Lullabies Louder Than Storms (Mental Health Awareness Week 2024)

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week, and as someone who has his fair share of issues in this field, I’m compelled to write. While the world has advanced in its understanding of mental health and it’s perhaps now easier to talk about the subject, we’re still not in utopia. It’s still not easy to sit here and say that I struggle with my mental health. I want to be honest and open about it, but that doesn’t come naturally. Talking about it can be exhausting and throwing this out into the world involves a level of trust I don’t always feel. But I’m still here typing, because I don’t think staying silent particularly helps. Silence just allows things to fester and mutate in the dark; silence just feeds the monster. And the ridiculous thing is there is no monster.

Mental illness is exactly that – an illness. It’s not an act of will, or someone getting over-emotional, it’s an issue with an individual’s brain chemistry or trauma response or whichever other squatter gets into the backrooms of our brains to vandalise the furniture. Someone is mentally ill because they’re ill, not because of a lack of emotional fortitude.

That illness can manifest in all sorts of ways – a rolling sense of anxiety and disaster, for instance, the nagging insistence that we’re only three minutes away from a cataclysm. Or picture days, weeks and months of depression wrapping someone in a thick, insulating fog made of anvils. Hair-trigger rage or hair-trigger self-loathing, or some volatile cocktail of the two. Strange thoughts like intruders lashing out when you least expect it. Name any one of a hundred different symptoms that our brains adopt as a strategy, because their primal wiring is more interested in surviving than thriving, creating a new, buggy operating system as a result. And that’s the frustrating thing about it all, because if you’ve got a broken leg, eventually you’ll realise you can walk again. Mental illness can rob us of that realisation and understanding, can rob us of a sense of what’s real, our imagination for what it’s like to be healthy.

It doesn’t help that we live in a world that’s being shaped by a media environment that wants our eyes locked on screens, because that’s where the sacred ad’s are, and that’s how they process our lives into a billion bits of monetised data. The tools that enable all this aren’t always conducive to mental health, and so we’re swimming in a sea where algorithmic waves keep us churning in their wake. At times like that, all you need to do is get out of the sea, but that’s easier said than done when it feels like you’re drowning.

There is hope though. From a Christian perspective, God is with us, even when we feel as though the world is twisting and shaking, even when we’re horribly aware that the foundations of our lives are riddled with vicious cracks. And I’m comforted that God often shows up in the middle of the turmoil, standing next to us in the maelstrom. When the prophet Elijah wanted to simply lie down and die rather than feel his crushing anxiety any longer, God encountered him in silence, but that was silence surrounded by an earthquake and a firestorm. Compared to that, the time I felt a sense of peace in the middle of San Francisco’s noisy and crowded Fisherman’s Wharf is small scale and unspectacular, but sometimes that’s enough. God is in the small places and small moments as well; sometimes we make God too big. And our theology loses something if we forget that Jesus went through agonising moments of fear and physical trauma, so much so that, when he appeared to the disciples following the resurrection, he still bore the scars and, as heretical an assumption as this may be, still remembered the emotional and mental anguish of the crucifixion. Worshipping a scarred God means that, when we reach out for the divine, we’re repaid with empathy and understanding.

Reaching out is easier said than done sometimes. There are times when our minds won’t allow us to string the words together, times when we can’t face the despair as our prayers bounce off the ceiling once again. At times like this it’s important that there are people out there willing to help and support us. Again, that’s when churches have to be intentional about taking mental illness seriously and the time for that isn’t just in the middle of someone’s deepest moment of crisis. It’s about providing sanctuaries, establishing communities to which people can escape when needed. People can’t just assume a community is safe because it’s linked to a church, we have to visibly and vocally live out that value, because for those who struggle, the mere act of asking for prayer requires mustering reserves of both courage and trust; at the same time, the pray-er needs to embrace the idea that coming alongside someone facing depression or anxiety may be more of a marathon than a sprint. God is a healer, and while we look at dramatic, instant recoveries as miracles, God often – perhaps more often – walks the longer path of medicine and therapy. I don’t deny that sometimes God miraculously liberates people from the things that hold them down through a dramatic and inexplicable move of the Spirit, and those moments are amazing to behold. But those moments are rarer than we’d like, and we’ve been given the knowledge of science and psychology for a reason.

So I’ve taken medication. I’m working with a therapist. Because this is something I need to do for my own sake and the sake of my family. My mental health issues impact my relationships, my career, the way I travel through the day-to-day. I’m haunted by mental illness and the exorcism is a journey that takes time, but it’s a journey God blesses. Things are falling into place, and I slowly understand myself more. The intrusive thoughts still scream at me; my heart is still weighed down by ghosts, real or imagined, but I trust that one day the screaming will stop, that one day the ghosts will fade with the daylight. In many ways, the scariest thing is not knowing who I am without them, but my faith is rooted in resurrection and rebirth and recreation. Those ideas still sing to me, even when I fail to believe in them; they’re the gentle lullabies that, as my healing continues, I can tune into beyond the static.

