Mask Wearing, Legal Exemptions, and the Reality of Dissociation

Morning pages 19th January 2022. Written close to noon after some difficulties.

...

It's windy out there but this morning the weather is stunning.  I want to be walking, to see the river, explore the land above Ovingham or to return to the Derwent valley or to the forest at Chopwell.  Instead my only walk was to the physiotherapy department and back.

I have been struggling with dissociation.  That's nothing new.  I truly did not want to wear a face mask for my appointment, having dissociated during the previous two.  I had to though, even though I'm exempt from wearing one.  The therapist said I had to and it was clear the appointment would be cancelled if I didn't.  I was forced to do something I didn't legally have to do and while there's no point being cross about it because that changes nothing, I am cross.

It's not like I don't want to help by wearing a mask.  I do, desperately.  I just know what the consequences can be.  In some appointments in the past I've dissociated so extremely that staff have been very worried about me but of course Lucy assures them we can get home safely even when she is not assured of it herself.  Sometimes it's not Lucy who gets us home because sometimes she doesn't know how.

I don't function well in appointments if masked and often cannot remember them afterwards because I drift away and someone else fronts.  Being able to remember an appointment is quite important to me. I'd taken a lateral flow test too, ninety minutes before the appointment.  Unless I'd become contagious in the previous hour I wasn't likely to infect anyone with Covid.  While I do understand the need to protect people and wear a face mask if I can in shops and on buses and in other similar situations - which so many people don't even though they're not exempt - the fact is that I am exempt and sometimes need to be firm about that.

In any case, if he was so worried about Covid, why was it me who asked for the window to be opened for ventilation?  Why wasn't it open as a safety measure already?

Writing this a few hours later I can say this: I cannot remember much of the appointment.  I know there were some leg things done but can't tell you much about them.  I know I'm meant to do exercises each day because there was a sheet of them in my bag when I got home.  I know there's another appointment because that's written on the exercise sheet.  And I do know that my ribs will be examined again soon.  I can't remember much more.

Why?  Because of dissociation.  Because of the mask.

It doesn't always happen and often I can control it.  Sometimes I can't and over the last two years I've learned to spot when the more difficult consequences would arise.  Not always, but in the beginning I couldn't spot it at all.  Sometimes I try to wear a mask on a bus and have to take it off even before leaving Byker, two minutes into the journey.  Sometimes I simply have to admit I can't do it and I know full well that I've pushed myself too far on quite a few occasions and ended up in difficulties where I can hardly get home safely.

This isn't just pretending.  This is my reality.  I can't express how much I hated seeing people when masks first became compulsory calling on their conspiracy and conspirituality chums to pretend to be exempt and then state the law if challenged.  That's right, there were calls for people to pretend to be disabled just to get out of something that may not be a joyous bundle of laughs but which does help the situation as study after study has proved without any iota of doubt.  Perhaps some masks are better than others in preventing transmission but they all did something as long as mouth and nose were covered up.

The level of dishonesty in pretending to be disabled shocked me.  It doesn't shock me now and there has been much worse since.  I'm almost beyond being shocked at how despicable people can easily become.  Now I'm more saddened at how quickly normal people can be convinced that evil is good.

I am exempt though, in theory for three different reasons.

Asthma gets me an exemption though I don't claim it because my asthma is mild and there are plenty of asthmatic people who become surgeons and nurses or join other professions where a mask is essential.  They wear masks for much longer than most of us would have to and for many hours more than I've ever done.  Very often the masks they wear are far more difficult to wear and far more uncomfortable than the basic cloth or sometimes surgical masks I've worn.  We've all seen the photos of nurses coming off shift from a covid ward and the painful looking marks on their faces.  Some of them are asthmatic too so it's not like my asthma is any justification for avoiding masking up.

Autism and related sensory sensitivities get me an exemption though I don't claim it because I know I can overcome that, at least in terms of a mask.  It can be hard but I've overcome so many things that the physical discomfort is just one more and I wasn't going to let a piece of material defeat me just for that. If I could get of those psychiatric pills and get to the end of the horrible withdrawal I went through then I can just deal with masks and sensory difficulties.

Exemption number three I claim.  When I need to.  At least I've been learning to claim it.  Sticking on a face mask can give me flashbacks of sexual abuse I don't consciously remember and the distress levels can lead very quickly to dissociation and consequent risks.  Sometimes I can go straight to dissociation.  It's not nice.  How's that for understating the extent of the problem?

When I, Clare, say I need that exemption then I damn well need it otherwise you won't be talking to Clare anymore.  I'll have faded out, switched out, and one of the others will speak and act in my place.  Sometimes recovery is quick.  Sometimes not.  Today was quick though I still feel the effects mentally and physically and will still have the remnants of that tomorrow.

So I can't remember the appointment.  That's not good but perhaps Lucy will be able to explain later.  Getting out of the building and removing the mask helped immediately, especially because the sky is so bright today.  At home Lucy played a game for an hour while I came back into focus.  She watched me play the game last year and now she wants to play it all too.  There are plenty of things worse than that and I'm fortunate because Lucy won't deliberately hurt us.

My head hurts now, a post- involuntary switch headache.  That's milder too than it can be.  Sometimes they've been agony and I've been left with emotional remnants too that I don't know what to do with.  Still, there was no sexual flashback this morning and for that I'm grateful.  Perhaps Lucy stepped in to protect me.

It's a surprise to me that sometimes I can be in a shop or on a short bus ride and have no more discomfort from the mask than anyone - not that I can compare.  Then the next time it's an impossible or something I force myself to endure even though I know the risks and how vulnerable I can become.  I haven't failed to get home yet but it's sometimes taken much longer than it should, hours longer on occasion, and I am left with no memory of that time.  Lucy may be wise but she's a child and there are others in my head who aren't so keen on protecting me.

