty.
And in order to get that you need to be seeing such a psychiatrist and to have been given by them an official diagnosis. I don't know if this is still the case but for me that was, via ICD10, "Transsexualism F60.0" a diagnosis with a VERY problematic description and not an ideal name either. ICD11 changes things somewhat. I haven't even properly fit that diagnosis for several years unless parts of the description are completely ignored.
In order for that outdated and totally binary diagnosis to happen you need to have reached the top of the waiting list. According to the latest figures that may take four years. It may take five or more. And some of the gender dysphoria clinics now say they can't even estimate the wait. Waiting lists can be growing by a week every week and for one of the services people haven't got any closer to seeing either the gatekeeper to the service or, years later, the consultant psychiatrist.
I changed my name by deed poll less than a month after the GP agreed to refer me to the Northern Regional Gender Dysphoria Service. I was lucky. I got in at that one point when waiting lists weren't very long.
But imagine now. You change your name. You live "full time in your chosen gender role." You're told you can spend lots of money and get strangers to assess whether you're you. In two years' time. But you're also told you can't send off the form without a piece of paper that you won't get for at least five years.
Two years before applying for a gender recognition certificate?
For people being referred for diagnosis and treatment now, make that four. Or five. Or six. Or God only knows.
We can discuss whether or not self declaration of gender is the way forward, as has been introduced already in several countries without any of the scare stories being proven true. I understand the worries people have about this though many of them are far-fetched and unrealistic.
I'd like to see self declaration introduced but there are issues related to it that are perfectly fair for discussion and there are reasonable worries that, while they don't imply self-dec should never happen, do imply that checks and balances might be an important part of that self declaration of gender, if those things are not already inherent in the binding legality of that declaration.
We can discuss whether two years is a sensible minimum waiting time for a legal change that's for life. To be honest I think a waiting time of some sort is a good thing, while a very frustrating thing too if you're waiting. Not as frustrating as those waiting lists though. It's a safeguard for everyone meaning that nobody is ever likely to take advantage of the system for the scary reasons people suggest - many of which are in reality completely irrelevant to the gender recognition process - and there's far less chance of someone changing their mind after making a legal change that's difficult to reverse. We know detransitioning does happen every now and again, though not at the rate that media sometimes suggest and not to the detriment of any argument for the well-being and rights of transgender people. When someone does detransition they are always deserving of much compassion and support.
What I don't think should be up for discussion is whether or not the current gender recognition process needs reforming. It should. The current legal system combined with the current state of the gender dysphoria service make the process ridiculously bad.
Even if that reform is only such that there can be a gender dysphoria service that's funded and staffed well enough that people can be seen in good time and can get that essential piece of evidence without waiting an often heartbreaking length of time that would be a good thing.
Of course I'd like to see that happen to the service but realistically there's a good chance it won't. Even if self declaration by statutory declaration, which has lots of legal safeguards built in, isn't introduced I'd like to see the process not cost so much money. I'd also like to see the judgement on whether a person is who they say they are to be made by people who know the person and, importantly, to see legal non-binary gender recognition.
In short, whatever happens with reform of the Gender Recognition Act, should the government ever stick to its promise to deal with the matter rather than repeatedly sidelining it, I'd like the process to be more human and less dehumanising to all transgender people.
For this post I'm ignoring that the phrase "chosen gender role" is pretty crappy because we don't choose our gender and what the heck is the role of a woman or man anyway? That phrase isn't just bad for transgender people. It's bad for everyone.
I'm ignoring that there is no option for people of whatever non-binary gender, that is, not just male or female. It's one of the many things that needs to change for people whose gender is not binary. As far as ID and gender goes in the UK it's legally a case of "No X Please, We're British."
It's the two years I want to talk about. Now, you might say that waiting two years after legally changing your name isn't that long to wait when, for the most part, getting a gender recognition certificate doesn't affect your day to day life and the choices you make. In some ways it does affect people's day to day lives depending in part on who they are and what they enjoy doing. I'm ignoring that too.
What I'm not ignoring is that the two year period is now a completely meaningless timescale. That's because in order to apply for gender recognition one of the things you need is a letter or form from a psychiatrist with a specialty in gender dysphoria. As if a highly paid consultant psychiatrist is the best person to confirm what tends to be bloody obvious to people with no wage or specialty.
And in order to get that you need to be seeing such a psychiatrist and to have been given by them an official diagnosis. I don't know if this is still the case but for me that was, via ICD10, "Transsexualism F60.0" a diagnosis with a VERY problematic description and not an ideal name either. ICD11 changes things somewhat. I haven't even properly fit that diagnosis for several years unless parts of the description are completely ignored.
In order for that outdated and totally binary diagnosis to happen you need to have reached the top of the waiting list. According to the latest figures that may take four years. It may take five or more. And some of the gender dysphoria clinics now say they can't even estimate the wait. Waiting lists can be growing by a week every week and for one of the services people haven't got any closer to seeing either the gatekeeper to the service or, years later, the consultant psychiatrist.
