“And he shall be like a tree planted by the river of water, that brings forth fruit in his season.”
This writing is dedicated to Fiona Barnett
Dear Saints,
In the earliest years of the ecclesia, the saints were able to make much profit of the Imperial Roman postal network of their day, which allowed letters to be passed between nations and even continents at a relatively fast rate. These letters allowed the various scattered communities of believers in Christ to communicate with each other and to remain united as a larger body. Some of them also proved to be the most astounding letters ever written in the history of man.
In spite of the power of these epistles, the early saints held to a certain preference in how they discerned a man’s true spirit within the ecclesia. They preferred to do so not solely through his letters but by meeting him face to face, eye to eye, lamp to lamp.
The following writing is my own personal testimony of faith, as well as a belated letter of introduction, to a small portion of the Remnant in these last days. It is an account of my life with Christ, leading to the point when I was born again over the course of a single night. Because this testimony involves the entirety of my life, from childhood to middle-age, it will no doubt be longer than I would like it to be. I will endeavour to keep it as short as I can, while also making it interesting and edifying for readers. I also pray that during the creative flow, these words will be graced with life enough to reflect something of my inner spirit for those who read them. For within this testimony to Christ’s love for us all, this is also what I have been commanded to share with my brethren. Something of my spirit.
But if I should fail in this in any way, or if I should provoke through misunderstanding and clumsiness, please have patience with me.
It is only that I am unable to share these things by simply looking you in the eye.
From Darkness To Light
The later parts of this Testimony will focus upon walking in spirit, which has been one of the twin streams of experiential learning throughout my life, while the earlier portions will cover the other stream, that of warfare. So along with personal accounts of walking in spirit, and some observations that may be of value to my brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus, I will also be exploring the warfare that my life has been involved in ever since I was born into the midst of war.
In previous writings for the Parables blog, I have found it profitable to share details about my walk and my personal life – as they are now – with readers scattered around the world. Fruit has blossomed from these offerings. Yet already, I can feel the beginnings of discomfort as I begin to move towards the personal side of this testimony to Christ. How vain these reflections can sound in my own mind. ‘Me me me & I’. This is what also makes this testament a sacrificial offering. A small stepping into the fire. For I am not at all comfortable with writing in such ways about my deepest past.
We are all different. We are all cast for our own roles and with our own arrays of talents and weaknesses.
For myself, my flesh has always recoiled at undressing in public. While some people are made for the spotlight – look at me! – others are made for hiding at the back of the classroom until the bell rings. While this is partly why I have been hesitant in writing a personal testimony, I have also remained hesitant because what I have to disclose here is of an intense nature. My life has been an intense one, and it has crafted an intense person.
From an early age, intense people learn that they must ‘hold back’ on their intensity with the vast majority of people around them. Intensity – sharpness of the sword – is often mistaken for anger, even wrath. It also tends to unsettle those who are not intense at all, the lukewarm, from their daily sleepy complacency.
Yet the intense also learn that it is better to be intense, to some degree, whether it be for good or bad, for hot or cold, than to be merely lukewarm towards life.
The most intense followers of Christ are those who shine.
Our lives, regardless of how unusual or ‘normal’ we might consider our circumstances, can create the most striking of stories whenever we look back on them with the context of age. Themes emerge. Life-long echoes which are echoing within us because they are not meant to be ignored, but grasped and understood.
I am 51 years old now, and an introverted, life-long writer. For a long, long, long time my dream was be a professional author of escapist novels. For years I foresaw a life that I was destined to achieve in spite of my lowly beginnings – in spite of even being dyslexic – a life where I could survive and thrive on the profits of doing something that not only did I love to do with all my substance, but which I have always felt very fiercely that I am called to do despite of my weaknesses. In every way, this aimed-for life of the writer was to be an escape from the awful life I had so far been experiencing.
When I finally achieved this dream at the ripened age of 35 and had my first novel published internationally (such joy!), and began to live the life of a published author, some of the demands called upon me by the publishing world caused a great deal of distress. Video interviews, magazine interviews, book signings, stage appearances in foreign countries, email after email after email … none of this resonated with the mission that had been placed deep within my heart, which was to do what I had been called to do ‘with all my might’ (Solomon ____); to write to the fullest limits of my God-given abilities with self-abandon. These other things seemed like distractions and temptations trying to lead me away from my daily mission.
And neither am I any kind of public speaker. Verbal speech is difficult for me. At a very early age I was required to go to Speech Therapy. I cannot do and speak well at the same time, and speaking publicly is very much a doing, especially when you are aware of every detail, every nuance of expression in the people you are addressing – yes, I have always been able to pretty much read a person’s thoughts and feelings as I speak with them, purely from the micro-responses of their eyes and face. Even talking with people I do not know all that well, and who do not know me, I find awkward and trying because of this. Verbal communication is exhausting. If I am not speaking passionately and intensely in the flow of the spirit, then I tend not to say very much at all.
For these reasons, at some level, the interviews and appearances I was being asked to do as author simply felt wrong for me to do, as though I was going against my own grain. So I declined much of these things whenever I could decline them, and those which I relented to were largely an effort to maintain peace with my publishers and their PR departments and with my agent, for I did not wish to cause them undue bother. They were only doing what they were supposed to be doing after all. I still hope I was not too much of a pain
In my earlier years as an author, I made a few gaffs in a few of the lengthier interviews which I consented to give to the press. In my over-eagerness I spilled much too much about myself. And the results proved very embarrassing to read. Back then I was still not yet free of all vanity. I had chips on my shoulder. For a long time I had desired to prove all those people wrong who had treated my dream of writing with disdain and mockery, and who had judged me as a worthless dreamer without hope. And now, I had proven them all wrong when they saw my first novel displayed in the windows of their local book stores.
I had come from the very worst of beginnings but now found myself in the company of fellow authors and peers in the publishing industry, people who appeared to my eyes as professionally-blessed beach-dwellers with lives that had placed in them the intensity of stones. I wished to impress with my hard-won working class credentials as a real writer, a man who was actually living it for real … ‘Hear me now for I have suffered for my art, you lukewarm wannabe’s.’
Yes, I confess, the resulting feelings of embarrassment from the over-egged blatherings of certain of my earlier interviews lingered in me for some years to come. It was only when I was reborn in Christ that these regrets left me, for when I finally cast off the old man of SELF, I stopped caring about such things.
They blew off in the wind as chaff.
Having sat on the kernel of this testimony of faith for almost a year now without proceeding with it, I have finally been given the go-ahead to write and publish these words as witness to the power of Christ’s love and redemption in my life. I am being told that the time for these words has now ripened.
