ViaMedia

Category: Mental Health

  • International Women’s Day – Choose to Challenge

    by the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester

    In 2019, on a visit to the Holy Land I visited the church in Magdala and found myself faced with an enormous and extraordinary modern painting by Daniel Cariola depicting larger-than-life sandaled feet which are those of Jesus Christ and those around him. There is also the hand of a woman stretched out so that it is just touching the hem of Jesus’ robes, and at the point of connection there is a vibrant, almost electric, circle of light. As I recall that picture now, it is not only deeply poignant as we live a time when close proximity and touch are things many people long for, but it also seems pertinent this week as we mark International Women’s Day (IWD) with the theme ‘Choose to Challenge’.

    We have had a bucketful of challenges over this past year and little of it has been of our choosing. Yet I am also aware that even when there is not a viral pandemic, for many people across our world there is continual and overwhelming challenge, not least for many girls and women. Not much of their challenge is chosen, good or life-giving – unlike the sort of challenge which is the focus of IWD.

    The hand in the Cariola painting is that of the woman who had been suffering for 12 years from a continuous flow of blood.  She knew much about isolation, trauma, and loss, not due to a viral pandemic but due to her gynaecological condition. I suspect her mental health was affected as well as her physical health.

    As the woman touches Jesus, he feels power go out of him and he voices a challenge, ‘who touched me?’. The question would have sounded absurd to Christ’s disciples given they were being jostled by a crowd, but it could also be heard as critical and disapproving. Yet I wonder if it was more about ‘choosing to challenge’ in order to make this woman visible, such that the ‘who’ in his question was inviting the woman to be revealed as someone with a unique identity and story. Here is a woman who has been hidden, rendered irrelevant and even stigmatised, and now she is about to be deeply noticed as a significant and loved individual.

    The gospel writers, as is so often the case where women are concerned, refer to her simply as a woman (unlike the men named by Mark and Luke in their chapters recounting this incident). We will never know if Jesus actually used her name in the moments of their encounter, but he does call her ‘daughter’, reflecting value and intimacy in relationship.

    It is this challenge to notice and recognise that the Church is called to join in with wherever people are hidden, stigmatised, labelled, or condemned as ‘other’, not only as we live a viral pandemic but as we emerge from it and shape the future we want to see.

    Yet there is another challenge in that circle of light, and it is that of the woman herself. Amid her desperation, isolation, and pain, she shows great courage in acknowledging her need and taking a decision to reach out.

    In my recent book ‘Encounters’ (which has Cariola’s painting on the cover), I reflect on this gospel story in the context of women in prison. It is not easy for those women to reach out for help, yet rehabilitation and restoration are not possible until that moment comes.  Indeed, it requires a woman’s story to be heard and her trauma to be recognised.

    This week as the Domestic Abuse Bill reaches Report Stage in the House of Lords many of our proposed amendments and challenges to the government are endeavouring to recognise the people who are powerless to challenge and remain hidden, most of whom are women, but not exclusively so.

    I am acutely aware that whenever one speaks out specifically for women and girls there is nearly always a backlash from people who want to critically point out that boys and men should not be left out. I agree. Yet, I also want to say that sometimes we need to shine a light more strongly in particular areas to change a pervasive culture which has been perpetuated down the centuries. And working for that kingdom-of-God-shaped shalom means sometimes unashamedly choosing to shine the spotlight on women in order to bring challenge so that their potential and equality can be recognised and fanned into flame.

    It is all part of the bigger picture in which we need to choose to challenge injustice, inequality, and discrimination, not least when it comes to disability, sexuality, background and colour.  At the same time,  we must never forget of course that the category ‘women and girls’ is of a different shape –  as all of those other listed categories of ‘difference’ include women, girls, men, and boys.

    As we mark IWD this year I hope that we might all be challenged about how we challenge to make visible those who are hidden in the crowd of our communities and further afield, and how we do so in a way which enables those unique individuals to recognise their own worth and needs such that they can dare to challenge the narrative they have of themselves.

    And today it is about women.

     

  • LLF – Has There Been a Murder?

    by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham, Member of General Synod and Trustee of the Ozanne Foundation 

    Has there been a murder or at least death by misadventure?

    Has Covid -19 killed Living in Love and Faith?

    We are in the middle of a global plague. People we love are dying. We have no idea how resilient churches will be in terms of attendance or finance. Where have our children gone?

    Big stuff is going on.

    Living in Love and Faith always was ill-conceived. It was attempting to speak into a dilemma that no longer existed even before Covid.

    In the reality of today’s world a vanishingly small number of people want pick this scab. It’s over. Living in Love and Faith has died a death and we ‘d best give it a quiet burial.