I need the exemption.  Today it was refused.  I'm home.  I'm safe.  I'm recovering.  I'm looking forward to lunch.  Yet there are consequences even today.  I wonder if I'd be allowed to audio record the next appointment so I could fill in memory gaps.

Now it's time to sit and be calm.  Later I am out again and am wise enough that I'll claim the exemption on the bus.

...

Evening:

I wasn't wise.  On the way out I was.  On the way back I felt so guilty because the bus was more crowded that I put the mask on.  It wasn't good.  Listening to music helped but it truly wasn't good.  All the bus windows were closed too.  Why can't people leave them open for everyone's benefit?

I didn't cope well at the social group I went to.  I had to stand outside quite a few times and then go and sit in another room for half the time.  I was close to tears for a lot of it.  Tonight the headache is worse than it was at lunchtime and we had a collective meltdown when it was time to make dinner.  Eventually we had one of the very cheap Pot Noodles we bought yesterday at a community charity project.  

I'm anxious.  I'm struggling to stay focused and Lucy played her game for a couple more hours.  Sleep will help and tomorrow is a new day.  Today will fade away.

Next week I see the physiotherapist again.  And my choices will be taken away.  The appointment is at the end of the week and today we learned that by then some of the Covid protection measures will be gone including the requirement to wear masks in public spaces.  It's going back to "advisory" which we all know means most people won't do it just as they didn't when it was "advisory" before.  That won't apply to NHS sites though.

I worry now.  For the million people in this country who are clinically vulnerable in different ways.  What of their safety?

Distractions of Meditations. The Faith at the Centre of the Soul.

It's day eight of an experiment.  Or of an experience.

Day eight and I'm exhausted and today I am downhearted too.  As if the universe is in league with my being, this first side of A4 paper has a browned edge.  It's from an old pad I found in cupboard, perhaps a dozen sheets left, perhaps a few more.  I probably wrote on all the others in writing groups I no longer attend, creating pieces I no longer have but may one day reclaim to see whether, with a clearer mind, there's anything work salvaging, editing, even performing or publishing in something more than a tiny blog post nobody reads.

I'm neither fatigued nor downhearted by the experiment but only by lack of sleep and an appointment today that went as far from ideally as possible because of rules and systems that make no sense.  The lack of sleep is partly linked to the appointment and both relate to physical pain which is presently a constant, running on a scale from "mildly annoying" to "fuckfuckfuck make it stop!"

The experiment won't cure that though I've seen highly overblown and unrealistic claims made for similar experiments.  Do this and your pain will stop.  Do this and there will be no way your life won't be happy and infinitely better in every way.  A book I've been sitting with, reading two or three pages a day says these sales techniques appeal to our materialism, our wanting to get things and that isn't far from what the experiment really is.

Eight days of meditation.  Also eleven days of writing these pages, meandering non-fictions and fictions that perhaps have more meaning.  Meditation, morning and evening, taking the time to sit and see what happens.  And what happens in the fifteen minutes that I raised to twenty to see if it felt different - the ideal later would be thirty - is a cacophony of thoughts, voices, distractions, physical itches and annoyances.  Generally everything that isn't what might be said when people often describe meditation.

It's so far from the form of internally saying the mantra, finding silence beneath it, and just being with what is that it makes me laugh.  I'm almost tempted to set up a voice recorded and speak out every time something inside or outside distracts me from presence.  But the speaking out and the recording would both inevitably alter the nature and scope of the distractions, in ways far more understandable than the way observation affects things like electrons or photons according to the quantum physics book I'm reading.

I don't understand that at all so am pleased when the author agrees that it's incomprehensible.  I understand it so little that I don't even know whether calling photons and electrons "things" was wrong.  The science seems to be true, as do the observations but nobody understands why or how it can be true.  Perhaps that's like meditation though.  The experience, at least when the inner storm can be walked through without getting so soaked, cannot be explained.  There is only the experience and explanations don't explain.  Then again quantum physics will almost certainly explain the inexplicable of photons and quanta in ways agreed upon by those with doctorates in the subject.  However, at this point it's very easy to explain my meditation experiences.

It is meditation though.  I don't doubt that.  No matter how distracted or noisy or sometimes totally peculiar my thoughts and intrusive thoughts, how much I lose the mantra and how little I glimpse silence, a core, the ground of being.  I don't see that at all and that's okay.  It is still truly meditation.

Meditation does not imply perfection or silence or becoming found in the present moment or lost in whatever we might describe as divine.  All of that may in time be approached.  I hope it is and know that striving for it as the "goal" of my practice may only take away the opportunity for that first sight, that first revelation of a truth beyond ego, beyond the waves on the sea.

Meditation is a commitment.  It's a discipline, an intent, a practice that may take different forms for different people.  Every one of those twenty minutes was meditation.  Perhaps even the evening I got up half way through to check that the radiator wasn't leaking because the sounds it made were worrying me.

There are people, many people who say that meditation is not for them because their minds are just too noisy.  "I can't meditate.  I'm too distracted." I've been told that a lot.  I've found during previous times of trying a practice and giving up, sometimes with good reason and sometimes without, that if you mention it to people there's about a fifty percent chance that you'll get that response.  "I have thoughts, deliberate and intrusive.  It's too loud.  Meditation is a big no and always will be because my brain just isn't made that way."  I've heard other reasons though.  "I can't meditate because I'm autistic."  That excuse happens even though lots of autistic people meditate.