In the spirit of fair warning, this is not going to be the kind of Christian testimony that you are used to reading. And it will also be longer than most testimonies, requiring a few instalments, so again my apologies. But at least once it is is done, it is done.
The following account starts with darkness. But it will lead to light.
Born Into War
Violence, terror and dread were the daily bread of my own particular childhood. And much worse things than that.
The Irish civil war known as the Troubles had ignited in 1969. Though the flames of this civil war were really only just flaring up when I was born into the midst of them in 1973, so that my early formative years took place among the worst periods to be seen over the many decades that it ran. While the violence escalated every day with more bombings and shootings and assassinations, with the Provisional IRA launching waves of attack and the ‘Protestant’ communities most loyal to the British Crown taking up arms – appearing mysteriously as though from nowhere – ‘in defence of their homeland’, I was a likewise troubled boy growing up in a working class ‘Loyalist’ housing estate, in a community that was very typical of the working class communities bearing the brunt of this war on both sides. It was this type of community in which I grew up where those people who fought clandestinely in this conflict – the so-called ‘terrorists and freedom fighters’ clad in their black masks – the foot soldiers – were recruited from, and this was done largely through the Masonic and Orange Order lodges found across the land.
This staged civil war ran on for 30 years – for an entire generation.
I did not leave it myself until I was 30, shortly after it was over.
During those three decades of violence, we would have remained unaware of much of the nightmare that enmeshed us had it not been for the daily news reports, which filled our heads with bloody atrocities that could happen to anyone, at any time or place or age. No real context or analysis was ever provided concerning this violence. No real questions ever asked. It was presented as simply mindless chaos between two rival communities gone mad.
And we all bought into this narrative.
Even now, years after the war was ended by those winged Envoys of Peace known to the world as Tony Blair and Billy-Goat Clinton, hardly anyone has any real notion as to what the Troubles really were about – and why. And this is frankly quite amazing. Especially when we consider how many deep secrets have come to light elsewhere in the world at this point. Here, it has all remained clouded in darkness, with only some glimmers of light emerging in the last few years.
For the simple truth is that the Troubles were not what was presented to us by the media and our leaders. The Troubles were not a grass-roots war of hatred between two embittered sides driven to kill each other over their differences. And it was surely not a civil war between ‘Catholics and Protestants’, since few of those involved would have ever claimed to be Christians. In reality, the 30-year Troubles was a pre-planned social-engineering experiment and psy-op, waged by the Cabal or Cult which rules our world through money and deception – those powers still hiding in the shadows, called by one notable observer ‘Team Antichrist’. This experiment and psy-op had many goals and agendas concerning the use of domestic terrorism against a captive population. The fact that it was, and still is, heavily depicted by the media as a war between Catholics and Protestants – in other words a war between Christians – offers more clue towards understanding their motivations.
But the real understanding to behold is that both sides of the conflict were run behind the scenes in an off-handed manner by the same people.
It is much the same today with Hamas created by Mossad and Isis created by the West, and the armed and militant transgender terror cells now emerging in America, created by Blackwater and ‘the deep state’ – cells which are now being primed to launch a full-out terror campaign against conservative America. It is the same with these terror groups and agencies because they are all run by the same people who developed these techniques, firstly during their terrorist campaign against ethnic Palestine, and then when they scaled up these methods for full effect against the divided population of Ireland.
Even though I lived in the very midst of all of this, with my own father picking up a gun, I was only shown the truth of the Troubles many years later after I came to the Light. The truths of the Troubles were shown to me purely by revelations of the Spirit. My eyes were opened to things which now, only now, are starting to be supported by the research and analysis of other Irishmen who have also been having their eyes opened to the same things at the same time. The veil is starting to be lifted, even here in the heart of darkness.
My First Encounter With The Devil
If I am presenting a darkly grim story here, I am afraid it only gets worse.
Because now we come to the devil in all of this, and the devil in my own early life.
The first time I encountered the devil, I was only three or four years of age. My parents were having a party downstairs in the house. I had finally managed to fall asleep despite the noise, when all of a sudden something shocked me AWAKE. I was very aware that I was not dreaming. That this was very real. And I knew I was not alone. When I peeked out from over my heavy quilt, I saw a shadowy head with horns breathing at me, right next to my bed. I was terrified, obviously, and I hid myself deep beneath the covers and tried not to whimper. When I finally gained enough courage to look out again, the figure was gone.*
* (Looking back on this seemingly small yet odd event in more recent times, I came to understand its fuller implications. But the point I wish to offer here is that it was my first remembered experience of the devil.)
For all that my home town remains a place of many churches and believers, there was also a dark undercurrent that was deeply hidden away from sight – a brooding spiritual undertow which could only be felt without any real comprehension of what was being sensed. Though its consequences were visible all around us and in our lives, in the form of shattered and dangerous people.
I witnessed demons in others many times from an early age. Some people were almost completely under their power when under the sway of alcohol. I recall, in one of my earliest memories, of being woken at night by screams and shouting, and upon going out into the landing, looking down to see my mother being dragged around by the hair and beaten by the raging drunken figure of my father. From down on the carpet my mother saw me standing there at the top of the stairs in my jammies, three years of age and terrified, and she screamed at me to help her. Fear rooted me to the spot. She screamed at me to run down the road and fetch my grandfather out of his sleep so he could come and help her. But my father roared at me to get back into my room.
So I went back into my room.*
At that age I had no notion of demons. But even though I did not know what I was seeing, I still saw them.
* (It took three decades of living before I realised what a hold this event had over me, how much it had cause me to overcompensate on behalf of protecting women, how fierce I had been in placing women on a pedestal because of it, and how many other ways it had shaped me).
There were always rumours of Satanism and Satanists when I was growing up in the town. Rumours of old barns being used for blood sacrifices and darkly shameful acts. Sites out in the woods where you would find sticks arranged into shapes that someone had brushed only partially away, lying there among other weird and unsettling paraphernalia. One time I found a magazine of pornography (‘porn’ – from the original Greek word, porneía, meaning sexual immorality). I was so shocked and perturbed by this thing that after some moments of staring at the starkest images of naked women in amazement, I cast it away, feeling defiled just to have touched it.
Today the area has begin to display its true underbelly right out in the open: https://gript.ie/locals-protest-lisburn-councils-satanic-statue-at-a-cost-of-707000-to-taxpayer-for-whole-series/
My home town is not far from Belfast (Bel: Baal, Fast: Stronghold). It was during the decade of the 1970’s that we witnessed the horrors of the Shankill Butchers in the divided city of Belfast. A ‘rogue gang’ of young men linked to Loyalist paramilitaries, who donned balaclavas to kidnap random people off the streets at night at gun point, supposedly because they suspected them of being Catholics, before torturing and murdering their terrified victims usually with a knife, usually by slicing their throat like sacrificial victims. It has been reported that they engaged in cannibal acts and other atrocities. They killed at least 23 people.
