Social media link to girls' transgender rate needs study

           From the video What do DETRANSITIONED WOMEN think of SOCIAL MEDIA? on the              YouTube channel Pique Resilience Project

The impact of social media on all our lives is just beginning to be realised – as with the scrutiny the tech giants are facing from lawmakers in the United States and Europe. But of concern, too, is whether girls  in particular are being harmed by social media through bearing additional forms of social pressure, forms that are much stronger than that which young people have typically had to deal with.

A new first-person account of how a troubled British teenager was handled by the National Health Service highlights some startling UK statistics. Kiera Bell, who went through a transitioning programme from girl to boy, writes:

Notably, a growing wave of girls has been seeking treatment for gender dysphoria. In 2009-10, 77 children were referred to the [National Health Service’s] Gender Identity Development Service, 52% of whom were boys. That ratio started to reverse a few years later as the overall number of referrals soared. In England in 2018-19, 624 boys were referred and 1,740 girls, or 74% of the total. Over half of referrals were for those aged 14 or under; some were as young as 3 years old. The court noted the practitioners at the Tavistock did not put forward “any clinical explanation” for the dramatic rise in girls…

Kiera Bell after her court victory

The reference to the Tavistock centre needs explanation. Bell, who is from a broken family, came to believe she would be happier as a boy. She was referred to the Tavistock clinic. The clinic’s practitioners acceded to her demands with little counselling, a matter that led her to take it to court for a judicial review of her treatment while a teenager, especially relating to her ability to give informed consent over the serious actions taken that would affect her later life. All the way through she had wanted to transition, even having a double mastectomy as a 20-year-old.

However, there came a point where she knew that she had made a big mistake: “As I matured, I recognized that gender dysphoria was a symptom of my overall misery, not its cause.”

Bell, who has subsequently detransitioned, won her case against the clinic, with the judges ruling that youths under treatment at the centre could not meaningfully consent to the medical interventions recommended.

Last year, another set of figures were published in the United States by Abigail Shrier, who is concerned about the impact of social pressure on girls with regards their self-esteem. She writes:

In America and across the Western world, adolescents were reporting a sudden spike in gender dysphoria—the medical condition associated with the social designation “transgender.” Between 2016 and 2017, the number of gender surgeries for natal females in the United States quadrupled, with biological women suddenly accounting for—as we have seen—70 percent of all gender surgeries. In 2018, the UK reported a 4,400 percent rise over the previous decade in teenage girls seeking gender treatments. In Canada, Sweden, Finland, and the UK, clinicians and gender therapists began reporting a sudden and dramatic shift in the demographics of those presenting with gender dysphoria—from predominately preschool-aged boys to predominately adolescent girls.

Clusters of cases among friends, and the existence of trendy sites on Tumblr and Reddit, point to the need of all platforms to send a message about social media literacy to young people as Tumblr did in 2012 when there was a flareup of self-harm linked to material in posts it was hosting. That message is at “A New Policy Against Self-Harm Blogs”,  here and here .

Researchers are exploring the role of “social contagion” among young people. Findings will be of great value to parents who suffer when surprised by statements about sexuality arising from a child “out of the blue”. 

This is how Dr Lisa Littman, the Brown University researcher who introduced to this field of study the term “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria”, describes how her work encapsulating social media is helping understand the unique and rapid phenomenon that we see in the transgender "explosion", in which greater social acceptance can only be just part of the underlying set of causes. Dr Littman said in an interview:

This research explores, through the reports of parents, a phenomenon whereby teens and young adults who did not exhibit childhood signs of gender issues appeared to suddenly identify as transgender. This new identification seemed to occur in the context of either belonging to a group of friends [in which] multiple—or even all—members became transgender-identified around the same time, or through immersion in social media, or both. The findings of the research support the hypotheses that what I have described could represent a new type of gender dysphoria (referred to as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria; that, for some teens and young adults, their gender dysphoria might represent a maladaptive coping mechanism; and that peer and social influences might contribute to the development of gender dysphoria. More research will need to be done to confirm or refute these hypotheses.

Is God merely a person’s subjective projection?

Good and evil angels struggling for possession of a child - William Blake 

How do you respond to the skeptic who says that God is merely a subjective projection? was a question asked of professor Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University, where she teaches anthropology and psychology, when she took part in a video discussion on the publication last year of her book How God Becomes Real.