    Last week Bishop Paul Bayes wrote a really moving tribute to Bill Kirkpatrick. Fr Bill actually died three years ago but the deep thoughts and feelings that Bishop Paul expressed were stirred by the TV series ‘It’s a Sin’ which traced the story of AIDS. The cruelty and judgement thoughtlessly inflicted on gay men as AIDS claimed so many lives is agony to watch. Fr Bill walked alongside those who were ill and dying and he listened and reached out, and he prayed.

    It leaves you wondering if things have changed.  Thankfully that answer is mostly yes. Society is far from perfect but for the vast majority of people being gay is just one of a variety of ways in which human beings are made and even folk who can’t quite get their heads around it because of the era in which they grew up want to treat it as private and personal. They’d rather not talk about it; live and let live.

    If you are in sport it can be tougher, but nowhere other than the church is your sexuality open game for public discussion.

    Of course there are Christians who genuinely feel this is the issue to go to the wall for, but there is an important piece of learning I’ve acquired as I’ve explored how the church can move into an era of full acceptance. One remarkable bishop that +Alan and I spoke to once he was retired talked about the cost of bringing about change. It had indeed cost him dear in many ways and we asked him what he’d do differently. He reflected that the greatest mistake he made was spending too much time and effort of the extreme conservative lobby. This sounds harsh, but as you unpack it there is sense in this. There are a group of people who live their faith believing they and others are teetering on the cliff edge of hell, and no one can sadly alter the fact that daring to change their attitude to being gay risks tipping them over the edge into eternal fire.

    Unlimited discussions around Living in Love and Faith cannot possibly change this conviction -and such Christians will only engage on the basis of proving they are right.

    We need to let go. To say ‘so be it.’ It must be pretty grim to frame your faith in a loving God that way.

    The time for continuing with conversations which almost no-one wants, as a way of stopping doing what is right, is over.

    I’ll name it:  Well-intentioned though it might have been (and I’m not even convinced about that) – it’s over! Living in Love and Faith landed in the midst of a global pandemic and turned out to be – let’s put it kindly – a chocolate teapot!

    We have always had a way forward. It’s as if Paul saw this coming. Romans 14 is crystal clear. It was the usual bust up about what was morally right to eat. Paul tells them it’s not really the food or the possible idolatry that matters, it’s the judging one another.

    As people of faith we are called respect the integrity of other people’s conscience. The key is in not judging -and therefore not controlling. We got there in the end with the re-marriage of divorcees. Finding a place where there is mutual respect of conscience on this matter could be the key.

    I hear that it is proving very difficult to find LLF champions for the proposed discussions around the country. Maybe this speaks for itself. I have yet to meet anyone who would turn up to such a group. Gay people themselves have had years and years of generous and self-revelatory discussions. Often they have suffered abuse in that context and it is completely unreasonable to expect yet another round of such nonsense. Most people in our churches have friends or family members who are gay and they simply love them. It’s no longer a big deal, but they really, really don’t want to discuss it in public.

    A lot of resource, financial and personal has gone into the construction of LLF. Senior people are heavily invested in it. I get that.

    So I am asking for a grown up act of courage. Stop pretending. LLF has died.

    Bury it.

    ← Back

    Thank you for your response. ✨

     

  • “It’s a Sin…Not to Care and Listen”

    by the Rt Revd Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool and Chair of the Ozanne Foundation

    In 1982 I moved to west London to minister as a University chaplain there. I had been ordained for three years. The West London Chaplaincy was a wonderful, creative outfit; it had been set up a generation before by Ivor Smith-Cameron and had no place of its own, built around small groups meeting in halls, departments and community houses. There were about 60 of these groups each week. The work was very rewarding. Intellectually demanding certainly, but it was also lovely to minister alongside Christian students; men and women whose sense of identity, and Christian calling, grew as they learned from one another.

    It was at this time, as a young priest wanting to make sense of my life and of ministry, that I connected with the late, great Bill Kirkpatrick, who became my spiritual director. Fr Bill lived in a basement flat in Earl’s Court, from where he opened his heart to the community through “Reaching Out”, his ministry of presence and listening and love. He had converted a coal cellar, under the Inner Ring Road, into a chapel, with plain whitewashed walls and (for a place that shook whenever a lorry rolled over its roof) an extraordinary quietness and peace.

    Fr Bill Kirkpatrick

    Fr Bill was an intense presence. His listening released truth in the people he met. He wore a wooden holding cross around his neck. He made a great cup of tea. At the end of every session he would say “Thanks for sharing”, and I’d go and pray in that coal cellar and then walk up to Earl’s Court tube station feeling that I’d been heard and understood, and feeling that life was richer than I had known before.

