Something Needs To Change...4

I have been invited to speak in my church. I will be the last of a series of five laypersons speaking briefly at the end of the service about how we have experienced God during times of change. This is an honour, of course, but it is also a challenge. It isn't because I have never experienced change in my life, and neither is it from a lack of experiencing God's grace and love during those times. Rather, it is finding a way of communicating effectively and constructively to a church full of persons whose lives and social class and life expectations have been very different from mine. These are upper middle class, mostly white Anglicans of a certain age. Nothing at all wrong with this by the way, and they are lovely and very kind people. However, they are also people for whom change has probably never been the constant in life, and change has always been my constant, with perhaps a slight exception with the relative employment and living stability I have been enjoying for the past sixteen years or so. This is not the style of stability to which anyone in St. Faith's would be accustomed. I do not own my home. I am not even in a nice market rental. I live in government-subsidized social housing in a building located in an unsafe downtown neighbourhood and forty percent of the tenants here are living with a mental illness. However, for me, it is a roof over my head, it is affordable, and knowing that the alternatives would be either street homelessness or having to move altogether out of the Lower Mainland, I am counting my blessings and staying put. And there is no way that I am going to disclose this kind of personal information in front of a room full of upper middle class Anglicans whom I scarcely know. Neither am I going to mention my own experience of homelessness and unsafe housing that led up to my living in this building. It isn't that it is none of their business (and it isn't any of their business) but because of the huge gap of life experience between us, this kind of disclosure is going to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and the response will be any combination of pity, contempt and fawning admiration for my courage, and none of those for me are desirable outcomes. Neither am I going to disclose one single iota about my own mental health diagnosis of PTSD and the following diagnosis and psychiatric treatment that not only cinched my recovery, but opened the way for my current employment as a mental health peer support worker. There are several reasons for not disclosing. There is still stigma and I am not going to further this stigma by betraying myself. I also refuse to talk openly about my work as a peer support worker. There are reasons, of course, not least of all I do not want to betray the confidentiality of my clients, but also there is embedded stigma in this occupation. In order to be a peer support worker you have to have lived experience of a mental health issue, and I am not ready to reveal this in front of a church, though I will mention it one to one in conversations where I can be assured that nothing is going to be taken out of context. This is not stable employment, by the way. It is contract work and I am paid, per client or meeting, a whopping fourteen bucks an hour with absolutely no opportunity for advancement, and there is absolutely no hope that I will be paid a living wage. And if my supervisors can't come up with new clients for me, this is also going to affect my bottom line, and though this has never happened, it is not inconceivable that I could end up with no income for an entire month! Neither am I going to tell them that I have no family, am completely alone in the world, and that surviving relatives have such contempt towards me that I didn't even learn about my father's death until he had been cold and in the grave for almost three years! I could talk about my experience of living as a queer, asexual, non gender-binary man in a world that does not have a place for me and has resulted in a lot of doors being slammed in my face, but they are not going to get it. I have compromised myself enough in the past with this kind of self-disclosure, been really hurt by the consequences and this is not going to happen again. I am new to this parish, having been in attendance for the last six months. This is November, which in the Anglican Church of Canada is also known as Stewardship Month, or, the Great Diocesan Cash Grab. This is not my favourite month by any measure. November is the month of death and dying. The summer is long over and autumn begins its chilly transition to winter. We have the Night of All Hallows, or Hallowe'en night to kick off the month, followed by los dias de muerto, or the days of the dead, as celebrated in Mexico, with All Saints' Day November 1, followed by All Souls' Day. Then there is the great death fest of Remembrance Day, November 11, where it seems everyone remembers their own war dead while conveniently forgetting all the foreigners (most innocent civilians), they were sent overseas to murder. And I am one of the few pacifists in attendance of an Anglican parish. November is not my favourite month. I do not have fond memories or associations with Stewardship Month. When I began attending St. Paul's Anglican in September 2007 they really ambushed me about it just two months later. They already knew I was on a low income, and could barely afford to keep body and soul together, yet, four times I was nagged and harassed to start shoving out some of my income to the parish. I of course refused, and actually left the church in protest for a couple of months because this was traumatizing. I have many other unresolved issues with the Anglican church by the way, and certain clergy and others in this diocese have also been vectors in aggravating my experience of trauma, thus compromising my employability and helping entrench for me a life of poverty. If I could afford to hire a good lawyer I would sue this diocese, but this is not going to happen, so my only retaliation is in withholding funds. They are not getting a bloody nickel from me, though they also have the privilege of my forgiveness and my willingness to try again with them and to give them my heart instead of my pocketbook. Here endeth the lesson, Gentle Reader!