7. This thing about God

God really gets a bad rap. It’s blamed for most of the world’s ills and most of its religions.

Things got written down that are allegedly what God said. Then they were put in boxes. Some of the writings are terrific and some of them are terrifying. All of them, if they were said were relevant for that time. What people often don't realise is that God is quite capable of updating with the times. You would be really, if you were a God.

Most people nowadays will say (if they say anything) ‘I’m not religious – more spiritual.’ They quite understandably don’t want to be tied up with any of the dreadful things that happen in the name of religion.

Lots of people say to me ‘if there’s a God, why is the world such shit?’ (there’s an answer to that on my YouTube comedy video). But basically, the world isn’t shit because of God, if the world is shit it’s because of human beings.

Sure, natural catastrophes happen. That’s because we live on a living, breathing planet that sneezes sometimes. And, frankly, if you were covered in a species like us wouldn’t you find they got up your nose a bit? But when catastrophes happen, that’s when human beings show up as their best – as well as at their worst.

People often say that religion was invented in order to control people. I think religion was invented to try and make sense of death and dying. The control bit came later.

But here’s the thing – if God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and all that, He/She/It is simply not going to fit in a box. And any religion is a box.

‘Hang on a minute,’ you may say. ‘You’re an independent Catholic priest. Isn’t that a box?’

Not really  ... or if it is, it’s a box that embraces all the other boxes. It’s a faith that just happens to use a certain liturgy because we like it and it works. But I’m just as happy at Ashrams, Buddhist temples and synagogues as I am in a church. I'm just your common or garden heretic.

So we’ve hung these labels on God and put He/She/It in boxes. And He/She/It doesn’t fit in any of them.

Even more, God hasn’t read the terms and conditions.

Throughout this blog I’m going to refer to God ... and to God and me ... and I’m going to call God ‘It.’ Apart from anything else, the He/She/It part takes a lot of typing and feminists don't like it. And if I type She/He/It, we're back to the original question... 

I know that lots of people have problems with the name God and prefer all sorts of other soubrettes  but it’s what we believe that counts. Most of us actually believe in a mean bastard of a God who's totally unfair.

God is going to be what to you exactly what you believe it to be.

Ouch.

People said to me when my first husband Henry died, 'Aren't you angry with God? How could God do that to you?' God didn't do that to me. And just supposing God did do that to Henry and/or me, then where was the good in it? Trust me, there was a lot of good in it. Trouble is, you can't see any good if you really think that physical death is the end of everything. I get that. But I don't think physical death is the end of everything. I'm an immortal soul. I'd quite like death to be a bit of a rest as this life of miracles has been pretty busy on and off, but I'm sure I'll get bored pretty soon and want to come back for another go on the roundabouts.

By the way, not being angry at God doesn't mean I'm not angry at other things. The life-enhancing disease has a lot to do with not learning how to experience and release anger safely. But I'm doing a lot of chopping logs lately along with all the therapy and I'm getting the knack.

I believe in a truly all-embracing loving God that allows human beings to be responsible and pick up our own messes. It’ll step in and offer to help if we ask and it will often provide miracles. But we’ve got to notice them.

The thing about miracles is that they are God thinking out of the box that you may have put It in. So you’ve pretty well usually got to get out of your own box to recognize them.

6. Perhaps you shouldn't be doing comedy.

It was always going to be scary becoming a comedian. I only did it because I had had too many people for it to be a coincidence tell me that I ought to try stand-up. One of them was my friend Nick Williams who knows a lot about shadow inspiration.

Shadow inspiration is where you help other people to do what you would most like to do yourself.

Anyway, when three people in just one week said 'you should try stand-up' I thought that I should, at least, check out whether there were any courses that taught this weird and wonderful thing. There was one of course, starting a week from then and just two miles from my home. Dead cheap too.

So I went ... and was greeted with 'what are you doing here, you're like, old! I don't like old people' from one other participant. I told her that she'd get over that in time and everyone laughed. That was odd.

So, I did the course, I enjoyed it ... and I was surprised at how well I did. At the end of the six weeks we did a performance at the Queen Victoria Pub in Birmingham and I started getting gigs around Birmingham. And then in London. And then all over the place.

I really, really enjoyed it. The great thing was that my bishop just loved it too - and called me his 'Fool for God.'

But my former spiritual teacher wrote me a letter warning me that I was bringing the clergy into disrepute. That felt really, really horrid.

So when Nigel turned up, nine months after the comedy course, it was a frightening thought that maybe the comedy was the wrong direction. Maybe I was being shown that it was the wrong thing to do? Maybe I was being punished? (hang on, don't I believe in a loving supportive God?)

Or perhaps it was my inner self-scupperer?

I promptly enrolled on another comedy course run by Mirth Control in Bath and the Universe conspired to help me get there. And what's more, Geoff Whiting liked my act. And when Britain's Got Talent came to him for recommendations for people to approach for the 2014 competition, he recommended me.

