TV Quiz pt 1

Back at the beginning of the year, I did something a bit reckless. In my defence I didn't have much idea what I was doing. In response to "you should do that" while watching BBC Mastermind, I filled out an online application.

So yesterday I was in Manchester having my knowledge/ignorance quotient recorded for television.

Between the two events there were phone interviews and tests, a face-to-face audition and more phone consultations, during which time I repeatedly thought "why am I doing this?" and repeatedly teetered on the brink of pulling out. I don't like being the focus of attention, I avoid competitive situations (I'm not fond of losing, but I find winning embarrassing too), and I've spent a large majority of my life insulated from popular culture. Each time, though, I told myself that those were all very good reasons to go ahead. I'm not good at putting it into practice, but I firmly believe in the value of going beyond what I think I am capable of.

I also discovered one thing which showed how little I knew about popular culture: Mastermind seems to come packaged with a whole set of assumptions for everybody. They ALL know the format, most can name a previous winner, and all regard it as something that other people do. That may be because it still has a bit of prestige among the many quiz shows there are, or it may be a hangover from the days when there weren't so many, I'm not sure.

Needless to say I didn't cover myself with glory in the event, and I confess to feeling a bit deflated in spite of that being exactly in line with my expectations (don't we all dream of the perfect set of circumstances when we imagine a scenario, even we keep replacing it with realism). Still, I'm quietly proud too, mainly because I know I tend to avoid putting myself on the line in any way, and I know, even if nobody else does, how hard this was to do - effectively putting an aspect of myself out to be judged in as public a way as possible.

Probably the second hardest thing I've done, actually. And that's a good positive thing, and I'm glad I did it.

Tidying the straggles

I feel at a crossroads right now. Having said that, I've felt similarly for about three years ... which is how long it's been since I started to write down what I felt and thought about life among the brethren and in the process changed my life.

It feels a bit strange at this distance. I was quite worked up, and I can't recapture that. Not to mention that once I'd made my feelings public it became impossible for me to stay in the circumstances that were driving my writing, although the novelty of the change to "normal life" provided material for a while.

If I've learned anything on the journey, it's that there's nothing particularly remarkable about being in the brethren, nor about not being in the brethren, nor about having a past in the brethren. Human life is varied. Everybody has a story about where they came from and where they are now. Everybody has hopes, fears and ambitions. So do I, and my past still provides interest to people I meet if it happens to come up, but interesting is all it is. Nobody assumes it defines me, or that it explains anything, let alone provides an excuse for anything. I was once in this strange religious group that has plenty of quirks useful for small talk. Someone else lived for years in a third-world country. People are interesting.

I suspect that this is pretty much incomprehensible to those remaining in the brethren. The group is the centre of the universe, and the fact that they simply don't matter much is something they cannot grasp. They expect that anybody who isn't for them must be against them, and that anybody who's left must have very strong feelings because everything is black and white, especially about such a hugely significant thing as the existence of the brethren and their doings.

From my observation of many of us who have left, I think we tend to carry a lot of that with us. I spent a good while feeling as though my ex-brethren status defined me, even while trying to prove otherwise, and using it (mostly just to myself) as a reason for all sorts of things. "I'm new to this," I'd think, "I can't be expected to understand / succeed / react correctly." I've gradually realised that that is how most of the world feels most of the time, actually. Maybe it's the rigid boundaries of our old brethren life that makes us unusually conscious of the fluidity and unexpectedness of normal life - or maybe that's just another layer of the excuses that come so naturally. Anyway, I think it's a trap, moving subtly from thinking we're unique and different because we're part of the brethren to thinking we're unique and different because we used to be.

So as and when I find time, I'm going to try to note down my thoughts as they are now, three years from the start. I'd like to round this whole blog off neatly instead of letting it dribble away to nothing! Then perhaps I can move off into proper normality, leaving this phase as a properly-formed complete document of the experience.

My Lunch

Brief break in the busy-ness-induced silence to announce that my fifteen minutes of fame have arrived:

Monster Burger Lunch

Compassion

This seems very appropriate, somehow.

