No Ripple

I have grown to like being still.

I have taken to sitting in silence, especially in the daytime when Owen is away. Sometimes I play a record on softly in the background, usually an old favourite: Nick Drake or Leonard Cohen. Often even that is overwhelming. I dislike too much noise. I sit, with my thoughts on mute; sitting, breathing, just being.

I can do that for a long time, sometimes hours. I can’t explain why, or how but I find such beauty, such depth in silence. I feel a stripping away of the layers, a crumbling of the barriers until all you’re left with is a pure and calm stillness. Sometimes, my body rebels. It gets bored and restless, it longs for the shiny, for the new. I persevere. Still I sit, still I breathe, in and out, in and out. The boredom, too, eventually melts away.

I focus on the breath. I count to ten like I’ve been taught. One to ten and back again. Just me and the breath. Everything else disappears. I count to ten. I breathe in and out. Until the thoughts are still and all is quiet within.

Sometimes, when I am feeling this calm, I take out pad and pen and let myself write. This is a true joy. I write spontaneously. I have never done this before. I don’t know where the words come from, but I don’t think them first like I usually do. I do not edit, I do not delete. They sometimes make sense, they sometimes don’t. I don’t care what happens to them. They are not my words, they do not belong to me. They are pure: free from ego and competition and paralysis. I like writing this way, although it feels more like channeling than writing. When I read the words back though, I can tell they came from somewhere inside me. I am no medium, except of my own subconscious. It is so different when you let the words form on the page without worrying about them. You learn that they usually take care of themselves. It’s like a mother finally having the courage to let go of her child’s hand as they cross the road. It’s all in the act of letting go that things become pleasurable, really pleasurable and that you become free. The stress disappears, the knots unravel. The words on the page do not belong to me, nothing belongs to me, hell, there is no me! It’s just all good. Really good. And it makes me smile.

But that’s the writing. I do that because I can’t not write. I’ve never been able to live a life where I don’t write. But the day is long and mostly I just sit. I sit on my stool or I sit on the sofa. I sit on the park bench, I sit by the river. The water flows like time passing. You never put your foot in the same stream twice.

Home again: I stare at the white wall. I see so much peace and beauty there. I walk into the garden. I smell a flower. For a moment, that flower is the universe. I watch the bees and wasps fly around the garden. I wish them well. I breathe, I breathe, I breathe. I go inside. I brew a cup of tea in my old china cup. It is white with a golden rim, and a chip in the top. I pour the water slowly, watch the leaves diffuse. I blow. I sip. I swallow. The tea becomes part of me. Water becomes blood. Hydrogen and Oxygen along with everything else. I wash the cup, the soapy bubbles pop on my arm. I rinse. I dry. I place the cup back in the cupboard. I am aware of every movement in my hands, the feel of the rough tea towel against my moist knuckles. I walk back to the sofa. I sit. I stare at the white wall. I see such beauty there.

Later: I smile. It is colder now. I pull my blanket round me. I don’t know the time. I don’t want to know the time. He is not here, but will be back. Until then, I sit. I make Nick sing some more. I don’t listen to the words, just the melody, the sound of his instruments; his guitar and his voice. That’s how it’s always been with Nick and I. The sun sets, I watch it on the horizon through my window. I do not ignore the building site opposite. I try to see the beauty in the cranes and the scaffolding. It is not difficult, although it was at seven o’ clock this morning. I yawn and stretch my arms into the space above me. I sit, I light a candle. I stare into the flame, I don’t know how long for. Soon, I don’t hear noises, not even Nick. I stare at the candle, I stare at the flame and its many different colours. My eyes softly, gently close.

There is a smell of smoke. I open my eyes. The candle has blown out. Its plumage spirals towards the overhead light. I lick my fingers and pinch the wick. It fizzles but does not burn.

I stand, fully awake. Nick has long stopped, the disk ejected. Outside there is darkness. I shut the curtains, turn on the light. The stillness remains within me, unshakable. My stomach rumbles. I walk into the kitchen, open the cupboards, ponder quietly what to create for us today. Whilst I am thinking, I hear the front door slam. He is home. I smile: another day over and not a ripple in the pond. What joy I have known today, what more could I want for? The door opens, he is wet with drizzle and his nose is red. He kisses me, throws his arms around me, says; ‘It’s good to see you, it’s great to be home.’ Here, you see, I have everything I need. Here, you see, I want for nothing. After all, this is my home. Not this town, not this house, not this man, not even this body. Home is the stillness, the rich beautiful stillness that lies here: deep down inside me.

