My Pastor Gazed At Me And Said, "Wow! You Were REALLY Fucked Up!"

To begin, a photograph.  I've taken this from a Messianic Christian page about faith in God.   The page argues, through links to many articles, that atheists should become Christians because that would be the sensible thing to do given the "evidence."  On the right of the screen there's an offer for a free book.

It's called, "I Have A Friend Who's Jewish ... Have You?"  Sounds riveting.

Today I've been sorting some files on my laptop.  It shouldn't have taken long but I got quite distracted by my past.  In the process of sorting I've found myself looking at Christian books and documents I saved. I've been looking at some of my own writing too which covers much of my Christian life. I still have the text of sermons preached in the year 2000, all kinds of documents from when I was an enthusiastic Catholic, and some really strong Protestant conservatism I briefly clung to after leaving the Catholic church and wondering how I could survive without it.

I found a document containing my prayer diary through a week almost exactly ten years ago. During that period I was undertaking the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola in daily life, with one to one spiritual guidance from a woman who was part of the outreach team of Saint Beuno's Jesuit retreat centre in North Wales.

That particular week included this exciting day trip in London: It took in 3 churches, 2 cathedrals, a church centre, 2 Catholic bookshops and 2 masses.

In the same document I wrote about other days in this two week period in May 2007.

These days could and would include more hours spent kneeling in front of the "blessed sacrament", daily mantra and meditation prayers, praying the Office, rosaries, chaplets – including that of Divine Mercy, the triple colloquy, litanies, the Ignatian spiritual exercises, consideration of the "Mysteries", biblical meditations, Bible verses turned into daily prayers.

These were all happening on the same day.

You read that correctly. On. The. Same. Day. In my most ardent periods I could pray for six hours a day.

And what comments did I give? Many. They include these:

I wanted to enter more into the pain of Jesus. (Because some saints or spiritual writers recommend it.)

I asked of myself, "Could I be Judas?"

I said, "Not much progress in prayer."

I said, "Much need for change and for grace."

And the classic, "Not enough praying in the house."

Honestly. I wrote that. You read that correctly too.

I didn't believe I was praying as much as I should. I certainly didn't believe I was praying as well as I should. After all, hadn't I consecrated my entire life to Jesus? Hadn't I also made an act of total consecration to Jesus through Mary, in the manner of Saint Louis Marie de Montfort? Shouldn't I be praying more? Studying more?

That's what I thought anyway. Because I was utterly lost. Trapped. Despairing. Still self-hating. And when you self-hate it's hard to love others. Not truly and deeply.

As I've looked through some of the books as I've been clearing them out I find similar words from "heroes of faith" canonised by Rome. These men and women were also giving everything they possibly could for their God. And they still beat themselves up for it - mostly emotionally and mentally but sometimes physically too.

I was utterly screwed up. My ex-pastor from MCC used the phrase “fucked up.” But I was being reinforced in being screwed up and fucked up by the books I read, the spiritual writers, the saints.

Was there any hope for someone so screwed up when he was told that the grace to ask for that week included, “Shame and deep grief because the Lord is suffering for me.” And “Faced with the suffering of the Passion, I may have to pray even for the gift of letting myself want to experience it with Christ.”

I arrived screwed up. I left screwed up.

There were happy events.  There were some smiles.  But underneath it all I was screwed up.  Constantly.

I am immensely glad to become free of all that horror.

I am also glad that on my way out of the faith I discovered some Christian spiritual writers who didn't beat themselves up and who had a Jesus who could and would smile. Some people even have a Jesus I like. I recommend someone like Jim Palmer – a Jesus follower but pretty much an atheist. Or the writings of someone like Gretta Vosper – a Jesus follower but an atheist. There are even some theist Jesus followers I can cope with and dip into.

I'm glad they've found a faith around Jesus that's full of good things. No original sin. No exclusivity. No false gods. A view of the Bible that doesn't try to justify it having plenty of horrific things in both Testaments but just says, “The writers tried but got it wrong.”   I even know very happy Christians.  And I know Christians whose love and service to others is a big example to me.  I am glad they have found inspiration for that in the versions of the Jesus story people once wrote.

As for me, the pain is too deep, too long-lasting. It's hard to find any comfort at all in the Galilean preacher and peasant who was elevated to the sky by his followers with the accretion of pagan myths and superstition, a man whose very words were mostly put into his mouth by his followers and whose miracles were inventions. Yes inventions. Arising from the way religion was done then and often is now. In the quest for the historical Jesus, which some say is doomed from the outset, the New Testament narratives are in many places worse than useless no matter how many fine words they contain.

As for me, my question is what inspiration there is to be found in what is true and in the wonder of being - and the wonders of this cosmos, this earth, and humanity - without appealing to a very faulty ancient book that tells of a man who we can't know much, if anything, about.  As such I plan, after six months of putting it off, to attend a humanist meeting tomorrow night.  I want to see what answers they give.  I want to see too whether they offer new ways of questioning.  I'm looking forward to it and the talks at the meetings always sound fascinating.

It's pointed out to me that Jesus said (or is alleged to have said) some very good things. I can only agree with that. But I don't see that as any reason whatsoever to follow him or call him Lord.  He said (or is alleged to have said) some rather more problematic things too.  In addition, lots of people have said very good things. I've met some of them. I don't call them Lord either and some of them aren't holding onto and speaking with an ancient world view and in words arising from primitive superstitions and ancient pagan blood sacrifice cults.

Why would I want to be a Jesus follower – whether a red-letter Christian or an atheist without a sky god – over and above any other guide and inspiration? Why? I don't see a reason. I certainly don't see any unique claim of salvation power being valid. And I don't see the Jesus way as superior to all other ways although I recognise the inspiration and excitement many people find in him. I am told Jesus is about growing into freedom. I see that some people manage that. I missed the boat on that one!

For me, I need – at least for the present – to keep any version of Jesus at arm's length.  Any version. Even the Jim Palmer inner anarchist version. I was hurt in the churches, hurt by the Saints, hurt by Scripture.  Hurt in self hatred and there being enough in that faith to justify my self hatred even while talking of a God of love.  The second biggest selling Christian work in history is The Imitation of Christ.  In it we learn the call to despise ourselves.

I couldn't see it then. I couldn't see how damaged I was by my faith because my faith was the reason I clung to for continuing to exist and my hope that there was a better future if I would only persevere in faith until the end.  I believed in mercy.  And I was thankful because I believed that without the blood sacrifice of Jesus that mercy wouldn't be given to me who, like everyone else, deserved hell - either in fire or separation eternally from God.

I couldn't see how my faith strengthened my despair for this life.

I see it now.

I see it increasingly clearly the more I explore outside of my old faith.

At this time I am grieving for all the lost years.

But I am rejoicing for my future, wherever that may take me.

Outside of the certainty and shame of my Christian faith it may take me anywhere.

And by his lack of stripes I find I am being healed. (Isaiah 53)

If you pray I would ask you not to pray that I return to Christianity. I would ask that you not hope I return to the flock.

I would ask, if you pray, to pray that I may find the way that is right for me, the way that leads me into the fullest life I can live. If there eventually turns out to be some Jesus in that then so be it. If not, that's great. And I would ask that your hope is that I will be free to be myself, to grow in myself, and to rejoice in living and learning to love in ways that were impossible when I was trapped in religion.

At this point I am an atheist. I have no sky god to pray to.  That picture again.

But the statement “I am an atheist” tells you as little about me as it would tell you if I said “I believe in God.”

I apologise for this: I'm not going to expand on the statement any further today.

My Transgender Coming Out Story - A Tale of Difficulties and Deep Joy

So this is me.  Or one version of me.  A selfie taken a few days ago in a moment of deep joy and contentment at the top of a hill not too many miles from home.  I share it because it's where my story is right now, four years after coming out as a transgender woman.  There I am.  Just me.  In what is one of the stranger pictures.  You won't see many selfies of a transgender woman in a post about being transgender that look quite like this one.  Welcome to my reality.  I like it.  Especially when I'm being a little more crazy or weird than usual.

I just read an article about what one person has learned coming out as a non-binary trans person at the age of 43. After 100 days they say they did everything too fast. Their experiences are those of one person.  It is their truth.

My experiences and truth are also those of one person. They're bound to be a little different because I'm a woman, pure and simple, and about as far from non-binary as any woman gets. The article got me thinking about my own transgender life and the way I came out to the world and began to live publicly as a woman.

