Chapter 22 - The Alien And The Theological Cul-De-Sac

I had been attending the Christian Youth Fellowship for over two years by the time I was twenty one. All the other members of the youth group were at least four years younger and had Christian parents to reinforce their faith. The nearest I had to such reinforcement were the holidays I'd had as a child at  my Gran's, where she was a staunch church goer and I went with her. I remained surprised at the ease with which I was accepted in the fellowship, given my lack of Christian reinforcement from my family. What I did not realise was that my acceptance was built on my being seen as a stray, but then one way or another my family saw me as a stray to be hemmed in. The fellowship was less defensive than my family was. I was made to feel welcome by that reduced defensiveness.

As Keith, my Quaker friend had advised me, I had to choose a church to go to on my own  to get nearer being the adult Christian I needed to be, in addition to the Sunday evenings with the Youth Fellowship. I did not know how to choose a church or denomination. I would like to have chosen Keith's denomination, but choosing that would have looked too much like I was following him. Also his church were The Quakers, who I admired for their values which included accepting all comers at face value, but for any long term commitment with them a maturity greater than I could stump up was a basic requirement. To become more mature I had to 'sow my spiritual oats' and get through the changes that were mine to make, to get those changes out of my system, and grow through, before I was fit for the Quakers. 

The Churches in the town were like the local Labour Party, a sometimes active minority culture full of odd rituals that were riven by perplexing divisions. Unlike the local Labour Party the divisions and variations in rituals between the churches were near universally accepted within those churches as being historic variations on the same idea. The denomination who owned the oldest building was the Church of England, the second oldest church building was owned by the Quakers. The church that claimed to be the oldest was the small local Roman Catholic congregation, but also with a history long enough to be misremembered there was the Methodist church, the United Reformed Church, and The Jehovah's Witnesses. That said the newest church, The Pentecostal Church saw themselves as the exception to all life around them, whether the life was in different churches or outside all the churches put together.

Perhaps the newest kid on the block automatically thinks he is the best and thinks other kids are not worth knowing. As well as being the newest church in the town the Pentecostal Church were the church who were the most overtly authoritarian, and the least able to support their weaker members who they attracted because the leadership projected 'security'. The church did not strengthen their 'new converts' from the inside out because it did not realise that the converts were so weak. With the selective authoritarianism in my family background I was strongly drawn to them. If I even half-saw how joining the Pentecostal Church was a folly from the beginning, and how Keith would have warned me it was a bad idea, then on my own I still did not know how to resist the idea. I did not know how to stop putting myself through what was to become a spiritual masochism. At the time I reasoned that if I was going to learn from a mistake then a big mistake was easier to learn from than a small one, the size of the mistake should be easier to recognise sooner. 

The Pentecostal church leader had a love/hate relationship with every other church leader. Pastor Paul said that they 'were not Christians'-his quote. Lay members of the Pente church, as it was commonly known, mixed well with the lay members of the other churches. At the lay level there was nearly no one-up-churchmanship. But in their own services the Pentes behaved as if only they were Heaven Bound and the other churches were spiritual slackers. I started by saying that the churches were like the local Labour Party, riven by division and sects with it's outlying fanatics, the above behaviour is the perfect example of this.

One of the better stories about the Pentecostal minister was how he told his church that it was a miracle when at his door was left a Christmas hamper and on other occasion he had been left generous sums of money, all anonymously. He also told his congregation that the other churches 'did not believe in miracles'. I was told in private that the hamper was a gift to him from the members of the council of churches who found that giving to him anonymously was the only way they had of giving to him without causing offence.

It took a while before I fell for the Pentes. My journey started with my regular attendance at All Saints, the local high Anglican church. It was a barn of a building where every week there was a choir, the organ sounded beautiful. The place was elegantly stuffed with the trappings of wealth, as bestowed upon it since the fourteenth century when the site was first built upon. At first the trappings overwhelmed me. I did not know where to look in the building or what to listen for most. Since I half-knew some of the people present I always used my greeting them as my settling point. At first I assessed the service by what I thought was the most spontaneous moment each week that I attended. The part of the service that varied the most was usually the sermon. But even it was strictly limited to being under seven minutes long. The longer I attended the harder I found it to fathom what anyone could say that might vary and strike the mind afresh in under seven minutes. Every other part of the service moved like clockwork and did the same motions every week. There was definitely a skill in performance there, and the different creeds we sang always worked for me. But however aesthetically impressive and grand the service was, the chat and connection with people outside church were where faith started to mean something. 

