When Jesus heard the ruler’s reply, he said to him, ‘One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come follow me’. But when the man heard this he became sad, for he was very rich.
Luke 18: 22–3
Having designed an approximate schema for understanding biographical information and emotional commentary, the third element of the interviews concerns what I have loosely called ‘the spiritual’ or ‘spirituality’. My aim is to produce a similar analysis, aware from the outset, however, that the material is even less precise than that which formed biographical or emotional content. This chapter focuses on a broad categorisation of the interview material taken under five headings, in part influenced by previously described concepts of spirituality and religious experience: Images of God, Experiences of Church and the Bible, Single Religious Experiences, Personal Theologies, and Humour. I wanted to include the idea of laughter somewhere in this analysis because it featured often enough during descriptions of traumatic events to be noteworthy and surprising. By placing examples in the section on Spirituality, I follow Michael Screech’s Laughter at the Foot of the Cross which sees laughter as a significant element in a Christian understanding of God and human beings.
In general the reaction to my questions about God or spirituality elicited a wider range of responses than the previous areas of biography or emotion: wider in the sense that some individuals like Jim or Danni had almost nothing to say, whereas for Julie or Pete talking about God seemed part of their natural discourse; wider also in the sense of how the question was interpreted. Some opened by talking directly of God, others preferred the safer ground of assuming I referred to the Church. Some indicated from their initial remarks the kind of conversation we would have – ‘I’ve never been a conventionally religious person’ (Charlie) and ‘Oh, I was very lucky. I was brought up in a children’s home by nuns, so I’ve always believed that God’s been there’ (Julie). Others needed a series of specific questions. The following sections enable the reader a further glimpse into the world of these individuals and how they speak about the significance of spirituality in their lives.
Swinburne’s distinction between God ‘being there’ and God ‘doing something or bringing about something’ is one I shall maintain here particularly in reference to Julie’s interview. The following gives an example of how she expresses herself about God:
God’s always with me, as bad as I am, which my probation officer says, ‘You’re not bad, you’re only a shoplifter’. Though I steal, I believe that God will help me through it eventually, given a chance. And also that God’s on my side and human beings shouldn’t judge me anyway because I don’t judge any other human beings. That’s up to my Maker to judge me at the end of the day. When judgement day comes, I’ll face what I’ve got to face.
From this I take God to be always present, supportive and helping, but also judging. The notion of the presence of God is re-enforced a little later when Julie declares that God is everywhere and it is human beings who lose God in the ‘desolation’ they have created. While ‘my Maker’ may be said without much reflection, God as creator is intended when she introduces this more theological point:
The way I look at it is God gave us a beautiful garden and gave us lots of animals and trees, things and flowers, and we were supposed to be gardeners as far as I’m concerned and look after his world. We just turned it into a rubbish tip.
I ask Julie specifically to describe her picture of God and she replies without hesitation with the abstract: ‘All I know is that God is love and that is all I need to know’. Towards the end of the interview she introduces the phrase Higher Power in reference to God, and explains that she uses this because of her experience with groups like Families Anonymous. Many people she meets prefer this phrase to talk about ‘someone to belief in, that’s greater than yourself’.
Both Charlie and Danni use the same or a similar phrase: ‘as for there being a Higher Being, yes, I believe there is somewhere’ (Charlie). He has read about the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe so ‘there’s got to be someone who said “let there be light” if you like and started it all off in the first place’. Danni recognises the term Higher Power from her rehabilitation programme but it has no real meaning for her. Tim says that his image of God is ‘as someone I’ve been able to turn round to in prayer, or talk to, quite a few times in my life, in sticky positions’. He is the only person to refer to prayer. Pete is another person whose easy talk about God produces a variety of different images. In describing how he met his second much younger wife he says that:
God compensated me for the loss of everybody then because my mum had died, my father had died, my father-in-law, my mother-in-law, my wife, so all my connections with anything previous had come to a halt.
Another image of God as protector and life guide is seen in relation to his attempt to commit suicide. He concludes that ‘our friend up there made the big-end on the car pack up because it appears he has further things for me to do in my life’. He is not clear what this might be, except that he recognises that his singing voice is a gift from God and best used for the benefit of others in charity concerts and for worship. Pete begins his story with the death of his first wife; she too is considered as a gift. God is also conceived of as someone who is testing Pete through the different experiences of his wives, so that he wonders if God exists at all, and if so why he is being tested. This made him reluctant to attend any formal worship. Charlie also blames God for a sense of isolation and abandonment. This is the answer to my question seeking to tease out any spiritual experience, however vague, during that period of his life:
When my wife died, I felt I had been let down. Quite honestly, to an extent I thought, if there is a God up there, how the hell could he let this woman suffer like this. I had already lost my father in a fire and my mother with multiple sclerosis. I felt very sick with life, in general, you know.