If you look into the affair now, you will quickly arrive at obvious and very well funded gaslighting. Beyond the slickly-evil movie that was made of these people and their crimes, starring Stuart Townsend as the blood-drinking psycho-hero, you will find articles telling you how no such Satanic links existed in their clearly Satanic behaviours. Their acts were driven solely by a particular form of hatred and division which the media endlessly called ‘sectarianism’. This is the same narrative which has been branded upon the entire period of the Troubles. We simply went mad.
In 1979, when the gang of ‘Butchers’ were finally ‘brought to justice’, the judge who oversaw their trial described their blood-sacrificing atrocities as “a lasting monument to blind sectarian bigotry”.
During those years, British and Irish Intelligence ran the civil war known as the Troubles from both sides. But within these Intelligence streams, as we find within all Intelligence streams, lurked people with deeper agendas, the working field operatives of the Cult.
One of the most self-shattering revelations shown to me after I picked up my cross, was the reality of Satanism, and specifically Generational Satanism, in our communities and lives and the world at large. And the fact that it runs right up to the very top of the human race. That it is organised, and has been organised for many centuries. It is governed. These awakenings were probably the very last things I would ever wish to have discovered about this world. And probably the last thing I would like to be writing about now.
Yet in the breathtaking opening of my eyes that occurred after I was reborn, I was even lead to discover that these things touched upon my own life and past. And that my home town was in fact rife with the presence of Generational Satanists – at least, those of the lower orders of Satanists, the foot soldiers and whores, the dealers and traffickers, the suppliers of babies and children. This went hand in hand with another plague of my home town which likewise remained hidden from sight, but which was awfully revealed to me over a period of many years both before and after my redemption in Christ – the absolute prevalence of childhood sexual abuse.
One plague was the cause of the other plague.
A handful of years ago, I ‘googled’ my home town and added ‘Satanism’ to the end of the town’s name. When the search results appeared, I saw that Satanic activities had been reported there with some real alarm at the time of my youth.
I started to ‘ask around’ about these things with locals during my very rare visits back to my creepy home town – did they remember anything, had they ever heard anything about Satanism in the area … I probed and probed and more was revealed to me. I was astounded time and again. Wholly through the spirit, I was shown that the large British Army Base hidden way out at the back of the town – which, just like Masonic Lodges, no one ever seems to mention – was connected to many of these things I was now delving into. I was shown in the spirit how the darkest of evils were being pursued up there in that Army Base by embedded units of British Military Intelligence.
This led me down the deepest and darkest of rabbit holes, leading to many outer and inner horrors.*
* (And eventually to my confrontation with the devil, and to the discovery that CHRIST IS REAL).
Through leadings of my Father, these rabbit holes opened my eyes to the realities of MK-Ultra and Project Monarch, and how they were long-running, scientifically-applied applications of ancient methods of mind control. Yes, mind control is a real phenomenon. And although I use the term ‘scientific application’ here, I mean the scientific application of ancient techniques for breaking a child’s mind and soul such as brutal rape and much, much worse. Things beyond speaking of.
The modern ongoing practices of MK-Ultra and Project Monarch were developed and widely deployed here in the Northern Irish Troubles, against a compliant population who still to this day remains entirely unaware of this fact yet are deeply broken because of it, and who back then were already embedded with low-level Generational Satanists within their communities (some of these figures being the most respected members of their communities, even church-goers, even ministers). These were used to ‘program’ the young men, on both sides, recruited to fight in the civil war and to participate in its death squads and murders. But the vast majority of MK-Ultra operations are used not against young men, but against young children.
In a long-running operation, which still remains entirely hidden to scrutiny – since these are the Enemy’s deepest and darkest secrets – many children exposed to Satanists were processed, against their will, by professionals in white coats using techniques originally developed by ancient Mystery Cults for shattering souls into pieces through the very worst of traumatic experiences, and then programming them like machines to be slaves; sex slaves, soldier slaves, and loyal operatives.
This is the greatest secret of the Gnostics. That true Gnostics are not liberated by their ‘enlightenment’ at all, but are in fact mind-controlled slaves.
Generational Satanists, Occultists, Gnostics, call them what we will … those who are most wholly given over to the devil are those most enslaved by his darkness from a very early age. And this includes many of the famous faces we see on the screens of modern media. Their eventual ‘consent’ in finally giving themselves over to Satan was not real consent at all, but rather a breaking of a child’s will under the most impossible of conditions. One of the hardest aspects to hold in our mind and especially our heart about these monsters is that they were once helpless victims too – they were once innocent children themselves without any real say in the matter.
They remain the most lost of us all.
A year after I had started asking around about these matters locally and being lead down these rabbit holes, I happened to do the same ‘google’ search about my home town and Satanism. This time, at the very top of the search results stood a different listing. The heading contained the words ‘Satanic Panic’, and the link lead to a recent article about a ‘Satanic Panic’ which had supposedly started in my home town in 1973, the year I was born there. The article was written by a fellow ‘who had previously worked’ in British Military Intelligence’, a person called Colin something. And it claimed that yes, indeed, there had been a ‘mild’ and ‘daft’ kind of ‘Satanic Panic’ in the town for a brief period after 1973, but that actually it had not been real, there had been no real Satanists involved, Satan was only a bogeyman, and all those weird rumours of Satanism that people had started reporting back then were in fact nothing more than a silly experiment run by British Military Intelligence out of the town’s Army Base, in order to see if ‘Satanic Panics’ could be used in some way as a form of domestic warfare …
This was curious to me. By this time I had come to the shocking realisation that during the Troubles, British Military Intelligence (along with others forces) had launched a deeply covert offensive of entirely real Satanism upon my people. They had waged domestic warfare by unleashing Satanism and a subsequent plague of child abuse, upon us.
Also by this time, I knew that Satanists did very much exist in the town, and that I even knew some of them. I also knew that beyond a certain depth, Intelligence organisations and Satanism converged into the same thing – the professional covert arms of the Cult. Luciferian creeds are to be found embedded within all levels of Intelligence groups, though this is hidden from sight by the usual ‘front porch’ of regular unaware employees. Historically, going back to the original secret services of the English Crown, occultists and ‘spies’ have always gone hand in hand (think of occult sorcerers like John Dee, the original 007). The required secrecy of intelligence operations naturally dovetails into the shadow-mastery of occultists, who due to their heinous tastes and practices are also required to operate in the shadows. This is why wherever Intelligence agencies go, very real Satanic activities always follow them (think of child trafficking and sexual blackmail).
