For as long as I can remember I’ve been a fan of Horror movies.

I’m not sure where it originates from but I do remember seeing the trailer for Psycho 2 when I was 8 or 9 and being immediately intrigued and scared.

I remember coming out of the movie theater around the same age and seeing a poster for one of the Childs Play Movies.

I remember my friend Stephen’s friend Daniel, who told me both his parents gave him 5 quid for pocket money each week carrying a Freddie poster around to my house for some strange reason.

Or going shopping in Stewarts with my gran on Friday mornings during the Summer Holidays and exploring all the video covers while she paid for her groceries. Picking up titles like Maniac Cop and Phantasm, seduced by their covers and intently reading their descriptions knowing there was not a chance in Hell my mum would let me watch them.

I remember the most scared I had been as a kid watching Ghostwatch on BBC 1 one Halloween night; the 11 year old me convinced by familiar Children’s TV personality Sarah Greene, that I was watching something real and live.

I remember all of this and more and I loved how it felt.

I also remember as long as I’ve been remembering things, going to Church.

It was just a part of our lives that was always there and I’m so grateful my mum instilled this openness to God and Jesus in our lives. I know that at times it felt like the biggest pain but as I’ve grown up and explored what my Christian faith looks like and how it has transformed, I know that it was because of this foundation that was set for me.

Perhaps because both Church and Horror have seemingly been a major part of my life since I was a kid; I’ve never seen either as being incompatible.

Reading through the Bible it is very apparent that darkness and evil are everywhere. Even stories that as kids we sang songs about like Noah and the Ark, are inherently Horrific tales.

If the traditional Evangelical Hellraiser-esque depictions of Hell aren’t the very essence of horror, I’m not sure what is.

Even as I’ve grown up and explored more mystic versions of Christianity and embraced practices such as meditation, people have warned me about letting something demonic in.

So fear is deeply rooted in much of today’s Christianity. We’re afraid of Hell, demons and we’re afraid of what (and who) we don’t understand. We’re afraid of what will happen if the Democrats or Republicans get into power. We’re afraid that if we accept God’s grace too much, we will abuse it. We’re afraid that our theology is a little too dangerous.

Fear is far more common than we think.

So there is no better genre to help us as Christians explore our faith honestly and openly than Horror.

It’s not just movies like the Exorcist or the Omen which have explored the relationship between good and evil, God and the Devil, but more recent movies have explored issues that everyone struggles to deal with. 

Movies like It Follows delve into the struggles between sex and growing up or the Australian Horror, The Babadook which explores what happens when we don’t express our grief and pain in a real way. Or my favorite movie of the last couple of years, The Witch. A movie that has much to speak into  how Fundamentalism, the dangers of arrogance in belief, and how life without a community to explore our faith, can result in bad things happening.

Or if that is too much for you, how goats don’t make suitable pets.

These are intelligent movies that don’t rely on cheap scares to simply entertain but rather are clever and stylish pieces of art that help us find something bigger than ourselves in their portrayals of issues that Christians have struggled to grapple with.

Movie makers like Scott Derrickson, a Christian, have used Horror to explore the dark recesses of our minds in movies like “The Exorcism of Emily Rose”, “Sinister” and “Hellraiser: Inferno”.

So why do Christians have such a hard time embracing the horror genre?

I think one reason is that good horror is honest. It doesn’t pretend that everything is alright and it doesn’t just give us easy answers to life’s deepest questions. Derrickson himself put it astutely when he said,

“Christ, in His moment on the cross where He endured the ultimate horror, gives us God’s mindset. He is not detached from suffering.”

Somehow though, we’ve become detached from suffering and don’t know how to face up to our fears, doubts and questions. We gloss over them until they are unrecognizable; but they still exist, controlling us without us even noticing.

Our greatest fear maybe, is that if we go too far down the rabbit hole of where our pain resides we’ll never come back. Carl Jung the Philosopher and all round smart guy talks about the Shadow. The Shadow is the part of us whose existence we don’t like to acknowledge but in which resides healing and ultimately the light. Turning towards our Shadow as described by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels in their great book “The Tools” ultimately allows us to reconnect with our pain and suffering, bringing us back into the light.

If we can embrace that evil is real, not to justify it, but to heal it, we’ll find new types of freedom.

This is why Horror is so crucial to Christians. It gives us permission to face our fears.

We talk a lot about unconditional love in Christian circles but we don’t really believe it. It sounds nice and it gives us a get out of Hell free ticket but day to day we work tirelessly to suppress everything about ourselves that we feel people will reject. Ultimately, what we reject in others is what we’re too afraid to see in ourselves.

I used to be a small groups Pastor, helping men addicted to porn find healing. Most of the time the healing required was not some comforting words but using the light to go deep into their doubts and fears. One guy, experienced a deep transformation but it was painful and it was horrific at times. But he embraced his pain and by facing his Shadow, he was healed.

Others were so afraid of their beliefs crumbling before them that they would rather have continued as an addict than finding beliefs that actually worked.

What causes us to stay in these places? What makes someone desire the prison they are in more than having their beliefs challenged?

