The Christianity I grew up with was fuelled by fear. This religion didn’t help me come to terms with my innate fear of separation and death; it actually pushed me even deeper into fear, making it infinite and personal through the doctrine of hell. During the first twenty years of my life I was tormented by this fear, becoming ever more anxious and neurotic, trying desperately to please God because I thought only God could save me. In my early twenties I rebelled against this story, rejecting Christianity wholeheartedly and becoming an atheist. It would be much later in life, after many years of healing from the deep psychological trauma that Christianity had inflicted on me, that I came to understand that within all the fear there also was love, and that this love had transformed me.
The demons
It started when I was five years old, when Mum sat me down in the living room and told me that sin separated me from God. She said I just needed to pray and say sorry to God, to invite Jesus into my heart, and then all would be well. With a five-year-old’s understanding of what any of the words meant, I prayed the words as she instructed me. When we had finished Mum was overjoyed: she believed that this moment would be the defining moment in my life, the moment when I attained salvation.
Mum took us to a charismatic evangelical church. The worship was lively, and the leaders would strut about on stage, knocking people to the floor under the power of the Holy Spirit. We clapped and danced and people cried out for revival. But underneath the excitement, the seeds of fear were already being planted within me. There were exorcisms that happened at the end of each church service, during which people would scream out loud and writhe about on the floor. I learned that we were doing battle in a spiritual war, and that Satan was present everywhere — just like God — and he was looking for any opportunity to get his demons inside us.
Going back to this environment week after week watered the seeds of fear, as I gradually learned that even though I had prayed to Jesus, from a spiritual perspective I wasn’t ever going to be safe. One day, when the world passed away, a spiritual eternity would begin for me. If I had been successful in the spiritual war, eternity would be vaguely blissful in heaven, but if not I would face an eternity of torment with Satan and his demons.
I desperately needed to know that I would be safe from this frightening spiritual reality, but there was no way of getting confirmation directly from God. I had to rely on proxies: the praise of my parents and other adults in church and in school. I worked hard to do everything I could to please them, doing very well in school and being obedient at home. If they said I was good, hopefully God would think so too.
While I was still very young — under ten years old — all this trying very hard had got too much for me, and so I gave up on the ‘good boy’ role. I started to vent my pent-up emotions. I stopped smiling all the time, put on a moody voice to show I was unhappy, and even said “no” when people asked me to do things. The next time we went to church, Mum brought me before the elders and told them that I was possessed, that a demon had taken control of my emotions. Of course I felt nervous when I realised what was about to happen, but when they laid their hands on me I didn’t feel anything at all. I certainly didn’t feel that a demon had left me. But the procedure had its desired effect: I now knew without any doubt that ‘negative’ emotions like unhappiness and fear were unacceptable for a child of God. And so from that point on I repressed these feelings as completely as I could.
The unforgivable sin
It’s only with many years’ hindsight that I can now understand how the world felt to me as a boy. It was terrifying. Most of all I feared hell, because I knew that once in hell you would only know suffering, and that the suffering would never end. Of course I knew that if I said the right words to Jesus, that I would be saved from hell, but what if I hadn’t said the words right? Or what if I had somehow undone my salvation? There was one verse I found in the Bible that made me especially frightened:
So I tell you, every sin and blasphemy can be forgiven—except blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which will never be forgiven. Matthew 12:31
Here’s how I understood that. Blaspheming against the Holy Spirit would mean I couldn’t enter heaven, because I would carry unforgiven sin. This clearly meant I would spend eternity in hell, even if I did this sin just once. I knew that I could avoid speaking such blasphemy out loud, but what if I accidentally thought it? Jesus taught that the things you do in your mind can be just as sinful as doing the things themselves (e.g. Matthew 5:27–28). So it seemed perfectly consistent that if I thought something blasphemous against the Holy Spirit, I would also not be forgiven. My imagination now created ‘the unforgivable thought’, the most blasphemous thing I could imagine: fuck the Holy Spirit! This sentence hovered on the edge of my consciousness, threatening to become a fully fledged thought and so damn me forever, and each time this happened I would desperately try to fill my mind with other thoughts to make sure that didn’t happen.
I had a recurring nightmare of standing in my garden under a blood red sky, realising that Mum had mysteriously vanished. For me Mum was a symbol of the real Christian, and in the dream I knew that she had been taken away into heaven. This meant that I had missed the Rapture, and was standing on the threshold of the end of the world, the ‘Great Tribulation’. In the dream I was terrified to realise that this meant I wasn’t a real Christian, and that I was about to face three-and-a-half years of suffering as God’s wrath was poured out over the earth. And if I couldn’t work out how to become a real Christian in these final years, I would be headed for an eternity of suffering in hell. I woke up from these dreams crying.
These repressed fears dwelled in my unconscious, creating a background of constant anxiety throughout my childhood. I found ways to temporarily alleviate them. One was to compulsively pray the sinner’s prayer, as a kind of reset button, just in case I had somehow got unsaved. Another was to say “Jesus is Lord” out loud, because I had read in the Bible that only a real Christian could say that (1 Corinthians 12:3). If I could say this out loud, preferably in someone else’s hearing, it was proof that I hadn’t yet committed the unforgivable sin.
