A Man Born Blind

Exploring Christian traditions in the contemporary world.

[amanbornblind-blog]

Some Thoughts Concerning Grief

I tire of blogs, labeled as theologically “emergent” or “liberal”, which spend their time slagging off those pesky fundamentalists. I’m not annoyed because I’ve had positive experiences with conservatives: I’m annoyed because I haven’t. I need to learn how to deal with hurt and disillusionment.  

Besides, my experiences of other forms of Protestantism show me there’s more interesting things to think about. That’s one of the reasons I started A Man Born Blind. After ranting and ranting about how shite I think everything is, I wanted to try and express something beautiful and life-giving while being honest about my “emergent” and “liberal” biases.

And yet the hurt remains, the disillusionment as scalding as ever. The idiocy I experienced swirls around my head:

‘If young women get pregnant, they should be forced to give birth as punishment for having sex before marriage. Abortion should never be an option.’ ‘We wouldn’t let a pedophile marry a child, so why let a man marry another man?’ ‘Single people are selfish.’ ‘Don’t listen to music that’s in a foreign language. It could mean anything.’ ‘But women should earn less than men!’ ‘We should be allowed to call black people [the N-word]. They do. It’s political correctness.’ ‘Under no circumstances is it right to leave a church. No church is perfect. You should stay and be dedicated.’ ‘Gay people can’t love each other. It’s not real love.’ ‘Children are sexually abused as a test from God, to make them stronger.’ ‘Women who get beaten by their husbands should stay with their husbands. They’re married!’ ‘All women are designed to stay at home and be mothers.’ ‘Jesus wasn’t culturally sensitive, so why should we be?’

I could go on. I can only give you my word that these statements were spoken: they weren’t said jokingly. The Bible was used, in accordance with an internal logic, to justify all of them. Here’s my point:

Is it possible to grieve one’s experiences without pointing fingers? Can those who back away from pernicious communities express their suffering without sinking to the level of the perpetrators? Perhaps I’m asking for communities which can be honest about pain in aid of healing. This, God damn it, would include seeing the enemy’s point of view. In the best possible scenarios, it would include reconciliation. Is that the only way these situations can reach a proper conclusion?        

[amanbornblind-blog]

Yesterday

Two strangers, on separate occasions, hugged me because they thought I looked sad. One said, ‘Everything’s going to be alright. Everything’s going to be alright,’ as he held me.   

[amanbornblind-blog]

Repetition

I pray from The Book of Common Worship three times a day. I’m no Anglican (although they’re the group I affiliate with most, these days. Foundation, the community I’m happily a part of, exists on the interstices of evangelicalism, emergent Christianity and alternative worship, yet is framed by the Church of England).   

Growing up in conservative evangelical circles, liturgy was considered legalistic and even cultish. Prayer was, in essence, an improvised riff of praises, thanks and wants. Charismatic prayer was much the same, but with added proclamation and glossolalia. 

For many reasons, I reached a point where I could no longer pray: What is the ontology of God? Isn’t praying to an image of God in my head a delusion? And what stops that being my own thoughts feeding back on themselves? How do my ideas influence my view of God, and how negative can they be? But, most of all, a complete lack of structure meant my prayers were always the same: inert, insincere declarations of a faith I never had, descending into self-obsession.      

Ironically, liturgical structures offered more freedom. For starters my improvised view of prayer had a name: intercessory prayer. It was one type of prayer amidst others. This alone allowed new ways to think. Furthermore, praying someone else’s words forced me to leave my ego. Prayer became less narcissistic. But isn’t praying the same twenty-one prayers every week equally repetitive? Yes. That’s what makes liturgy so extraordinary.              

It’s as if I centre myself on a love that is outside of language. This takes discipline. I fail more times than I succeed. But the performance of it, the conscious performance, functions the same as art: it changes something in me, as if I met with something so inexplicable I can never be the same again.   

[amanbornblind-blog]

The Prodigal

Once upon a time, there was a man with two sons. One afternoon, the younger sat with his dad on the living room’s sofa. The son said, ‘I know how successful you are. You retired when you were my age! You’ve got loads of money in your will and... I want it,’ the son almost banged his fist against his leg, ‘I want it now. It’s mine anyway.’

The son didn’t talk to his dad in the days that passed. Eventually the money had been transferred, so the son bought a car and made his way to the nearest big city.

He spent months going out every night. He bought everyone’s drinks, everyone’s drugs and the most expensive women. He rented the fanciest flat in the poshest neighborhood. It wasn’t long before the money, inordinate though it was, dried up. All the son’s friends left him, since he could no longer afford shots or pills or women, and he couldn’t keep up his rent payments. Soon enough, he was homeless. 

Because he grew up in the countryside, he tried to find work relating to farming or gardening. No one would employ him because he had no experience. All he could do was stumble around streets all day, asking strangers for money. One night, when he was trying to sleep on a park bench, he thought to himself, Maybe my dad will take me back... He has so many housekeepers, chefs, the butler... They have a better life than this... If I at least try and go back, the worse he can do is say no...’ So the son made his way, by foot, back home.   

As the son neared the family home, he saw some of his dad’s workers through the windows. He rang the doorbell. The butler said, ‘O, no.’ on seeing him through the peephole. It took a while for the door to open. His dad did it himself. 

His dad spoke first, ‘Repeat after me: Father, forgive me. I am a sinner. I have sinned against you and this family. Please take me back, so I might know you.’ After the son repeated these words, his dad said, ‘You are welcome here.’    

As they sat on the same sofa as before, the dad explained to his son what to do to be part of the family. ‘First you need to agree with what my family, indeed my entire business, stands for. From now on, you hate who we hate and love who we love. You can learn this in our local groups, such as the What This Family is All About course, and the What This Family is All About Level 2 course. After all this, you can have the pleasure of working here without pay.’ His dad seemed different, like he was holding a lot more back than before. But the son was grateful, either way.  

The son went through the courses, and stood in front of the family, the housekeepers and chefs, publicly declaring his love for his dad. After this the son got to work as a cleaner. 

Over the years, the son became more and more a part of his dad’s family. Because it wasn’t the same relationship as before, he often struggled with whether or not his dad really loved him. The son struggled with an awful lot of guilt but, as he spoke about it with the rest of the staff, he became confident his dad did love him and that the family’s rules and courses, the public declarations, were really quite gracious and kind. Sometimes, when he was in the middle of his cleaning, the son would look behind his shoulder and see his older brother grin. 

[shneevon]

If you speak of God to feel less lonely in your nothingness, he is nothing more than an invention and a pretext for loneliness.

E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, p. 22 (via shneevon)

[amanbornblind-blog]

How Not to Act Like Jesus

A few months back, I was working night shifts. Five nights a week, Wednesday - Sunday, 10PM - 6AM. As you might imagine, I had no life and was reasonably rude to most the people I love, but that’s a post for another time. 

I was given a night off because it was a bank holiday, and all I wanted was to be around people and music. Luckily, in Bristol, UK (where I reside) there’s an incredible array of bars that have amazing live bands for free on a nightly basis. 

So I went to my local bar, ordered a pint and made my way to the smoking area. It’s a beautiful arrangement of tables on a porch, with plants and fairy lights. There’s a huge graffiti mural of Jesus breakdancing on one side, and an original Bansky on the other.

I’m not really a smoker anymore but, the few times I get to go out by myself, I buy a small pouch of tobacco to keep myself occupied. I asked a guy, who’s sat on his own at a table if the other seats were taken. He said no but because there was a seat opposite him, and we’d gotten talking, I sat there and rolled a cigarette. 

We made our way through our pints and talked about what we do. He had these heavy eyes, always looking down at the table. He finished his drink a bit before me, began to stand and said, ‘I’m going to the toilet. I was sexually abused.’ 

