Outside View

My regular interlocutor Trevor, a lot of the time, ascribes his misfortunes to a curse. The source of the curse varies, and occasionally he concludes that it doesn't actually exist and his belief in it is a function of his illness, but most of the time he's emphatic about it, to the point that we don't talk about it and when he raises the matter I don't pursue it. Now and again he will get very angry with me that I can't do anything to combat it, that there are no rituals or ceremonies the Church of England can use for curse-breaking, or that there are but I refuse to make use of them. Actually there are things we can do to counteract, let's say, malign spiritual influences, and he and I have done them ad infinitum, but his model that somewhere there are witches whose ill-wishing has caused every unhappiness in his life from a business failing to friends deserting him to agoraphobia to constantly having to give way to other drivers on the road - which was a matter he raised a few weeks ago - isn't something the Church can accommodate.

Yesterday I found myself having a long conversation with a man who came to the church and whose story I was struggling to grasp when he mentioned a non-existent person and thus alerted me to the presence of delusion. His problems in life, he believes, are down to a group of people who can make things happen, including illness in his family, by means of bugs, tracking devices and satellites. His great sadness is that nobody believes him, and, as politely as I could, I had to say, because he asked me, that without more specifics I couldn't either. This is clearly a non-religious version of the same rationalisation of misfortune Trevor has arrived at as well. Mr A's persecutors are not witches, but their powers are just as pervasive, invisible and invincible.

Neither Mr A nor Trevor's experiences are unreal in the sense that there is genuine misfortune at the heart of both, but of course their rationalisations of those experiences, no matter how comforting it may be to have a story to tell themselves, will lock both of them into patterns of thought and behaviour that make it impossible to change their circumstances for the better. How very sad to live like this.