“Have you thought it through, sweetheart?”
“John, she only found out about it this morning … she’s got years to go before anything happens.”
“Well I think I should come to your next appointment and hear what Mr Cooke has to say.”
“But what about what I have to say?”
“Well, tell me … what do you think about it?”
“I want to have the operation. I definitely do.”
“You’ve got time to think about it”, Mum interjected, trying to pace me.
“Why? Don’t you think I should go through with it?” I hadn’t altogether managed to work out what Mum thought.
“I do. But it’s OK for you to change your mind.”
“Didi! Do you really want her to go through that? With all your nursing, you know better than anyone what it will entail …” Dad was dismayed.
“But Dad, why don’t you want me to do it?”
“Because I don’t want to see you suffer.”
There was a pause. I wasn’t thinking of what to say, I was just trying to hold the words back as long as I could.
Then I said it, very quietly. “But I’m suffering now.”
It was the closest I had come to letting them know what things were like for me because of my face, and I didn’t want to let them get any closer, so I got up and walked towards the hallway.
“Joey,” Mum called after me, “why don’t you spend some time praying about it?”
Afterwards, I didn’t pray about it.
I lived in a home where everything we owned was considered a blessing from the Lord; where God was brought into every decision and everything we did was submitted to the Lordship of Christ. When it came to choosing subjects at school things like sociology and psychology were off-limits, considered too liberal for a girl raised to know that Jesus was the Way, the Truth and the Life. When I asked to do something, like having my ears pierced, Mum and Dad would tell me to ask the Lord whether I should, which was really just them giving me a chance to hear God’s No, before theirs; because generally God seemed to be against stuff.
Top of the Pops, swearing, fornication, make-up, wizards, shopping on Sundays and taking too much interest in material things: they were all frowned upon if not entirely ruled out. Which meant Rosalind and I didn’t really need to pray about things because we got a sixth sense about the things God was going to be OK with. Things like tithing, spending time at church or youth group or any other Christian gathering, and television programmes like Highway to Heaven and Songs of Praise. And pierced ears; in the end God didn’t mind too much about that either.
Now here was an epic, life-changing, life-giving possibility on which there was no clear biblical guidance. And it was mine. It wasn’t a parental edict that I had to obey; it wasn’t money that could be tithed; it wasn’t virginity that I was compelled to pledge to some far-off ideal of a husband. Mr Cooke had given me a choice and it was my decision to make. I couldn’t now risk offering this up in prayer only for God to come and lash through my hope with His No. It didn’t belong to Him.
Perhaps it wasn’t strange that this promise of cutting and splicing, of breaking and remoulding, felt so whole. Its presence way ahead in the unlived days of 1995 became a shelter from the assaults as I journeyed through the rest of 1991 … 92 … 93 … 94 … What I couldn’t yet acknowledge were the splits and denials that my half-beliefs in God were causing. The thought of my attempts to convert people, the image of Louise’s tears and my inability to make the Good News good, curdled in my memory. The fear of God and what His wrath would do to me if I failed to live up to this good Christian life: these were the distorted untruths that fractured me. To give them voice would be like knowing the answer is 7 but admitting to the teacher that somehow you keep calculating 3.9. All I’d ever been told was that God is love and God is good, but all I now heard and absorbed were threats of where we’d end up if we didn’t mirror that goodness in our lives. So I lingered, silently, with the wounds of fear and confusion that these jagged edges of half-truth and twisted dogma had left, not realizing that, unacknowledged, they would soon become infected.
Out of all the games of “Hot or Not” going on in my world, Christianity operated the least attractive one. Who thought that threats of eternity spent in outer darkness would be the message of love to compel unbelievers to believe? How did our Christian leaders not see that it would simply plant the seeds of cynicism and unbelief in our own young minds? We were burdened with The Truth and told to take it to the nations in the Name of Jesus, but nobody stopped to tell us that judgement of mortal souls was never ours to make. And so we carried on doing our best to slap the sticking-plasters of truth onto the cuts our words of proclamation had inflicted. “So it says in the Bible that I’m going to go to hell unless I believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life?” my prey would ask. “Yes, but Jesus has died and risen to save you from that destiny … as long as you accept him.”
I wonder if Eve, having taken and eaten the forbidden fruit, suddenly found herself trying to appropriate the complexities of all her newly acquired knowledge. Did she struggle to handle these frightening new layers of good and evil, which could only ever be held by the wise omnipotent God? Standing on the sidelines of the Genesis story I hear myself shouting at her, “Turn around! Turn around! Stop hiding; stop trying to manage it all by yourself … You can tell God … Don’t be afraid … Remember the love and just tell Him!”
Love is, after all, what we want.
But she didn’t return to that love because, overtaken by confusion, she tried to find her salvation in knowledge, instead of letting love hold and remind her.
Such fear and confusion had also overtaken me. Fear that I wasn’t really saved, and that I had irrevocably flouted God’s love by not demonstrating enough faith for Him to minister through me. But, if someone was shouting from the sidelines at me, “Turn around! You don’t have to hold all this together … Just tell God … He understands … He loves you! Don’t be afraid!”, I didn’t hear them and battled on trying to prove to God that I could handle what I mistakenly thought He required of me.
