Playing the organ and The Lord's Prayer is a recipe for good mental health

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

Time doesn't permit more than a quick jotting here but I have been observing a friend in a state of breakdown.

The brain in such a state can be a very raw jumble of sideways connected thoughts without much structure nor categorisation between them leading to an inability to prioritise and thereby to kick-start a process of rationalisation and sorting through any decision making process.

A good approach to "religion" can actually provide access to a mental health service for free in contrast to the hundreds of pounds per hour charged by secular consultants and the Church would do well to harness the benefits that it can provide and gain thereby considerable support. But in order to do so, the Church and its priests would do well to find less dogmatic paths based on "faith" in facts and rules, the kindergarten stuff, and instead focus on the way in which Jesus teaches us how to think.

Certainly in my own youth where stress in an academic place with tough exams could not be a fact of life that could be denied, I found playing the organ to be extremely therapeutic. Whether it be a Bach Fuge or the Norman Cocker Tuba Tune in which each finger of each chord moves from beat to beat, the brain-power that the machinery of the organ required absorbed the whole capacity of the brain to think, preventing any other thoughts and so blanking it to all negative thought-processes, replacung them only by the positive processes of physical control in overcoming the multplicities of the demands of the instrument. Perhaps in others this is replaced by a desire for Buddhist or Transcendental Meditation. I believe that at the organ bench we are transformed by Yogic Flying and our minds quite literally ascend.

It releases the mind from pre-existing thought patterns.

The Lord's prayer is a magic formula, not in hocus pocus but in what it achieves for us - every line is so affirmative, assuring and self building away from the state of nervous breakdown and its causes which I outlined above.

Our Father WHICH art in Heaven (there's a certainty here about how our fathers guide and look after us but a hint here that this Father is a non-human force and it's a force in a place, a state to which we aspire - to which this line becomes the key)(Or is your Father someone who's wisdom you would like to have, or is heaven the place where you would like to be, or is it the state of mind that you would like to be in / achieve? This is our contract that if we follow the words which follow, this will be the state to which we shall ascend)

Hallowed by Thy Name an acknowledgement towards our submission to the process

Thy Kingdom Come On Earth this is something for us to do, here and now, and for us to achieve
As it is in Heaven within us

Give us this day our Daily Bread a pact with the Heavenly Forces that if we work with this, we need not worry, as the birds and the bees, of from whence shall come the resources to feed us

And forgive us our trespasses release us from our wrong steps, crossed directions, our past, what we feel we owe, those things that burden us
As we forgive those that trespass against us a process that enables the process to work, releasing us from our bad things in the process

And lead us not into temptation we really like temptation but we know the consequences, and we have to avoid them
But deliver us from Evil may we be protected from those things which we cannot do anything about

For Thine is the Power etc an acknowledgement that individually alone we have no power of our own in this mortal existence (in comparison with the huge forces of nature, and of death, and of randomness, random circumstances about which we can do nothing - tsunamis, malfunctioning nuclear power plants) and that by the power of the eternal and invisible that we cannot see and the all powerful through which the whole of matter is ordered into the universe that we experience

When all of these lines are so powerfully positive and the collection of the healing power of the  components exceeding the sum of the parts, is it worth being an Atheist just for the sake of throwing it all away?

Best wishes

David P