Teacher

Yesterday I had a weird experience. I sat for half an hour and had a wonderful meditation full of peace and joy. I was totally serene and happy, even after quite a stressful day. Then, (as I often do) I looked at a photograph of the monk who despite the fact I have never met him, I consider to be my teacher, the venerable Ajahn Brahmavamso. I don’t know why I get the urge to do this, I just always have, since I first heard him talk the Dhamma. Anyway, yesterday I got out the photo and I just spontaneously burst into tears. My eyes welled up with water and I felt such happiness and such pure overwhelming love for this man who has touched me so deeply. I just sat there, for a few minutes, just crying and smiling at the same time, feeling blissfully calm and loved and content.

Now this is going to sound like the biggest load of hippy crap that has ever come out of my mouth to date, but I must relate to you my weird experience in full. I stared at his image and clearly felt his love radiate out of that picture, almost like ripples from a stone that has plopped into a pond. It was that real I could almost see it. I stared at the photograph, transfixed. His posture, his smile, his silly double chin all just seemed to me to be the image of absolute love, and kindness. It seemed to me the perfect symbol of all that is right with the world. I felt so devoted to this man that if I had been actually in the room with him I would have wanted to throw myself at his feet. I seemed to be looking at goodness and truth itself. I felt almost like I was in a room with him, and he was speaking to me, not in words but in emotions: he was moving me, comforting me, healing me.

And I was moved. For the rest of the evening I walked on a cloud.

Man, this religion stuff is some powerful shit.

In the cold light of day, my rational side comes into play and I woke up this morning and thought to myself, yeah, nice projection there Jen. You want to be real careful messing with that. That’s fertile Bootham territory, right there. One minute you’re crying at a picture of a benevolent monk, the next you’re hearing spiders talking to you and you’re back on the ward.

So this train of thought naturally got me thinking about religion and madness. Historically, the two have been intertwined, with many religious people having the accusatory finger of madness pointed at them. Jesus and Mohammed were repeatedly accused of madness as well as their many followers from Joan of Arc to, more recently, footballer Glen Campbell. There is certainly a large grey area where the two overlap and in Britain, in our increasingly secular society those with strongly held religious views, especially of an exotic nature (i.e. not your cucumber sandwich eating C of E garden party variety) are often treated with suspicion. Certainly, to talk of visions or voices, of ecstasy and higher plains of experience has people either running for the door, reaching for the phone to the hospital or at least raising their eyebrows with contempt. In hospital I have met many messiahs and prophets. I even met a guy who had given away all his possessions including his house because he had read a secret code in Revelation that told him the world was going to end tomorrow. Myself, I have had an admission to a psyche ward that revolved around delusions I had that God was communicating with me through animals and insects.

So to me this raises some interesting questions:

* How can anyone with a mental health diagnosis be sure that any spiritual experience isn’t just a symptom of their illness?

* How can we distinguish psychosis from genuine visions/ enlightenment etc?

* For that matter, whether you officially have a diagnosis or not, how can anybody be sure that their religious experiences fall within the realm of sanity?

* With my history, that I have blogged about here, How can I, of all people be messing with this stuff again? What is the appeal of it all for someone whom in the past the spiritual has had such a negative impact on their life?

I know I can’t really answer this for anyone else, as I can’t get inside their head. For sure, I have seen the conviction on the face of a fundamentalist Christian arguing that the world was created in six days, and thought to myself; ‘are they absolutely bonkers?’ It is true, their eyes glaze over with a passion and in the heat of the debate I find them claiming the strangest things: that carbon dating machines are the work of the devil, as are the planted dinosaur bones that might as well be the skeletons of red herrings rather than huge prehistoric reptiles. It's bizarre really, what a religious faith can make you believe, in my lifetime I have heard the strangest arguments come from the mouths of impassioned believers, desperate to defend their faith.

However, I think our understanding of mental health has developed enough to realise that beliefs that we consider to be wrong, even passionately, ignorantly, flying in the face of common sense and science and laws of reason wrong do not in themselves equal insanity. I didn’t agree with the principles of Tony Blair’s government, but calling the man insane? That’s a laughable concept to me. I have spent many years in the company of seriously mentally ill people and many of them struggle to get their groceries together on a weekly basis. If you are mentally ill enough to be termed insane, you can hardly remember your name let alone run a country. Yes I know world leaders have dealt with bouts of depression and mania, (Churchill for example) and I’m not saying that mentally ill people can’t achieve great things in their life, but here I am drawing a distinct difference between being depressed and being psychotic or insane. Insanity doesn’t just mean holding an irrational belief- however wacky, it is a total breakdown of reality within your life.