She started her answer by affirming that her research did not aim to prove the existence of God, but it “reveals how people learn to experience [their] God more vividly”. In this she seemed at pains to espouse an impartial or objective viewpoint:

“Whatever social science can say about [God] is perfectly compatible with the view that God is nothing more than the way that humans imagine this invisible being.

“But it is not incompatible with the question whether an external presence can be made more vividly present in an ordinary human’s life.”

Her research goal was to “get to the core of this human experience of interacting with invisible others”.

 As my previous post illustrates, Luhrmann found that people used their imagination extensively to “interact with invisible others”.  She states that this might be frowned upon in the rationalistic, materialistic West, but that that experience is more natural  where our "inner and outer senses" have not been corrupted (my word) by the governing mentality of “seeing is believing”.

In preparation for your look at Luhrmann’s ideas in the following post I provide here two samples relating how Christians have traditionally used their imaginations to pray.  The texts refer to the insights of Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Jesuit order of priests and brothers in 1534.

The first description of the Ignatian style of prayer comes from Grace Institute of Luther College, Iowa:  

Ignatian Contemplation is prayer with Scripture. It is meeting God through story. The prayer develops as you “live into” a Scripture story with all your senses and imagination. You become a participant in the story, and you continue in the story in your heart, mind, imagination, spirit and body after the reading ends. You let the Spirit guide the prayer - you don’t force anything to happen - you let it happen to you, within you, around you. You may pray with the same story for many days in a row before you feel the prayer is complete, that God has spoken to you, that you have heard God, and worked through what it means for you. It is a wonderful, rich experience.

Ignatian Contemplation is a prayer form developed by Ignatius of Loyola in the 1500s to help people come to know Jesus through imaginative interaction with Scripture. Through the story God meets and interacts with each listener personally and differently. That interaction of our spirit with God is prayer. The difficult part of the process is relaxing into it and letting God be in control, rather than trying to force your response or reaction.

Second, the Ignatian Spirituality website has this description of how to pray using the imagination:

Put yourself in a Gospel story.

Just choose which character you’re going to be, and walk right into the scene where Jesus heals someone, delivers a teaching, or feeds thousands. You can be a main character in the story, or you can be a bystander or friend that you simply invent for this prayer. Don’t get distracted by trying to be historically accurate—this is not about you interpreting Scripture in a scholarly way. The point is to encounter Jesus. Ask the Holy Spirit to guide this very spiritual function, the human imagination, to where you need to go.

Pray as though you are having a conversation across the dinner table or in your living room.

In the Spiritual Exercises, this is called a colloquy, but it’s just conversational prayer. You speak to Jesus as you would a close friend. You speak to Mary, his mother, or to God the Father/Creator, or to the Holy Spirit who is comforter, or to one of the saints, who can be part of this conversation with the Divine. Sometimes, when we pray the way we talk, it can enable us to be more honest. Probably the only danger is that we become flippant or casual, but this isn’t much of a temptation when we remember who it is we’re talking to.

Finally, as a general matter of interest, here is a snippet of information about Ignatius of Loyola from History.com:

The Jesuit movement was founded by Ignatius de Loyola, a Spanish soldier turned priest, in August 1534, with 6 companions. The Jesuits have 16,000 priests and brothers and in training.

Under Ignatius’ charismatic leadership, the Society of Jesus grew quickly. Jesuit missionaries played a leading role in the Counter-Reformation and won back many of the European faithful who had been lost to Protestantism. In Ignatius’ lifetime, Jesuits were also dispatched to India, Brazil, the Congo region, and Ethiopia.

Education was of utmost importance to the Jesuits, and this has been especially true in the United States with several universities established. When Ignatius de Loyola died in July 1556, there were more than 1,000 Jesuit priests.

Another view of the man, who might be regarded as an unlikely promoter of imaginative prayer: 

St. Ignatius of Loyola’s passion to become a dashing courtier, a courageous and celebrated soldier, and an advisor to royalty became, under the influence of grace, a passion to serve Christ—all the way, holding nothing back.

He effected this influence first through the establishment of the Jesuit order, which even in Ignatius’ lifetime had become a powerful force in Europe and beyond and which today spans the globe; and second, through his masterpiece the Spiritual Exercises, which for the past five centuries has taught people how to commune with God and to find true freedom. (Word on Fire.org)

Of course, the use of art and the outpouring of creativity have been notable features of religion throughout history, as part of the "human experience of interacting with invisible others". This continues with the practice of sharing uplifting photo and quote cards on Facebook and the like. 

