Anger

Anger

The anger came later.

I think that I was angry at first simply because of what had happened to us. I was angry at the MS. Within a short period of forty eight hours, on holiday in Scotland, Janet went from being a young, attractive woman working as an Occupational Therapist in an Intensive Psychotherapy Unit in Birmingham, a busy mother of four children and a friend, lover and wife to me, to in a sense, becoming her own Grandmother. Janet’s mother had died when she was very young and Granny Haskell had stepped in as a carer and support. She was an eccentric elderly lady and I had warmed to her very quickly.

The attack struck on a Wednesday morning and the local GP in Poolewe where we were holidaying diagnosed Labrynthitis, the next day he increased the level of severity to a small stroke and on the next day sent Janet to Inverness to hospital in Raigmoor she was admitted to a stroke unit for elderly ladies. The left side of her face dropped, she drooled and lost her sight.

A CT Scan revealed plaques in both sides of the brain and the Doctors confirmed what we had been told some years earlier that it was likely that Janet’s symptoms were a strong indication that the eventual diagnosis would confirm that MS was the root cause of the problems Janet had experienced over the years.

But I was also angry because I realised what I had done. From being ordained in 1969 I had followed a conventional path as curate, senior curate, Vicar and then Bishop’s Adviser in Social Responsibility and Priest in Charge of St Andrew’s, Newcastle. In 1984 I was made an Honorary Canon of Newcastle Cathedral.

We spent nine happy years in Newcastle, our children grew up there, our son was born there and we thought that we might stay in the North East permanently, but after a Sabbatical in the USA in 1985, I realised that it was time for a change and we moved as a family to Birmingham where I was appointed as The Director of the Centre for Applied Christian Studies at Selly Oak College.

In Newcastle I had written the Diocesan Submission to the Commission on Faith in the City a document which was well received by the commission and for which I was complimented.

I remember on one occasion as a member of the Bishops Staff sitting in on a disciplinary meeting regarding a clergyman who had embarked on an affair with a young parishioner, causing great distress to her family and his wife. After due deliberation by the Bishop and his advisers the decision was made to move him to a small rural parish in the North of the Diocese where he could spend time under the tutelage of a wiser older priest and reflect on his actions.

I suddenly realised that my own removal to Castle Carrock was of a similar order. Suddenly I found myself in the countryside miles away from family and friends, the church had been signally unable to offer me any support or assistance, I had been told by the Bishop of Carlisle that I was too big for the job I had applied for but he had nothing else to offer, I had not been unfaithful to my wife, I hadn’t brought the Church into disrepute or caused distress, but I had been exiled.

In time I was asked if I would take on a role as the Diocese Faith in the City officer and started to attend meetings of officers from other Diocese’ in the North West, it was at this point that my anger finally welled up and I began to rage against what I saw as the major injustice of what had happened.

Matters came to a head, first at a conference in Birmingham to discuss and debate the progress of the Faith in the City report, then I was asked to stop attending the regional meetings of the Faith in the City Officers, because I was disruptive and offensive, and finally when Gill Moody, who was then the National Bishop’s Officer, came to Carlisle, I took her on a high speed tour of the West Coast in my red convertible sports coupe, a rather high profile and dangerous expression of road rage.

It was at this point that I decided that I needed help.

Fortunately there was a Diocesan Counselling Scheme in operation in the three Diocese of Blackburn, Manchester and Carlisle and I made contact with the Counsellor for Carlisle.

We met and talked over my counselling needs and the nature of my anger.

I was amused and relieved when the counsellor advised me that it was OK to be angry about some things, the MS but also the Church and began to share with me some of his own anger at the Church and sheer incompetence of the Bishops and other senior figures he had encountered in his own ministry. He was by now retired and free to speak his mind. I of course was not retired but I was speaking my mind and as a friend commented at the meeting in Birmingham, ‘You certainly know how to pick your enemies’.

So the counselling began.

The process owed much to the work of Frank Lake and the process of recovering childhood memories.

Over a matter of six months or so, meeting about once a week, with me lying in a defenceless position on the floor with my head on a cushion and the counsellor seated, I began to work my way backwards to my childhood.

Progress at first was fairly rapid. I unpacked the feelings generated by becoming a young parent and the immense pride I had in my Children, the MS took less time than I expected, my ordination and the support I received at the hands of my first incumbent, Ted Greathead who had been a lifelong friend. I spent time over meeting Janet and the early years of our marriage with its ups and downs. Former girl friends didn’t take long as there hadn’t been many of those.

Until I came to a more difficult time, when I first realised a sense of what later came to recognise as vocation. It was then that I first encountered the prejudice and snobbery that was, and is, so prevalent in the Church. As a young man I experienced a degree of prejudice which was firmly based on class. I remember being described in extremely crude terms on one occasion by a girl friends head teacher when she met us together in the Parish Church. Advising the girl friend to bring the friendship to an end, because, she pronounced I was destined to be nothing more than a labourer, whilst she had a promising career ahead of her from which I would only hold her back.

That summary of my destiny was revised somewhat surprisingly when I had two poems published in Staffordshire Life, whilst amazement was declared that I could actually write never mind get what I had written into print, nevertheless, well done.

But the therapeutic monologue, guided by gentle prompting from the counsellor still moved me backward through time until I found myself standing in the kitchen of my parents’ first house in Crossland Road, Droylsden, Manchester.

It was a familiar scene and one that my mother had told me about some time after it had occurred and again shortly before her death.

She was pregnant with my sister or possibly with her second pregnancy when she lost the child she was carrying. During her pregnancy she had from time to time suddenly fainted. During these fainting attacks she told me, I would, at four or possibly two, years old, drag a chair across the kitchen to the sink, stand on the chair, fill a glass with water from the tap and stand next to her waiting for her to awaken, when I would offer her the water.

But what I did not know and what I now recalled was a dramatic finale to the events and to my therapy. Suddenly the back door opened and a figure came into the house, lifted me bodily into the tiny, best room, in the front of the house, shut the door firmly and then, presumably attended to my mother.

I was furious, not just at the time, but then and there in the counselling session, I cried out with anger, ‘How dare you?’

Later recalling the incident I remarked on what a small event it seemed so long ago in the childhood of a man now fifty years older than he had been at the time. But like so much of what happens to us the experience grows and what was a relatively small anger at four, although I recall it as a pretty big anger for a four year old, later it becomes not just a bigger anger but in my case, redacted through the experience of Janet’s illness and my having put out of the room by the church, it became a huge rage.

I was asked if I wanted to continue to work on the experience, to identify who the person had been, what had happened subsequently? But I didn’t see what there was to be gained from this. I didn’t need to blame any one individual. It could only have been one of three or four people, it was probably my Father and I didn’t need to know. It was enough to experience again the strong sense of rejection and the refusal to allow me to perform the service I knew I was perfectly capable of, bringing a glass of water to my mother.

Since that experience I have been much better at controlling my anger, directing it more usefully and using it constructively.