Wrong or irrational doesn’t equal insane, then. But then that of course brings us onto: what does?

Yes I know: the DSM-IV diagnostic system, yada yada. These days we all know the twelve signs of depression, we all know our schitzos from our elbows. Yet if I write down on paper two brief case studies who I have personally come into contact with over the years I think the point I am trying to make will become obvious:

Linda (Met in hospital)

Believes that Tony Blair is the devil incarnate. Believes that Tony Blair speaks to her on a daily basis and tells her that she is going to hell. He tells her to do things, from what to wear everyday, to what to eat for tea. She has intricate visions of the future and hallucinations of things she believes will pass. Is hospitalised indefinitely on a section because of her relationship with “Tony” and for fears that she might one day, attempt to harm either him, or more likely, herself.

Steven (Met at a Church in Sheffield)

Believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Believes that Jesus talks to him, personally on a daily basis and gives him intricate instructions on many details of his life. He has sold his house and possessions to work as a youth worker in the church and lives only on the donations of the congregation. He sees actions of ‘the devil’ everywhere, from the new civil partnerships for gay people, to abortion laws to the promiscuous behaviour of today’s youth. He spends his time pleading with young people to ‘repent’ or else they will go to hell. He speaks in a divine language, has prophecies and visions and believes that the end of the world is imminent.

Of course these are just two hastily constructed case studies. You can believe them or not. But I am sure you will have met or read about people who resemble these two in your own experience. The overlap in psychology is clear, the main difference being to me that whilst Steve’s views and beliefs are equally as unsubstantiated (if not more so!) as Linda’s with the weight of the church behind him he is a prominent figure in the community whilst she languishes her 2nd year away on a locked ward.

So what am I saying here? That the billions of people worldwide who all follow a religion worldwide are in actuality insane?

Well, no: it is clearly more complex than that.

I can only speak for myself but having experienced both intense religious experiences and psychotic episodes, all I can say is that there are similarities, for sure, but there are also vast, vast, differences between the two.

For example the first one that springs to mind is that a psychotic experience at least for me is usually accompanied by a whole host of unpleasant things; a complete breakdown in day to day functioning, a lack of self care, an all consuming sense of paranoia, a total detachment from reality and a serious mood problem as well, at either end of the spectrum. I am quite obviously ill, sick, loopy loo, round the twist, whatever you want to call it.

Spiritual experiences are not like that at all. (I’m not going to get into the authenticity of spiritual experience full stop, I think that is too big to tackle right here and now, lets accept for now that spiritual experiences do exist, whether they be caused by altered states or mass hysteria or the goddess divine channelling through you, lets leave that for another time.) But as for them differentiating from madness, I would say that although they might involve beliefs and behaviours that seem hard to believe or odd to the casual onlooker they are usually contained within a system, a framework. Within religious traditions there are people who have trod the path before you and these spiritual phenomena not only have strict guidelines but are not seen as particularly unusual. Followers of mainstream religions will often be well versed in what to expect from a religious experience before it happens to them, and in this sense they are ready for it when it happens, and can cope with it when it occurs.

Most religious people, even after undergoing a pretty significant spiritual experience within their chosen framework, whether that’s receiving a prophecy from Allah or reaching a Jana within Buddhist meditation or collapsing through the power of the holy spirit at a Christian rally, will dust themselves down, talk to the minister for a few minutes or go for a walk in the rain to clear their head. Then they will fairly quickly get back to their day to day lives, albeit from a renewed perspective. They go back to their kids and their jobs and talking about football on the bus with their friends. I’m not saying these experiences don’t change you, indeed they can have a profound effect, but if it’s a spiritual experience, it shouldn’t leave you in a corner banging your head against the wall for weeks on end or swinging at the end of a rope. Your life may be transformed absolutely but these changes should not leave you sick and poorly. On the contrary, most people who undergo these experiences often appear to be in great health, approaching life with a new strength and vigour. In my experience some of the most spiritual people I have met, whether I agree with their beliefs or not, seem to be some of the happiest of all of my friends.

So, in a nutshell I think mental illness is when your mind works abnormally causing you great distress. Spiritual experience also involves stepping outside of everyday emotions and perception but in a much more controlled, less random, and consequently much less disturbing way.

Are they two sides of the same coin, well, who can say?