If God had wanted me to be compassionate ...

Spiritual on Demand

I suppose it hadn't occurred to me how odd the assumptions behind activity in Brethren meetings are until I saw the interest sparked by my comment on preparing for preachings. At some level I know it isn't standard, but it's all so familiar to me that it doesn't arouse much thought.

There is a slightly awkward mix of spontaneity and pre-planning in most brethren meetings, the result of the belief that all participation should be the result of spiritual promptings and not "the natural mind", combined with the usual pragmatism about what works in practice. Even in the most spontaneous of occasions the format is quite rigid, for example.

In a reading meeting, which is typical of the way the brethren work when gathered, one man acts as a sort of chairman of a discussion, and all questions and remarks are addressed to him. Somebody else usually has the responsibility of selecting this chairman. Theory says that whoever is asked to "take the meeting" should be ready and willing to do so, and should be open to whatever God gives him to say to get things going. Normally, though, several people refuse to do so for assorted reasons, and are prepared to accept the implication that they aren't close enough to God for the messages to get through, before somebody actually does the job. If there are too many refusals then distress can build up among those taking it all seriously, because they conclude that there is too much slackness in the company for anybody to have God's word for them. However, there is a subtle social jostling going on in all this, because taking a meeting implies acceptance of the fact that the person doing so has been given (by God) what is required for the whole company gathered, yet it is wise for the person concerned to be humble - often humble enough to deny that they should be taking the meeting at all. So the ideal situation is for them to be pressured into doing so because then they get to combine the prestige and the humility. The result of all this is that it can be quite complicated getting these meetings started at times, as people dance between what is said and what is actually meant, and the selector tries to judge whether the person they've picked on is really unwilling to bite the bullet or they're still fishing for more pressure.

Preachings actually follow a similar pattern with one key difference: the selection is not done in public. Typically two men are responsible for picking preachers in each place where preachings happen, and it is done outside meeting times. For some reason, better excuses are required to refuse to preach, although obviously nobody could practically be forced to do so. The fact remains that the stakes are altered by the lack of publicity, and I suppose that is one cause of a taboo against refusal - otherwise it could prove even harder to persuade potential preachers. There is little prestige in preaching because everybody is fully aware that the preacher is the preacher because he was asked to be (and I'm not sure why this differs from readings, but I can only conclude that the difference derives in some way from the visibility of the selection process), and so few people enjoy the responsibility.

Here again, preaching is theoretically the giving of a message from God provided at the time, which is the apparent reason why it is bad to refuse: the person refusing puts themselves in the position of declaring themselves unready to receive such a message. In reality, though, it is only human to prepare if you have advance notice, especially for the many who don't preach very often. The rationalisation of this says that God will speak to a person in the right "state" (broadly the current degree of moral cleanliness and harmony with the divine), and therefore the preacher will take extra care to be so by doing good brethren things such as reading the brethren literature and taking time out to think about spiritual matters. It is axiomatic in the brethren system that the person will then get some kind of message to give.

It is a clear enough pattern, indeed, that when a preaching follows a reading the person charged with finding the man to take charge for that reading will normally hit first on those he knows will be preaching ... because it is hard for them to claim they have no message! The only trump card in this case is to claim to be so dependent on the provision of this message at the time it is required that the reading beforehand is too early to have received it, and usually this is quite hard to pull off, not least because someone so in tune with the spiritual needs will surely also be able to perform in both cases.

Younger men, being less aware of the complex etiquette and social belief around all this, tend to be a bit blunter in their methods when asked to preach. They know they are supposed to be a mouthpiece for the Holy Spirit, but make as sure as they can that they don't dry up entirely the moment they stand up in front of everybody, and that usually means pretty blatant preparation, not least because they know for a fact that their usual lives don't bear much resemblance to the way people who get messages from God are supposed to live! Consequently it's usually apparent that they've arrived with their message spelled out in their heads to some degree, and the rest of the congregation indulge them in that. I do recall one case where a young man gave a surprisingly coherent blood-and-thunder preaching, and a friend afterwards discovered it written out word for word in his bible ... but that is very definitely frowned upon. Most at least TRY to include some spontaneity.