I believe it is fear. Fear of death. But if we’re not free, we’re already dead.

Darkness is essentially the absence of light. The existence of darkness is wholly dependent on the light. It bows down to the light. But for the light to have any authority we need to acknowledge that there is darkness.

A healthy spirituality and faith is one that points to something bigger than itself. Good horror too, isn’t about the imagery or the story so much as what it says about our deepest fears and where the light can shine in.

Horror and faith it seems then, have more in common than we would like to admit.

I remember on November 8th when Brit and I sat and watched the results come in, we were expecting like everyone for a completely different outcome. Slowly though, we realized that was not going to happen and what we had hoped wouldn’t happen, was happening.

We were genuinely scared and frightened. How would this impact us and the people we loved. We all heard the rhetoric coming from the new President elect but didn’t quite believe it would be as bad as was being made out.

The first week and a half of his term has shown that maybe it could be as bad. Worse even.  Continue reading →

I want you to know you don’t have to feel guilty anymore.

You don’t have to have a quiet time.

You aren’t a bad person for not having one or even not wanting to have one. Let’s look at why quiet times are a waste of time. You take a few minutes first thing in the morning (has to be as early as possible) and pray (but mostly just fall asleep) and read a passage out of the Bible. You then will probably forget half way through brushing your teeth what you had read earlier; really regretting not taking that extra half hour in bed. Does God want you to spend time with Him first thing in the morning if it’s going to make you grouchy all day?

Leaving out the lack of sleep for now, I’m not a fan of quiet times for a few reasons and here are 3 of them.

1. Compartmentalizing God is kind of missing the point.

If God is omnipresent and an all knowing being, why on earth do we think the best time to speak or hear him is at an ungodly hour. It’s called ungodly because even God is asleep. He’s tired enough trying to keep up with our prayers to convert our friends or for the LGBT community to repent. Give Him/Her a break. What would help would be if we stopped thinking about God in ways that limit him. This isn’t just about quiet times. It’s about realizing we don’t need to go to church on a Sunday or a Wednesday night, “expectant” for God to show up as if there’s a very specific window in which God can fit us in. It’s about being ready during all those moments we aren’t ready to experience His spirit because we thought we missed our chance for the day when we slept in like a Heathen.

He’s already showing up. We just don’t know how to shut up for long enough to hear Him.

2. The Bible is not a self help book.

Most of the time we read the Bible as if it is a guide on how to not swear, lie, murder (ok not everyone struggles with that one) or look at naked pictures. But if we’re really going to treat the Bible like a how to for not sinning let’s look at some of the people in the Bible who we hold up as the epitome of Holiness. King David, a man who sent his best friend off to the frontline to die, just so he could get cozy with his bf’s wife. Or Judas one of Jesus closest friends, who sold him out for 30 gold coins which come on, even taking inflation into account can’t be worth much. Then of course Moses, who got so pissed he couldn’t remember who he was and even fell for the riddle about how many of each animal Moses put into the ark.

The Bible is really just like an episode of Coronation Street or Eastenders but probably with a lot sexier characters.

We need to read the Bible for what it is. A vast library of books written over thousands of years by different people in different styles, who all flawed just like us, but in no ways examples for how to live healthy lives. It seems to me the main reason we have to read the Bible then is to see ourselves in these stories, learning about hope, grace and love. To put ourselves into these stories of redemption with the sole purpose not to make sure we don’t screw up majorly today but can bring light to the world.

3. The more the merrier.

One of the reasons we like the Bible as Christians is because it hasn’t changed in thousands of years. The words are still the same and so we don’t feel like we need to face that most uncomfortable reality of change. We don’t like it. We don’t like when someone comes along and suggests a new reading or understanding of a passage or that we maybe stop singing “Blessed be Your Name” for just one week in church (seriously, we’re still singing that?!) But change is good, it’s healthy and it creates life.

It’s kind of ironic because the Bible is full of people who changed their views on God and who decided to try it a different way.

Once we get into a groove with quiet times, we like to stick with what we know. Maybe we don’t like to be challenged or even worse, believe that “this way” is the only way that God can speak to us. When God created the world he said it was good but he didn’t say it was finished….that came in the sequel.

The point being that creativity is in the essence of all humans and the times we seek to interact with God shouldn’t be exempt from that creative spark we are all born with.

Life comes from change, from creativity, from a new freshness. It’s not that the old ways are always inherently bad. They may just be past their sell by date. Then other times we realize that it’s actually us who have changed the way things are done. I mean, this idea of reading the Bible on our own is a pretty new and novel way to read. It’s not actually that Biblical. Reading and interpreting with other people on the other hand.. What would happen if we began to read the Bible with others? Praying the words over and over, letting the Spirit guide us into a meaning and to find a truth much deeper and richer than just the literal?

Of course there is a place and an important one at that, for us to carve out time to allow that part of us that wants to be involved in something bigger than ourselves, speak to us. Just sometimes the manner we go about it gets stale, and needs something new and fresh injected into it.

Coming up in my next post, a couple of things I have been trying that have changed how I view connecting with God.