Blame and anger with God are more clearly marked in the interview with Geoff. The death of his granddaughter in a car accident has left him with questions but no answers:
Geoff. My granddaughter was eleven, on 25th August she was twelve and killed the day after her birthday in a car accident. The car went out of control, hit a tree and she was killed outright. One of my daughters was on a life support machine and the youngest one had a six hour head operation. One of the two drug addicts said he would swap for her, but he was a waste of space.
David. Did the other two survive?
Geoff. Yes, but my daughter suffers physically and mentally through the accident. But life goes on. I ask him upstairs why he did it, her and not me or one of those useless sods. There’s no answer.
David. Did you expect an answer?
Geoff. No, not really [pause] I suppose at the time I did. Why did this happen?
His answer in terms of an image of God is to say that there is definitely ‘something’ there and he ‘ought to come back and sort it out’. The image of God as protector is given an indirect reference by Jim. He describes a car accident which could have been fatal except that ‘someone didn’t want me to die’. He wonders why in his drunkenness he was able to escape the car wheels, and decides that ‘destiny is in other men’s hands … someone else is above me’.
God as abstract creator is the nearest Richard comes to an image of God, as he thinks about the beginning and ending of the universe; whereas Fran is much more personal. God for her is the power inside her to give life and energy: ‘I know there’s a God inside me all the time because that’s what gives me power to be able to get up and go’. She also has this lovely image of the imperfection of living away from home, which yet contains something of God:
The essence has gone out of it, as I say living in hostels and things, the essence is slightly taken away, but we’re also given something which is more, which is close … to God … the silver is slightly tarnished, you know, it’s not a complete home there’s no home there so it’s different.
Marc and Julie are the only interviewees who mention Jesus. Marc uses three images: Jesus in pain on the cross, Jesus as someone who loves him, and Jesus as protector and guardian. His comment on his multiple attempts at suicide is to say that ‘I think Jesus kept me alive’. Julie’s reference is of Jesus using the plain language of parables as the vehicle for his message. Suitable quotations are included in the section ‘Personal Theologies’ below.
There are many comments about Church in the course of these interviews, covering a wide spectrum of opinions, both positive and negative. Caroline considers the thought that churches might be there to help people in her situation, but does not see in reality how they could have done so. Her actual experience of Church is as a child – ‘I went to Mass every Sunday, I knew the words off by heart and I used to say it at the same time as the priest did under my breath’. She also recalls school assemblies and having her flat blessed. She does make some connection between Church and her own situation when she describes her feelings:
I tell you what it felt like: hell. That’s how, this is my … I think that we live in hell and when we die we go to heaven, see, because when we live we’re worried there are always bad things that can happen but when we die, at peace, at rest, we don’t need to worry you see, nothing can hurt you … I’ve always thought that, thought that ever since I left home, well I thought that all my life, really. So I must have thought about the Church because that’s to do with the Church … you do live in hell because it is hell to live.
Danni also responds to the word ‘spiritual’ by remembering that she went to church when she was younger, but there was no opportunity at the children’s home. In prison, faced with the choice of being locked up or going to the chapel, she chose the chapel. Her more recent experience of Church is attending A.A. meetings in church buildings. We then move quickly to a more blurred area in which she talks about her therapy. In the A.A. programme Steps Four and Five are reflective exercises about self-knowledge and moving forward. The link here is that the person who helped her reflect was a priest. God is not immediately there for her in this process, but her reaction is still interesting:
Danni. You do, I can’t remember what the title was, but basically it’s an inventory of your life and there’s about thirty-six categories and you have to do two examples of each category and it’s basically about tolerance, impatience, like you get the bad side and the good side of each subject. Basically it’s like a lifestory, in categories. You have to read through it with a priest. Some people were with the priest like seven or eight hours. It was a whole day thing. It wasn’t just an hour and that was it, you know. Some of it was really heavy.
David. Did you feel kind of, did you feel God was there at all, or was it just something you were sitting doing at Akron?
Danni. I felt before I went in, I was really upright, really nervous about it all. When we started sitting down and talking, I didn’t feel that at all. I did feel relaxed, comfortable with it all.