All I know is this: my psychotic experiences make me crippled and broken. They leave me hospitalised and in need of strong medication even to get dressed properly in the morning. My buddhism and spiritual practice on the other hand gives me great strength, energy, clarity and hope. It leaves me feeling healthy, happy and focused. Sometimes I feel challenged, sometimes confused. But never suicidal, never bedridden, never hopeless.

If you don’t think there’s a difference between a religious vision and a psychotic one, then all I can say is go visit a Pentecostal church then a psyche ward. Both places will shake you out of your comfort zone, but any great ideas you have about them being one and the same will be dispelled in an instant.

So maybe that’s the reason I feel able to continue down this spiritual path. I trust that I know my own mind enough to know what is healthy and what is not, to explore my mind’s potential without breaking it. Sometimes, it feels like a gamble. Sometimes, I think ‘girl what the hell are you playing at?’ But mostly this sense of inner peace that grows daily as I go through the daily rituals of chanting, zazen and kinhin, the strength that is blossoming within me calms my doubts and leaves me thinking this can only be a good thing. So to go back to the whole weird experience thing, maybe it does seem a bit odd that I would cry at a photograph of a man who I never met. But before you write me off as a religious nutter, or even worse just a nutter full stop please bear in mind that I have tried every drug under the sun and every therapy on the market to get rid of this black hole in my life. None of them have ever had any lasting effect. Ajahn brahms teachings on the other hand are turning my life around at a rate of knots and giving me a chance of genuine happiness and stability that I thought I’d never have. So is it any wonder then, that staring at his peaceful smile (and silly double chin) can make me shed a few tears? I may not be able to give a definitive answer to the ‘what is madness’ question that has puzzled academics, doctors and patients alike for centuries, but I can tell you certainly what it is not. Madness is not rising from your zazen stool after half an hour’s silent meditation, making a cup of green tea with jasmine and sitting quietly all evening feeling content, like you are glad and so, so happy to be alive.

God Shaped Hole

It was a sunny day. Owen and I were walking down the river, hand in hand. I told him that I found the trees and the water, the ducks and the general air of peace quite spiritual. He laughed. He said that to him the word spiritual translated as ‘bullshit bullshit bullshit’ and he generally switches off whenever someone says it.

Since then I’ve been thinking about the spiritual path, or more precisely the one I am walking on. What does it mean to be spiritual? How would I define that in my own life? I do consider myself to be a spiritual person but I think I have a weird definition of what that means- on which I will elaborate later. I also see Owen’s point. There is a hell of a lot of bullshit out there. Most religious people, including many many Buddhists, anger me with their illogicality, superstition and intolerance. So, I’d like to do a series of three blogs dealing with different aspects of my journey and how my concept of the spiritual has changed over the years. For simplicities sake I’ll split it into the early past, later past and the present respectively.

So, the beginning. To say I had a very religious upbringing would be understatement of the decade. On the one hand it was wonderful. I was born into a close knit group of loving Christians in a small charismatic church. They were one large extended family and my early life was spent in the company of some of the kindest, gentlest, most generous and giving people I have ever met. My life was infused with love, acceptance, meaning and purpose. I felt close to God, my heavenly father and when you are a child that is a wonderfully enriching and joyous experience. Jesus, too, was my best friend and I loved him almost as much as my Mum and Dad (I was supposed to love him more, but I never quite managed that.) Every day was spent doing churchy activities; I studied the bible, played my saxophone in the music group, wore a camel outfit in the nativity play, sang in the choir, went to Sunday school and regular church twice a week as well as a multitude of ‘extracurricular’ activities. My love of justice and social issues stems from what I did in those early days at our church. We regularly visited old people’s homes and hospitals, we ran and campaigned for charities such as Tradecraft, Tearfund and Christian Aid. Through our missionaries we were always very aware of what life in the developing world was like and our youth leader slept in a cardboard box for a week on the streets of Sheffield to teach us youngsters about the sufferings of the homeless.

My whole childhood revolved around God, the first playgrounds I recall don’t involve slides and swings, but tombstones, as me and my brothers would play hopscotch over graves and clamber over stone crosses in the graveyard whilst waiting for the adults to finish a healing ceremony or a PCC meeting. Ritual and the supernatural infused every mundane event: we would pray together as a family to find a car parking space in Tesco and say another one when it ‘miraculously’ appeared- amazing on a busy Saturday! In fact, praying was the bee’s knees. We were encouraged to pray anywhere and everywhere and by the age of six or seven I had an almost unstoppable chatter to God in my head. We prayed before eating, sleeping and traveling and a million times in between. We would pray for everything: to heal grandmas gammy leg, for the weather to clear up before the church bazaar, to protect the house from fires and burglars when we went on holiday, for world peace, for the presents from Santa to be the ones we wanted, for our toothache to clear up, for Sheffield Wednesday to win the cup, that we would find the TV remote, the end of child poverty and that our hamsters would never, ever die.

