Alex Beecroft - Things Unseen: A Book of Queer Christian Witness

CHAPTER ONE

Chapter One

I have been procrastinating over starting this book for two days. I think Im afraid. After a lifetime of being the quiet one in the corner, hiding my thoughts, hiding my true self, here I am. I am standing up and making my inner life clear. I am showing myself - in so far as I am able - undefended to the world.

I dont know whether I am just naturally shy, or whether a childhood in which I knew I was strange, and in which I was frequently laughed at drove me into a shell I would not have otherwise worn. Maybe both. But even as I write a small voice in my head says Who would be interested in you ? What kind of arrogance is it that says that you have anything new or interesting to contribute to the world?

To that voice, I have to answer 1. You cant simultaneously believe that youre weird and believe that you have nothing new to say. If you are unusual - and you are - then perhaps your unusual perspective will be new to some people.

And 2. Im not here to talk about myself. Not really. Im here to talk about God, and Gods loving-kindness to me over the last half century of my lifetime.

There is a squirrel sitting outside the window of the shed where I write. Hes scratching his arm-pit. Hes all fluffed up because its the end of November and ice is on the ground. But the sun is pale gold on the bare branches, and Im reminded that it is in the individual, specific details of our lives that God shows his richness of invention and prodigality of gifts. I cant talk about my experience of Him without also talking about myself.

I called the book Things Unseen, because from the outside I have lived a blessedly uneventful life. If a biographer was one day to write my life story, I think he would despair of how boring it was. I went to school, I went to university. I got a job. I got married. I left work to raise my children. I began writing novels and was published for the first time in 2007. I carried on writing, and here I am ten years later with about 15 books out and more to come.

Snore. Right?

And yet on the inside - unseen, except by me and God - that same life has been a succession of miracles. I have met God and demons and creatures that were perhaps somewhere in between. God has sought me out and saved me and taught me things about himself and about me that I had never imagined.

If I dont say anything, those things will remain invisible, unseen and unknown. That doesnt seem right.

Ive been waiting a lot of my life for the call to do something spectacular for God, to somehow pay him back for all the trouble hes been to with me. I feel he deserves a bigger return on investment from me than I have been giving him.

In the mean time, I did what I wanted to do with my life - which was to write books.

On many occasions, Ive tried to give my writing to the Lord, expecting to be asked to give it up as a sacrifice to him, in favour of going and being a missionary overseas or something equally strenuous. And on every occasion it has seemed to me that he gave it back, saying No. Why do you think I gave you a skill and allowed you to love it, if I was only going to take it away? Keep the gift that you have been given and use it for me.

Finally, I may have got the message.

I always used to be somewhat confused about witnessing. I thought it meant that you had to pounce on people in the street and shout Have you heard the good news of Christ our Saviour! Which of course I could not do myself, and frankly would have found offensive if it was done to me.

I dont know who it was who pointed out to me that in a court case a witness is someone who is asked only to describe what they themselves saw. They are asked to testify only to what happened to them.

Just recently these two thoughts have come together in my mind and finally worked a revolution:

Use your writing for the Lord.

Witness to what you yourself have seen.

And laid out like that it was pretty obvious even to me that it was time to write a book in which I told the world about what the Lord had done for me.

This is that book. Masks off. Silence broken. I am still afraid of ridicule and of saying something wrong. I am still afraid of being seen. But that doesnt matter. Lets do it anyway.

I should start with some visible things, the verifiable facts of the matter. I was born in Dundonald in Northern Ireland in 1965. My father was an Insurance manager with Eagle Star Insurance, and he had been transferred to a branch in Belfast a couple of years before that. Much though I wanted to believe I was Irish as a result of being born in Ireland and spending my first four years there, mum and dad were both English, and I was only ever really a visitor.

I have two sisters - the older, who is twenty years older than me, and the younger, who is eighteen years older than me. Im not entirely sure when they moved out, but by the time we moved back to England and settled in Wilmslow, in Cheshire, they were not living with us.

It was just my father, mother and me in the house from then on, except for the occasional visit from my sisters, so although I do have siblings they were to me more like aunts.

In the normal course of biology, I presume that I also had grandparents, but by the time I was old enough to remember anything, they were all dead, and I do not know their names.

My elder sister tells me that when she was young the family lived near my mothers mother and her family - the Beecrofts in Yorkshire - and that there were a whole plethora of relatives. But again, because of my fathers moving around with his job and his tendency not to keep in touch with his family, and to discourage my mother from keeping in touch with hers, I only remember us being alone. There was me, and my father and my mother in the house, and we had no family history or other relatives.

This seemed normal to me at the time, but I think it contributed to my tendency to be secretive. There was no one to tell about what was going on in my head except for dad - who would have ridiculed me for it, and mum - who had real problems of her own.

Life in our house was not happy. My father had all the economic and physical power, and he treated my mother as though she was an idiot and a sponger. It amused him to laugh at her and to be cruel. She feared to ask for things for herself, and she strategized carefully over how to ask for things for me.

About once a month, my father would spectacularly lose his temper at her, shout and swear, sometimes throw things and threaten to boot us both out of the house. We believed that if he was provoked he probably would go through with it, so the rest of the month we spent walking on eggshells, trying not to set him off.

This too, obviously, contributed to my desire to be invisible. If I was not seen, I would be safe. If I had no opinions - or at least if I voiced none - I would be safe. Safer, anyway.

So I was a very quiet and obedient child, though one who rarely did anything. (Not doing anything was also safer than trying to achieve things.) I spent a lot of time out of the house, walking alone in the woods that surrounded our street, finding tree-houses and dens in the ever present r hododendron bushes, planning to run away from home and live in the woods, and living inside my head.