Church as an experience of youth is recalled also by Pete – three times a day on Sunday – until the age of 18 when he decided to stop attending. He describes some later visits to hear a Salvation Army band concert (where he met his first wife) but it was not until her death that, thinking back now, he was aware of the absence of God. A visit very soon after her death by the local curate is a significant event for him when Pete is persuaded that taking his own life is not a shortcut to being reunited with his wife. He is given the opportunity to reflect on what life means for him now and encouraged to find a new purpose. In retrospect now he comments: ‘It was my faith really in the end that kept me going for as long as I did’. Yet the importance of this mourning for him can be seen in his memory of spending some period every day at her graveside and being there at midnight on each New Year’s Eve following her death. The priest reminds him that she is not there, and he replies that he knows that, but it does not stop him. He has also experienced the other side of the Salvation Army as a homeless person himself, and is grateful for their help. They again encouraged him in the idea that ‘there is a plan worked out for me’. He does not want to be thought of as ‘a religious nut’ but his ‘creed in life … is to do as the good book says: to do unto others as they would do unto me’.
Of all the interviewees, Tim describes the most positive attitude towards the Church. During his experience of being homeless he has in fact become a ‘regular church-goer’, though he has moved from the Church of England to the Baptist Church. I enquire further into this:
David. So what do you get out of church, that’s the $64,000 question?
Tim. You mean personal feelings? Financially nothing! Being able to have a fixed firm belief. I’m given a lot more strength, plus my local Baptist Church has never done anything to bring any fixed bearings on me. They took their own time to get used to me. It’s difficult to generalise, it may well be that the C of E here is different.
David. You’ve been given a lot more strength, what sort of strength?
Tim. I’m given a lot more confidence to ‘perpetuate the lifestyle I lead now’. Over a period of time they’ve never brought any pressure to bear. Other organizations have thrown cheap coffee at you.
Another positive though indirect experience of Church is described by Marc. He has visited a Christian cafe called Pete the Rock (a former butcher’s shop called Pete the Meat) near the hostel in which he lives. He is encouraged to read the Bible and it is from these visits that Marc draws the images of Jesus around the theme of pain. He starts to help there – cleaning tables and serving meals – noting that the people at the cafe are friendlier than at The Victory and from more diverse backgrounds. He says later in the interview that the Bible helps him when he is feeling depressed: ‘Even now, occasionally I read the Bible, when I want to read it, like if I’m down, deep down, I read it. That perks me up a little bit’. Some of his approach is fatalistic however. This is how he speaks of one way of reading:
Shut the Bible, where I shut the page, slamming down, I put my hand on a certain page, it opened on a certain page, I thought he wants me to read this, he must want me to read this certain page here, so I kept reading, reading it. You know I read the Bible occasionally, not very often; to start with it looked like a story to me, I enjoyed it. I thought, well they’ll get to know me, they’ll get to know people on streets like from Victory.
A more mixed response is seen in the interviews with Fran and Julie. Fran’s view of Church is coloured by the relationship with her sister whom she calls a ‘born again Christian’, who insists that Fran is not properly Christian until she has been re-baptised. Fran’s reply is that since she has been baptised once she is a Christian already, and that this is important to her. Another Christian has challenged her practice of martial arts accusing her of being ‘with the devil’. Julie takes a critical look at Church in her usual sharp way, with an image of how different churches relate to one another. In the first extract below, she links Church to how she sees her role as a disciple, and in the second she gives an interpretation of ecumenism:
I’ve been to churches, lots of different churches in my life, when I’m doing down on church or whoever knocks on my door I think most of them have got certain things right, but they’ve got a little lost. The Mormons have got lost for a start, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have got lost. They think they are the only ones going to heaven. They’re really lost [laugh] … I talk about God to all my friends. I don’t go to Church. I know I don’t go to Church. I try and pass on my own messages and that’s all the disciples did. They just stayed down there with the people – sometimes you can’t reach the people at the top. Sometimes you have to stay down with them.
I go Christmas Eve to any church which is available because I don’t believe that, I believe my only way of explaining is that, in a field you’ve got a tree and as a branch you’ve got, on one branch you’ve got apples, and on one branch you’ve got oranges, on one branch you’ve got lemons, on one branch you’ve got peaches, but it’s the same stem … I always pop into the nearest church where I’m living. As I said it doesn’t matter what church, so long as it’s a church and I thank him for my year and I ask him to forgive me at the end of the year.