Like Adam and Eve, trying to digest the kind of knowledge that was only truly safe in God’s hands, I messily regurgitated the dogmatic truths that I wasn’t big enough to contain.
11
Kafir and Caliphates
It might have been a much cleaner process if I’d just tried to understand St Paul’s theology, given that most New Testament threats seemed to emanate from him. But I decided I would find little sympathy for any question or challenge of the man whom preacher-men seemed – unaccountably – to rave about. I didn’t want to get into trouble for being disruptive at Sunday school, so I tried to muster enthusiasm for the positive bits where he didn’t appear too ranty. And I tried to ignore just how conflicted I felt about my need to make it into his heavenly gang. Because we all need a gang, right? And when you’re desperate to get into a gang, there’s nothing quite as reassuring as someone pointing out those who aren’t in it.
I was used to people pointing out that I wasn’t in the popular gang, and I was used to preacher-men pointing out who wasn’t in God’s gang: people who campaign for shopping on Sundays; people who have sex before marriage; people who think they’re a good person and don’t need to invite Jesus into their hearts; homosexuals and Muslims.
The memory of a preacher-man at camp years before, standing on the main stage loudly declaring that the Muslims were waiting to rise up and take over the UK and establish their Islamic Caliphate, had carved its way into my worldview. It was another one of those adult meetings that I probably shouldn’t have gatecrashed. Living in Cheltenham, where there weren’t many Muslims, made the prospect even more sinister because it seemed they must all be hiding somewhere out of sight, watching us, just waiting for their moment to take over the nation. So it was a shock when, that summer, we arrived at Good News Crusade to find we were sharing the showground with an Islamic youth c
amp.
As we drove through the main gate entrance, all hot and dishevelled in our non-air-conditioned car, we immediately noticed the long, high fence that had been erected to the side of the main track. Where we expected to see the familiar arrangement of Big Top, Power Pack, Salt Pot and bookshop tents, there was a large square marquee and behind it two smaller rectangular tents. The field, where we spent our evenings lolling around with chips and a ghetto-blaster, was now unfamiliar with the sight of dark skinned, kufi-capped boys and further away, behind another fence, a large crowd of robed girls, the edges of their veils lifting in the breeze.
“Hello! What’s all this?” Mum wound down her window as Dad slowed the car and leaned across her to get a better view.
“What have they done with our camp?” Rosalind piped up, clutching the top of the open window with both hands.
Dad slowed the pace to 5mph while he surveyed their camp.
“I don’t believe it. They’re on our field”, I cried.
“Who are they? They’re not part of GNC!”
“They’ve gone and rented out half the camp to Muslims by the looks of things”, he said, gently accelerating.
“Didi, we’re going to have to watch Alastair closely. As far as he’s concerned that’s where his youth meetings take place.”
“Girls, do you hear me? You need to make sure that you stick with AJ to and from meetings until he’s got the hang of the new layout.”
“Oh goodness”, Mum murmured. “I hope we don’t lose him in there.”
For Alastair the religious divisions, demarcated by fence and doctrine, would find little purchase in his mind. It was the rest of us in whom the defences of suspicion and prejudice and exclusion took root. Now we had something besides demons to intrigue us. Each day Charlie, his friend Russell, Katie, Julia, Hannah and I would gather by the fence to watch the goings on beyond the wire. “Do you remember John Barton saying that the Muslims were going to rise up and take over Britain?” I asked Charlie.
“No. John Barton hasn’t been at camp for years. When did he say that?”
“It was years ago, in one of the Big Top meetings.”
“What do you think they do over there?” Katie was sitting cross-legged in front of the fence, chewing a piece of grass, her fingers absent-mindedly twiddling round the wire.
“They don’t sing, they don’t play games: what’s their camp for?”
“To prepare them to rise up and take over the UK when they grow up …”, Charlie smirked.
“It might be. They don’t seem to be having any other fun.”
“Yeah, they’re separated from the girls for a start”, Russell murmured out of the corner of his mouth.
“I wish we could talk to them and find out what they’re doing.” Katie looked over her shoulder at me, hoping to find a partner in crime. Charlie was having none of it.
“How do you think that would go, Kate? For a start you’re a girl. They’re not going to go anywhere near you.”
But they did come near us, or at least two of them did, because it turned out that they were just as intrigued about the noise that came from our camp as we were about the lack of noise from theirs. As we stood pressed up against the fence trying to coax the two lads to come closer and talk to us, they stayed a little way off, nervously looking over their shoulders and talking in low voices between themselves.
I leaned over to Charlie. “They’re not going to take over anything with that kind of attitude.”
Charlie called out to them gently, “Hey, hey, can you come and talk to us? Go on … we just want to say hello and have a chat …”
They took a few paces towards us, and one of them called back, “What are you lot doing?”
“Trying to talk to you.”