What made this worse was that there was no-one I could talk to. The Bible said that perfect love casts out all fear (1 John 4:18), and the way we understood this was that good Christians shouldn’t be afraid. My child’s mind deduced that if Christians don’t fear, then any evidence of fear would be evidence that I wasn’t saved — and this would make me fear all the more. I was caught in a double bind of eternal magnitude, and so my mind did everything it possibly could to hide from the fear. I never let up trying to be the perfect Christian, confessing every sin. I unconsciously reasoned that if the all-seeing God sees how good I am, and how hard I try, he will definitely welcome me into heaven. Almost certainly.
The good seed
Looking back, I feel like I already was in hell, and I wonder how I ever escaped it. I think the answer to this question is that there was a seed of goodness in that religion, a seed that slowly grew within me and kept alive my conviction that there is something deeper, something good that we can all trust. The seed of goodness is this: God is love, and we can experience that love. In my childhood some of these experiences were forced, like when I first spoke in tongues during a prayer session which was deliberately set up by the youth leader to get us to start speaking in tongues. There was something ecstatic, joyful and loving here, but it also felt a bit like a performance. In contrast, the experiences which left the deepest impression on me were the unexpected ones, like the time I regained consciousness, lying on the floor during a worship session in an Anglican church. I had no memory of falling, and couldn’t feel any pain from hitting the ground. I could only feel an all-enveloping sense of peace and love. A circle of adults had gathered around me. One of them spoke dreamily to Mum: “It’s reassuring, isn’t it?”
The deconstruction
For me these were deeply reassuring, and they gave me just enough confidence to face the big challenges that threatened to destabilise my faith when I was 20. The first of these challenges arose when I was studying philosophy and social constructionism on my degree. I learned about ‘discourse’, the stories given to us by culture which shape how we talk and think about the world. I realised that my church’s teachings on how women should behave were a discourse that benefited men. I also learned that the idea of homosexuality as a sin was another discourse, and saw how and why it had lasted so long, not just within Christianity but within wider society. When my mind opened up to these ideas, naturally I started to question the Bible. How could it be the inerrant word of God when it contained so much divinely-sanctioned violence? Most significantly for me, I finally came to doubt that such a thing as hell could exist. I reasoned: if God in perfect foreknowledge knew that even one soul could possibly end up in an eternal hell, would God have created the universe? I believed that God was love, and so the only answer to this question could be no, God could not have created such a universe. And so the universe we’re living in cannot contain that hell. This felt like a momentous discovery, and looking back I can see that picking apart this doctrine of hell and discarding it was when the whole fortress of belief really began to tumble down.
But despite these changing beliefs, I didn’t feel that I was losing God — I actually felt I was getting closer to the truth, by stripping away unhealthy parts of Christian religion. Books like Tomlinson’s The Post-Evangelical showed me that I wasn’t alone in this process: there was already a path beyond my evangelical faith that others had walked before me. Setting out on this path felt both liberating and exciting.
It was during this time of radical rethinking when one night, as I was cycling back home, I was overwhelmed by an experience of the Holy Spirit. I had to stop pedalling and get off the bike, and then worshiped in tongues by the side of the road. It was an ecstatic moment, and I felt it confirmed that God was with me in my brave faith exploration. So what came next was a shock.
The day when god went away
Just weeks later, as I was lying in bed and beginning to say my morning prayers, I realised that today something was missing. I knew what it was right away: it was God. I couldn’t feel that God was there any more. This was huge: God is gone! Immediately after realising this, I also realised that until this morning, I had sensed that God was with me. It was only when I had lost it that I knew the thing I had lost.
I didn’t panic. This was a new experience and in time it would surely make sense. But while I waited for that, I wouldn’t deny or hide from the experience. For me this meant I stopped praying, stopped reading the Bible, and stopped all my many church engagements. Gradually I felt like my family and my Christian friends — which was all of my closest friends — could not understand me any more, and this left me feeling that I was both without God and without friends. This was of course worrying and upsetting, but it was also a great liberation. I could now be friends with anyone, and I didn’t have to worry at all about converting them or setting a Christly example to them. I could just be friends with them, with no other motives. When I started making real friendships with these ‘non-Christians’, I realised something else for the first time: how I had always looked down on non-Christians before. But now I was one of them, and I relished the feeling of being just like everyone else.
Life free from religion was thrilling. Some of the ways I pushed beyond old boundaries was by wearing my hair in spikes, getting a piercing, and starting smoking. But the process I was going through was immensely painful. I alternated between moments of joy and sharing with my new friends, in ecstatic parties until sunrise, and dark moments where I came close to self-harming. Life was out of control, and I needed to escape. When a friend told me about her gap year, I realised this could be my way out. So I held on until I could graduate, and began my planning for a one-year backpacking odyssey that I hoped I would let me find out who I was, and what meaning I could find in this new life without God.
