Keeping Faith With Unknowing

On unfathomable things

All pictures this week are from my local winter walks, except this snowy archway in Portland, Dorset, taken by a friend.

As I walked out today, the great tits were already singing their spring songs: ‘I am here! See how fit and healthy I am! I wish to mate!’¹ I had woken up with far too much love and nowhere to stow it. So, with a prayer and a wry smile, I laid my bundle at the door of The Great Mystery.

And then He said², ‘Tell them about that time I fixed your back.’

I spent a long time forgetting this, thereby resisting some kind of initiation. Now it’s time to stop running.

Grace

It was 1987, I was fifteen, and still a Goth. Several Existentialist books had been set for French but I read them in English too, so that I didn’t miss the nuances. I was not aware at the time how this would start to erode my rather thin bedrock of faith. There was a girl, Laura,³ who lived around the corner from me who was also a Goth, and although we were in different years at school, our shared taste for music by The Cure meant we would occasionally hang out together. I had left my mum’s once-thriving Baptist Church after the new pastor turned out to be sleazy and the church quickly started to fragment. I fondly remembered the ‘kiss of peace’⁴ each week after Holy Communion and how genuinely warm the congregation had been. They had twice clubbed together to make sure our family could come on church holidays to Lee Abbey in Devon. Things changed under new leadership, and when mum stopped going there, so did I.

Next, I tried the local Elim Pentecostal Church, it was like Methodism Lite with bad modern choruses in place of rousing traditional hymns. Soon, somehow, Laura and I both started going to the same church, an evangelical place in an old Non-Conformist chapel down by the River Stour. On Sunday nights we could be found in our long skirts, incongruous amongst the other teens in the balcony pews, shouting Hallelujah! and Hosanna! Encouraged by the pastor, we would attempt to ‘speak in tongues’ and we swooned from the Holy Spirit, or peer pressure, or both. We were given a warm welcome but told to stop listening to Depeche Mode, Led Zeppelin and Prince, as their music was from The Devil and would lead us astray.

Inconsistent pronouncements⁵ about some of my favourite bands mixed in with the thoughts and feelings roused by my teenage grasp of Camus, Sartre and De Beauvoir, plus my burgeoning love of studying science, all began to corrode the childish faith I had taken for granted since Sunday School. But still I kept going to church.

Revival

Laura’s older brother was a low-key drug addict and she wanted to take him to a revival, a faith healing organised by another charismatic church thirty minutes away in Southampton. She felt it would somehow spur him into a better life, if he could be healed by The Holy Spirit. I secretly thought this all sounded Very American, but I was not about to say anything, as I wanted to see what went on at a faith healing. Our church had the ‘laying on of hands’ quite regularly, when many people would all pray for one congregant at once, but it had never happened to me, as I was generally hiding at the back. The month progressed with no call to meet up with Laura. I stopped going to church and put my energy into revising for exams instead.

Later that month, standing in the middle of a busy school corridor by the assembly hall, I told my Religious Studies teacher that I had lost my faith, when she asked me why I no longer came to the Christian Society lunchtime meetings. I will never forget her wince, nor the look of sadness on her face, as I blithely said I just didn’t believe it all anymore. I had Science and Philosophy on my side now and no longer had any need for all those old myths and implausible stories of miracles.

Then one evening a call came from Laura, would I accompany her and her brother to the faith healing? She needed moral support and I felt obliged to go along, even though I had lost my faith. Plus, I was still intrigued about such an event. Next Saturday evening we got in the car and her brother drove us to a large grey community hall, which was quickly filling up with people. I felt incredibly self-conscious, with big wired braces on my top and bottom teeth, an overshot jaw (from the orthodontics that were preparing me for a major operation, still two years away), bad posture and terrible acne. I had toned down my usual black gear and crucifixes so as not to offend anyone and was instead wearing an awful home-made flowery long skirt. We went in and found a few seats at the back near a table and waited for the evening to begin. I don’t think we said more than a few words to each other. We were all there for Laura’s brother; no-one suspected that I needed a healing of my own.

What most people did not know is that I’d had severe pain most of my life due to a too-flat section of several vertebrae in my upper back. Years of treatment at the local Anglo European College of Chiropractic had done little to alleviate things. By this point, I needed to roll onto my side to get up from lying on the floor, or my bed. I could not sit straight up. Each night I lay with a rolled towel under my neck to somehow encourage it to take a better shape. X-rays from the college clearly showed a slight deformation of the spine, but not enough to operate. I’d learned to live with it. But earlier that year, as I kicked upwards to do an inept handstand in gymnastics class, the girl who was supposed to catch my legs got distracted and looked away.⁶ As I crumpled to the ground, my neck made strange grating sounds and I spent the rest of the day in agony, barely able to move. Since then, back and neck pain were a constant companion. No one seemed to have any advice for me, so I tried to ignore it, (as I did in those days with almost anything or anyone I didn’t like, or had failed to understand).

