Freedom and responsibility

'You don't NEED to follow me! You don't NEED to follow ANYBODY! You are all individuals!'

From Monty Python's 'The Life of Brian'.

A profound statement.
Saw the program on Monty Python this week in which the members of the group argue that Life of Brian parodies the trappings of religion, not belief itself.
I would have to agree. It's possible to embrace your ultimate freedom and responsibility and remain a person of faith, although the form that faith takes may be changed and refined...

[Untitled image from the Life of Brian], downloaded 25th February, 2010, from:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertainment/film/life-of-brian-crossed-off-banned-list/2008/09/26/1222217478730.html.

Fowler and monotheistic faith

In his book 'Stages of faith: the psychology of human development and the quest for meaning,' Fowler (1995) writes about the concept of monotheism, which for him has nothing to do with how many gods one worships: it is as possible to be a 'monotheist' whether one is Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, or a person of 'secular faith.'* Instead, monotheism refers to a unity of purpose, (to paraphrase) to having one reason for getting out of bed in the morning! The way that Fowler talks about 'polytheists', with their diffuse, diluted sense of purpose, leads me to believe he is describing the difference between living a meaningful life, and leading a life 'light on' for meaning. Polytheists are invested in so many priorities and pastimes that their investment becomes broad rather than deep.

For me the temptation has always been to move beyond monotheism into monomania. Growing up in the charismatic and evangelical movements, I was taught that God is everything, that almost nothing else matters. This is a distortion which can have unhealthy results. (One expression of it was the notion that for any relationship to be successful each partner must put God before the other, always. This exaggerated view has probably meant that I've had trouble recognising the love and provision of God in the person and loving actions of my partner.)

When I'm able to get in touch with faith and with God, I can tend to get obsessive about them, making them everything, shutting out all else. I can find it difficult to 'go gently' as my spiritual director used to say. I can neglect the balance that is essential to wellbeing. This monomania in turn leads to anxiety.

I was talking to Dr I. about this anxiety yesterday. He suggested that perhaps the anxiety is a sign that I'm 'pushing it' too much, that I've had enough of something (reading a book on spirituality etc.) and that it's time to move on to something else. This rings true for me...

* See my previous post discussing this book by Fowler, 'The Fear of the Lord Part I'.
When I think of secular faith, I am reminded of the monotheism some atheists display regarding art or science as an overarching life purpose.

Fowler, J. W. (1995). Stages of faith: the psychology of human development and the quest for meaning. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

[Untitled image of Ganesh], downloaded 20th January, 2010, from:
http://www.telugubhakti.com/TELUGUPAGES/Pdfs/Ganesh/Ganesh.htm.

Prayer for a person confused about goodness

At the end of the film,
when the goodies defeat the baddies,
may I still be standing
because all I know how to do is
keep bouncing back...

copyright amber proctor 2010


[untitled photo of film reels], downloaded 1st January, 2010, from:
http://www.investmentnz.govt.nz/section/14237/17987.aspx.

Truth-telling, comedy, psychotherapy, faith...

I was watching 'Make 'Em Laugh' on the ABC last night, the episode about wise guys. Truth-telling as the basis of comedy was brought up particularly with respect to Larry David's character in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and Joan Rivers' stand-up. It was remarked that truth-telling comedy is as funny as it is because it says things that we all think but haven't owned up to. It tells the untellable about human nature - none of us is as good as we let on. Jung says something similar to this in relation to the shadow*. And indeed, telling the truth about how far from perfect our deepest motivations (and many of our words and actions) can be is an integral part of psychotherapy: it is the path to wellness. Perhaps this is why I've felt that psychotherapy has been so threatening to the kind of faith I had when I began it. It's not just threatening to black-and-white, fundamentalist faith: no matter how much Christians may want to emphasise forgiveness over goodness, the 'g' word pops up everywhere, even in the most liberal congregations. At times the pressure to be less than 100% honest about goodness is merely transferred from a discussion of traditional virtues and vices to issues surrounding political correctness, the environment, sometimes even psychological maturity versus immaturity. A friend who enjoys reading Bernard Salt's writing on psychodemographics paraphrased him in this way: 'In the past, if you didn't believe in God, that was considered shocking. Nowadays, if you were to say that you didn't believe in recycling, that would be considered shocking in almost the same way'.

My spiritual anxiety really makes itself known when issues of morality and goodness crop up. Again, I think this is because I feel that people in authority (in a spiritual or church context) are asking me to believe something, or say something about myself, that my intuition, trained by lots of years of psychotherapy, knows to be untrue. My motives are not pure! In fact, sometimes, they're atrocious! And from now on, I resolve to picture my God as the Great Psychotherapist in the Sky: someone who tells the truth, even when it's ugly; who wants to hear the truth, even when it's ugly... and hopefully has a sense of humour about it too.