Although we never called it this; mine was a magical childhood in the literal sense, dominated by the mystical. Our daily lives were, we perceived, being guided by the invisible hand of a loving but knee tremblingly powerful creator God. We were his special children and we knew it. As I got older, I got more into the heavy stuff. Encouraged by my parents and those in the church around me, I would have visions, really intense intricate ones and I started to speak in tongues at large rallies. Strangers would come to me on trains and in the streets at random and give me bible verses. I had a strong feeling of being divinely blessed, of being a vessel to channel God’s love and his all important message. I would go on marches with churches from the area; walking through the streets of my town with a banner in my hand shouting ‘Jesus loves you’ and ‘Be bold! Be strong! For the Lord your God is with you’. The kids from my school would snigger and laugh at me but I would wave my banner proudly safe in the knowledge I was going to heaven. When I was sick I would be prayed over by all my Mum and Dad’s Christian friends in their beautiful and personal holy languages, I remember feeling such peace, reveling in their divine lullaby as I shut my fevered eyes. I soon got baptized, then later confirmed. I drank the blood and ate the body of God incarnate. It tasted bittersweet. I loved God with every ounce of my being and he was so, so real to me. He spoke to me in words and in pictures, in music, song and through the words of others. He was present in the natural world around me, I saw him in the trees and the wind and the thunder. We were told, repeatedly, that he knows everything about you; he knows how many hairs are on your head and is listening to every single thought you have. There is no escaping him; we used to sing in Sunday school: ‘so high you can’t get over it, so low you can’t get under it, so wide you can’t get round it, oh wonderful love.’ My mother told us that if we were ever stuck for an answer to something, pray to Jesus and then open the bible at random. When I did this there always seemed to be something of guidance, so I did it a lot.

Life was just so deep, so rich and so intense. There were layers within layers within layers. Signs and symbols abounded everywhere, we wore our fish badges on our clothes and on our cars and eagerly spotted them on long journeys like other kids do to Ferraris. God didn’t keep his views to himself; everything was charged with significance. Turning the TV on in the morning to find a story about local traffic congestion was God personally telling you to set off early for school that day. There was an unseen world beyond our world brimming with angels and demons and, we were told, they were every bit as real as you or I. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny might have been fictions, but in our house the devil was alive and kicking. It was possible, even, to see the future, although this was dangerous territory for a mere child. Possession was real, the occult a deadly threat and in our church exorcisms were not unheard of. After all, ours was a battle, a spiritual battle. There was a judgment day coming, it could be any day now, any minute. We were at war with evil and what’s more we were on the winning team, the Bible told us that was so. I believed so much I gave part of my £1 pocket money every week to the cause. I went to emotional praise services where I raised my arms in the air and sang, ‘hallelujah’ over and over again with tears of joy streaming down my face. I went to healing groups where men who hadn’t walked for twenty years threw away their wheels and went tottering down the aisle like a fifteen stone baby taking its first steps. I saw grown women collapse through the power of the Holy Spirit and heard grown men speak terrifying prophecies of things that surely would pass, (praise be to Christ our Lord). At the age of eleven I was more in love with God than any boy at school and I was more than secure in the fact that the feeling was mutual.

I write this now, read it back and I think, fuck. Actually, that paragraph explains a lot. Because I’m so close to my parents now, I always forget how fucking fucked up my childhood was, in some senses. Goddammit, is there any wonder that I am writing these words through the hazy filter of a cocktail of some of the worlds strongest antipsychotic drugs? I mean, I spent my childhood chattering away in a divine language to a god who could read my mind, who paid for my sins with the blood I drank every Sunday, who could give or take away everything I had and smite at will; instead of thinking fairies and pop stars like most kids I was, at least some of the time, caught in a cataclysmic battle between good and evil.

No, this love affair did not end happily. In fact, it ended very badly.

