Watch, Wallet

When I was a child, I understood the Holy to be my left shoulder and Spirit to be my right shoulder, following on from the Father at my forehead and the Son at my chest.

When I was old enough to memorise the Creed and the Gloria, I understood the Holy Spirit to be connected to the Father and the Son in some distant way. In the Creed, the Father gets an introductory paragraph, Jesus gets a long story, and then the Holy Spirit gets bundled into the closing paragraph and has to share random billing with the Prophets, the Church, baptism and resurrection: none of which seemed to me to be connected in any way. In the Gloria it’s a similar deal: Father gets the intro, Son of the Father gets the lion’s share, and the Holy Spirit gets a cursory mention in the closing. So, the Holy Spirit wasn’t the runner who sprang powerfully out of the blocks at the loud crack of the starting pistol, nor the athlete who crossed the finish line in glory to the buzz of the crowds cheering in such adulation that they drowned out Vangelis’ plinky-piano-over-reverberating-synthesizer-snaps title theme from Chariots of Fire blaring over the loudhailers; he/she/it was surely on the relay team, but in a quietly unobtrusive way.

When I was a teenager, the Holy Spirit was some strange thing they had in other churches, something spoken about in hushed tones that implied the presence of frighteningly supernatural goings-on. As an adolescent fascinated by horror movies like Carrie and The Shining, I would think very carefully before going to those churches; and when I did go, I would be completely on my guard, even though the other kids seemed to be good friends and they talked about the fun stuff they did at Youth. Maybe that was just a cover story to get you to come inside, and then you would be possessed and sorry, and walking towards the light would be the worst mistake you could make.

At the time of my Confirmation, I gave very little thought to the Holy Spirit because my attention was all wrapped up in trying to memorise my line in the second reading taken from the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 2: Sr Loreto thought it would be a great idea to have us Candidates lined up along the altar rail, facing the congregation, no notes in hand, to recite the readings. We were each given a line, or a part of a line, to say in turn. God bless Richard Mackrill, standing two people before me in the nervous white stripe, who loudly proclaimed that we could hear “Croutons and Arabs!” speaking in our own tongues. He got me so tongue-tied on my stifled shoulder-shaking laughter that when my turn came I could barely utter my astounded bewilderment or ask what it all meant.

When I had quit church, the Holy Spirit was a facetious explanation for drunkards and people who were behaving strangely. “What’s wrong with him?” “Dunno, maybe he’s got the Holy Spirit?!”

Despite my flagrant lack of regard for God, when I was in my mid-twenties I suddenly and inexplicably felt the lack of God in my life. It was visceral. I woke up one Sunday morning with a strong desire to go to church. But not to the Catholic Church, mind you! On 26 September 1999 I braved the 18:30 evening service at the local Assembly of God, where I knew not a single soul. Just my luck: an itinerant preacher called Maureen Onions had come to do a ‘Holy Spirit service’. That was quite some service; it frightened me half to death, but it kicked my prayer life into top gear. Suddenly I was talking to God again after years of angry silence, it was like someone had slammed opened the sluice gates at the last possible moment before the dam walls holding my life’s chaos would be breached. My prayers burst forth in a soundless torrent, with a sincere intensity they had never had before:

“Dear God, please save me from these crazy people! If you get me out of here alive, I will go to a proper church, I promise you, I promise, I do SO promise!”

