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Please help me

photo © 2008 Ricardo Bernardo | more info (via: Wylio)


I got fed up of people not being able to comment on my blog, so I have moved to WordPress - the new blog is here.

I guess I'll get used to it, but at the moment it all seems very difficult and ugly.... Can you go across and check out whether you can comment?

Thanks!

Mr Catolick talks about Appointing Bishops

(For the story see Andrew Brown)

Bishops are not the Focus for Unity

photo © 2007 Southbanksteve | more info (via: Wylio)


I am absolutely furious this morning with Rowan Williams and with the Church of England. I don't trust myself right now to write anything about the power abuses and the blatant injustices within the organisation I work for. (Read Andrew Brown). So I just want to concentrate on the phrase about bishops being the "focus for unity"

Apparently a Bishop can only be appointed if they can be a “focus of unity” in the diocese. But how many objectors does it take to stop a bishop? And who decides? Are there any priests who could carry the whole of a diocese with them before appointment? And suppose a bishop loses the support of his diocese – should he then resign? (I can’t possibly imagine Rowan thinks that for one moment, not at present!)

“Focus for unity” may appear to be a reasonable phrase, but in fact it is meaningless; it allows the blocking of anyone as a bishop because someone doesn’t like the look of them, with no definition of who is and isn’t acceptable. All rather like the Anglican Covenant, the offence is in upsetting someone else, not in any objective and predefined behaviour.

Given that “offence” is the basis of the blocking, then perhaps we will see no more Conservative Evangelical or Anglo Catholic bishops. We can certainly be assured that if the Women Bishops legislation gets through General Synod then it will be utterly useless - because surely there will be one parish in each diocese who would claim that a woman would not be a "focus for unity".

Or perhaps we can be sensible and decide that “focus of unity” is not a job description for the bishop, but for the diocese; that it is incumbent upon all of us in a diocese to gather round and support our bishops, which doesn’t mean unthinking obedience, whether we agree with them or not.

Of all the rotten excuses for discrimination that I have heard this is by far the worst. It guarantees the status quo and the grounds for discriminating is "someone doesn't like your face".

Jesus is our "focus for unity", not the bishops! No wonder we are suffering power abuses if the Bishops have decided to put themselves in the place of God.

Recovering from Abuse - The problem of memory

photo © 2008 Sarah Le Clerc | more info (via: Wylio)

When I was a kid, between the ages of 7 and 10, I lived at 6642 Kirkley Ave, McLean, Virginia. My road was low lying, running parallel to a creek that ran along the bottom of our yard. The main road also ran parallel to my road and it was elevated compared to us. Three roads ran perpendicular to my road joining us to the main road and I cycled down them, scaring myself. They were breathtakingly steep, perhaps 1 in 5, it was exhilarating.

This is my memory of my house. Is it true? Absolutely, I would think. I would swear to it and get very indignant if anyone contradicted me. But then I went to visit the house when I was older, and I was shocked to find that the slopes that I so bravely cycled down were pathetically tame.

I guess we all have this experience. The things we remember as children turn out to be smaller, milder, tamer when we see them through the eyes of an adult. We come to doubt our childhood memories.

So what do we do with half remembered fragments of ‘something’ that points towards abuse? Well we doubt them. But they call to us – nag us...

I was asked how to recover memories of abuse in the comments of a post entitled ‘Recovering from Abuse – Remembering’, the commenter says:

Years ago I had a couple of panic reactions to situations which caused me to suspect that I had been abused. Since then some bits of memories have come back to me that would back that up and something else said by a family member also points to that conclusion. I just feel it's all so vague and sometimes I feel inconclusive. I know I'll probably never remember every detail and that probably wouldn't be helpful anyway but I feel like as you say it's a jigsaw with missing pieces. I just wish I could find enough pieces to give me an idea of the overall picture so that I could deal with it.

If remembering is the first step towards healing how can I make that step? Just now I swing between trusting that God will reveal things to me when the time is right and feeling like I have to know now in order to move on.

I remember this very well. For me it was agonising – having tiny shards of memory – like, for instance - a hand over my mouth that also blocked my nostrils so I was wildly trying to breathe, my heels pedalling wildly, digging into my mattress to get some purchase so I might get away. With the shard of memory was the emotion associated with it – sheer terror.

What do you do with that? For me, I had to know. I am lucky enough to have had two Spiritual Directors who have helped me, one after the other – they took pity on me in my agony and sacrificially decided to accompany me in the pursuit of finding out the truth.

They were both very aware of the accusations of False Memory Syndrome that had been a feature of child abuse cases in the States in the 1990s. So they were cautious, but still wanted to help me.

The first helped me using prayer. We would settle into a very deep silent prayerful state and then she would ask me if Jesus was there. It was a sort-of Ignatian prayer, which is the type of prayer I do at the end of the day – walking alongside Jesus through the memories of my day – through the highs and lows, coming to peace with it all.

So I had many sessions when we prayed and I walked alongside Jesus through the memories. I could remember more than I thought – I believe the memories were blocked by stress and tension – and as I was with someone I trusted, in a relaxed state of prayer, hanging out with Jesus, it was easier to remember. In particular, it helped me remember the splitting, the way I willed myself to be outside the room, and I actually achieved it psychologically – I was free, the other side of the window and in the night sky, completely unaware of what was happening in the room.

I thought it was all behind me, and it was for a while, but then another shard or two of terrifying memory appeared that I couldn't make sense of...

So the second Spiritual Director did something similar to the first – she used a technique to help me relax, and then in a relaxed state I could enter through a door, and the door led me into whichever memory I wanted to go to. I probably could have remembered more if I had allowed myself to keep going back, but it was too frightening, and eventually I understood enough to draw a line under it all.

Do I trust the memories? Not every one of them entirely. However, almost everything I have written about my childhood home above did turn out to be accurate. I believe my memories are broadly true because

- there are some vivid bits,
- they completely explain the wacky phobias I have,
- I was a very psychologically poorly child indeed and my symptoms are in line with what happens to children who suffer sexual abuse,
- I can remember the re-abuse, and I was very knowing indeed, I had clearly done it before,
- the behaviour of my abuser towards me as a child and as an adult is in line with him having abused me.

It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, it doesn’t have to – but the recovery of enough shards of memory was a way of me getting the healing I needed.

I think I am lucky in many ways - lucky that some of the shards of memory returned, lucky that I had the opportunity to take the recovery in two bites - first the re-abuse and then the first abuse, lucky that I had such wonderful spiritual directors, lucky that I am a Christian and have had a sense of God's love and sense of being held.

Not everyone gets the help that I have been given. I wish they did.