The
therapy of the routine
I often found there was therapy in the routine, as I
carried on with tasks and projects which didn’t require too much original
thought, but which gave me the satisfaction of being creative, and making a
useful contribution. For all the occasional stresses, my work – especially
latterly when I was working at the Education Resource Centre planning learning
exhibitions with my colleagues – was often therapeutic. So were my church
responsibilities – organising the regular book-stall, helping edit and produce
the newsletter, even taking services at other churches in central Scotland (but
never without the precautionary valium!)
My motives for these activities were far from pure. I
suspect they were done more for my own benefit – for what they contributed to
my own sense of self-worth – rather than as service to God and for the benefit
of other. I believe, however, that this questionable motivation didn’t mean
that what I was doing had no value, or that folk weren’t touched by grace
through it.
During these years I researched and wrote up theses
for MA and PhD degrees, both of which investigated the economics of religious
book publishing in 19th century Scotland. Completing these projects
took courage and determination. I remember sitting on the floor one morning,
struggling as I wrote paragraph after paragraph, all the while wrestling to
keep my mind fixed on the calm serene certainties of T. & T. Clark’s George
Street office in Edinburgh in the 1890s and to drown the suicidal thoughts
which threatened to reduce me to chaos.
I remember standing at a dark bus stop in Edinburgh’s
Willowbrae Road during my Christmas break one year waiting for a bus to take me
to the National Library of Scotland, afraid that I’d throw myself in front of
the vehicle before it stopped. When I got on board, I’d avert my eyes so that I
wouldn’t see the EXIT sign above the other door, because it would remind me of
the assisted suicide society with this word as its name. After our evening
meal, I’d stand beside the family friend I was staying with in Edinburgh,
drying dishes, and panicking in case some impulse would lead me to stab her
with the long, sharp bread knife.
I wasn’t particularly anxious about the oral
examination of my PhD thesis. What did terrify me was its location – in the
professor’s room on the 13th floor of Strathclyde University’s
Livingstone Tower. I sat in the middle of the room, trying to forget how high
up I was and to ignore the windows, keeping my eyes focussed on the external
examiner, my mind fixed on his convoluted questions about publishing
economics.
But I made it through, and graduated MA in 1983, and
PhD in 1987. There was no great sense of achievement, but I guess nothing I did
would have been enough to make me feel fulfilled. Later I was to learn that you
are most able to enjoy and feel satisfaction in what you have done when you
have a prior sense of wholeness and fulfilment. At the time, I guess I simply
moved on to the next project, the next challenge, for though there was no sense
of achievement when a project was complete there was an undeniable therapy in
the process of working on it.
And there were other routes to therapeutic escapism. I
remember waking up at home on the Monday morning after I’d abandoned my holiday
in Wales (I’d come back from my parents’
place on the Sunday) wondering what on earth I was to do with myself for the
two weeks which stretched ahead. There was no peace to be found in going for
long walks; when I visited the Monklands industrial archaeology park at
Summerlee in Coatbridge on a blistering hot summer afternoon, I wandered round,
feeling remote from the reality of it, even though I was interested to see
products made at Murray and Paterson’s steel works just down the road where my
grandfather had been a foreman.
Bibliotherapy
But that Monday morning I drove down to the local W.H.
Smith and bought an omnibus volume of the James Herriot vet stories, and the
first of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester
Chronicles, and went home, and lay down on the couch, and read and read,
and managed to lose myself in these marvellous escapist narratives, except at
points where the raw pain of life invaded the stories, heightening my awareness
of my anxieties. I am grateful beyond words to Herriot and Trollope for what
they did for me those weeks. Perhaps they saved my life.
I also appreciated escapist television programmes in
which could simply lose yourself for an hour. That fortnight they were
screening episodes of a manic successor to the Anneka Rice Treasure Hunt series, which involved contestants trying to complete
a challenge while being pursued by a hooded figure in a helicopter whose task
was to locate and immobilise them. I seem to remember that it was pulled from
the schedules after a couple of programmes had been transmitted because the
audience figures were dire. It was loud, and crazy but somehow I managed to
lose myself in the mayhem, and for that I am deeply grateful.
Specifically Christian books were often particularly
helpful, both for the hope they awakened, and for the realisation they gave me
that I was not alone. I remember being encouraged by books by Christian
psychologists, such as David Seamands’ Healing
for damaged emotions which reminded me that I was of infinite value to a
God who loved me. I believe God brought
healingly alive in my heart some of the ideas in these books.