I thought I misheard him amidst the chatter of the crowd and background music. I got my thoughts together enough to think that, A) He’s either so distraught he’s still working through it, or, B) He’s taking the piss. 

When he returned, he didn’t have another pint. He just sat there staring at his empty glass. I was coming to the end of mine, so asked, ‘Do you want another drink?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Did you say you were sexually abused?’

‘Yeah. When I was a teenager.’ I figured if he’s being honest and wants to talk, I should listen, and if he’s taking the piss, it’s worth the risk of making an arse of myself. As he explained some details, I sat there bricking it. What do people say in this situation?

I remembered the story of Jesus talking to the woman at the well told in John chapter 4. Because of historical and Biblical scholarship, it’s considered that the woman was a sex worker. Furthermore she was a Samaritan, who Jesus’ fellow Jews considered scum. It’s a double-whammy: a sex-worker, that the laws laid down in Leviticus would want executed; and a Samaritan. And there’s Jesus, a Jew fraternising with “the lowest of the low.”        

I don’t know why this was the first thing that came to mind. I certainly didn’t see the gentleman opposite me as low. Perhaps it’s because Jesus could go into these situations with such balls, knowing exactly what to say, and make people see something in their lives that transformed them. And there I was, sitting on the porch of a bar, stuttering, smoking, looking at the bottom of my stout.

As the guy spoke, he clearly blamed himself for being abused. He said things like, ‘If I didn’t...’ and ‘I shouldn’t have...’ In my confused, one-pint state, all I could do was repeat over and over, ‘This is not your fault. This is not your fault. The men who did this to you were mentally ill. This is not your fault.’ He tried to change the subject back to what he did, or what he should have done. I interrupted him, ‘Shut up! Listen to me. This is not your fault. This is not your fault. The men who did this to you were mentally ill. This is not your fault.’ We went through this exchange a few times, until we ended up sitting in silence. Then we got talking about his interest in sports science, and how he wants a career in that discipline. He never got himself another drink. He had to be at work the following morning. We shook hands, he got up and left.

He’s probably forgotten about our conversation. Or he’s laughing about it with his friends, about the guy down the pub he strung along for the night. The thing I remember most is what it was like, sitting on my own after. The 76 bus I used to catch to work drove pass, and a guy wearing a hi-viz cycled up the road. Homeless people put their hands through the fence of the bar, begging for change. A guy in a black coat walked out the brothel further down the street. There were cars full of people.          

[amanbornblind-blog]

Us and Us

When I was a kid, there was us and them. They were called sinners: drunkards, divorcees, gays, the sexually promiscuous, arrogant humanists, and whatever you do don’t mention the Muslims. We called ourselves holy, and shouted about how righteous we were... My story’s not original: I got to an age where I actually spent time with non-Christians. 

I felt so alienated in Church. Christians liked Contemporary Christian Worship and countryside dramas; I liked Squarepusher and old horror films. I got so bored with my Christian friends wanting to stay in on weekends, usually to watch talent shows or play board games, that I started going to pubs and bars by myself. It was heaven on earth.

These people, who were classed as sex-crazed drunkards and sluts by my tribe, were the most friendly, encouraging people I’d ever met: and that’s just the ones who didn’t drink! I didn’t have to hide who I was or feel ashamed about my interests. Over the years, this has made me more joyful, peaceful, patient with different people types... Because I have a wide social circle, I’ve even started having more self-control (it seems easier to, when people accept you for who you are).         

That’s pretty much this blog’s ethos. It’s a place where I, and others inspired by Jesus’ story, don’t have to hide. Where we can think about what it means to be inspired, provoked and confused by Jesus and the Bible in our contemporary world. 

I don’t know if I’m a Christian. I can’t even intellectually affirm the existence of God! Or Jesus! All I know is the more I pray, or read the Bible, or engage in liturgy, or attempt (and mostly fail) to act like Christ... It’s as if I was blind, but then I could see.