The faith healing meeting began with prayers, songs and Hallelujahs, much like my previous regular church. The guest preacher was introduced and I was disappointed to find out he was not an American, but was just from slightly nearer London. He roused everyone with stories from the Gospel and then began laying on of hands in the Name of Jesus to people afflicted with blindness, deafness, or who were wheelchair-bound. I had never seen anything like this, except in the background of gritty TV detective series, usually when something was about to go very wrong for a kindly woman making tea in a back room. There were almost no positive or realistic portrayals of real British Christianity beyond Songs of Praise.⁷

Awe

I felt my usual mixture of embarrassment and awe. How were these people brave enough to step up and ask for help? Where did you get guts like that? How did they know they were worth helping? After healing, people got up from wheelchairs, others threw down their crutches and were helped back to their seats by friends. There was a lot of clapping and crying. Everyone seemed highly emotional. I wanted to curl up and die. Then the preacher picked up his microphone again and said, ‘Everybody with a bad back come down the front now! Come forward and be healed by the love of Jesus and the Grace of the Holy Spirit!’

I went bright red and started to sweat. This was a direct call! I didn’t know what to do: I’d lost my faith weeks ago. I was not worthy. I wasn’t disabled, just in pain. Every part of my teen mind wanted to run away rather than have people look at me and feel pity. I wanted to be aloof and serious, profound and self-contained, like a true Goth; not fainting in a floral skirt behind an old lady, in a concrete building in the ugliest port on The Solent.

But without a word to Laura or her brother, and with my ears ringing, I slouched to the front. My head was choppy with conflicting thoughts: feral hope fighting with cynicism. I was already aware of what most people thought of the mind manipulation techniques ascribed to such events, and I had experienced the power of group behaviour and peer pressure at my own church. That was certainly one of the many reasons I had lost my faith. I blamed church for the personal shortcomings of some of the pastors and vicars, yet I conveniently forgot all about the positive aspects of my various churches, and the countless good people I’d known in them, as it didn’t fit my new storyline.

Standing in a small group of people at the front, I tried to focus on what the preacher was saying as he prayed aloud over us. Others from the congregation gathered round to catch us if we fell. My brokenness had made me stand up and come forward. All this talk of healing and wholeness seemed so alien, yet so promising, I just couldn’t resist. How would it be to not be in pain? To feel blessed rather than cursed? To be deemed worthy of love? I had no idea. I thought to myself, what's the worst that can happen? That nothing will happen and that I’ll just be even more embarrassed.

However, the loudest question in my head was simple and sincere,⁸ 

‘Please, can you heal me?’

At that moment, I didn't know how I felt about the Trinity, whether I even believed in God, what I thought of the example of Jesus, or whether I would ever again experience my once-frequent childhood feelings of Spirit moving. As I spiralled into existential doubts, the preacher raised his right hand and invoked the Holy Spirit. People in our group began to keel over, others fainted outright. I stumbled backwards a bit, unsure as to whether I’d felt anything, or was just acting along with what was expected of me. Then I suddenly felt acutely embarrassed again and somehow walked back to the table where my friends were waiting.

Heat

I skulked off to the side and perched on the edge of the table while the next group of people were ushered to the front, including Laura’s brother and all those who were suffering from addictions and compulsions. As I sat there, dazed and disappointed, I began to have sudden sensations like a red hot poker up my back, but with only heat, not pain. Simultaneously, I experienced the feeling of very hot hands up and down either side of my spine, along the erector spinae and up to the trapezius muscles, just like during a deep-tissue sports massage. Then the hot hands feeling moved to the tops of my shoulders, into the neck and around the whole of the cervical spine, right up into the base of my skull. All the time I sat upright and unsupported on the table’s edge, my spine loudly going, click, click, click, click, click, click. I looked around, convinced everyone could hear the loud clicking, but widespread clapping and cheering had started up again, so no one was looking my way. For twenty minutes, I sat bolt upright on the table, legs dangling, my back red hot and loudly clicking, feeling as though someone very competent and caring was working on my spine from behind. I was used to a similar but less dramatic feeling from years of chiropractic, so somehow, I trusted it. I did not move or turn around, as there was no one behind me, and in truth, I did not want it to stop.