It's nonsense though, a complete misunderstanding of what meditation is.  It's not anyone's fault for thinking that way.  The practice and subject are sold as something they were never meant to be and with a legalistic "you must find the silence" that doesn't belong in the freedom of practice.

Heck, this morning my head threw at me images and action and lines from a television series I haven't seen in years, in the actor's voices.  In all honesty I don't find the words and actions of Theodore Bagwell very calming, especially when he's carrying a shiv!

If those people were right then my lesson would be very clear.  "Stop meditating.  Stop trying.  Your head is much too loud and sometimes it's plural too.  Give up.  Delete the timer from your phone.  Give away all books you own.  Instead read a book, watch YouTube videos, solve more puzzles and hope that one day you can go for long walks again instead of experiencing hell on short ones.  Don't kid yourself that you'll ever be a meditator or able to do it properly and live in some enlightened state.  That's for other people.  Give up Clare.  Don't be such an idiot or so arrogant to think it's for you."

They're wrong though.  While the intensity and range of distractions has been humbling through the last week it's not the point.  Meditation is intent and practice.  It's one foot in front of the other, not an already sitting with a cake in the cafe on top of Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon).  Meditation is acceptance.  And that's enough for now.  What happens happens.  What I discover or experience will be what it will be.  A deliberate phrase - the name of God revealed to Moses, just not in the present tense you would read it in most English Bibles.

The book says "God is the centre of the soul."  I quote exactly.  "Meditate consistently, in finding silence, in letting go of the world and ego you draw towards the infinitely close God and from there your relationship with ego and world are transformed."  I paraphrase - perhaps incorrectly.  Teachers call this mystery.  I call it absolute mystery, invisible in the thunder of my head.

"God is the centre of the soul."  What, Clare?  Do you believe that?  Yes.  Yes, I do.  I don't believe in a supernatural God and now find theism almost antithetical to human knowledge about the world and the universe.  I don't believe in a soul that might continue after the physical body is gone.  There I agree with most but not all cognitive neuroscientists.  And even the word "centre" can't possibly be literal.

Yet I can still say I believe it.  God is the centre of the soul.  I may not interpret it how someone else does and may understand the words very differently to the author of the book but I do believe.

It takes faith though.  If God is being, freedom or truth it takes faith.  If God is the ground of being it takes faith.  I believe but do not know how.  Perhaps if God is simply nature like the metaphor in "Does God play dice?" then the centre of my soul is nature, a nature I don't fully embrace or live in fulness.  Perhaps.

But if God is love?  Love is the centre of my soul.  That takes great faith indeed.  I'd like it to be true of all of us but what is love anyway?  Is it an objective reality or merely a construct we find helpful?  I don't know.  Then, when I look at myself can I believe love is central?  I know my selfishness.  I know how I've hurt people and sometimes said extremely horrible things.  I've lost friends and sometimes they were right to walk away briskly.  Some of my worst words were said when dissociating and not even knowing I ever dissociated.  Some were not, they were entirely down to me and my responsibility.  And some were the result of things I believed.  Those words I regret fully while offering grace to myself for being under those harsh beliefs.

God is the centre of my soul.

I look at my brokenness, my limitations, my egocentric ways, my excuses, and so on.  Still I say, "Yes.  I do believe.  God, whatever that is, is the centre of my soul, of everyone's soul."

The Pope: Misquotes, Manglings and The Selflessness of Owning a Cat

Headlines.  Reactions to headlines.  The agony of outrage crosses the internet like a tsunami just as it does most days.  Destructive, unreasonable, stories leaving truth behind or spattering it with mud until almost unrecognisable.

What is it today?  It's the Pope, Francis.  What's he been saying this time?  Is he picking on people like me again?  Well read the headlines.  If you're enthusiastic then read the articles too.  Today the headlines all agree, "Pope says that people who choose to have pets rather than children are selfish."  I'm paraphrasing of course but I'm freewriting rather than checking my phone and offering three sample headlines from three different newspapers in three different countries.  You can check for yourself if you want to read the headlines.

Naturally people are annoyed.  What a crappy thing for the Pope to say.  They're on the attack.  "What about social care?" they ask, though Francis often promotes that.  "What about poor people who can't afford to look after children?" though he's often addressed poverty too.  "How can he say that in the riches of the Vatican?" which are a lot less than people believe though still very far from material simplicity.  "How can a celibate priest say such things about the choice to have children?" which is a question that can often be asked, perhaps with abundant justification.  There are tweets and posts and comments that say horribly mean things too.  I saw it suggested that Francis just wants to have lots more children born so that priests can abuse them.  Outrage soon turns to lashing out in sour anger.

Most people, including Catholics, would agree the abuse in churches is utterly evil and more so that the response to abuse by the church and church leaders has also very often been utterly evil.  We'd say, rightly, that any attempt to protect the reputation of the church organisation, or a priest or the seal of confession over and above the lives and wellbeing of abused children is completely indefensible.  Of course we would because most of us are far from being monsters.

This is not going to be a defence of the Pope or of the office of the Papacy.  It's not a defence of the Catholic Church, of religion, of abuse, or of anything else. The Pope says lots of things with which I disagree.  The Church teaches lots of things I disagree with too.  We don't see eye to eye on the existence of that one creator God.

I used to regularly spend time in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament held aloft in a monstrance and publicly displayed in what Catholicism called "Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament."  I believed Jesus was before me sacramentally under the appearance of that wafer and I worshiped him with all of my heart.  Now I confess to finding the entire Catholic (and Orthodox) belief in transubstantiation to be nonsense.  While I can't prove absolutely that a wafer isn't body - and in Catholic teaching the blood too - of Jesus even though it looks and tastes and can be chemically analysed to be a wafer I don't think I have the burden of proof or evidence here.  I'm not making the extraordinary claim when I say that I believe a wafer, while it may symbolically mean more to a believer, is still a wafer.  Nevertheless the church has taught more than symbolism for 1900 years and I understand the emotional and mental appeal of the belief.

No, I'm not a defender of the faith and I stand far from Rome dogmatically and morally as well on lots of issues.  How can I not when I'm a transgender lesbian?  The Catechism of the Catholic Church still calls homosexuality intrinsically disordered and same sex relationships gravely disordered and Francis himself has said and written on several occasions that the very existence of transgender people goes against both God and nature so it's really possible at all.  How could I possibly want to defend that?  I ask the question as one who for so long rejected myself and others and did defend things like that.

Yet today I find myself on the defensive in some way for Pope Francis.  And I'm on the attack against media sources and the consequent outrage that I suspect is often the deliberate intent of such articles.  When we are constantly outraged against little things we are distracted from bigger things.  In the UK we were outraged over a party in Downing Street that shouldn't have happened.  No, it shouldn't.  Absolutely it was wrong and not only it should be condemned but the subsequent lies and attempts at justification by the government.  But in the noise made about a party they were pushing through two laws restricting our freedoms and human rights in ways far more dangerous, wide ranging, and long-term than a very condemnable party.

I read some of the articles last night.  I wanted to know what Francis had said and on the face of it what the articles include was utterly outrageous.  Selfish to not have children?  Those without children are less human?  Outrageous.  It's easy to see why anyone would be annoyed.  There's a lot to be annoyed about.

I wondered about it though and asked a question that most readers will not have asked:  "Did Pope Francis say it?"

I've seen before that there are occasions when a Pope's words are misreported or taken out of context or twisted into an entirely different intent.  I remember an occasion where a sentence spoken by Pope Benedict XVI was quoted in full.  Almost.  The sentence as reported in the media was disgusting.  An absolutely horrible thing for anyone to say and therefore Benedict must be as bad as a devil.  I'll happily condemn some things Benedict said.  There are things that make me physically shudder.  On that occasion though one word was left out of the quotation and that word was "Not."  What he'd said was the absolute opposite to that which ended up appearing in media worldwide to widespread moral outrage.

None of the articles I read last night included a link to the full talk Francis gave but they did say it was during a General Audience, something which for many years has included the Pope giving a catechesis to the church on a particular subject, often in a long series on particular aspects of the church's faith and life.  I used to own, in print, the catechesis of Pope John Paul II on the creed, something that took him quite a few years to cover.

I was curious.  What would I find if I read the talk?  It turned out to be the sixth in a series about Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus or so the story says.  From other reading this week I happen to be able to put adoption into a better contemporary to Jesus cultural context than I could a week ago.  The most important child in that time, at least in the situations and cultures in which the gospels were written, was the one adopted into the family.  That's a topic for another occasion but it's something that's lost in many sermons.

What did I find?  Simply that the claim of global newspapers was, to a large extent, false.

Francis did not call people who have pets instead of children "selfish" or "less human."  That's a lie and a lie doesn't become true no matter how easy people find it to believe.

The word "selfishness" does appear in the English translation of the talk, and I wonder further about the intent, vocabulary and nuances in the original language.  However the word does not appear alongside people who prefer to own a cat than have a human child or alongside people who do not have the physical means, mental resources or desire to raise a child.

He does also speak of a loss of humanity when we, primarily speaking societally and to Catholics, are not open to life or to children.  Take from that what you will and condemn if you wish but the way his words and ideas have been misquoted and twisted can only either be deliberate dishonesty or gross stupidity or the ignorance that comes when a modern myth is repeated as literal truth.

Unfortunately people do not tend to question reports which which they want to agree.  That's true for almost everyone.  Some of the outraged and some of those who seemingly are just glad of the opportunity to insult the church are the same people who often speak out and tell us to distrust media reports, to check sources, and to be very wise to journalistic and editorial biases.

It is wise to do all that too, at least to the extent our intelligence, time, resources and energy allow.  Often there are fact checking sites that do the work for us and reference everything well.  Last night I shared a video responding to an interview on Joe Rogan's show with the scientist most often quoted by Covid anti-vaxxers.  Every single point he made was thoroughly debunked if necessary and the facts given instead.  Every fact and rebuttal was thoroughly backed up with the best of sources and scientific papers and the whole thing had been produced with the input, advice and checking of other scientists.  I didn't have to do any work.  People far more knowledgeable than me had done it all. I only had to watch a video.

Most of us are far more inclined to challenge the things that disagree with our own thoughts, beliefs, likes and motives than those that broadly agree with us.  That goes for the biggest conspiracy theory and the smallest misquotation.  It goes for the most rational among us.  It goes for me too and I've been known to post things I agree with without checking, things that have turned out to be false.  When we are emotionally attached it's harder too.  For all of us.  A Covid anti-vaxxer will probably not watch the video and dispassionately consider all the sources.  A religious fundamentalist will find it hard to explore any other possibility.  And we all have weak points where our own biases and prejudices will, most times, drown out even the most well backed up alternative view.

Another important thing to note is the intended audience.  These catecheses are spoken primarily to Catholics, members of a church with a particular teaching or set of teachings about parenthood, family, the openness to life, self-offering and so on.  You may not agree with the teachings and probably don't know many of them.  Even committed Catholics often don't agree with all the teachings.  I don't agree either - about LGBT acceptance, abortion, contraception, and lots of other Catholic teachings even without looking at theological views.  That's okay though.  I'm not a Catholic and there's no reason for me to agree.

