THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF A MANIC DEPRESSIVE
P. S was a graphics computer operator for 33 years. In his late thirties he studied with the Open University and obtained a Bachelor of Science honours degree. He subsequently gained a Certific- ate and Diploma in Counselling. Since his early fifties he has worked in a retail store. He enjoys photography, jazz, crime novels, tracing his fam- ily tree and Badminton.
I was born in 1951, in the north Midlands of England the only child of working class parents living in an industrial town. I remember my child- hood as happy and secure. I went through the then-usual gamut of child- hood illnesses – measles, mumps, chicken pox and so on. There was also a period when I had scarlet fever and was placed in an isolation hospital for three weeks at the age of three and a half. This was quite a traumatic experience for an only child of this age and did leave a few problems in later life, such as overwhelming feelings of isolation even on a crowded room. It was an experience that proved to be interesting to explore as part of my self-development in my counselling studies years later. I went to the local school with my friends and played in the local park. There were day trips to the coast and holidays in Wales. Neither of my parents were churchgoers, though they considered themselves to be Christians and encouraged me to go to Sunday School like many parents did with their children in the mid fifties. I had attended the local Church of Eng- land Sunday school (St. J ) as an infant, and during a period of un- happiness there when I was about six or seven years old, I was encour- aged by my piano teacher to go to a local Congregational church which I attended until I was about twelve years old. I remember having a respect for church and I refused to fool around or misbehave in church like some of my friends but nevertheless, by the age of twelve I found the whole thing very boring and drifted away. That was in 1963. I was not a ‘sporty’ child – I hated football and cricket – and was a thin boy, slightly underweight and slightly shy and introverted.
My first experience of what we might call mental disturbance was at the age of ten or eleven. In those days, in England, a school exam called the 11-Plus was a very important milestone in a child’s education. It con- sisted of a day of exams – in maths, English and so on – that determined what level of education the child was to progress to for their secondary education in their teen years. Failure to pass the exam meant that one was sent to ‘senior’ school – grouped together with low achievers who would eventually go into some sort of lower paid manual work. Success in the exam meant entrance to a grammar school or high school – with more opportunities, higher standards, and therefore an opportunity to obtain a higher quality job or profession – even a chance at University. The pressure to pass this exam was quite intense in those days, and all school work was geared to rehearsing the kind of questions and answers needed to pass this exam. Parents put pressure on their children to succeed and to gain opportunities for a better job in the future. My parents were by no means excessive in this, but encouraged me to do my best. Due to the date of my birthday within the year, I was one of the young- est in the class and at this age, that year makes quite a difference in one’s maturity, skills and abilities. In this, I was at a disadvantage. Neither am I quick learner – it takes time sometimes for ideas and concepts to sink in, thus, I was at another disadvantage. Nevertheless, I got a reasonable result and went on to a Technical High School. But the pressure was undoubtedly there and I certainly felt it. For a few days during this peri- od, I went to bed and my parent’s activity around me seemed to ‘speed up’. I guess I was suffering from some sort of feverish activity in my mind – feeling overwhelmed, mithered and distracted by this general pressure. It felt very disturbing and I would not go to sleep on my own for about a week. The experience only lasted for a few seconds or a minute, but was a little frighteneing for a 10/11 year old. It was bad enough for me to be taken to the doctors by my parents, but it was dis- missed as a reaction to the pressure of this 11-Plus exam and after a few days, this mithered distraction passed. I believe now that this was my first encounter with a borderline manic episode.
My first encounter with Christian fundamentalism was at the age of 16. Fundamentalism is term that covers both religious and secular areas, but I use the term here with reference to Christian protestant churches which insist on the inerrancy of the Bible. They contest that the Bible is the inspired word of God, and that therefore it is without any mistakes or errors, Thus they use the Bible as their authority in matters of faith and conduct, with frequent appeals to it’s texts and verses. Despite their shared this view of Biblical inerrancy, different fundamentalist churches hold to different and even opposing views. This is because these churches emphasise different verses of the Bible and draw out different interpretations of Biblical passages. Thus, though sharing a common be- lief in Biblical inerrancy, these groups have different systems of govern- ment and practice, and draw out different systems of belief. Some are Arminian, some Calvinist; some believe that extraordinary gifts like tongues prophecy and healing continue today, whilst others do not; some are democratic, some are not. These groups include Christadelphi- ans, Pentecostal churches, both Elim and Assemblies of God, Brethren churches and Evangelical Reformed churches, which may be Baptist churches or local independent churches.
