The vulnerable mind

Last Friday, the Evangelical Alliance published an article of mine in their Friday night theology series. The aim is to write about 500 words on something topical. I've written for them a number of times, but I think in the end I have been most pleased with this article. You can read it here: Friday Night Theology: The Vulnerable Mind.

It's very tempting for Christians to pretend life is a bed of roses for them. I think that has a number of causes. One is the habit that preachers used to have of saying something like, "Come to Jesus and all your problems will be sorted." As Anne said at Stanford's Festival Songs of Praise last Sunday, that certainly wasn't the message that Saul, later St Paul, was given at his conversion, as God tells the reluctant evangelist, Ananias, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel. For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” Not a great sales pitch! 


Another is the culture of "strength" fostered among the clergy. It's not done to admit weakness, either mistakes or mental fragility. I was very fortunate when I was an apprentice pastor to have an understanding boss - as within my first year I was plagued by panic attacks. Early intervention and counselling restored my equilibrium. Later on, I actually believe that my MND, which is such an obvious weakness, helped some in our church to feel free to admit to their vulnerabilities. It made us all more real with each other and with God. 


Depression is of course not at all obvious. It may creep up insidiously as MND does, but it's easier to conceal and has a public stigma which encourages concealment. However, to my mind, it's worse than any physical ailment, as is true for all mental unwellness. The truth is that people of faith have never been insulated from mental struggles. Look through the Old Testament and try to find heroes of faith who sailed untroubled through life.... Of course the example who is most often cited is Elijah, whose treatment begins with food and rest, but you can uncover questionings, doubts and tears all over the place. The psalms contain their fair share of complaints and honest misery. If you've suffered depression, you'll recognise the feeling of Psalm 55: 

“Oh, that I had wings like a dove!
    I would fly away and be at rest;
⁷ yes, I would wander far away;
    I would lodge in the wilderness;
⁸ I would hurry to find a shelter
    from the raging wind and tempest."

Jesus himself was not immune from doubts (in the temptations) or from the sense of God having abandoned him. When he said, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" I can't believe he was pretending, or merely reciting poetry. I believe he was using the closest words he could find to describe his experience. "This is what I'm going through - and it hurts even more than the nails." The sheer cliffs of the mind are dreadful places to hang.

My article was inspired, oddly enough, by the transparent honesty of four MPs in a recent debate. When, I wondered, did I last hear a prominent church leader talking about his struggle with mental health? Would someone who admitted the vulnerability even be considered for ministry in the church? And if not, what sort of message does that send to other Christians? The wrong sort. The Church is not the domain of the strong and satisfied; it's the haven for the hurting and the hungry. It's not the resort of the successful, but of the lost and limping. It has good news not for the righteous, but for washed-up sinners. It's meant to be a ragbag of mixed-up, messed-up men and women, not there in the first place because they need mending, but there because they need loving - and they are loved. And because Christ loves every member of his motley Church and gave himself for them, so they in turn are meant to accept and love each other in the same way, without conditions and without reservations.

Blessings

I owe a lot to my friends Miles and Sarah, who now live in posh London. They used to live in Stanford in the Vale where I was vicar. Sarah has a lovely voice and used to lead worship for us. Every now and then she makes a comment on Facebook about a singer whom she's discovered. When I've found them on YouTube, she invariably proves a great talent spotter. One was Alison Krauss. Yesterday she posted, "Just discovered the amazingly beautiful voice and lyrics of Laura Story - loving Blessings." So I followed it up, and of course she's right! Blessings on YouTube

On her website, I found this account by Laura Story, which I reckoned was very helpful and rather good theology.

"The album that I did three to four years ago happened right after my husband went through surgery for a brain tumor. So a lot of the ideas that I was writing about then were just very fresh, about how do we worship in the midst of trials. So fast forwarding a few years later, a lot of things have changed. A lot of things have gotten better with his health, and a lot of things have not. We pray for God to bless us, but what does it look like when I spend four or so years praying for healing for my husband that never comes? I feel like we’ve kind of gotten to a place of having to make a choice. Are we going to judge God based on our circumstances that we don’t understand, or are we going to choose to judge our circumstances based on what we know to be true about God? Not that I choose the right thing every day, but I’m learning that every morning when I wake up to choose to trust God.