I was all for keeping my promises. After visiting a string of churches in my neighbourhood, I attended The Alpha Course hosted at the Catholic Church (and the story about that invitation needs its own page, so I won’t include it here!). Here I got the benefit of distinctly charismatic Holy Spirit teaching, but in a more mainstream church environment. Compared with my encounter at the AoG, this was only marginally scary, but it was still scary: what would happen to me if I asked to be filled with the Holy Spirit? And what if I asked and nothing happened at all? What if everybody else started speaking in tongues, getting words of knowledge and prophesying, and I was left out? The Alpha Course encouraged me to give serious thought to the person and work of the Holy Spirit. Apart from the serious thought – which was interesting but quite confusing at the same time because everybody had their own ideas and it didn’t seem like anybody was being told their ideas were wrong, which gave the impression that even priests and deacons are not completely sure about the Holy Spirit – the course also gave me an opportunity to connect with God at a deeply intuitive level. I was always very comfortable living in my head, and Alpha challenged me and helped me to begin to open up and start living from my heart, to start learning to let go enough to get in touch with my spirit. My experience was a profound one, and relatively unique: I wasn’t seeing a resemblance reflected back or articulated by others in my circle, and I was a little unsettled by some of the blank looks I would get when I spoke about my experience. I felt like I was a submarine sending out sonar pings but getting no response echo, surrounded by the silence of an empty ocean. But at the same time, some of the testimonies given by people that I had prayed with, seemed to bear out my gut feeling that God was moving powerfully in the liminal space between our heads and our hearts in those prayer meetings.

Since I was having a lot of experience of the Holy Spirit, but didn’t feel that I had gained any sound understanding of the Spirit, I thought it best to pursue whatever teaching I could find in churches that seemed to be a bit better equipped for this Holy Spirit business. I got hands-on training from roving youth prayer animator Jeannie Morgan from Soul Survivor church in Watford, UK. Rather than teaching me theoretical knowledge, she taught me how to still myself and open my being to God, and to be brave enough to share whatever I saw and felt during those sessions. My barriers began to come down and I felt connected to a benevolent power beyond imagining, and I had an overwhelming sense of glimpsing eternity: all things, all people, all places, and for all time, held together in love and unconditional goodwill. These were awesome experiences, but in some respects they had me swimming across very deep water, when the truth was that I could barely manage dog paddle with water-wings. I suppose it was progress of a sort: I had abandoned the submarine!

Looking back on it now, I think that the feeling I had of wanting to know everything I could about the Holy Spirit was really an unconscious fear of the dark waters of the unknown. My faith failed me, and instead of walking on the water towards Jesus’ outstretched hand, I succumbed to an impulsive need to be in control of my world at all times, and I sank down into that deep green sea. I imagined that if I could learn enough about the Holy Spirit, then I would know how to tap into or unplug from the God grid at my leisure, the way Luke Skywalker learns to use the Force in Star Wars. I would be able to choose when to use the power, and when I didn’t know how to deal with something, the power would know and sort stuff out for me. I could turn stones into bread, I could jump from a parapet, man the world was my oyster! I would finally be in charge of whatever happened to me in this life. I would see things coming, and I could duck and parry as necessary; I could avoid getting thrashed or kicked to the kerb. I was trying to make God and His cruel world safe by learning how to harness and channel the Holy Spirit’s boundless Karate Kid energy. I can laugh about the absurdity of this now, but at the time I had no clue what I was doing. I was like a crouton in a bowl of Shourabat El Qeema.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then! From 2004 to 2007 I spent my Monday afternoons on a shrink’s couch and my Wednesday nights in Monsignor Borello’s theology class, and in both of those places I was challenged to move out of my own space, my self-absorption and my insistence on an exclusive relationship with God who was there to look after me and my demands, into a new realm of growing in relationship with God through encountering other people. I began to experience the Holy Spirit as the thread that weaves its way through the universal tapestry of billions of people’s life stories, and the energy that makes dialogue and relationship possible, regardless of the barriers that exist between gender, race, religion, levels of education.

I still have a lot to learn about co-operating with the Spirit. I am a unique individual and it’s important that I know who I am, and that I am true to who I am, because only then can I be fully the gift that I am intended to be for others – but I have to balance my own inner journey with reaching out and being prepared to move beyond my boundaries and my comfort zones. I need to allow other people to challenge me, even change me. To do this with integrity, I depend on the life of the Holy Spirit within me to move me and guide me, and keep me connected to God through increasingly healthy relationships with other people. The Spirit is also my memoria passionis and teaches me compassion.

Conversion

Describe how you have experienced conversion as an event and a process.