So lesson no. 2 is to deal with the inner self-scupperer. Careful consideration showed that this had been around for quite as long as shame.

I can't tell you when I'll be on BGT - as I type there's no known scheduling but I am confirmed on the televised auditions in February. But I have to spend January practicing and laughing. And laughter is the best medicine. So if you do watch that programme and spot me - give me a wave.

5. That's a pretty horrid message isn't it?

So ... does this mean that if you get happy - really happy - then you're going to get sick? Yikes. That's a pretty foul message to put out isn't it?

Please be aware that this blog is just my musings. And to you it may be total ********. Your life is your life and my truth isn't your truth.

But there is something in this which is worth noting. You may have heard of the 'Happiness Set Point.' Marci Shimoff wrote of it in her book Happy for No Reason. It's also known as the 'Emotional Set Point.'

In a nutshell, it's exactly how happy your ego is going to allow you to be before it organises something to scupper a feeling that it feels you don't deserve.

Can a human ego do that? Hell yes. The ego is our automatic responses. It's trained when we are children (the Jesuits know what they are saying with the phrase 'give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man'). We have a set point of exactly how happy we are permitted to be so that it doesn't piss our parents off too much.

If your parents aren't happy (as mine weren't), your happiness set point isn't going to be very high.

I've done a lot of work on mine - and had to do a lot more when Lion and I got married because my ego thought I didn't deserve to be that happy and organised some new and exciting financial issues. And guess what...? Sorted all that. Wrote some excellent books - and arranged to be criticised for them by people I loved and admired.

Sorted all that. Wrote another couple of books ... decided to become a comedian and moved to paradise.

As I said earlier - never been so happy.

So could it have been the Happiness Set Point kicking in? Quite possibly. It's never just one thing is it? But it's not working this time because apart from the horrid days and the scary days, I am actually happier with this life-enhancing dis-ease. That's because it is enhancing my life. And I couldn't be anything but happy living in Devon. So even if it was that, it's not working.

Good.

But I would suggest you might like to take a look at your own happiness set point. It can be raised but it's slow, diligent work. Excuse the advertisement but there's a lot about it on my Soul Wisdom website. And trust me, learning to raise it so that you can create and maintain bliss is a really, really good idea.

You may of course say 'what the **** do you know about that?' All I know is that in heart and soul I am a very happy woman.

4. Why this? Why now?

Henry's terminal diagnosis came seven months after our marriage and he died two weeks after our first wedding anniversary. It was the first marriage for both of us - he was 42 and I was 32 and apart from loving each other we were so relieved to have broken that duck.

I don't actually believe that there's 'a shelf.' I know lots of people, my Dad included, who found true love very late in life. And Lion and I didn't discover each other until we were in our mid 40s.

So, if Henry was finally happy, why did he get cancer?

Well, these things take a while to grow in the body. I had a pathologist friend who told me that pretty much everyone has small cancerous tumours in their bodies which have been sealed off and aren't hurting anyone. Then a trauma or something happens or some genes mutate and suddenly what was no problem at all starts to grow. He said that often the very worst thing for anyone was a diagnosis of something that was minding its own business because then the fear and interference would certainly make it grow.

In Henry's case, there had been trauma enough in his life and lots of inner angers too. I think - I don't know - that it came out simply because he was happy; maybe he was settled and he relaxed and let go. And he was in the perfect place with someone who would care for him and love him every moment of it, and research stuff for him and, frankly, replace the mother he had never had.

One of the reasons why he didn't recover, although he'd changed his diet drastically and was changing his life too - and the cancer had stopped growing - was because chemotherapy killed him.  His doctor encouraged him to stop his Vitamin C therapy and diet simply because they needed the cancer to grow to treat him with chemo. So, he stopped it. The cancer started growing again and he had chemo. The registrar at the QE hospital, Oliver Rose, told me that we were 'lucky' because the death from the chemo would be easier than death from that cancer. Oliver was trying to be helpful and I did see that.

I wasn't angry with God about it but I was very angry with the doctors as well as grief-stricken. But people in my family didn't show anger (though a few shop assistants got it in the neck over the next few months). And I married again very swiftly - two years later - which made me very happy. However, I don't think I'd dealt with all the grief and certainly the second marriage had its own fill of traumas.

Anyway, my dis-sease arrived exactly seven months after Lion and I had moved to paradise. We had decided to decamp to Devon and begin living the kind of life we had always wanted to live - away from the city, working via the Internet and able to walk on Dartmoor every day.

I can honestly say, I'd never been so happy. I had a new book coming out that was probably the best I'd written, I loved my husband and our home, I was delighted with my new career as a comedian, I was just filled with joy.

I wrote daily appreciations on my Soul Wisdom page on Facebook (I still do). I was absolutely certain that health was all about loving life.