William Blake used the image of a tiger to explore the power of God:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And to see heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hands,
And eternity in an hour.
If the doors of perception were cleansed
Everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

LitCharts has this to say about the poem and introduces the artist Blake:

The Tyger is a poem by visionary English poet William Blake, and is often said to be the most widely anthologized poem in the English language. ... At the same time, however, the poem is an expression of marvel and wonder at the tiger and its fearsome power, and by extension the power of both nature and God.

Why don’t you talk to God in your daily life?

“What I want to talk about this morning is a remarkable phenomenon: that people not only talk to God but they learn to experience God is talking back.”

With those words Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann* opened a TEDx account of her research on people’s relationship with God, "which led to astonishing discoveries about those who say they hear God speak to them, literally". Her talk followed the 2012 publication of When God Speaks Back, in which she explored “how rational, sensible people of faith experience the presence of an invisible being and sustain that belief in an environment of skepticism”.

Luhrmann’s How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others was published by Princeton University Press last year.

This blog has been tracking the divergence of stances with regards belief in God, or at least, the acceptance of the transcendental element of human life, between those who are open to the spiritual and those who are closed to that experience. Therefore, Luhrmann’s research is of importance because it illustrates how each person can train themselves, in the way that anyone does to develop a skill, to move beyond the physical aspect of our human nature to experience "objects without material presence", such as the non-physical reality of prayer and a relationship with God.

Luhrmann’s findings are very pertinent to our understanding of our nature so, in order to give the full view of her conclusions, what follows is the transcription of her talk.  Notice her emphasis on the use of the imagination. This capacity, often mocked by those who reduce the human person to solely the physical, is shown to be central to a spiritual life. Luhrmann states that “… many Americans are involved in […]  a renewalist spirituality, a kind of spirituality in which they want to experience God intimately, personally and interactively; they want to reach out and touch the Divine here on earth”. She continues:

I am an anthropologist. My job is to immerse myself in the world that I've come to study and to keep observing so that to some degree, I get a sense of what it would take to become a native in that world.

Unlike Margret Mead and Gregory Bateson, I did this work in America. I spent two years in the "renewalist" church in Chicago and another two years in one in the Bay Area. I went to Sunday morning services. I was a member of house groups. I was in a prayer circle. I hung out with people. I prayed with people. I really wanted to know how their God became real to them.

So let me begin by asking, Who is God in a church like this? Well, God is God, God is big, God is mighty and holy and beyond, but God is also a person among people. The pastors in this kind of church want you to experience God the way the early disciples experienced Jesus. They walked with Jesus. They ate with Jesus. They talked with Jesus. He was their friend. And these pastors will tell you that you should put out a cup of coffee for God, you should have a beer with God, go for a walk with God, hang out, do the kind of thing with God that you'd get to not do with anyone who you wanted to know as a person.

And he cares about all the stuff in your life, the little stuff: where you want to go in your summer vacation, what shirt you want to wear tomorrow morning. You can talk to him about that.

So I wanted to know how people learned to interact with God, how they felt that God was speaking back. And I knew that they learned because newcomers would come to these churches, and they would say things like "God doesn't talk to me," and then six to nine months later, they would say, "I recognize God's voice the way I recognize my mom's voice on the phone."

What I saw the church teach was that you should think about your mind not as a fortress full of your own self-generated thoughts and feelings and images, but you should think of your mind as a place where you were going to meet God, and that some of those thoughts that you might have thought of as yours, they were really God's thoughts being given to you, and your job was to figure out who was God.

And in fact, people did talk in ways that suggested that they would have - as if they had experiences that weren't their own.

A woman said to me, "As I've started to pray in this church, it feels like my mind is a screen that images are projected on. Somebody else is controlling that clicker."

And of course, not all thoughts were thought to be good candidates for the kinds of things God would say. People would look for thoughts that stood out, that were more spontaneous than other thoughts, thoughts that were louder, that captured your attention.

One woman explaining to me how she learned to discern God speaking said that people were praying over her one day, and the phrase "Go to Kansas" flashed into her mind. So her parents live in Kansas. She was kind of idly thinking about visiting them, but when this thought just captured her attention, it made her say, "You know, makes me want to say, 'Where did that come from?'"

So you could imagine there would be risks from this style of discerning God's voice. I did think people were reasonably thoughtful about the process. I also thought that the church took care to minimize those risks.

One morning, the pastor said in church, "You know, if you think God is telling you to relax and calm down - totally fine, take it as God. If you think that God is telling you to quit your job, pack your bags and move to Los Angeles, I want you to be praying with every member of your house group, I want you to be praying with your prayer circle, I want you to be praying with me, so that together, this community can help you to discern whether that's actually God or just some of your own stuff that's getting in the way of your relationship."

