No longer going to Chapel every Sunday, was a recognition I'd reached the age where I was allowed to make my own decisions about what I did or did not do. About what my beliefs were, or more precisely, it appeared mostly about what they were not. What followed was a vague period of neglectful agnosticism, which is never a place for a fully worked out belief system. It's more a holding position, whilst you decide. Though I may have sat there in a mellow vat of cynicism stewing, I never reached, or saw, the logical point of atheism. Atheism is a position of reactivity, subsequently rationalised into a point of principle. My leaving of one established religious institution was purely a reaction to disenchantment, I don't think I could have told you at the time exactly why in any great detail. Hence why this was followed by such a long period of uncertainty, of not knowing, and if I'm truly being honest, not caring to know.
This state of spiritual prevarication lasted a good ten years or more. Set against a background of leaving home and going to art college, in the time of punk. As practical real life experiences began to forge my character into adulthood. I returned to a non conformist Chapel during this period on a couple of occasions as a student, when I was lonely and personally struggling, and needed a place where I thought I'd be unquestioningly welcomed in a congregation. And that search for a place to comfortably belong might be a more accurate reason for staying agnostic.
From my early teens I'd worked out my sexual orientation was a gay one. So I understood my journey from immature teenager to a grown adult, was in 1970's England, not going to be a straightforward one. Though this was certainly a cause of anxiety for me, I understood quite clearly that the problem wasn't with me. I wasn't the one who was deluded, wrong headed or morally dubious. Whether Christianity's attitude towards homosexuality was a factor in my disenchantment with that religion, my recollection remains curiously blank. I was at that time, not that worldly aware of anything more than the need to stay schtum about it. Today, at the age of sixty nine, I'm very happily married to a man I love. I think you can safely say any 'gay phase' endured and prospered, despite anyone's expectations or condemnations otherwise.
If I'd stayed in my village, I think the pace of these self realisations would've been - much slower. College life thrusts you into a context with a wider range of people, viewpoints, experiences, and ways of living. It's also an opportunity to reinvent oneself, to break free of accumulated assumptions from your childhood, about who you are, what you can be. Which I did begin to do. But the first thing I encountered was a personal difficulty - how painfully self conscious and shy I could be, how self limiting that emotional state was, how it clouded the horizons of my ambition. I may have had aspirations to be consistently extrovert, but found more often I was this painfully introverted young man who lived uncomfortably and frustratedly with it This was a futile tug of war I fought with myself, for a lot longer than I like to remember it being.
Any search for spiritual self knowledge would have to be read between the lines of one exercise book, where I'd decided in 1973 to write down all the books I read. Little knowing I'd keep this practice up all my life. But these days I find these note books a good corrective to the inaccuracies of memory concerning time and sequence. In amongst the Sci Fi worlds of utopias and dystopia's, and numerous Micheal Moorcock sword and sorcery fantasies, you'll find a scattering of psychology books, many by R D Laing, and the almost inevitable period of a young adult's enthusiasm for Nietzsche. It was during this period I certainly developed into an enquiring and self motivated reader. I followed up on my enthusiasms, for writers or investigating particular subject matters, picking up on new lines of interest and enquiry as I went along. Some of it was driven by me trying to make sense of who I was, and why, and asking similar questions of the world. Though it was simultaneously the simple enjoyment of being open to new ideas, experiences and ways of looking at life and reality.
I'd started writing poetry. Decided I'd become an artist, then a graphic designer. So there were numerous books about art and artists, design and designers. A similar pattern persisted when later on I became enthusiastic for theatre and started acting in amateur drama, eventually taking up performance art. I read books about these subjects voraciously. All of them became a way to explore who I could be, what my potential was, for making something good out of my life. A future that would personally be both satisfying and introduce something beautiful into the world. Having shelved the idea of a creator God, the perception of beauty through art or nature assumed an elevated sensory divinity. This was a spiritual search to locate the meaning and purpose of life, but relocated into a secular context.
However, when myself or reality failed to meet my aspirations and expectations, the suffering that resulted inevitably became a more insistent spiritual prompt. A world without a Godhead can assume an impoverished desultory demeanor. Turning everyday reality into this dreary indifferent mechanism, and my mind towards the dead end that is nihilism. Discovering one specific book introduced me to a new way of looking at reality and my experience of it, that would provide the catalyst to set me off in a fresh, more positive direction.
Next - No 5 - Fulfilment & Insecurity
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