Grace (3)
In year five the school was swept by a craze. It was not marbles or YoYos. Instead, someone made a little slingshot out of a bobby pin and a rubber band, and soon, most of us had one. Farmer's kids went down to the implement shed and pinched a bit of high tensile tie wire, and used the vise and pliers to make souped up versions that would send a well folded spitball the length of the twin classroom.
The teachers soon caught on, of course, and one morning recess, a goon squad of prefects began confiscating slingshots. In the next lesson, the headmaster visited each class, gave them a lecture on the danger of such things, and demanded that any slingshots which remained be handed over. Suddenly the whole class was pointing at me: "He's got one." Twenty-nine newly pious kids purging their guilt by putting the focus on me. I'd been here before, never quite fitting in, always on edge. Resentful. I protested that the prefects had taken mine already. They repeated the accusations. The headmaster looked at me and then turned to the class and said, "I've never had Andrew Prior tell me a lie, so I'm going to believe him.
It was a potent dose of a dangerous drug: Be good, do the right thing, and those in authority will reward you, and will rescue you from the mob. It's a lie, of course, but it was true just often enough to be thoroughly addictive. It reinforced early childhood conditioning about being a "good boy," which added to its potency. And it saved me. As a psychiatrist told me in my 30's, "Being this good proper person enabled you to survive. You might not be here, otherwise." He continued by saying, "But now it's undermining everything you do. You need to find a new way to be you." It was one of those moments of grace when someone says something that lets us see ourselves in an entirely different light. It was true. I was judgemental, harsh, self-righteous, and unforgiving... and miserable. I lived on the edges of depression.
I was also stuck, with no idea what to do. It turns out we can't just go out and be a new us, no matter what self-help books say. They may offer potent advice on how to hack our present selves, be more efficient perhaps, but becoming a new person is the work of a lifetime: it took us until now to become who we are, after all! Becoming a new person is a process of conversion not the adoption of a few life hacks.
And there is more. If we are malnourished as a child, that gets "laid down in the bones." The effects are often not reversible, and even with good food later, we may have to live with long term consequences. It is the same with early conditioning. The way we learn to live in our early lives forms us. These things are not simply reversible. They have created us. We often have to learn to live with them and around them, or "after them." So, therapy and prayer may have genuine, rapid," low hanging fruit" effects. But there will also be much deeper issues to address. As an example, I had a growth near my eye as a young child. It was removed under anaesthetic. There is only a scar remaining. I think we can call that a cure. But that was one of a number of early hospitalisations which left me traumatised and unable to function in a hospital setting; not helpful for a clergy person. I live around that. I cope well. But it is a healing, not a cure. Even waiting in the lounge while my wife had brief day surgery—what was I thinking—left me exhausted. That early life hospital experience will not let me go; if I arrange to visit you, I also arrange to take the afternoon off. I’m emphasising this point because my experience of the last several years has been that those old habits of being seem almost to have a will of their own.
Before that though, there has been another lesson to learn. Unable to change, seemingly stuck in my old angry and self-righteous self, I did what I could. I tried to be patient, to love people, to give, to accept all people—a sort of living Philippians 4:8 by strength of will, not that it seemed to do much to change me. About 15 years in from my moment of truth, someone said to me in a moment of distress, "It's alright for you! You like everybody!" Displaying my not excellent pastoral skills, I laughed. Nothing could be further from the truth! Except, on reflection, I realised how much I had been changed. Something had happened.
If I had any doubt about whether I had changed, or had been changed, it was settled a decade later at a moment of high drama in our church life. I was on the majority side in a painful vote over an issue in which I was deeply emotionally invested. Standing at the end of the proceedings I saw a group from "the other side," looking grey and exhausted, and felt an involuntary compassion for them. My ceaseless inner voice was gobsmacked: "What!? Them!?" Normally, that inner voice would have been the cheer squad for my schadenfreude and condemnation. This was grace, something acting upon me; I think the most I had done in all my efforts to be a good minister was open myself to the possibility of being open to it. That sense of being acted upon has not ceased. I am amazed and blessed by the healing of old hatreds and the softening of my attitudes towards people. As a child, I had a copy of "Pilgrim's Progress" which had a picture of the burden falling from his back. I feel something of that lightness of being.