So what are people doing when they're praying like this? They're using their imagination to do something that they do not regard as imaginary. If you're going to represent God, if you're going to think about God, you've got to use imagination because God is invisible.

It's a very 21st-century thing to draw the inference that if you're using your imagination, you are doing something false. It turns out that using the inner senses, using the imagination has been part of the tradition of Christian spirituality […] The medieval monastics cultivated their inner senses to make God more alive and present to them. That's what these Christians are doing. They are not only talking to God in their mind - using their mind's ear to talk and then to listen to something that God might say - they are imagining that they are sitting on God's lap while they're doing that, or they're on a park bench and they're trying to feel God's arm around their shoulders, or they're in the throne room and their cheek feels warm because of the heat of the blazing light from the throne, or they're lighting a candle to God in their mind and they're trying to smell the scent of the smoke as it wafts up to heaven.

My work demonstrates that this cultivation of the inner senses, it's a skill. You get better at it over time, and it changes you. The people who do this, they say that their mental imagery gets sharper, they say that things they have to imagine become more real to them, and they are more likely to report that God's voice would sort of pop out into the world and they'll hear it with their ears.

So just to give you a sense of the way people talk about their own change: This is a woman who said to me that as she began to pray, her images would get so vivid, "Sometimes," she said, "it's almost like a PowerPoint presentation." And then she spontaneously gave this example of God's voice popping out into the world so she could hear it with her ears.

So one morning, she had wonderful devotions, she felt great about her prayer time with God, she came out on to the street - it was Chicago, it was freezing - she was very grateful that God brought the bus along really quickly, she gets onto the bus, she's reading a book, she's getting all caught up in the book, and she is missing her stop to get off the bus.

And God says to her in a way she can hear with her ears, "Get off the bus!" So she stops the bus driver, she gets off, and she feels wonderful all day that God has been so intimately involved with her as to enable her to make her stop.

What do we make of those kinds of experiences? It turns out that these funny voices and visions, they are less unusual than you'd imagine.

Depending on the way that you ask the questions, somewhere between 10% of the general population and 70% of the general population will say they've had one of these odd experiences, like maybe even drifting off to sleep and you hear your mom calling your name, or maybe you walk into the living room and you look at the cat, the cat's on the couch, you look again, you realize the cat was never there.

These are not crazy; they have a different structure and pattern than the kinds of experiences people have when, for example, they meet the criteria for schizophrenia. They tend to be rare, and many people have them. When you ask people whether they've ever had such an experience, they'll remember one, maybe two, maybe a handful of these experiences.

They're really brief. You see the wingtip of an angel and then it's gone. You hear a voice, four to six words, and then it stops.

And they are positive. I remember a woman who was in distress, and she was driving down the street, and she really heard God speak out of the seat behind her in the car and say, "I will always be with you."

It was a little freaky. She pulled over to the side of the road. But then she wept with joy because, I mean, why would you not?

My work demonstrates that people respond to training. The more people practice inner sense cultivation, the more likely it is that they'll say that they've had one or more of these experiences, and the more likely they are to say that the experience was powerful.

While doing this work, I ran an experiment. I got a hundred people into my office. We randomize them into lectures on the Gospels or this inner-sense-rich prayer. And the rule was 30 minutes a day, six days a week, for four weeks.

We brought them back; we gave them a bunch of computers experiments and standardized questionnaires.

And turned out it was the folks in the prayer condition who, on average, reported sharper mental images - they reported more sense of God's presence, and they said that God was more present as a person to them, and they were more likely to say that they had unusual spiritual experiences - among them these voices and visions.

We were also able to demonstrate that some people are better at this kind of stuff, independent of the amount of time they spend praying.

We give people a standardized questionnaire that asks them, in effect, whether they feel comfortable being absorbed in their imagination. Turns out that the more items you say true to on that scale, the more likely you are to say that you experience God as a person, the more likely you are to say that you have a back-and-forth relationship to God, the more likely you are to say that you've had one or more of these odd voices and visions.

So what do we learn from this? Well, the skeptic could say that we learned that, you know, Christians are just making it up out of their imagination, and that's what I have always thought - end of story.

I actually don't think that we learned anything about the real nature of God from these observations. I don't think that social science can answer that question.