Other meetings have different balances, but I think this is long enough for now.

Prospecting in the Indexes

I'm just reading an article about Gorbachev, and how he truly believed in Communism, and that true belief is a prime reason why it collapsed - essentially, he thought it was strong enough to survive reform.

I have thought before that there are many parallels between political ideology and brethren beliefs. But what caught my eye in this case was a little reference to lip-service. Apparently by the Eighties, even most Party members in the USSR had stopped really believing in their system, yet it was necessary to claim to believe. Gorbachev himself read Lenin for enlightenment on issues, whereas for most it was a politically sensible move to have his books on the shelf but no more.

"It was politically correct to have Lenin in your library. If you had to write a speech you were keen to find a Lenin quote so you turned to the index."

Doesn't that sound exactly like a brother preparing to preach on Sunday, especially if he doesn't do it very often? My preference was always for novel phrasing of conventional doctrine, but I know many contemporaries who did it this Russian way by checking ministry indexes. It was always pretty transparent, I thought.

Incidentally, the magazine with the article is Prospect. It's one of the few magazines with enough words in it to be interesting for more than half an hour, I find, but I'm regularly disappointed to find yet more friends who think it's the very essence of dullness.

True Belief

A friend just recently gave me a nudge (in the form of a magazine article) which has pushed me onto a path of learning about Gnosticism. Not a subject I've encountered often before, but rather rewarding in an arcane sort of way. It seems to be like Christianity cross-pollinated with Eastern mysticism, and that is a mix I like.

Anyway, my primer for now is a slim book about the Gnostic Gospels, discovered around the same time as the Dead Sea Scrolls but, it seems, somewhat less notorious. This book teases out apparent differences between what would become orthodox Christianity (with a small "o") and the original variations which would come to be called heresy, as shown by these manuscripts which were hidden by someone before they could be destroyed by those with power in the steadily-more-established church.

What appears to crop up repeatedly is the way rival doctrines stand or fall not because of their inherent merit - what is more influential is the difference adherence to particular doctrines makes to the structure of society. As an example, the author of this book makes the case that the literalness of Christ's rising from the dead was a necessary belief because it was from the contact with the ex-dead man that the original disciples had their authority. There would have been no credible leadership for Christians with Christ gone, had he not returned to proclaim living men the means of continuing the faith. So alternative versions of the doctrine which said that the resurrection should be understood more subtly, were also subtly undermining the leadership of the church by putting the whole of humanity on the same footing: that of spiritual-only contact, not handed-down direct physical instruction. Weakening the leadership could not be allowed, and so alternative doctrines were stamped out with as much force as was needed.

I find this interesting, because the natural tendency when looking at this with modern eyes is to be cynical. The leadership shore up their own position, and power maintains the status quo which suits it. The author is careful to point out in this book that such assumptions are careless.

Anyone spot the parallels with brethrenism? How often does the outside observer look at a typical brethren "turning of a corner", or even an established brethren belief, and think "Oh, that's very convenient for them"? Yes indeed, but it may not look cynical from the inside, and I'd say it usually doesn't.

The point is that such things are the result of a whole world-view. The leadership of the ancient church thought, of course, that they had it right. The structure of the church was, as they thought, modelled on the natural inherent order of life as ordained and blessed by God. Had they thought otherwise, why would they have risen to the top of it? It suited the way they thought, and the fact that it had worked well for them personally surely didn't feed any doubts about it. And so, no doubt, they felt compelled to defend that "truth" - the fact that they were at the same time defending themselves, boosting themselves, was merely a happy side-effect, proof, if anything, that they were on God's side.

So be careful assuming that a religious man with a message increasing his own power is a hypocrite. He may be, but it's more likely he's fooling himself first. Look for the patterns of belief the message implies, and you're more likely to find ammunition there than in cynicism.