For future discussion: are God's motives always pure? What is a pure motive, anyway? I don't know if one exists...

*I want to mention how liberating the concept of the shadow is, the idea that everything 'impure' that we suppress in ourselves is there within us anyway, just in a hidden compartment! We contain all goodness and all badness and everything in between. This concept is suprememly effective in countering what I've begun to call my 'spiritual anxiety'. Thank God for Jung...

'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?'

When I was a teenager, my family moved overseas. At the time we moved, I was a hopeless romantic. I had a faith (I was brought up in the church) but it wasn't one I had to cling to, it just came naturally to me. I was also used to interacting with the Australian natural environment - I had a kind of romantic relationship to it. Just before we left, I went to the local market and bought an oil burner and some orange oil to burn in it. I would turn off the lights or close the curtains, and light the tealight candle, and warm light in the shapes of moons and stars would pattern my bedroom walls. There was magic in that dim, warm light and in the warm scent of orange oil. In the move overseas, my bottle of orange oil leaked, and perhaps the burner broke, because when we arrived in our new country, I bought both a new burner and some peppermint oil. The magic had somehow been left in Australia though. I had bought the peppermint oil because it was supposed to be calming, so perhaps I was already experiencing some anxiety about starting over in this new, strange land. I would lie on my bed, smelling the cold peppermint, and willing myself to feel that old magic, but my sense of panic would just escalate. I couldn't understand how the difference between orange and peppermint, or a mere geographical shift, could so alter my once magical experience.

It was in this strange land that I had my conversion experience (despite already being a person of faith) and became a bit of a fundo. I had come across the idea that one has to make one's own decision regarding faith, and be 'born again'. I had lost that natural, easy, magical faith I had as a child and younger teenager forever. And the landscape (or skyscape) in this new place troubled me. The sky was almost always grey, and even when it was blue, it had a kind of vacant look. By comparison, I think the Australian sky seems always possessed by something or someone, utterly full to the brim with a deep blue, or with sunshine, or with cloud or rain. I always knew God was 'in' the Australian environment. I remember asking a friend in the 'strange land' whether, given that God was everywhere, and God was therefore in the sky, and God loved me, you could actually say that the sky loved me. She looked at me like I was a lunatic! (and perhaps I was getting unwell. My last doctor believed that during this period I was experiencing the prodrome to my illness). To put it simply, I felt that God was absent. Perhaps my new fundamentalist faith was an attempt on my part to grasp and cling ever more desperately to the God who had gone so thoroughly missing from the places I usually found Her.

My delusions have always been about parallel worlds, about there being one 'good' or 'normal' world and one sinister world. Once I even had the delusion that in one world Christ had been born and died and in the other world, He had not. There is an undeniable logic to these delusions.

Before coming to this realisation, that God seemed absent in the parallel world where the Australian sense of 'possession' was absent, where there was only a small, vacant sky, I didn't really understand the psalm the title to this post is taken from (Psalm 137:4). Of course God is everywhere, in every land, however unfamiliar, I thought. On reflection now, I know exactly what the verse means. The physical is imbued with the sacred. When you lose the natural environment that your God has permeated, to some extent you lose (or lose sight of) your God.

Prayer for a person experiencing psychosis

Whatever I might see, hear, feel, smell, taste
or believe
may I always be honest,
with myself, with You, my loved ones and my doctor.
May I hold my freedom together with the wish
not to hurt the ones I love, or myself.
When I can, may I use my imagination and intuition
to create, rather than to diminish life
and may I find space
amid all my seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting
and believing
to sense You near.

copyright amber proctor 2009

The Fear of the Lord Part I...

Why do I find God so frightening?
I expect I may need to speak to a specially skilled counsellor to begin to unpack this, but one idea I have is that I feel fear when someone in authority tells me something about God that my intuition tells me isn't true (or atleast is not true for me...). I think there's more to it than that, but perhaps that's a start. Towards the time I gave up on God, I was becoming more and more 'theologically picky', until there were maybe two or three churches in Melbourne whose theology resonated with me and didn't cause me to panic. Perhaps I have just arrived at a point in my life when I can no longer tolerate another person telling me who God is or is not. I certainly feel much more comfortable writing about who I think God is (to simplify what I'm doing here) than I ever have hearing someone else tell me. Is this a little like the mystics? - who would not be told by authorities or doctrines who God was, but had to experience Her for themselves, and then share their experiences with others (sometimes bishops or Popes...) Such audacity! On their part, and also on mine, to assert some kind of connection with them. Perhaps it always takes a degree of audacity to approach God.
It's interesting that it's always the audacity of fundamentalists, who say they know God better than I do, and that their God says I am wrong, that makes me furious. Is it actually healthy to balance audacity with fear?
I don't think I would wish this kind of fear on anyone...