Here's a little of my experience. Just one woman trying to navigate her way into her truth. I've free written what follows and haven't edited at all.  Any mistakes are my own.

I came out to myself in a way I couldn't ever deny again at the age of 43. 43 years to get to that point. From then on things moved quickly.

2 weeks on: I dressed solely in women's clothes. Except when preaching. Not publicly in skirts and dresses. Not yet. But solely in woman's clothes I'd bought for myself via the miracle of very cheap charity shops. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. Everything was a matter of experimentation and sometimes I got it very wrong and nobody told me quickly enough before I had a chance to inflict my lack of dress sense on the world.

4 weeks on: I had told pretty much everyone that I was now Clare. The church leaders panicked about how to tell everyone and that delayed legal changes and the whole process. Most people were okay about it. Some people rejected me. Some people told me at length how staggeringly wonderful they were to not totally reject me. Gee, thanks!

8 weeks on: Having sorted things out with the church and had a ten day holiday as Clare (during which time my transition was officially announced to the congregation) I got round to legally changing my name. Much paperwork. Some people change their name quite often. They must love paperwork.

I was that (appearing to the world) 40 something man in a frock. Dark shadows of stubble. No make up. No hair removal. Hair that I'd cut short a few weeks before coming out. Totally, completely obvious. I was yet to meet anyone from Tyne Trans (as was). I had asked the GP to refer me to the gender dysphoria service – 27 days after coming out to myself, half of which was waiting for the appointment! - but my first appointment wasn't until three and a half months after signing that deed poll. To all intents and purposes anyone who saw me in the street would have clocked me as a cross dressing man not as a woman determined to be herself.

And sometimes, unsurprisingly, the world made things bloody difficult. Bloody difficult. Transphobia is real. If I had phoned the police every time I experienced it I would have been phoning a lot. Every. Single. Day. At times it was horrible. Truly horrible. And I was one of the more fortunate ones. Others have suffered a hell of a lot more than me after coming out. Every one of them is amazing for getting through that hell. When people quote the suicide and attempted suicide rate for transgender people I can only wonder why it isn't higher. For the record, in the UK nearly half of all transgender people have attempted suicide.

Four years have passed since I came out and demanded to be called Clare and she. Woe to anyone who deliberately calls me he or protests that they don't see an issue with it if I get misgendered or who tells me it's too hard to remember that I'm female and so would like to be addressed as female. Fortunately that doesn't happen much now – and most people I see never knew me as he. Yes, pretty much my entire life, excepting family, is filled with people I didn't know four years ago.

I've learned a lot in those four years.

Would I do it again? Come out like that?

You bet I would. Except I'd have done it quicker.

And I wouldn't allow a religion to delay anything. I truly wish I'd come out to the church in the middle of a sermon I preached. It was very tempting indeed and I wish I'd done it. After coming out I was told that it would be "inappropriate" for me to preach or lead anything in case "anyone is ever worried." All the confusion. All the having to meet with diocesan pastoral advisors and so on. Just so I could be banned and yet find that the congregation itself was supportive. Yeah, I wish I hadn't let the panicking of the CofE delay me for one second.

If I knew now what I knew then I wouldn't have been so afraid. And to be honest I spent the entirety of those 8 weeks in a state in which my great joy at accepting myself was mixed with an immense amount of terror. Some days I didn't know whether I could do it and without my immediate family and the support of another church - Northern Lights MCC - I might have taken longer about the whole thing.

If I knew now, there would have been less fear. And I would have reached that deed poll milestone quicker.

I have regrets. I shouldn't. Because what's the point? I might as well regret not coming out when I was at college – and I was thinking only this morning of a couple of times the truth was very close to the surface in my mind and how things could have been different if I'd only chosen to speak one sentence differently. I might as well regret my A level choices or giving up the violin when I was nine or anything else that I can't change. Maybe they're not regrets. And each one led in some way to my life being as it is.

But I'd certainly change some parts of the coming out process if I had the chance. Not just the CofE thing.

I regret not telling my online world en masse rather than having to pluck up courage - through terror, always through terror - to tell people one at a time. I'm grateful my mum accidentally outed me to some people, after which I just said "To hell with it" and told the rest.

I regret that my Facebook account is not the one I had under my old name. There were many years of history on that old account and I wish I'd kept it back than and closed this one. The account is still there. With no friends. My old name isn't even friends with my new name.

I regret how defensive I've been about the whole trans thing and how much of that arose from fear and an expectation, borne of 43 years of self rejection and self hatred, that many people who reject and hate me too. I guess most people who come out can got through an over-defensive time arising from that same fear. Bear with us, we get over it – just don't expect us to ever give way to prejudice. We won't.

But these regrets and others are only little compared to the satisfaction and life-changing wonder of coming out at all, of acceptance. It's not just that I'm happier as Clare, more content, and so on. My life has been completely changed in many ways that wouldn't have been possible probably had I not done this. Or if possible, very unlikely.

I have met so many amazing people I wouldn't have met otherwise - including many of you. I've been so blessed. And I meet many more amazing people every time I uncover a little more of myself – this transgender, autistic, creative, weirdly spiritual, nature loving woman.

I've done amazing things too. In my own way. And being Clare has allowed me to start to work through other aspects of my life and being and slowly begin to heal and allow myself to be me.

Without coming out I don't think I'd have been able to accept being autistic. I don't think I'd be exploring creativity as I am. I wouldn't have encountered Broadacre House, wouldn't have completely transformed my faith and spiritual life - and I don't think I'd ever have found the freedom to leave church and start to find my own path again.

Yes. It's been bloody difficult. And there have been lots of difficult things in the past four years. Autism - yeah, that's been tougher than being transgender in very many ways. I've cried. Lots. I've been rejected by some. I've been labelled an abomination by my own church pastor (not the CofE or MCC one). My mental health, while generally much improved, continues to be a minefield just as it always has.

But it's been worth it.

Fabulously, profoundly, superbly worth it.

And I look forward to my future as Clare, as the person I'm discovering myself to be. I am excited for my future. Excited to meet more amazing people and do more amazing (for me) things. Excited because there always seems to be a new surprise when you allow the surprises and give them permission to bring change.

I'm typing all this in my bedroom. Nearly everything in here isn't just something I didn't own before coming out. It's something I wouldn't have considered owning at all. Not just the obvious clothes. But soft toys, my books, the purple Buddha on the wall, that whisk over there that doubles as a head massager (buying it was hilarious), precious things from autism conferences, poetry books, writing books, the meditation material on the bed, precious items from Manchester, even a series of books called Skulduggery Pleasant. I wouldn't have read those if I hadn't come out.  I look at this room and know that my life is almost infinitely better for coming out.

My life is very much not as I would have expected it to be. And the changes just keep happening.  There are more on the way that I know about.  And there will be more surprises too.

I give thanks for Clare.

In ten days time I will give thanks again. For it will be the fourth anniversary of the night I looked at myself in a mirror, fully dressed as myself without guilt for the first time in my life, and greeted myself as Clare for the first time. Welcomed myself into the world.

Guest Post: Joshua James, Spirit Medium and Healer. My Story.

This was free written on paper, Nexus Art Cafe, Manchester on 9th March.  Typed up with no alterations at all, 10th March.  At this point it's possible that I will miss a day or two of posting on this blog.  I'm visiting Manchester and haven't got a lot of time for writing and posting.  While I gave myself a little leeway I'm not sure I gave myself enough.  We'll see.  It's possible I won't have time to write again until I'm home.  But I could always borrow a story I posted elsewhere towards the end of last year.  I haven't posted it on this blog or on any of the blogs I was creating last year.  We will see.  I don't want to miss days but a post a day for a year is always going to be a challenge.

Image taken from here.

Joshua James.  Psychic.  Spirit Medium.  That's me.  I'm gonna be famous.  Want your fortune told?  Come to me.  Want to get a message from you mum?  I'm your man.  Believe me.  Come to one of my shows and you won't leave unchanged.  That's what one reviewer said.  Look it up.  If you like.  It's on my Facebook page.  They wrote that they'd never spent a better ten pounds and that I'd made them a believer.  That's what I'm here for.  And twenty pounds is nothing compared to the comfort.  Price of fame - I had to charge more but it's still a bargain.  And with every ticket you'll get a two pounds of voucher for my book.  I'll even sign it too.  For free.  Photos cost more.  Great book.  You'll never forgive yourself if you don't buy a copy.  And some for your friends too.  "Joshua James.  My Life With the Spirit World."  The stories will amaze you.  All true.  All of it.  That's what you get from me.  Truth.  Truth and revelation.  No charlatan tricks.  No fakery.  I'm no Psychic Sally.  I'm the real deal and you wouldn't catch me with someone feeding me messages.

