Articles - From the Vicar

During my teenage years in the nineteen-seventies, my personal soundscape was dominated by two contrasting musical genres: the classical music of the various orchestras and choirs in which I played and sang, and the 'prog rock' - progressive rock - of bands such as Pink Floyd and King Crimson to which I listened with fierce intensity and long hair. Well the long hair is long-gone, but I re-lived some of the intensity on hearing of the death last month of Syd Barrett, one of the founders of Pink Floyd who left the band before they became famous but who nevertheless has joined the prog rock pantheon.

Barrett left Pink Floyd because of a mental breakdown and spent the last forty years of his life in comparative seclusion. The scale of his mental breakdown was undoubtedly exacerbated by drug-taking, but to offer the latter as the only reason for the former is, perhaps, to be over-confident about cause and effect. In any case, there are plenty of people with mental health problems who have never been involved in the consumption of illegal drugs: according to a fact sheet published by the World Health Organisation in 2003, as much as a third of all GP consultations in Europe are related to mental health issues; and the Mental Health Foundation estimates that one in four of the UK population will experience some kind of mental health problem in the course of a year - that's the equivalent of between seventy and eighty of the adults and children who worship at least once a month at St. Edmund's at one or other of our services.

Medication has an important part to play in the healing of those who live with mental illness, but it's hardly a startling insight to say that medication, even where it is necessary, is never sufficient. A Christian community, at its best, is one of the contexts which can complement medical therapies; a place in which those who come wounded in mind and spirit should be able to find the unconditional acceptance of Christ and the freedom to offer their wounds for healing. May God give us the grace at St. Edmund's to be a community in which such healing may be found.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay