Eyre Lines

Letting go of chains

I read in “Living the Questions” (Felten and Procter-Murphy 1998 p.5) a quotation from the author Maya Angelou. “I’m startled or taken aback when people walk up to me and tell me they are Christians. My first response is the question ‘Already?’ “.

I sympathise with that. I also sympathise with Dave Tomlinson’s description of himself as a “Bad Christian” in “How to be a Bad Christian”; he cannot (yet) do all the things he thinks a true, a complete Christian should do, so he is a “Bad Christian”.

Yes, I may well not be yet a Christian, or I may be a Bad Christian, or I may be an incomplete Christian. I have a direction, but I have not reached the destination of my journey, nor do I think I ever will. I see that Jesus encourages me to give away all I possess to the poor (Mat. 19:21), in many passages; by the standards of many in the world, I am a “rich man” and though I can imagine ways in which I could pass a camel through the eye of a needle (Mat. 19:24), the poor beast would be very unlikely still to be a functioning camel on the other side (blenders and extreme gravitational effects sprang to mind).

I have a wife and children and an aged mother, and though I also hear Jesus asking his disciples to leave their families and jobs and follow him (repeatedly, in Mark 1:17 and throughout the early parts of the gospels), I fear that as matters stand I feel my obligations to them outweigh my obligations to myself.

And yet I know from personal experience that the more I let go of ties which bind me to the world, to money, to possessions, to self-image, to status in the eyes of others, to control of my or others’ lives and to individual other people, the more my heart is lightened by letting me pursue the Great Commandments. Thus I talk of my obligation to myself.

In all these, I cannot say that I can yet “Love the Lord my God with all my heart, and with all my soul, and with all my mind” (Matt. 22:37). I doubt I will ever achieve that degree of surrender except, perhaps, for very brief periods. I try to imitate Jesus, to imitate Christ, as best I can, but cannot hope to count myself his equal.

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The abrupt ending, on 26^th May of this year, of 17 or more years worth of decline into depression, for the last 8 years severe clinical depression, has given me an opportunity to review my life in a way impossible to me for at least the last 8 years, and with the gift (taken away by the depression) of being able to recall the emotions (or lack of them) which affected me previously. Depression, if severe, removes emotional recall as well as the ability to feel positive emotions and, eventually, all emotion.

Indeed, depression may have been growing well before 17 years ago, because despite emotional recall, I cannot remember a period when I felt so energised, so enthusiastic, so optimistic, so accepting, so grateful and so alive before at any time in my life. I have a better lens through which to view, so I can look back at my self-examination in the past (a regular exercise for 45 years) and see more.

In Acts 28:20 Paul says “since it is because of the hope of Israel that I am bound with this chain”. According to Acts, Paul had been arrested and bound with chains in Jerusalem when in fear of his life from the local population, and via various places, all under Roman guard and, it is supposed, attached to a Roman soldier by a chain, eventually reached Rome, preaching all the way. On his route, Felix, governor at Caesarea, was willing to let him go, but did not in order to placate “the Jews” (24:27).

So, he was bound by chains, and bound because of his preaching, his attachment to Christ – a binding, an attachment, which did not affect his ability to preach to soldiers, governors, a King, sailors and finally people in Rome, as distinct from Romans.  He was a prisoner, but his bond to Christ made him free. In Ephesians 3:1 he says “I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus”, but the translation is sometimes “OF Christ Jesus”, and we can see which of the Romans or Jesus kept him prisoner successfully, and of these which he accepted voluntarily from choice, which of necessity.

There is a talk given by a well known 12 Step speaker called Earl Hightower, entitled “How free do you want to be”.  He focuses on the 12 Step programmes’ Step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”. Briefly, his argument is that by surrendering completely to God and to the programme, you will become free, and the more you surrender the freer you will be. I wonder whether Earl had been reading about Paul, or, indeed, if his predecessor Bill W. had been. We see there Paul surrendered to his relationship with Christ, effectively free despite actually being in chains; he is doing what he needs to do, he is doing what he wants to do. He seems to have achieved that every time he was imprisoned, in fact.

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Depression is like imprisonment. I’m not unacquainted with real imprisonment; as Paul found, if the spirit is free, the walls and the chains cannot bind. The insidious prison, however, is one you make for yourself; the “Open Prison” tends to have this characteristic – all the inmates could walk out at any time, but they imprison themselves for fear of what would happen if they ventured outside (in that case, generally a significantly more restrictive prison). Often the more restrictive form of open prison stays with people after they leave. Prisons generally can also sap hope and will; it is common for people to become institutionalised, so their situation, however awful, seems better than any alternative could. Life can evolve to live in volcanoes, prisoners can learn to live in Hell.