Joshua James.  Psychic.  Medium.  Healer.  Yes, healer.  I only discovered my healing power a while back.  Thirty quid a session.  Can't beat it.  And while I can't claim you'll be totally well in a day I can say that if you come back regularly things might surprise you.  Lisa Colgan said so.  Said I'd cured her asthma, her bad back.  And her depression too.  All in only twenty sessions.  And you know you can trust Lisa.  She's got a good heart and mentioned me on TV once too.

It's down to her I got my next gig.  I'm playing the West End.  Seven nights in a theatre there.  They're gonna love me.  Of course.  I'll start with something simple.  A few words for the sick.  Then get on with the fine art of contacting the dead.  It'll be excellent and then I'm pretty sure I'll get a TV show.

It's all be worth it.  The years of struggle, rejection.  The times I got laughed at for saying it's real.  I used to play in local halls I did.  I was a half decent conjuror and mentalist.  Used to play to mainly empty rooms exposing the tricks of people like Psychic Sally.  Awful woman.  That's what I think.  I thought it all nonsense.  Cast myself as a follower of Houdini, James Randi, and the school of skeptics.  My friends kept telling me I'd make more cash if I fleeced the vulnerable.  But I kept telling them no.

Those were hard years. The Humanists would pay me thirty quid for an evening.  That was about it.  I went on tour once.  Paid for it myself.  Lost a lot of money because nobody wanted to know about Sally.  One time I played in Manchester.  Same night as Sally.  She sold out one of the big theatres.  I sold seventeen tickets.  I had a happy audience of course but happiness doesn't pay the rent.  Sally had no rent worries.  It was all so unfair.  Of course it was.  People are completely gullible.  Don't want to know they've been fooled, fallen for a false cult of spiritism.  "Joshua James Exposes The Charlatans" wasn't ever going to be a hit show.  But I was proud of it.  There were jokes too and demonstrations of fake mediumship, and fake healings that some people thought real even when I said they weren't.  I could hold an audience.  It's just I didn't get an audience to hold.

Everything changed a couple of years back.  Made a discovery.  I discovered that if I truly believed it was true then it might be.  I read Psychic Sally's books.  Saw her life.  Saw how she wrote about it all even while faking those messages and getting messages from people who weren't even dead.  And I decided.  I wanted a house too.  Wanted to be able to afford nice food.  Wanted to be on TV.  So I decided I would choose to believe.  Present it all as true until it became true.  In the middle of a drunken binge I realised I could change my act.  That I'd be more loved as the real thing.  That there wasn't room for two Derren Browns but plenty of room for another Sally.  One called Joshua.

So that's what I did.  The exposer of frauds became the fraud.  The monster slayer became the monster.  New show.  New act.  Totally.  My old friends laughed at me.  Called me scum, a traitor to reason.  That was fair.  I was that traitor.  Totally.  I own it.  But I didn't care.  The Royal had booked me without a second thought based on a five minute proposal.  Tickets sold out in a week.  And I became psychic.  Medium.  And lately a healer too.

Imagine my surprised expression when halfway through my second fakery show everything became real.  I received a gift.  Was given second sight.  I saw the dead.  Truly.  Saw the dead.  Lots of them.  I could have kept up that show all night, there were so many dead people.  It was brilliant.  You can read about it in chapter eight of my second book, "My Moment Of Truth."  Only twenty quid from all bookshops and two pounds off at my shows.  Chapters nine to twelve bring my story up do date and there some fabulous, totally true stories.  My psychiatrist tells me they're imaginary, that I just want them to be real and that I know so many magic tricks that my brain can just pretend.  She recommends anti-psychotic drugs.

But I know what I see.  And I'm going to be rich.  I can tell.  I can.  Because I'm psychic.  It's a gift.  You'll realise it too.  If you come to my show.  You might even be blessed with comfort.  You never know.  It's what you all want.  So come.  Be amazed.  And tell your friends.  Spread the word.  My name is Joshua James.  The real thing.  The best.  Psychic to the stars.  To Lisa Colgan anyway.  And I do it all for you.  The money is very good.  But I do it just for you.



(1043 words)

Chasing The Sun To The Dwelling Of God On Eryri's Highest Peak

48. The Stars: Take inspiration from a night sky.

The 48th prompt is convenient.  It ties in with something said to me during a writers' workshop this morning.  I mentioned the experience I've written about here and it was suggested I could write about it.  It's not the only thing to come out of the workshop today.  There's a story to write - possibly even as a play if I can attempt a play eventually.  I've not written a play since I wrote something incredibly awful when I was about eight.  Perhaps it wasn't awful for an eight year old!  More than that, I free wrote another story which people there want me to submit to places and see if it can be published.  I have never submitted anything for possible publication before.  Someone was quite surprised I'd just written it - very, very quickly - during the workshop.  She said is was "bloody brilliant."  Direct quote.

Last night I had the worst panic attack I've had in a long while.  It was awful.  Lots of noises, tears, hyperventilation, and inside it was bad, bad, bad.  Briefly I wanted to stop.  To give up.  This morning it was only brute force of determination that got me out of the house.  Only force of will that got me to the workshop.  And even when I got into the cafe where it takes place I nearly turned round on seeing there were people there and I would have to cope with them.  But I am very glad indeed to have walked in and taken my place among them.  It's a safe space.  Supportive.  And in the writing we all just lift one another.  All criticism is constructive and all writing is encouraged.

It goes to show:  The worst of moments is just a moment.  The sun sets.  It rises again.  Every day.

Note.  This experience took place long before anyone was carrying mobile phones up Snowdon, and long before they would have got a signal from the summit.  You can get a signal now.  I once phoned my wife at work and asked her to phone our child's school to say I might be slightly late picking her up because I had gone for a short walk and accidentally climbed Snowdon.  As you do.

The photos below were taken when I was seven years old, the first time I walked up Snowdon, recovering from mumps at the time.  Looking at the photos of that day I find one thing to be true:  My parents' recollection of the cloud that day was highly exaggerated.  Looking at the photos I am amazed to discover that there was a good view through the clouds.

_________________________

Looking to Snowdon's summit from the Pyg Track

We arrived on that summit, we three, weary.  We had chased the sun as it fell.  Hoped to catch it on the mountain top, then release it to fall away beyond distant peaks.  From the small hostel in the pass we walked full stride, almost running to stand still against the heat of the shining disc as it sank away.  My legs protested but more so my lungs, unused to such a feat of endurance.  Led by that strange figure in his broken boots I looked at my own and wished they might become winged or enchanted with hundred league strides.  Heart pumped beyond the danger zone.  Lungs strained further than I believed they could.

And I followed.  Along a path I'd followed only once before, a small child trusting his parents to know the way as the clouds gathered, stealing the light in unseasonal cold intensity.  That day we had time to stop, see, surrender ourselves to beauty.  Above the lake we dined, a feast carried from our vehicle on the track below.  We smiled at the simplicity of our walk that day.  Smiled as we looked ahead to the summit, believed it close.   We made it and saw one small corner of the world spread before us, excitedly pointed to the lakes, towards where we knew the settlements of Gelert and Peris hid under the horizon hills.  Then the clouds closed upon us, casting their curtain on all we surveyed.

Yes, I followed the broken booted man, the frightening friend, fighting to keep up as his pace increased and the sun announced that we would not see her again.  I wanted to stop, breathe, cough up the bloody taste and lie on the earth, letting rock and grass swallow me into their elemental embrace.  I wanted more to continue, to witness the double, triple sunset, to reach the summit and sound my triumphant yawp so loud it would resonate across Wales and wake the fallen Bards to collaborate on a greater song.  Most of all I was proud.  I did not want to exhibit weakness, display the truth that I was less able than my companions.

Me.  Seven years old.

We had walked together all day, making the most of a December sun, a clear sky, and unexpected warmth.  From an unknown point Ogwen's lake we had meandered, crossing frozen pools, laughing and singing.  We three alone in the wilds, unheard by men, only by the goddesses and spirits of the mountains, the deities of streams and cataracts, the djinn who dwelt under the scree face.  We headed into a guided gully, clambered, scrambled over fallen rocks, up the cliffs and reached Tryfan's ridge.