    I was not the only one to receive wisdom from Bill, whose ministry was widespread and deeply respected. (For example Colin Coward has written movingly of his own connection with him[1]). But in the years I knew him, Bill’s ministry took on one focus in particular, because of where he was and who he was. For Bill was a gay partnered man living in Earl’s Court, and these were the years of what was then a mystery illness that devastated and further marginalised the gay community in London, as in so many other cities; the years of AIDS/HIV.

    And so, more and more, Bill’s life was spent accompanying people in their journey of illness and too often of death and bereavement. He brought a listening ear and the openness and love of Christ to people in fear and desperate need, people who saw all too little of that openness and love in communities of Christians that told them nothing more than that they were sinners, and passed by on the other side when they fell ill.

    I write this partly to give honour to Fr Bill, who died three years ago this month and whose radical mission and radical ministry deserves to be celebrated at any time. But I write it in particular now because those years have been dramatized and recaptured by Russell T Davies in his TV series “It’s a Sin”.[2]

    The series follows a group of young people, mostly gay men, as the adventure of their adult lives begins in the 80s. We are with them as they find themselves, and then find themselves under a terrible shadow. It’s truthful, honest, unsparing about the consequences of unknowing and unbridled promiscuity in a community that was still finding out how to live wisely in a world where love was not forbidden. It also remembers energy and laughter and joy and friendship and care and life, sustained even in the face of fear and illness and death.

    It is resonant. Gay friends of mine have been triggered by it this week, remembering people they loved and lost in those years, remembering their own experience of living in the shadows, still hearing the homophobic echoes in their lives today. “It’s a Sin” is a title with a lot of resonance –it references the Pet Shop Boys’ song of course, but wherever did Chris and Neil get the idea for such a title or for such a lyric?

    “When I look back upon my life
    it’s always with a sense of shame
    I’ve always been the one to blame…”

    Neil Tennant has said his song “was intended as a camp joke and it wasn’t something I consciously took very seriously.” But he went on: “Sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time…”[3]

    Well, yes, you do wonder. Thirty years later, poor little talkative Christianity continues to talk. The churches’ conversations on love and faith, which so many are still pleased to call “debates”, will continue for a good while yet. Human lives will continue to be pressed like flowers between the covers of one book or another.

    For myself, I love the body of Christ and I believe Jesus was serious when he asked his Father that we might all be one. So I will continue to do my best to take part in these conversations; I will do my best not to talk about people without them being there. I will do my best to advocate for love and marriage for all, in the persistent hope that Christ’s body may move forward together, may indeed be one, in love.

    But when from time to time all this talking gets too much and I tiptoe out of the room in search of the God of love, when I want to follow Jesus Christ onto the street, I’m going to remember Fr Bill Kirkpatrick – a partnered gay man with a ministry on the edge of the church to people on the edge of the world, a man who reached out.

    And I’ll remember a coal cellar under the London streets, and place of contemplation and silence as the cars roar overhead. And a priest with a ministry of “hearing through listening”, a ministry of unfailing presence, a ministry of encouragement for so many including me, most of all a ministry of listening to his people where his people were – listening in the hubbub of the Coleherne, listening on the street, listening on the ward, listening by the grave. And alongside all this a ministry of resourcing and writing[4] – about prayer, about AIDS, about death, and in everything he wrote, about life.

    Thanks for sharing, Bill. Remembering you I’ll remember that a self-absorbed, censorious and condemning Christianity need not have the last word – it will indeed never have the last word, because the last word is life beyond death.[5]

    Fr Bill Kirkpatrick

    [1]  http://www.unadulteratedlove.net/blog/2018/1/27/fr-bill-kirkpatrick-rip

    [2] https://www.channel4.com/4viewers/blog/its-a-sin

    [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/06/for-hard-core-petheads-the-tennant-interview-in-full/200905/

    [4] For example “The Creativity of Listening: Being There, Reaching Out”,“AIDS: Sharing the Pain”, and “Going Forth: a practical and spiritual approach to dying and death”

    [5] https://www.barnesandsons.co.uk/news/the-late-father-william-john-ashley-kirkpatrick-father-bill/

  • LLF – That Video, Those Principles & a Call for a Public Inquiry

    by Jayne Ozanne, Editor of ViaMedia, Member of General Synod and Director of the Ozanne Foundation

    I made myself sit down and watch the Church of England’s Evangelical Council’s “Beautiful Story” video yesterday, which, like reading the massive tome Living in Love and Faith, I have been steeling myself to do as I knew it would need both a high level of resilience and courage.

    The opening notes of synthesised music immediately acted as a trigger – taking me back to those large packed worship spaces, where we are all carried along on a wave of professional modern music that lulls us into believing that we are safe, we are loved and that we are in God’s presence.  

    It was a world I was so utterly familiar with – a world where I had, to use Rosie Harper’s term from her recent Via Media blog, been “groomed” as a young impressionable Christian.

