nothing is written

Eight months with my head out of the loop and I finally wake up to a double portion of shame, betrayal and intrigue.

First up, Todd Bentley – the guy with all the tattoos and tv interest – has left his wife. One minute he was being heralded as the edgy, awkward deliverer of the very latest brand of God-Soaked Things. The next, he’s been far too edgy and awkward and left people are left wondering whether it was all a fraud.

Not so much need for the wondering with Mike Guglielmucci. The guy wrote a song – ‘healer’ – and added to his creation by letting people know that he was suffering from terminal cancer. It turns out, however, he hasn’t and never did suffer from cancer – just a sixteen-year addiction to porn.

Of course many are responding with shock and disappointment, and words like betrayal and fraud are never far from the screen. God TV – the station that appeared to do all that it could to promote the meetings in Florida that Bentley hosted – now has little to say on the subject, let alone show. I heard that ‘healer’ has suffered a similar punishment, having been quickly yanked from YouTube as well as various forthcoming live albums; how – the logic goes – can people sing the song knowing such lies have been woven into it?

I don’t know what I think about Bentley. I mean, I know what I think – I wrote about those thoughts a while back – but the sad news that his life is so obviously in some kind of free-fall does not really change how I feel. If anything it makes the fault lines even clearer; yet again the Church has missed the point and got blinded by the lights, pumped up by the sugar rush of something that seems New and Exciting. We wanted Bentley to have caught hold of something truly dramatic, radical and utterly transformative – something that would change our world as we know it. And because we wanted it all so desperately I can only assume that he fell into the same trap of so many others, where delivering on expectation eventually became more important than pursuing personal integrity.

We wanted the glitz and the excitement, and in a way, I suppose that’s exactly what we got. And if there’s any shame in the story I think it belongs to us, who forced our heads into the trough and gorged on the assumption that transformation, drama and radical experience could be found simply by turning up to a meeting or flicking a tv remote. We want change? Well, it comes through us, not to us. We want something that could change the world? What more do we need than the ancient and eternal truths that bind our faith together?

When it comes to Guglielmucci and his lies, I feel sad. I feel sad that he treated cancer as a dressing-up box accompaniment, a tool for advancing his art. Life deserves more respect than that. It is clear that his own freefall has been going on for some time, and it saddens me that secrets and lies lasted well into their second decade. I feel sad that he felt the need to develop a good story to help promote the song. But none of it surprises me.

I suppose I feel more sad about the reactions of others. The way I see it, the background to the song is now utterly different, but the lyrics remain just as true as they have over the millennia. Surely now, at last, Guglielmucci can sing those words out loud without having to shield the deceit? Why, then, can’t we? Doesn’t he need us to sing for him more than ever? Doesn’t the song now have far more authenticity that we know the truth behind it? Isn’t it now finally about God alone, rather than a terribly human attempt to create something to impress the congregations?

So I don’t see why Hillsong has yanked footage of Guglielmucci speaking at one of their events with an oxygen tube strapped across his face like a misplaced smile. I don’t see why this song must be buried without trace. If the work of fallen songsmiths should disappear then where does that leave us with the Psalms? By extension, what do we do with Martin Luther King’s words? Do any of us make the grade?

What I do see is that yet again this fall exposes our own failings. Once more we missed the point and made the story about us rather than God. We  got seduced by the hype and got lost in the crowd.

It will happen again, I suppose. These wanderings off course have a familiar feel to them. But we really ought to know better. And if we continue to pursue excitement and frills and easy-answers to complex questions, if we reduce our part in the faith to hopping on a plane or singing a sing with enough passion, then the world will rot on our watch as this bride of Christ flirts with the wedding guests.

I turned up to a meeting last Friday and got chatting with one of the guys. We exchanged a few bits of chat and then he said that he’d had a look at this blog before he came out to the meeting. He commented on the fact that I don’t seem to be holding much back.