Later we encountered our first parents, Adam and Eve and bowed before them as they watched the seasons of Ogwen, oblivious to their first fault and the sin they brought to our world.  I climbed on Adam's head.  There was no cry of complaint.  Jumped to the head of Eve and she too remained silent.  No word was heard but I know, had I slipped, they would not have made a move to catch me before I fell to death.  I knew the death fall was their path.  It was not mine.  Not then.  Maybe they had touched me after all for seventy and seven days later I encountered the Second Adam and bowed before him too, willingly placing my head under his feet and pledging never to stand again.  Under his magnificence I forgot how to walk, unlearned my childlike running.

We three turned from our parents, pressed forward until we climbed the ridge of bristles, leaving the safety of its gully and hauling ourselves up the cliff face to reach another summit, still a third, large and small, the sisters Glydderau, wild witches both, not to be laughed at.  We ran from the witches, fast, fast, bare chested in the heat, cheering our own escape.  And so we three, the strange booted man, his beloved disciple, and I, arrived at that hostel.  They looked as though they had not begun to walk.  I looked the child of exhaustion.

Me and my brother. On the ascent.

The booted prophet spoke simple words.  Even I could understand the terms of the prophet.  "The sun will set on the summit ahead in one hour.  No more, no less.  Let us set forth, quicken our pace and witness the last embers of the Eryri day.  Come my loves and we shall be blessed."

As the route grew steeper we left path behind and set our faces to the face of the mountain.  I was left behind.  Could not keep the pace and the two walked away from the one.  I reached the summit but the sun had gone, the sky reddening, darkening to night.

We stood.  Three people.  Silent on Yr Wyddfa's peak.  Alone with each other.  Alone with the alone.  Watching as the colours flattened into grey and far to black.  As the influence of the great ruler of day waned, so we felt the imposition of the rule of the great light of night, Luna herself, full flown, grown bright above; daring to share space with a thousand lesser lights and the lives of the myth men.

Silent night, holy night.
All is calm, all is bright.

Ten years previous, mother and child stood on the same spot.  Now, only the child remained, wonderstruck by all he witnessed.  If ever there was a night called holy, this was it.  And the silence, O the silence.  Lit up the world more perfectly than the lightning revelation.  Silence ruled and in that silence the child was reborn and grew, until murdered again by the discordant noise of civilisation.

We wished to stay we three.  Wished further that we could.  If we had known at daybreak what we knew at day's end we would have spent that December night nestled in concord close to heaven.  We couldn't stay.  We had no food.  No makeshift shelter, no bag to keep us warm.  And friends below awaited our coming.  To stay on Yr Wyddfa's pinnacle would be to inconvenience a hundred men, called upon to find us.  To stay would have brought a night of tears and the breaking both of friendships and promises.

So in darkness, in sadness, we turned from our solitude, our unity with creation, and set our path down the mountain trusting our steps to the moonlight.  As we descended we laughed together, fully aware we had experienced Godhead on the mountain top.  We had found Mount Zion where, it is said by some, God dwells in perpetual peace.

We believed such an experience would bind us together for all time.  How could it not?  I don't know.  Maybe you can say how three enlightened beings lost each other.  Maybe you can say too how they spurned enlightenment as soon as they reached the settlement of Peris.  Maybe you can say how they immediately set their hearts and minds back upon the earth.

I know the answer.  It's because, in the rapidly cooling night of December in Snowdonia, they could not resist something that has proved the downfall of many a potential Saint:

They bought ice creams!

A Tale Of Two Crucifixes. It Was The Best Of Faith, The Worst Of Faith.

Prompt 33. Jewelry: Write about a piece of jewelry. Who does it belong to?

In considering this prompt two options came to mind.

The first was to write a fiction.  Either something a little creepy along the lines of the person who wants to get their jewellery back from the protagonist.  The item would belong to a crime boss or a magician.  Or something with a more historical tone.  At one point I considered a piece of archival detective work about an inscribed bracelet and the discovery that it was a gift to Nell Gwyn from King Charles II.

The second was to stick to the facts.  At least in part.  I'd thought about my own jewellery collection.  It's not a valuable set of trinkets.  Most of them were bought second hand so perhaps I could imagine a piece of telemetry to discover the previous owners of items and tell their stories.  Or I could imagine how the crystals turned out to have more mystical qualities than they should, leading to meetings with other crystal bearers.

As I sat with it further I decided not to write a fiction today.  Or a part fiction.  Today you're getting facts.  You'll just have to decide whether I've deviated from the truth at any point.  Perhaps my memory is flawed.  Perhaps I'm just making things up.  Autistic people are rubbish at lying.  But we can be very good at making things up.

I want to take you back to my childhood, to when a very cute little boy was growing up in a perfectly ordinary family, in a completely ordinary terraced house on an estate.  I was that cute little boy.  Let's get that admission out of the way straight away.  This isn't going to be one of those dreadful morality plays in which the author says at the end, "I know.  Because I was there.  I was that boy."  I'm not going to do that to you.  Honesty from the beginning.  Here I am.  Cute as a red panda.  You are free to disagree.  Cute is an opinion not an objective fact.

I was ten years old and had recently entered into the first phase of my obsession with Christianity.  I had already become as obsessed as I could be with spirituality when growing up in a decidedly unspiritual environment.  At the age of ten I started attending the local church, not for any devout "I want to go to heaven" reasons but because I wanted to sing in a choir.  I wasn't just a cute little boy.  I was a cute little chorister too.  So cute and so clear voiced that I was elevated to being the boy soloist.

I joined the children's group at the church too and it was with them that I became a performer at a local arts festival.  I performed once.  Three of us spoke in our little dramatic rendition while other children mimed or wandered around the square or did something or other that I could possibly recall under deep hypnosis.  I knew my station in life.  And that's why I performed in the role of God.  They made me God at the age of ten.

I got disillusioned with church not long afterwards.  Nobody there showed me any wonderful spiritual way or any benefit of Christianity beyond singing some nice songs on a Sunday and making egg box monsters on a Friday night.  It was all pretty dull.  Whoever Jesus is, the person they showed me was dead and irrelevant.  So I stopped going to the church so much.  Then they threw me out of the choir for being so irregular.  Then I left the church entirely.  Now they have a leaking roof.  I don't mean to imply causation by that correlation.

Roll on two years.  I was a cute twelve year old boy.  Perhaps not so cute as I had been at ten.  Perhaps not cute enough for anybody else to label my image in such a manner.  I admit it.  I wasn't cute.  That was the year I raced in indoor athletics because I couldn't get out of being there.  That was the year I raced and passed the relay baton onto a boy who would later be captain of the England football team.  And that was the year my family spent part of a holiday in Lincolnshire on a campsite with no more than basic amenities.

In Lincoln I decided what my souvenir should be.  I, the non-Christian who didn't see any use in the church, would buy myself a crucifix.  I think a book I'd read on the occult had mentioned that Jesus himself was quite nice even if the church was deathly.  My mother didn't understand.  She did her very best to convince me that buying a crucifix was a bad move.  Another of those things she said were silly and stupid.  She gave in though and allowed me to make my choice.  It wasn't a mistake.

My dad took the photos in this post.  This one was taken from Lincoln Castle.  Below the cathedral, though you can't see them were a selection of Christian bling and tack and 'piety' shops.  It was time for me to go shopping.  I hunted through several shops until I found a crucifix that seemed to call out to me.  "I am yours."  My mother butted in again and said I shouldn't buy that one.  "That one's rubbish.  Why do you want that cheap thing?  Wouldn't you rather have one of these pretty ones?"  I didn't want them.  Once I'd seen that crucifix I knew that no other would do.  And so I parted with my sixty-seven pence, exchanging it for Jesus.

I've tried to find a photograph showing the crucifix clearly.  This heavily cropped image of a teenager at the peak of his acne phase is the best I can do.

I loved that cross.  My memory says that I wore it every day after that.  The photos of my teenage years tell a different story.  It rarely got worn.  Until I was about fifteen or sixteen.  After that it did get worn most of the time.  I still didn't believe in the church or the traditional stories of Jesus.  But my new age training college said that Jesus was one of the good guys.

Three years I wore that cross.  Nearly every day.  And then, in a sorry tale I won't speak of here, I became a Christian.  Born again.  Sinner's prayer.  Conservative.  Evangelical.  A Bible believing Jesus freak finding myself in churches surrounded by Jesus freaks.

