Families And How To Escape Them - Chapter Twenty Seven - Spiritual And Mental Health Matters

If Graham meant his time with me to leave me hopeful of more contact, then the longer I heard nothing, the more that optimism ebbed away. He had seen Agape House was where I lived: it was proof that I had 'landed on my feet'. I could not see how our difference of opinion could feel like a disagreement worth inflating into an argument. Maybe he expected me to change to nearer how he thought the same way he thought the whole world should is be transformed in a moment. There was no way of finding out.

My first memory of meeting Graham was when I was twenty. But his first memory of meeting me was when he was seven and I was five. He was friends with the boy who lived in he house next door to mine, who was three years older than me. The three of us met in the summer holiday when were all off school and the adults pushed us together thinking all would be well. Graham and Dale were near the same age, I was younger. The situation was beyond blame or credit. It was what the grown ups around us wanted. That I seemed to be a little lost and they wanted to be on their own was inevitable. But when somebody is older than another person when both are young, then the older person will always think they are most right for being older. Graham would have had to look out for me in a different way when I was twenty. By then the life I had around my family was would have unsettled anyone and I did not not know how to settle myself.

Now I was on my own and more settled. Maybe he saw how settled I seemed to be on the surface as his time to dive into the future he always wanted, but for good this time. Me? On my own I played more of the music I can remember us enjoying together over the last ten years, not particularly minding how the music made since then had dated what we used to enjoy as if it were some tide musical/creative mark that the later waters were not going to return to.

Up to then Graham R had not appeared in the journals. But he appeared as a side view on other arguments in my head that I had to subdue through writing them out, for lack of any other means of getting the night's sleep I wanted. I was less afraid of asking for help now. What was awkward about asking for help was asking where I knew that what I was asking for might be awkward itself, or might be the wrong way to use up busy people's time. That was partly why the journaling had seemed the effective solution it was to me. I had the time to help myself, even I was inefficient at it and it validated my relative isolation, whilst I was unemployed so I had better use my time well, even when it was a license to further isolation. But there came a point in the nightly journaling where the overriding thought that came to me over several days was 'Get some help'.

I knew that a talk with the doctor was something I was always entitled to. But he had got me in the queue for group therapy. That was the limit of what he could do. In church attending services was the contact point of the ongoing relationship I had with community and with God. My relationship with the leaders of the church was that they were leader and I was one of the many being led. They would always be personable, but distant from me. They had their own managerial agendas to see to.

Nonetheless, rarely as I spoke to him personally, I rang the office of the assistant pastor, Pastor Lou. I asked if I could see him in his office and we could talk and we might pray together. if there was an approved way of asking for these things, then I did not know what it was. He gave me an appointment time and explained that he would have an assistant as well because that was part of good church practice.

Although I prayed I often thought other people were better at getting answers to their prayers than I should expect to be for myself. I felt it more apt to pray that I be accepted in spite of my doubts, rather than for my doubts be removed by permanent change happening to me. Many times I had seen the choreography of a response to an altar call. It seemed overwrought to me. There the  experts in prayer marshalled the scene by keeping those they I am guessing thought to be either inexperienced believers or rubberneckers at a distance from the person who was having a spiritual experience and being prayed for: inexperienced people mostly just get in the way.

I wanted a civil conversation, not something that needed to be choreographed and marshalled. I wanted calm and understanding conveyed in plain language, politely and quietly spoken. And so it was that at the appointed time I was sat in Pastor Lou's office where I explained what had God told me 'Get help'. He very neutrally  suggested that all three of us in the room should pray. After ten minutes of prayers with silence between the prayers the words very gently came to me that  'Malcolm you have a spirit of death about you.'. In further explanation through prayer what came to me that this spirit was bequeathed me by my father who lived under the same spirit too. This spirit of death was part of what drove him to always keep the television on in the house, where he preferred what the television said to him over what his family might say. Thus spirit would not let him admit that it drove him this way. There was a simple prayer after that, that technically was a casting out or renunciation of this spirit. But again no histrionics. Lou and his prayer partner asked me to leave the room and said nothing else. After ten minutes of sitting in the church I did not know what to think but assumed they were done with me and had nothing more to say, I left the building and went home.

When I got home I realised that I did not know what was safe or what was unsafe for me with television. Out of caution I avoided watching television with the rest of the house where I could sociably leave the room. My need for quietness and discretion had left me without a link to follow-on instructions. Three days later I was contacted by Pastor Lou on the phone at home. He asked me call in his office that same day.

Since I was unemployed I was free and so I went along to his office as I was asked. The first point Pastor Lou and other elder explained to me was to clear up the misunderstanding that after the prayers they had wanted to talk to me, but needed to confer with each other first. They were surprised when they could not find me to talk with. Then they reassured me that  that watching television sociably was now probably safer for me to watch than it had been in the past when the spirit of death might have directed my viewing habits. Most entertainments were safe as long as I sought discernment on the matter.

Then we had a discussion where he asked me about my background, since it had become obvious to both of them that my family was different to most of the church families they normally encountered. I told them I was gay, That I had been labelled maladjusted at age 10, and from age 16 I had struggled to mature against a background that had inhibited my maturity, including my spiritual maturity, At aged 19 I had switched the hand I write with from left to right hand after nine years of writing with my left hand, where when I started writing with the left hand  nobody seemed to notice the difference, or think that the change was a clue to other changes I was going through. I gave them the word picture of me where when any authority noticed that I needed help, then the help always came too late for it to be as simple and effective as it was meant to be when it was first noticed I needed it. The timing of the help always ensured future complications.

I explained how I had become an outsider because in my experience I found asking for help and individual attention often did not work for me. Nor did I have much of a sense of reward. I told them about the cottaging, since for some time I had worked out that if the mechanism that ensured the continued anonymity of the sex relied on silence about it, then breaking the silence would surely break either the anonymity or the cyclic nature of the acts, and maybe break the desire for the sex outright. Lou sided with me about the power of the silence that perpetuated cottaging. He did not put sex on some rhetorical pedestal where being obedient to God in the area of sexual experience was some unexplainable process of faith, bound by taboo, where taboo was expected to keep a person asexual by keeping the language they could use asexual as well. Taboo was required, and helpful, for public meetings. But when applied individually it became and obstruction to honesty in relationships. 

Pastor Lou was easy to like, and a profound help to me in ways that I had not expected him to be. He was an assistant pastor who was the second assistant pastor I had liked since I had started attending service in the church. Where the second pastor with whom my knowing them was helpful to me cut short by his being promoted elsewhere to lead pastor in another place. Each time their promotion left the work they had started with me half undone. 

Whether the issue was mental health, or spiritual matters, the booking systems for getting one to one time with helpful professional people seemed to be like cottaging itself: freighted with a shortage of time, words unsaid and unsayable, and a trust that retreated further, the more it seemed to be there. Still each half step forward that I made seemed to be a half step worth making. At least I had the A4 pad and plenty of pens with which to write out what no other person had the time  to hear me say, and bear witness with.

Please left click here for Chapter Twenty Eight.