By this point I was also aware that the very term ‘Satanic Panic’ had not even been coined by the media until long after the 1970’s. (Indeed, as a previous advertising copywriter, I can hear the ‘jingoistic poetry’ of this term; I can tell it was conceived and used by marketing people because of its sound). ‘Satanic Panic’, like ‘False Memory Syndrome’, is a fairly modern form of gaslighting, used whenever very real cases of Ritual Satanic Abuse against children erupt within a community. There are many examples of this if you doubt these things.
In a typical piece of gaslighting, you will likely read the following form of denial, as scripted by the perpetrators themselves:
“The satanic panic is an example of how fear, ignorance, and prejudice can lead to mass hysteria and injustice. It also shows how media sensationalism, religious extremism, and professional misconduct can fuel and exploit such hysteria for their own agendas.”
It is only ‘fear, ignorance, prejudice, mass hysteria, religious extremism …’ The very same things we are told caused the Troubles.
So there were no Satanists after all. We had simply gone mad again.
The article about a ‘Satanic Panic’ was gaslighting. And quite crude gaslighting at that.
And it had not been there before I had started probing.
Warred Upon By The Devil’s Mystery Cult
It is thanks to the manipulations of modern media that we are prone to thinking that monstrosities like Jeffrey Epstein and the use by Intelligence Agencies of child sexual exploitation for blackmail – and other purposes – is somehow a modern phenomenon. However, these ‘techniques’ are ancient, and their uses in modern times were developed and tested in places like the Northern Irish Troubles. The staged ‘civil war’ was a Satanic laboratory.
In places like the Kincora Boy’s Home in Belfast, British Military Intelligence used the sexual exploitation of children in order to blackmail Loyalist Paramilitaries, Loyalist politicians, top British MPs, police officers and others. The worst perpetrators not only destroyed the boys being held under care there, they even snatched boys from the streets, and murdered and dismembered them in a shed at the back of the property.
All of these things were run knowingly by certain Cult-agents within British Military Intelligence, which is not surprising since it is one of the main Intelligence arms of the Cult.
And those things the Cult learned and perfected over its 30-year run here have been rolled out across the entire West – most of all across those ‘Crown’ or ‘ex-Crown’ nations who speak English, including the US.
This is how I am able to see what is happening in America right now, and what is coming.
Because we have already been through it here.
Son Of A Soldier
I was born in the crucible of a material and spiritual war. A war often referred to on the ground as ‘The Dirty War’, because it employed the most heinous of methods and was marked by constant betrayals and double-agents working both sides.
However, while the Troubles were very much a staged conflict, many people did believe in it, and many fought and murdered and died on behalf of its hidden agendas.
As a young man, my own father was recruited by these Intelligence agencies to fight in the civil war in defence of his homeland, in the same manner as every other paramilitary. He believed in the cause and likely had no clue at the time what he was volunteering for, nor the real truth behind his ‘Loyalist’ handlers. He was recruited and indoctrinated before becoming a fully-fledged ‘paramilitary’, the so-called terrorists or freedom-fighters of the time bearing assault rifles and balaclavas. In the name of the cause he ran protection rackets and robbed banks and shot people. The favoured tactic was to shoot someone in the face when they answered their door at night, or simply to kick in the door and shoot them in front of their family (‘the door-kickers’), or if the victim was, say, a taxi driver – to ride in the back of his taxi as a fare to a quiet spot somewhere, and then rather than giving him his fare, shooting him in the back of the skull instead. Often this was simply because the person was a Catholic. Almost always there seemed to be grief-broken wives and children left in the wake of these atrocities.
My father rose through the ranks of the Loyalist terror-groups until he became the military commander of my home town’s Battalion. He became a household name there, hailed as hero by committed Loyalists and dreaded by everyone else. A man reported about in the local news.
And the process of all this destroyed him, what was left to be destroyed. For he had already been a deeply disturbed man even before his recruitment into the death squads. Upon joining, he soon became a ragingly-violent alcoholic possessed by demons. And in the process he destroyed or caused great and lasting harm upon those closest to him, those who – at some deeper level within him – he must have only desired to love and protect and cherish as any father and husband is supposed to.
Instead, he was a monster to his loved ones.
Unlike my younger brother, who naturally embraced the things of the Loyalist community around him, for some reason from the earliest of ages I refused to have anything to do with these beliefs or this culture of ‘Loyalist resistance’. The flags with a bloody Red Hand imposed over a Star of David looked weird and unsettling to me. The same of murals of masked gunmen on the walls of houses, and the kerbstones painted in the colours of the British Flag, and the anthems sung to the Queen of England, and the Orange Marches (though the thundering Lambeg drums were truly spectacular). This whole culture seemed strangely foreign to me, and made me feel like I was a stranger living in a strange land.
To be perfectly honest, as I grew older and began to understand some of the context of what I was living through, it was the other side who I developed more sympathy towards. It was the native Irish under the heel, not the descendants of English and Scottish colonists of previous Plantations, who I identified more strongly with.* This was not in any way a political thing. I always simply sided with the underdog, the oppressed, the bullied in life.
* (While my love for my own troubled people – the working-class ‘Protestants’ of Ulster – remains to this day, it is not based on any notions of right or wrong, but sympathy).
Despite this attitude of non-participation, when I was growing up I was tarred with the same brush that my father the terrorist was painted with. Even though I had always disavowed these things, I was tarred and judged as the son of a terrorist by peers and strangers and even by my teachers, some of whom liked to make my life difficult because of the fact. It was like being the son of Tony Soprano.
This only worsened any time my father ended up in the news. People would look at me as though I was somehow bad. When in my heart I considered myself to be on the side of the good. Evil and badness were what I wished to resist.
My father, and therefore my family, ended up in the news again after the British Army raided our house one night.
I am still not certain why this event even took place (beyond my darkest suspicions). Even my father, in a BBC documentary decades later, offered testimony to camera that his actions as a leader of a death squad had been aided by British agents at the time. This ‘Collusion’ between Loyalist paramilitaries and their British handlers is openly recognised now – just not the outright control and running of these people along with the war itself.
Yet one night the British Army kicked in our front door while we were all sleeping, and stormed the house.