People in the churches asked me why I wore a crucifix.  I said I know wore it proudly because I believed in Jesus.  That seemed obvious to me.  But then a devout and quite scary woman approached me and asked.  She then told me that she found it very painful to see me wearing a crucifix because it went against Christianity.  She was personally hurt by it.  She said the cross was empty.  Jesus was risen from the dead (Hallelujah!) so you shouldn't wear something as blasphemous as a crucifix.

Of course now I know better.  I'd have had an answer.  Stood my ground.  I'd have kept wearing my crucifix and loving my Jesus.  I'd have pointed out that the cross wasn't empty because Jesus rose from the dead.  It was empty because he died and got taken down from it.  Just like the thieves who died at his side.  All very normal for such a form of execution.  I would have told her that the crucifix was a picture of and a reminder of the wonderful salvation Jesus had worked though his suffering and dying on a cross for me.  I would have told her that every time I saw a crucifix I fell deeper in love with my blessed saviour.  I would have told her lots more.  Please ignore for now the fact that I'm no longer a Christian.

I didn't know better.  I was a new Christian.  Seeking naively to do the will of my new God.  So I took off my beloved crucifix.  Later that night I threw it away and heartily repented of my sin.  Mea culpa.  Mea culpa.  Mea maxima culpa.  Although not in Latin of course.  We conservative Protestant pentecostals didn't do Latin.  Leave that to the false church of Rome!

Fast forward through my life.  Fourteen years pass.  In that time I never lost sight of my solid Protestant faith though its expression and denomination changed plenty of times.  Things change.  To my surprise I found myself attending mass in a Catholic church and enrolled in a course that would lead to my acceptance as a fully paid up "in communion" member of that church I had once called false.

Then there was regret.  I didn't have my crucifix.  Thrown in a dustbin all those years before there wasn't any likelihood of getting it back.  Every holy place I went to, every Catholic shrine and shop, I would hunt for a cross like the one I was taught to despise by Christians.  I didn't find one.  What I did find, in Westminster Cathedral, was a new crucifix.  A new piece of holy jewellery to wear round my neck every single day.

Westminster Cathedral

I loved that crucifix, symbol of my new found and highly enthusiastic form of Catholicism.  The image of Jesus meant everything to me and as an added bonus the centre of the cross contained the Medal of Saint Benedict.  I adored that medal - though not as much as I adored Christ of course.  No flagrant abuse of the anti-idolatry rules in my devotion thank you.  I loved the letters on the medal and how they stood for Latin slogans - "Begone Satan! Never tempt me with your vanities! What you offer me is evil. Drink the poison yourself!" and "May the dragon never be my overlord!"  You would be hard pressed to find a medal more exciting than that.

A final bonus.  Much of the crucifix was a very pleasing shade of blue.  Attractive as well as holy.  Here I am in October 2006 modelling my cross.

Yes, I did love it.  I did wear it each day.  It weighed me down but not so much as I later realised I was being weighed down by my Christianity.  And then a disaster struck.  In 2008 I lost my crucifix.  I was on a train through London when it happened.  I got on the train with the crucifix hung round my neck.  I got off the train without it.  I was distraught at the loss.  Missed my bling more than is proper for something that is really just bling with a medal in it.

The next time I was in London I returned to Westminster Cathedral to buy a replacement.  They didn't have one.  Not in blue.  I was able to buy similar crucifixes in red and green.  They were okay but I missed the original blue cross.  Even after I walked away from the Catholic Church I still missed it.  But what could I do?  Lost on a train years before it might as well have been thrown in a bin with the Lincoln cross.  Irreplaceable.  Irredeemable.  Lost.

Some people say miracles never occur.  Some people have faith.  See what you think of this.

In 2015 I began the job of clearing out my parents' house.  They owned an almost complete set of OS maps.  Most were upstairs but all of the maps covering areas anywhere near their home were on a shelf in the lounge.  It was when I emptied that shelf that I found it.

It was there.  Hanging on a little hook behind the maps.

The crucifix.  Lost on a train seven years before.

It was there.

A miracle?

Not a particularly edifying miracle to my religious sustenance because a year later, after a long battle with a dying faith and with my struggles to become free, I gave up attending church.  Initially I gave up for Lent but discovered how much better my life was without regular services.  I have not returned to church life and no longer call myself a Christian.  I think a lot more of Jesus than I did a year ago, but any relationship with him that I may have doesn't include ceremonial reenactments of a man being crucified to pay for my sins.

I have my crucifix back.  I've even worn it sometimes.  And I find, in my post-Christian days, that I remain grateful for small miracles.

The Teacher Who Gave Me Freedom And Took Away My Hope

Prompt 31. The Professor: Write about a teacher that has influenced you.

Last night I considered these questions:  Has any teacher influenced me in a big way?  How was I influenced?

I concluded that no school or university teacher influenced me in any spectacular way worth writing about.  Some teachers helped me.  Some, I'm sorry to say, hindered me.  Very few encouraged me in the realms of ideas and I'm not someone who says, "Ah yes, without Mrs. Burke I don't know where I'd be now."

I decided I'd write something about my secondary school music teacher, Phil Baker.  He was a good man and I wish I'd allowed him to be more of a friend.  I also wished I'd decided to study A level music with him.  It would have been a brilliant two years, one to one teaching with Phil.  He ran our community choir and he introduced me to music I wouldn't otherwise have heard.  I also socialised with him a few times out of school.  He took me to a world premier concert, got me involved in a production of My Fair Lady, and took me to a spirituality day at Tekels Park - which was a home to both the Theosophical Society and the Liberal Catholic Church.  Phil Baker was the best.  The last time I saw him was many years ago.  He surprised me by showing up at the house to see how we all were.  We weren't all great.  My mother happened to be an inpatient at the Royal Marsden.  Phil instantly changed his plans and took me up to see her.  He was one of the best things about my school.  So why didn't I study A level music?  That's not a question I'm answering today.

I didn't write about Phil though.  What I wrote deviated from the facts about a teacher who has influenced me.  It's true that Phil had an office near the main music teaching room.  It's true that his clothes were slightly to the left of Jeremy Corbyn.  And it's true that he used to sit in his book-filled office, music playing, and smoking a pipe.  All of that is true.  The rest is not.

What follows is a free-written story.  It's unfinished.  1800 words plus the 500 you've just read is enough for now.  I think I know a little of how the story would develop.  I'll let you into a secret:  An arrest follows.  And a hiding away.  Then either a sad resolution or an antagonist and a crisis to lead into something bigger.  You can have your own ideas and complete the tale in your head.  That's what the full tale is about:  Having your own ideas.

"Freyja and the Necklace" by James Doyle Penrose

He was a brilliant man.

He was my religious studies teacher and he was my first love.  Half the girls fancied him, and no wonder, but I loved him for his intellect.  Almost from the beginning of my first year in the school I looked up to him because he seemed so in control of his life.  It felt like nothing could ever worry him and the air of calm he carried with him was contagious.

He wasn't anything like the other teachers.  Compared to Mr. Stevens they were nothing to me.  They might as well all have been robotic imitations of people for all the difference it would have made.  A lesson with them felt like being bossed around by something only programmed for one task and with one set of knowledge.  Go to a maths class and it's just maths, monotonally mouthed.  The beauty of numbers was systematically drained of excitement in those lessons.  Go to an English class and have grammar forced into you as if the English language was meant to be the most fundamentally dull subject on the planet rather than the tongue of the poets, the orators and the novelists.  Even music had life sucked from it.  It felt very much like our music teacher, Mr. Cuthbertson, was on a mission to encourage all children to want to avoid all forms of melody and harmony in their adult lives.  Whether Bach or The Beatles, Chopin or Coltrane, his view was that we should analyse them methodically but that they weren't there to be enjoyed.  In our school music was just maths, and maths just a near infinite series of meaningless tests to be completed.

Mr. Stevens was different.  He was the only teacher who made life bearable in that place.  He was quite the eccentric.  He would sit in his little office playing music at high volume, smoking a pipe.  He wasn't really meant to smoke on school premises of course and lots of us would joke that it was something stronger than tobacco in his pipe.  He would tell jokes too.  Often they were bad jokes but they were the best we could get in our school.  He dressed scruffy.  Dress code was that all male teachers wore a suit and tie and Mr. Stevens followed the code.  He just followed it badly, without a hint of enthusiasm.  His jacket and trousers never matched and his jacket was so old it had patches in places where it had worn out.  His tie always seemed out of place.  It was never tied neatly, was often brightly coloured and sometimes had words on related to religion or politics.  Children would laugh about Mr. Stevens sometimes but the jesting was only half-serious because although we thought of him as the school nutcase we all liked his lessons and wished he taught us more often.