If you had asked me in the year 2000 to describe how I experienced conversion as an event and a process, I would have told you in all sincerity that the process by which I experienced the event of my conversion was fourfold: I went on an Alpha weekend in mid-February, I got up out of my chair and went forward for prayer on the Saturday night (12 February, around 19:30) just after the Holy Spirit talk, I stood there looking and feeling stupid for some minutes, and then I went back to my seat. And there it was; a done deal. I had fought long and hard with my demons, but I had taken the big scary step that would change my life forever: I had given my life to Christ, I was converted.

Ten years later, my answer to this question is much more complex.

Being a converted Christian was wonderful, for the first few months. But it took all of the energy that I could muster to be nice to everyone all of the time and restrain my darker impulses, the way I knew a good Christian should. I poured all of my energy into reading the Bible and other spiritual writing, and into prayer groups and a variety of church activities. This kept me busy and out of the way of mischief. In my quest for perfection, I signed myself up for far too many activities and pushed myself to a point of exhaustion. And that’s when it happened. A helper on a church course did something stupid and irritating: they stood idly by and made critical comments while they watched me wear myself out trying to do the million things I had voluntarily taken on, instead of making themselves useful by helping me, the way a proper Christian should. I lost my temper.

And so the spell was broken: clearly I was not the holy converted Christian I thought I was, instead I was the same old devil I had always been. I was gutted.

I was not ready to throw in the towel. Not just yet. But the harder I tried, the more slip-ups I made. I lamented: can a mean girl change her tongue? The leopard her spots? As easily would I be able to do good, accustomed to evil as I was. Realising this, I could hardly believe it took as long as it did to get to that first watershed temper tantrum! This posed a dilemma indeed: if I was a new creation in Christ, why had the old things not passed away? Why was it so hard to cease to do evil and learn to do good? If it takes a caterpillar two weeks to be metamorphosed into a Monarch butterfly, how long would it take me to be conformed to the image of Christ? I was not the least bit consoled by Paul’s irremovable thorn theory. Why would God give a person a weakness just to keep them humble? That hardly seemed fair: keeping holy perfection of out of someone’s reach was akin to holding an ice-cream cone over a child’s head where they could see it but couldn’t grab it. Cruel.

Nobody has ever justly accused me of being a highly disciplined person, so it was against the odds that I decided to persevere with my quest for Christ even though I was becoming increasingly convinced that I was never going to succeed at becoming Christ-like in this lifetime. Something resilient in the depths of my stubborn soul decided to stick to the commitment I had made on that Alpha weekend in early 2000. Maybe it was because of the amount of flak I had taken from people who were unimpressed that I had ‘gone all Christian on them’, maybe it was because conceding defeat would be tantamount to denying the truth of a very deep spiritual experience, and doing that would mean refuting my grasp on reality along with my affinity for Christ. I could not explain the spirit of what had happened to me on that all-important Saturday when I’d gone away on a Christian weekend instead of going out clubbing with my so-called friends, but it had profound meaning for me, and it had changed my life by making me more open to real – and not just superficial – relationships with other people. And that was why turning around and going back to how things had been Before Christ was just not an option! My spirit had grown too much for it to fit back into the hole it had crawled out of.

So, since going back was not an option, and given that my inclination towards sin was coupled to my inclination to finding and holding onto God, what were my options? The way I saw it, I couldn’t afford to step off the gas with attending talks and courses and reading and reading and reading everything I could get my hands on that would help me to see how other people had gone about achieving enlightenment. I also frequented the cinema more and more regularly: most of the material screened at Cinema Nouveau offered food for thought about people and relationships, and these forays into the darkness of the movie theatre presented me with glimpses of light and transcendent beauty that proclaimed God’s real presence in this broken world and offered me hope. It might not be easy for characters to change and grow and become something quite different by the time the credits roll at the end of the movie, but every fleeting frame of celluloid whispers the promise that transformation is possible.

Somewhere in amongst all of this, I found myself more at home in the Catholic Church again. As a youth I had forsworn my mother’s hypocritical religion, but as I became more and more sincere about my own flaws and failings, there was something about the faith of my childhood that appealed to me and offered me reassurance. If I was prepared to acknowledge and confess my sins, I could be sure of receiving forgiveness. This wasn’t available in the other churches I had attended: you said sorry in the silence of your heart, but how did you know for sure that you had been forgiven? There is something liberating, even healing, about hearing an authoritative human voice confidently speaking the words in God’s name: “Go in peace, your sins have been forgiven”.