I’ve wondered about it for a few days. Self-absorption? Perhaps. Stuck in a creative rut? Possibly. But the only real point I can make with any certainty is that these pages are here act like some kind of skimming pool filter; whatever’s up on the surface will make its way out. That’s not to say that there isn’t other stuff deeper down, but these little bobbins are the ones that just seem to keep on coming back out.

Pain is loneliness.

I’ve been wondering why this seems so true of late – why is it that with a wife of 11 years, 3 kids, numerous friends within a five minute walk of here and plenty of scattered soul-mates across several countries  I still feel a profound sense of loneliness these days?

There’s a feeling I have that has become familiar of late. It’s more geographical than emotional, as if it’s some kind of second-hand deja-vu I’ve mysteriously inherited. To the side and behind me is fog, the kind that is saturated with rain that defies the laws and hangs in the air, refusing to fall. I think there may be people nearby – or there may have been. Perhaps I’ve been walking with them, but since I cannot hear, see or touch them they don’t feature too heavily in the scene.

I know that I have travelled some distance and gained some altitude to get to this place; my body feels a little tired, yet excited by the fact that it is working well enough to get me this far. But as I stand here – wherever here happens to be – something becomes clear; all that has gone on before is just the beginning. Ahead of me lies nothing more than a mile-high mass of fogged-out emptiness across which I must travel. Alone.

This is the sense I have so often, that recent times have taken me on some kind of mini-epic journey, forcing me to climb higher than ever before – so high I don’t even have to look down to know how precarious this position has become; the sense of risk is all around. Six months on since the first funeral of the three and there have been clear signs that this initial phase is drawing to a close. Days of suffocating tears have long gone, as have the moments of feeling utterly allergic to the toxic shock of Normal Life. I have been able to work, to write, to laugh and reacquaint myself with the new normal.

But this feeling – this sense of the months having only just been an introduction – this is something new and at times overwhelming. The sheer length of time ahead feels like too much

Last night a friend talked to me about the ‘ancientness of sorrow’. He said that loss connects us with something bigger, something timeless, something that to some extent we have to shoulder on our own. I’m wondering how many characters – Biblical and otherwise – fit the mold: David, Job, Jesus, Jonah, Paul, Lear. The list could be long.

I have to stop now, before I find myself putting on old Cure albums at an unreasonable volume.

Thanks to those of you who have read, commented or sent messages. All your kindness is truly appreciated.

The five of us – Emma, myself and the three little Borlases – returned home from a few weeks away in France at the weekend. It was late – 2am, I think – and despite the pep-talk in the car about how this time we really weren’t going to do anything other than just put the kids and ourselves straight to bed… I was still up at 3.27am checking emails. Ever since I returned home from a week away a couple of years back to discover that I was about to be sued by an irate fellow-author, I’ve been nervous about opening up the inbox after a long absence. Perhaps that’s why I always seem to do it when everyone else is asleep.

It turns out there was no need to be nervy this time (or, in fact, last time either; the threat of litigation never came to anything, in case you’re wondering). But as I worked my way up the column a sense of familiarity settled uneasily next to me. Old feelings – and recent ones too – told me I was home; the sense of time stretching out in front of me and a past now partially boarded up with mum and step-dad now gone… the sense of there being so much life to be lived ahead of me, but without so much of that which sustained me up to this point.

This was outside one of the gites we were staying in. I guess you could make it into a visual representation of how things are these days – the fact the influence of life carries on long past the actual business of being alive is over, the way that the new growth at the bottom seems so fragile and temporary by comparison to the weather stone and wood.  But I think it’s probably better seen as just a boarded up window.

What I am sure of is that there are some broader reasons to be genuinely excited and optimistic these days, as well as plenty of the personal stuff that requires a deep inhalation and determined step forward. It seems like we’re in the middle of a subtle yet potentially significant shift… a slight move away from the corporate and commercialized Christianity towards a more authentic, less impressive way of putting this faith of ours into flesh and blood. Little by little I wonder whether we are getting less impressed by the people we are following and more inspired by the change we are making.

I hope so.