    It was a world where I believed without question that those “up front” are always right, for they are our ordained leaders “appointed by God” (oh yes, and bishops) to lead us into all truth and righteousness.

    Their teachings – like the interviews in The Video – sound so reasonable, so plausible.  Indeed, to think otherwise would be to question Truth itself. 

    I couldn’t help thinking of the parallels with the many Trump supporters who are currently living under what the rest of the world believes to be a false sense of reality, fervently believing that the election has been rigged and that Trump is indeed the True President.  What’s more, no matter how much you try and tell them otherwise, they are so “sure of their truth” that anyone challenging them “must be working for the other side” – that is, for the devil himself!

    Many friends have asked me: “Why don’t you just switch the film off, walk away from this mess, stop putting yourself in a place that hurts and wounds you so much?”  The answer is because I am committed, I’d even say called, to work for a world where not one more young LGBT+ person will go through what I had to suffer.  I do not want another LGBT+ Christian to have to sit under this “oh so reasonable sounding teaching” and contemplate killing themself, because they can see no other way out.

    So, at long last we have a 30-minute piece of evidence that clearly sets out the harmful teaching to which many evangelical churches are subjecting their congregations – including their LGBT+ congregants – to.  Please just stop and think for a minute what it must feel like to be a young LGBT+ teenager growing up in these churches, wondering who they can trust with the knowledge that they are “different”, that they are, heaven forbid, gay or bisexual or trans and being asked to watch this.  Here are leaders you have been brought up to revere, that everyone around you admires and respects, telling you that being in an intimate relationship with someone you love is wrong and sinful.  Here are “role models” clearly stating that it’s absolutely fine and normal to be single and celibate for your whole life, as that is what Jesus did and what he calls those of us who are not heterosexual to do. (Editor’s note – we are not Jesus!).

    The pressure this sort of teaching puts people under is enormous.  It comes from those in authority at the front, with no hint that there may be other senior Christian leaders – even evangelicals – who think differently. They just say “this is The Truth”.  End of. Full stop.

    Make no mistake about it, Church of England, this sort of teaching is wrong, harmful, dangerous and must be stopped.  What is it going to take?  Another young person deciding to take their life? Another set of statistics and reports that tell you what you already know but refuse to admit, that you cannot try and appease all sides in this debate?

    Seriously, I have absolutely no idea why church leaders, including bishops, do not see what their inability to act is doing to the vulnerable in their care.  This constitutes gross negligence, which future generations will look upon with disgust and ask how we let it all go on, on our watch, for so long without anyone blowing the whistle or anyone caring enough to intervene.

    That is why I believe the time has finally come to call for an independent inquiry into the harmful practices and rhetoric that LGBT+ people are being subjected to in our society, and by certain religious groups in particular.  It needs to be led by a QC who can hear the evidence of the trauma that people have gone through, and continue to go through, by those in positions of influence and authority over them.

    The Church of England seems to believe that it has dealt with this by creating a set of six Pastoral Principles.  My personal view is that that process, just like the Living in Love & Faith (LLF) process, was highly flawed in its conception, its objectives and in its membership.  Despite repeated interventions on the floor of Synod, calling out the fact that there were a lamentable number of LGBT+ people with the right experience engaged with the process, the Church of England proceeded – deaf to any of this input, and arrogant in its assumption that “it knew best”.  The project is now in the court of public opinion – and the verdict is deafening.  They should have listened!  But that is not, sadly, a skill that many in the central structures seem to have.  

    I mean, who would put a group together that was primarily tasked with providing safeguarding proposals, which had a membership weighted towards those perpetrating the very harm we were trying to protect people from?  No wonder they didn’t want to come up with anything other than “principles” or “guidelines”, to do otherwise would risk a whole plethora of Clergy Discipline Measurers against their friends and colleagues!  We needed something that had teeth, that would hold people to account, with clear consequences for when they crossed the line.  Instead we got “guidelines”, which can be interpreted in any number of ways and so does not set a clear safeguarding standard.

    However, the sad fact is that these principles are all that we now have for now.  So perhaps we should try and measure “The Beautiful Story” video against them?

    Prejudice – from its opening words to its close, the film shows a deep-seated prejudice towards LGBT+ people, particularly LGBT+ Christians, and indeed to anyone who holds a different view.

    Silence – the video says absolutely nothing about what other faithful Christians believe, particularly LGBT+ Christians, even though many fronting the film have been part of the LLF process and are more than aware of what other Christians believe and teach.

    Ignorance – it shows absolutely no understanding of the harm they are creating, nor of the mental health consequences of the teachings they are commending.