I even got to a point where I felt that I was ready to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. This was a pity for me, because I had already been confirmed when I was in high school, and Church law is quite clear that Confirmation is a sacrament that can be administered only once. I had some regrets about that: it would have been so nice to have received the sacrament now that I was really ready to belong to the believing community. To get over my disappointment, and to affirm my uncelebrated intention of becoming properly Catholic, I decided to attend Monsignor Borello’s theology course.

Borello’s teaching about the Sacraments opened my eyes and I began to understand what Baptism and Confirmation and Eucharist are about. I was baptised when I was nine and I had been reverently taking communion since the day after my baptism, and I’d even kept going after I was confirmed under duress in order to do what was required of a Catholic daughter, but I honestly had no idea what God had been doing in me through those sacraments of Christian initiation! Luckily for me, being clueless was no barrier to receiving God’s grace, and it seemed that I must have received enough grace in my early years to preserve my life in Christ through the days when I had no intention of taking refuge in God. With no knowledge of the meaning of the words ‘proper disposition’ in receiving the Sacraments, and without conscious knowledge of Church teaching about man’s capacity for God, the desire for God was written in my heart; and God never ceased to draw me to himself. God’s grace was enough to inspire, revivify and advance my innermost quest for God. From the moment I came into being, God never withdrew the invitation to converse. It took one Andrew Ivo Borello to read that invitation to me in a translation I could appreciate!

While I was doing theology every Wednesday night for four years, I was also becoming more active in ministry at Archdiocesan level, where I was being pushed out of my middle-class white comfort zone and discovering how much I don’t know about other South Africans: from language, to culture, to Auntie Abrahamse’s koesisters (not the twisted plaas variety, the ones with aniseed and coconut!)

This past decade has seen me being radically transformed. An interlocking series of changes and developments are flowing out of this: my psychological, educational, sociological and cultural horizons are shifting. My basic stance towards reality is being fundamentally altered: what had once gone unnoticed is becoming present and vivid, what had once been of no concern is now of the highest importance; my direction is altered, my eyes are open and I perceive the world in a new way. Indeed, I perceive a new world. I am shifting from the level of thought to the level of action: I am recognising myself as free and responsible, able to make decisions that are based not on personal satisfaction but on value, not just on what gives pleasure but on what is truly good and worthwhile. My emotions, decisions and actions are all being shaped and directed anew – because I find myself being-in-love with God: heart, soul, mind and strength*. In this new world, I talk to total strangers in public as though they were my friends and family. If I keep this up, I might even start loving my neighbours! The more I am converted, the more I realise how much I need to be converted.

* Concluding paragraph borrows much from McBrien, Richard P. 1981 Catholicism New York, Harper & Row, pg 961-963 (on conversion, explaining Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology)

My Redeemer Lives - Job 19:25-26

I think that Job’s assertion is a statement of faith: in the face of extreme suffering, his hope of release and vindication is his lifeline. Job knows that his own actions cannot save him, and neither do his friends seem able to help him (indeed their efforts only compound his suffering). But while Job cannot understand or explain his suffering, he is convinced that God exists, and he believes that God, who is both benevolent and omnipotent, will redeem him in time. Job cannot conceive of giving up hope of salvation while God exists: God is good, and everything will work out in the end.

Like Job, I experience occasions and patterns of suffering in my life, some of which are brought about by my dogged determination to do the right thing, and some of which are entirely beyond my understanding. Even so, I have no intention of admitting an aversion a Deo, of revoking my fundamental option, that deep-seated inclination that I have towards God. I am convinced that despite my unworthiness God will come to my aid and will save me from distress. My vindicator will help my enemies to understand what I have been unable to articulate in all of my dealings with them: that I’m just a soul whose intentions are good, O Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood *.

Unlike Job, I live in a world where Christ has already come, and his perfect work of redemption has already been concluded. There is no need for God to “Just Do It” because it has already been done. In some respects this makes it both easier and more difficult to be a person of faith: easier because I know that it is finished, salvation has been achieved, and failure or inaction on God’s part is no longer an option post-Christ; and more difficult because I need to make sense of a lived experience of suffering in the face of completed redemption, and have patience with the ‘always only becoming’.