Lion and I went on a lovely holiday to Tunisia for a break - our birthdays are two days apart so we thought we'd go away and just celebrate for a full week. It was just wonderful - best holiday in years.

Two days before we came home the lump arrived. It literally came overnight - you're pretty much in tune with your body in sunshine and swimming costumes. And I knew that life had changed forever.

So why, why, why when I was so happy? So fulfilled? So full of joy?

I asked God about that while I was home and walking on the moors. The answer came immediately from left field (which is when you know they are real answers). 'So it would happen somewhere where you were safe and surrounded by exactly the people you need to work this through. It's time. You are happy enough now to heal this old, old rubbish that has been sitting in you for years.'

And it is true. Four therapists/healers within 30 miles in this brand new land became my mentors and the moor became my bones and my guidance. It happened here because I am strong enough now, it happened where I could still be happy and in my happiness is my healing.

3. Signs and Portents

When you have a ‘bad’ diagnosis you feel very alone. No matter how lovely people are, they are not you and they can walk away. However, I have been showered with signs and portents and blessings from day one. I just had to learn to believe them.

For a minister, a healer, a teacher that should be simple, right?

Yeah, right.

I did believe each and every one of them – for about a week. And then I would go down into fear again. It took a shaman who lived just down the road from me (thank you God!) to tell me that I had to start believing at a deeper level and holding that belief. And as an amazing sign occurred against all the odds in her healing room at the beginning of the session, I really had to start listening.

Here’s an example of one of the signs.

When my first husband, Henry, was given a terminal diagnosis with melanoma, back in 1989, and we were both reeling with the shock, I went to the bible that we had been given on our wedding day and opened it at random, asking for a sign from God.

My finger fell on a line from psalm 118 ‘I shall not die; instead I shall live to praise the Lord my God.’

It felt so good – of course I interpreted it that Henry wouldn’t die. But it meant me. I would not die from this time of trauma, rather I would get through my life-time of being an armchair Christian and start to discover what I truly believed. It didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be a barrow-load of crud to get through first.

Move the story on by a decade and my second husband (whom in this blog I’ll call Jay) had just decided to end our marriage. He unadvisedly told me that it was for my good and that I’d thank him eventually and he was absolutely right but at that specific time I was, to say the least, a little bit sore.

I went up to Birmingham to stay with my Mum and we went to Evensong at the church where Henry’s ashes had been buried. I remember standing by his grave and thinking ‘where did the hope go? This is the second time my world has been destroyed.’ Then I went into the church, opened my hymn book and a sheaf of paper fell out. It was the 118^th psalm with a sentence underlined. Which line? ‘I shall not die, instead I shall live to praise the Lord my God.’

A bit of a hint, I would say.

A few months back (three months after diagnosis), I went on retreat to the Poor Clare’s Monastery in north Devon. It was a much-needed time to myself to meditate and pray and I was able to join with the nuns in their daily liturgy. On the last morning, after communal mediation, I left the nuns’ chapel ... I paused at the back of the main church to look at some leaflets and heard them begin to sing again. I realized that I had missed the final part of that morning’s prayer.

It would be about five minutes’ worth and I was hungry for my breakfast so there was really no point in returning but even so, I knew I must. I retraced my steps and went quietly back into the chapel. There, I fumbled a bit, trying to find the place in the prayer book and Sister Maximilian came over to help me.

One of the sisters is Swedish and I had noticed that she sometimes sang verses of the liturgy out of order. Just as I got to the right page in the book, it was her turn to sing. She sang one particular line and the rest of the nuns stopped dead because it was the ‘wrong’ line.

They started again at the beginning of that psalm.

Which one?

Psalm 118.

Which line did the sister sing out of turn?

‘I shall not die, instead I shall live to praise the Lord my God.’

I'd say that was probably time to start listening to what God had been trying to yell in my ear all along.

2. Shame

The very first thing I did when I was told that I had a dis-ease was not tell people about it.

I’ve always been a bit of a hermit – and I’m married to another hermit. Even in my early 20s when I was at journalism college, a friend said ‘If I ever see a job advertised for “hermit – optional social life” I’ll let you know.’

I guess there were three main reasons apart from that. Firstly I had to get used to the idea myself and I had to find out who I was now as opposed to who I had been and I didn’t think other people’s opinions on the matter would necessarily help. Selfish? Hell, yes. And about time I started being a little bit more selfish. WBX would call it self-full.

My husband knew of course, my two best friends, my homeopath and my healer but that was enough for the time being.

The second reason was because I had to learn how to deal with being in the medical system. I’ve not had a stroke of illness in my life that needed hospital treatment apart from a couple of broken bones. I hadn’t even been to a doctor in 18 years.  I found it incredibly difficult because it was all about Nigel and the only bit that was about me was that I was carrying Nigel around for all the appropriate tests. 