“But what are you doing at your camp?”
“Is it true that you’re religious?” the other one cut in.
“We’re at Good News Crusade, it’s a Bible camp.”
“So you’re Christians?”
“Yes!” We all chipped in, nodding.
“What are you doing?” I couldn’t wait any longer to find out.
“Muslim youth camp.”
“Yeah but what do you do all day?”
“We learn the Koran … pray … learn the teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him.”
“So … er … are you having a good time?” I asked, unable to tell whether this translated into the kind of socializing that our own week of religious teaching and worship allowed.
“Joey!” Charlie jabbed his elbow in my ribs. But the boys didn’t answer, they just nervously checked over their shoulders to see if anyone had noticed them.
“Why aren’t you allowed to talk to us?”
“You’re kafir.”
“What’s that?” I retorted, pretty sure that I was nothing of the sort.
“You’re unbelievers …”
“We’re not … we definitely believe.”
“We’re Christians.”
“We shouldn’t be talking to you”, the other one said, more for the benefit of his friend.
“Because we’re Christians?”
“You’re not going to convert anyone if you don’t talk to us.” The flippancy of his words told me that Charlie was now warming up for some fun.
“Are you worried that we might try and convert you?” I asked them, trying to wrestle the conversation from his mischief.
“You can’t convert us.” He spoke defiantly, thrusting his chin up as he did so; then he turned to his friend and they spoke in low voices again.
“Well, you can’t convert us either … But we still want to talk to you.” I added that so as not to appear unfriendly.
But he ignored me and looked at Charlie and Russell, “Yeah, so … what do you do at your camp then?”
I felt perfectly able to answer and there was no need for the boys to do all the talking, but from across their field came a distant shout. A voice raised, calling out in our direction. The boys turned and hurried away towards the voice, and we stood there for a few moments before realizing that the sight of us all pressed up against the fence watching was probably going to give them away.
“Let’s come back later and see if they’re here again”, Katie persisted, feeling she’d not got a full enough picture of what a week at Islam Camp had to offer.
During the afternoon I thought about our certainties, about each of our claims to be Believers and how confidently all of us would deny that each other was a Believer also. I thought about how easily we thought we knew better than them: that they weren’t believers but sadly deceived teenagers who didn’t have the hope of salvation like we did. Which meant that I didn’t feel so entitled to be angered by their dismissal of us as kafir, but nevertheless I was. What did they know? How dare they? They were so blinded by the half-truths of Islam! Goodness, it would be more or less impossible to convert them. And I began to think about which verses of scripture I would start with if I were going to try.
Through the afternoon’s praise and worship I sat thinking of scriptures about Jesus dying and rising to new life and how I would use them to win this brewing faith-off. But if it were that straightforward to tell them our Jesus story then evangelism would be easy and I would always be on the winning side.
What I couldn’t see that afternoon was that this was no faith-off, because it wasn’t about faith. Not on their side of the fence, nor on ours. The twisted metal confining each of us within the limits of religious truth was hammered and held in place by pillars of other people’s fears and hopes. These leaders, parents, preachers, imams who had brought us to our various sides of the fence had done so because they wanted us to take on their beliefs. They wanted to shape our souls and minds along the angles of their belief, and deepen the roots of our character in the ground of their doctrines. They wanted us to shoulder their religion so that we, too, would help them remake the world around us in the same mould. It was an evolutionary instinct shored up by a muddle of love and cult
ural politics.
You want to protect your children and keep them safe from moral corruption or eternal suffering, you want to give them knowledge of a love that goes beyond the reach of any protection you could ever provide for them. This is the faith you want to give them. But children can never be repositories of their parents’ faith – for faith cannot be imposed. Its exhilaration can only be experienced at the point of heart-leaping, mouth-gulping risk. Instead we were being removed from the possibility of faith, removed from risk to the safety of a place where questions would be met with firm answers and desires bridled by strict moral codes. But they didn’t yet see that they were setting us up to come to the riskiest place of all, where we might have to break through all the architecture of their anxiety and indoctrination and, beyond the splintered mess, find faith for the first time.
When we returned to our grassy spot later that evening we were disappointed at first to find that all was quiet on the other side of the wire. It was only after a little while that I noticed the white of their clothing standing out against the dark trees, moving slowly near the far fence. “What are they doing?”
The others all swivelled to follow my pointing finger. We each began to move back to the fence again to see properly. Slowly, the two figures moved closer along the far perimeter so that we could see them.
“What are they doing?” Katie echoed my words as the rest of us stood silently trying to compute what we were seeing.
It was them: the boys we’d been talking to. Hands behind their heads, crawling on their knees like unwilling pilgrims around the half-mile circumference of the fence.
“Is that because of us?”
No one spoke.
“Probably”, Charlie finally replied, sombrely. “Their leaders are probably trying to send us a message.”
“Is that even allowed?”
“I feel sick.”
“Let’s call Childline.”
“We can’t, no one’s going to come and get them out of there. And even if they did, then what? That’s their religion.”
A Lot Like Eve Page 7