I changed my name by deed poll less than a month after the GP agreed to refer me to the Northern Regional Gender Dysphoria Service. I was lucky. I got in at that one point when waiting lists weren't very long.
But imagine now. You change your name. You live "full time in your chosen gender role." You're told you can spend lots of money and get strangers to assess whether you're you. In two years' time. But you're also told you can't send off the form without a piece of paper that you won't get for at least five years.
Two years before applying for a gender recognition certificate?
For people being referred for diagnosis and treatment now, make that four. Or five. Or six. Or God only knows.
We can discuss whether or not self declaration of gender is the way forward, as has been introduced already in several countries without any of the scare stories being proven true. I understand the worries people have about this though many of them are far-fetched and unrealistic.
I'd like to see self declaration introduced but there are issues related to it that are perfectly fair for discussion and there are reasonable worries that, while they don't imply self-dec should never happen, do imply that checks and balances might be an important part of that self declaration of gender, if those things are not already inherent in the binding legality of that declaration.
We can discuss whether two years is a sensible minimum waiting time for a legal change that's for life. To be honest I think a waiting time of some sort is a good thing, while a very frustrating thing too if you're waiting. Not as frustrating as those waiting lists though. It's a safeguard for everyone meaning that nobody is ever likely to take advantage of the system for the scary reasons people suggest - many of which are in reality completely irrelevant to the gender recognition process - and there's far less chance of someone changing their mind after making a legal change that's difficult to reverse. We know detransitioning does happen every now and again, though not at the rate that media sometimes suggest and not to the detriment of any argument for the well-being and rights of transgender people. When someone does detransition they are always deserving of much compassion and support.
What I don't think should be up for discussion is whether or not the current gender recognition process needs reforming. It should. The current legal system combined with the current state of the gender dysphoria service make the process ridiculously bad.
Even if that reform is only such that there can be a gender dysphoria service that's funded and staffed well enough that people can be seen in good time and can get that essential piece of evidence without waiting an often heartbreaking length of time that would be a good thing.
Of course I'd like to see that happen to the service but realistically there's a good chance it won't. Even if self declaration by statutory declaration, which has lots of legal safeguards built in, isn't introduced I'd like to see the process not cost so much money. I'd also like to see the judgement on whether a person is who they say they are to be made by people who know the person and, importantly, to see legal non-binary gender recognition.
In short, whatever happens with reform of the Gender Recognition Act, should the government ever stick to its promise to deal with the matter rather than repeatedly sidelining it, I'd like the process to be more human and less dehumanising to all transgender people.
Friday, 14 February 2020
GAD7 - The Anxiety Test That Turns Experiences Into Problems
It's only fair to warn you. This entire post following the image is a Facebook post and comment that grew out of control and which I haven't edited in the slightest since typing there. It's a little disconnected in places as my head exploded its way through the topic.
Just for fun I looked yesterday at the GAD-7 questionnaire, the one that's handed out to impose a diagnosis of Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
It asks you to consider a range of symptoms each time with the same question:
"Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?"
I was looking at the symptoms. On how many days have you felt nervous or on edge? Had trouble relaxing? Become irritable? and so on.
And I realised this:
I could answer that questionnaire even now and gain top marks because every day I feel anxious at some point.
I could get middle or low marks by interpreting the intent of the questions differently, because I haven't been anxious all day. I did that. I'm only mildly disordered now, which is less disordered than at any point since I first encountered the questionnaire.
Or I could score zero. Because while I may experience anxiety, that's a normal part of human experience. I was very anxious before my exams. So what. Am I "bothered by" these things? No, not really. Do I choose to interpret them as "problems?" No.
That's just one way the questionnaire makes assumptions and applies a major bias to the diagnostic procedure.
It's a way I haven't thought much about before. I could talk at length about other ways in which the questionnaire is flawed. But that one's new to me.
I'm now imagining people visiting a doctor and finding themselves quizzed about things they interpreted merely as "experiences" but which the expert is immediately telling them are "problems" to be "bothered about".
That could serve to create an anxiety disorder where none previously existed. Congratulations psychiatry! You can make people ill. To be fair, physical illness diagnosis can do that on occasion too - there was a recent article in MiA that mentioned the effects on people of greatly widening the criteria for hypertension and it's well known that believing you're in a high risk group for heart disease increases your chances of getting it just as much as actually being in a high risk group.
That's without all the other problems of the testing. I can tell you that two weeks after the election many of my friends would have been diagnosed with an illness. The people on this estate who can't really afford to eat pass it too, with flying colours. Drug them! That'll sort out their medical illness as defined by psychiatric symptom books. They won't suffer with their GAD anymore. They'll be too drugged to care. It's a crock of shit.
I was thinking about poverty last night in relation to the cost of psychiatry. Yes, I was awake in the night so that's an extra GAD7 point to me. Drug me now! The cost of seeing the consultant. Or a night in a psych unit. Or of everything else involved in the medical model.
A full nine month course of the new antidepressant nasal spray - which has a bad scientific evidence base but we won't mention that! - set for approval in the UK soon costs nearly £30,000. And yes, I'm sure that if someone takes ketamine they might feel different. Same with alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. Heroin can be incredibly calming I'm told but nobody says the calming effect is because it's tackling a mythical physical illness of neurochemistry. I bet that if it wasn't so addictive Bayer would have marketed it for mental illness.