I remember waking up fully to the sounds and tremors of their booted thunder on the stairs. Seeing blue lights flashing through the curtains. Hearing voices roaring. I can remember how I clenched my whole body – leapt into myself – when men burst into the bedroom and pointed assault rifles and torches at myself and my younger brother in the other bed. I lay there with the barrel of a gun pointing at my face. The young squaddies – who I only glimpsed in shadows and torch light – seemed totally hyped up and even on the edge of violence (in hindsight, it was as though they were drunk or on drugs, or both). They dragged us out of bed by the hair. Tossed the mattresses from the beds and made a show of searching for something while others dragged us downstairs. And then the British Army proceeded to tear the entire house to pieces, even ripping out the walls. And even at that young age, it seemed to me that what I witnessed was more a form of punishment or even coercion than any real sincere ‘search for hidden arms’. They seemed to want us to feel it.
It was the first time I experienced terrorism on the receiving end.
I was 5 or so years of age.
Eventually my father was arrested for his activities. He was caught red-handed during an attempted murder/assassination – this was a war where being caught red-handed was just about the only way anyone ever seemed to be caught by the authorities (informers being routinely tortured and shot).
He had gone to kill a man living up in the hills, a man allegedly working as a spotter for the IRA. Whatever the truth of this, the man happened to be carrying a loaded shotgun, for hunting, when my father arrived in a car wearing a balaclava and opened fire on the fellow from the passenger seat. In the exchange of fire my father was hit in the arm, but he was driven clear by his colleague. He was later arrested, having required serious medical attention at a hospital.
Upon sentencing he was sent to the highest security prison in the British Commonwealth – The Maze, or Long Kesh, prison.
I visited him only once there in the Maze.
I was a young teenager. A more suffocating place I cannot describe for a person of that age. And that was from the vantage of a visitor. It was not that it was filthy or unruly or chaotic or loud. It was none of these things. It was all coldly professional and in order. But my skin crawled from beginning to end and I could barely breathe until I was out of there. When you step into a prison, even briefly, you find that the prison in some way steps into you.
Outside the prison walls the staged civil war continued. The Provisional IRA still raged against the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the British Army, and helpless civilians, just as they had been doing since the very beginnings of the 1970’s; only now they were worse. Their actions fuelling more and more young men into the arms of the Loyalist paramilitaries. And amongst all of this trauma-based social engineering, ordinary people tried to live ordinary lives, just at they had been doing since it had all kicked off back in 1969.
The vast majority of people had nothing to with the conflict. It simply raged around them while a small group of people made havoc of their communities and lives. Even at its height, the Provisional IRA did not number much more than a few thousand active volunteers. The numbers for the Loyalists must have been much the same, or even lower. Yet these small groups were able to turn the entire region into a theater of war for 30 years, backed by the media and the State. It was truly a cauldron of evil and deception.
These are the conditions I was born into.
The Boy With The Thousand Yard Stare
I was entirely alone in early life. There was no one to turn to, nor anyone to offer any love. I was surrounded largely by wicked people and wicked scheming; surrounded by violence, fear and the devil.
As a boy I was very quiet, and had a maturity that caused adults and peers to not really know what to make of me. I was also very sensitive, to the degree that I knew the moods and thoughts of others. And deeply soulful. I did not yet know that I had been given the heart of a poet and artist. A dreamer and visionary.
I did not know how these things were an anathema to my people, nor why that is so.
Primary School was a daily trial of character. The teachers there were generally cold and judgemental towards the children. The disciplinarians called the children by their surnames, barking at us for talking as they marched us in long files from one place to another to the sounds of insanely-loud bells like soldiers in training.
It was obvious that they looked down on myself and my younger brother quite severely. Often the worst teachers would throw barbs of some kind, or set us apart for special treatment. Like my younger brother, I was dyslexic but did not know it. Reading and writing came to me only because I discovered a love for escaping into stories, and so I read despite my weaknesses and drew picture-stories until I was old enough to write them down in my clumsy handwriting. I still cannot spell to this day nor remember numbers. But back then I struggled even to learn the alphabet or the months of the year. It was very frustrating. I was entirely unaware that I had a damaged brain that was unable to remember numbers and the spelling of words nor sequential lists of any kind. Neither did I learn in the linear bottom-up fashion in which things are taught in schools. I learned by grasping things in their entirety first and working inwards from there (which was why I essentially educated myself over the years).
I was too independent and intelligent to consider myself stupid. Yet still I was plagued by these weaknesses of seeming-stupidity, unable to remember the simplest of things. Because of these contradictions, my teachers were never able to wholly conceal their surprise whenever I produced a piece of writing or a decent work of art in the classroom.
My Primary School teachers knew that I was not stupid, so just as happened later in Highschool, they decided that I was simply being a lazy child, and judged me even more harshly for it. Shamed me, in fact, by forcing me to stand in front of the classroom, day after day, while I tried to recite things like the alphabet to the rest of the laughing children – unable to even think straight with all the distractions before me.
One day, I recall how we were receiving our vaccination jabs. I think the jabs had mostly been given to the children, and that I was late for some reason. Inexplicably, I went through the door of the school’s small infirmary without knocking. This is something that I have been propelled into doing several times in life – opening a door without knocking when I clearly should be knocking first. Each time I have been lead to do this, I have opened the door onto a scene of surprise, catching out the people or person on the other side (once I caught one of my Religious Studies university lecturers perched like a bird on his office window sill, leering down at some student in the square below).
This was the first time I had ever done this though. Back in Primary School on the day of the vaccine jabs. And upon opening the door of the Infirmary I was confronted with the sight of one of the prettiest girls of my class, who I had a crush over, standing there stripped to her underpants before the desk with her back to me. She was not speaking or moving. Just standing there almost wholly naked, while the doctor or whoever the man was behind the desk simply stared at her. He ordered me to get out of the room.
So in my confusion I left her there.
On the surface at least there was nothing particularly bad about this school. Yet every day, the final bell ringing was like a release from prison into green pastures.
What friends I made in those days were terrified of coming round to my home in case my father was there. I was terrified of coming home in case my father was there, for he was a brutal and violent man back then, and much taken with tormenting those closest to him. Sometimes the parents of my friends would be cagey about our friendships too, because of the looming reputation of my father. As a family we also moved house a lot, for security reasons, so we always eventually seemed to be moving on and leaving friends behind.
The men of my world were rough and unfeeling. The women the same. They had been brutalised in ways I did not understand at the time, but which ran contrary to my own soulful sensitivities. I did not fit in with them or their culture. I did not even fit in with my own family. I felt like I had been dropped there from somewhere else.
I felt this way about the entire world.
I did not fit in with anything.
In a photo from that early period, you can see me sitting there as a small boy with the knowing eyes of a combat veteran looking back at you. It is very unsettling.