There's also a Christian way to ask this question, which is, If God is always speaking, how come not everybody hears? I think what we learn is that change is real, that as people enter churches like these and they begin to pay attention to their mind in new ways, they begin to pay attention to their inner senses, they really do have different experiences that they associate with the presence of God.

I came to think of churches as offering a social invitation to pay attention in particular ways, and I thought of individuals as having a psychological response to the way that they trained that attention.

I also think that we learned that belief is not a thing. Sometimes if you are a secular person and you kind of look at somebody who is a believer, it is tempting to think that they have this extra thing in their life -it's like they've got a piece of furniture in their house that you don't have.

I think these observations suggest that in many ways, the experience of God is made slowly, through the way that you pay attention to your world, to the way that you pay attention to your mind, to your history of hearing God and talking with God and feeling more confident that God is there.

I think these practices make God more real to people, and that has a palpable effect on their life. I also think this helps to explain why these kinds of practices are so much more appealing in this kind of society.

Since the 1960s, there is Christian mainstream liberal churches -,their membership has been plummeting. Churches like these, they've exploded; the congregations are huge. I think it's because of these kinds of practices. I think that they make God more relevant.

You know, you're trying to hear God speak - God shifts from a 45-minute engagement on Sunday morning to something you're doing throughout the week.

These practices make God more real to people, they make God more alive. And I think these churches, by putting the emphasis on these practices, emphasize the experience of God and emphasize God's mystery.

That helps somebody to hang on to a sense of God in what they perceive to be a skeptical, secular society.

Finally, I think we learned something about our minds. I think that we learned that the way we pay attention to our minds changes our mental experience. It's so tempting to think that the inner landscape of your experience is somehow set as the way that it is. I think that we learned from this that whether or not you are a religious person, whether or not you believe in God, you are making choices in the way that you use your imagination and your inner senses, and the choices you make will change you.

*Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department.  She also teaches psychology, with her work focusing on the way that objects without material presence come to seem real to people, and the way that ideas about the mind affect mental experience. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. When God Talks Back (2012, Knopf) was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. She has written for the New York Times and her work has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines.

See a discussion of How God Becomes Real here

See also this philosophical discussion of what is termed "religious epistemology"

Morals and markets and outlandish CEO pay

Markets and morality: a tale of two uproars - reaction to the 2008 financial upheaval. Reuters photo

One of the searing issues in society is that of the pay difference between those in management and the "ordinary worker", especially the pay gap between chief executives and workers. On Twitter this week the US figures were again highlighted with tweets discussing data that CEO pay growth from 1979-2019 was 1167%, whereas worker pay growth from 1979-2019 was 13.7%. These US figures came out last year in a report by the Economic Policy Institute. 

The global picture was given publicity in 2014  with the examination of attitudes in 16 countries to this matter. One of the glaring findings was that people do not realise what the gap in pay levels is within a typical company. For example, the study found that Americans thought the pay gap was in the order of 30:1; in fact, it was 350:1 (using 2012 statistics). That ignorance, the researchers said, probably allowed CEO pay to broadly remain unchallenged. 

Business observers often cite self-interest and greed, not productivity or profitability, as the reasons for the lack of consideration of other stakeholders in the company, such as workers, especially at the production level overseas. One commentator on these statistics stated that their positions of power allowed that the business leaders' immorality to flourish: 

The reasons for this power are are many, including the fact that CEOs serve on each other’s corporate boards and are generous to each other. They pay the fees of corporate compensation consultants, who typically recommend generous raises, studies show. They pay the fees of board directors, who were paid an average of $255,000 in 2014 at the top 500 companies, which had increased 50 percent since 2006, a Boston Globe analysis found, and which has probably increased significantly since then. And the board members who earn these fees for a few hours work per week are, in turn, generous to the executives who pay them.

In short, its about insider power, not payment for skills. “CEO compensation could be reduced across the board and the economy would not suffer any loss of output,” the report notes.

As to the what many see is the failure of the players in business - as in society in general -to maintain a moral sense, Jonathan Sacks, in his 2020 book*, urges everyone to rethink neglect of behaviours that respect the common good:

There is no question that the behaviour of banks, other financial institutions and CEOs of major corporations has generated much anger at the most visceral level. After all, gut instinct is what drives our feelings of justice as fairness. But that behaviour is the logical consequence of the individualism that has been our substitute for morality since the 1960s: the ‘I’ that takes precedence over the ‘We’. How could we reject the claims of traditional morality in every other sphere of life and yet expect them to prevail in the heat of the marketplace? Was that not the point of the famous speech delivered by the actor Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street that ‘Greed – for lack of a better word – is good’? Greed ‘captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit’, he said: it marks ‘the upward surge of mankind’.