It's interesting that withdrawal symptoms from heroin are known as withdrawal symptoms while withdrawal symptoms from prescribed drugs are known as "psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome." I was talking with someone yesterday for whom the withdrawal brain zaps didn't stop. I can only hope they do and that they haven't been permanently harmed in that difficult way by the drugs. Talking with someone else yesterday who is a wheelchair user only because their physical symptoms were put down to mental illness for years.
You could raise someone out of poverty for the money it costs to "properly" medically treat them, and do so much more. I think that would be far healthier than leaving them in poverty hell and drugging them. To be less anxious and depressed because you have no food insecurity, you can get clothes for your child and aren't one step away from homelessness seems infinitely better than to be less anxious because you're taking Xanax or Sertraline or, coming soon to a pharmacy near you, Ketamine. We're brainwashed into thinking that lack of services causes the mental health crisis - a friend wrote yesterday that that's the cause. It doesn't. It only harms people already in crisis because of what's happened. The medical model harms people too because it's so disempowering and dehumanising and stigmatising to our complexity. And sometimes the medical system creates a bigger crisis once you enter into it.
Wow, I don't like psychiatry very much! As one of my lecturers says, it's primary function was and often still is control of people and the othering of people who don't quite fit in to societally sanctioned ways of being or can't quite mask their differences or who don't have the privilege to get away with it. Actually looking after people was secondary, no matter how many good people were scattered in the profession or how many good and caring people have psychiatric functions in community mental health teams.
I guess creating an illness that didn't ever exist would serve the motives of the copyright holder who allow the quiz to be used for free - as long as the question is not altered in the slightest because that actually goes against the free use agreement and breaks copyright law. Perhaps I'm too cynical, except it's Pfizer which makes Sertraline, although the patent is now expired so they're not making as much cash off it anymore. Similarly they introduced Xanax, and Effexor. Sertraline itself is a drug which doesn't really work much at all for depression (none of them have clinically meaningful test results so that's not a surprise) beyond placebo in (very flawed) double blind testing - even according to recent Lancet Psychiatry studies - but has a little effect for anxiety "disorders" (i.e. it numbs people to it) and which there is now pressure to prescribe to people who don't even merit a diagnosis of anything at all.
PHQ9 is also owned by Pfizer and they're written by Robert Spitzer, one of the key names in DSM3 and the resurrection of Kraepelin leading to vastly increased and systemic medicalisation of human experience to the exclusion of social factors and that simple fact that we're human beings. Just like GAD and PHQ do every single day in the NHS and lots of other places.
That may be too cynical but I would feel better if the questionnaires in such common use weren't owned by a pharmaceutical company and written by a man who did so much to codify the medical model of mental illness. What patients are presented with isn't a fair test but the opinion of someone with a particular view of people that excludes taking into account those people's thoughts and experiences.
Patients won't know the background to the tests or the history of mental health care. They won't know about Kraepelian nosology or the history of diagnostic systems. They won't have read up on how nobody worth listening to actually believes that thing the papers keep saying about serotonin causing depression. They won't, unless they're like me, have a genius level IQ - even with that strangely high IQ it still took me years to fully usurp the authority I'd granted the system of psychiatry in my life.
The expert will show them the expert's questions and tell them their life is full of more problems to bother them than they thought. The expert has the power in that situation. The patient is disempowered, removed from the meaning their lives have, and it's done with a simple piece of paper. In Talking Therapies in Newcastle I have to answer the questionnaires every single visit even though I said, giving reasons, why I didn't want to and even though the person I was seeing didn't like them either. Rules are rules. You have to follow the rules. Even when the rules don't make much sense. Even when the rules are harmful. Because the rules are imposed by the powerful and rejecting the rules means you can be turned away from receiving care of any kind. The UK punitive benefits system is very similar to psychiatry at times!
Guess who has some strong feelings and views about such things and about the biases inherent in a diagnostic procedure that is, yes, a load of rubbish anyway.
Guess who's sometimes the controversial one even in a Mad Studies group! It annoys the small number there who are strong disciples of the medical model. I do stay quiet sometimes. And sometimes others can be more controversial than me.
I wanted an anxiety image to go with this post and settled on this one. It's the front cover of a book being published later this year. I want a copy when it's released. The blurb on Amazon says this:
"An in-depth guide for engaging with anxiety--not as an affliction, but as an essential source of foresight, intuition, and energy for completing your tasks and projects.
If you're facing anxiety, you've probably got one thing on your mind--how to make it go away. But what if this challenging emotion were actually trying to help?"
"An in-depth guide for engaging with anxiety--not as an affliction, but as an essential source of foresight, intuition, and energy for completing your tasks and projects.
If you're facing anxiety, you've probably got one thing on your mind--how to make it go away. But what if this challenging emotion were actually trying to help?"