The feelings eventually faded and soon the evening was over. It was all very disconcerting. I didn't say anything to Laura because she was busy with her brother, who was pale and confused, but still needed to drive us back to Bournemouth. They dropped me home and I just didn't tell anyone about what had happened. Not my mum, not my boyfriend, not my schoolfriends. I didn’t return to church and I stopped seeing Laura. From that day onward, I never had any more upper back or neck pain and no longer had to shift onto my side to get off the floor or out of bed. I just accepted the new reality and promptly forgot about my embarrassing Christian past, as I was an Atheist now and based my life on Facts.⁹

Amnesia

In fact, I had no back issues at all until I was in a band thirteen years later and had to regularly roadie my own huge bass amps, eventually losing a disc after a lower back injury. The emergency X-rays and MRI scans showed no upper back deformities at all, the only issue was a ruptured disc in my lumbar spine. When I limped out of hospital with my torn disc in a specimen jar, like a piece of gristle the size of an old two pence piece,¹⁰ having narrowly avoided paralysis from the waist down thanks to the quick actions of my GP, I remembered what had happened to me in my teens. The first person I told this story to was my then-husband, who I had married only four days before the emergency operation. A few weeks later, recovering at Derwent Water, broken once again and in search of healing, I was given another chance to see things through Grace, but it evaporated in moments. I wrote about it here.

As I recovered from the operation through returning to T’ai Chi, I once again mostly forgot about the events of my teens, and instead chased the ‘golden feeling’ I’d had in the Lake District. I told my next long term partner about it, but no one else. It remained an almost-forgotten anecdote from my young life, something I barely thought about. Until a couple of years ago, when a good friend converted to Christianity, and asked me all about my younger life in the faith. Recounting the story over email, one day, I felt odd. Why was this important memory so peripheral to my life? Why was it not alive in my mind and central, as were so many other formative teenage experiences? My friend asked me the same thing. I still do not have a simple answer.

Paradox

This last three months, I have experimented with telling friends and family members about the ‘faith healing’. Before writing this, I had told a total of about ten people in the world. I am grateful to them for receiving my story non-judgmentally. I wasn’t sure when, how, or if I would write about it here, though a couple of friends have strongly encouraged me to do so. On waking yesterday, I was given a clear sign to write, whether by my unconscious, The Muse, or The Great Mystery, or perhaps all three, I cannot say.

As anyone who has read me here for any length of time will know, I am an admirer of Keats’ Doctrine of Negative Capability, and I esteem in others the ability to live with and hold paradoxes above almost anything, except perhaps loving-kindness. Life is a conundrum, but it is not a problem to be solved.

One atheist relative remarked how incredible the innate healing powers of the human mind and body are, and that it was wonderful that such a spontaneous improvement had happened to me. Perhaps my body was already almost at the point of recovery, having outgrown a childhood issue, and it coincided with going to the prayer meeting. A Christian friend told me that it didn’t matter that I had lost my faith at the time of the healing, as I had many years previously let Christ into my heart, so he was still there then. In fact, he says, Christ is still there now, and that I am actually still a Christian, but just don’t know or accept it.

Perhaps I should have an opinion about what people think of my apparent healing, or should have come to a firm conclusion about the events I describe above. The strangest thing for me, (someone who is not short of an opinion or two), is that I haven’t. Somehow, I can’t fix any thoughts around it into definite meanings which I could defend. Now that I am not hiding from the facts of what happened by forgetting, and have tried to set them down here in words as fully and truthfully to my teenage experience as I can, without interpretation, I still feel the same spaciousness as when I first told my friends. I am not laying down a burden, I am taking a lid off a lamp that was being smothered for lack of air.

Mystery

I am sitting at my desk, overlooking bare winter chestnut trees across the street, bathed in bright late January light, two days after beginning to write this piece, I’m recording it. I am trying to find some definite thing I can say to sum-up the event, or about my faith in what I call The Great Mystery, but I can’t. So instead I will write a few words about unknowing, paradox, uncertainty and love.

Why I'm telling you this story isn't because it's anything special, because actually it's nothing special. There were a couple of hundred people at the revival on the night I went in 1987 and other people seemed to experience far more dramatic healings than me. Imagine all the other towns and cities in the UK holding similar events that month, and all the ordinary, hopeful people who attended. Then multiply that by all the years that’s been going on, and all the countries where such things take place, and then add the other religions and paths where healing is considered part of life, (which is most of them).