In the military, they call this the ‘thousand yard stare’.
I can no longer locate the photo I am thinking of. But my stare in that picture looked something like this, though I was very much younger:
Or this:
Even at that early age, I had already been through daily warfare against my mind and heart and spirit.
There was no light in the immediate world that I lived in. No love. No honour. No righteousness. No truth. No beauty. No soul.
No-one even to look up to and respect.
These things I sought out wherever I could find them.
The one shining exception to this darkness was my dear grandmother, a quiet and gentle Christian lady who acted the way that grandmothers are supposed to act towards their grandchildren. My grandmother is the only kind and warm-hearted person I can remember from childhood. She was humble in her spirit, very unassuming. The opposite of opinionated. She did not speak much. Though she carried great hidden depths within her, and when we looked into each other’s eyes, we knew each other.
She was the one example, later in life, who I was able to cite whenever I was called to defend the Christian faith against haters – which I was often called to do for some reason, even though I was not knowingly a Christian, and even though I had no love of the Church itself. I would tell people of her example of true Christian behaviour and how deeply it had affected me, how it had helped me, in my troubled youth. When I was defending Christ, I was defending Christ in my grandmother.
Yet even my beloved grandmother was deeply wracked by inner troubles from far in her past. I glimpsed this once when I was still a boy, when she confessed that she had a great fear of open waters. I asked her why she was so afraid of drowning. She told me she was not afraid of drowning, and that was the problem. That whenever she stood near open water she was drawn to it, tempted towards its depths, lulled into throwing herself into it to such a degree that it caused a great and trembling fear in her.
I believe the shadows of her deep past caused her to seek oblivion in some way, and this only worsened as she grew to be truly elderly, and her mind succumbed to anxiety and turmoil. Eventually she ended up in the one place she had always vehemently said she never wished to go to – a retirement home. Even with her mind and memories failing her she insisted she did not wish to be there. When I saw her for the last time as an adult, on a visit back to Northern Ireland, I barely recognised her for the little frail creature sitting before me. She could no longer speak. Her hands gripped mine and her eyes wept freely as we looked at each other, for she wanted out of there and she wanted me to know it. Because she wanted me to take her out of there.
I went outside and stood weeping in the carpark, out of my depth and not knowing what to do.
I left her there to die in the nursing home.
I miss her still.
My First Encounter With Christ
To be honest I cannot recall the vast majority of my childhood growing up in the Troubles of Northern Ireland, thank Yah for His mercy, save for certain moments – both good and bad – which have never left me and I suppose never will. I believe there is a purpose to this. These are the moments that define us.
One shining memory, which only came back to me when I was born again at the age of 43, is of my first encounter with Christ. It was possibly not my very first encounter with our Lord at all – but it is the first one that I recall. And surprisingly it did actually happen in a church, though this was to be my only experience of churches for most of my life.
I was four or five years of age, and briefly attending the Sunday School of my grandfather’s Presbyterian church. For some reason I did not belong in this church. It felt entirely alien to me. And the people themselves were no less alien than the people outside its walls. No less cold and unloving. Certainly not any less vain. Even to a child they appeared puffed up in their own judgements and condemnations upon the rest of the world, which they also seemed terribly afraid of, in case it should tempt them. The congregation was mostly elderly, and the spirit of the place was that of dust and old bones, covered over with the reek of artificial chemical perfumes which the women liked to douse themselves in before Sunday service, bitter-sweet niceties that cloyed at the back of your throat and made you think of rotting fruit.
I did not belong there, just like I did not belong anywhere, and I did not even feel comfortable in the Sunday school with the other children. Every moment in attendance, I felt like an outsider. Maybe I was simply angry at God. Or maybe my spirit was only recoiling from things that it should have been recoiling from. Or maybe it was both of these things.
But even here, one morning in Sunday school, something did happen. A story was being read aloud about Jesus and John The Baptist. I cannot offer any context before or after this event, but right then, the more that I listened to the story of Jesus and his walk and John The Baptist and his walk, the more the tears flowed and flowed from my young eyes.
Did anyone notice the small boy in the corner of the room weeping as he heard of Jesus and John The Baptist? I cannot recall that anyone did. And at first I did not even know why I was weeping. I only knew that in some way I was desperately in need of help, and that I was desperately ensnared by evil. I know that there was something about the lonely walk of John The Baptist, way out in the wilderness, that burned deeply within me in response to my own experience as a loner and a boy who felt set apart from the world of man.
I am fairly sure I did not repent of my sins or anything like that. I would not have known what to repent for or likely what it even meant.
I simply know that as I wept silently, I became aware of being in the presence of His love.
And that I finally felt accepted.
I finally knew where I belonged.
Forgetting Jesus
Yet many things conspired to place a veil over my eyes concerning this mysterious belonging to Jesus Christ, this mysterious calling of my heart. Darkness and trauma swept over my life again. I stopped attending Sunday school – my memory of why is almost entirely blank to me, along with most of my other memories of this time. Accompanying these things came a growing worship of the Image of the Beast, the modern media, which further drew me away from reality. All these factors caused me to entirely forget that I had known anything of Jesus at all.
Over time I fell back into the condition of feeling lost in the world.
Of all the things that caused me to forget this early calling of my Saviour, one of the worst of them were the examples of the Presbyterian church of my grandfather, the same church where for a brief while I had attended Sunday school.
Unlike my grandmother, who attended the same church, her peers seemed lifeless to me, dead inside, without soul.
My grandmother was a woman of heart and the attitude of her heart, rather than of teaching and doctrine. I believe she was severely dyslexic and likely could not read well. For her it was an inner living experience with God, because she was denied a more intellectual approach to faith.
Her main focus was love, SELFless service for others.
For many of her peers though, love seemed strangely absent.
As I looked back on this church recently, I was lead to some deeper understandings. I wished to know why they had cast such a long and lasting impression upon me, to the extent where their example as Christians had propelled me away from the Christian faith for several decades.
Through understandings concerning my own walk, I was shown how these believers had mistaken the daily crucifying of their flesh – the Old Man of SELF – for the total oblivion of their SOULS (their lives). That instead of losing their souls (their lives) by throwing them into the winds of their Maker’s will as a sacrificial offering, they had instead dashed them upon the rocks of annihilation at the tempting lies of the devil, thinking that this was faith.
“The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the Temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here …’ [and God’s angels will catch you].”
Luke 4:9
They were following a temptation of their own RELIGIOUS flesh, and of their own man-made RELIGION, thinking this act of total annihilation was Godly when really it was of the devil, thinking it was a SELFless act when really it was a SELF-led one, thinking that their Lord’s angels would catch them in their fall when in fact they were dashed upon the ground to the utter destruction of their inner life.