By 1967, a new minister, B. T. , had arrived at the local Con- gregational church following the merging of the Congregational church with the local Railway Mission, whose building had been burnt down. Many of my friends were impressed with this new Pastor, a young man in his early twenties who came from a working class background in Manchester and was fresh from Bible College. He developed an instant rapport with the young people and the church youth club had grown in popularity as a result. It was about six months after his arrival that I started to attend the youth club with my friends. Being a church youth club for the youth of the church, it was expected that those who attended the youth club should also attend church services or Sunday school on Sunday mornings. No one ever challenged me on this, but I felt obliged to attend church and began to do so, a little begrudgingly since the youth club seemed worth it. I attended with an open mind, considering myself a Christian, with the same sort of respect that I used to have before. Over a period of six months it became clear to me that the message being preached by this new minister was different from what I had heard be- fore. These sermons were preached from the Bible passages and texts and it appeared that they were faithful to these verses and passages. The messages declared that I appeared to be in danger of a 'lost' eternity, be- cause a Just and Pure God demanded that failures and disobedience against God be punished. I saw that my failures and disobedience against God demanded such punishment and weighed against me when put in the balance. I saw the sword of God's justice hanging over me, rightly and fairly because I had offended a Just and Pure God. But I also saw the Love and Mercy of God in the offering of His Son Jesus Christ to take my deserved punishment on my behalf, and therefore an opportun- ity for deliverance by trusting in Jesus Christ to that effect.
Through August and September of 1968 these things occupied my mind and I sincerely wanted to believe and trust in Jesus and 'asked Je- sus into my heart' many times. But I was not sure that I had obtained de- liverance or forgiveness. I began to change my behaviour; to shun things that I felt were displeasing to God and to seek to do those things which it appeared that God approved of. At that time I bought a gospel record by Little Richard, the Rock and Roll singer of the 50's. It still remains an ex- cellent Gospel album of spirituals by the likes of Thomas Dorsey. Whilst listening to that album and particularly the track ‘Peace in the valley', I had, for the first time, the experience of assurance of salvation. All of a sudden, I knew that I was going to have 'peace in the valley some day' and that my sins were forgiven and that I was welcome by Jesus. These ideas were no longer theories or doctrines out there, but I felt that they became personal: they applied to me: I had a personal interest in them. I wept with joy as my salvation anxiety fell away and I felt assured of a place in paradise for all eternity. Eternal, Invisible, Spiritual things seemed Real and True to me. This was my ‘conversion’ experience – I was ‘born again’.
I continued to attend church and became enrolled as a member. Some of the young people, myself included, asked for a young people's Bible study. We spent three years going through Paul's Epistle to the Romans once a week. During this period I also to attended evening services and mid week Bible studies. By 1971, I was asked if I would serve as a dea- con, a sort of church administrator in more secular matters, which was considered at that time to be a role that lasted one year and which was then open for election again by the membership. Deacons deal with various odd jobs around the church, organised the bread and wine for communion and dealt with things like decorating, heating, maintenance and so on. With some reservations, I agreed. Looking back, this was a big mistake: I was not mature enough or educated enough in spiritual mat- ters, but this was in many ways still a young church and not very large in membership, and the minister had introduced a tremendous sense of community and fellowship. These were happy days for me: full of hu- mour, exploring together, playing together and working together. The structure and organisation of the church was moderately loose and in- formal and there was room for spontaneity and flexibility.
During this time I developed a growing respect for Scripture, but it was not until two or three years after my 'conversion' that I considered the Bible to be the inerrant word of God. I remember sitting through a sermon on Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 5, where Paul talks about the first and second Adam. The Adam of Genesis is referred to as a real person, not a parable or symbol and it was pointed out that Jesus himself regarded Adam as a real human being. If the Apostles and Jesus the Son of God taught this, then it must be so I thought. This literalism, this dis- missing of analogy or metaphor except where plainly intended, such as in parables, is a typical feature of Christian fundamentalism. The cre- ation story in Genesis for example, is often taken quite literally by fundamentalists, who often believe in a literal, seven 24hr day creation of the universe and a young earth only tens of thousands of years old rather than millions or billions of years old. I was no exception and it was argu- ments like this coupled with an increasing faith and commitment that moved me to an acceptance of Scripture as God's inerrant Word and eventually to a position of being a young earth creationist, that is one who believes that God literally created the world in seven days about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. I was encouraged to lead the occasional Bible study and to preach and these meetings obviously met with some approval since I was asked to preach and lead again at various occasions.