Markets don't distribute rewards fairly

 In a world where the market rules and its operation is driven by greed, people come to believe that their worth is measured by what you earn or can afford and not by qualities of character like honesty, integrity and service to others. Politics itself, because it can assume no shared morality among its citizens, ceases to be about vision, aspiration and the common good and becomes instead transactional, managerial, a kind of consumer product: vote for the party that gives you more of what you want for a lower price in taxes. You discover that politicians are claiming unwarranted expenses or getting paid for access: in short that politics has come to be seen as a business like any other, and not an entirely reputable one. That is when young people no longer get involved. Why should they? If all that matters is money, they can make more of it elsewhere.

However, Sacks is not advocating the overthrow of the free market system. But he is saying that when the morality that made the markets work, involving trust and confidence and faith in people and their words and signed documents, is neglected, "something significant is going wrong". He explains:

The market economy has generated more real wealth, eliminated more poverty and liberated more human creativity than any other economic system. The fault is not with the market itself, but with the idea that the market alone is all we need. Markets do not guarantee equity, responsibility or integrity. They can maximise short-term gain at the cost of long-term sustainability. They cannot be relied upon to distribute rewards fairly. They cannot guarantee honesty. When confronted with flagrant self-interest, they combine the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. Markets need morals, and morals are not made by markets.

They are made by schools, the media, custom, tradition, religious leaders, moral role models and the influence of people. But when religion loses its voice and the media worship success, when right and wrong become relativised and all talk of morality is condemned as ‘judgemental’, when people lose all sense of honour and shame and there is nothing they will not do if they can get away with it, no regulation will save us. People will continually outwit the regulators, as they did by the so-called ‘securitisation’ of risk that meant no one knew who owed what to whom.

Markets were made to serve us; we were not made to serve markets. Economics needs ethics. Markets do not survive by market forces alone. They depend on respect for the people affected by our decisions. Lose that and we will lose not just money and jobs but something more significant still: freedom, trust and decency, the things that have a value, not a price.

*Jonathan Sacks, 2020, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, Hodder & Stoughton/Hachette, London and New York.  

Lovely People digs into Social Credit-style life

From Lovely People, a graphic novel about bunnies living under a Social Credit system

 In China, people are given points or have points removed on a government-run database according to their behaviour. This is called Social Credit. It affects each person's ability to use transport, banks, education, and much more.  Moreover, many people see Western governments and social media organisations like Facebook, Twitter and Google's YouTube increasingly acting as if they are part of a Social Credit system. A short graphic novel just out explores life under this kind of social checking. It’s written and drawn by Minna Sundberg, a Finnish graphic artist. You can access it here.  Enjoy the artist's creative approach to the issue. 

How to change our attitude to suffering

Writer Maggie O'Farrell, who contracted viral encephalitis, a sudden swelling of the brain, when she was eight years old, having to learn to walk again and to talk clearly

What a friend shared to many recently has made me sensitive to what people say about their suffering - whether there is a stance with regards that experience other than cursing God. I quickly found a surprising consensus. My friend suffered a vicious attack in 2014. This is the sharing:

What I’m about to say will most likely be misunderstood, or for some, hard to hear. Recently I watched a TV show on the Disney Channel (I know, I’m really a child at heart). The show is called Secrets of Sulphur Springs. It’s about some children who have found a portal to go back in time and they are working to change something bad that happened. After finishing several episodes I started thinking, if I found a portal and could go back in time, to May 19, 2014, would I change things? And as hard as it is to say (and I’m sure for you to understand) I came to the conclusion that I would not change things. Although I still deal with grief and lingering trauma…I would not change things.  [...] even I’m surprised by my response.

What situation in your life do you believe Jesus has mismanaged for you? What I’ve learned is that Jesus is willing to be misunderstood by us in order to do good things for us. I don’t understand or have all the answers but I know that He works all things together for our good...and, oh, there was a time I could not stand to hear that verse…but it is such a powerful (hard to understand) truth.

Within days of this, the Guardian website had an interview with Irish-British writer Maggie O’Farrell, who has won a prize for her novel Hamnet, about the death of Shakespeare's son. The interview relates...

her own experience of viral encephalitis as an eight-year-old, when she woke up one summer morning with a headache and “the world looked different”. Later in hospital, she overheard the nurse whisper to another child: “Hush, there’s a little girl dying in there,” and was shocked to discover that she was talking about her. “I think anyone who has been through a really severe illness knows that it completely refigures you,” she says. “It is a bit like passing through a fire.”

