Revd Ravi Holy preaching at the Goth Eucharist 14th March 2006
The question I've kept asking myself since I found out about this service is if it had been running in the 80s when lived in Cambridge, would I have come to it? I called myself a punk not a goth but my favourite band was the Damned who we heard a moment ago and their lead singer Dave Vanian was arguably the first goth along with Siouxsie Sioux. And like Vanian I used to wear make-up which certainly wasn't true of all of the Cambridge punks, many of whom were basically skinheads with mohicans stuck on. Of course, I had a mohican myself, when I had hair - and I think it went through every colour of the rainbow at some point, often at the same time - but it was a crimped, backcombed glam-rock mohican not a hardcore, Wattie from the Exploited one.
Nonetheless, us 'hippy-punks' as we sometimes called ourselves used to hang out with the more hardcore punks. We all used to sit on the benches outside the Guildhall or in Lion Yard drinking cider and extorting money from any tourists who were foolish enough to try and take our photograph (and obviously any money we got went on more cider).
The only time we went into churches was to desecrate them. Because all punks (whether hippy-punks or hardcore) were anarchists. And God was the figurehead of the system (capital T capital S) that all of us hated and that all of us were victims of in one way or another. As far as we were concerned, the church was a department of the government and as such was a legitimate target in our struggle against evil. We put bricks through the windows of churches just as we did banks or butchers shops.
But while I started out fighting against evil, I ended up embracing it. Like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost I said 'Evil, be thou my good' and devoted myself to all those things that society and the church condemned: drugs, magic, even the devil himself. I didn't actually believe in the devil, of course; he was just a useful symbol of my rejection of all things holy. And in fact, I talked about the Lords of Chaos (plural) rather than the devil (singular) because, as an anarchist I was drawn to chaos magic rather than ceremonial magic which I regarded as no better than any other form of organised religion. But chaos was definitely a left hand path...
This became more and more clear to me over the next few years as my drinking and drug-taking spiralled out of control and the nightmares from which I regularly woke screaming became more frequent and intense until finally the demons which haunted my dreams started invading my waking hours as well.
On 19th April 1988, as I lay down to go to sleep, I was visited by a spirit who looked exactly like the grim reaper of legend. The spirit claimed to be a messenger of the Lords of Chaos and informed me that his masters (and mine) had decreed that either myself or one of my fellow chaos-worshippers (who I will call Simon) was going to die that night; a sacrifice to the powers of darkness. He asked me to choose which of us it would be... I started mumbling something about not wanting to die but not wanting my friend to either when suddenly an alien voice spoke through me and said 'Such decisions are not man's to make but God's so I suggest you go and ask him' at which point the spirit disappeared. I found this rather odd because I didn't believe in God but then odd things happen when you take a lot of drugs so I just wrote the whole thing off as a hallucination and went to sleep...
The following evening when I walked into the pub (the King Street Run which I assume is still there?) I was informed that Simon had died the previous night, around the time of my encounter with the demon.
Now Simon had been seriously ill for some time and he died of that illness but there was no way that I could regard the literal co-incidence of these two events as mere coincidence. Clearly, something was going on and whatever it was was not good.
At Simon's funeral a week later, I decided that I'd had enough. Regardless of whether my vision of the angel of death was real or simply drug-crazed fantasy it was clear to me that, eitherway, I needed to stop taking drugs and get the hell out of the scene I was in. But I'd tried to do that many times and failed. I needed help but who could I turn to? Certainly not to any of my friends who were all as lost as I was. And there was no way I was going to talk to anybody in straight society about my experiences; they wouldn't have understood and I would probably have been sectioned.
So, that was the point at which, with no other options open to me, I turned to God. I wasn't sure if he was there; still less that he would want anything to do with me after the way I had lived my life but I had nothing to lose. So, in desperation I said 'God if you're there, please help me'. And much to my surprise, God answered my prayer straight away and one version of my story is that my life has been completely different since that moment. And it is a fact that I have not taken any drugs or had a sip of alcohol - apart from communion wine - since then; which is nearly 18 years now.
But I wouldn't want to suggest that all my problems disappeared in the twinkling of an eye. I went to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous every day for the next year and several times a week for some years after that. And I didn't identify myself specifically as a Christian for quite a long time. As far as I was concerned, the loving, gracious God that had turned my life around had nothing to do with the God of judgement, rules and regulations I'd been taught about as a child. But over time, I felt irresistibly drawn by the God that I had learned to trust into the church and obviously I eventually felt called into the priesthood. I wonder what the 18 year old me would think if he walked in here now and saw his future self standing in the pulpit? He'd probably accuse me of selling out or call me a fascist!
But it hasn't been an easy path from there to here. The road out of hell has been just as long and hard as the road to hell from which God rescued me. Indeed, at one point, about 12 years ago, the road to recovery took me back to the very darkest place I have ever been: namely, the abuse that I suffered in my childhood. That was what had driven me to drink and the drug scene in the first place. I had tried to forget it but if you bury things alive, they come back to haunt you. As I said, I often woke up screaming in the past…
The church that I was attending at that time was a Pentecostal one and while I experienced God in many wonderful ways there, it wasn't the best place to be when trying to come to terms with childhood sexual abuse and the difficult feelings and questions that went with that. A lot of people there said some very unhelpful things which I experienced as spiritual abuse and I ended up leaving that Church at the time that I needed it most. But I can say that God was always there for me.
Just when I thought that God too had abandoned me, an angel spoke to me. It only said two words and they wouldn't mean anything to you but they meant the world to me and I have never known the presence of God as I knew it at that moment. I now believe that it was that same angel that spoke through me to the demonic angel of death and I have sometimes wondered whether that guardian angel had been with me throughout my life, watching over me…
Of course, you might well ask, how come an angel didn't intervene on poor old Simon's behalf? Does God have favourites? Well, of course, I don't believe that he does and while I don't really understand why Simon died and I didn't, why God apparently reveals himself to some and not to others, I am convinced that God loves everybody equally and that He is equally committed to their ultimate well-being. So, even if we have different experiences in this life, I believe that God will eventually do for Simon and for everybody else what he has done for me and for so many others. Indeed, after communion we will affirm precisely that: Keep us firm in the hope you have set before us, so we and all your children shall be free and the whole earth live to praise your name. Until that day, may angels accompany you on your journey through life and may God bless you all.