speak through the earthquake, wind and fire

on faith, psychosis and conversion

In the late fourteenth century, after the birth of her first child, Margery Kempe experienced an episode of what some readers have called postpartum psychosis. She saw devils with mouths of fire, she bit herself so hard that the scar remained on her hand for the rest of her life, she ‘pitilessly tore the skin on her body near her heart with her nails, for she had no other implement, and she would have done something worse, except that she was tied up and restrained both day and night.’

This is how Margery begins her autobiography. After half a year of hell, her visions changed — she saw Christ, ‘clad in a mantle of purple silk, sitting on her bedside, looking on her with so blessed a countenance that she was strengthened in all her spirits, and he said to her these words: “Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I neer forsook you?”’ And then she was calm—‘she took food and drink as her bodily strength would allow her, and she once again recognised her friends.’

But she was different. She carried on with her life for a while—she wore the latest fashions and ran a brewery and a horse-mill and had more children and flirted with the men of the town—but slowly, surely, her world began to change. She began to travel around England with her husband, visiting churches and shrines. She sought permission from the Bishop of Lincoln to wear white, a colour usually reserved for virgins, and to live chastely with her husband (despite his protestations). She went on pilgrimage to Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Jerusalem, where she ‘fell down because she could not stand or kneel, but writhed and wrestled with her body, spreading her arms out wide, and cried with a loud voice as though her heart would have burst apart, for in the city of her soul she saw truly and freshly how our Lord was crucified.’ The intensity of her religious experience was unusual—she admits that her ‘crying was so loud and so amazing that it astounded people’—but her devotion to Christ and her method of meditation (placing herself within a scene from the Gospel and allowing her imagination to expand on it, so that Christ or Mary addressed her directly) sits within the normal pattern of late medieval piety. Eamon Duffy, in his Stripping of the Altars, frequently uses her autobiography as a source for the vitality of lay devotional practices in that final century before the Reformation.

Even so, Margery’s own neighbours dismissed her. She recalls that on one occasion, in Canterbury, ‘she was greatly despised and reproved because she wept so much—both by the monks and priests, and by secular men, nearly all day, both morning and afternoon—and so much so that her husband went away from her as if he had not known her, and left her alone among them.’ On another occasion, when her weeping interrupted the preacher at her parish church, he ordered her to leave: ‘I wish this woman were out of the church; she is annoying people.’ In her defence, her friends told him, ‘Sir, do excuse her. She can’t control it.’ Even today, she arouses feelings of condescension or outright irritation. When I went to lectures about her at university, there was a note of disdain—this woman had inconveniently written the first autobiography in the English language, but she was a bit much.

I don’t think it’s useful to use terms like ‘psychosis’ or ‘mental illness’ in relation to a society that wouldn’t recognise those terms. But whatever we call it, Margery had a break—total, extreme, bizarre to those around her. She fought hard to get people to understand her faith (particularly because she was a married laywoman; as a nun, she would have faced less difficulty) and was accused of Lollardy and examined for heresy on many occasions. But her beliefs were never heretical—she never claimed that God had given her new revelations, or that she was somehow special, chosen. God only told her that she was loved and invited her to walk with Him—and she took up the offer with everything she had.

Usually, when people ask me how I became a Christian, I tell them that I went to Evensong at my college chapel and found a sense of peace that I hadn’t found anywhere else, and kept going, and learnt more about the words I repeated each Sunday, and read the Gospels, and eventually came to accept that it might plausibly be true enough for me to get baptised, even if I didn’t completely believe it. This is part of the truth, but there’s another story that I’ve only told to a few people. In my first year of university, I had a stress-induced psychotic episode. My mum was homeless, my friendship group had fallen apart, I’d suspended my degree and had to figure out how to make rent without student finance, and my brain broke. I thought there were demons invading my dreams and I thought I had some crucial part to play in a cosmic battle between God and the Devil, like every choice I made was a move of celestial proportions. I thought I was a fallen angel and that my choices could redeem or damn the world. It lasted for a few months and then went away as suddenly as it had come; I did a diligent year of therapy, kept mostly to myself, and steered my way back to reality.