Depression sets boundaries you contribute to yourself, it cuts you off from yourself, taking away your emotions, your hopes, your mere likes and dislikes, leaching all of the colour and life out of life until the only reason the idle thought that death would probably be better doesn’t get acted on is that it would take some emotion to muster the energy, and that went years ago. Eventually, like the institutionalised prisoner, you become complicit in its continuance.

I feel I’ve just been let out of prison after 17 or more years of depression, and let out of the self-imprisonment as well. More, though – I can now see what I couldn’t see before, that there are ways of looking at my life which just haven’t been available to me for years, ways which involve actual emotions rather than just coldly logical analysis. In 12 Step terms, this is a “Step 4”, making a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself. It is not usually recommended that you share this (in Step 5) with the whole internet community as I seem to be doing, though, just another human being and God.

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So, what do I now see? Well, at the beginning I talked of Jesus commending the abandonment of money, jobs, family and, of course, security. In Matt. 10:39 we read the culmination of this; “whosoever loses his life will find it”. I see these as chains which bind us, which hold us from pursuing a loving relationship with God without condition.

I see the young Chris, fairly free of chains, entering into a relationship with the lady who is now his wife; I see him taking a job, buying a house and borrowing money to do that, doing a job which was about helping others and taking on obligations towards them; entering politics and taking on obligations to look after the people he represented; starting a family and commencing a lifelong responsibility towards children and becoming an employer and taking responsibility for the welfare of employees.

None of these was a bad thing. An accompanying sense that in order to fulfil all of these commitments, more money needed to be made was not so much bad as dangerous (at least it wasn’t pursuit of money for its own sake). A growing fear of failing in these commitments might have been beneficial in small measure, but was damaging when allowed to grow. A lack of trust that “all would be well, and all manner of things would be well” without Chris’ own endeavours was very damaging. Accepting the obligations as absolutely necessary, as things which could never be let go of, was fatal.

These were all chains, and eventually they became too heavy when there was a shock to Chris’ system. But he tried to pick himself up and push forward, despite the growing knowledge that something had broken, and that he was, after all, too weak for all of these chains. He could not; the weight became steadily more unbearable; Chris started to self-medicate with alcohol in order to cope and eventually one of the chains (a client) pulled hard and Chris allowed himself to be pulled into a stupid and catastrophic action.

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The last ten years have been horrible. I came close to losing wife and family (my wife on several occasions, only once by her leaving), I did lose business, ability to practice my profession and social status; financial security nearly to the point of bankruptcy; nearly my home; my physical health, for a time my mental health, for a time my liberty and very nearly my life. And, for over 6 years, hope, purpose and all positive emotion – and my consciousness of God.

Twelve steppers will recognise that everyone who starts seriously upon a twelve step programme has experienced an emotional rock bottom; without it, you cannot start to rebuild successfully. Mine came on the 30^th of November 2006 when all of the above had either been lost or their loss seemed inescapable. Sadly, it took some time following that, from the prison of depression, to be released.

I’m now free of the chains of business and profession, clients and electors, the desire for financial security, or at least excessive financial security and if the house goes, God will provide somehow. This has been forced on me as of 25^th May 2013; I don’t think I could have let go completely voluntarily. My family, I can attend to without the chains being too heavy now, and I can see that they didn’t just need a bank balance, they needed me, and me without all these other chains. It has been a painful corrective exercise, but I can now see it as a necessary one.

So, Earl Hightower asks me “How free do you want to be”, and I say “exactly as free as I am; and if I need to be more free I can weaken my grip on a chain or two”. The chain I will not willingly drop is that to God; previously, among all the others, I think I had dropped it. It took 6 years to find it again, or for God to press it back into my hand. *

So, with Paul, I will happily be a prisoner OF Christ. Not a perfect one, as Maya Angelou or Dave Tomlinson would agree, with some reservations, but knowing the other chains which bind me and which I elect to hold on to.

* In conscience, I will not willingly drop the chain representing my wife either; I did effectively drop this for a period in 2006-7 and regret that; I hope there is never a stark choice of God or her, because I would probably choose her. We are joined in flesh and spirit, as Paul would put it; I cannot separate us.