Simply, the Pope wasn't really talking to the world except perhaps in a secondary manner.  He spoke to a people within a particular tradition that raises up the particular calling to marriage for most people who are not called to a full time religious life.  Even teachings about these things are subject to change.  Priestly celibacy, for example, is a discipline not a dogma.  It won't necessarily remain part of the vows most ordained catholic priests make.  Francis' words and pastoral advice are to them primarily.  Not to someone such as me.

There are things I disagree with and things I'd unequivocally like to see change and I'm well aware of ways in which both church members and its leaders have often fallen far short of the ideals called for in the teaching and times in which the organisation has metaphorically pushed for Hell rather than Heaven.   They've turned from teachings the rest of us may find peculiar (ignoring for just this moment the more anti-human doctrinal and moral teachings though we could all discuss them) into practices that cannot be seen as anything but evil.

However that does not, in itself, annihilate the intent and audience of papal catechesis.  This is no more addressed to everyone regardless of creed, religion or personal philosophies and choices than were Francis previous teachings about Joseph or the months he spent before that looking at the biblical letter to the church in Galatia.

We can see of course that in some (or many) respects Francis and catholic teaching is out of step with our post-modern society and the freedoms we'd all like to be able to take for granted.  We can see from his words that he seems bemused and even confused by it.  He seems to be stumbling and finding it hard to see that other ways than his may be just as valid.  Even ways that may lead to the demographic winter he, along with some secular sociologists, talks about.

I'm going to close by noting that it's not only media sources and non-catholics who misreport and misrepresent words and situations, sometimes completely deliberately and with arrogance.  Catholics can do it too.  Even Catholic priests.

When I was an ardent Catholic and entrenched in traditionalism while being very suspicious of modernist tendencies in the church I followed a traditional priest online.  I liked what he wrote at the time though I now realise his views would lead to a church even more stuck in the past and increasingly irrelevant than it is, a church where perfection in ceremonies became more longed for than perfection in love.

I started to become disillusioned by such ways and by his ways in particular as a result of something in one of his blog posts.  A quotation and a claim that a particular person said it.  I can't remember who of course or what the quotation was.  It's been more than ten years and I couldn't reliably quote the conversation I had this morning.  I remember though that it seemed to me highly unlikely that this person ever said those words.  So I checked.  Very thoroughly.  They hadn't said anything remotely similar.  The priest had got something wrong.  He wouldn't like that!

So I queried the quotation with the priest expecting a response along the lines of "Hey, thanks for telling me.  I'll get that changed because I like truth and don't want to spread falsehoods and slander."

That didn't happen.

His response was that he agreed with the quotation so it didn't matter that it had never been said and it didn't matter that the person it was attributed to hadn't said it.  The priest agreed with the words and that was all that mattered to him.  I was shocked and began to see on that day that the priest couldn't be a hero of faith because he was happy to knowingly lie to promote his religious ideals.

I was amused, much later.  I'd set up a blog when we lived in Wales.  My first ever blog.  Don't go hunting, it's no longer there.  I have posted on it.  Not once.  My mum did once though, completely accidentally when staying with us.  She wrote a very nice post with excellent photos about a family walk on Bangor Mountain.

Later, when starting a second blog that fared only marginally better than the first, I spotted that that priest had taken time to seek out my blog and that he'd placed a comment on my mum's accidently post.

"You are a very rude person."

If anyone ever chanced upon and read the blog and comment they'll have been very confused!

2588 words.  I'm pretty sure free-written morning pages aren't meant to be 2500 words long.

Returning to Meditation. Again and again and again.

Morning pages.  Day five.  I was hoping to return to the fictional world that appeared from nowhere on day two and developed a little on day four.  That will happen.  I have no doubt of that.  There are idea fragments whirling in the background of my mind and the time to write them into form will come.  The time to plan something beyond free writing will come too if I allow it.  Not this morning.  This month, I think.  Today as I sat with my cheap Bic pen I knew I had to write about something else.  Did you ever see the video of that Christian "prophetess" telling how anyone who used a Bic pen was living under the curse and how God wants all his people to use pens made of pure god, just like her pen?  To me it seems more like the curse they're living after is being indoctrinated so well that they give a greedy woman enough money to afford pens made of God.  For me a Bic is perfect.  With my terrible version of left-handed writing style most pens smudge.  A cheap Bic pen doesn't.  I was once dragged before the school headmaster just so he could be shown how bad the way I hold a pen is!  With my Bic I'm living under the blessing.

...

A decision:  To return to a meditation practice.

Begin Again

Writing about meditation after three fifteen minute sessions and a day and half may seem a peculiar thing.  What can I possibly have to teach?  What insights can such writing give?  Possibly nothing.  Possibly none.  Yet my words may be able to state in imperfect terms some whys and hows and whos.  Why am I doing this?  How did I make the choice?  And who did the choosing.

I've believed for a while that I needed to return to something.  I moved from theism to atheism, at least insofar as I reject the theism I once believed, the view that there is one creator God who intervenes in our lives and world.  Or many Gods, but I was firm in my monotheistic certainty even though much of the Bible I read clearly isn't so firm.  A college essay asked us, "Was Moses a monotheist?"  He wasn't.  Most of the heroes of faith in the Old Testament are henotheistic.  In simple terms, there are lots of Gods but our one is the best and there will be trouble if you worship one of the others.