Lastly, Charlie and Geoff talk about Church more negatively. For Charlie it is a memory of going to a church for a free meal and being expected to repeat a Hail Mary prayer which he did not know. ‘I mumbled something, God knows what it was, so awkward really’. This then is transferred to a wider comment on how much he dislikes the concept of sacramental confession. He names the Roman Catholic Church in connection with ‘too much dressing up, too much pomp and circumstance in churches, far too much’ and reckons the Church should be more like a communist state: ‘Everyone should be equal within the Church. They’re not, are they?’ He also dislikes any form of fanaticism in organized religion. Geoff’s criticism dates from his days at a Catholic school. He says that he could recite the catechism but not do simple additions or tell the time. He resents religion being ‘jammed down my throat’. We end the interview with this exchange, which gives a fair reflection of the tone of the whole:
David. Does that wind it up?
Geoff. I don’t like Myra Hindley’s use of religion. God is just an excuse.
David. You don’t like religion very much, do you?
Geoff. Not when it’s used to manipulate people. Ask me about church?
David. When?
Geoff. Four Sundays ago. I just walked in and sat down.
Geoff. No, in Basingstoke. It was URC, no particular reason for it. I had no vision of God to go on or anything.
David. How was that?
Geoff. It was different, it was explained. There was biblical explanation which I find interesting, not religion but explaining. One bit I remember was the crucifixion, not four foot in the air on a cross but at eye-level.
David. That was interesting?
Geoff. Yes, I always thought of it four foot in the air. I could see Peter’s hair on fire. A lot of people interpret the Bible to suit themselves. Churches use lots of things to suit themselves on the day. We should get our own house in order before we have Christian Aid abroad.
Religious experience-as-event (in Beardsworth’s definition) is mentioned in only one interview, and that briefly. When Charlie is first asked whether there has been anything spiritual in his life, his reply interrupts me:
To a certain extent I’ve never been a conventionally religious person, because although I do tend to think … I’ve never had a spiritual or religious experience, OK? I’ve got to say, the only experience I’ve ever had which is out of the ordinary is my wife was somewhat of a healer. She was very good with animals, she was a very caring person. She died in a horrible way and it always seems to happen to the nice people in this life that they have to go like that. She was a really lovely person, very gentle. And she once, I used to suffer from migraines, and she literally lifted a migraine out of the top of my head with her hands, literally lifted it out of the top. I could feel it going out the top of my head, lifted and that’s about the only spiritual experience of any kind that I’ve ever had.
When Julie is asked whether she has had any particular experience of God, she shies away from a concrete answer and prefers instead ‘Sunrises and sunsets that’s all to do with God … God’s in everything I see’. Geoff describes a couple of experiences of second sight but refuses to call these religious experiences:
David. Have you had any other experiences?
Geoff. I don’t know, but I can tell you nothing about religion. I’m not a crank. There was a big dance in France, it caught fire. All the exits were cemented up. I saw that happen. I knew it happened. A few days later in the paper it was all there. There was a witness, a young boy from Reading. He disappeared from home in a green anorak, everybody was looking for him. She came outside and asked what am I doing? I say that there’s a young lad out here, he’s drowned. I said he had blue anorak on but it was green. He walked into the mud and dropped through and drowned … Quite a few of things like that. I can’t get the numbers in the lottery.
In re-reading these transcripts I am struck by participants attempting to express complex ideas without many of the tools to do so. It is important here to acknowledge this attempt and see beyond the difficulties of expression. Some concepts are explicitly Christian (Julie’s for the most part), others are implicitly so, some people use the language of Christianity but produce a skewed result, and others again (Richard for example) are trying to describe their own ideas. Some of these examples have been used previously so need not be reproduced in full again.
The two theological motifs of Julie’s interview are sin/forgiveness and discipleship, which are repeated in different forms a number of times. In the section Images of God, the idea of personal sin is linked to judgement and salvation, as well as the wider picture of God’s creation spoilt by the greed of human beings. On another occasion I ask the question more directly:
David. When you ask God for forgiveness, what does God say to you?
Julie. I don’t know if God forgives me or not, but I won’t know until the end of my life. I mean, I think he understands. He’s the only one who can look into my heart and know what I’m really like, so at the end of the day … [laughs] I haven’t killed anyone yet. We weren’t put down here to be perfect. We weren’t perfect when we got here, you know. I try my hardest to do the best I can in this life. All right, so I have a problem with shoplifting, but I think apart from that, I’m not too bad a Christian, not too bad a person to a lot of people.
The last words here connect to the second element of Julie’s personal theology: mission or discipleship. She imagines a definite role for herself ‘in the underground of life’, and while she does not feel it important to attend Church, she does want to ‘pass [on] my own messages’ like a disciple. Similarly she says: ‘Because I talk God and I talk nice and I talk love and a lot of criminals don’t like that sort of talk, I have to suffer quite a lot down this end’. By implication, the message she is passing on is the same as her root image of God: ‘God is love’. The simplicity of this is important for her in contrast to the obfuscations of everyday life:
God made life so simple. It was people that complicated it. We’re losing each other with lots of big words that people don’t understand. God spoke in … Jesus spoke in parables and things like that and made it so simple. He took something from life to explain something. They don’t do that here. They explain things with things that people don’t understand. With jargon, people don’t understand jargon. They don’t need jargon.