When I was thirteen or fourteen my dad got a new job at a different church, and I was wrenched away from the bosom of St James, the church I grew up in, and transplanted to a new one where I never fitted in. The church was a lot less charismatic, a lot more ‘normal’ and I couldn’t really cope with the implications of that. I missed the community, I missed the friendship of St James, but more than that I missed the intense fusion of the spiritual with the everyday, the raw, emotive worship of an awe inspiring god. At the new church, they were more likely to argue for hours about the colour of the choir robes and the grape variety of the communion wine rather than harnessing Gods power to heal lame men. It was all a bit middle England and the teachings were totally different. The spark died, the romance began to fizzle out. I also began to read more widely than the children’s literature and Christian books I had been brought up on. I started reading newspapers, and a lifelong curiosity towards other cultures and their belief systems kicked in. Doubts arose- Why is there suffering? Why is homosexuality a sin? Is the bible really the divinely inspired word of God? What about dinosaurs? What about Feminism? For the first time my unshakable faith faltered. Over the following years the doubts grew and grew. I stepped further and further away from my roots. To my parents dismay, I became a ‘liberal Christian’ then a ‘Unitarian Universalist’ then an agnostic until, when I left home and consequently the church, I took a deep breath and proclaimed myself an atheist. My house, as they say, was built upon the sand.

The God shaped hole physically hurt me. It left a void in my life so huge it nearly consumed me. It ached and itched and gnawed away at me. I could not feel peace. I was haunted by guilt and doubt and anger. I was sure I was going to hell, an eternal separation from happiness and peace. My head did not know how to cope without my hotline to God. Who now would I turn to for help, for guidance? All my coping mechanisms were taken from under my feet. My black and white worldview dissolved, leaving only a huge grey area that confused and disturbed me. My whole interior world basically collapsed. I did not know what or who to believe about anything. I found it hard to trust anyone. When I discovered alcohol and marijuana, I saw the oblivion as a refuge from the whirlwind inside me, but this would ultimately (as you’d expect) exacerbate rather than solve my problems.

My ultimate refuge, as it still is, was the written word. I immersed myself in books. I wrote and wrote and wrote. By now I was deeply suspicious of the techniques our church employed to recruit and gradually shape the faithful, I sneaked books in from the library to the house and hid them under my pillow. They dealt with emotional and religious manipulation, spoke boldly about brainwashing techniques and various forms of propaganda and I read them avidly from cover to cover. I found that there were many correlations between what I had experienced and the things that people who were in so called cults had gone through. Even if the examples in the books I read were more extreme than my experiences: I had never been told to have sex with the priest or give all my possessions away, however a lot of the emotional processes had been the same. I came to the conclusion that all religions were basically cults, were harmful and dangerous. I began to think of what I had been through as abuse. Unintentional abuse, I must stress. My parents 100% believe that they acted in my best interests and they hold that view to this day. But the truth is that the church did a lot of harm to me. I found for many years reality hard to deal with and in the sober light of day, dwelling in a world without angels and demons and an omnipresent God, I struggled immensely. To have a god shaped hole is the most painful thing that to this day I have experienced. It is the loss of a father, a friend and an eternity of bliss. It is the loss of a community, a world view, a coping mechanism and a purpose. It is a loss of self, in a sense, a self that you have to rebuild from scratch without the help of your family or support networks. For many years I teetered on the edge of the God shaped hole. Sometimes, I thought I would be sucked in completely and just cave in on myself, never to return. The recovery process has been long and is not over. It was helped by many years in therapy, but still part of me aches for my unshakeable faith never to have wavered and for me to be writing this to you with my bible in hand and fish badge on my collar. But that is not my path. Once you have seen through something and identified it as a lie you can never go back.

Aged 18 I’d turned my back on God for good. There were just too many doubts and intellectual contradictions, too much guilt. As much as the church meant to me, I knew if I were ever to be happy, I had to leave it behind. I came to see God as my parent’s fictional friend and Jesus as a man who was quite inspirational but ultimately made up. I no longer believed in miracles or the mystical, I came to see my experiences as a manifestation of mass hysteria. None of it, the prophecies, the conversations with God, the healing, the miracles were real. I had been duped, good and proper and all I had to show for it was a broken heart and a disintegrating bible. At the age of eighteen I felt like a country that had been ravaged by war, torn apart and fractured into many parts. The rebuilding process would take years and the practice of forgiveness even longer. The years that lay ahead would be difficult, taking me to the edge of sanity and back but nothing, nothing I have ever done in my life was as hard as the day I finally closed my eyes and said:

Dear God

I don’t believe in you any more.

This is the last time we will ever talk.

Goodbye.



(to be continued….)