A rejection of theism is not a rejection of spirituality or a rejection of spirit even when accompanied by the rejection of a belief in any kind of afterlife.  Spirituality cannot be constrained and there are atheist spiritualities, some better than others.  In any case, I no longer call myself atheist except when that term is easier to use.  Atheism historically has taken a wide variety of forms but now comes with much baggage as a word.  Think atheism and many people think Richard Dawkins.  He's come to represent the word in many people's minds though it's hardly an ideal association and he's definitely far from representative of the forms and ideas of atheism.

Mostly I use the term "nontheist" of myself, influenced in part by that time I spent "worshiping" with Quakers.  I put that word in quotes because like atheism or Christianity it has a much broader possible scope than we tend to give it.  When I wrote a few days ago that God is that which creates and when I use the language of God so often to express aspects of life, how can I honestly call myself atheist?  Nontheist is better.  It gives space for possibilities beyond an atheist or theist dichotomy.

So I'm not a theist and so am definitely an atheist in that sense but that doesn't tell anyone anything about me.  To say I'm an atheist is hardly more useful than answering "I'm not Chinese" when asked what country I'm from.  It doesn't tell me anything about me either except in remembering the way a particular form of theism was once the centre of my beliefs and meanings.

All of that is a digression.  The point is that I am not an enemy of spirituality.  I just had to spend time far from my religious past as I realised and worked through some of the damage it had done to me and by extension to those around me.  Spirituality, of some kind or kinds, is part of our humanity and to embrace it is to become more human.

Begin Again

Last year I decided I needed to find some practice again, a meditation form free from all religious creeds and dogmas.  By chance some good people in the city happened to be restarting an eight week introduction to mindfulness meditation.  At that time they were offering it for free because they had been able to access funding by which at least some of their bills were temporarily paid.  I'm not going to speak against them or against mindfulness.  There are many useful insights there. 

It's not for everyone though but it's sometimes marketed and promoted as if it is and further that it will solve all kinds of problems.  Sometimes mindfulness has been turned into a destructive monster simply by being oversold, sometimes by being offered as a panacea in a difficult life such as when companies overwork staff to the point of despair and rather than improving work conditions offer a weekly lunchtime mindfulness session as if that's what is needed.

That's beside the point though.  The insights and usefulness remain if the malpractice can be avoided.  Just don't get me started talking about the thousands of products that now have the word "mindfulness" on the cover or box to boost sales.  Mindfulness colouring.  Mindfulness jigsaws.  Mindfulness sudoku.  Mindfulness aerobics.  It's only a matter of time before there is a mindfulness Marvel film or something equally as ridiculous.  The Buddha would probably join Jesus in overturning some tables.

Much to my surprise, I found this: Mindfulness meditation, as taught by those good people, massively fucked me up.

Their teaching was mainstream, just the kind of thing you would find from Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mark Williams, or other prominent mindfulness teachers and writers.  It wasn't bad teaching or mindfulness plus something cult-like.  But it still fucked me up.  I wrote about all of that at the time, even while enduring it.  After a month of daily practice I was a mess but I stuck out the eight weeks, deteriorated, and spent the rest of the year mentally messed up and working hard each day towards recovery and finding something approaching balance again.  I don't need to rewrite what already got written.  The point is that it was very bad for me.

Begin Again

Even so, here I am at the start of another year still desiring and looking to spirituality.  Without dogma.  Without complexity.  Without ancient religious beliefs about reality that don't make that much sense.  Without imposed rules.  A spirituality of freedom, reverence, awe, creativity, love, compassion, peace making, unknowing and more.

This much is certain:  I do not have that spirituality.  Perhaps nobody does, at least not perfectly.  It's an aspiration, a broad way of life, the revelation metaphorically of the eternal.

I have much experience.  That doesn't matter.  This is beginning again.  And again.  And again.  Each day is a beginning even for the wisest of meditation teachers, the greatest creatives and the most extravagant lovers.  There is always more to unknow and spiritual insight can reveal that unknowing more clearly.

So I begin again.  Choose a practice.  Choose a teacher, a guide who won't enforce and who may point in directions by won't pretend they've followed any road to the end.  Even enlightenment, whatever that is, is just a beginning.

I've made my choice.  I'm not saying what that choice is today.  It's irrelevant because my choice is probably not yours and yours probably isn't mine.  Spirituality doesn't imply consensus of form, practice or vocabulary.  My choice may prove a good one for me.  It may not.  Time and commitment will tell.  Time without commitment will not.

After a day and a half all I know is this.  I am too filled with ego, knowledge and confusion to glimpse a sign of the apophatic revelation that comes through and within silence.

Jesus, Stones, Dogs and Donuts. What Happened to the Preacher's Body?

Morning pages, 3rd January 2022.  Free written with some edits and extra sentences as I typed. 

Last night I read that there's a real possibility that the body of Jesus was eaten by dogs.

The suggestion is clear that there was no clean tomb into which his corpse was lovingly placed only to be discovered missing a couple of days later.  I loved that old story of course and history can't ever prove it didn't happy.  It can merely suggest it didn't, that there are other possibilities, and give reasons for making that suggestion, far from any of the contradictory gospel narratives.

Years ago I read Frank Morison's book, "Who Moved the Stone?" and believed in its brilliance as proof that Jesus must have risen, airtight enough evidence to be accepted in any court of law.  Except, as I now realise, all of the impossible alternatives in the book are in fact just not probable and improbable things happen every day.  Also, while our medical definitions of death are not exactly what they were 2000 years ago it's generally accepted that coming back to life days after being executed is impossible rather than improbable.  Unless we have faith in the story at all in which case the impossible is made possible in our minds.