That's almost diametrically opposed to anything ever said to me by anyone from the psychiatric professions in decades as a "service user". Some psychologists, especially recently, have said to embrace anxiety. But for most I've experienced in "services" and in most internet memes anxiety has been seen as the great enemy. A negative emotion. Something to be conquered, fought. Something to be anxious about! I'm firmly convinced though that to fight or suppress our anxiety is to fight or suppress part of ourselves. Seeing our anxiety as an enemy is ultimately to see ourself as the enemy. To embrace our anxiety is a part of learning to better love and accept ourselves.
Just for fun I looked yesterday at the GAD-7 questionnaire, the one that's handed out to impose a diagnosis of Generalised Anxiety Disorder.
It asks you to consider a range of symptoms each time with the same question:
"Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?"
I was looking at the symptoms. On how many days have you felt nervous or on edge? Had trouble relaxing? Become irritable? and so on.
And I realised this:
I could answer that questionnaire even now and gain top marks because every day I feel anxious at some point.
I could get middle or low marks by interpreting the intent of the questions differently, because I haven't been anxious all day. I did that. I'm only mildly disordered now, which is less disordered than at any point since I first encountered the questionnaire.
Or I could score zero. Because while I may experience anxiety, that's a normal part of human experience. I was very anxious before my exams. So what. Am I "bothered by" these things? No, not really. Do I choose to interpret them as "problems?" No.
That's just one way the questionnaire makes assumptions and applies a major bias to the diagnostic procedure.
It's a way I haven't thought much about before. I could talk at length about other ways in which the questionnaire is flawed. But that one's new to me.
I'm now imagining people visiting a doctor and finding themselves quizzed about things they interpreted merely as "experiences" but which the expert is immediately telling them are "problems" to be "bothered about".
That could serve to create an anxiety disorder where none previously existed. Congratulations psychiatry! You can make people ill. To be fair, physical illness diagnosis can do that on occasion too - there was a recent article in MiA that mentioned the effects on people of greatly widening the criteria for hypertension and it's well known that believing you're in a high risk group for heart disease increases your chances of getting it just as much as actually being in a high risk group.
That's without all the other problems of the testing. I can tell you that two weeks after the election many of my friends would have been diagnosed with an illness. The people on this estate who can't really afford to eat pass it too, with flying colours. Drug them! That'll sort out their medical illness as defined by psychiatric symptom books. They won't suffer with their GAD anymore. They'll be too drugged to care. It's a crock of shit.
I was thinking about poverty last night in relation to the cost of psychiatry. Yes, I was awake in the night so that's an extra GAD7 point to me. Drug me now! The cost of seeing the consultant. Or a night in a psych unit. Or of everything else involved in the medical model.
A full nine month course of the new antidepressant nasal spray - which has a bad scientific evidence base but we won't mention that! - set for approval in the UK soon costs nearly £30,000. And yes, I'm sure that if someone takes ketamine they might feel different. Same with alcohol, cocaine, and heroin. Heroin can be incredibly calming I'm told but nobody says the calming effect is because it's tackling a mythical physical illness of neurochemistry. I bet that if it wasn't so addictive Bayer would have marketed it for mental illness.
It's interesting that withdrawal symptoms from heroin are known as withdrawal symptoms while withdrawal symptoms from prescribed drugs are known as "psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome." I was talking with someone yesterday for whom the withdrawal brain zaps didn't stop. I can only hope they do and that they haven't been permanently harmed in that difficult way by the drugs. Talking with someone else yesterday who is a wheelchair user only because their physical symptoms were put down to mental illness for years.
You could raise someone out of poverty for the money it costs to "properly" medically treat them, and do so much more. I think that would be far healthier than leaving them in poverty hell and drugging them. To be less anxious and depressed because you have no food insecurity, you can get clothes for your child and aren't one step away from homelessness seems infinitely better than to be less anxious because you're taking Xanax or Sertraline or, coming soon to a pharmacy near you, Ketamine. We're brainwashed into thinking that lack of services causes the mental health crisis - a friend wrote yesterday that that's the cause. It doesn't. It only harms people already in crisis because of what's happened. The medical model harms people too because it's so disempowering and dehumanising and stigmatising to our complexity. And sometimes the medical system creates a bigger crisis once you enter into it.
Wow, I don't like psychiatry very much! As one of my lecturers says, it's primary function was and often still is control of people and the othering of people who don't quite fit in to societally sanctioned ways of being or can't quite mask their differences or who don't have the privilege to get away with it. Actually looking after people was secondary, no matter how many good people were scattered in the profession or how many good and caring people have psychiatric functions in community mental health teams.
I guess creating an illness that didn't ever exist would serve the motives of the copyright holder who allow the quiz to be used for free - as long as the question is not altered in the slightest because that actually goes against the free use agreement and breaks copyright law. Perhaps I'm too cynical, except it's Pfizer which makes Sertraline, although the patent is now expired so they're not making as much cash off it anymore. Similarly they introduced Xanax, and Effexor. Sertraline itself is a drug which doesn't really work much at all for depression (none of them have clinically meaningful test results so that's not a surprise) beyond placebo in (very flawed) double blind testing - even according to recent Lancet Psychiatry studies - but has a little effect for anxiety "disorders" (i.e. it numbs people to it) and which there is now pressure to prescribe to people who don't even merit a diagnosis of anything at all.
