One of the loveliest things about writing a blog is the friends you make. People you would never otherwise have met appear in your life as kindred souls.
Someone of whom that has been true for me is Debi Peck. We have been talking about writing on and off via email since the end of 2019, and then came a surprising and rather wonderful coincidence last year. Debi wrote to me because she was finishing off a manuscript for publication on the topic of Religious Scrupulosity, a form of OCD. She asked if she could use a quotation from one of my books, and sent me her manuscript to read. I absolutely devoured it! But the odd thing was, at the exact same time I had been sketching out the same OCD problem experienced by one of the young monks of St Alcuins Abbey, in the manuscript I'd been working on — Brother Cyril's Book.
Realising that Debi knows pretty much everything there is to know about this form of OCD, I asked her in turn if she'd read through my manuscript to check I hadn't got anything ludicrously wrong.
And now here we are; both these books — my Brother Cyril's Book and Debi's The Hi-jacked Conscience — publish this month. Mine was out this week, Debi's will be out with SacraSage Press in just a few days. I wholeheartedly recommend you to read it; she has written a very, very good book indeed. In a day or two when it's published and launched, I'll put up a post with links so you know where to find it — but in the meantime I thought you might like to keep company with Debi and me through a recent email conversation we had:
PEN: Debi, the first word that comes to mind when I'm reading your book, The Hijacked Conscience — which is absolutely brilliant — is "brave".
I can see you have had to be so brave to work and study and struggle your way free from the confines of Religious Scrupulosity Obsessive Compulsive disorder and become the person you are today. But I also think writing this book was a brave thing to do. You have been very honest and open in telling your story, and I think that cannot have been easy. Is that right? Did it take a lot of courage to write your book?
DEBI: I was thinking about courage just this morning, and specifically, the kinds of courage it took to write my book. Writing about the deeply personal aspects of Scrupulosity, those things that have filled me with deep shame throughout my life, took a great deal of courage. The knowledge that my friends, family, and strangers will be reading about the darkest times in my life and knowing that afterward, I will need to look them in the eye, knowing they know my deepest struggles requires me to move forward with courage. Writing the book, however, was only a small part of my choice to be brave. Believing enough in myself and in the goal of my book to help others required me to send my manuscript to publishers and then bravely wait (sometimes not so bravely!) to hear back from them. Asking people — a couple who I knew, but the rest strangers — to review my book and potentially endorse it was one of the bravest things I had to do. It is a true mark of the distance I've come in my healing to be able to do that. Sharing my book with you, a real-life author who has written some of my most beloved books, was brave, too. But, look what I found in the process — a dear sister-in-community!
One of the things I have most loved about your whole The Hawk and The Dove series is the courage you write into the stories. The courage of those in places of authority ministering through their brokenness and not despite it, helped write into my own heart the desire to minister Christ to others not from a place of strength, but from a place of vulnerability. The courage it took for each of the brothers to face their own brokenness and need for Christ's healing showed me the way to my own brave venture of healing.Was this something you, yourself, experienced, or where did you come up with that model for your books?
PEN: Well, something I've tried to do in writing fiction, is to start at a place in my heart where some issue of faith or relationship is unresolved, and explore it with the people I write about. When I start to write, I don't know where the community (of St Alcuins) will take me, but I have confidence in their path, so I walk along it.
For me, a particular hurdle to overcome has been writing about the central importance of a living connection with Jesus. In the world of Christian fiction — and indeed I see it in the church generally — there's a trend towards speaking only about the outside of the way of faith. So, people in church are comfortable talking about "my faith" or "why I come to church", but rarely do I find them talking about being with Jesus. This might be more a British than American thing, maybe? It's like they find it embarrassing. Among Christian fiction writers and publishers, there's a distaste — even contempt — for what's called "confessional" fiction; you know, where people hear the gospel and see the light and their lives are transformed. The preference is for characters who are flawed and "real". In the UK, a good example of this is the TV series The Vicar of Dibley, where the central character's inner world is all about fancying men and eating chocolate and telling jokes. So the faith part is simply that she is a vicar. It has taken courage for me to stick with what I believe is honestly the root of hope and healing and transformation — knowing Jesus personally, meeting him, staying close to him. In my stories, a theme runs through about specifically and explicitly inviting Jesus to come in, and about the difference that makes. I was scared that would make my stories unpublishable, and that they would be sneered at as too confessional; but for me, without that artery of connection with Jesus, everything else falls apart. I suppose it's the main thing in my life; I haven't really got anything else to write about.
When I read The Hijacked Conscience, I found it especially exciting that here was someone making the same journey — someone who had got trapped and tangled and oppressed by the rigidity and mind control of religion, but instead of leaving it had gone down within to discover for herself the living wellspring of the presence of Jesus. I see you know for yourself his company, his voice, his strength. Religion is not all a bad thing, it can be a framework for justice and integrity, but it can also be used as a channel for power games and controlling people through fear. Like an external form of OCD! Taking refuge in religion is, to my mind, a dangerous game. I believe it's necessary to go beyond, to find for oneself the living Jesus; in making that connection is where the healing is, and the freedom. Once a person has that, it makes any context — including church — potentially a place of welcome and redemption.
You write about both the direct help of Jesus and the effect on you of different religious contexts — what made things better, what made things worse. And of course The Hijacked Conscience is intended to both help individuals make headway in their own brave struggle, and help church pastors identify and appropriately respond to the Religious Scrupulosity form of OCD. You point out that this kind of OCD is often wrongly understood as a moral or spiritual issue, so the person seeks help from their pastor rather than finding a counsellor, and The Hijacked Conscience is written to build a bridge connecting the therapeutic and pastoral approaches.
Can you say a bit about how, for you, the spiritual strength of connecting with Jesus and being part of the faith community balances with the practical wisdom of counselling and psychological insight?
DEBI: It is definitely not just a British thing not to talk about Jesus! I've often remarked that Christians seldom actually talk about the Christ whose name they carry. I, myself, have struggled with this. American culture (and perhaps British, too?) has so emphasized the "personal" aspect of our faith that we are afraid we will offend others if we mention Jesus. Even among Christians, there is an embarrassment in talking about the deeper life of faith. I think there is such a separation in people's thinking between their faith and their "real life." People talk about their "secular job", "secular entertainment", etc., as if they add Jesus to their life like a commodity instead of Jesus being the center from which all of their life then becomes sacred. I talk in my book about how I struggled with the concept of "Christ in you" because it felt like the responsibility for keeping Him there rested completely on me, and I knew I could never be good enough to have Him stay there. I was the center of that relationship. (Yes, Scripture talks about Christ being in us, but for me, it wasn't a helpful picture.) When I started focusing more on being "In Christ," my life changed. He became the center and the source. In Christ, I am a new creation. There is security and belonging for me in Christ. That has made all the difference for me.
On the topic of the importance of combining the different aspects of a deep connection with Jesus, being in religious community, and the usefulness of counselling, you ask an important question. For so long, faith communities and mental health professionals were pitted against each other. In my own life, pastors and other religious leaders often said that professional counseling wasn't necessary because if I just prayed harder, or really trusted God, I wouldn't be depressed or have mental illness. Mental health professionals, on the other hand, were often cynical about God or the church. However, I have come to believe that there is help and healing from both places. Often, pastors are not trained to deal with the effects of trauma, and can, indeed, cause further harm. Likewise, it is a wise counselor who recognizes that a person's faith can be an incredible vehicle for healing. I think you and I would both argue that finding that deep connection with Jesus is the source of healing. Both pastors and mental health professionals can work together, each bringing their strengths to the mix.
Not to be forgotten, though, is the absolute importance of community. I think that is the one most often lacking in our lives. The "rugged individualism" of the American culture often leaves people thinking they can make it on their own. In reality, we need each other. I tend to think that much "talk therapy" could actually be better accomplished in community. Being able to share our stories without fear of judgment is what makes counselling so powerful. In reality, that should be able to be accomplished within our communities, but so often, communities have instead become unsafe places. What makes me love your books so much is the life-in-community of St. Alcuin's. John Wesley taught that "there is no holiness but social holiness." Community offers us the chance to live out a holy life. You write so passionately about community, Pen. How has your experience with community affected how you write about it?
PEN: Ah. Now you have put your finger on something. I find this a little embarrassing to answer, because I can't say what is true without showing my own relational inadequacies and failures. The honest truth is that I found my way to St Alcuins through the portal of my own loneliness — writing not out of something that was there, but out of the desperate yearning for something that was not. It was a belonging and a connection my heart longed for and could not find anywhere; but this is what I have found — that in the centre of the human heart there is a way in, a secret door, and if we can find that then it opens to healing and to hope. I stumbled across the community at St Alcuins at a time when I was quite desperately lonely, and it has been the aching absence of anything quite like it that has sent me back again and again to seek their company. And when I go there — why, there they are.
Now, although I feel as if I could go on talking with you forever and ever, a blog post must come to an end. I think we'll do this again one day, shall we? I have so enjoyed sitting here talking with you. Thank you, thank you ...
So friends, please look out for Debi's new book The Hijacked Conscience — I'll post details for you in a few days when it's properly out, and I absolutely recommend it to you; eye-opening, fascinating, a story of courage and healing, sane and strong, full of hope.