So as historical or legal argument "Who Moved the Stone?" failed.  There are reasonable alternatives, other stone movers are possible and we do not have to resort to a belief that God let Jesus out, alive and well but scarred and not quite physical in the normal way by which we can't walk through walls - it's clear belief in his physical resurrection hadn't fully developed even by the time that story was written or compiled.  Not even the greatest conjuror can walk through walls just as they can't really walk on water no matter how impressive the illusion is.

Last night's reading showed me that Who Moved the Stone? and all similar apologetic attempts fail in an even more important respect than merely arguing that events that are not probable are impossible or saying that, for example, the followers of Jesus wouldn't have stolen the body and lied because Christians are too nice to lie.  The slightest look at church history shows that to be nonsense when we see Christians can perpetrate all kinds of evil.  Sometimes they later repent and call it sin.  Sometimes they call it God's holy will.  Faith in Jesus doesn't make anyone immune from fraud or dishonesty though of course most Christians resolve to seek to live a better life.

Perhaps the biggest failure for the honest and critical historian then, something Frank Morison claimed he was seeking to be, was the failure of assumption.  Who Moved the Stone?  There's a giant assumption in the question isn't there?  It assumes there was a stone to be moved and with that comes the assumptions that there was a tomb behind the stone and that the gospel narratives are accurate.  C S Lewis makes the same mistake in his famous Lord, liar, or lunatic trilemma from Mere Christianity.  If the texts aren't reliable as words and actions of Jesus then the trilemma fails.  It fails even if the texts were perfectly reliable as history because there are still other options than the three Lewis can imagine.  I was part of the Christian Union at university for a while and I shudder remembering how every single session for a term the invited speaker, different each time, would quote those words of Lewis as if they could never be answered or critiqued.

But what if there was no stone, no tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea?  What if they were stories and traditions that developed in the decades after the death of Jesus, like so many myth narratives of his life such as the Christmas stories many of us will have heard recently or the story of the magi celebrated by western churches in a few day's time?  

Then the question "Who Moved the Stone?" becomes at best a mind game, a hypothetical, a "What if?"  What if the tomb stories were true?  What could possibly explain them?  I now do not believe in the slightest in the physical resurrection of Jesus but I used to completely agree that there was only one answer to the questions, a supernatural answer, miraculous, a unique event, Hallelujah, Praise Jesus, the risen Lord, himself God the Son and conqueror of death.

History cannot prove the story false.  We don't have good enough sources.  There is nothing from unbiased eyewitnesses.  There was nothing recorded at the time.  No mention in any other sources of a giant earthquake, an eclipse, the curtain in the temple ripping in two, or of lots of dead people coming back to life and wandering around.  I would expect something of that to be mentioned somewhere.  The dead rising from graves isn't exactly an everyday event but nobody thought to mention it.  There's no mention anywhere else of the five hundred other people who are said to have seen the resurrected Jesus, most of whom didn't then follow him or believe in him if we're to believe the numbers in the Pentecost narratives.  What we do have are contradictory sources from later religious believers writing with definite motives out of developed, largely augmented oral traditions and probably a written source or possibly several written sources that are now lost.

If there was no stone there can be no question of who moved it.  At this moment a song is in my head.  I sincerely and absolutely wish it wasn't.  It's a song from "The Donut Man," a Christian children's television show made by a man named Rob Evans (the Donut Man and head of the Donut Repair Club) helped by children and a simple donut glove puppet named Duncan who always looked suspiciously like a bagel!  The song I'm suffering now is called "Run Peter Run" and the chorus begins "He's alive, he's alive ... the stone is rolled away."

There's that assumption again:  It's not just a set of contradictory religious stories based on faith.  It all really happened and afterwards the apostles or disciples were explicitly ordered to stay in Jerusalem until Pentecost.  Or they were explicitly ordered to go to Galilee. It depends which account you want to believe.  Conservative so-called "Biblical" Christians believe both even though that makes no sense.  Some contradictions you can remedy with clever, though unlikely solutions.  That one cannot.  To the liberal Christian the contradictions don't matter because they see the text differently but if you believe it's the infallible word of God, "God breathed," then it becomes very important to harmonise the text because faith becomes based at least in part on there being no possibility of error or myth in what's seen as a fully reliable historical text.

So let's question the assumption of a stone, a tomb, a resurrection proven thanks to Frank Morison and his well written book that any judge in any land would say convicts all who deny the physical resurrection of Jesus as being wrong.

There are good reasons to question.  Bart Ehrman, who I was reading last night and will read again today, gives some of them.  I'm looking forward to covering similar ground when I return to and finish "Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography" by the scholar John Dominic Crossan.  He and Ehrman share much common ground in their historical analyses.

What if there was no tomb?  What if Jesus was eaten by dogs as I suggested in the first paragraph?  Crossan has a chapter in his biography, "The Dogs Beneath the Cross."  Neither Ehrman nor Crossan claim to prove it of course but both suggest it as a strong possibility as they study crucifixion practices across the Roman empire and as far as possible in first century Palestine.  They further study what happened to the bodies of those convicted as criminals after they died and study what we know about Pontius Pilate and the way he ran things.

They also cover the way in which Pilate was gradually redeemed in Christian though from being portrayed as thoroughly evil, to trying his very best to go against the cries of the Jews and not crucify Jesus at all, and in later gospels that didn't make the final New Testament cut even to converting to Christianity.  Why did this happen?  Simply to place the blame for everything more squarely on the Jews.  Unfortunately it didn't take long from the preaching of the Jewish prophet and his Jewish disciples to become infected with worsening anti-semitism, mostly from gentile influences.

