James Ballantyne

Tag: faith

  • Could my Soul have an Ancestory?

    I know my Name.

    I know where my name comes from.

    Actually finding out a little more of my family history in the last 4 years has helped me to join the dots, reconnect and give me a sense of something.

    It stared with googling my name.

    I’m now on a bit of a treasure hunt. To find evidence of past Ballantynes, and also artefacts of both RM Ballantyne and the published works of James Ballantyne (based in Edinburgh from the 1700’s).

    Some of this I want to know about, some will be a treasure and surprise when I find it.

    I have a physical ancestry. A story.

    But – what if my soul has an ancestors too?

    My body and mind aren’t going to last forever, but my soul might?

    And if so – might it have been somewhere else before?

    and further still …. might the soul I have now, have been someone else’s one time before and was there a process for it to choose my body, my life and my experiences…

    and if so…for what purpose?

    Have you ever thought this?

    I don’t think I mean reincarnation, but maybe soul ancestry, what’s the history of my soul, and curiously was it reluctant, happy or determined to exist in my experience now, for the time I am hosting it?

    Was my Soul happy before and why my experiences?

    and might there be a point when my embodied soul considers itself complete? or will it accumulate experiences, feelings and character for all eternity – if that’s even what it is doing?

    Or will it become something different, like non human. Animal even? Is that what my soul might become next? Was it non human before? might this explain my affinity with nature – but then might this explain all of our affinity with the natural world?

    Then, thinking Shakespeare… If all the world is a stage… what’s the role of the soul? Might Jung be right to consider the God archetype part of our humanity to exist – and this might be the soul- but what stages, performance, directions, scenes has my soul played before? Or has it been the same one, and its just the actor, the body that’s changed.

    And, when there’s different performances of the soul – what happens in the gap? The Soul interval? From one person to another – and in those moments where might the soul rest, or wait, or choose?

    Then again… Would I want to know? Would I want to know the full list of other people, objects, animals, trees even – that it has inhabited since it was created.. and when was that – what would I do with that list , my soul ancestry? Would it help me to explain things now? Like my genetic make up, from 10 generations of Ballantyne for example.

    Continuing that thought. When was my soul created? Or was it always, well just always there. When did it come from?

    Isn’t that it all along. Is the question not about how the world was created, but how the souls did?

    Might this be God, divine or source all along? A lake of souls from which emanated souls like rivers into the flow of human existence?

    Is my soul in my today, in January 2023, right now for a purpose?

    And if so…what is it?

    So so many questions, maybe the start of this was to recognise having a soul in the first place, as well as wanting to have some understanding of my familial past.

    Like discovering Ballantynes, maybe my souls journey will take me on a similar treasure hunt.

  • Personal Thank You

    Personal Thank You

    I just wanted to say

    For the very positive responses, comments and feedback from my recent blog about ‘1000 days since leaving Church‘ which I published just over a week ago.

    I did not quite realise, though had I thought about it, I may have also realised it, quite how common my experience has been.

    Thank you for reading, sharing and commenting on it, thank you.

    Its been very apparent in the comments, both public and private to me, from youth workers, pioneer folks, leaders in churches and denominations, for how many folks, they had to leave church, to re-find God, and find a faith.

    I guess I wasn’t brave enough to do it all those years ago.

    I guess I still wanted something about what ‘organised church’ could offer, anyway..

    So, thank you.

    Thank you for reaching out, thank you for encouraging me on the same journey.

    And that’s just it, its a journey. Cliche alert.

    I haven’t ‘made it’ , neither have I the answers, and any certainty expressed sometimes comes back as vulnerability or a lesson to be learned.

    But something feels more coherent.

    I found home in myself, in a way that I was trying to find home elsewhere.

    There was a hole in my life and heart – it wasn’t God shaped, it was because of childhood abuse, because of neglect. That God was an external being to surrender to and lose myself to – despite an internal ache that never went away.