They were trying to kill the Old Man of their flesh through the workings of the Old Man of flesh – through their own understanding – rather than allowing God to refine them of the corruptions of SELF, the thorny weeds and stony grounds of their hearts and minds, so that what remained would thrive and flower into a small portion of the Kingdom here and now, to be seen by all. And so they had not received the inner blessings of the saint’s daily refinements through trials and sufferings. They had not received a return of anything they had given over into the hands of God. Because they were not walking in the spirit, and so had not discovered the fact that when we offer to God a sacrifice of those things we love most of all in our lives – our dreams and deepest life-long desires, even our most precious children – like Abraham with Isaac upon the sacrificial rock – that these things would eventually be given back to them in a loving and refined way, along with much power.
This is why they seemed to so empty inside, without joy or radiance.
They did not see that Jesus wept over Jerusalem because Jerusalem represents man lost to the sins of his own flesh, his own SELF-directed will divorced from the will of their Creator. And so they worshiped Jerusalem as a Holy City even now, mistaking it for the spiritual Holy Mountain of Zion, the Kingdom of God where all such SELF-led oblivions are vanquished.
They did not know that the more their worldly SELF-led lives were slain daily, the more their SOUL-lives in Christ began to shine. That God wishes to preserve our refined souls and everything remaining in them after the Old Man of SELF has been burned away.
Because of this their man-made religion also believed that everything in a person was wholly wicked and corrupt, to be suppressed or at least beheld in eternal suspicion. So they considered everything in the world to be unclean, even for the holy.
This was why they considered all personal interests like art or writing or humour or hiking or adventure or even sex between man and wife as being fleshy.
This was why they suppressed the feelings of their own supposedly-regenerated hearts to the point that they were cold and uncaring and stony.
They believed that to walk in Christ was to walk in death and imprisonment, not life and liberation.
They saw Christ being slain upon the Cross; but not the SERPENT of SELF.
Not the cosmic consequences of all the sins cast from the world’s SELF-led lives.
And so the fruit of their beliefs presented itself as rotten fruit, a dead fruit. Something that once had been beautiful but now was spoiled. They shared not a living faith in Christ but a walking mode of deathwish. They were not a lamp to be drawn towards but a deadly pit of SELF to be avoided.
This was why they did no outreach work in the community. Did not engage in any way with the lost people of the fallen world around them, or even associate with them, or even care about them. Instead, to the observer, it seemed that they preferred to judge and snipe the badness of others from their ‘saved’ positions of election, assured that as soon as they died they were to be whisked away to Heaven for their Heavenly rewards.
This was why when their preachers delivered the gospel in the streets they screeched the Good News in anger; manic street preachers casting not seeds of faith but condemnations.
This was how they managed to make the Good News sound like the Bad News.
This was why the example they cast as believers turned people from the light.
This was how they had turned my own early path away from what I did not even know to be my faith in Christ, so that I fell back into the world.
They were not yet free in Christ.
In fairness, I do not believe they were aware of any of these things with any clarity. They were simple people, in the best sense of the word. Our walks in Christ teaches us much simplicity. But they were only aware of what their preachers had taught them, and they only saw what they read in their Bibles through the lenses they had been given, through the scales over their eyes handed to them by others. Their only real notion of following the Holy Spirit was to pray for what they wanted with much feeling.
They had been led astray by shepherds with false teachings and this thing calling itself ‘the Church’, the Church of Jesus Christ, which teaches a form of Gnostic soul-death and a loathing for all Creation rather than the Gospel of living faith and eternal life found in Christ Jesus. They were captives without their knowing it, following a man-made Religion rather than the inner revelations of the Spirit.
But even worse than being lost and blinded children, they were also deeply asleep in their faith. They lacked fire. They lacked a true heart for God. They lacked intensity. And so they were not lead out of the errors of their Religion by the promptings of the Holy Spirit, because they had failed to move onwards from the very first point of our faith in Christ Jesus, to hear his calling and to believe in Him. They had failed to take the crucial next step of starting to walk in spirit rather than sight (the obscured senses and understandings of SELF).
And they were ensnared within a Religious System that had been built upon this first moment of our faith, a System which had taken that first locus of belief and had erected upon it a gateway which almost entirely barred the way ahead, a gateway so narrow that believers could barely even glimpse that there was a shining path to be walked in front of them.
But I did not see it through loving eyes of understanding back then.
Back then I resented these Presbyterians for their spiritual smugness, wallowing in their own SELVES while I as a child was undergoing the process of daily crucifixion of my own SELF through unwanted sufferings and trials. They were saved, so what else mattered? Why care about anyone else? Why do anything? It is all in the hands of God after all. And so they did nothing but go to church every Sunday, and condemned the world the rest of the time from a distasteful distance.
“‘What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”
James 2:14-26
‘Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out’, was the borrowed motto of the ‘Protestant’ Death Squads during the worst of the Troubles here. You would see it written on walls. You would see it emblazoned on the sides of houses, across painted murals of masked men bearing assault rifles for the cause.
It is a kind of fatalism, this semi-Religious do-nothing attitude about evil or suffering because it is all in God’s hands, like Islamic fatalism (the same form that justifies all kinds of evils as ‘The Will of Allah’). It is a kind of passivity towards evil and suffering. Where the relationship between God’s Sovereignty and our own free will across the battlefield of a fallen world is twisted and simplified to mean that God is the author of all evils and sufferings. So that these things are not in fact actively hated by the children of God, but in fact only considered loathsome aspects of God’s will and therefore not to be confronted.
Yet Yahweh calls on us to resist evils and to never imagine otherwise:
“They have built the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as offerings to Baal — something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.“
Jeremiah 19:5
As soldiers in Christ, there are many ways to advance the Kingdom by the waging of peace and love. What tremendous redemptive force we see entering our fallen world when we feed the hungry and clothe the orphans out of SELFless love for them. When we shed cherished lies for truth even though we must go through the fires in order to do so. When we heal the disturbed and free the demonised. When we establish justice where there was no justice. When we bring the Good News to the lost and desperate.
When we give our lives for another.
We are also called by the Almighty, throughout the scriptures, to stand up to evil by hating evil.
“Hate evil, love good,
And establish justice in the gate!
Perhaps the Lord God of hosts
May be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.“
Amos 5:15
And we are told that we receive great blessings when we do so.
“You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, Your God, has anointed You above Your companions with the oil of joy.”
Hebrews 1:9
Hate is not only a feeling, no more than love is only a feeling, but also and much more importantly a doing, just as love is a doing. Hate is an act as much as love is an act.