My name’s Matt and I suffer from mental illness. But my scarred God lets me know that mental illness isn’t my destiny, that eventually the lullabies will be louder than the storm.

Deaf Awareness Week 2024

The Blessing in BSL and with subtitles

We’re halfway through Deaf Awareness Week, an opportunity to recognise and celebrate deaf culture as well as highlight the challenges faced by the community. Some background – my son is Deaf, having been born with practically no cochlear nerve, and uses British Sign Language (BSL). He accesses church because we belong to a congregation that provides a BSL interpreter (shout out to all the interpreters out there!), and my wife and I support that, but I’m aware that I don’t have personal experience of hearing loss or being deaf. That’s why this post aims to platform some Deaf voices to help give a wider perspective to the church as a whole. I urge you to check out the links.

For instance, a moving post at the Limping Chicken blog highlights the importance of the Deaf church in providing pastoral support for its members, and while this should be the mark of any church that’s walking the walk, it points to the need for the wider Christian family to support and resource Deaf churches if and when needed. This article points out how a movement of Deaf church leaders started Deaf congregations and preached in sign. While this tragically ended up being undermined by ableist attitudes that suppression signing and saw people who couldn’t access English as intellectually ‘lesser’, its an example of Deaf Christians establishing their own congregations and communicating God’s love to people excluded from hearing churches. The contemporary equivalent of these churches need our prayers as they tackle both the day-to-day work that goes into Sunday services, but also society’s negative perceptions of Deaf people and the stigma faced by those with hearing loss, as highlighted by a report published this week by RNID.

Here we have the chance to learn from each other. Take worship, for instance. In many ways ‘worship’ has become conflated with music and singing, but not everyone accesses music in the same way, and there’s a variety of ways in which Deaf Christians engage with worship music. There’s also a nice post at Deaf Church Where which highlights different ways of worshipping and how worship can be multisensory and whole-body. Hearing churches perhaps focus too much on the vocal – singing songs, listening to a sermon – but this is far from the whole story. And throughout history, Deaf Christians have found intimacy in God through silence, finding God in the very nature of who they are.

(No links here, as I couldn’t find much beyond arguments, but given the importance some denominations place on the spiritual gift of tongues, where does that leave people who don’t speak? Can tongues be expressed through a form of sign language? Is a gift that, in some cases, is expressed only in the mind? If/when tongues are expressed through sign, what about interpretation? And in a way I’m glad I don’t have answers because it makes me think about the church and how Deaf expressions of worship challenge the limits some congregations place on how the Spirit works.)

And then there’s communicating with the wider Deaf community. Last Christmas, a number of denominations came together to produce a BSL carol service to be broadcast on Facebook and YouTube, presenting the Christmas story and traditional carols in sign. Meanwhile, US filmmaker Michael Davis has produced Jesus, a retelling of the gospel starring Deaf actors using American Sign Language (ASL) – here’s a link to the trailer. There’s something powerful about seeing a familiar story played out in sign language, and I think that points to something that underlies all the different expressions of Deafness and the church – the Holy Spirit knows sign language and body language, and all the other ways in which we communicate. In a week or so we’ll be celebrating Pentecost, when the Spirit manifested in the apostles through them speaking scores of different languages. In my biblical head canon, one of them is signing.

God the Midwife (Psalm 22:9-10)

I entered the lives of my children as a stepfather, so I missed out on the antenatal classes and the ultrasounds and everything else. My only real experience of pregnancy was 47 years ago and while I was there, I’m not sure how proactive I was. I was, however, a poorly baby, albeit the biggest baby in the maternity ward’s incubators. As an adult, I know I owe a lot to modern medicine and obstetrics, so it’s worth acknowledging the International Day of the Midwife. Throughout history, midwives have been present at the moments of life that are simultaneously the most joyful and the most frightening, supporting mothers as they carry their babies and bring them into the world. It’s one of the professional roles that traditionally falls to women (apart from those times when midwives were oppressed and rejected because male surgeons thought they knew better – spoiler alert, they didn’t), and going back as far as ancient Egypt we’ve got examples of how-to texts that midwives would have used in the course of their duties, and in passing down this vital knowledge to generations of women throughout the ages. And this knowledge has changed beyond recognition, with midwives now having to innovate their services in communities stricken by climate change.