    Haemin Sunim says this:

    We must cultivate all three intelligences for our overall health

    Critical intelligence, emotional intelligence and Spiritual intelligence

    If one falls to the wayside, it slows the growth of the other two

    Haemin Sunim, Things you can only see when we slow down.

    If I were to do a 3 way audit of these three intelligences at different times in my life – what would I have found – how might this pie chart look like?

    Something like this, probably

    And that’s 5% emotional intelligence and awareness on a good day.

    In fact I was scared of those weird things like emotions, best to stay disconnected from them, dissociate, and stay in my head. That was the safe place. Critical intelligence to the absolute full. God is to be understood and not felt.

    But without all three, no growth. No heart. Or peace. Or Joy. Or love.

    What I had been looking for, was closer than I realised. Everything I needed was within, and I have just had to be given permission, and the tools to see it. I just Am. (as are you)

    I like this from John O’Donohue too, on coming home to yourself:

    May all the is unforgiven in you

    Be Released,

    May all your fears yield

    Their deepest tranquilities.

    May all that is unloved in you

    Blossom into a future

    Graced with love.

    So…..Thank you , I am very grateful and appreciative, I really am.

    James

  • 1000 Days (Since I last went to Church)

    In a week when its been revealed that 50% of the UK is no longer christian, no surprise really, tbh… but I have to ‘confess’ something:

    I dont go to church anymore.

    It just stopped.

    I just stopped going.

    About 1000 days ago. That’s over 150 potential Church going Sundays.

    Oh and by the way, its also about 1000 days since the start of the March 2020 lockdown.

    But, my last Sunday Church Sunday was over a month before.

    A month before everyone was doing it.

    I just stopped going.

    And…. I haven’t gone back.

    On one hand that no one contacted me from the church I was going to at the time, revealed to me something, but I know the world was gearing up for a major crisis at that time, and me not going to church was barely that. Im glad in a way though, as it meant I didnt have to deal with any conversation about not going.

    So here I am, 1000 ish days later.

    To say id been drifting away from church for a long time before was pretty accurate. I knew I didnt want to commit to a church, something was stopping me, and had for a while.

    Also, though I wrote this piece in 2016/7, about falling off the evangelical cliff, and the resources I gathered along the way, what I hadn’t quite been able to do was ‘stop’ going to church.

    Falling off the Evangelical Cliff

    ‘Church’ had been part of me for , well, a lifetime, and ‘not’ going at that time was too much, I think. I still needed it, for the things that it gave me, identity, some influence, even a space to be creative, music and the odd preach. But in another world I was dynamic, edgy, liberal, yet I still ‘went’ to church in quite a conforming way.

    So I still kept going. Just.

    So, not going had been on the cards for a while.

    It took a bit of courage to finally stop going. Two Sundays of guilt. But that was it.

    Then I stopped, I thought it might be for a few weeks.

    But then no one went to church for months.

    And neither did I.

    And… it was ok…

    And…I am still alive…

    What I lost by not going was some of the people who went.

    But what I gained was significant time for me.

    I also gained coherence, and the time I didnt waste in trying to justify something to myself, doing something I felt I ‘should’ do, and had always felt I ‘should’ do. But then Sundays became another day at the weekend to walk, another day for me.

    I gained many other things too, and I think they are for future writing.

    And, in the last 1000 days, I have so needed those days.

    As, what I have come to terms with and dealt with in the those 1000 days has been the extent of the abuse I suffered as a child, and the effects of ‘self-loathing’ evangelicalism, and the impact of rigid, moralistic, closed minded evangelical faith on me as a child.

    Also in those 1000 days I began and recently ended a process in challenging that abuse, and in that process constructed significant boundaries from them, yes, finally 28 years after wanting to do it the first time, I have effectively divorced my parents.

    I took time to undergo therapy for those events, and their impact.

    It has been significant, and hard.