I also remember Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ Spiritual Depression – I was
particularly struck by the chapter entitled Men
as trees walking, which describes Jesus’ unique healing of a blind man,
unique in that the healing took place in two stages. First, the man was given a
blurred, imprecise vision so that people looked to him like walking trees, and
then, after a further intervention from Jesus, he was able to see perfectly. I
was helped by this as it enabled me to synthesise both the fact that I had been
conscious of divine intervention in my life, and yet at the same time was aware
of so much dross, so much work-in-progress, so much I wanted to be but was not
yet.
I was comforted by the experiences of other Christians
who suffered in a similar way, notably J.B. Phillips, the Anglican priest who
translated the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament into modern
English. His suffering from severe depression is described in his biography The Price of Success and is the main
theme of The Wounded Healer, a
collection of his letters to people who wrote to him for help and guidance. I
was inspired by this concept of the wounded having by the very fact of their
woundedness the power to bring to other sufferers the healing of empathy and an
informed comfort. It was certainly my experience that my personal acquaintance
with mental suffering enabled me to draw near both in person and from the
pulpit to others who were traversing the same dark valley. And it was
encouraging to remember that all of us wounded healers were walking in the footsteps
of the one who was our paradigm, Jesus himself.
Though I found reading helpful, I found music
depressing rather than uplifting. I had always enjoyed listening to classical
music, but during the hard years this – particularly when it was in a minor
key, and especially when it was anything written earlier than Mozart – seemed
to grip my emotions and pull them inexorably downwards. When I was out for a
meal, I’d groan inwardly if my hosts had music playing in the background, for
already the tension levels would be rising in direct proportion to the
plummeting of my spirits. Christian hymns and songs could sometimes be helpful.
I remember a line sung by the then-popular Scandinavian Christian singer Evie
(who was performing at the Filey event the year I attended it) which lodged in
my mind. ‘The hard times,’ she reminded me, ‘make you strong.’ I hoped she was
right, while never being quite convinced of it.
From the moment I came across his work during my
university English classes, I loved the life story and writings of Gerard
Manley Hopkins. His passionate poems about the beauties of nature were
uplifting, but I particularly empathised with the depressive melancholy which
shadowed his life. In To R.B. he
explained his longing of ‘the one rapture of an inspiration’, should his friend
Robert Bridges to whom the poem was addressed have missed ‘in these lagging
lines…..the roll, the rise the carol, the creation.’ Words which are all the
more poignant to those of us who seek the same touch of rapture since despite –
or perhaps even because of – his pain and sense of failure, Hopkins was still
able to write divinely.
I remember concluding a sermon with a quotation from
Hopkins at the end of a difficult day preaching at Hamilton Baptist Church. It
was at the time I’d become convinced that I was called to be a Baptist minister
and that to make this possible God would somehow work a miracle and evaporate
my fear of public speaking. I applied as a candidate for the ministry to the
Baptist Union of Scotland, and started learning New Testament Greek. But far
from diminishing, the stress levels progressively increased.
That Sunday, I drove to Hamilton in complete terror.
As the church secretary and I prayed before the service, I was wracked with the
usual panic, unsure whether I’d be able to survive the hour ahead. And then I
walked out into the pulpit where the little sign in old-fashioned lettering,
visible only to the person leading the service, quoted words from the book of
Acts - ‘Sirs, we would see Jesus.’ What kind of crucifixion would they see that
morning?
I don’t know how I made it through the service. I was
in perpetual fear that I’d collapse in panic, or burst into an uncontrollable
tirade of gibberish and obscenity. Word after word, sentence after sentence, I
tried desperately to focus on the present moment, simply to survive, second by
second. It did not, I imagine, make for particularly edifying listening.
In the evening I, and the congregation, were back for
more. I was preaching about the Christian understanding of suffering,
particularly of depression. About half-way through the service I realised I
might actually make it to the end without collapsing, and my mood lightened.
I finished the sermon by quoting the opening lines of
Hopkins’ masterpiece The Wreck of the
Deutschland, a poem in which he draws parallel between a recent shipwreck
and the courage and faith demonstrated by one of a group of nuns who were on
board, and his own experience of faith tested by trauma and pain. He begins with a description of how God the
creator who ‘hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh’ subsequently
subjected him to an experience so severe that he was ‘almost unmade’. And then
he says ‘dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find
thee.’ I quoted those words, and suggested to the congregation that despite the
intensity of our pain and darkness the time will come when God will say ‘Enough!’,
and once again we will experience God’s healing intervention. I don’t think I
felt his finger that night at Hamilton. There was simply relief that I had
survived. But the hope was there, no matter how apparently irrational, that one
day the cloud would lift and God’s touch would be tangible.
I drove home after the service and gave my £40 fee for
the day to the minister of my own church in Airdrie, because I reckoned he
needed it more than I did, and I accepted that I had been wrong, and that I was
not, after all, called to be the full-time pastor of a church.
(Part 6 is here.)
(Part 6 is here.)
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