Almost every child looked forward to religious studies even though half of us couldn't really care less about the subject and wouldn't have wanted to go home and discuss religion with their families.  He animated every topic with his teaching style.  He could make Immanuel Kant exciting and I'll always remember the time he got us debating the rights and wrongs of David Hume's views about the possibility of miracles.  That anyone would ever think to debate this when it was so clear that Hume was anti-truth and an idiot astounded me.  How can you debate a liar?  But it was when Mr. Stevens left behind pure philosophy and taught from the sacred ground of the greater and lesser religions that his classes really took off for me.

I came from a godless family.  It wasn't as if our lack of a god had turned us into rabidly immoral creatures or had made us all fall into a bleak nihilism and despair at the dinner table about the meaninglessness of it all, wondering whether it was even worth eating another meatball for all the lack of good it would do in the long run.  We just didn't do God.  No deity ever got a mention and to this day I don't know what my parents personally believed about God beyond a belief that religion should never be discussed or expressed except in a church.  I don't think they realised there were religious people who didn't meet in a church.

I knew what they thought about maths and the sciences.  They told me often, "You make sure you pass those physics exams or you'll spend your life washing up in the back room of a bar where terrorists meet."  My parents had some strange ideas and they knew what they wanted for my life.  Any other choices would have been a disappointment for them.  My choice.  I was disappointing enough that they locked me up for six months until I promised to buckle down and become a proper scientist.  When I turned again from that path they disowned me.  If it hadn't been for Mr. Stevens I'd have obeyed them without question.  Tried to make my scientific contribution to saving our world from the climactic climate disaster that looks to be inevitable.

Mr. Stevens showed me the path of the religious and I was hooked.  He showed me the path of the musician and the writer too and once apologised for how useless Mr. Cuthbertson and the rest were.  One lunchtime I needed to go and see Mr. Stevens about a problem I was having with a tricky essay about the relationships between Christianity and Islam in the time of the Crusades and how it was that Jerusalem was of such importance to both, and to the Jews too, a people often persecuted by both of the larger religions.

Mr. Stevens sorted out my confusion in moments and then beckoned me across to his desk, saying excitedly, "Look at that, boy."  A large book was open on his desk and on the page was an image of woman.  She was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen in a book and I told Mr. Stevens so.  "This is Freya," he said.  "She's one of the goddesses of old, like a god but they're women.  You won't learn about her in lessons.  She's not in the curriculum.  The powers that be think we need to be protected from ideas of goddesses.  As if the gods have done a good job.  Just look at those Crusades boy.  All that bloodshed, fighting over land and whose god is better.  Perhaps we should have done away with all of those dictatorial deities long ago.  Instead we see them coming back and our governments are complicit.  Maybe they think another batch of Crusades would be good for the economy.  What do you think about that boy?"

I really didn't know.  I'd never heard anyone talk like that before, not even Mr. Stevens.  And I had never heard that their might have ever been female deities.  I fumbled for a reply and mumbled something inane about how I didn't want more Crusades and wished the religions could just agree to differ and that people should stop fighting for each other's land when there was plenty to go around.  Mr. Stevens nodded, harumphed and said, "Freya was more free than we are.  I'll tell you more sometime if you like.  Now go boy or you'll be late for your next class."

I went back to Mr. Stevens' office the next lunchtime to look at Freya again and he began to tell me more about her.  I was astounded by the ideas he was giving me and that there could be another way of thinking than the one we were all used to.  Wasn't our way the only way?  Wouldn't it be seditious to even talk about an idea that challenged it?  I asked Mr. Stevens that and he quickly back-tracked.  "Of course I don't believe in Freya.  Of course not.  But I don't think there's any harm in looking at the old books or uncovering a forgotten history.  This is how some people lived and whether or not we choose to remember them or suppress this knowledge is up to us.  There's lots to learn.  Come back tomorrow I'll show you more."

After that I was in that office nearly every lunchtime and often I'd go there after school too.  Our teacher-pupil relationship developed into a friendship and I became more and more fascinated by the old ways and the possibility that there might be a greater truth beyond the three religions proscribed by our governments and that strange Jewish religion that had been allowed to exist within all three societies ever since the trilateral planetary treaty was signed two centuries ago.

Mr. Stevens had dozens of books hidden in his office, all of which told of other faiths and other systems of government too.  I told my friends and parents that I was working in the office, that I found it a calming place where I could better focus on preparing for science exams.  In truth of course I could hardly contain my excitement at the thought of reading more from those volumes.  Mr. Stevens told me that most of them were forbidden.  He warned me that even reading them was officially a crime and that I would be punished severely if the authorities discovered I knew about this forbidden history and hadn't reported it.

I would never have jeopardised my lunch times of course.  I treasured being able to sit with Mr. Stevens.  We would drink tea together and discuss the ideas and wisdom as we discovered it and would talk of how there might, one day, be a world in which hundreds of choices might be expressed without fear.  I came to see how our media consistently promoted one viewpoint, how there was no freedom in the press and how the newscasts didn't always say what was right.  We were fed what our leaders wanted us to think was right, that Christianity was the basis of the superior society and that we must continue our battle against the inferior Islamic and Hindu societies in the other societies, standing firm lest we be overcome by them.

Sitting with Mr. Stevens it became clear that such spoon fed misinformation was garbage.  Sitting with him I became more and more angry.  I wanted change, wanted to be able to talk of Freya, Confucius, Lao Tzu, and all the deep beauty found in them.  I discovered there were even Christians whose teachings had been uncompromisingly repressed.  Mr. Stevens taught me about Quakers, about the Progressive Christians and about rogue theologians like Kierkegaard and Eckhart.  He even showed me how much merit and clarity there was in the ideas of David Hume and how he was a brilliant man we were all taught to despise.

I asked Mr. Stevens, "So what do we do?  Is there a way to bring change?  What would it take for me to stand up for freedom?"  He sighed sadly and said he didn't know.

She's Addicted To Jesus But She Ain't No Jesus Freak.

A writing prompt from thinkwritten.com.  I read it this morning and have typed the following in an evening.  During the day lots of different thoughts passed through my head and I didn't know what I'd be writing about until I sat down and found myself typing the first sentence.  Even as I pressed the first key this post could have gone in several directions including a few with no basis in fact.

Addict: Everyone’s addicted to something in some shape or form. What are things you can’t go without?

Are you A to J?

That was a question asked at the start of a song called Addicted to Jesus, the title track of an album by a Christian recording artist named Carman.  On this track he was joined by a Christian band called DC Talk whose album Jesus Freak achieved more than two million sales in the USA.  I've got to admit it's a decent album and I confess that even in my post-theist days it's still on my phone today.

I do not have the song Addicted to Jesus on my phone or anywhere in my music collection.  Have a listen and you might be able to hear why. 

The album was released in 1992 and even then I found parts of it musically and lyrically painful.  I was addicted to other Jesus music in 1992.  In that year I had a subscription with Vineyard Music which churned out dozens of new songs from the Vineyard churches.  A new album. Every month, complete with sheet music for every song.  I loved those albums dearly and I adored singing those songs.  I would play them often with the guitar, often with friends.  That kind of behaviour was acceptable and normal because I was studying in a Presbyterian theological college.  That sounds grander than it was.

I became an evangelical, charismatic, born-again Christian in 1990 and it's safe to say that I was addicted to Jesus.  Or at least addicted to something that I found within that Christian tradition.  I think now that I wasn't addicted to Jesus at all but rather to the sense of belonging and certainty I found in my faith, a real sense of hope and meaning, the fuel that Christian books gave my head, and in those days to the highs and excitement given me in the kind of churches I attended.  My addiction was to ideas and experiences rather than to a historical man.

I had heard of Carman not long before becoming a Christian.  I can place a time and date on that conversion.  It was then that I prayed the "sinner's prayer", asked for forgiveness, and welcomed Jesus into my life to be my Lord and Saviour.  I prayed at about nine in the evening on February 20th 1990 in a friend's bedroom in a hall of residence in Bradford.  I remember it well and remember the surprise I had at how damn good I felt afterwards.  I honestly felt as if a weight had lifted from me and that "all things are possible to him who believes."  It was a solid and sound born-again conversion experience.  They're not uncommon.  Tonight there will be people in Britain who have a similar experience to mine and they too will feel damn good afterwards and their faces will beam as much as mine did that night.  These people may become addicted too.

