Matt Drapps

Clip from chapter 10 - Lizzie and Harry chatting on the tram

“But we had real miracles.” I hissed.

A video reel of moments fluttered across my mind, projecting images against the inside of my head. A loaf of bread, torn before communion. Sweating palms lifted skyward. Lightning passing between Dylan and me as we prayed, a glow reverberating down the skin of our outstretched arms. My hands cupped either side of Christine’s face, looking deep into her eyes and speaking her future in words I believed at the time came directly from G to prophesy a partner at St Michaels was going to be in her life forever. She had glanced momentarily at Oscar. In another memory, Jeremy and I stood in the rain outside St Michaels first thing one Sunday morning calling for the clouds to move away, to leave, to shift across the sky. Our whole gang ate a picnic the same Sunday under a cloudless sky.

I remembered running, so fast, shifting effortlessly at great speed from street to street in Sheffield, one minute outside the City Hall and moments later skidding to a stop near the Cathedral.

“Did we?” Lizzie pressed the red button to stop the tram and we got up to wait near the door.

“Of course we did. You remember when our food increased to include everyone who arrived at Small Group no matter how much we cooked.”

“What if we just made enough for everyone we invited?”

We exited the tram, but didn’t move off the stop while we continued this discussion.

“How often did we pray for people to be healed?” Every service. Morgan finished each sermon with a call to action. He used to say G wanted to heal anyone who was here, to come forward with any ailments from a common cold to a broken leg. G’s presence had anointed us. Morgan would encourage us to gather around and pray for those who had come forward. Oscar, Sebastian and I would touch the hurting part of a person and pray aloud, “Headache be gone. Have faith in the power of Gabriel. May the light of the night brighten your body!”

“Did you see anyone get healed though?” Lizzie’s eyes flashed. It was clear she was hurt by my questioning the way she understood and remembered what had happened at St Michaels.

Those who had limped to the front often limped away, it was true. But as Morgan explained, it took faith to be healed. If your faith wavered, your healing would not come. People claimed their headaches had left them! Someone had seen a broken leg literally grow out, I remembered them saying so. And there were extreme stories too.

One evening, the presence had been particularly heavy. You could feel the power in the very atmosphere of the church. Morgan had invited an elderly wheelchair user to the front of the church, assisted by her grown-up daughter. “Can these old bones rise?” Morgan had cried, quoting the Bible from a story of skeletons pulling on flesh and joining a war. “Can we have two strong lads down here. Oscar, you’re strong, come on down. Sebastian too.” I had been about to volunteer, but he waved me away. “Get an arm under her shoulders, each of you,” Morgan had instructed, kneeling before the small but faith-filled woman in her chair. Dipping a finger into a bag of grey powder, Morgan drew a line above each of her eyebrows, like wings painted across her forehead. “Feel his wings beneath you and RISE!” he cried. Sebastian and Oscar lent an arm and a shoulder to the women, helping her gently but firmly to her feet.

Her sandals touched the floor as she pressed her weight onto one foot and then the other. Her muscles were weakened from years of not walking far. As small as she looked, she weighed heavily against Sebastian, whose face gave the impression he was more responsible for holding her upright than the wings of Gabriel. Together, the three figures stepped out across the stage, one short step after the other, right to left in full view of the congregation.

A low cheer began at the front of the church and rumbled backwards through the rows, clapping and shouting, whooping, hoorays and hallelujahs, “Come on!”s and “He can do it!” (Not she can.) As we watched with our own eyes, this elderly woman literally stepped out in faith, rising from her chair to walk in front of us. “Can these old bones walk?” Morgan shouted, joining the din.

Later, we had seen her daughter, cheeks tear-stained with joy (or something else?), pushing her mother from the building in her wheelchair and using a motorised disabled ramp to lift her into the side entrance of a van specially designed to transport her mother more easily from the nursing home to visit the outside world.

As I shared this story, Lizzie stopped me. “Harry, will you shut up? Don’t you know it is actually gross to use disabled people as a sermon prop,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to explain to you, many people who use wheelchairs can walk short distances and move about. The chair is a tool, not a burden. Hefting an old woman out of the security of her chair to parade her in front of an audience is not evidence of a miracle. If churches want the deaf to hear, they are better off paying for an interpreter to sign the sermon, not a supernatural team to try and pray the deaf away.”