    And, from a spiritual perspective, through these discovered something about myself that has been profoundly impactful, about the spirituality that has been revealed that exists on my inside – and that’s for another day in terms of writing about it, but it has been a beautiful life filling awakening spiritual journey. (Do have a look in the menu above to see some of the resources that have guided me during this time on this, especially Lucia Cappacione, Eckhart Tolle, Haemin Sunim, Richard Rohr, Gary Zukav, as well as the Daily Northumbria prayer book, The CCA daily readings, and more recently John O Donohue)

    In 1000 days, or more specifically, since I started a 2nd bout of therapy 2 years ago this week, unbeknown to what I thought I was going to therapy for, I discovered a coherency to my spiritual life that I hadn’t encountered before. And I feel significantly better for it.

    God makes more sense too, because actually God makes less sense, but I feel God and this is a whole new mysterious love that is deeply connectful. God seems everywhere and in everything and also deeply within. Maybe that’s what Colossians was about all the time. Reconciliation of all things.

    ( See.. I haven’t rejected faith)

    I have enjoyed in the last three years experiencing a number of ‘online’ churches, with the most coherent, deep, soulful and peaceful being a Jewish Bar mitzvah and the Buddhist meditations, and these I have gone with with Christelle, who I also introduced her to anglican services too with Gemma Sampson (then in Hartlepool).

    I didnt expect to not keep going to church, in the same way that I didnt expect that going to therapy became the beginning of a spiritual journey, via some of the dark nights of my own soul. And also, discovering that soul too. A soul, a life, a ‘James’ that had been left behind and adapted into a type of existence.

    And this is before some of the other things that have happened to me in the last 1000 days, including marrying my beautiful Christelle a few months ago – changing jobs, flats and cars in that time too.

    As I look back on these 1000 days I now notice that its been a time of shedding of the old, and some of that was very painful, some less so, some shedding, like the proverbial Onion involved tears, and other sheddings gave space for the new to emerge.

    And some of that is for the future.

    But for today, its to recognise that its now about 1000 days, especially in a week when the christian faith in the UK has been brought to the attention, it prompted me to share a little.

    Maybe I’m now in the ‘spiritual’ and still slightly religious category, maybe I’m just realising myself and the spirituality within me, within the universe and the divine love that connects all, maybe….

    Maybe its just about becoming me, and that required a deep emotional and spiritual cleanse.

    So, tomorrow, its Sunday… where shall I go for a walk?

  • Morning moment

    (A Morning Blessing by John O’Donohue)

    I arise today

    In the name of Silence

    Womb of the word,

    In the name of stillness

    Home of Belonging,

    In the name of the Solitude

    Of the Soul and the Earth

    I arise today

    Blessed by all things,

    Wings of breath,

    Delight of eyes,

    Wonder of whisper,

    Intimacy of touch

    Eternity of soul

    Urgency of thought,

    Miracle of breath

    Embrace of God

    May I live this day

    Compassionate of heart,

    Clear in word,

    Gracious in awareness,

    Courageous in thought,

    Generous in love.

    (Words from John O’Donohue ‘To Bless the Space between us’ , pictures my own)

  • Self Love is a Risk

    Self Love is a Risk

    You’ve just got to love yourself, they say

    Give yourself time

    You are important

    You are enough

    Its about being vulnerable, and embracing discomfort

    Thats what some of the books say.

    Thats what’s required for life, for creativity and innovation (Brene Brown, Daring Greatly)

    I get it. I want to get it.

    But.

    Even the first of these seems risky.

    Loving myself. Loving and listening to myself.

    Becoming aware of my feelings.

    It was brought home to me over the last few weeks.

    Its a risk.

    Complex trauma, both emotional neglect and abuse, coupled with strong childhood adherence to an evangelical faith make this risky.

    Too many self sacrificing defaults have been set.

    Too many ‘put others first’ learned behaviours have been performed.