Ian hadn't brought many personal possessions with him from home.  He'd had to transport himself from Belfast without a car and couldn't carry enough to furnish a room with the amount of clutter that I was managing to pack in to my own room across the hall.  He didn't have a lot.  He didn't need a lot.  Perhaps he had always been that way.  Or perhaps his faith had the useful side effect of teaching him that he didn't need lots of stuff in order to be happy.

What he did have in his room was a case containing twenty cassette albums of contemporary Christian music.  From Ian I learned the names of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith.  I learned of Christian rock and I confess that I devoured it.  It might not have been the greatest music in the world.  Some of it was more dreadful than lame.  I loved it though and could listen to songs about Jesus and sing about him as much as I liked.  It felt marvellous.  I'd fallen for Jesus and could sing love songs that made me smile.  I listened to Whiteheart, Petra, Stryper and lots of other bands and when I'd worked my way through Ian's tape box I started to buy my own cassettes.

And then there was Carman.  Ian had brought a Carman album with him from home.  It was his live album called Radically Saved.  Here's the title track.  You may wish to block your ears.  You may wish to laugh.  You might even enjoy it.  I loved that album.  Mea culpa!

I received that album with much enthusiasm.  I copied all of Ian's cassettes and played that one many times before buying my own copy.  My girlfriend became a Christian a month after me - and stopped being a Christian twenty years before me!  She loved that album too and enjoyed Carman so much that when he came to the UK and played a gig in London she went to it.

So why am I talking about Carman and my Jesus addiction?  An addiction that in my post-Christian days I've relegated in my head to the status of special interest.  Why aren't I talking about my other addictions,  addictive behaviours, obsessions and special interests?  After all, I've had more than a few of those.  I was tempted today to write about self harm.  Or something more mundane like sudoku, old time radio, tea drinking and buying, books, CD buying, various computer games, or anything else that has veered towards being psychological addiction.  Perhaps writing too will become an addictive behaviour but I hope it doesn't.  My addictions or obsessions sometimes end badly.

There is a reason Carman came to mind among the many thoughts of today and that reason is Facebook.  For some reason Facebook's algorithm decided that I would want to look at something he posted.  He is going to be premiering a new song on January 19th about Donald Trump.  How exciting.  A Carman song about Trump.  It is exciting.  It must be because a lot of people are excited about it.  I'm not excited at all.  A song about Donald Trump written by a man who called the election result a "miracle victory."  It's just not my thing.  I believe that Carman is doing his best.  And I believe that sitting down for a pot of tea with him might turn out to be pleasant.  Perhaps we would even sing together.  But I think I will give this song a miss even though it's likely to contain jokes.

Carman asked his fans what kind of things should be in the song.  My answer that racism and sexism should form the themes of the first two verses was not popular.  Nobody liked my idea.  I personally think any song or poem about Trump should include topics like that.  Donald Trump provides us with a lavish smorgasbord of things to write about and manages to create a new tasty dish nearly every day.  I can't decide whether he is a satirist's dream or a whether he's a satirist's nightmare because he is beyond satire.  A spoof Donald Trump twitter account would be no stranger than the real one.

Carman wasn't really asking for my answer.  I'm not a fan, though it's enjoyable to remember the time I was.  For the most part I can smile at the old songs again.

If Carman was to visit my home he might ask me this:  "Are you A to J?"

And I would answer, "No I am not."

But would I be telling the truth?  Or is my addiction much like it would be if it were substance abuse?  Am I still an addict?  Perhaps for me it is impossible for me to become an ex-Jesus addict.  Perhaps my brain will keep going back to him in different ways for as long as I live.  Maybe Jesus is like self harm and never truly goes away completely.

I just asked a friend this:  "Am I addicted to Jesus?"

She gave me an immediate response.  Didn't even have to think about it.

Yes, she said, you are.  He's not real and you're addicted to him.

So this is Clare, Jesus addict.

Ex-Christian.  Ex-theist.  Ex-Jesus Freak.  And Jesus addict.

On An Encounter With Fundamentalism. And On The Wonders Of The Human Race.

I chatted with some preachers in Sunderland yesterday.  I wasn't meaning to.  I was just wanting to finish my ice cream in peace.  Damn you preachers, you thwarted my quiet ice cream enjoyment.

But once they began talking at me, and because I am still utterly obsessed about God things and think about them a heck of a lot, and because I wasn't at that point falling to pieces mentally, I talked back.  It's still a novelty to me to be so far on this side of the dogmatic fence.

We talked about a lot of things.  All of them may bore you.  Some of them you may find strange.  Some of them will make you wonder why Christians sometimes don't even love each other let alone non-believers.

I am no longer a Christian.  I'm not.  But I am still fascinated by it all.  It's a special interest.

So as someone with a deep fascination, I've done the talking.  So you don't have to!  There.  Aren't you pleased?  You will know, when you encounter such people, the kinds of things you are happy to be missing by not having a conversation with them.

I have to give this disclaimer:  Not all Christians are like the ones I chatted with.  Quite a lot are very different indeed.  My plans for the day had fallen apart due to my own absent-mindedness, confusion and panic.  But those plans had been to meet with, sit with and relate with a group of Christians.  To talk, share and learn about theology with them.  I'd been looking forward to it too and am sad to have missed out on the experience.  I believe it would have been great.  And I believe that the Christians I didn't manage to meet with would have had nearly as many disagreements with the fundamentalists as I did.

If you did choose to engage a fundamentalist of this variety, a strange choice, what might you talk about?

Image from https://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/is-fundamentalism-destroying-christianity/

I'll start with the more boring bits (history and doctrine) and will end with the most interesting bits (humans and my thoughts about the people I met).  Skip through to the end.  Most of this is not exciting stuff for most people, only strange obsessives like me.  Seriously.  This is long.  And it doesn't even cover the full encounter.  Skip through to the part about people.  Because that's the important thing.

We talked a little of church history.

They said there was a church existing sometimes in secret and sometimes in persecuted groups from the time of Constantine until the Protestant Reformation began.  Theodore Beza, the successor of Calvin, wrote about this history.  That's not an uncommon claim among Protestant fundamentalists but it's a laughable one.  Plus Beza, a man who wrote in defense of burning heretics alive, didn't have the information available to write a reliable church history - which might be why he didn't write one!



They gave some examples of the secret church that upheld the "one true faith."

The Cathars

I was informed that this group were Christians with a beautiful Christian faith, part of the true church. They were persecuted because they held the way of salvation hated by Rome.  This is something I find very funny.  Because the Cathars were dualists - they believed in two Gods.  And they believed in reincarnation.  The Cathars were also gnostics and believed in the ultimate salvation of all people.

In all honesty I don't think the Cathar faith was quite the same as that of these preachers!  I tried to tell them that - because I looked into the Cathars years ago when, as a Catholic, I had the same claims thrown at me.  But no.  Everything I had read and learned was a lie.  Propaganda.  Invented by the Catholic Church.

The Albigensians

I was told that this group were also just like beautiful Protestants.  Bearers of the one true faith.  In fact they were a Cathar sect.  Where most Cathars were pretty ascetic, the Albigensians were more extreme than most.  They also believed that Jesus was just human, not God.  For these people to be held up as models of the true Protestant gospel - the proper Jesus - is crazy.

The Waldensians

This is the funniest of all.  I'll say why a little later.

We talked of other historical documents from the early church.  Reputable ones.  The ones for which we know who wrote them.  And when.  Such as the epistles of Ignatius of Antioch to seven churches, written on his journey to Rome where he was martyred in about AD107.  Such as the two Apologia of Justin Martyr, written to the Roman Emperor around AD150 in the hopes of stopping a persecution.  Those documents contain much that wouldn't fit into the Beza history or the preachers' ideas of the early church.  I know.  I read them a lot before becoming a Catholic for a while.  But no.  All of those documents were fabrications, forgeries from much later, many centuries later, written to prop up a false church.  All such documents that the preachers disagreed with were deemed to be completely non-existent or fake.  I urged them to read these early church documents.  See what was believed by these men of faith and see, especially in Justin, how the early church functioned and how the mid-2nd century Christians worshiped.  I didn't say to follow the way of Justin - just to see for themselves that such a way had been followed by early Christians.

The preacher kept on talking about what Beza is meant to have said and how we have to believe Beza and how all the other things were just false and shouldn't be touched at all.  I could see that historically, there wasn't really any wiggle room for a rational conversation.

We talked a little of doctrine.