You will notice that it is a huge number of people seeking out, and perhaps even experiencing, such things. It’s just that perhaps few of them write it up here on Substack, almost none of them are part of the legacy media, they don’t make up the bulk of the professional-managerial class who run things in my country. By writing our truths, which may contain one or more outlandish stories of transformation, or cringe religious experience, whether Christian or not, we are immediately suspect as intellectual persons. We risk being seen as gullible, or as part of lunatic fringes, when in fact we are perfectly ordinary, even thoughtful, people. It is possible that the majority of people in the world do not see the universe as a lifeless machine, (as do our tech-bro overlords), but as a living cosmos, full of beauty and intelligence. How could such a widespread and long-held beneficial view now be seen as beyond the pale?¹¹

It is a profoundly moving practice, slowly reading chapter 28¹² (on The Sacred) of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things each night. It has imparted its own curious healing. With meticulous marginal notes and many thousands of studies to support his thesis, a clear impression of the religious experience of countless scientists, philosophers and mystics emerges, that is so aligned with my own apophatic faith that I felt emboldened to finally tell this story. I write it here in case doing so allows just one other person to feel welcome in this strange fellowship of those who refuse to classify Grace, or to label God.

The Way that can be told is not the eternal Way.¹³

Unknowing

I am still not a Christian. But I do empathise with what my friend said, in a casual comment last October, which sparked a cascade of contemplation in me and my friends, ‘I’m not not a Christian’. I still sometimes describe myself as a Taoist. My practices are very simple: meditation and T’ai Chi, contemplation of the Classics and a sometimes raggedy attempt to live by them in amongst the hubbub of ordinary life. Regular daily prayer to The Great Mystery supplements this, and miraculously, it feels like a conversation, as in childhood. It is strongest when I walk in nature, which is hardly uncommon… I still thoroughly fail to have any concrete ideas about God, healing, What It All Means, or how everybody else should live their lives.

I wish to live out my years in and as this great, fertile, uncertainty. To be a part of the unfolding of things and not to shirk playing my small role, either by aggrandising it or by belittling it. My late T’ai Chi Grandmaster John Kells used to say that everyone thinks they’re special. He said, ‘What’s really special is knowing you are not special. That’s when the truly interesting work can begin.’

So that’s it this week from me, a middle-aged woman from a seaside town, in the south of a small damp island full of 60 million or so souls, off the northern coast of Europe. It’s my birthday, so I am going to go for a coffee with a friend, and then I’ll come back to this writing desk and get on with my book.

I wish all who read this the courage to remain in unknowing and not to fear uncertainty. Taken medicinally, I have found they both tenderise the heart and help it fill up with love.

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This week’s good thing: I have just finished reading

Peco

Gaskovski’s book Exogenesis, from Ignatius Press. After reading much of Peco’s view of Modernity and the Machine here on Substack, I looked forward to reading his debut speculative fiction book, but secretly feared that plot and characterisation might suffer from the need to further a certain world-view. I should have had no such fears. The book bounds along as inventively as many by my favourite authors, (the Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Attwood comes to mind), and I will admit I became addicted. Two nights last week, I sat up reading in bed late into the wee hours, knowing I had to get up early, but eager to find out what happened. I won’t give any plot twist spoilers here, other than to say it’s great Sci Fi and the even-handed treatment of some great questions of how we might all live together, or apart, are deftly treated.

1. One sympathises.

2. Yes, ‘He’. The great Mystery isn’t a man or a woman, obviously. But as ‘She’ is far too familiar to me, as I am a ‘she’ myself, and as ‘They’ is very much a plural or ‘modern gender neutral terminology some of my non-binary friends prefer’ to me, it was not the right word for how I address Divinity. So, however mainstream it may seem, ‘He’ it is. I am finally ok with that.

3. I have changed her name.

4. Where congregants would all turn and greet everyone around them with handshakes, hugs and a few friendly words.

5. Why not Frankie Goes to Hollywood? As their songs were clearly about drugs and sex, possibly even Gay sex…

6. I used to think it was deliberate on her part, as she had recently also dropped me as a friend, but it is impossible to be sure. And now, it no longer matters.

7. A weekly Christian magazine programme from the BBC featuring a different host congregation from around the UK each week.

8. As it always is before I receive help or Grace.

9. A classic left hemisphere response, straight outta The Master and His Emissary, Chapter 2.

10. As far as I know, my disc is still in the collection of strange scientific and natural history curios of my friend, the painter Mark Francis.

11. If you’d like a full answer to that you can read The Matter With Things…

12. Not chapter 18 as mentioned in the voiceover.

13. Tao Te Ching verse 1