Another milestone on the road to recovery, or perhaps
it was another indication that recovery was progressing, was the moment when I
had enough insight and confidence to distance myself from my mother. I have no
doubt that she loved me, and she was a woman of faith, but my relationship with
her was very difficult. For many years, I had been conscious that there was a
dividing wall between us, and I had felt a deepened sense of anxiety when I was
alone with her, possibly due to unacknowledged feelings of resentment on my
part.
I felt she couldn’t accept me as I was, and that my
falling short of her ideal was an endless source of irritation to her. She
constantly voiced strong opinions, and it seemed to me she wouldn’t be happy
until I saw the world exactly as she did, and was prepared to let her squeeze
me into the mould of her imagining. It was above all to escape from this
pressure and my resultant sense of failure that at long last I bought my own
flat and left home at the end of 1983. But even then I constantly felt I wasn’t
matching up to her expectations, and continued to believe it was my duty to
appease and to affirm her. Gradually, however, I grew more able to accept her
faults, and find freedom to be myself.
I remember the moment I realised how much progress I
was making along this healing route. It was three months after I’d began taking
the Anafranil. I’d been visiting my parents, and as usual my mother had been
very vocal in expressing her negative thoughts. I walked down the drive towards
my car with dad, and I said to him, with deep feeling, ‘That woman is a bloody
pain.’ (You need to realise that I normally never swore outwardly.) I glanced
at my father. He didn’t disagree with me, or even look shocked. But what
liberating joy those words brought! It was the kind of satisfaction you get
from running round the house burning up your rage by kicking shut every door in
sight. ‘That woman is a bloody pain.’
One of my most powerful memories of the difficult
years dates from the spring of 1980, when I was working with Scripture Union in
the Glasgow bookshop, and still living at home. My parents decided to go off
for a week’s holiday, but since I’d been having a difficult time emotionally,
they felt it wouldn’t be good for me to be left on my own at home, which would
have been my preference, though they never discussed the matter with me. They
arranged for me to spend the week at a former missionary training college in
Glasgow, which still belonged to the mission, and was used as a residence for
Christian students studying at the university and local colleges. I knew Roy
and Daphne Spraggett who managed this facility – I had been taken to missionary
conferences there for as long as I could remember, and recently I’d been doing
volunteer work cataloguing the books in the mission resource centre which was
also in the building.
But I didn’t know the Spraggets well, and it was with
a sense of foreboding, and of having been somehow abandoned that I set off to
work that Friday morning from Airdrie lugging my case, and later in the day dragged it up Clarence Drive
in Glasgow’s west end on my way from Hyndland Station to Prince Albert Road.
Roy and Daphne welcomed me, and showed me to my room. The next day, the
Saturday, I was working, but back at the college in the evening the tension
began to mount. Gripped by the old familiar feeling that I was just managing to
keep the lid on some disastrous emotional explosion, I sat at the table in the
library, forcing myself to fill out a catalogue card for the next book in the
pile. I think I was invited to attend the Saturday evening service at church
but I declined.
The next morning, in bright sunshine, I walked across
Kelvingrove Park to the Sandyford Henderson Memorial Church of Scotland with
the Spraggetts’ daughters and some of the students whose accommodation I was
sharing, and sat down in the cool interior of the old building. The only thing
I remember about the service was a verse from the book of Job in the Bible
which the Revd George Philip quoted in a prayer – ‘Though he slay me, yet will
I trust in him.’ I had never, to my knowledge, heard these words, this naked
expression of faith in God no matter what, this apparently insane conviction
that despite the incomprehensible darkness and pain all would be well.
The translators differ over whether the words George
Philip quoted from the King James version of the Bible are in fact an accurate
equivalent of the original Hebrew, but no matter. For me, that morning, they
were the words I needed to hear, not just for that day, but for the days to
come. I found I could identify both with Job’s sense of alienation and bleak
abandonment, and with the faith in which he was able to say, in effect ‘I don’t
know what you are doing, God. I don‘t know why you are inflicting this terrible
pain on me like a malicious sadist, or at very least sitting back, it seems, a
spectator in the arena of my suffering, but I believe. I believe you are love.
I believe that somehow in this your love is present. I believe. Whatever
happens, I believe.’
And as I gladly took those words ‘though you slay me
yet will I trust in you’ and made them my own, I found an oasis of peace at the
heart of the storm, where I remained throughout the day. Later, I reflected
that those words of Job could so easily have been used by Jesus as he died,
absorbing from God’s hand the judgement which the human race deserved. It was
because of his perseverance and faith in the goodness of God when it seemed
that his father had become his enemy that we, as his followers, can find a
secure place, and draw near to the oasis.
That afternoon, back at the college, I sat in the
library, much calmer. Out in the porch, venerable retired missionaries sat in
the sunlight talking of the Lord’s goodness in their lives, and their level of
spirituality seemed so much deeper than mine. And yet I was confident that I
could trust God in the darkness, and for then, as for much of my life, that was
enough for me.
The next day, my parents phoned. How was I? I’d had a
bit of a tough time, but I was much, much better now, I replied. My mother
seeming to hear just the first part of what I said, decided that they should
abandon their holiday and come home. ‘No, I’m fine now,’ I said, ‘You just stay
where you are.’ But they insisted on returning, and as a result I felt so
frustrated – first I’d felt abandoned by them, and now I was full of guilt because their holiday was
coming to a premature end, and as I thought, it was all my fault!
One of the mantras which helped me frequently was
‘don’t doubt in the darkness what you saw in the light.’ What you understood,
and appreciated when your thinking was clear and unstressed is likely to be
reality. Don’t abandon your hope in that when your mind is overshadowed by
darkness. And this is true. But is also true that there are lessons to be
learned in the darkness – that you can learn to trust and depend on God in a
deeper way when you are at an end of yourself, and can’t see the way ahead. And
so it is also true to say ‘Don’t doubt in the light what you saw in the
darkness.’
Another dream, inspired I think by a feature in one of
kids’ comics I read as a child, where the artist’s pencil and rubber actually
featured in the strip, visibly changing the reality the character experienced.
I am in a room, with blank newsprint-white walls, kneeling painting the floor,
concentrating hard on the task. I look up, and realise that I’ve started at the
wrong place. Behind me, there’s a corner; between me and the door a thick
covering of sticky, brown paint. I pause, and begin to panic. But then I
remember the possibilities. I stand up, and take a pencil from my pocket, and
draw on the wall behind me the outline of a door, and hinges, and a handle. I
turn the handle; the door opens; I walk out of the room into another world. I’m
in the heart of the countryside; the sun is shining through the trees; there
are leaves and foliage in every conceivable shade of green; birds are singing,
and not far away a stream gurgles. Lightness in my heart, I take my first, tentative
steps.
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