The Catholics invented Transubstantiation in AD999.  And believes we're saved by works.  And rejects the Bible.  And has a false Jesus.  And a false priesthood.  And Constantine invented it.  And so on and so on.  These preachers don't like Catholics!

I found it strange.  Two days previously I had laid into some of the teachings of the Catholic Church - with full acceptance that I was giving one side of the teaching far over and above the other.  Now I found myself defending Catholicism.  Of course I'm not Catholic now.  But the accusations fundy Protestants throw at Catholics are ludicrous and hateful.

On a personal note, I am condemned for my Catholic ways and if I don't repent of them I will be judged and burn for eternity.  As a non-Catholic learning this came as something of a surprise.

The New Testament was in its final form by the end of the first century because the apostle John made it so.  Er, no.  Just no.

The gospel was preached across the world by the first generation of Christians - because the Bible says so.

This does not include Australia or the Americas because there wasn't anyone there to tell about Jesus then.  I was told that we know there can't have been people in Australia 2000 years ago because the apostolic church didn't go and preach to them.  Honest.  I was told that.

But the gospel was preached in the British Isles in the first century AD.  Oh yes, I was told that.  And I was told who by.  Apparently the Waldensians came here and told the natives about Jesus.  Oh yes, they did.  Now, unlike the Cathars, the Waldensians did have a faith similar to that seen in the ideas that can be seen in the Protestant Reformation.  Some of their ideas and major criticisms of the Western church of their day are not only valid, they are very praiseworthy.

But did the Waldensians bring the story of Jesus to our shores in the first century?  Well, no.  It would have been difficult for them to do so.  Peter Waldo didn't start that movement until the late twelfth century.  It's an interesting story.  But his followers were not time travelers.

On a personal note, I am the antichrist and an abomination.  That didn't come as a surprise to me.  Old news.

We talked a little about ethics and morality.

I was asked if lying is wrong.  I agree, it usually is.  But to me it wasn't a yes/no question.  I posited an extreme situation.  Sometimes extreme cases disprove a rule.  I was in Germany in 1943 harboring a family of Jews under my floorboards.  The Gestapo paid me a visit and asked whether I was harboring any Jews.  I said I would lie.  He said he wouldn't lie and that God would judge me for my sin in lying.  I tried to explain situational ethics 101.  For the preacher the way of righteousness would have been to give those Jews up to the Gestapo - and myself too, I suppose, for protecting them.

We talked about the verses in the Old Testament in which God commands genocide.  He said that he didn't believe God would command his people to commit genocide now because God does things differently now Jesus has risen.  He said that God is holy and commanding genocide was holy.  He said that if God did command genocide now he would take part in it and kill people because it was better to obey God.  I pointed out a group of children who were passing at that moment and asked, "Would you kill those children?"  He replied that he would, if God told him to.

We talked of the times when it's written that God hardened pharaoh's heart after some of the plagues - and so pharaoh didn't let the Israelites like he had planned.  That's in the story.  But that means that the killing of all the first born children of Egypt wasn't necessary.  Which kinda means all that horror is God's fault.  It's there in the text.  If you, like the preacher, want to believe the text.  The preacher didn't like that.  He couldn't accept it was there because it didn't fit into his dogma. Others say God did it so his power could be seen.  Which rather makes God out to be an egotistical monster.

Yes.  The preacher would slaughter the children of Sunderland under some circumstances.  

Holy crap!

We talked of science.

The preachers believe that the universe is 6000 years old.  I asked about the light coming from a supernova 50,000 light years away.  I was being kind to the man giving this number because it's hardly any distance at all in terms of the universe.  Of all the galaxies in this astonishing universe, less than 100 of them are closer than ten-million light years and we have detected supernovae in galaxies far further away than that.   Wouldn't we thus be seeing the light from a star exploding thousands of years before they would say the universe began?  I got the reply that I didn't know what I was talking about because (a) the universe is expanding so the star would have been much closer 6000 years ago, (b) the speed of light is very different in space to what it is here, and (c) there is no time once you leave planet Earth.  Time doesn't exist anywhere else.  I was told that's what science says.

Evolution is of course a lie.  Anything a scientist says that doesn't fit in with the preachers' brand of dogma is a lie given by Satan.

We talked about other Christians.

Because there are Christians I love who have a faith that's attractive.  They said that these people aren't Christians at all and certainly haven't got the right Jesus.  They said that these other Christians need to repent or burn.

The Protestant Church was going well because it had the Authorised Bible.  But then people started making non-authorised translations from the wrong Greek and Hebrew manuscripts.  And then the Protestant Church went wrong.  Any church using the false Bibles hasn't got Jesus.  Any Christian with a false Bible probably isn't a Christian at all and if they are they desparately need to repent and find the true Jesus in the King James Bible.

On a personal level, I am a fool.

We talked of judgement - and inevitably talked of sexuality.

Please note that I didn't bring this up.  They did.

God has judged and condemned nations in the past.  And he's going to judge this one and condemn it if it doesn't repent, especially from the sin of homosexuality.

On a personal level, I am condemned for my sexuality.

And we talked about other human beings.

They told me this of the human race:  All people, from birth, deserve to burn painfully in Hell for all eternity.  All people are at root evil because of sin.  There is no light in them.  Nothing of God.  Nothing of hope.  Unless they believe on the Lord Jesus Christ (and exactly the right version).

I have a confession to make.  I used to believe that kind of thing.  I thought the Bible said so.  And I wanted to believe the Bible.  I wasn't as extreme as the preachers I met yesterday.  But I believed quite a lot of things that I now find either embarrassing, shockingly reprehensible, or both.  I don't blame myself.  I know the reasons why I came to believe as I did.  But I regret many things.  I accepted Christ in a fucked up state.  And in many ways was fucked up further by my Christianity.

As I talked with those preachers I felt myself more filled with light than I possibly ever have been before.  I did.  And why?  Because when I looked at all the people around me, ordinary people from Sunderland, I saw light.  I saw beauty.  I saw magnificence.  If God is light then I saw God shining from each and every person on that shopping street and saw it as plainly as I could see their physical forms.  It was an amazing experience to have that clarity.

Now, I believe that humans are basically good.  No matter what they do, what they've suffered, what they've been taught to repress or embrace.  No matter what they're going through.  They're basically good.  All humans.  Every single one.

We all make mistakes.  We're all imperfect - or perfectly imperfect.  And sometimes we muck up bigtime or embrace views and beliefs that we later may look back on with a sense of regret or shame.  We all hurt other people sometimes.  We let each other down sometimes.  And all of us may become people who say or do horrible things.

All of that is admitted.  We screw up!  We hurt.  We may be in need of healing.  We may be hungry.  We may be scared.  We may be lonely.  We may act badly out of insecurity.  We may get raised in an environment in which we are taught racism or homophobia or some other prejudice.

But.  We are all basically good.  I believe that.  I know I can be rubbish at social skills at times.  I know I can fail to act in love and light - out of laziness or out of my own woundedness or out of lack of resources.  But I do believe all human beings are wonderful.  Yes, even the suicide bomber.  Even the preacher!

I looked yesterday at the people of Sunderland and I saw shining lights.  And it was wonderful.

And I was being told that all those shining lights were evil.  Dead.  Deserving of eternal torment.

And that for me, beyond history and dogma and science and all the rest of it, is the saddest thing about those preachers.  The saddest by far.

As I think about those preachers I feel this:

Sadness for the years of my life in which I would have gone along with at least part of what they believe, including that view of a fundamentally evil human race in need of salvation from Hell.  Sadness for the relationships I missed out on because of my faith.  Sadness for the times I hurt people because of my faith.

Gladness that the rest of my life will not be spent following such a path.  Gladness for all the things that happened in the last five years - some of them very painful and difficult - which have brought me to this point in my life.  Gladness that I have been "set free from the law of sin and death" which I lived under as an evangelical Christian.

And as for those preachers, I pity them.  And I feel deep sorrow for people in their lives who become affected by the results of their dogma.  I won't be leading the preachers out of the darkness in which they now unwittingly stand.  I hope that they find their way, just as I have been learning to find mine.

My other sadness was that the woman I talked to - because she was answering back to a preacher and had really cool hair and seemed nice - didn't have time to come for a drink with me.  And she really didn't.  Lots of shopping to do before a six hour Megabus journey this morning.  She says if I see her again, to ask again.  I think it would have been quite fun to drink tea with this stranger whose life I completely butted into.  It wouldn't be the first time I've done something like that.