The interrupter that slowed the worship machine down a little and caused increased discussion was the new prayer book. The old prayer book was first written in the reign of Henry VIII, revised in the reign of Charles II, and had its last major revision in 1927. With each revision it was trying to reaffirm the majesty of God through the majesty of the English language, which it did very well. As a newbie I did not know how deeply attached long standing church members were to the words that had been handed down for nearly 450 years, that were repeated every week. I did not know the history of the prayer book so I did not know why church members struggled so much with the anodyne words of it's 1980's replacement. language, and were apt with that change to look for other changes in their church/faith life. Since I did not know the history of The Book of Common Prayer I was happier to content myself with my own much smaller and more recent struggles towards a sense of majesty in life and language.

I had a real faith coupled with a nearly non existent understanding of church history. In the youth group I was never out of my depth, we made up what we did as we went along. No history lesson or knowledge of church history required. In the Youth Fellowship they did not even compare notes on confirmation, with them all coming from different churches and being confirmed. What they did confirm was that as a youth group they were a holding place for young church members who had left Sunday School after their confirmation who had yet to find their place in adult congregations. Like them I had sought my place as an adult in an adult congregation, but I had to do it with much less advice and support.

When I did not understand the character of Anglican church that did not make me give up. Often the people around me spoke to each other, including me, with a sophistication and a shared understanding that I openly failed to observe the refinement of. When that happened the nearest I could get to being honest and apologetic about being out of my depth with the company I was in was for me to say 'I am hanging on to shirt tails of Christianity' as if such a simile explained how my hopes were founded in aspiration rather than experience.

My drift from misunderstanding high Anglicanism towards wondering what I was doing at The Pentes was slow but sure. At All Saints C of E church the evening prayer service became the first victim of the new prayer book. The numbers attending the evening service dropped off in droves, and with the way that lay members of different congregations mixed, the Anglicans who were still loyal to the morning service looked to the lay members of other churches for finding what was the right place to go on a Sunday evening. The Pentes were the first beneficiary of this now deserted church service, where the increased evening service numbers there were called 'a renewal' and the desertion of the C of E service was left unmentioned, or became the cause of some prickly and negative comment. The second beneficiary was a church in a nearby city with a charismatic leader whose charisma seemed to be a human charisma as well being spiritual. John Shelbourne was a genial charismatic who was known for being solid on doctrine without being doctrinaire. He had an inclusive sense of humour too. He was a big bear of a man who wore well fitting three piece suits in bright colours and his voice had a smile in it. I was one of many who found him easy to like. It was a shock when he unexpectedly died young, in his fifties, of a heart attack. That was maybe the first time I became aware of how easy it was to see reasons for belief in the personality of the preacher rather than find reason and belief in myself or through the whole of the service or the culture of the denomination.

Based upon the way other churches worked, the Anglicans who had left the bland new evening service also started an Anglican based house group meeting once a week, which I was invited to attend, and not just to bump up the numbers, but reinforce what was best about what remained of the Anglican church. Once again I wanted to give, misread the company rather badly at times, but accepted that I was there to receive more than give, even though in the more adult company that felt more unequal than when the same principle was in operation in the youth group.

   

I was a keen reader, but mostly secular reading matters. Early on in attending church I had not read The Bible on my own very much or read any academic book that showed me how it came to be written, why what was written was believed, and who originally believed it. One of the many errors I kept making was that my memories of watching television kept interrupting my concentration when I was in group Bible studies. My mistake was having the wrong foundational background, which I could only correct through trial and error. That others had gone through my trials and errors with me to get me out of them was a process I did not know how to limit.  Each time I conflated the section of The Bible we were studying with some Hollywood film that paraphrased it, the leader who had prepared the questions for that week had to tell me that The Bible is The Bible, and what Hollywood did was entertainment that was fairly and squarely made for profit. Nobody knew what first century Palestinians looked like but they did not look like Charlton Heston or Tony Curtis. This is an edited version of what the leaders said, but the patience of the leaders of Bible study groups in which I was consistently unprepared is something I remain thankful for.

When I started my religious/historical reading it took me down some strange routes, none of which cost me the price of what I believed, but they did make me wonder. I thought that the BBC television adaptations of 'I Claudius' and 'Claudius the God' were brilliant. Each time they were repeated, at least twice, they went up in my estimation. But reading the books by Robert Graves was even better. Where it got strange was reading 'King Jesus' by the same author where the author wrote about life in Palestine in the first century but purely from the perspective of the Roman Empire, where Christianity was all but invisible, and where it was recognised then it was ridiculed. The divine origins of Christianity were reduced to a demeaning rumour. Reading that was a shock. But for all that I saw the book as worthwhile fiction because it was a skilled recreation of a world that once did exist. That such a world could never be properly recreated was as good a reason for reading The New Testaments as reading later fictions like 'King Jesus', we have to try if we want to get closer to those times.