    Fear – the whole teaching is wrapped in a fear of admitting that they might be wrong

    Hypocrisy – goodness, there is so much I could write here, but perhaps the starting point is how can someone who has been an active member of the LLF co-ordinating group, and who is tasked with rolling it out in his diocese, be the front person of this film? How can bishops who are tasked with ensuring the roll-out across their dioceses of the LLF resource be seen to say “this is the only way of reading Scripture”?

    Power – I don’t think these church leaders have an inkling of the power they hold over younger people in their care.  There is sadly an air of “assumed privilege” from most of the speakers, which comes from a deep internal belief that they are the only ones to take Scripture and Christ seriously.

    So where do we go from here?

    Well the Church of England has proved itself completely incapable of protecting the most vulnerable – one just needs to look at the recent IICSA or Adi Cooper reports to recognise this.  That is why we must look to another more senior source of power – which is why an independent inquiry is needed.

    Meanwhile, like Trump supporters living in their alternative reality, many in churches that revere the “Beautiful Story” will continue to believe that the secular world is “the enemy”, that only they “have the truth” and that Jesus is coming soon.

    It is clear that these people cannot and will not change their minds, so it is high time that the bishops stepped up to the plate and laid out clear safeguarding rules and regulations to protect those in their care.

    The key question, to which we need an answer, is why don’t they?

  • Safeguarding, ‘Reabuse’ and LGBT People

    by the Revd Canon Simon Butler, Prolocutor of the Province of Canterbury and member of the Archbishops’ Council

    Last Tuesday was perhaps the most shameful day in the history of the Church of England for hundreds of years. Forensically, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) catalogued the personal and institutional generational failures which led to the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults by people in trusted positions in the Church. Whilst many say that the failure to address this issue over decades amounts to ‘reabuse’, some even saying that it is worse than the sexual offences once committed, none of us can escape the responsibility that this has taken place on our watch and that we have the duty to put it right. Some are even calling for a Truth and Reconciliation process like that of post-apartheid South Africa. It’s an idea worth exploring.

    I was struck therefore by a forceful response to what seemed to me to be sincere statement of sympathy for survivors and victims of sexual abuse by Bishop Sarah Mullally from one of her priests in the Diocese of London. Father Robert Thompson described Sarah’s words on Twitter as ‘virtue signalling vacuousness’, pointing out that he has raised 4 safeguarding concerns with the Diocese of London concerning the treatment of LGBTI+ church members in some evangelical and charismatic congregations and has not had a proper response to any one of them. Lest this should seem like special pleading from him (or me) for a particular group within the life of the Church of which we are part, we should note that the IICSA report makes specific what we have known for a long time: that our hypocrisy and dishonesty about sexuality has without doubt contributed to the culture in which sexual (and I would say) emotional and spiritual abuse has been allowed to exist.

    To be fair, however, we must not assume that being LGBTI+ in and of itself makes one a vulnerable adult in safeguarding terms. Still, for as long as I can remember I have had to listen to simply dreadful stories emerging from certain evangelical and charismatic churches, usually when a church member comes out or refuses to toe the line taken by ‘the leadership’ (which usually means the clergy). They find themselves silenced, removed from every ministry and leadership role, and generally treated like pariahs. The failure of many of these congregations to be able to discuss matters of sexuality or to live with diverse opinions has wreaked a dreadful emotional toll on many LGBTI+ church members and has contributed to what can only be described as a culture of fear, the subtle and overt withholding of love or placing conditions on it, and silencing of dissent. It is, by any stretch of the imagination, a form of abuse. 

    Some within the tradition have felt uncomfortable about this for a long time. David Runcorn, a long-standing and respected Evangelical theological educator and spiritual director, has attempted to provide an Evangelical theological narrative based on openness, generosity (including to those who take a conservative view) and pastoral care. His recently-published Love Means Love addresses these concerns with an eirenic spirit that is admirable and biblical, although as a straight man he cannot necessarily summon the sense of righteous anger that those of us who see the damaged lives that have resulted do. Other evangelicals within General Synod, effectively kicked out of the Evangelical Group in General Synod (EGGS) for simply wanting to explore a line similar to Runcorn’s, have coalesced into a new group in which a different, honest expression of dissent can be aired, within a caring atmosphere far different from the stifling atmosphere of EGGS which, over my twelve years as a member, became increasingly reminiscent of a Soviet-style party meeting. It gives me no pleasure to admit I often felt afraid. Father Thompson notes the way in which especially some large churches in this tradition use their financial clout to exert leverage over dioceses: do what we want, or else, is the message.

    The tragedy for the Church of England is that there is much within evangelical and charismatic traditions that the rest of the Church of England desperately needs. Missional zeal, social justice and deep personal faith were once the hallmarks of Evangelicalism, things that attracted me to Christian faith, even if these days I feel excluded from the evangelical tradition. Ever the optimist, I remain hopeful that the tradition most committed to the theological concepts of personal sin and repentance can see the beam in its own eye instead of projecting it onto its LGBTI+ members and their friends. Some of those most urging change in the Church’s traditional position are senior evangelical bishops who have come to see that for themselves.