PHQ9 is also owned by Pfizer and they're written by Robert Spitzer, one of the key names in DSM3 and the resurrection of Kraepelin leading to vastly increased and systemic medicalisation of human experience to the exclusion of social factors and that simple fact that we're human beings. Just like GAD and PHQ do every single day in the NHS and lots of other places.
That may be too cynical but I would feel better if the questionnaires in such common use weren't owned by a pharmaceutical company and written by a man who did so much to codify the medical model of mental illness. What patients are presented with isn't a fair test but the opinion of someone with a particular view of people that excludes taking into account those people's thoughts and experiences.
Patients won't know the background to the tests or the history of mental health care. They won't know about Kraepelian nosology or the history of diagnostic systems. They won't have read up on how nobody worth listening to actually believes that thing the papers keep saying about serotonin causing depression. They won't, unless they're like me, have a genius level IQ - even with that strangely high IQ it still took me years to fully usurp the authority I'd granted the system of psychiatry in my life.
The expert will show them the expert's questions and tell them their life is full of more problems to bother them than they thought. The expert has the power in that situation. The patient is disempowered, removed from the meaning their lives have, and it's done with a simple piece of paper. In Talking Therapies in Newcastle I have to answer the questionnaires every single visit even though I said, giving reasons, why I didn't want to and even though the person I was seeing didn't like them either. Rules are rules. You have to follow the rules. Even when the rules don't make much sense. Even when the rules are harmful. Because the rules are imposed by the powerful and rejecting the rules means you can be turned away from receiving care of any kind. The UK punitive benefits system is very similar to psychiatry at times!
Guess who has some strong feelings and views about such things and about the biases inherent in a diagnostic procedure that is, yes, a load of rubbish anyway.
Guess who's sometimes the controversial one even in a Mad Studies group! It annoys the small number there who are strong disciples of the medical model. I do stay quiet sometimes. And sometimes others can be more controversial than me.
Thursday, 13 February 2020
Mad Studies. Stigma and the Concept of Mental Illness
Mad Studies week 3 is today. By week three last year I was almost dropping out because this head wasn't coping well. So much has changed, through hard work, in a year.
This morning we're looking mostly at stigma and discrimination. The slides include Goffman, Chamberlin, Foucault. All good.
The odd thing is, odd radical that I am, I say that the whole medical concept of mental illness can quickly become a stigmatisation of what it means to be fully human. Collectively we're taught to stigmatise our experiences as something very wrong with us and to fight a part of who we are at any particular moment. Individually we can end up stigmatising, rejecting, and even hating a part of what we are rather than radically accepting ourselves and being compassionate towards the distress we experience. One reason why I'm doing so well now compared to a year ago - and even better compared to two years ago - is my rejection of these presuppositions that I inherited as a child and built upon as an adult.
Mental illness, as a concept, has also often been used as a more direct way to "other" and stigmatise people. To combat this we're now at a societal point where we are taught to be proud of our mental illnesses and to claim that medical model even more powerfully for ourselves.
There has to be other ways. I wonder if we'll get that far today. Because there ARE other ways, even ways that exist within mental health professions and the move in some psych circles not to diagnose but to consider people as fully human people who hurt. Which is excellent.
Until you try to apply for support or until that brown envelope with a work capability assessment arrives. Or until you want US health insurance to pay out in which case you need a fancy diagnosis that will get your treatment paid for (if you're rich enough to have the insurance at all) but may be a permanent stigmatising mark on your life.
Yes, I was rereading Kate Millett's "The Illusion of Mental Illness" last night. It's reproduced in a book called "Alternatives Beyond Psychiatry" which is an attempt to seek and embrace those other ways in which humans are accepted as humans in their distress rather than put into the "you're struggling therefore you're sick" box.
Remember guys, there's no good evidence that "depression" is caused by a serotonin imbalance. None. Not even if a drug affecting serotonin makes life more bearable for some people, even if that's in a clinically meaningfully greater way than sugar pills. Even that brain scan evidence that the brains of people with schizophrenia are diffierent was absolutely blown out of the water last year. How are those for controversial and provocative statements? I can back them up though.
And even the word "stigma" can be problematic!
Monday, 10 February 2020
Winter - A Poem In Three Months
Winter
[Lines in moments, Chilli Studios, 5th February]
December
Life in a micro-climate.
A tropical temper, cut from
North wind swept Newcastle.
Flowers pollinate the winter walls.
January
Wake and smell the truth.
January
Wake and smell the truth.
Months are no longer and
Perfection is no less fallen
Under snow. Eden waits patiently.
A billion chances of symmetry.
February
I will rise, wear purple scarves
February
I will rise, wear purple scarves
And prepare for the day
When winters turn to spring,
Springs to summer,
And summers to unlivable wildfires.
Four Years Ago I Began Lent. Fasting From Going To Church.
Four years ago today was Ash Wednesday. I began my Lenten fast.