By now I was also beginning to seriously read Christian books. I had read introductory booklets to the Christian faith, but over a few years I had begun to read more deeply. Christianity really began my love of books and my love of philosophy. Over about five or six years I progressed from booklets, to modern book length studies, to Victorian works and eventually to the writings of the puritans. I sometimes had to have a dictionary on hand as I became aware of deeper, more thoughtful and more ‘technical’ works of theology and philosophy. I developed an increased love of the English language, grammar and the preciseness of the use of words in philosophy. Trips to second-hand bookshops became a joy.
I continued in this direction for about two years, but by late 1970 or early 1971 I began to suffer from tension and anxiety. The anxiety was what psychologists and psychiatrists call ‘free floating anxiety’: in other words, there wasn’t a particular issue or event that was causing my anxi- ety, but rather, I suffered from waves of anxiety in which my mind would latch on to some small or irrational concern and blow it out of all proportion. My stomach would tighten and I would get ‘butterflies’ in my stomach. Waves on unsettlement and worry would sweep over me and I would feel distracted, ‘mithered’ and cluttered in my head. It is not clear to me even now what triggered this condition, though it may just have been pressures of work, course exams and so on.
At lunch times I took to going to a local open space and sitting in the long grass for half an hour, to escape the hustle and bustle of the work- ing day. One particular day during the summer, I became deeply aware of the beauty of my surroundings. The sunshine, the tall grass blowing gently in the breeze, the sound of the grass as it moved, the patterns of the wind on the grass and the peaceful solitude all conspired together to produce in me a sense of natural harmony and simple beauty that seemed richer and fuller than I had ever experienced before. This open space seemed like a little paradise on earth, pure and unspoilt, and I felt deeply calm and peaceful and sensed the power and beauty of the God who must have made such harmonious nature.
However, my anxieties continued and I visited my doctor who pre- scribed the then wonder drug of Vallium. I was to learn ten years later that this drug causes me to become depressed about twenty-four hours after taking it. At this time though, I thought my depressions were a re- action to my anxieties. This condition was bad enough for me to be ab- sent for a few days from work occasionally and generally disrupted my life making me introspective, lacking in confidence and morose.
The world sometimes appeared to me to be a scary, unpredictable place and there was a feeling of things being slightly out of control. It is not surprising then that the issue of whether God was sovereign or not was exercising my mind: Was God in control? Was God effectively rul- ing the world or had God wound the world up like a clockwork toy such that it was now winding down in it's own way? If God was in control, why was there so much evil and suffering? It was in this frame of mind that I read a book called ‘The sovereignty of God’ (A. W. Pink. 1968). Using Biblical texts, this book proposed that God was indeed a sovereign God, in full control, ruling believers and unbelievers, events and circum- stances to accomplish His purposes. As I read this I remember suddenly seeing this sovereignty of God very clearly as True and Real. In what was to be a common factor in many of my experiences, it was as if a door in my mind opened and I saw things clearly. My heightened spiritual ex- periences often arose from an apprehension of some doctrine in a deeper and fuller way than before. In this case I saw clearly that God was a King of kings, ruling in power: He appeared as truly God to me. I was so em- powered by this apprehension of God and the perception that He was MY God and that I was watched over by Him, that I threw away my Val- lium tablets, knowing that I had nothing to be anxious about with such a God organising the circumstances of my life. My irrational anxieties were overcome and I recovered from my anxious state.
About a year later I remember coming home from a church service with an increased sense of the love of God towards me. This had prob- ably arisen from something in the sermon, though I cannot remember ex- actly what now. I walked home in a state of energised praise and con- templation on God and decided, when I got home, to spend some time in prayer. I went to my bedroom to pray alone and was increasingly filled with a sense of God's love for me such that I could no longer put my words together, because the sense of God's love was so great. I lay on the bed enraptured by the immediate sense of God's presence and His loving condescension to me and all I could do was bathe in God's love as I con- tinued in a state of bliss, taken up as it were, to a spiritual realm in close communion with God for about half an hour.