    In the meantime, we await the publication of Living in Love and Faith. I am committed to the process, more perhaps than many sceptics among the LGBTI+ community in the Church. But even I want to sound a word of warning. As we engage with scripture, science, theology and much more in the months ahead, we must not forget that, within parts of the evangelical and charismatic wings of our church, brothers and sisters face emotional and spiritual abuse. Conservatives and hard-liners within these traditions will want to focus on the intellectual issues – many will immediately want to rebut anything that smacks of a chink in the wall. But we must hold them and the wider church to account for this often unacknowledged abuse that is being inflicted in the name of “truth” and “sound doctrine” – including persuading those like Bishop Sarah who are I think very sensitive to issues of abuse that this is unfinished safeguarding business. I urge her and other bishops to take seriously the sort of allegations and concerns that Father Thompson has raised. There are plenty more where they came from.

    We must not forget those who are most vulnerable to bad religion and who remain at risk of the ongoing abuse that has shamed the church so obviously in recent days, and continues to do so where so-called ‘truth’ silences love. As I said at Archbishops’ Council recently, any defence of the gospel or the church that sees that as more important than protecting the vulnerable will lead us back to the place we are being shamed into leaving hopefully once and for all. Ironically, the evidence of such abuse is the clearest example of why the theological position held by conservatives is biblically untenable. 

    By your fruits you shall know them.

  • We Can’t Go Back…So We Need to Take Care of Our Mental Health

    by the Rt Revd Dame Sarah Mullally DBE, Bishop of London and former Chief Nursing Officer

    Sarah Mullally

    ‘Coronavirus has our brains pinging on “future threat,” driving global anxiety and shared fear, as we all live in this extreme state of uncertainty.’ So wrote Jan Bruce in Forbes magazine on March 5th. And if shared fear was a reality then, how much more so now? After three months of daily death tolls, R values and government appeals to stay at home, it is not surprising that a certain amount of anxiety might hang over the public’s heads.

    This week, the mental health charity Mind quantified the impact. In a survey of 16,000 people, they discovered that 65% of adults and 75% of 13-24 year olds with pre-existing mental health conditions said that their situations had worsened. More than a fifth of those aged 13 or older without prior mental health difficulties described their mental health as poor or very poor.[1]

    We needed the stats, the briefings and the message to stay at home. Coronavirus was and is a killer. Understanding the risks helped us to stay alert in a time of real danger. And I’m also acutely aware that many people have faced fearful burdens on top of the virus itself.  Those who have lost their jobs or have been put under severe financial pressures. The elderly who were shielding and less able to socialise online. Those who struggle with loneliness at the best of times, finding their feelings exacerbated by circumstances. Others found themselves suddenly trapped at home with abusers. They faced fears not just from an unseen killer but from a visible threat.

    But the general climate of fear that has been so successfully inculcated in us, leaves us with a conundrum. How do we encourage one another to wisely emerge from lockdown? How do we begin to navigate this brave new world of face masks and social distancing? A world in which we can meet with six others but cannot sing in church. Some can have a picnic in the park while others remain shut up at home. We have permission to roam but the newspapers warn of a second wave. We want to support the economy but can feel, more than anything, emotionally shattered.

    Thankfully, before COVID-19 hit, we had been moving towards a greater awareness of the need to attend to our mental health. Notably the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge spoke out last year. I was grateful to be able to speak on these issues at Lambeth Palace alongside Dr Jacqui Dyer, President of the Mental Health Foundation and the Archbishop of Canterbury last year. The increased engagement with mental health awareness day is evidence of what Justin Welby wrote then: “it feels like something is beginning to shift.”[2] It is becoming okay to not be okay. And in this regard, the Christian story has an important contribution to make.

    In the apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians he says:

    “We have this treasure,” [the treasure being the glory of God] “in jars of clay” [the jars being us] to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Corinthians 4:7).

    Paula Gooder, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, tells me that there were two types of jar in the first century. One was dark and thick used for display. The other used the thinnest material possible so that it would crack in the kiln. The cracks enabled light to diffuse out from within when a lamp was placed inside. The jar was purposely created to be vulnerable, so that the light would shine through it. This, says Paul is God’s design. Our fragility, vulnerability and brokenness is by design, so that the light of the glory of Christ might shine brightly as we persevere in living for Jesus through it.

    All of this means that as we emerge from lockdown, we do well to talk about our mental health. To talk to each other, to make it integral to our ministry life whatever context we find ourselves in, for mental health to be a subject for prayer in public as well as in private. In this way we can each find the comfort and support that we need.