But afterwards, I was different. I’d grown up with a single mother who believed in Jesus but also in the Mother Goddess, who worked as a healer and treated me with homeopathy and reflexology and chanting at the full moon instead of conventional medicine, who celebrated Imbolc rather than Easter. Perhaps as a kind of rebellion, I’d grown up stubbornly rationalist, refusing any kind of spirituality, reading The God Delusion and being a nightmare in my religious studies classes. In school, we’d said the Lord’s Prayer in Welsh before every meal and we’d gone to Chapel for Harvest and Christmas, and sometimes I’d wished that I had a faith because I felt like I was missing out, but it had never happened. Faith was a category I couldn’t think in. But as I recovered from the period of delusions, I felt like something had changed. I didn’t believe—and I was wary of any religious impulse in case it signalled a relapse—but the solid wall of atheism had crumbled a bit. It felt like now there was the possibility of faith. A newly carved-out space where belief could happen.

It took me years before I was baptised. I was slow and careful about it. I didn’t go to Evangelical services with big emotional displays or Catholic churches with saints and miracles. I became an Anglican because the focus on reason, scripture and tradition felt safe. Reason, after all, is the opposite of delusion. I studied and I spoke to priests and I asked all the questions I could and then, finally, I was baptised. And grace rushed in. And then I had to believe.

My psychiatric diagnosis includes, as one of its criteria, ‘transient, stress-induced paranoia and psychosis’. I know that in times of extreme stress I can slip into delusion. I watch for the signs: a weakening of trust in causation, a sense of particular spiritual power, a strong certainty in signs, patterns, synchronicities. I know that it can lead somewhere dangerous and solipsistic as I become increasingly convinced of my unique cosmological role and the significance of my every action. I know how bad it can get, and in previous years I’ve responded to these warning signs with an emphatic return to rationalism, a clamping down on any strange thinking patterns or behaviours. Sleep, food, low stimulation. Normality. Recently, though, I’ve tried flirting with it: seeing how far it’s possible to inhabit that strange, synchronicitous worldview without becoming sick, without losing my humility. If delusion is self-importance raised to the nth degree, its medicine must be recognising the infinite strangeness, the complexity, the impossible value of other people. Maybe the visionary is someone who can hold this paradox within herself: to flirt with the revelatory mode without being consumed by it, to be acquainted with a reality beyond everyday experience without being lost.

In Margery’s time, divine revelations were sorted from demonic revelations by a process called the discernment of spirits. For me, the task was to sort what came from God from what came from my own brain and its stresses and neuroses and preoccupations. I realised fairly quickly that the thing that distinguishes faith from delusion is ego. My delusions were all about me—my centrality in God’s plan, my choices, special things that only I knew. My faith, on the other hand, was about God—what I could know of him, what other Christians have known of him for two thousand years. The everyday of faith is underwhelming—wonderful, but ordinary. You read a passage of scripture and it says something to you and you know it’s said the same thing to millions of others who’ve read it. You go to Church every Sunday. You pray and you’re not a singled-out, special person—you’re beloved, like all of God’s creations, and you get to have a relationship which is simultaneously the most important thing in your life and also incredibly normal. Shared. You live out your faith in a community and in a communion of saints that stretch back through millennia, and nothing spectacular is new.