Four years ago I fasted from church and ignored the Lenten practice of not fasting on Sundays. It was almost the first time in my adult life that I'd intentionally missed getting to church on the "Lord's Day."
No regrets. None. Two years ago I wrote:
"That was a massive step. It took me a couple of years of deep searching and questioning to get to the point of even contemplating the experiment of a short break from communal services.
I didn't know whether I'd manage that fast. Not after more than 20 years of living for Jesus and God, giving myself to prayer, the Bible, worship and so much that daily destroyed me a little more.
I never went back. The release from guilt about missing even one Sunday was beautiful.
I soon found that life was far better outside of my old faith."
It's took a lot more to recover from it than I thought it would.
I don't mean the homophobia and transphobia parts of religion which naturally caused me to perpetually reject these parts of myself. I'd recovered from all that by spending a few years among people of faith who didn't believe or teach anything like that in any way and who offered a real welcome rather than a "Welcome, gay person. Stop being a gay person" kind of thing.
I mean firstly the way that, whatever it is, if you have something that is the ground and root and total centre of the meaning in your life as well as being your biggest source of community, belonging, and much else that's good for all of us then rejecting it leaves a massive hole and a confusion about how to fill it.
The evangelist says it's a "God shaped hole" and knows that most of us aren't satisfied and feel a hole. It's not God shaped at all. Finding out what it is is an individual journey. Eventually we may even learn that there never was a hole beyond the hell hole we created through the beliefs we received and held. There isn't a hole, it's an imposed illusion. The magician's box is not empty though it looks impossible that it contains anything.
Secondly I mean the damage done by orthodox Christian doctrine, especially for me the presuppositions on which the gospel depends and the way the doctrines of original sin came to be believed.
As we sang, "I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene, and wonder how he could love me; a sinner, condemned, unclean."
If you're in wonder and amazement that someone who is meant to be love, infinite love, infinite mercy and so on could possible love someone as bad as you then that's going to lead to more than a few problems.
Jesus says in John chapter 3, a very famous passage, that God so loved the world ... but if you don't believe in Jesus you're already condemned. Now if that's not a picture of emotionally abusive parenting I don't know what is. When you're taught to believe you can't do anything good unless daddy does it, when your dad tells you you deserve to burn forever but he'll help, when he says he can only bear to have you in his presence because blood was shed, it's not great for self esteem, self acceptance and reaching the fullness of your potential.
Yes, Christians tell you, rightly too, that the emphasis is on love, mercy, hope and so on. Being joyful because of salvation. I wrote an excellent sermon on joy and got halfway through writing a book on Christian joy. Trying to convince myself?
But the premises lying behind that salvation are, in orthodox formulations of the religion, anti-human. Calvin takes the doctrine of original sin, developed via the apostle Paul via Augustine, to its logical conclusion and teaches - it's the first point of Calvinism - that we are all born in a state of total depravity. Total depravity. Right from the beginning. Perhaps the most negative view of the human race found in any religion or belief system in history.
It's taken so much to recover from that and it's no coincidence that the phrase "Post traumatic church disorder" exists. It cost me my happiness and mental health to "see my sin upon the cross" which I wrote about a few years ago.
Recovery began some years before leaving the church. Firstly through a book I didn't even finish because I wasn't read for it. Seeds were planted though by what I read in "Original Grace" by Matthew Fox. They were developed by meeting, eventually, Christians who also rejected all of the original sin teaching and taught me to embrace words like "I am beautifully/fearfully and wonderfully made" from the psalm I used in my final ever sermon before being banned for accepting myself as wonderfully made and stopped rejecting who and what I am. Other Christian authors came to be important to me too. Bishop John Shelby Spong. John Main. Paul Tilllich. Plenty of others, all Christians whose books I still have on my shelves.
Four years after leaving the church I'm much less angry about the damage caused to me. If it wasn't for the Christians who made it safe for me to walk away I'd still be angry and hurting. Books like "Leaving the Fold" by Marlene Winell helped immensely and four years of looking at that hole and noticing it wasn't real helps. No, it's not real. We're bombarded by propaganda telling us it's real, that we and our lives are inadequate. God will fill it. Flora margarine or Bisto will make it okay. Yes, advertising can work just in the same way as the most manipulative of religions.
There is nothing to fill. There never was. Blindness to the meaning and wonder of your own self and the selves of others only makes it seem that there is.
Four years on I'm still finding that in some ways I'm recovering from religion. I was already messy and vulnerable when I became "born again" as the religious term puts it. I already had some pretty major experiences of mental health distress. Religion gave me good things and I was very glad to have them. It gave community, friendship, meaning, purpose, music and much more. Looking back, I know that any religion or faith group, theistic or secular, could have provided those things in different ways. The fulfillment of community wasn't because of Jesus but because of community itself, humans coming together to support one another. These are all good things and need to be nurtured outside of religion. They're also things that the secular world hasn't quite developed to the same extent. Perhaps it's harder to do it when people aren't gathered around a particular set of dogma or doctrines. Perhaps it's just that these things take time and the transition from religious to secular is always a challenge.