A journalist recently asked her if she could turn back time would she erase the illness. She replied: “No, because it is who I am. It made me who I am in a lot of ways.” She credits the long convalescence (endless audio books, reading and rereading), and the resulting stammer (thinking hard about every word), helped her to nurture writerly habits.

The Guardian piece tells how O'Farrell is well acquanted with suffering: 

Her offbeat memoir I Am, I Am, I Am – which documents her own 17 brushes with mortality, including a binoculars-wielding strangler, a couple of near-drownings, a botched caesarean, and acute encephalitis as a child – was a surprise bestseller in 2017.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Finally, my reading turned up more on suffering, this time  from Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who died in 2008 after being held in prison camps by the Communist regime, and exiled. An American writer has this to say about Solzhenitsyn's insights:

In his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn reveals how he and his fellow inmates were beaten, humiliated, made to live in filth and freezing temperatures. and to endure many other grotesque manifestations of Communism’s determination to create heaven on earth.

That’s why nothing in that epochal book’s pages shocks more than these lines:

"And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: 'Bless you, prison! ... Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!'”

Solzhenitsyn’s audacious claim was that suffering taught him to love. There is nothing in the Gospels that requires Christians to seek out suffering. The Word of God is not a prescription for masochism. But the life of Christ, as well as the Old Testament’s example of the prophets, compels believers to accept that suffering, if rightly received, can be a gift.

“Accepting suffering is the beginning of our liberation,” he says. “Suffering can be the source of great strength. It gives us the power to resist - a gift from God that invites us to change.”

Miracles need an open mind to comprehend

 

Christians can be blasé about the wonderful things they see in the lives of family or friends, and especially that they hear about from fellow believers who are moved to give testimony of the goodness of God. What follows is such an account from an American family who adopted a Chinese son. For the sake of privacy, the boy’s name has been changed to Elijah.

I do not know the family, but they have been vouched for by those whose judgement I trust. The father wrote in early March:

My six-year-old son Elijah was born mostly blind, afflicted with microphthalmia and congenital cataracts which in turn led to other issues, among them amblyopia and nystagmus. The conditions would have been treated almost immediately after birth here in the United States: in China, for a mother in desperate circumstances — which she must have been — there were no such options. My son was abandoned in a public place as an infant, and eventually found his way to his orphanage, and received no treatment whatsoever for his vision during the most critical early months of his life.

Several weeks before I met him for the first time I received a courtesy call from China: as the prospective adoptive father for [Chinese name], age 21 months, would I object to a local Ningbo medical clinic performing cataract-removal surgery tomorrow? Of course not, I replied. Please proceed. I felt confident in the decision. I have some familiarity with international health and medicine, and I knew that cataract-removal surgery is one of the most common surgical procedures in the world. It’s the sort of thing you can trust a small Zhejiang clinic to do right, even in a child.

I informed my wife, almost as an aside — it was late evening in Houston, early morning in Ningbo — and she said okay. Then she called me back. She was filled with a sense of dread. She was possessed with a conviction that this surgery must not happen. I had to call China back immediately. I had to stop them.

Responding with the gentle understanding that makes marital life with men from my family an exercise in premature aging, I ticked through all the reasons she was being preposterous. The surgery made sense. It is exceptionally common. Zhejiang is a cut above most of China in medical care. The chances for harm are small anyway: the boy is probably almost totally blind no matter what. Reason says do it. Plus, I have no idea how to track down these people in China now.

She listened, and then said: Stop it. Stop it now.

Frustrated and tired at this stage in the evening, I told her I’d think about it. I indulged my frustration for a little while, and then decided that it wasn’t worth the domestic squabble. The child would be blind anyway. The surgery can wait. I’ll make the effort, which won’t work, and then I can say I tried.

Mostly my ego was bruised at the emphatic rejection of what I thought was my knowledge and insight.

I called the adoption agency’s man in China. He picked up the phone and, across a bad connection, I explained to him that he had to track down this orphanage and stop this surgery that was happening in — oh, maybe thirty minutes? I will try, he said, but I don’t think I can. I hung up.

About an hour later he called back. They were bundling the child up to go to the clinic when he reached them, he said. They were annoyed, but they complied. There was no surgery. Thanks, I said, and I thought that was the end of it.

