did Jesus have therapy?

For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:
...a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance...

I couldn't think of a bible passage that explored the idea of self-awareness. I know they're out there, but often within a different context. And how dangerous a verse out of context can be...

Of course Jesus didn't have therapy, the man couldn't afford a hotel room, let alone the rates a psychiatrist charges. No doubt it's a Riding Lights sketch in the making...it would have to be after his death though: "And your father made you do what??"

If there were a passage in one of Paul's letters that condoned self-reflection and self-awareness, that said people should take time out to discuss their problems and find closure from past trauma I wouldn't be asking this question. Therapy, however, is a Western privelege. Some would say indulgence, but then those who would say that have probably never had the kind of experiences that demand closure.

Strangely enough, contemporary Christianity does encourage the sharing of problems - a symptom perhaps of more feminine influence? (cf. the departure from overtly competitive learning environments for children) - provided these are the right problems. Strengthening marriage, and not accountable dating; problems at work, and not physical abuse; the present and not the past. Prayer is offered as a form of therapy. If not the only therapy.

Perhaps it is psychiatry's relationship to enlightened philosophy that creates a boundary of sorts between Christianity and therapy? The intention of psychiatry - that of rescuing people from their past experiences to find a new life that is more free - is a direct competitor to the promise of Christianity, albeit a secular one. If a Christian has to resort to therapy then perhaps they're just not very good Christians?


I chose the bible verse above because it offers a more realistic view of life, with its ups and downs than the Charismatic attitude that every day is Easter Day. For those days when it is a time to weep or a time to break down or a time to mourn, there needs to be a support system. If you have broken down, and if prayer is harder because of it, it should not be shameful to look for other ways to find a way to understand yourself, and from that how to build up again.

...perhaps the evangelical answer is "Jesus is therapy". Perhaps the liberal answer is "Jesus did not need therapy". Perhaps the secular answer is "He would have if he could have". Perhaps there is no real answer.

finding a way

This water ain't holy, that bird ain't a dove
when the road gets darkest
tread lightly my love


I have been going to a church for a while now. I have even joined a home group. I am not yet a paid up member, but in essence I am a card-carrying church goer.

How long will it last?

At a home group meeting the other day one of the members told a few stories about his prayers being answered. Good on him, all very exciting stuff. An agreement that came through in the nick of time, a God who truly does answer prayer.

Don't get me wrong, I completely believe that God answers prayer, but I also believe that you need to know what you're praying for first. It is a brave and committed believer who explains exactly what he wants in prayer to God. For two reasons: first that he can stand before God and ask for something without realising by the process of this asking that it is either not what he does want or something God would not want; secondly that his faith is strong enough to risk the experience.

If you ask something of God He will answer. He may not say yes, but he will answer. So being clear about your prayer risks a yes, a no, a wait but most of all that very human of temptations - testing His very existence.

It is in this context that I listened to the home group guy talk with earnest evangelical enthusiasm. Bugger, I thought, if I start engaging in the talk tonight, I may expose myself as a fluffy liberal.

So I look around the room and there in front of me is my expression etched on the face of another. A quizical look that screamed: "That's all very well for you, but I find prayer hard and risking answers harder." I could not wait to hear her say what she was thinking, providing of course that she wasn't too scared to do so.

Thus began a conversation that was not me being the voice of dissent but a group of people sharing their hopes and their fears.

Perhaps I can do this church/home group thing. If even Spring Harvest can invite speakers who speak about the homosexual community in Amsterdam with compassion, or mention the bishop of the alternative church, Jonny Baker with respect, then maybe I can join a church community without assuming I will be excommunicated along the way...

what was going through his head?

The Kingdom of God is near. Repent! And believe the good news. Mark 1: 15

The church I go to - not 'my' church since in human terms it is the vicar's and in theological terms it is God's - has begun a series on Mark's Gospel. This means loooooong passages of an evening and clever manipulation that sees in Easter alongside the relevant Gospel chapters.

Last weekend we began the New Year with the first few chapters. I noticed something I hadn't done before: the casual aside that John the Baptist had been put in prison, but no explanation for why, nor why Jesus wasn't implicated as well. I must look into that.