    I’m doing all I can to ensure that the NHS provides the mental health services that our nation will need through my role in the House of Lords. But in the first instance, Paul doesn’t point us to specialised support groups but the shoulders to cry on that he provides in the church. The brothers and sisters that should be available to us all. The challenge to us as churches, is to continue to have a culture in which everyone feels safe to share their struggles and feel able to speak openly.

    Our fear is not something that we need to hide. It is something that can be harnessed in our walk with God. So often it is when we are at our wit’s end that we recognise our need to cry out to the Lord for help (Psalm 107:27). So often, in God’s peculiar plan for this world, it is when we have received comfort from Him and his people, that we are best equipped to comfort others in return (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

    [1] https://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/news/uk-government-must-urgently-plan-for-recovery-from-coronavirus-mental-health-crisis-says-mind/

    [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/18/children-alone-uk-mental-health-problems-listening-stigma

     

  • Trauma & Tragedy in Congregations & Communities

    by the Revd Hilary Ison, Project Team Member for Trauma and Tragedy in Congregations

    Hilary Ison

    The local church often finds itself at the centre of response in situations of tragedy and trauma, ‘opening the doors’ of the church for refuge for frontline responders, providing sacred space for gathering and vigil, or providing practical support and supplies for the local community.

    In order to help understand how best to equip churches to deal with this the Templeton World Charities Foundation agreed to fund a three year project led by Professor Christopher Southgate, to research how best to prepare and train ministers to lead congregations in times of tragedy and trauma.  The small project team, of which I am pleased to be a part, brought together various specialisms: the Bible and Trauma, Christian theodicy, practical and pastoral theology, and embodied and systemic approaches to ministry.  As such we have been able to offer various training days and have published a book (for more info www.tragedyandcongregations.org.uk).

    It seems now more than ever it is important to understand how we respond in situations of trauma so we can help each other navigate our way through these uncharted waters.

    At the start of the lock-down stage in Britain our project team therefore gathered virtually (!) with other specialists in trauma studies to think about how the learning from our project applied to the Covid-19 crisis.  This resulted in a short document (see below), which was produced with ministers in mind, but can be used by anyone in leadership.

    Before reading it, it is important to remember that we are in it for the long haul with this present Covid-19 crisis.  We will need to build new things, new ways of being and of doing, new understandings and connections as we emerge from trauma.

    The thoughts that follow are offered to help navigate this process:

    Thoughts for Ministers during the First Phase of the Coronavirus Crisis

    We are offering these out of the work of a three-year project on trauma and tragedy in Christian congregations.

    First thought: context is everything.
    You will know better than anyone else how your particular community is likely to react.

    Second: this is a trauma to communities, the nation, the world.
    It’s not a shock-event like a fire or a terrorist attack, but slowly there has built, and is still worsening, a crisis that shatters people’s assumptions that the world is generally safe and reliable, and that all that we have worked for in businesses, churches and communities will be fruitful.  The loss of those assumptions, the breaking of connections between people, and the overwhelming of people’s ordinary resources – all of these are characteristic of trauma.

    Some of the wisdom that has been gained about trauma recently can help us:

    1. People’s whole selves are affected – they may feel all sorts of strange symptoms because the body is reacting to the fact that they are not safe. Emotions will be all over the place in surprising ways. Concentration may be difficult. Sharing this information – that it is normal to be up, down, energetic, exhausted, afraid – will help people to cope with it.
    2. People react very differently depending on different backgrounds and experiences, including past traumas.
    3. People respond best when they have clear, reliable information; when they have something to do – ‘agency’ of some sort; and when they are cared for in warm and authentic ways. Even phone calls can be reassuring.
    4. We make sense of things by being able to integrate the experience into an overarching story. But it is much too soon to assemble a coherent narrative out of all this. Even the process of meaningfully gathering together to lament what has been lost is very hard. The trauma is unfolding and there are many losses yet unrevealed

    Community responses to disaster typically show a ‘heroic phase’, full of energy and self-sacrifice, which burns itself out and is followed by a ‘disillusionment phase’, which may contain much mutual blame and suspicion. Only as the disillusionment phase loses its force can realistic, hopeful re-making take place.

    Many of the responses in communities can be celebrated and affirmed. It is worth ministers thinking about what, over and above the generous and heroic actions of many in the secular world, Christian story and practice can contribute. That is particularly true in this time approaching Holy Week and Easter. Public worship may be suspended, but these great transformative moments in the whole human story need some sort of marking.

    Lastly and in a way most importantly, this is a very confusing and draining time, a time when ordinary healthy rhythms are lost.  Trauma professionals are disoriented!

