Spiritual Abuse

The woman came to my house, accompanied by her friend. I had first met her a couple of months earlier, when she turned up in my church. I spoke to her after the service and welcomed her. She turned up a couple more times after that and then she appeared with her friend. She must have been in early twenties and her friend was probably about ten years older. Again I spoke to them and they asked if they could come and see me. We fixed a date. Now they had arrived at my house and we sat together in my sitting room. It was obvious that they were a couple. The younger woman was clearly distressed, indeed she seemed bowed down in pain. Her friend was a deeply concerned about her. They began to tell their story. The younger woman was a Christian and, while her friend was not, she respected her partner’s faith and had come with her to see me about the issue that was causing such distress. The younger women had grown up as a Christian, indeed she was devout and committed in her faith. Now she had fallen in love and they were planning to enter a Civil Partnership. Yet, ever since she had become aware of her sexuality, she had been taught that she was evil and detested by God because of her sexual orientation. She was being torn apart by the pain of her situation, having found her life companion, yet at the cost of the condemnation that she had been taught was God’s judgement on her. I asked her what she thought the bible had to say about her situation and she launched into a detailed list of every biblical text that proved the condemnation that had been piled upon her. I listened to her and I empathised with the pain and wounding that had been imposed on her by the churches to which she had belonged. I marveled at her faith, a faith that had withstood such an onslaught, and the brokenness that that ‘Gospel message’ had imposed on her life. She talked herself out and looked at me in astonishment as I told her that not all Christians would interpret those texts in the way that she had been taught. I spoke to her about the God who had created her as the person she was and I told her that she was so loved and precious to God that Jesus had given his life for her. It was simply the Gospel that has transformed and healed my own life that I shared with her. As I spoke it seemed as if chains were falling off her and a crippling, so systematically imposed on her by the Church over the years, was being healed before my very eyes. It brought to mind the healing stories from the Gospels. Here was a miracle taking place before me. It was nothing I had brought about, except to speak of the Gospel message of God’s transforming love that had been revealed in Jesus. She left my house as a changed person and I said I would pray with them when their big day came. Would I have blessed them? It is God alone who blesses and indeed, for this couple, he had  blessed them by his grace and through my ministry.

In recent times the Evangelical Alliance has expressed concerns about the use of the term ‘spiritual abuse’. I would not want to suggest that their member churches are engaged in any such abuse, but they seem to display an instinct that some aspects of their teaching might somehow be labelled by others as abusive. Coming, as I do, from a culture (both church and education) in which safeguarding is now at a premium, I know that abuse comes in many forms and that spiritual abuse is one of the categories of abuse. The woman I have spoken of was, in my opinion, the victim of serious and systematic abuse over many years. What she had been taught had utterly crippled her and given her a sense of being beyond redemption. In saying this, I am not putting forward the argument that all those who disagree with me are abusive. What I am saying is that there can be a stark, hardline attitude to matters of belief that can cripple, rather than heal; destroy, rather than liberate. The biblical text which epitomizes this for me most clearly is the scene of angry men lined up to stone an adulterous woman. What drives such a passion to cripple and destroy? It has to be a deep desire to protect their position, culture, doctrine, beliefs or law. There is something deeply imprisoning in such a frantic urge to buttress and fortify one’s cherished and dug-in position. Jesus takes a different position and he sets the woman free. The experience of my own life leads me to interpret what happened, not as a letting-off by Jesus, on condition that the woman did not sin again, but a liberation of forgiveness which transformed her life so that she was now released from her tangled web of broken relationships and given the grace to live a renewed life. Spiritual abuse is real. It happens all around us. Far from distancing ourselves from this category of safeguarding, we need to be challenged to ask ourselves if what we practice and preach seeks to enslave the lives of others, or to set them free.

Retirement

I have not attended to this blog since last summer. A lot has been going on, both in terms of retirement from my parish and some bouts of sickness, from which I am emerging. I find that my blog is a good way to mull over life, in a way in which can be shared with a wider audience. I have no followers, but it is clear that one or two have logged in to read what I have said. I even met one free-church minister, who said that he pinched sermon ideas from what I have written! Well, publishing my thoughts does mean that they are available to be used as the reader sees fit.

At a previous church, in which I served, there were two internal porches, one for the South West door and the other for the North West one. The external porches are massive stone affairs, open to the surrounding churchyard and affording fairly substantial shelter, both for passers by and for homeless people seeking a place to sleep. They give access to the heavy double oak doors into the church, yet therein lies a problem. To leave them open would let all the heat out of the church, so on each side of the church a fairly substantial inner porch was constructed, which means that those entering the church have to go through two sets of doors. This provides a means of keeping the heat in. I had not been long at the church when I suggested adding lighting into each of these internal porches. As things stood, entering the church was a matter of walking into a dark box. Objections were raised. It was fairly easy to get through the double door system without the need for a light. No objections had been raised, so why spend money on this? My answer was that we needed to make our church a place of welcome and to create a sense of invitation for any visitor who might come into the building. Expecting people to walk into a dark box was not a clever way to entice the people of the parish to come into their building. So lighting was added and we also put in sensors and improved lighting in the outer porches to make the whole process of coming in easier and more user friendly.

I have found that the process of retirement has been like walking into one of those dark places. You know that there must be something beyond the second set of doors, but first you must leave a place of light and step into a room in which you will have little light and a good deal of uncertainly as to what to expect next. When I was a curate I was told that I was now the Chapter Clerk, with the responsibility of keeping minutes of the meetings of the deanery clergy, sending out reminders of meetings and so on. I asked for a list of the clergy, but no one seemed to know of one. So I set about doing a stock-take of clergy. There were six incumbents (three of whom never attended meetings), two curates and thirty eight retired clergy. As I got to know the retired ones, it became obvious to me that many of them found retirement difficult and they filled their time by taking as many services as possible around the thirty six churches of the deanery. It appeared that what they had done in their full-time ministry was all of life for them. I admired their faithful commitment to their vocation, but I wondered whether all of what it means to be a priest is so tied up in what we do. I once knew a priest who was an industrial chaplain. He was talking to us students about his ministry and he said that he had not presided at the Eucharist for some eighteen months. One of our number told him that he was not a real priest, which I think hurt him. Yet it seemed to me that his priestly ministry was self-evident. The way he was embedded in the life of the communities he served, in a very incarnational way, brought a very real sense of the presence of Christ into the situations he encountered and in a way which was often transformational. It struck me that being a priest needs to well up from being the person God has called me to be. That 'being' may well find expression in the 'doing' of priestly things, but just doing priestly things is not of the essence of what it mean to be a priest.

So stepping into the dark box of retirement has meant accepting the letting go of what I did as a priest. In my diocese you have to wait at least six months after retirement before you can apply for the Permission to Officate, which is needed to exercise a formal ministry within the Church of England. I have been grateful for the gift of these six months. It has meant that retirement is not just a continuation of what I did before, but rather a stepping out into something new. It has been a step into the dark, in the sense that I have no idea of what will come next, but it has been a bold step that I could take with confidence, because I carry the light of Christ in my heart. It has helped me to change gear, away from what could have been a longing to be useful in continuing my priestly craft, to a time of fresh surrender into the life of God and a waiting on Him for how, what and where my priestly calling will be in the journey ahead. And perhaps there is in this a realization that indeed all human living should find empowerment in such waiting on God, rather than the frantic endeavour of working to worldly agendas.