"And that’s what 'Blessings' is about. It’s just considering that maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for. No one wants a brain tumor, and no one wants a severed marriage and these things that we pray that God will reconcile. But even though this situation is definitely nothing that we ever would have asked for or prayed for, there has been a depth of intimacy with the Lord that I’m not sure I would have known apart from such a hard road that we’ve walked. And in the end, if I’ve learned to cling to that old rugged cross all the more, I truly can say that I’m a blessed person."

http://laurastorymusic.com/2011/09/story-behind-the-song-“blessings”/

Isn't that a paradoxical insight: "maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for"? I wonder what Laura means by learning "to cling to that old rugged cross". (It was a favourite funeral hymn among Stanford villagers, which always fascinated me...!) I suspect it's to do with learning to trust the love of the crucified God in the teeth of everything. 

Don't miss out

I enjoyed Saturday. It was dry, which helped. We'd arranged to meet my college pal, let's call him Murgatroyd, and his partner, I'll call her Annie, in Oxford. It's a long time since I've spent time with him and we'd never met her. We arranged to meet at the Ashmolean Museum. They're architects and he had not seen it since its £ multi-million rebuild. It is a most impressive, if confusing, building. They spotted, before following us to Brown's for a meal, the Vermeer painting on loan there.

Jane and I went to see it after lunch. It's the only painting by the Dutch master in private ownership, Young Woman seated at a virginal, and it's quite small (10 x 8 inches); but it stands out from all the others on the wall. It's very simple, but beautiful. It's in Oxford only until September, when it returns presumably to the wall of a very wealthy and lucky person in New York. You might easily miss it.

Opportunities to renew old friendships and make new ones are precious, and it's easy to miss them. That meal in Brown's was a quite simple sharing of good food and talk. Which is what "companionship" meant originally. But it was more. It was the seizing of a moment. It's all too easy to dwell in the past and so to miss what God may have in store. We've all made mistakes we regret, leaving behind hurts. And yet, it seems to me, that Jesus didn't hold such things against people. He invited himself to their homes for a meal. We've all had experiences which have scarred us. And yet he didn't allow such things to keep a stranglehold on people. He restored them to live life again in the future.

I'm sad to see yet another programme is scheduled on Channel 4 about Tony Nicklinson, trapped by a stroke in an unresponding body. Its title tells us that it will be an emotional tract advocating euthanasia: "Let our dad die". I'm sad because I believe he is actually missing out on what fellow-sufferer, Bram Harrison, said, "I enjoy my rather limited life"- see Bram Harrison's locked-in life. I quote Bram because his life is more like Tony's than mine is, for the moment. However I agree with Bram. It's surprising how much can be made of how little, given the opportunity and a positive attitude.

Times and seasons

I see it's a very long time since I last posted here. Business isn't the reason. I suppose it's because I've not had much to say. However I was struck in the interim by what Jesus said before ascending: "It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed...".


At the end of May, Jane had to make the difficult decision to uproot our wallflowers and pansies which were still in full bloom. The result was that the flower bed and the pots were left bare and brown. Of course that wasn't the end. The next stage was putting in the young plants we bought from the local garden centre. Even so the view from my seat is a tad dull and not a patch on what it was before.  

Why did she grub up flowers in their prime? Vandalism? Perversity? Of course not. We know the reason. The season is the reason. In order for new flowers to blossom in the summer, the winter/spring flowers need to be grubbed up. As I look at the incomplete garden, it occurs to me that it might be how God works with us. Why does he take away? Why does he cut us down in our prime? Why does life hurt so often? Maybe it's a matter of times and seasons. Maybe it's because, as St Paul says, we are his workmanship. Maybe he has something good in mind.