Meanwhile the guy doing the sermon decides to focus on the Repent! bit. No, hang on, first he spends 15 tedious minutes flitting from one version of Gospel and redaction history to another. Then he comes back to the issue of repenting.

Call me a popularist, but surely on the first Sunday of the New Year, when people are 6 days into nicotine cravings, alcohol withdrawal, gym membership aches and a myriad other symptoms of reinventing themselves in the name of resolution, the idea of repenting is a little closer to home?

Apparently not. Apparently we should wake up every morning and repeat these words to ourselves: The Kingdom of God is near. Repent! And believe the good news. Then shall we look back on a week and see the effect. So excited was he that he repeated it again and asked: "Do you mind?"

Down bowed his head for several minutes and we were left blinking in the light of his halo-like bald patch.

What on earth was that all about?

Amateur psychology designed to bring about the Kingdom of God in a week; a moment's self-indulgent reflection that emphasised his excitement to the detriment of those listening.

At the very least he could have made a point. Then perhaps I wouldn't be left pondering on him, rather than on God.

Christmas stuff

Rockin around the Christmas tree
At the Christmas party hop
Mistletoe hung where you can see
Every couple tries to stop

Christmas: loving to hate it.

I love it. However, I'm so very fortunate and so very sadly different.

This year my grandma died. This is sad and it happens a lot to people. However for me and my family it spells the end of a generation. From now on my Mum and my Dad are the next ones to go, they are matriarch and patriarch, without the benefit of grandchildren to justify this elevated position. (damn contraception, elevated perceptions of love and the dissolution of arrange marriage).

It has also become the catalyst for a family Christmas. We are so very fortunate because my family - Mum, Dad, me and little brother - get on so well with my Uncle's family - Mum's little bro, his wife, my male cousin and younger female cousin.

Last time it was all of us together (with Nanna, don't forget) it was "the best Christmas ever". This year we hope to build on that!

There will of course be those moments where our hearts wrench. People whose absence is so acute that tears are not enough. Smiles not there, hugs not available, moments so redolent of the family Christmas that will never happen again. Even now I well up because I know how much love within the family has been lost.

But this is where we are so very very lucky. My family genuinely cares for each other. Christmas is a time when we get together. Us young'uns have a tradition of the Christmas pillow-fight, taken on as soon as earthly possible after crossing the threshold (where I once lost my favourite earring). We have games planned that are eagerly anticipated rather than patiently endured. We have meals that are raucous occasions rather than excuses for more drink. We have visits to church that are part of the Christmas spirit rather than empty tradition. Presents are happy extras, but little more than the icing on the cake.

In short, we are a model of family festivity, and I am so grateful for it.

In a conversation this evening with a friend whose parents split up when he was very young, he envied my excitement over the impending Christmas. I felt guilty and he asked me not to.

I'm not sure if it is a good thing or not, because during the days when me and my family will be enjoying Christmas with our whole hearts, there will be families enduring Christmas as best they can.

It's easy to see the homeless or the elderly as the victims of Christmas, and they need all the compassion that is available. But in so many ways my heart goes out to the many families where Christmas is not fun, spelling several days of travel to appease parent after parent, or extended family squabbles, or even close and toxic family proximity.

I am so lucky, because for me the Christmas hype of cheesy music, presents, American rhetoric, pantomime and glitz is a pretty backdrop to what really matters - people who love each other and are lucky enough to do so.

Into the Wild

If you forgive you love. And if you love the face of God shines upon you.


Alexander Supertramp, or Christoper McCandless, did not have to die. Apparently if he had taken a map, or done research, or even walked a little further along the river bank, he would have found a way home.

But what then? This was a man who sent his entire savings to Oxfam, who cut up his social security card, who enjoyed a life of wandering. If he had not died, would he have simply gone back home, taken an office job and occasionally used up his annual leave to scratch his exploratory itch? Or would he have found another stop gap to shore up funds ready for the next challenge.

I would guess the latter, in which case at some point, in the pursuit of freedom and adventure, he would have died.