I don't mean the homophobia and transphobia parts of religion which naturally caused me to perpetually reject these parts of myself. I'd recovered from all that by spending a few years among people of faith who didn't believe or teach anything like that in any way and who offered a real welcome rather than a "Welcome, gay person. Stop being a gay person" kind of thing.
I mean firstly the way that, whatever it is, if you have something that is the ground and root and total centre of the meaning in your life as well as being your biggest source of community, belonging, and much else that's good for all of us then rejecting it leaves a massive hole and a confusion about how to fill it.
The evangelist says it's a "God shaped hole" and knows that most of us aren't satisfied and feel a hole. It's not God shaped at all. Finding out what it is is an individual journey. Eventually we may even learn that there never was a hole beyond the hell hole we created through the beliefs we received and held. There isn't a hole, it's an imposed illusion. The magician's box is not empty though it looks impossible that it contains anything.
Secondly I mean the damage done by orthodox Christian doctrine, especially for me the presuppositions on which the gospel depends and the way the doctrines of original sin came to be believed.
As we sang, "I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene, and wonder how he could love me; a sinner, condemned, unclean."
If you're in wonder and amazement that someone who is meant to be love, infinite love, infinite mercy and so on could possible love someone as bad as you then that's going to lead to more than a few problems.
Jesus says in John chapter 3, a very famous passage, that God so loved the world ... but if you don't believe in Jesus you're already condemned. Now if that's not a picture of emotionally abusive parenting I don't know what is. When you're taught to believe you can't do anything good unless daddy does it, when your dad tells you you deserve to burn forever but he'll help, when he says he can only bear to have you in his presence because blood was shed, it's not great for self esteem, self acceptance and reaching the fullness of your potential.
Yes, Christians tell you, rightly too, that the emphasis is on love, mercy, hope and so on. Being joyful because of salvation. I wrote an excellent sermon on joy and got halfway through writing a book on Christian joy. Trying to convince myself?
But the premises lying behind that salvation are, in orthodox formulations of the religion, anti-human. Calvin takes the doctrine of original sin, developed via the apostle Paul via Augustine, to its logical conclusion and teaches - it's the first point of Calvinism - that we are all born in a state of total depravity. Total depravity. Right from the beginning. Perhaps the most negative view of the human race found in any religion or belief system in history.
It's taken so much to recover from that and it's no coincidence that the phrase "Post traumatic church disorder" exists. It cost me my happiness and mental health to "see my sin upon the cross" which I wrote about a few years ago.
Recovery began some years before leaving the church. Firstly through a book I didn't even finish because I wasn't read for it. Seeds were planted though by what I read in "Original Grace" by Matthew Fox. They were developed by meeting, eventually, Christians who also rejected all of the original sin teaching and taught me to embrace words like "I am beautifully/fearfully and wonderfully made" from the psalm I used in my final ever sermon before being banned for accepting myself as wonderfully made and stopped rejecting who and what I am. Other Christian authors came to be important to me too. Bishop John Shelby Spong. John Main. Paul Tilllich. Plenty of others, all Christians whose books I still have on my shelves.
Four years after leaving the church I'm much less angry about the damage caused to me. If it wasn't for the Christians who made it safe for me to walk away I'd still be angry and hurting. Books like "Leaving the Fold" by Marlene Winell helped immensely and four years of looking at that hole and noticing it wasn't real helps. No, it's not real. We're bombarded by propaganda telling us it's real, that we and our lives are inadequate. God will fill it. Flora margarine or Bisto will make it okay. Yes, advertising can work just in the same way as the most manipulative of religions.
There is nothing to fill. There never was. Blindness to the meaning and wonder of your own self and the selves of others only makes it seem that there is.
Four years on I'm still finding that in some ways I'm recovering from religion. I was already messy and vulnerable when I became "born again" as the religious term puts it. I already had some pretty major experiences of mental health distress. Religion gave me good things and I was very glad to have them. It gave community, friendship, meaning, purpose, music and much more. Looking back, I know that any religion or faith group, theistic or secular, could have provided those things in different ways. The fulfillment of community wasn't because of Jesus but because of community itself, humans coming together to support one another. These are all good things and need to be nurtured outside of religion. They're also things that the secular world hasn't quite developed to the same extent. Perhaps it's harder to do it when people aren't gathered around a particular set of dogma or doctrines. Perhaps it's just that these things take time and the transition from religious to secular is always a challenge.
My Christian experiences contained those good things, in varying degrees in different churches. I learned years later that the church which gave the greatest fulfillment of community was also the one which had the largest incidence of child sexual, physical and emotional abuse. That's something for others to write about when the time is right. However, my Christian experiences also created a religious form of C-PTSD as it's done to many people I've listened to in the last few years. Some Christians have a much healthier form of religion without the damaging aspects that have been pervasive in Christian societies. That's possible. For them, who I naturally disagree with about belief in God, I am glad. While I'm up for philosophical discussions with believers it doesn't matter to me if someone believes in God and that belief leads them to ways which are full of light. Why would it, even after I was damaged so much? There are Christians I know and love and whose lives, largely flowing from their faith, I admire greatly. None of the above is an attack on Christians or on Jesus, at least not the psychologically healthier interpretations of his person and actions. It is in part an attack on abusive or inhuman forms of religion and for that I make no apology.