A couple months later, I met him at the orphanage in Ningbo — May 12th, 2016, possibly the most wonderful day of my life — and watched him feel his way along the floor, and thought I was right about that surgery.

Six months after that, I saw him again, on the date of formal adoption, and I thought again that we still should have done that surgery. But in a truly heroic act, I kept it to myself.

Three months after that, after a series of exams and scans of his afflicted eyes — now in the United States — we learned that the peculiarity of his cataracts and the scarring within his eyes meant that had that surgery gone forward, his retinas would probably have been pulled off and he would have been plunged into darkness forever.

It stopped me short. My complacent assurance would have doomed him for his entire life. My wife’s passionate conviction, so unusual in its context, arising ex nihilo as it were, was the antidote — as was my (candidly) very uncharacteristic decision to acquiesce to it. My little boy was saved from a maiming and blinding by mere minutes.

I still think it was Divine intervention, and I thank God my wife had the sense to listen to the abrupt conviction that seized her then.

This morning Elijah went to the eye surgeon for a periodic check-in. He’ll have surgery for the amblyopia this summer. The first time this surgeon saw him, four years ago, she estimated his vision at perhaps in the 20/600 to 20/800 range: shapes and colors and shadows and nothing more for him.

This morning his distance vision tests out at 20/100 to 20/150.  His near vision is 20/30.

Someone watches out for this little boy, and we are just the instruments. My son, my miracle, my Elijah.

But there is more in the brief history of this adopted child. A friend of the family gave them an icon of St Paraskevi, a second century Greek Christian who was born in Rome. She is considered to be a healer of the blind, because of a miracle she prompted in restoring the sight of Emperor Antonius Pius, who had been torturing her because of her faith. An account of her life can be read here.

Elijah’s father provides more details of what seems to be miraculous care for the boy. He writes:

Elijah came home with us in early December 2016, and we got him examined, with the surgeon and an MRI, in January. The examination results were grim: lots of scarring (likely from in-utero infection), and what’s known as persistent fetal vasculature (PFV) in both eyes. (This is where we learned that the China-side cataract removals would have likely pulled off the retinas.) The PFV is usually a consequence of the eyes’ failure to develop in the womb: they start to form, and then basically stop, meaning the network of blood vessels that normally dissolve into the vitreous fluid within the eyes, don’t. We got those results back, and it basically meant that any future intervention would be marginal at best: even with cataract removal, the PFV inside the eyes would permanently block vision. You can’t go in and clean those out.

A week or so after this happened, a good friend of ours — [a priest] — called to let us know he was in [our city]. That was a nice surprise. Even more surprising was that he had relics of St Paraskevi with him. I forget why he had them, [and] he offered to come over and bless Elijah with the relics. So I said of course, and he came over and did just that. Elijah was only two years old then, so he squirmed about a bit while it happened, and that was it. Then we had a nice chat, and caught up, and I thought no more of it.

Maybe a month or so after that, we had to go get another MRI — or maybe it was an exam under sedation, I’ll have to ask my wife — because the retinal surgeon wanted it. So we did. And guess what: the PFV was gone.

Gone, gone, gone.

This changed everything for Elijah. Now we could start planning for what we actually ended up doing later in the autumn: have surgery to remove his cataracts and give him artificial lenses, which is what he sees with today. About a month later, I took Elijah to the monastery of St Paraskevi [in] central Texas to give thanks.

So that was the big miracle as far as I’m concerned. What’s really interesting, by the bye, is how utterly unfazed the physicians were by the change. I was totally astonished and amazed, and they weren’t. (I didn’t tell them about the holy relics.) To them, it was simply a matter of conflicting inputs, with the latest one invalidating the earlier one. I suppose I should allow that possibility: that the PFV was never there, and that it was a bad scan at the outset, and that I am imputing a miracle where there is only ordinary processes. But I don’t think I am: PFV is, well, not subtle.

Two thoughts on this that have occurred to me as we’ve watched this happen:

First, there is nothing — nothing — about me or my wife that suggests a holiness in family life or personal devotion that would suggest the sort of people who may simply expect saintly intercession.

Second, I have to admit that I never quite believed saints like St Paraskevi really existed. […] Surely we can’t be expected to believe that a young Roman woman of no social standing once proclaimed her faith, and performed miracles, before the Emperor Antonius Pius? I was very much taken with modernist standards of proof. Then I was given an entirely different standard of proof: that a once-young Roman woman interceded before God for my little boy.

See related: Miracles can be filtered out of our sense of reality