Suddenly others believed that they had complete autonomy over my body. That did not sit well.

The third was because I had to process shame.

Why shame? Because I’d been an holistic teacher for years; I had (I hoped) helped many with sessions, workshops and books. I ‘shouldn’t’ have got something like this. I should have walked my talk and been healthy until I was 100 when I’d have died in my sleep.

That feeling was fuelled by some of the holistic community’s reactions to Gill Edwards’ and Gerry Hicks’ deaths a year or so back. People seemed to think that someone in spiritual work had to be perfect. I guess I thought that too in a way (though Gerry was 89 – and something really does have to take you out eventually).

But I thought it meant I was a failure; I felt like a failure. And to start with, I couldn’t understand because I thought I had done all I could. In fact, just like Brandon Bays, when I found the emotional root cause of Nigel I said ‘but I’ve dealt with that.’

Obviously, I hadn’t.

What was wonderful – and life-enhancing – was that those I did tell as the weeks went by did not judge me the way I had been judging myself. They were shocked sometimes, but never other than loving. 

One wonderful lady, who’d been a client as well as a friend for years said ‘Maggy, you’ll lead us all through this. You’re still an inspiration.’ That made me cry.

Maybe it's true. I do know that the phrase 'I have been there' is often of great comfort. It means someone understands your journey. I have understood the journey of those who were in financial difficulties because of psychological and spiritual blockages. Now I can understand the journey of those who sick or in fear for their life. Ho hum. As the Buddha says, “Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.”

It made me think about where I was familiar with shame ... I wrote a list of times when I had felt humiliated during my life. It turned out to be a very, very long list. That was a bit of an eye-opener.

So, lesson one – of so, so many, lessons – was "you were carrying shame and you didn’t even know it. Shame alone is a dis-ease. We could do with dealing with that."

1. The Life-Enhancing Dis-ease.

Welcome to 2014. I wish you a wonderful happy year.

Last year was pretty awe-full.

There were times too that I thought it was awful. Lots of them. 2013 was the year that I was diagnosed with a life-enhancing dis-ease.

That’s not what the doctors called it, of course. That was something entirely different.

But a life-enhancing disease it is. 

It took a few months to realize this fully ... because I am entirely human. It also took a few months to realize that I am incredibly grateful for it. Please do try not to vomit when you read that. I do realise it's a bit on the wanky bollox side. (WBX, as it will be referred to from now on, is my favourite way of describing over-the-top, unicorn-friendly, fluffy pink, holistic positive-speak).

This blog is about the journey I’m on with this life-enhancer. It will probably get pretty weird; it will definitely contain a fair amount of WBX. But I’ll try to keep it grounded. And I will tell the truth about the processes – glorious and painful.

Why am I writing it? Well I’m a writer anyway; it’s therapy for me and, if it just for one moment, helps someone else with a life-enhancing dis-ease or helps someone enhance their life without having to manifest such a dis-ease then that’s pretty good.

The dis-ease will get named on and off during this blog but not a lot. That’s not because I’m trying to hide anything but because the dis-ease itself is not the story, it’s the symptoms of the story.

I called it Nigel because as soon as the doctors decided that I had it they made all sorts of plans for Nigel (Google XTC Making Plans for Nigel if you’re too young to know the song). But apart from allowing me six holistic therapies for free, there really wasn’t anything the doctors could say about making plans for Maggy. After all, that’s not their job.

I’m responsible for Maggy. I’m a spiritual being, incarnate as a human being. I also have a body. Nigel is not me. Nigel is an it. Nigel is something that came along to teach me something important. It may well have come along to save my life not to destroy it.

It’s also annoying, uncomfortable, has required serious life-changes - and will probably require more - and made me one of those annoying people who doesn't eat gluten or sugar or half the stuff that's really, really nice and everyone else adores (oh that has been such a challenge!). But most importantly of all it’s a dis-ease that I went down on my knees and begged for. 

Yes, I did. I am entirely responsible for it. No, not because I ate badly (too much sugary stuff for sure but home-cooked organic food, locally sourced and not a KFC in more than a decade), and not because I have been a ‘bad person’ (though I am sure there are some who would disagree) and not because I haven’t meditated or prayed or been kind to others (though I’m sure I could have done more) and not because I ‘haven’t worked hard enough holistically or spiritually’ (ditto).

It’s here because I went down on my knees and begged God to clear out all the inner resentments, angers, hatreds, fears and blocks that could possibly have been inside me at any level that were stopping me from being the person I am meant to be. I asked to be a clear channel of Grace. I asked to be cleansed in mind, body and spirit. And I meant it.

And the answer was ‘Let’s do it together, Maggy.  I will give you the means, the process and all the support you could possibly need to do what you ask.’

Bugger.

Be careful what you ask for, you may get it.