We all die. The only variables are when and how. As a society we seem to have turned full circle from the Victorian culture of talking about death but not sex, to talking about sex but not death. Why is this?

In the last few weeks I have discovered that being in love and forging a relationship is terrifying. As terrifying as the thought of death. If I can gather up the courage to be honest about my relationship, I should be able to talk openly about death, surely?

However, trying to talk with friends about the nature of Chris' death in this film is met with defensiveness.

I have no conclusions, this is just a stream of conciousness. But it does make me think...

The Next Big Thing (part 1)

There is a level of cowardice lower than the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand

This is a quick post. One that expresses what's been bugging me for the last few months. What is the next big thing for christian discourse?

The woman debate and the gay debate have not been concluded yet. But they're not likely to be any time soon. However, people are getting bored, women are getting ordained, and - despite homosexuals in the developing world being beaten and brutally murdered - in this country being gay is more acceptable, even if the theologians haven't formed a concensus as to why.

Dear God don't let it be climate change. That was en vogue ten years ago, now it's bandwagon pathetic. Talking about it detracts from doing things about it. Churches enforcing car shares, or even congregants being encouraged to walk to church of a Sunday; asking people to wear extra jumpers instead of heating the building; pushing Cornwall by train as a holiday destination instead of oohing at the Time Share in the Seychelles - actions rather than words or even bullshit vigils, that's more useful.

So what will the Next Big Thing be?

Suggestion no.1

How to bring up children?

eg. the most orthodox of kids break eventually, and shielding children from the 'evils' of society is not possible. How to encourage a righteous life without expecting perfection?

Suggestion no.2

Gender in churches

eg. whiny choruses and sharing our feelings; women with career choices and an enlightened sense of self; men who like meek meeting women who aren't; expressions of worship that emasculate and the church as dating ritual. Where is the future for exploring expressions of gender within church doctrine?

That's it for now, but yet more questions are still bubbling. Where is the future and what are the debates?

God loves me because I'm...special?

I was with a friend a few weeks ago who was describing a guy he knew: kind, lovely, good looking... I, using the tired line of young single women everywhere, piped up with "ooh, is he single?"

The friend turns back and says "oh, he's far too special for you!"

I console myself now with the thought it was all in the name of banter, but at the time the comment stung.

One of the issues I have with the "God loves you" rhetoric - because when it becomes rote and the sincerity is lost it can only be rhetoric - is that understanding that, let alone why, someone may love you is a difficult one to come to terms with.

I know that enthusiastic types would use the concept of a great and almighty God loving little ol' me as a demonstration of the power of the Gospel. But feeling loved and being loved is a tough one to reconcile in one's own heart.

The word 'love' is very over-used in contemporary society. Groovy sermons might cover the various Greek words for love: brotherly love, sexual love, divine love. They may even make the comparison with the Eskimos' many words for snow: snow that's new and crisp, snow that is too wet to walk safely on and hides ice underneath, snow that makes good weaponry. But without exploring our own language for the myriad forms of love, such a comparison loses its relevance.

I am lucky to be very loved by my parents. And also my brother. They are, however, my family and there are arguments and shared moments, well-considered presents at Christmas and the all important fact that they kind of have to love me.

Anyone outside of this familial love and I find myself in tremulous territory. While I may love them - my friends, my work colleagues, Johnny Depp - it is hard to believe that they love me. At least when their presence or soothing words are there when they're needed, or blissful afternoons are spent laughing together there is a sense of being loved, but when they are not there I find my self-esteem kicks in and questions why they would bother with me.

God, now. He's a very busy man but He makes time for me. In His own way. It is this way that I am constantly seeking to understand, and with my personal model of feeling loved on shaky ground, being told by a religious type that He loves me when life is tough, my faith is shaky and no one is there on a cold Wednesday evening to give me a warm and enveloping hug when I get home, doesn't really help.

How much more difficult might it be then for people who don't even have a model of unconditional family love? How much deeper perhaps is their faith that when someone reminds them God loves them, they smile and say "yes, I know" believing wholly that they are indeed special?