Hate is rightly found in a saint’s heart, just as love is found there. Because they are not opposites to the saint. In spirit they become one and the same thing. Hatred of evil becomes the same as love for the good.
“Hate evil, you who love the Lord.”
Psalm 97:10
It is not hate that is the opposite of love, but SELFishness.
And LOVE, SELFlessness to God’s will, is LIFE.
Those who truly hate evil actively resist evil, whether it is within them or outside of them. Just like the boy who steps forwards for his King to take on the giant with a sling in his hand and a prayer on his bone-dry lips, offering his life (his soul) to the will and purpose of God, while his elders shrink back in SELF-led terror. The boy is the one who truly hates evil, for he confronts it WITHOUT SELF at the calling of God’s will (in other words with love), offering his soul, his life, as a sacrifice.
His resistance to evil is an act of love.
And those who resist evil with love are granted blessings and POWER.
While those who do not are granted shame.
One day back when I was that kind of boy, I was visiting my grandmother when their minister, Reverend Fox, called round for a visit. I suspect this was not an accidental timing, for my grandmother was always looking out for her grandchildren. Mr Fox had a frightening countenance about him. Like the looming old prophets in those Hollywood movies starring Charlton Heston. He was a thundering kind of preacher man. A man who feared God, as opposed to some of the charlatans who proceeded him. Yet still, there was something of the shadow of death about the man. He did not shine.
Reverend Fox asked me why I always liked to wear black.
I had not realised that I did like wearing black. (The memory of this is surprising, because I am not drawn to black clothing at all. It must have been a particularly dark time).
When he asked me why I always wore black, my reply came out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.
‘Why do you always wear black?’
Because black was the colour that he always wore as a Presbyterian minister.
And because I identified that colour, or anti-colour, with death, not life.
And because he was clearly implying that I was worshiping death myself.
Lord bless the old fellow. I know he was only trying to help a troubled boy who apparently had turned to wearing black all the time, the colour of mourning. It takes personal courage to minister to people, even to children. Yet there was something of a confrontation in the moment too. He stood in absolute rightness and wished me to know that I stood in absolute wrongness. There was an undercurrent of down-the-nose judgement in his manner. Sensing the great irony in his question, my spirit was quickened to respond.
Much, much later in life, just after I was reborn in Christ and still very naive about Christianity, I was excited at the prospect of sharing this incredible ignition of faith with my ageing grandfather, who had always been close with Reverend Fox. At last we would have something in common after all these years of distance between us. And what an amazing thing to be share with your grandfather. We were brothers in Jesus Christ!
Except, when he heard the news of my miraculous conversion, his response was not one of happiness. Instead he said that because I was not attending a church, I was therefore not a Christian.
It was then – right as the hurt of these words stabbed though my heart – that I was told in my spirit that this was a moment of instruction. That it was a confirmation of the faint leading I had been following since being born again in Christ to NOT ATTEND ANY CHURCHES. I had been doubting this leading of the Spirit. Not all churches are the same. Some church-goers have much love for others and their Maker. Yet still the message was clear as day and straight as an arrow. Do not go into those places. Look at the dead things they are making.
When I sent a present to my grandfather a while after this, a small wall decoration of a dove and a Cross, he cast it aside as being idolatry.
Whatever world he was living in, whatever Christ he was living in, I did not belong there.
Yet Never Forsaken
As I mentioned previously, I went on later in life to entirely forget my early experience of the presence of Christ’s love calling me. Most of my memories of childhood fell away into the memory hole.
Yet still this same thing kept happening to me as an adult. Even as a liberal anarchist libertarian and struggling writer, at certain times in life the name of Jesus would seize my heart, and I would suddenly and quite unexpectedly find tears pricking at my eyes. Emotions would flow as though my heart had suddenly burst open, and I would feel the calling again.
The most striking occurrence of this as an adult was when I was attending a Quaker silent meeting in the north of England. I was 30 years of age, and I was there in exploration as part of a university degree in Religious Studies, which I was undertaking as a ‘mature student’. These silent Quaker meetings, in which Friends come together to share of the spirit and the presence of Christ silently, were of real interest to me, having already explored the world of Zen and meditation in my earlier personal searchings for inner peace and healing. The idea behind silent Quaker meetings is that the congregation sits around in silence until someone is stirred in the spirit enough to stand up and declare or share something just revealed to them. It is a sound idea. I am still very attracted to it.
But I had read in my studies that in most modern Quaker meetings there was an aversion to declaring Christ and Scripture out aloud, because silent meditation had become the main focus of this practice, and Christ and Scripture were said to create factionalism and contention. So many Quaker silent meetings were no longer supposedly Christ-centric. And certainly, the Meeting House I attended did open its doors to every New Age and Eastern Religion out there, allowing them to use the premises for their own purposes regardless of what they taught.
During a week of attending these daily silent meetings, this was indeed the spirit that I did observe there. A worldly spirit, and nothing about Jesus. Except for the very last meeting that I attended. There were only a handful of us gathered in the room at the time, sharing our silence. And in the midst of this half hour of quietude, the hairy bearded man immediately to my right, who seemed – like me – to be an incongruous presence in this meeting of Friends – stood up slowly, though surely, and in a cracking voice began to declare the name of Jesus Christ aloud.
The room was stunned. You could feel it right away. That sudden hum. And the man giving witness to Christ could hear it too. Yet he was saying the words anyway. Like a John The Baptist who did not care if it would cost him his head. And sure enough I felt the growing discomfort of the Friends as they heard his words turning into open testimony concerning his relationship with Christ, tumbling out of him not as vanity but as trembling obedient courage to the Spirit.
I was weeping by then (of course).
The Spirit was upon me too, but I did not know it.
Christ’s love was in our presence.
“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.”
Matthew 18:20
At the first sound of the name of Jesus the tears had started in my eyes again. There I was, a 30-year-old man sitting crying next to strangers. And as usual I seemed not to grasp why. Every time that splendid bearded saint standing beside me declared the name of Jesus out aloud, more tears were squeezed from my heart. I sat there trembling and weeping, amazed at the power contained within His name.
Amazed by how much I was moved by this simple incident.
This rupturing of my hardened heart by the simple name of Jesus.
And by these feelings pouring from my heart, as though this was where I belonged.
NEXT POST: A CHILD SOLDIER PART 2
May you be blessed with peace and understanding in these last days.
Colin Buchanan
thiswisefool@protonmail.com
Thank you for sharing Colin. I suddenly have a strong desire for instant coffee, and late night fellowship, in a countryside Irish cottage. I’ll be looking forward to part 2. Much love brother