    Too many times was it safer for me to revolve around others, my abusive mothers, needs than attend to my own – too many times soothing my abuser meant safety for me.

    Too many times I heard – ‘love your neighbour’ very few times I heard ‘as yourself’ – though with the all too often shame that was associated with too much pride. Shame.

    Ahh yes, that ‘S’ word.

    The word you’d feel if you uttered the other S word in church.

    And fear of being accused of being Selfish was the other S word. Especially at Home.

    It took a risk to start to think of myself as anything, let alone something – though I sort of knew I was ok.

    Self love is risky.

    Knowing I can love myself – without justification

    Knowing I can choose what I do with my time – can feel utterly alien and pushing through sand to feel like this is even allowed or possible

    That voice. That inner critic voice. Be useful. Don’t be lazy. Stay Busy. You don’t deserve this. Surely there’s something else to do.

    Its as if its waiting for that moment.

    Self love can feel a risk.

    A risk because it challenges so much of…well everything.. everything I once knew and had become default.

    My childhood emotional needs, my identity and adaption into an evangelical christian faith (though it needn’t have been as evangelical to still have all those ‘S’ words)

    Loving myself is a challenge and a risk. A risk that means looking inwards. A Risk because I dont often want to look at or be close to the painful bits, or shame bits, and feeling like I’m not able to love myself because I might be in trouble for doing so, or be told off for being selfish, or its something else.

    Self love is risky because i grew up with an understanding of responsibility and fault. I believed I was to blame, and I took on responsibility, because I was projected on as being spoilt, selfish, too clever, messy, not there enough for that person, not fulfilling her needs, not able to ‘fix’ the family.

    The over think everything, get lost in my thoughts, think them through, think all the options, think about what I should have done, what I didnt do, what I need to do what I am , what kind of person I was or am, think James, think, and it keeps on going, wake up with the same thinking thoughts.

    I was the fixer of, and helper of others. Responsible. Over thinking.

    Self love is a risk – for that voice tells me not to be selfish.

    I love the writing of Dr Glenn Patrick Doyle, recently he shared this on his blog

    Self love is a risk. Self love, deep self love is courageous.

    It changes the pattern.

    It undo’s the default.

    It communicates to myself that I am important.

    Its a risk. Its a risk every time.

    Its a challenge every day.

    Brene Brown is right. We are living in an age of scarcity. An age where love is scarce- but where products are traded as love. Loving ourselves is the risk to start turning to whats inside of ourselves as a source of love, a source of peace and joy, and give this the opportunity to shine. Self love may well be the source of the river, where it all starts.

    Maybe Jesus was saying, you can only love your neighbour as you love yourself. That was the challenge set down to the lawyer who asked in the question. Can you love yourself? and in that love – will your neighbour be loved too? It wasn’t just loving a neighbour for show. Where might there be balance in the love for self and neighbour/others in the Bible – just thinking out loud…

    Self love is about being brave and courageous – taking the risk and being vulnerable to myself- not just being strong and getting through it.

    Self love.

    Do you dare take the risk? Do you dare not too?

    Thank you for reading my blogs on this page, if you’d like to support my work and writing further, you can do so by making a gift donation here, thank you

  • Vulnerability; The Surprising Path to Spiritual Growth

    Vulnerability; The Surprising Path to Spiritual Growth

    I written before that being involved in church as a teenager was a ‘safe place’ for me. It was a place to develop a bit of an identity, a space to have some importance – I was a junior leader, I was in the music group, I was part of the ‘Mens group’ from 18 for about 6 months, and after then was a leader in church things, team leader on a frontline team, youth leader in a church. Church meant involvement, and from about the age of 18 it was a place for me where I had some respect, importance. It was a place where I had responsibility.