And because the focus of this blog is the Bible, I can’t help but note the moments in scripture at which a midwife witnessed the script being changed and subsequently named an ancestor of Jesus; I can’t help but note that we know the names of the midwives of the Exodus but not the Pharoah, because they’re the ones who prevented a genocide. It’s always worth noting these moments, because when history gets filtered through the narratives of Great Men, stories like this can be forgotten, the importance of midwives and their presence at the intimate and beautiful and heartbreaking moments of our lives fading into obscurity. Given that, shockingly, a woman or baby dies every two minutes because of childbirth, midwives are frontline heroes of the medical profession.

But I also want to look at Psalm 22. I wrote about this for Good Friday, because it’s the Psalm Jesus quotes when dying on the cross. Because of that, I overlooked verses 9 and 10:

Yet you brought me out of the womb;
    you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.
From birth I was cast on you;
    from my mother’s womb you have been my God.

Here the Psalmist uses midwifery imagery to describe his relationship with God. We see him remember his birth, being taken to his mother’s breast, and all the time they’re being supported by God, who’s been with them through the whole process. It’s a very intimate portrayal of God, tender and protective, nurturing and supportive. It’s a far cry from the image of an angry old man looking for someone to smite. Here God is a trusted presence, keeping the Psalmist safe at his most vulnerable through his wisdom and skill. There’s also power in it being a more feminine image, because God contains multitudes and the Bible’s metaphors reflect that.

And we can expand this – when Jesus tells Nicodemus about the need to be born again, who’s midwifing that process? When the world groans with the birth pains of a new creation, who is overseeing that birth? God midwives us into a new and eternal life, helping us through the process, the first person to hold us as we’re (re)born, undeterred by the mess and the noise. And as we take our place in that family, God goes on to do the same for others, for there are always more lives to bring to birth, and the work of the divine midwife continues.

Hostile Sanctuaries

Image take from the National Coalition for the Homeless website

So I’m reading a book about hostile architecture, how the various elements of our public spaces (benches, ledges, dustbins…) are increasingly being designed to drive our people experiencing homelessness. These designs embody the politics and philosophies of our towns, villages and cities (or at least the people who lead them), attacking the homeless themselves while ignoring the issues that create homelessness and extreme poverty in the first place and, crucially, often being invisible to everyone else.

I’ve blogged about hostile architecture before, but because my brain’s basically a semi-functional compost heap, I’m thinking about how this impacts our church buildings and how they can be exclusionary spaces. And while I get that churches come in all shapes and sizes, and that some older historic buildings can be difficult to adapt because of x, y and z, I still think our buildings reflect our unconscious attitudes and our upspoken theologies. If a sloping seat at a bus shelter says something about how that town sees rough sleepers, having pulpits and stages that can only be accessed by people with full mobility, for instance, says something about who we expect to be leading our services, whether we realise it or not.

Now, unlike the anti-homeless architecture out there, I don’t think churches are consciously designed to be inaccessible; I’ll leave it to you to decide if that’s better than people with disabilities simply not entering the equation in the first place. As an example, I’ve heard the argument that if a church has no wheelchair users then there’s no need to make adaptations, which leads us to the chicken-and-egg question of why there are no wheelchair users there in the first place.

(Heck, I’m a preacher and I still have to fight my programmed instinct that wants me to say “Let’s stand to sing”. My hypocrisy points to how embedded this stuff is.)

(If you want chapter and verse on this, you can start with Leviticus 19:14-15. And while I don’t condone stoning for people who nick disabled parking spaces, neither am I taking it off the table.)

Ultimately, I think this comes down to a theology of hospitality, of welcome, but also of equality and inclusion. And while it’s easy to express this in a nice sermon or a legislation-compliant mission statement, the truth of it all is really exposed in the less visible operations of our churches. As an example, just because Deaf Awareness Week starts on Monday, having sign language interpretation for our services doesn’t just need the interpreter themselves, it needs us to think about our lighting rigs, how we arrange chairs, how fast the worship leader speaks – basically, making the invisible ‘architecture’ of our services hospitable rather than hostile. There doesn’t need to be a big song and dance about this, because it’s possible to embed all this into the day-to-day.

Image taken from the BBC website

My favourite metaphor for this is the little button at the bottom of pedestrian crossing control panels. This button rotates when the lights change, helping blind people cross the road, but most people don’t know or talk about it – it’s just integrated into the world. And this is vital, because spaces should be accessible, not because of high-minded charity but because everyone, regardless of individual circumstances, has the right to interact with the world.

And look, this is the church we’re talking about and so everything should really come down to Jesus. And before he was a preacher and teacher, before Gethsemane and Calvary, Jesus was a builder. And call me a heretic, but I wonder if sometimes he looks at our buildings and sanctuaries and thinks “That’s not how I’d’ve done it.” At times like that, our hands and hearts need to be guided by Christ the Construction Worker as we construct churches that welcome rather than exclude, as we build communities that draw in rather than push away.