PS. I saw Richard Dawkins interviewed on "Elders with Andrew Denton"1 on the ABC last week, and they showed a clip of Dawkins being accused of arrogance by someone I understood to be in a role of leadership in the church, someone who came across as being equally arrogant (or just audacious??). It made me think of Fowler's (1995) writing on the stages of spiritual development, where he talks about 'secular faith'. I've often thought there can be a discernible spirituality to atheism, but of course there can be fundamentalist atheists too.

Notes
1. Transcript available on the ABC website at:
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/elders/transcripts/s2757522.htm


Fowler, J. W. (1995). Stages of faith: the psychology of human development and the quest for meaning. San Francisco: HarperCollins.

Cherries

When I write the nativity,
the mystics will come from the South, and bring cherries
because their lustre is more carnal than gold;
because when I bite them, they bleed,
red flesh hanging on a wooden core;
because, like the star, they are pointers
from this world
that the spirit has arrived
from that spirit-world.
I could hang them on my tree,
but instead I receive them
as a summer Eucharist
and I am filled.

copyright amber proctor 2009
[untitled photo of cherries] retrieved 27th December 2009, from:
http://www.buttermilkpress.com/blog/recipe-for-cool-cherry-soup-perfect-for-summer-meals/.

Christmas Day

What does Christmas mean to me?
This year I have been thinking a little bit about the concept of incarnation, of the sacred and the physical being or becoming one entity.
Often when I'm unwell my delusions have to do with elements of nature providing me with signs or symbols that things are amiss, and at other times the physical (non-psychotic) world seems little more than an overlay, something superimposed over the deeper reality that is taking place, in the psychotic world.
Over the last few weeks, though, interaction with nature has come to represent something far more healthy and life-giving for me. In fact, my nature walks have been almost the only source of non-psychotic spirituality I've been able to find.

I suppose my use of the phrase "non-psychotic spirituality" needs further explanation.
The reason I have set up this blog is that recently my psychiatrist and I were talking about the notion that when you recover from a psychotic illness (as I have, although I'm still on medication), there are actually things you lose, along with gaining better quality of life, the ability to support yourself financially, in my case, the ability to sustain a long-term relationship.
So, having gained so much, what is it that I feel I have lost? I think that while it is frightening and debilitating, psychosis can lend one a sense of deep mystery, of connection with the "essence of things", even if that perceived essence may be sinister or scarey. In short, I believe there is a spirituality of psychosis (and of course I didn't just concoct this, much has already been written on the topic - some of which I hope to talk about later). My doctor (who will henceforth be known as Dr. I) suggested that people who have suffered a psychotic illness have almost a choice as to whether or not to be psychotic, that for some patients he has treated it has almost been a matter of willing the psychosis to come on, or willing it to go away (this resonates with me to a certain extent). He suggested that if one is to choose not to be psychotic, perhaps one has to find a way to be compensated for what is lost in becoming well. In my case, the loss of meaning that it represents dictates that I need to find a way to inject more meaning into everyday (non-psychotic) life.

Dr. I thinks I need to go back to church.

Well, there is another 42 posts at least just in the idea of going back to church. It's more complicated than that, Dr.I! But the idea of this blog is to go on a journey (cliche, cliche, cliche....) and to find out, through thinking and experimenting and experiencing, whether it is in fact possible for me to be "compensated". Whether I can shake off the feeling of emptiness and hollowness that has characterised my life as a post-psychotic person and find well-being.

Broad issues I want to look at also include: the idea of taking responsibility for one's illness (what do I do if everyday life doesn't get more meaningful??), methods of treatment, psychosis as illness versus a special kind of sensitivity, the nature of truth (just a piddling little matter, that), the link between psychosis, spirituality and creativity, and... lots more.

It's important to acknowledge that I know next to nothing about psychosis from a clinician's point of view, so this will be based on the experience of psychosis and spirituality, and the practice of art.

Hopefully I can avoid becoming too self-indulgent and confessional, and invite a couple of people along on the journey (there it is again) with me.

Merry Christmas and a Very Happy Incarnation Day...

Amber.