    Psychologically it was the place, one of many, that as a younger child, my ‘adaptive’ child took precedence. I adapted into the adult world of the local church, was a leader, even in the youth group, and had some kind of status. This isn’t and wasn’t new by any stretch of the imagination. It happens a lot. The most significant thing for me was that it was a space where my parents left from me being around 13 years old. So it immediately became safer for me, and only their torpid residue still hung on, like tentacles of time.

    My role in churches, whether youth worker, leader or in ecumenical groups or denominations was exactly what the 20-30’s me required. Churches in which I kept some emotional distance (because I was an employee in many cases) , and could be important and useful, through either a paid role or voluntary ones involving music, young people or just by being a thoughtful, critical person who could preach or lead services even now and then.

    ADAPTED JAMES was in his element.

    The Shield.

    Wounded interior hiding behind a hard shell. Back turned.

    Oh and it was so easy.

    Adapt to rules, expectation and performance

    What I mean is, that it was so easy for me to exist in this way.

    Nothing in main could get close, because academic critical head of mine would question, criticism or cynicism it away.

    By the way that’s when I know I’m not feeling safe. I can tell.

    But then I could keep all the barriers up.

    I could hide the wounds behind the active mind. I didn’t have to be. To be honest, I didnt know, that I wasnt ‘being’ I was just aware that I wasnt alive. Not fully.

    Church was a place where I could easily hide. Keep up the appearances. Easy to keep masks on when no one else is asking that question, and if they did I would run and hide.

    Hiding behind responsibility, Hiding behind intelligence, Emotions left outside, Emotions no where.

    Though I wouldn’t have admitted it, at the time, I had tied myself into the expectations of the identity of ‘going to church’, and it helped me in some ways to have some parts of my ego massaged with some importance and influence, but I didnt want to get close. And for a number of years I didnt know why.

    I couldn’t emotionally invest myself in church. I needed it for my sake. Aside from frustrations I had no emotion to give at times. I had a head faith. But a head full of doubts. But not a heart faith – because actually that heart was well and truly hidden. And only, only on rare occasions did anything get through – especially in a church situation.

    I used to criticise people in churches for not being real and vulnerable – when that was me – I just lacked any awareness to know it.

    Projection as a defence mechanism, I shudder with my own embarrassment.

    What provoked all flow of thinking you might ask?

    I think, actually, no, I feel and beginning to know, that part of the healing journey I have been on in the last 3-4 years has been emotional, it has also been spiritual, and this has affected how I have interacted with the formative faith of my up to 40 year old self. I would say I have had more spiritual experiences since undergoing therapy than any time before. Through times when I have felt the most broken and confused, damaged and lost and also times when I have recognised my need to love myself – and to sense the spirituality and consciousness within myself. Its a journey that has taken me to Eckhart Tolle, to Karen Armstrong, to Gary Zukav, Irvin Yalom, Paulo Coelho, Richard Rohr, Victor Frankl and Haemin Sunim, and many others, as I continually discover the universe as a spiritual being, and the spiritual being deep inside of me, and spirituality of my body – the feelings and emotions. Holding in balance a spirituality that includes myself, God, creation and the other, and not denying the very heart and soul of myself – for the sake of the other.

    But what I read today was the thing to which so much of my spiritual and religious life made some sense, and for that I hand the end of this blog over the the wonderful Brene Brown.

    When religious leaders leverage our fear and need for more certainty by extracting vulnerability from spirituality and turning faith into ‘compliance and consequences’ rather than teaching and modelling how to wrestle with the unknown and to embrace mystery, the entire concept of faith is bankrupt on its own terms. …

    (Brene Brown, Daring Greatly) going on to say….

    I needed Church and I thought church needed me.

    I left my own vulnerability at the front door. It was barely on the same street to be honest.

    Performance, expectation and compliance was my safe place.