Three pages a day is my writing challenge.  Today I was planning to continue on from the fiction I wrote yesterday set in one of many worlds I could build.   I believed that would happen as I wrote the first letter, an L.  In honesty I can say that I'd have preferred to write more of that.  Instead, aspects of last night's reading tumbled out as I continue deconstructing and understanding my old faith.

As for the dogs? Perhaps I'll write of them another day.  Or perhaps you can just read Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan.  Both are far more knowledgeable than me!

To Hold the Holy Spirit of Creation. To Begin to Write Again.

New Year's Day is not the best day to try writing morning pages for the first time in many months.  It's not the day to want to get up and begin a process of kickstarting a creative surge where words tumble out into reasonable quality writing as once happened.  New Year's Day is not the day to think, "I'm going to set an alarm early, get up full of energy, and be disciplined enough to hand-write three pages of A4 paper with a cheap pen."  Not when New Year's Eve means that you know there's no point trying to sleep until the fireworks die down and afterwards only manage to doze due to a background of loud and perhaps drunken merriment just about in earshot from Newcastle Quayside or the city centre.

New Year's Day is a day to be gentle, to get up late if possible, to expect that any brilliant resolution is going to fail immediately due to a headache and trepidation about heading into another year in which terms like lateral flow, lockdown, and Boris Johnson are known to you.

Nevertheless, before the morning was over I'd sat at a desk with sheets of lined paper from a brand new jumbo sized Wilko pad.   I'd found a new cheap pen, bought in the Wilko sale.  And the first ink was shed.  It didn't begin well.  I stole the first sentence.  From Moses, as I once believed.  From the "E" authorship as I came to know.  Words many of us know in English and words I had to learn in Hebrew although the pronunciation we learned in college would take any Hebrew speaker past horror into laughs of derision.

We wrote today. We also walked to the nearby marina
for the first time since falling seven weeks ago.
Our knees now hate us!

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  I'm not so ambitious and aim to create words, melded into phrases, sentences and some kind of coherence.  It's an experiment after a year of not writing, of despondency and even a hatred, for a while, of all that went before.

The words dried.  The flow became barren and the story became unwritten as a new tale arose that I could no longer write, that my words were without merit, without grace, turgid turpentine extrusions that deserved no aspiration to redemption or appreciation.

Stories are stories.  The legend of the silent pen.  The fable of self rejection.  The saga of worthlessness in the time of illness.  I believed the head flood would never again reach paper, could never be curves and lines on a page.  All would have been purged, burned away, had I not been stopped.

Yet here I am, watching the encroaching clouds on New Year's Day while Radio Three continues to play the music of Christmas.  Today I will not express the music of the new or the variations in a symphonic sky.  Today I will only begin, like God but smaller.  The stories tell of how he wrote stories.  I am more real yet hope only to write microcosms.

Perhaps it doesn't matter.  Jesus wrote only some unknown words in the dust.  Or so another story related.  He did not need to write and we must wonder what is story and what is history.  Could he write at all or was he, like all of his artisan craftsman class, illiterate?

So writing is not to be burden.  It's not to be in my personal, secular decalogue:

Rule six:  Thou shalt write.  Thou shalt produce three pages every morning even though your hand hurts already at the top of page two and your handwriting has deteriorated to a near illegible scrawl through a year of believing a lie and only using a pen to add letters to crosswords and numbers to sudoku or to record the walks you can't currently do.

Rule seven: Write shorter rules.

Writing then is to be free.  Sit and see what happens.  Will the words flow again?  Yes they will but words are like the sea, washing in tides.  Or like the moon, waxing and waning.  Can we remain the full moon?  Some claim we can and write for hours every day whether their head pours out extravagance or not.

For me, I will write today, meandering on the beginning.  It's a matter of simplicity not of the scholar.  Learning about God and creation in Hebrew won't help you create.  It might be interesting.  Or it may just be frustrating as it was for me.  I was ill for weeks and dropped too far behind in parsing verbs to catch up.  Creation is not a matter of academia.  Even the local masters degree in creative writing is not creation.

Creation is from within each of us.  I believe that.  We are born to be creative.  Not necessarily in words or colours or by chipping away stone into new forms.  Creation builds communities as well as novellas.  In theological terms we are all called to be co-creators with God.  All of us can metaphorically say "Let there be light" and create light.

Not that I "believe in God" as the term is mostly understood.  I'm atheist.  Or non-theist.  Or something.  Perhaps the old myths and legends still have meaning.  If I can see that morals in Aesop or appreciate the old Stoics whose metaphysical and supernatural beliefs are shared by nobody today then why shouldn't I draw meaning from those Biblical sagas I got to know so well when I was firm in the narrowest theism?

So in the beginning, God created ...

You and I hold divinity within us - however you take that word.  I'm going to define God now.  A partial, movable definition.  A beginning of definition, perhaps that start of a creed that can change with days, years and knowledge and which could never be read by millions each day, centuries after it becomes unreasonable.

A definition:  God is that which creates.

So as far as you create you are being God.  Or if that offends your theism you are doing the work of God.  And as far as you give others the space to create you are creating space for God to exist in the world.

On any day, not just New Year's Day, you can form an intention:  "In the beginning I will create, or participate in creating the heavens and the earth."

The dreamers of the James Webb Telescope are being God.  Greta Thunberg and all who stand for life and ecological harmony are being God.  The novelist and painter both express that divinity.  The food bank volunteers create hope and express other aspects of my unwritten creed too.   All of us can be co-creators.

And that, for myself, is something I often forgot last year.  I lost sight of my own calling to be that which is God.  Co-creator.  Lover.  Doer of good.  Student of compassion to others and to myself.  But mostly I simply rejected that I too held the Holy Spirit of Creation.

Three pages.  Complete.  A beginning.