A few months ago, while I was working at an Anglican church in central London, I came in at 7am for an hour of contemplative prayer. There were a few people already there, waiting for the sun to come up, and there were two nativity statues in front of the altar, which I hadn’t seen before. They were of Mary and Joseph, made of wood, with Mary cradling Jesus in her arms. I knelt in front of them for the hour and prayed—I prayed about Mary bringing this tiny child into the world, knowing what he would face, and the unbearable cruelty of that knowledge. How dark and bleak the world must be to crucify its God. I prayed about the resurrection, and the redemption of all that pain, that it might be made good somehow in ways I couldn’t understand. And then I saw the statue of Mary move. I saw her turn her head towards me and lift her arm to stroke her baby’s head. And I felt a sense of immense consolation, and tenderness, and love.

That morning changed what I believe: whereas previously the existence of heaven, the assumption of Mary, the possibility of miracles and direct, providential involvement of God in the world had all been attractive to me—doctrines held as aesthetically interesting and possibly true—they suddenly became real, solid articles of my faith. And as I talked to friends (Catholics or Anglicans who veered to the Catholic end of our tradition), I found that this type of experience was not uncommon. Visions, apparitions, and miracles were not as unusual as I’d imagined. Suddenly a new raft of possibilities floated into view.

In his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault writes ‘It is actually not accurate to say that Deleuze and Guattari develop the schizoanalytic approach, for, as they show, it has always been at work in writers like Miller or Nietzsche or Artaud. Stoned thinking based on intensely lived experiences: Pop Philosophy.’ Margery Kempe and many of the mystics could be counted in this lineage. Margery is so annoying precisely because she is so authentic; she speaks from prayer rather than convention, and her autobiography often reveals two simultaneous orders of emotion: her social feeling, where she is frustrated at being judged and misunderstood, and a more divine order of affect, where her self-possession and confidence flows directly from her relationship and frequent meetings with God. Her book is annoying in the same way as a very earnest Instagram post written on edibles. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between the breakthrough and breakdown of schizophrenic experience: whereas the breakthrough is a means of escape, breakdown is its inhibition and repression, the mechanism by which the schizophrenic process becomes illness. They quote R.D. Laing:

If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds. Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be breakthrough. The person going through ego-loss or transcendental experiences may or may not become in different ways confused. Then he might legitimately be regarded as mad. But to be mad is not necessarily to be ill, notwithstanding that in our culture the two categories have become confused.

Even in late medieval Europe, where Christianity was the dominant ideological frame for understanding the world, Margery didn’t quite fit. Despite her orthodoxy, the nature of her religious experiences marked her out as unusual and slightly deviant. And yet she didn’t, as Joan of Arc and Marguerite Porete did, deny the authority of the Church to assess her beliefs. She and other mystics—Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich—were not convicted or executed for heresy because they recognised that their direct apprehensions of God should be evaluated by a community; even a marred, corrupt, hierarchical community like the Church. They recognised the danger of ego—striking out on one’s own, elevating those direct, immediate revelations above the accumulated tradition of those who had gone before them. Even Teresa of Avila, who resisted the right of male theologians to assess her visions (she was examined by thirty-five of them over the course of her life), stressed the importance of discernment to nuns within her community. Mysticism was too important to be a solipsistic pursuit.

The history of Christianity is full of visions, prophetic dreams, miracles, apparitions, revelations. St Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, St Anthony’s battles with demons in the desert, St Julian of Norwich’s revelations of divine love on her sickbed. Maybe there’s something about dreams and illnesses that lets God break through the walls we’ve put up. There was nothing true about the delusions I had, but there was something that changed because of it: a space where faith could grow in its quiet, careful way. In contemplative prayer, we look for something similar to the schizophrenic state: a place of flow, unguarded, unmoored. A place of possibility, equally liable to tip into narcissism or revelation. Perhaps remaining sane while being open to something extraordinary is the work of prayer.

One of my favourite hymns is Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, which ends with the lines ‘Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, O still small voice of calm.’ O still small voice of calm. Our task is to discern that voice—to work out what is earthquake and what is God, to hear the small, still voice running beneath the chaos. But also not to disregard the chaos, or write off the people who live in it, because God is there too, in the earthquake, speaking in his constant, quiet, mutilated voice.