The more interest I took in the Pente church the more interest Pastor Paul took in me. I was honest when he asked me about what I read. I told him that I not only went to church but I also read these challenging books and I saw no contradiction there. You can guess how much he wanted to 'put me right', he told me that these books were Unchristian and unnecessary. Much later he said that the writings of Sigmund Freud and the idea of 'the unconscious' was 'of the occult'. I was glad he had nothing to do with the public library service, there would be few books that would have survived his Biblical criticism.

I read more orthodox books on the history of Christianity too, I particularly liked the Bamber Gasgoine history of Christianity which also became a thirteen hour long Granada television documentary series, but then I had always been impressed by his calm as the quiz master on 'University Challenge'. He was always on cue with his supplementary facts. These books explained human history in Christian terms rather than being 'Christian history', I saw the Christian figures Bamber Gasgoine described as part of the history of the world, a world I wanted to feel that I was part of in my own small way. I enjoyed the welcome I received locally. I liked part of the society around me, but where it seemed overly parochial it made me think that I might leave if I knew how to. Reading about far off places and times was the nearest I was going to get in lieu of preparing to leave. Later I appreciated books from the fourth century, St Augustine, 'Confessions', to the nineteenth, the many works by Soren Kierkagaard with theological works from the centuries in between. They were hard to read and that was where the good in them came from. They rewarded struggle with insight, and they were stepping stones to other insights. These books were, literally, worlds away from all that I had previously known and all that was in front of me.

Through my non-Biblical reading I learned that the world was a violent place and Christianity was a part of that world, however much it saw itself as set apart from the world. I was okay with that, partly because reading about violence is different to experiencing it directly. Where everything got more difficult with me was that I had not reckoned on how much the middle classes locally conflated the privilege in their social class with Christianity, as if their being middle class by default made them all Christian. I came from a secular working class background where the slightest of nods went to Christianity, from me being baptised as a child, and hearing Mother say grace before we ate as child, but to be an adult was to be godless. I wanted a different way of being an adult whilst being true to social class. Grace stopped being said at the meal table after I reached fourteen years old, and the older I got after that the more cursory nods like that became excuses to diverge from any expression of religion/faith, and more towards dad more directly ruling us through how he controlled the television. My dad stopped any talk of religion in the house. He even banned talk of why he banned all talk of religion. Because his ban was so complete it is hard for me to say why he banned it. At the simplest level he disliked any criticism of the right to be drunk, which he saw a duty to his mates and no doubt they believed the same. He knew that appearing to be clean living was important for keeping a family, as an example to them, but he also wanted his own personal opt out from the requirement from clean living whatever the consequences of that might be. 

The middle classes who thought they were Christian by default also wanted their own opt outs but for different reasons. They privately disliked any Christian church that was dedicated and mission minded, because it would stand against them wanting to own and run everything in the town, including the churches and all the political parties, according to their financial self interest. When CND had their big push in the town, in one public debate a Tory supporter of nuclear weapons debated with a Quaker who was anti-nuclear weapons where the argument was less around anything to do with nuclear weapons and settled more around the character of Jesus Christ. It was sort of a socially conservative vs radical left debate about 'what would Jesus do about nuclear weapons'. For the Tory, Jesus would always support the holding of them but would always stop a nuclear war because he was 'never violent' in the gospels. And since the property owning middle classes were 'never violent' that was why they were Christians in spite of the fact that they had no interest in either the Old or the New Testament, and rarely attended church. The Quaker shot that argument down with one simple example, the turning over of the tables of the moneylenders at the temple. The Tory replied 'But that is the only overt violence attributed to Jesus might well have been backed up by many quotes over the three years Jesus spoke as a teacher where he advocated civil unrest in the terms of his day. What dad and the middle classes had in common was that they viewed Jesus as being passive-aggressive because they were passive-aggressive. They saw non-violence as a license that continuously threaten others when they felt threatened, and further thought about passively threatening others when their sense of mistrust was aroused.

For anyone accused by them this non violent passive aggression presented them with a problem. Any action or words that combined both a calm response and effectively averting the accusation was difficult. If the accused remained calm it implied that they accepted the accusation. If they got wound up and angry, well their anger just proved their accuser's point. I sensed this at the time, but back then I was not the lucid thinker, and equal to other people, that Keith the Quaker believed I could be. I have struggled with passive aggression ever since then, Back then, newly escaped from the parental house, I had spent too many years enveloped in the parental doublethink to know how to resist passive aggression without my fight against it being seen as aggression.