She was right.

“Everything we thought we saw, we didn’t see. Do you understand?”

I did understand her point of view. And yet, I had felt G’s supernatural power. Hadn’t I? The same power had thrown us to the floor at times, and at others, lifted us toward the sky. You cannot dismiss those experiences just because you have become the outsider, gone back to being a non-con. An uneasy silence settled between us. Was I an unbeliever too? The more I tried to find a specific event or example, the less I could locate one.

And yet, here we were, at the gates of the cemetery where Oscar lay buried. And the reality of G’s power, or our belief in it, was real enough to have killed him....

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If you have been affected by any of the subject matter covered, you can find 24 hour helplines relating to mental health, https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/crisis-services/helplines-listening-services/

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23rd December Pre-wedding Party

People are forgetting.

I reach back to the night. An inky line connects me to the event. I wonder how anyone can forget. If I tried to pull away the line would tighten and drag me back.

“Honestly my memories from that time are quite hazy,” Lizzie tells me, snagging a miniature toast crisp topped with mackerel and cream cheese. “Do you know how many things have happened since then?”

For others, a lot, as their Instagram would attest – new jobs, first house keys, christenings, weddings – in fact we were at the latest wedding (a pre-wedding party, to be precise). Not to mention a pandemic had swept in from Europe and locked us indoors for two years, unable to fully move about in normal life for most of the year after that. People had read new things, changed belief systems, sung new songs, moved to new locations and created new milestones.

But not me.

It had been over six years, and I was still there.

On the surface of the moon.

I was also here in the glitz of Halifax’s central event space, surrounded by old friends and strangers – the Bride and Groom’s assorted relatives we had never met before and whom we would likely never get to know beyond a quick chat at the wedding itself on New Years Eve, after Christmas had passed.

Pinpricks of light danced around us from glimmering fairy-lights covering the bar. Sprigs of holly clawed along ancient paintings in gilded frames which hung from old-fashioned, ceiling to floor wallpaper in dark blue stripes. Severe chandeliers, all angles and bulbs, added coldness to the warmth of the golden fairy light glow.

Going to a wedding when you haven’t seen the people involved for two and a bit years of lockdown is a strange feeling. Are they the people you remember? Do you recall them as they were, or as they are? Memory can be tricky sometimes.

I was surprised sixty people had managed to fight their Christmas schedules to make it, though with the way the previous year had been, lockdown threats and tier systems, I suspect most were excited for any excuse to get out of the house. An event was an event! Plus, it was catered. The bride’s family had money and a few years delay had boosted the wedding savings to extravagant levels.

Clearly saving for their wedding had been a far cry from the kind of scrimping and saving we had all done during our other Missing Years, nearly six years past now, in Sheffield, where the church took more than twenty percent of our income and most of our time, allowing us only part-time jobs or reliance on friends and family topping up our banks to settle our bills, while the church raked in tithes and offerings from some of the poorest families in the city. We were happy to give. As they told us, you can’t out give God, one day you’ll wake up and it will all have come back to you.

Looking around, perhaps they weren’t wrong in that respect.

Or perhaps Christine’s family, her father from Poland and mother from a wealthy family in Edinburgh, would have always paid for a gorgeous wedding and G’s blessing had nothing to do with it. Even now, those thoughts feel like a betrayal of faith. What blessings would be snatched away for such lack of faith?

I was about to press my friend Lizzie on exactly what she has forgotten from our time when a commotion within the gathered clan caught my attention. Clapping hands with everyone he passed as if he had never heard of social distancing, my best friend, Dylan, pranced through the midst, grinning, laughing, slapping the groom’s father on the back, winking at the waiter with the tray of canapés, until he finally emerged by my side.

He grabbed me in a side-hug, squeezing my shoulder into his chest.

“Hi Dyzzie,” Lizzie smiled at him, using their old nickname (Lizzie and Dyzzie) before turning back to examine the appetizers more closely, chasing the waiter down.