    You may be feeling in yourself and your body the impact of trauma – feeling low and anxious one day and hard to get your brain in gear, energetic the next, and all at a time when clergy are needing to be creative and adaptive in their approach. So self-care, attending to your own well-being, is vital. That includes the basics of good rest, eating, and exercise. It also includes having people you trust whom you can share with, and making sure you are in touch with them.

    With warmest wishes for every blessing in this strange time,

    Christopher Southgate, Carla Grosch-Miller and Hilary Ison, Tragedies and Christian Congregations Project 

    Download this Summary Sheet

    Tragedies and Christian Congregations ed. Megan Warner et al is published by Routledge
    and is available from c.c.b.southgate@ex.ac.uk for £20 plus postage.

     

     

     

     

  • Flattening the Curve

    by the Ven Peter Leonard, Archdeacon of the Isle of Wight, Chair of OneBodyOneFaith and Member of General Synod

    peter leonard

    I am sure you will be familiar with the statements about ‘flattening the curve’.

    I am of course referring to the curve of coronavirus infections and I hope you are reading this at home, unless you are a key worker, so that we can support the NHS and do our very best to help them cope with current health crisis. I’m working from home, which as an Archdeacon is more straightforward then many jobs, supporting parishes across the Isle of Wight to care for their communities and continue the work of prayer and worship albeit not publicly.

    There is of course another curve which I am trying to flatten, the curve of my mental health. Those of you who know me or follow me on social media will know I have a history of depression which, thanks to therapy and the support of friends, is manageable. For those in a similar position to me this management becomes critical as the mental health curve fluctuates up and down like some reckless roller coaster.

    I wake up and do a work out at home  – this feels good and I am relatively calm. I watch the news and anxiety levels increase. I pray and the calming presence of Christ restores peace. I check social media and the peace dissipates. I speak to some of the amazing people in the churches in my archdeaconry and peace is restored along with hope. Someone phones me in a panic and their anxiety feeds mine. Whether you struggle with your mental health or not this pattern is probably very familiar right now.

    If you are expecting me to list a series of helpful suggestions as to what to do during the current crisis which is expected to last for some time yet, then you are about to be disappointed. There are more than enough self-proclaimed ‘experts’ broadcasting on social media telling us what we should and shouldn’t be doing. Personally, I find that unhelpful and you do not need me to add to them. Instead I am going to share with you the single most useful thing for me at the moment.You do YouYou do what works for you in the current situation, within the Government guidelines obviously!

    I started last week wondering what it meant to be the Archdeacon of the Isle of Wight in this unchartered territory. What did it mean to be Chair of OneBodyOneFaith when our members will be concerned and possibly self-isolating? How should I be a priest, a father a partner? How should I behave and what could I do? Should I have rushed out and bought toilet rolls for all my neighbours? Should I have set up a TV studio in my office and started broadcasting inspirational messages across the airwaves?

    In a fast-changing environment I guess I am still working out the answers to these questions and they are changing as fast as I start to grasp them. The truth is, with or without a national health crisis the thing I do best, the thing I know how to do and can be is Peter. So that is what I am doing, and it looks slightly different to what doing and being Peter looked like a month ago.

    Firstly, I have rediscovered the power of personal prayer, not that my prayer is so good that I am changing the world around me, but that prayer is changing me. It is enabling me to be calmer, more peaceful and thus to be more useful to my family, friends and neighbours. Prayer is a stone which casts significant ripples. Peter prays right now.

    Secondly, I am working out at home rather than the gym. As an extrovert, who gets his energy from others, this is a big deal for me. But the home workouts are helping me feel better about myself and my situation. Do I work as hard as when I visit the gym? No. Given the third thing below will I gain some weight? Quite possibly. Does that matter – not in the great scheme of things and I can tackle it at some point if I choose to. Peter works out and doesn’t add guilt to his curve.

    Thirdly, biscuits! Well, strictly speaking tea and biscuits. I had forgotten how immensely comforting tea and biscuits are. Alongside drinking lots of tea and eating biscuits I am also baking. I find baking incredibly therapeutic and so that too brings a sense of calm and well-being. Peter finds time to do the things that make him feel good.

    Fourthly, resisting the pressure which others put on me, or more likely I put on myself, to do and behave in certain ways. There are plenty of amazing people broadcasting worship and prayers and reflections. I do not need to add to it. I was overcome with hope and peace and pride this morning as I visited more churches in my patch than I have ever done before – via live streams, recordings, podcasts, prayer leaflets and emailed liturgies. All from the comfort of my study. Peter receives from others.

    Fifthly, connecting with my neighbours via a WhatsApp group has been wonderful. I have had conversations about supporting each other, shared jokes and even been passed a recipe for hand sanitizer made from sexual lubricant! No, I am not posting this to my Facebook page! Peter does what he can to help others.

    Be the person God created you to be in these testing times. Do what brings you hope and peace and calm and joy. You do you.