Despite this, in 2020, I retired sick. Retirement undid me. The times were stressful: COVID, the death of our mothers, moving house twice, and more, but something else underlaid it all. I had managed the inner voice and the depression from my childhood with a tightly organised routine of writing, congregational and other work, all linked together by my bike. I cycled way more miles than I drove. My doctor once wrote into her notes, making sure I was listening, "Managing depression with excessive exercise." It turns out that a job gives us permission to do lots of other things which can be fitted in and around the work schedule. I was riding 200km a week to go to work. I could schedule appointments around work, and no one complained about that—it was only reasonable. Suddenly, there was no routine, and it seemed impossible to create one. I slowly fell apart at the same time as I was making huge and healing discoveries about myself. How could Iife be so wonder- filled and horrible at the same time? The self-hatred which had been instilled in me in my early life paralysed me for days at a time.
I could sometimes shut down the inner voice of the old life by losing myself in a writing project for most of the day, and then cooking tea, and reading until bedtime. And would climb into bed exhausted, where the litany of grievances of my old self would crowd in on me. It felt like counterattack. I would still be fully awake hours later.
Farmers can count sheep in their sleep (so that strategy was useless) but I found that counting backwards, carefully enunciating each number, would take up enough brain bandwidth to crowd out the voice and the rumination. But getting from 4,000 down into negative numbers takes a long time!
I began to say some almost rote prayers from our faith tradition before going on to the counting. Small prayers, and then a couple of poems, which came from times and places where I had felt safe and affirmed. And hymns. I tried to add others which seemed theologically or pastorally appropriate—I might suggest them to someone in my situation, but I found them almost impossible to memorise. Yet , by comparison, the words and tunes from times of grace have been almost effortless to learn by heart. One night, a psalm from the Scottish Psalter returned from my childhood memories, unhidden and almost word perfect, even though I have no memory of ever learning it by heart.
I began this practice four years ago, but the inner hostility has worsened. I know the old rumination is disastrous, dangerous, and pulls me down into un-liveable places for days at a time. (Not to mention the pain it causes the rest of the house.) But knowing and stopping are two different things. I've had parishioners tell me of the sweet relief of shooting up; it sounds horribly familiar. Part of what is happening is this: We know how to live in painful post-abuse, or post-trauma situations, or in some other unhealthy fashion. We're already doing that. It is known territory. The pain, the emptiness, and the exhaustion, come from walking away from that at least familiar existence and going into and facing what seems an unanswerable, "How?" This is why, I think, it sometimes feels like the old existence is a live thing in me, fighting back.
Let all mortal flesh keep silence is an ancient hymn I met in theological college. I love this hymn. It begins my litany each night, sometimes several times. One terrible evening, I was dreading bed. The old litany of rumination had been pushing its way into my mind way before I got to the bedroom. And each time, the melody of Picardy would float like a divine ear-worm into my consciousness: Let all mortal flesh keep silence... Grace will not be denied.
John of the Cross suggests that the light of God assails and purges us. In this view, the grace-love for which we long is intensely painful. "The soul feels itself to be so impure and miserable that it believes God to be against it, and that it has set itself up against God. This causes it sore grief and pain, because it now believes that God has cast it away…" It is only as we begin to trust the light—get used to it, essentially, that this pain lessens.
But for me, the main issue seems simply to be undergoing the pain of refusing the old behaviours which offer the deadly sweet relief of an addictive drug. But the refusal has begun to "work."
I can scarcely put this into words. I see some of it in the metaphor of my physiotherapist. Shifting house meant finding a new physio who, it turns out, rarely does the gentle massage with which previous physios unlocked my seized up back. This new physio is about twisting and stretching. I have experienced the worst pain I can remember on her bench. And have regained more movement more quickly than in any other situation, including regaining feeling in parts of my body that had been numb for years. During my periodic visits, I have become aware of how concerned she is for my whole health, and how carefully she proceeds. I look forward to visiting when I need to, knowing that the pain is good; I am being cared for and made well. I think my back is in way better condition than my inner life, but the healing of both continues.
(Andrea Prior June 2025)