Dylan murmured in my ear, “Can we get out of here yet?” He was ready for a cigarette and a walk. He was hyperactive, always ready to move on to the next thing. “Come on, can we go, can we?”

We couldn’t. Not yet.

He rolled a cigarette on the reflective surface of the bar. An aggravated barman gave us an annoyed glance and then continued pouring cheap sparkling wine over orange juice to serve as over-priced Bucks Fizz. Dylan always said he could give up smoking anytime, and would never switch to a vape as it defeated the object of being rebellious.

Dylan and I stepped out through sliding doors to find ourselves on a balcony. The air was cold but clouds held back the frost.

As Dylan blew smoke into the moist air, I thought about all the times we would nip out of events at church so he could smoke, leaning against the stone of the ancient building while I would watch him, infinitely jealous. Back then, he would be on what, his third or fourth girlfriend of the year. Each one was given the blessing of the church elders, “Ahh yes, she really is the one God is setting out for you.” But weeks later, when they broke up, “God’s telling me to end it,” she would say, maybe because she had become too attracted to him and was afraid they would end up sleeping together, the mortal sin of that time. Dylan seemed to swiftly shrug off the heartbreak. He had better dating prospects outside of our small church circle and soon settled (for six months) with the girl who ran the cafe two streets away from the church. He was shunned for dating a non-con (non-convert), but they ran well together. Maybe her anchor outside of our wild world was what kept him safe.

Most of the men had worn blazers to the pre-wedding dinner, but Dylan had on a bright yellow McKenzie hoodie. I had found a jacket and trousers which matched each other at a charity shop thrift store and called that a massive win. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself as he did.

I heard the door slide open behind us and Sebastian, one of the most intelligent yet irritating people I ever met, joined us. “You two are not still canoodling outside buildings are you?”

Dylan held his cigarette between his teeth, span on the spot and expertly wrapped one arm around Sebastian’s neck, ruffling his perfectly quaffed curly hair into disarray.

“Alright, alright, leave it!” Sebastian pulled away, never one to fight back. Sebastian and I shared a hug. The best part of hanging with this lot again was the amount of human contact. Pandemic be damned, we had missed that, being apart for so long. I was already on my tenth bracing hug of the evening.

“What we talking about?” Sebastian asked.

“How long it’s been since Dylan went out with Lizzie,” I replied with a grin. “How long did that last?”

“Two weeks?” Sebastian suggested, but Dylan answered at the same time, “Two days?”

“I swear you were dating longer.”

“We had a lot of COFFEES together before she decided what God was saying was, ‘Date the football captain instead’.”

“That’ll be it.” At our church, the term ‘having a coffee’ meant either two attractive young people sitting down to set relationship boundaries or someone being sat down, in trouble with a small group leader. I would always have been in the second category, Dylan in the first. I couldn’t recall Sebastian sitting down for a relationship DTR (define the relationship) in that time, and he definitely was never in trouble. Perfect student.

“I forgot about him, Football Fred. Why’s he not here?”

“Think he’s got two kids now.”

“Football Frya and Football Francis.”

“And not with the person God apparently told to date him, so…”

Sebastian grimaced. “Some of you spent a lot of time not listening to what G was saying.”

“Look, we tried.” Dylan laughed with a shrug.

We actually did hear God, thank you very much, Sebastian, do you mind?

I held the comment inside my throat.

Besides the missing Football Fred and a few notable exceptions, there were more of us here than not here, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when we went back inside to run into—

“Morgan!” Sebastian enveloped the greying husk into a hug. Dylan abruptly disappeared, but I felt trapped under the intense eyes of our former leader, surrogate father figure and former instigator of many, “Let’s go for coffees,” when I was in some trouble or rather. I noticed his lips curl into what could be misinterpreted as a snarl before transforming into a thin smile.

We opted for an awkward elbow bump – the recent reinvention of the handshake for modern times. “Hello, Harry, how are you?” He had certainly not forgotten what happened in our last couple of weeks before the gang broke up the final summer, never to go back.

“Good, I’m good thanks. How is St Michaels?”

The snarl-smile returned. “Very different there without you kids.” I knew from stalking the church’s Instagram, a complete revamp in style, presence and presentation had been instigated in the time we had all been gone. “Less…” He rolled his tongue around his mouth, seeking the right word. “…passionate, more grounded.”