It was at this time that I met my first wife, W , who was also 'converted' under the church ministry. Though about twenty years old, I was still quite naïve and inexperienced with members of the opposite sex. During my mid teens, many of my friends had started to go to local nightclubs and discotheques, but these never appealed to me. My mother and father had been keen dancers and won competitions. Mt father was a qualified dance teacher. But they liked the Old Tyme and Modern sequence dancing which by the late 1960’s was seen as old fashioned. My parents used to host dancing at a couple of local workingmen’s clubs every week, and as a child I had been taken to these events. By my early teens I grew to dislike the cigarette smoke-and-beer laden atmosphere. I just grew to dislike such clubs and public houses…I never was and never have been a big drinker or a smoker. Neither have I been a fan of con- temporary popular music. My tastes turned to mellow Jazz, Blues and Latin music from Brazil, Cuba and Puerto Rico. So nightclubs and discos never held any fascination for me. As a result, the ‘swinging sixties’ partly passed me by and always seemed to be happening ‘somewhere else’. In any case, I always think that I must have seemed a bit of an oddball – wrapped up in Christianity, studious and introverted, not lik- ing modern popular music and still remaining physically thin and slightly underweight. Nevertheless, I was and still remain a bit of a ‘hippy’ at heart – at this time my hair was shoulder length like many oth- er males of my age, I had a ‘goatee’ beard and liked the sanitised version of flower-power and psychedelia. I had met and dated a couple of girls but to my frustration at times, nothing came of these brief relationships. It was therefore natural that I would gravitate to someone within the church circle who shared to a great degree my spiritual views.
At the end of 1971, the Minister of the church received an invitation to pastor a church at Bridgnorth in Shropshire and after prayer and consid- eration, he accepted. He helped us in our search for a new Pastor and fol- lowing a few months where the Deaconate looked after the church, our new minister, H. M. arrived in January 1973. Thus it was that I had found myself leading and preaching in church services along with other deacons during the period between our minister leaving and a new minister arriving.
The new minister, was a different man altogether from our previous pastor. A schoolteacher in his mid twenties, he had come up through the ranks of an independent reformed church at Brighton, where served as an assistant Pastor. Very quickly, the cold wind of a more austere Calvinism swept into the fellowship. Our previous pastor had taken a Calvinist stance, but H. M introduced a more intellectual and emotion– ally cold approach and by now, I was already locked into a worldview that had Scripture as God's inerrant Word: an authority that shaped my view of everything. It was no longer an easy thing for me to dismiss ap- parently Biblically based ideas. The young people's flamboyant humour and the church's free and open structure was interpreted by this new minister as he later admitted, as a form of Antinomianism: too free and liberal in it's approach to morals and having to much licence. Thus a stricter, more disciplined approach began to take shape.
The new pastor had also seen problems in the then-emerging Charismatic movement. This was a movement that laid stress on spontaneity and inspiration in worship and on spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongues and prophecy. It emphasised the personal experience of Baptism in the Spirit and centred on experience and joyous emotional displays in worship. This movement was critical of what it saw as the cold, dead formality of traditional English church services in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Our new pastor had seen at least one church divided and broken up by this clash between Charismatics and traditionalists and this had produced in him an acute wariness of ‘experiences’ or emotional displays; of hand clapping; chorus singing; tongue speaking or other such practices.
He also a more reasoning, intellectual approach to Scripture, though like all fundamentalists, this intellectual approach was strictly within the bounds of fundamentalist ideology and the Bible as the inerrant Word of God. For example, everyone was encouraged to have their Bible open during sermons so that they could check that what the preacher was saying really was Scriptural. The bookstall was checked to ensure that only 'sound' literature was available, that is, material which conformed to the fundamentalist Calvinist ideology. This was not seen as censorship, but as a preservation of the 'Truth'. It would soon extend to comments made about the sort of books that appeared on church member’s bookshelves, or the sorts of films they went to see or television that they watched. I re- member a considerable uproar for example when some of us decided to go and see 'The Exorcist'. The new pastor made it his aim to work through the whole Bible within ten years via the two Sunday services and midweek Bible study, which he succeeded in doing. His aim was to give a balanced Biblical view, not over-emphasising his favourite verses and not avoiding difficult or controversial passages. He soon began to wear a minister’s black gown in the pulpit to help assert his authority and he insisted that he be addressed as ‘Pastor’ rather than by the more familiar and informal use of his Christian name.
A new church manse was built via member's contributions, the men of the fellowship built a Baptistry and the church was redecorated. A church constitution was worked through and adopted, with the author- ity of the minister or ‘Elders’ being more firmly established together with the importance of respect for and submission to Elders in so far as they follow Scripture. An integrated doctrinal system took shape, based very much on protestant reformers like John Calvin and the high Calvinists like B. B. Warfield and A. A. Hodge. The church became fully independent, not relying on any grants, or on any special meetings which relied on public donations. In this way, it supported it's own full time minister with provision for pension in retirement. 'Unseemly' humour was clamped down on and standards of behaviour began to be imposed which were seen as consistent with Scripture. This imposition was ef- fected in various ways. Members who acted or spoke in an inappropriate way were likely to be taken into the church vestry for rebuke by the Pastor, or later into the Pastor's study, which became affectionately known by us as the 'Sin bin', much to the minister's annoyance. If a member desired to achieve a particular role within the church, they might not get approval from the minister. The shift was made from a spontaneous, natural fellowship to one where the Law of God and the Command- ments were paramount. But it was as if the Holy Spirit of God was being denied and stifled.
Matters had to be seen to be done 'decently and in order' - and that is an accurate portrayal: they were only ‘seen’ to be done decently and in order - under the surface and away from formal services, there persisted a quite surreal and zany humour, inspired by such programmes as 'I'm sorry I'll read that again', 'Monty Python', and Spike Milligan’s television programmes. There was often an irreverent and bawdy humour, serving I think as a compensation for imposed decency and order of formal services and as an outlet of our real personalities.
For me, these first few years under the new minister made Christianity become a burdensome affair. The joy and spontaneity that we previously enjoyed was repressed and suppressed and a soberness and seriousness descended on us all. The sense of community continued, as did a sense of achievement and growth. But it seemed to me that if things were bad, or we weren't seen to be enjoying this repressed, formal, legalised version of religion, then it was portrayed by the minister as basically our fault, our sin, our transgressions, our fallen human nature, because, after all, this version of religion was ‘True’, God's Law was perfect and de- lighted in by a righteous man. The implication was that doubt was being expressed concerning whether we had righteousness imputed by Christ, whether we had integrity, whether we had salvation. We had descended into a legalistic form of Calvinism, one of its heights being the placing in the church hall of a poster of the Ten Commandments. Someone wrote at the bottom of it, 'the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life' (II Corinthians 3 v 6) and other similar verses.
This tension between freedom in the Spirit and the continual applica- tion of Law which made me feel guilty and weak as a Christian contin- ued to grow. As an antidote I began to read yet more fundamentalist Christian literature and I was particularly shaped at this time by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones's writings, especially his Romans 5 volume. I had a number of meetings with the minister, both by myself and with one or two other like minded individuals to try and address our concerns, but the outcome was always the same: no real movement. There was an in- ability on my part to get him to see the problem, and he had an inability to see the difficulty. Tensions came to a head when a group of us went to an evangelical meeting called 'Come Together' in 1974, they year I got married. This was an American originated evangelism type of event. For the first time in a few years I saw people actually enjoying themselves in worship. Those of us who went to this meeting decided to meet together for prayer, both to get ourselves ‘right with God’ and to pray for the church.
Fairly quickly, house meetings began to be held each Friday evening, though it took some persuading to get the Pastor to agree to these meet- ings. Though we were not conscious of it at the time, we were setting up a situation where the minister did not have quite the same authority, since the meetings were taking place in someone’s house and not the church. But this was not our intention: we were seeking unity and blessing for the whole group and were constantly seeking to avoid divi- sion and schism from the rest of the church membership. These meetings ran for about two years, after which many of the young people who at- tended got married and moved a bit further away or went to university. These meetings were the source of almost a mini revival for some. There appeared to be at least one 'conversion', a sense of liberty and spontaneity and a deepening of spiritual fellowship and communion with each other and with God.
The weight of concern over the formal, legalistic and dead state of the church was for me overwhelming. I spent much time in prayer, anguish, discussion, frustration, depression, concern and study and for me 1972-75 was a very frustrating and difficult time. I was also struggling with my personal walk with God: various habitual behaviours, which I felt to be displeasing to God and against the code of Scripture, were present in my life and I could not shake them off. I felt a poor and un- worthy Christian and sometimes I wondered if I was a Christian at all. The 'Come together' meetings led me to read about the Welsh revivals of 1859/60 and 1904. I wept. Here seemed to be truly joyful and awesome Christian spirituality in practice: here were people moved greatly by an understanding of the Bible and a movement of the Spirit; here was the opposite of our dry state… lively and vital encounters with God. About half a dozen of us set out to pray for revival in our church.
The first Sunday of September 1975, (about six months after the Come Together meetings) was unlike any other. I give two accounts of it below, written at different times and from slightly different perspectives and emphasis, to try and give a flavour of this event:-
Here is the first account:-
This state of affairs changed on the first Sunday morning in September 1975. It is interesting to note that I had been struggling all that summer with a book by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, an exposition of the Apostle Paul's Epistle to the Romans. (Lloyd-Jones 1974). I had read about a third of the book and somehow could not get past one particular chapter. This was unusual for me: I tried many times to read it, it was not hard, but somehow, my concentration was not there. It was