As I travelled through India and Southeast Asia, I appreciated the exotic beauty in the countries I visited, and relished the lifestyle of the solo backpacker. I travelled slowly, without the internet or a guidebook, picking my next destination based on what fellow travellers recommended. I spent lazy hours drinking tea in the morning sun, reading about Buddhism, and taking slow walks on my own through mountain roads. I began to practice Zen meditation. This was the breathing space that I desperately needed, away from family and all those old friends, with all their expectations of who I was supposed to be. It was here, on the road, that I tentatively began the process of healing.
After 3 months of this, when my money had just about run out, I continued with the next phase of my journey: moving to New Zealand to find a job. After I’d settled into a job, while reading the staff newsletter one day, I came across the word ‘Reiki’ for the first time. On seeing this word, I immediately sensed that I was going to learn it, even though I didn’t yet know what Reiki was. This felt like a calling, and so I excitedly read all about it in the city library. And when my job contract expired I shouldered my backpack once more to begin the last stage of my year-long odyssey before returning home: hitch-hiking the length of New Zealand’s south island to find a Reiki teacher I’d heard about.
Reiki and the holy spirit
The Reiki course introduced me to a kind of healing that was so much more gentle than the process of ‘laying on of hands’ that I had known in charismatic Christianity. The most powerful part of the Reiki course was the first initiation ceremony. As I was sitting with my eyes closed, hands in prayer position, the teacher took me through the ritual. The silence was only broken by the gentle chime of a Tibetan singing bowl. At first I felt tense about what might be happening to me spiritually, but I let go of that, and began to feel a rushing of heat inside and around me. And in that moment I realised. I know you! This phenomenon called ‘Reiki’ was none other than my old friend, the Holy Spirit.
In Reiki I was encouraged to follow my intuition, to listen to my heart. There was no need to get back into the realm of theoretical belief in God or salvation, heaven or hell. Reiki works through the simple laying on of hands, and the healing isn’t a precursor to some bigger salvation: the healing is both the journey and the destination. And on this journey with Reiki I have had times where I could rest in the same love and peace that I felt back at that Anglican church, but without the fear-filled story that used to go with it.
Encounter with emotion, encounter with god
After many years of Reiki and meditation practice I began to feel more comfortable with myself, but there was still something that lay hidden inside which I didn’t want to face: the painful, unacceptable feelings that I had been repressing since childhood. But as the layers of my defences started to wear thin, I finally began to recognise how much pain I was still carrying. The first layer of feelings was anger, which I held towards both my parents and the church, for inflicting spiritual trauma on me and for shirking their responsibility to protect me. And underneath that anger was a thick layer of anxiety. This had been a background to daily life since early childhood, and now, in my early forties, I was only just becoming conscious of it. And underneath that anxiety was the little child who felt afraid of God and hell, a child who didn’t feel safe or loved.
Finally accepting these feelings was a huge step for me. In one sense I felt worse: I could now fully feel the pain of this anxiety, and every day it felt like my stomach was tied in a knot. But the pain of this anxiety was so much better than the pain of having to pretend, of constantly repressing the feelings, and so it felt like a heavy burden had been lifted.
While I was still getting used to these emotions, I was unexpectedly overcome by a mystical experience. During this I saw more clearly than ever the good seed that had been planted in me since the start: the experience of God as love. During the experience this love was beyond description and it utterly overwhelmed me. In the afterglow of the experience, it felt like I was seeing the world with new eyes. I had been given a direct experience of what Paul Tillich meant when he described God as the Ground of Being — not the apex being among other beings, but the root of beingness itself. It was radiantly clear to me that we could never do anything that could separate us from this Ground of Being, because it’s what reality itself is woven from.
When the afterglow started to subside, I realised that the fear and anxiety that had been holding my stomach in a knot every day had finally gone. I can never know for sure how this had happened, but I think it was this: the frightened little child inside had finally found the love he needed, and had rested in that love sufficiently to have been healed. Now that he felt safe, the cause for anxiety was gone.
Ultimate safety
My experience of Christianity was traumatic because the good seed—that God is love—was always secondary to the story that we are all fundamentally bad, and that if we don’t sort out that badness that we will suffer eternal torment. I’m deeply grateful that in my life the good seed somehow found the right conditions to grow, and that I’ve been able to rediscover the goodness in the context of a better story.
This story is that while our lives may be filled with suffering, on the deepest level we are very well and very safe—now and forever. In the Christian version of this story as I understand it, the Ground of Being is love, and as an incarnational religion we discover that our life’s purpose is not just to experience that love, but to be transformed by it and eventually to become that love ourselves. The version of this story told in Reiki is that the universe is filled with energy, and that our healing journey brings us home to the recognition that there never was any separation between ourselves and the unlimited universal source of energy called Reiki. And in Buddhism we find this story told too in the teaching that all sentient beings, without exception, have Buddha nature. It is not something you get during some far-off future enlightenment; it is something you wake up to now. And if you don’t wake up, it doesn’t make it any less true.
In my life the unfolding of this story meant I had to wholeheartedly reject the fear-filled religion of my childhood in a quest for truth and healing. There was just one thread that remained constant throughout: God is love.