    I know I did this, but how common is it? What is the cost in ministry terms when vulnerability isnt culturally valued? Thats a question others can answer…

    Thanks Brene, for helping me see, again, and be grateful for the journey I have been on, grateful for the churches and groups who hosted and held me, who I kept at arms length and who I ran from when I got emotionally frightened. Thank you because you didnt know, and I didnt know what kind of emotional mess and what kind of emotional trauma I was and still carry. Thank you for doing your best, well most of you.

    Thank you more so for those who in more recent days have held my actual vulnerability as I have let you into the layers and I have found connection and warmth and life through this process, thank you.

    Thank you Brene too, for causing me to see the extent to which I was hiding and avoiding being vulnerable.

    Surprisingly Emotional Therapy has given me Spiritual Epiphanies. Learning to be vulnerable to myself, learning to uncover the hard shell and layers one by one, learning to be warm and loving to myself. To value the God within. To Value love as a feeling, myself as a human. To be. To be , from the inside out.

  • Surviving Psychopathic Parenting (Part 5): The Little Grown Up

    Surviving Psychopathic Parenting (Part 5): The Little Grown Up

    Turn up at a church youth group hiding scratch marks under your sleeve, or bruises on your arm, and you are treated as a project, someone who needs attention and even too damaged to be considered useful.

    Turn up as someone considered ‘mature for their age’, who thinks of others more than themselves, is able to listen and support people, and has no physical marks of the emotional damage, and they get funnelled into leadership.

     

    Mature for his age

    He’s a kind lad

    He likes to help people

     

    I abandoned my  childhood.

    Because there was no point in being a child any more. What was the point of being childish, when nurture as a child wasn’t offered, far better to become self reliant, sufficient and work towards being an adult.

    Keep out of trouble, so not to upset the eggshells – might equal maturity in the eyes of an organisation like a church that equally seeks a level of conformity, and so church and me easily fit in together once it was safe.

    But going up in an emotionally abusive home doesn’t give you the physical scars.

    If anything, it gave me the fine emotionally attuned skills to have an open door for others to dump their issues and concerns on. That was how I thought I would be friends with people. I grew up a walking codependent, and that made me a good friend for many, and prime for a role in a church, growing up quick meant leadership from a young age.Merit Patches : Playwell Martial Arts, The UK's Largest Online Martial Arts Superstore | Est 1995

    Without any obvious needs, and had been encouraged not to have any of my own, I became the little grown up. At age 11 I realised I had to make the path for my own life, I got tidy (as well as being clever) and made school work for me, excelled at it, and ended with good grades. (this was also a ploy to stay out of trouble too)

    If you had a self reliant personality, your parent wouldn’t have seen you as the needy child for whom he or she could play the role of rescuing parent. Instead you may have been pegged as the child without needs, the little grown up (Gibson, Lindsey C, 2016

    And as a little grown up, I sought friends who were also grown up, adults rather than peers, or the ‘maturer’ peers in school, to have more in-depth chats, and likewise the youth leader, the adults in church. Taking on responsibility, I led Sunday school groups at age 12, youth club at 16.  Working from 13 as a paper boy, babysitting and then in supermarkets, I rarely to this day asked my parents for money, and became self reliant to an extent (not that they offered it mind, unless it was couched in favouritism or rescue mentality) , and have gone through 2 degree courses and 25 years of life since leaving home, without asking, and having to be self reliant.

    Interestingly, self sufficient children who dont spur their parents to become enmeshed are often left alone to create a more independent and self determined life. Therefore, they can achieve a level of self development exceeding that of their parents. In this way, not getting attention can actually pay off in the long run (Gibson, 2016)

    So, on this basis, growing up fast was not only my only survival option, but also growing up and not needing them was in my favour. I was the little grown up, caring for others, including the parent, and learned very quickly to withhold my own needs, or find my own resources in which to have them met. Growing up and connecting in a church community , also meant that it was easy to find roles, and spaces in which growing up and taking responsibility was encouraged and affirmed, and where I could become the person I needed to be. The person that left childish and childlike ways behind.

    Links to all the resources I mentioned are in the menu above.