My best analogy for this experience of redemption is to say that it is like watching a film that is based on a true story: we know how it must end, but we watch it anyway, because the telling of the story and the creative use of imagery and music and the interpretation of the characters by the cast are all as valuable as the storyline itself. Simply outlining the plot does not come close to doing a proper job of telling us what happened; we need to see and hear and feel the spirit of the story.

Monsignor Andrew Borello once suggested to his theology students that judgement day might be like sitting next to God while you watch the movie of your life, and then together you make an assessment of how you spent your time on Earth and how you used your freedom: judging by what you know is contained in Scripture. When judgement has been made, you will then be shown mercy †.

I am a big fan of cinema, and I quite like Borello’s proposal, it works for me. So I get out of bed every morning wondering how this day’s scenes will play out. I ask myself what choices my freedom will offer me, and what decisions I will make. How will the characters (especially mine) develop in terms of what motivates them and how they interact with each other and how they respond to, or drive, plot developments? How will the plot progress? Will the cinematography and the score come anywhere close to capturing the beauty that I see and hear all around me? And, most importantly, will God enjoy watching this movie with me, when it’s finished and done? (In a manner of speaking, God is the Executive Producer and owns the rights to my film: if He dislikes it, I have a problem!)

Of course, I know that in the movie of my life, some of the scenes will be ugly and regrettable and I’ll be tempted to excuse myself and go to the ladies room while those bits are on screen. But all is not lost: while I’m the lead character in my own doubtful movie, I’m also a supporting character in my friends’ movies, and I have walk-ons and cameos in literally hundreds of other people’s life stories. I’m hoping that if my biopic is not a winner in and of itself, I’ll be redeemed by the majority of my appearances in other people’s films. If I have brought life and hope and humour to most of my fellow beings, and if my presence in their lives has enriched the telling of their stories, then hopefully my body of work will have endeared me to my creator, my redeemer and my inspiration, even though my character is flawed and my overall performance has been variable and sketchy, morally unconvincing in parts, and compellingly villainous in some of my roles.

* B.Benjamin/S.Marcus/C.Caldwell wrote the lyrics of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood. First recorded by the sultry Nina Simone in 1964, it was vamped into an unforgettable Latin disco hit by Santa Esmeralda in 1977. There’s also an expressive 2006 version by Yusuf Islam – aka Cat Stevens.

† Monsignor Borello taught us that in the Greek icon-writing tradition, Christ Pantokrator (i.e. Christ Almighty) holds the book of the Gospels in one hand and makes the sign of blessing (or mercy, in some interpretations) with his other hand. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, during confession penitents kneel before an icon of Christ the Teacher, a variant of the Pantokrator, that depicts the Gospels held open to reveal the Word of God by which our lives are to be measured.

Interesting Snippets and Fun Facts

In Music
Monica Sinclair, the inconspicuous British operatic contralto who performed I Know That My Redeemer Liveth to critical acclaim in the 1959 Royal Philharmonic Orchestra recording of Handel’s Messiah under Sir Thomas Beecham (available on RCA Classics label), had a great gift for comedy and was married to a former Covent Garden horn player. As talented as she was, she had no need to blow her own trumpet.

In Movies
Thomas McCarthy’s 2003 film The Station Agent has a wonderful ensemble cast that includes Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Canavale and Michelle Williams: all of whom are well known for brilliant low-profile roles in many other productions. They interpret their roles with emotional depth, warmth and humour, and their onscreen presence is almost always uplifting and hopeful.

Thomas McCarthy

Peter Dinklage
Patricia Clarkson
Bobby Canavale

Michelle Williams
Peter Dinklage

Thomas McCarthy’s 2008 film The Visitor also features an ensemble cast of mostly unknown actors apart from Richard Jenkins, who comfortably fits the same profile as the character actors cast in The Station Agent. The newcomers in this later film all have the potential to grow into the profile.