Reflections on the nature of pain and suffering are common to three people here. Caroline, Charlie and Marc all place their comments within a framework of traditional religious language (heaven, hell, God) though it is only Marc who relates suffering to a theology of the cross. This same image of Jesus is mentioned twice in Marc’s interview; the second time in a rich mixture of Bible, love, lust and friendship:
Well, Jesus had pain for us, he died for us, had pain … like when you cut yourself you can put a plaster on, well he feels it, he must do, because you can easily wrap it up in plaster and that’s over and done with, but he felt the pain for us on the cross, must have done. Even now, occasionally I read Bible, when I want to read it, like if I’m down, or run down, deep down, I read it. That perks me up a little bit. I read a bit more … when I first read it, Tracy said, ‘Oh you don’t want to read that, it’s sloppy that’. I said, ‘Look it’s not, it’s a story’. Weeks go by and if I’m down, deep down, I read it and it helps, he helps you along that road … Saying that when Tracy says ‘I love you’ but I actually say, ‘I love you Tracy’, but what is love? I don’t know what it is, I never found it. Saying that, if Jesus loves you, you love him don’t you? It hurts a bit, like, I can’t grow attached to too many people. With John I knew his faults, his drinking, his tablets, but he didn’t love me, like … I don’t know. I was in lust or whatever, I don’t know, he said to me, ‘You’re too young to settle down’, too young at twenty-seven. So I still read the Bible it helps me along.
Elsewhere Charlie wants to escape the straight-jacket of religious language and concepts when he seeks to separate the notion of moral good from religion: ‘I think you can be a good person without being a religious person’. He is tired of hearing comments which imply that you have to be a Christian in order to be a ‘nice guy’.
By comparison, Pete freely uses theological language, but his concept of God in a Christian sense is limited and fatalistic. One interpretation would be that his image of God is as provider of wives who are there to ensure his comfort; his anger is directed to God when there appears to be an arbitrary removal of these either through death or drug addiction. He relies on there being a plan of life worked out for him, but he recognises that he is hardly in control of it. This contrasts to Julie’s remarks about a God of love and forgiveness.
Richard suggests an alternative viewpoint without using traditional religious language. He too imagines that life is planned, but in the context of a creator who also plans the beginning and end of the universe, who is greatly more advanced than we are. There is a reason for all creation, and human beings have to find their purpose within this. He talks of a ‘task’ or a ‘test’ which we have to experience, and therefore learn the kind of gifts we have and how they might be useful. It is partly this philosophy of life which prevents him from being angry with his situation. When I ask him further about this he says that as he has grown older ‘You’ve just got to sit there and mellow. You sit and listen more’.
Black humour makes light of the most serious events of life and risks being misunderstood or considered in bad taste. It is a mechanism by which we are able to approach the unapproachable in the speech of everyday, so it should not be surprising that in the seriousness of these interviews, the humour that is around is of this kind. Three examples suffice and in each the speaker laughed or smiled after their remark. Pete laughs as he tells the story of waking up in the middle of Dartmoor having assumed he was dead and finding himself still alive; Marc smiles at the recollection of trying to gas himself and discovering only an electric fire. Caroline laughs as she recalls a very young, unhappy marriage:
David. So you got married and your … that didn’t last very long?
Caroline. No I left him, he beat me up. He broke my nose and black eyes and bruises everywhere. I went back to him after that [laugh].
Pete lightens his story with less black humour, and jokes at my expense: ‘So I bought the vicar his cup of tea and sticky bun because vicars have never got any money. David, you know that’. Danni laughs in a little embarrassment as she remembers being questioned about who her Higher Power might be and finding that she really had no clue as so what was meant, unless she could include her pets:
They used to say to me that your Higher Power is someone or something you turn to for like guidance, or to talk to about problems. And apart from my probation officer or social worker, or something like that, the only person I turn to is my pets.
This kind of humour is different from the style of Julie’s interview, which relies more on wit and juxtaposition of opposites, part of her mechanism for survival in a hostile world. This chapter ends with two examples:
God gave us a beautiful garden … We just turned it into a rubbish tip.
I was lucky to be brought up in a children’s home. I might have been brought up in a family.