Recovery is possible. It's hard work. It's full of surprises. It demands much patience. But it is possible. Never doubt that.
Recovery is possible. It's hard work. It's full of surprises. It demands much patience. But it is possible. Never doubt that.
Sunday, 9 February 2020
Waiting For Advent, 2013 - Almost The First Poems I Wrote
30th November 2013. Nearly six months after admitting the truth to myself and to another that I am transgender - a word I didn't even know when I began to accept myself.
I was still a very enthusiastic Christian then and had found safety with Northern Lights MCC, a church here in Newcastle. On that day the church held a creativity day and in a time of stillness we sat before our God and reflected, waiting for the beginning of Advent.
While we sat I opened up an empty notebook I'd been carrying for months and I wrote. These are almost the first poems I'd written for many years. I can't recall having written a poem before then, not since writing a sonnet to a girlfriend in early 1994 because she asked for one and then being dumped about an hour later.
These are not good poems though the latter could still stand perfectly well as a liturgical litany.
The first is not just not good. It's bad! That's not important. What's important is that if we want to write we should and we shouldn't worry too much about the quality of what we write. If we keep writing our words will flow with more freedom and style. We'll always be learning and playing with our language and while we learn we can be liberated by letting out what would otherwise be trapped within.
I'm not a Christian now. I hope that I am at least a slightly better writer.
The Afternoon before Advent
(St Martin's Chapel, Byker, in the stillness, the advent wreath prepared but cold. To be read at my slow, chew-on-words pace)
Candles, dimmed,
Blackened wicks,
Standing proud, yet dead.
We wait for life, for fire
For the dull tool to become beacon,
For darkness, invisible in the dark
To be darkness, intangible in the light.
For bare sticks of wax, waiting, waiting
To signify your light, heat, triumph.
You came. The light was lit.
Prophets sang. The light was lit.
A yes was spoken. Be it done to me.
The light was lit. Darkness forced back.
Candles, lit, you came, you remain,
Come, come again, again, come again.
Light us, symbols of you
Not to reveal darkness but to be light
You, great light of the world
We, your lights for the world.
But, for today, candles, dimmed.
No defeat. Just expectation.
Light will come. You will come.
And in light, all will be lit,
All will be well.
Advent
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
To the poor, wrapped in poverty;
To the lost, beyond sight of the found.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
That my potential, still in the womb,
May birth, grow, ascend in you.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
You, discovered, truth in human flesh,
Reveal the discovery of my wonders.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
Born to be self-offering
Teach me my self, that I may offer.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
Godhead in inconsequential circumstance
Lead me to great consequence in you.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
God, creator, helpless, all powerful
Bless with the weakness of strength.
I was still a very enthusiastic Christian then and had found safety with Northern Lights MCC, a church here in Newcastle. On that day the church held a creativity day and in a time of stillness we sat before our God and reflected, waiting for the beginning of Advent.
While we sat I opened up an empty notebook I'd been carrying for months and I wrote. These are almost the first poems I'd written for many years. I can't recall having written a poem before then, not since writing a sonnet to a girlfriend in early 1994 because she asked for one and then being dumped about an hour later.
These are not good poems though the latter could still stand perfectly well as a liturgical litany.
The first is not just not good. It's bad! That's not important. What's important is that if we want to write we should and we shouldn't worry too much about the quality of what we write. If we keep writing our words will flow with more freedom and style. We'll always be learning and playing with our language and while we learn we can be liberated by letting out what would otherwise be trapped within.
I'm not a Christian now. I hope that I am at least a slightly better writer.
The Afternoon before Advent
(St Martin's Chapel, Byker, in the stillness, the advent wreath prepared but cold. To be read at my slow, chew-on-words pace)
Candles, dimmed,
Blackened wicks,
Standing proud, yet dead.
We wait for life, for fire
For the dull tool to become beacon,
For darkness, invisible in the dark
To be darkness, intangible in the light.
For bare sticks of wax, waiting, waiting
To signify your light, heat, triumph.
You came. The light was lit.
Prophets sang. The light was lit.
A yes was spoken. Be it done to me.
The light was lit. Darkness forced back.
Candles, lit, you came, you remain,
Come, come again, again, come again.
Light us, symbols of you
Not to reveal darkness but to be light
You, great light of the world
We, your lights for the world.
But, for today, candles, dimmed.
No defeat. Just expectation.
Light will come. You will come.
And in light, all will be lit,
All will be well.
Advent
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
To the poor, wrapped in poverty;
To the lost, beyond sight of the found.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
That my potential, still in the womb,
May birth, grow, ascend in you.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
You, discovered, truth in human flesh,
Reveal the discovery of my wonders.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
Born to be self-offering
Teach me my self, that I may offer.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
Godhead in inconsequential circumstance
Lead me to great consequence in you.
Come to me risen one,
Come as you came before:
God, creator, helpless, all powerful
Bless with the weakness of strength.
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