Another Chapter in Second Draft off to my Supervisor

Cherry Blossom

This weekend has been a bank holiday, so of course I stuck the extra day into my writing schedule. The weather has been glorious and with the sunshine the cherry blossom is out in profusion.  Also the Peregrines eggs have hatched in Sheffield and between writing I have watched bits of that. The other advantage of this day was that it meant that I did not feel badly going out for dinner yesterday as I still had today to write. It is funny how writing grows to fill the time you have for it! I was really getting through it on Friday, it slowed on Saturday and today if anything has been slower.

Actually this chapter has been interesting to write. There were three different threads that I have been interweaving in the chapter. On the one level there was the story of a particular Church meeting; the next one that I had to tackle was the actual ways identity was created within the congregation. I think I mainly kept that in but I might have missed something on welcome which might need to go into the last section. There is space for it and yes I know that putting welcome at the end is not quite the right place for it. The final bit was I had to weave together the argument that congregation as community involved both institutional, discursive and emotional systems. Just to make this interesting also to include the way that the whole situation interacts with the tradition so I suppose I am wrong and it is four threads I am plaiting with.

I was struggling with writing this morning, another blog posted on the URC site a link to his latest blog in which he asked whether the URC was depressed.  An interesting question, so many got upset about the analogy and felt it was insulting to mental illness. Now I am quite open about the fact I have (had) depression at a mild to moderate level. I also had the smiling sort. I am not insulted, basically because fairly early on in the journey I had to think what I was experiencing in my local congregation.  The best explanation I can think of is that the communal discourse reflected very strongly many aspects depressive thinking. Now I know depressive thinking is odd, it can be switched on and off and changing mood does seem to do that. However it is also true that changing the thinking can change the mood. That is how CBT works. I have discussed this with a variety of people this and nearly always they see what I am getting at, indeed on at least one occasion I someone asking precisely about this.

The problem however was I was writing the emotional part of the chapter and of course the emotional part of the chapter connects with the blog post. So I was jumping between the two and not really making much sense of either. In the end I had to be disciplined over Facebook and just concentrate on writing.

There is one problem I have not got the right title for the chapter yet. Maybe my supervisor will suggest it!