When I eventually fell for the Pentes I fell for them the way Pastor Paul wanted me to, heavily. It was the church membership equivalent of that unsuitable and intense teenage romance with the wrong person in which both parties were the last to know it was an unsuitable match, but everyone around them knew that both parties were too immature to sustain the relationship. Everyone but the couple could see that the breakup would be bruising. I will say this for the Pentes, they had patience with me, and I was never confused by any social class issues in that church. The members were mostly working class who had a tame curiosity about choice with how to live, and find the will to lead a good life. They saw The Bible as a book that was true where the truth of it had been proved through study. There the wisdom stopped, their reading of The Bible and the world was flat, and all they looked for/recognised were signs for the exit, the end of the world. This fundamentalist view was a view I knew in a softened, very dilute, form from other churches where the question became how the Christian was meant to live whilst we were waiting, and they were aware of previous generations waiting and still the world rolled on. The Pentes had not the patience of previous generations for comparison. They were too new, being rooted in a revival that started circa 1900. They had a chequered and oblique history compared with other denominations. I lasted there about eighteen months, until Pastor Paul made it clear that he wanted me to be something I could not be, and do something that was more suited to a more mature faith than mine would have difficulty achieving. If it was true, which I half knew, that I felt 'programmed' to look to older men to be father figures or mentors to me that they did not expect to be, then Pastor Paul was an interesting test of my lack of self knowledge. He disbelieved in self knowledge and thought all psychology and counselling, including empathetic listening, were 'of the Devil'. What price feeling listened to after that? 

The point about Pastor Paul was that for lack of Pastoral training he set up contradictory expectations; he wanted people to be open and honest with him, much more so than other ministers did-which in theory was a good thing. But as a listener he also expected that when people revealed their failings then they would deeply and instantly repent, as if they were acting out scenes, verbatim, from the gospels. The gospel writers surely knew that what they recorded of Jesus' life was a fraction of what happened and a shorthand for how it happened and they left in what complexities they could for future generations to work out, with no prior knowledge of how they would work it all out. A lot of material never got written down because in the Roman empire life was nasty, brutish, and short. There was not the time.

Paul might have been nearer the healing figure for me than he could have known. What Paul attempted with me was an amateurish Biblical Directive Counselling, something which he was not trained to do. But I liked his appeal for honesty, where I could without help face how it hurt me. But I could not take him then diving straight for the gay bashing Bible verses, it was so crass. He could not stop wanting me to take The Bible as literally as possible. If I had one prayer back then above many others it would have been 'Dear God, save me from literalism through lack of nuance. Amen.'. What Paul attempted through honesty and being too literal about scripture my dad had previously attempted via an evasive emotional ventriloquism. With Paul I recognised the process of what my dad did. By allowing me the recognition of how my dad worked Paul started a process of change, but it was a process that took years, decades, to patiently pursue. Pastor Paul provided me with the example I needed, though he never stopped expecting to succeed with me on his own terms. My final take away here must be that we use the human tools for understanding that we are given. I hope Paul allowed himself to change as much as his example allowed me the same.

When I left Paul's church I felt too bruised to attend anything that was Christian. Two months later I returned to the youth group. About six months later the person who had started the youth group John Sargent invited me to attend the quieter, more working class C of E church, St George's. I attended that church and followed John around as my missing father figure until I left the town. Where the local church could not meet my sexual queries then I wrote on and off to True Freedom Trust. 

The letter writing was good but frustrating. To me TFT mis-described the difficulties of being young, mis-described how 'self control' needed a lot more human support than many had access to, and whatever celibacy actually was, expecting it to be sustainable in a town with a strong alcohol culture that the churches had no impact on whatsoever was pissing in the wind. Without following anyone around I had to have a working model of Christian masculinity that seemed observably followable.. I had the masculinity of drunken men (dad), socialist men (Mother's best friend Ted H. and Uncle Terry) and many other examples and types of married men including ones who misused me, But where was male I could distantly emulate whilst 'being myself'? 

The male I needed to meet, if only once if it was on mutually agreed terms, had to have all the time required to be able to show me the empathy I needed. The meeting where this would happen was closer in time than I knew. It was only three years away from when I was approaching being aged twenty two. It would happen where I did not expect it to, Greenbelt, and it would be prompted by an unexpected and forced honesty from family that I both needed to hear and found deeply mortifying. I have already described the epiphany of the meeting with the counsellor at Greenbelt in 1986 some time ago. 

But I want to underline how life changing that meeting was. It happened as a cumulative sequence of coincidences that were surely more than random good timing. Being counselled over four hours at Greenbelt was my way out of all the theological, family, work based, and emotional/sexual,  cul-de-sacs combined that Keith the Quaker had first wanted me confront when he told me that I was the equal of any Christian company I was in when he encouraged me to seek an adult church and faith. He could not provide it himself. Like every other small town Christian male who tried to help, 

Keith had seen the need but his personal circumstances and lack of counselling skills pushed him past being able to make the time to meet me exactly where I was and unpick how I had got myself trapped.

Please find Chapter 23 here.

Please find the introduction and chapter guide here.