They had spent the last year planting trees in local neighbourhoods. Grounded was a good word, a complete diversion from our era of sky-gazing.

“Are you staying in Halifax?” I waved a hand towards the town which glowed outside the darkened windows. I was ready to switch topics, and name-dropping the town tended to be my key to unlocking a subject I can (pun not intended) go to town on. “Did you know Anne Lister is buried here and lived nearby, last summer we visited Shibden, her home.”

I could flip any conversation into local queer history. Here in Halifax, Anne Lister lived from late 1700s to early 1800s with her partner Ann Walker. They even got married on Easter Sunday in a communion ceremony. As much as I love to drop this kind of information into small talk, I kicked myself for having not asked more questions about St Michaels while I had a captive audience. All day, every day, while I am around people who never knew and can’t begin to understand, it is at the forefront of my mind, yet the one opportunity I have to unpack our history and the historical chat I opted for was local knowledge.

After Morgan extracted himself from our company, “Better freshen up before we eat,” Sebastian glared in his direction. Did they have a falling out I didn’t know about?

As we settled into our seats for food, Christine Nowak, the bride, stood up to say a few words: “Thank you all for coming, I know it’s nearly Christmas, whoop whoop! But we wanted everyone to get together and remind yourselves who everyone is before the wedding. Hi, I’m Christine.” Everyone chimed back like we were children in her primary school class, “Hi Christine!” We cheered and laughed as she continued.

“It has been a while, but we consider every one of you to be family, and as we are family, it is only right that we come together at Christmas and then see in the New Year together! Thank you again, and we’ll see you AT THE WEDDING!”

The groom, Jeremy, was up next, to say a prayer, grace for the food. I closed my eyes and held my breath. I never pray intentionally these days, but the instinct to break into prayer remains with me at all times. I cannot remember exactly how we were supposed to be. Us, together, in prayer. Eight years ago the power in the room would have rolled through us like electric lighting, hand in hand around the tables, rising till the chandeliers shook, fairy lights humming as their power sources surged, a glow so bright it would blind the non-cons.

Now, peeking one eye open, most of the table did not have bowed heads and were fiddling awkwardly with napkins or sneakily checking their phones as Jeremy began, “Father God,” no mention of Gabriel at least. “We thank you for protecting us throughout the last few years and bringing us together once again to celebrate with one another and with you. Thank you for this food, the servers and the farmers who grew it for us…”

A fluttering feeling snaked from the warmth behind my eyes, down my cheeks like an internal tear, through my shoulders and into my arms. I was afraid bolts of lighting might burst from my palms the way they used to, so I folded my hands together in my lap, opened my eyes and looked up at the plaster mouldings around the ceiling, up through the ceiling, into the low mist clouds, and almost up to —

“AMEN,” chanted the table, jolting me back into my seat.

“Amen.” I mumbled.

It has been a goddamn while.

—

Lesser Light is a limited series blog; a fantasy thriller about religion, trauma and cults (at Christmas). Join the conversation in the comments section, or on Twitter (@mattdrapps) or Facebook.

Lesser Light in paperback is available from lulu.com or on amazon, or as an ebook from Kindle or wherever you find your ebooks. You can listen to Lesser Light as an audio book on youtube, Spotify or Amazon music.

If you have been affected by any of the subject matter covered, you can find 24 hour helplines relating to mental health, here.

Lesser Light,  describes life in the regular world after experiences that are hard to make sense of in the high-control environment of a cult-like church. It follows a group of young adults investigating their past together, while a malevolent force tries to drag them back to the place of worship. Was it spiritual abuse or something supernatural? 

Matthew’s new book is a work of fiction, but contains elements from his own life and describes the complexity of leaving when religion has previously been the foundation of your life. The story also contains educational snippets of LGBT+ history connected to locations throughout the north of England.

Lesser Light is available in paperback or ebook from www.lulu.com and other booksellers, and chapters will also be released daily over Christmas 2022, from the 23rd December, on a free-to-read blog at www.lesserlight.blog, and as a Limited Series Audio Book Podcast available online.