Richard Jenkins
Haaz Sleiman

Danai Gurira
Hiam Abbass

Richard Jenkins
Hiam Abbass

While none of these actors is a big headline star, their consistent appearances in a wide range of film and television productions is what makes them memorable. Eventually the viewer begins to make the connections and say “Hey, where have I seen this person before? There is something so familiar about them, they’ve got real heart. They’re grappling with the first-order questions of life in the way they portray their characters. What else are they in, and where can I see those films?”

In my circle of friends, whenever someone reminisces that this or that now-deceased person was a “real character”, my response is always that I hope that people will one day say the same about me!

A Sinful Existence...?

How do you personally experience the terms ‘a sinful existence’ and a ‘hope-filled existence’?

When I was younger, everything connected with religion spoke to me of my life as a sinful existence: my mother’s household religion of cleanliness being next to godliness, my catechism lessons from high school onwards that seemed an attempt at controlling ceaselessly shameful behaviour. If I sneezed too loudly, chalk it up on the venial sin scorecard. If I was cheeky, that’s another black mark dangerously close to the mortal sins list. I couldn’t breathe or move without being made to feel guilty about having done wrong by someone, somehow; as Hermann Hesse has Mozart enlighten the Steppenwolf, “Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that.” I wanted very much to honour my religious education by being a good girl; but the pressure of having to try to be perfect at all times in order to avoid occasions of sin, or else be as much of a disappointment to God as I seemed to be to everyone else, was absolutely unbearable.

Unable to shoulder this immense burden, I decided that ‘sin’ was an illusion designed to control and manipulate me into submitting to the will of elders and others in authority, or indeed to anyone with a will to reference my subjection to God, who could use my fear of God’s retribution as a means of punishing me if I expressed an opinion or exerted my own will. I saw my experience mirrored in Antonia White’s book Frost in May, in which she describes a convent school teacher remarking about a troublesome potential scholar: “Ah, and here we have another little will to be broken”.

In order to be my own person, because I am who I am (and as Popeye-the-sailor-man famously said, “and that’s all that I am”), I claimed my independence in my late teens and early twenties by defiantly rejecting the notion of sin as a reality. It was then that hope began to blossom for me. Of course, my hope was in myself and not consciously in Christ or in Christ’s presence in me – so my lived ‘sinless’ conduct (in name but not in truth: and it took me some time to see how this philosophy was affecting my relationships with other people) was ultimately disappointing and unfulfilling. I had made of myself a god, reflecting only a distorted image of the God who still lived within me even though I had made up my mind that his existence or otherwise was no concern of mine.

In retrospect, I realise that while I thought that by rejecting all authoritarian claims over me, I was rejecting God, I was in truth sincerely searching for the freedom that comes from knowing God as wise, merciful and caring; God who wants to be connected through relationship to all people. I was looking for responsible existence in relationship with God and other persons and I was rejecting the mechanisms of power-play that coupled and characterised so many of my relationships when I was a youth: this corruption was the sin that I sought to forsake.

By God’s mercy, a sincere religious experience enabled me to encounter God, to look past the pseudo-religious construct that had obscured his visage from me until then, and to see him for who he really is. In my encounter with him, I came to know myself as loved by God. In the light of God’s love, I was able to acknowledge my own failings and sinfulness, ask for and receive mercy and pardon, and be reunited with Christ in a genuinely hope-filled existence: one that recognises sin and its effects as a reality, but that acknowledges God as the source of all goodness and God’s love as the power by which sin is overcome. Out of the ashes this phoenix arose: I grasped with both hands the opportunity to re-evaluate my personal creed, turn away from my fiercely independent rejection of what I had imagined to be God, and be faithful to the good news of God’s compassion and love.

This experience taught me that in finding freedom in Christ, I am in faith able to accept responsibility for my sin. In accepting responsibility for my failure to love fully, I find freedom to accept God’s forgiveness. In accepting God’s mercy, I find the strength to hold onto hope in a world where God’s intervention is always only the becoming historical and concrete of God’s transcendent yet embedded self-communication. In holding onto hope, I can live a life of love as far as I am able, and I can keep on learning how to love – even though I often get it wrong.