John Swinton – presence and belonging

Gillian begins our 2025 season on Belonging by talking with Prof John Swinton, Professor of Practical and pastoral theology at Aberdeen University. John is an registered mental health nurse, ordained minister and noted theologian, researching particularly in areas of mental health and dementia. He is also President of GoHealth, and a musician, recently releasing an album Beautiful songs about difficult things. 

Together they explore: 

• Countercultural presence 

• Absence because of mobile phone use 

• Getting comfortable with disruption in church 

• Mental health in terms of discipleship and vocation 

• Moving from ‘fixing’ to friendship. 

• Theology of the Psalms of lament. 

• Spirituality of darkness. 

• Helpful and harmful anger. 

• Solastalgia. 

• Belonging as being missed. 

• Learning to be kind. 

• The Denis Duncan Lecture 2025 

Links 

Beautiful Songs about Difficult Things by John Swinton 

Register here for the Denis Duncan Lecture 

Gillian Straine: Welcome to the Go Health podcast. I am Gillian Straine, Chief Exec of GoHealth, an organisation with a vision to enable churches and individual Christians to be a healing presence in the world. And we like to think of the GoHealth podcast as a place of belonging for our healing presences. People who want to connect health and faith and make a difference in the world, particularly where there is suffering.

Now this episode is going out in early 2025, so happy New Year to you all. We have lots of inspiring new resources and courses coming this year, and we’re starting it all off with our Dennis Duncan lecture on the 30th of January. So each year, we invite a great speaker who can help us all deepen our knowledge and our practice in the task of trying to think about what it means to be a Christian healer.

And this year, we are delighted to welcome Professor John Swinton, who is Professor of Practical and Pastoral Theology at Aberdeen University. John is an ordained minister, mental health nurse and noted theologian, researching particularly in areas of mental health and dementia. He’s also president of GoHealth and a musician, he’s recently released an album called Beautiful Songs for Difficult Times.

So we’re chatting in his office in Aberdeen University, and, we’ve been recording the lecture. We did it all day yesterday at Fountain Hall Church in Aberdeen. So, John, thank you for sitting down with me for the GoHealth podcast. 

So in your lecture, John, you are exploring how we can bring healing to the community, to our churches, to the world through our presence, simply being with people. Why did you choose this way to explore Christian healing? 

John Swinton: Well, just before the pandemic, I was in Australia for a year. I was working with an organisation based in Sydney called Hammond Care. And I spent my sabbatical looking at the issue of ‘carer presence’ because they had just had a Royal Commission there. And, one of the things the Royal Commission discovered was that one of the reasons why there was kind of, abuse against elderly people in particular was not necessarily because people were really unpleasant. It’s just because they were very often not present. So to be with an elderly person, particularly people with advanced communication difficulties, and they’d be in the room, but they’d be on their phones or talking over somebody. And so you end up developing a culture where it’s normal for you to be absent from the people in front of you, and when that happens, that’s when the abuse begins to develop. You don’t notice it because it’s just part of your culture. And so I was doing some research on that, and it just struck me that one of the big challenges that we have is absence. You know, your social media, you know, four people round the table on a phone, one in Vietnam, one in Birmingham, one whatever it is.

So you’re present but absent at exactly the same time. 

Gillian: Yeah. 

John: And then if you take that into, in that case, an aged care context, you can see the difficulties. But if you take that into any context, and we forget what it means to be with one another. Yeah. And so I took that and I thought, oh, how was Jesus present with people. And so that idea of presence that where I talk about in the lecture is kind of trying to mirror the presence of countercultural presence that Jesus offers to those who are marginalised.

Gillian: So, this idea of being absent, and it’s particularly something new, is it? Because we’ve got our mobile phones and we’re all, well, sort of half in a room, but we’re actually half looking at our phone the whole time. And it can be really addictive behaviour, can’t it?

John: It can yeah, we can end up with a phone shaped network (?) if you’re not careful. But I don’t think it’s new. I think it’s becoming more and more prevalent. You know, I think that, you know, I spent a lot of years working with people with mental health challenges, with intellectual disabilities. And it’s very easy to become absent when somebody is either strange to you or you can’t communicate with it. So it’s always been an issue but now I think it’s just exacerbated by social media. And the thing is, you don’t notice it anymore, it becomes the norm to do that. 

Gillian: Yes, yes, absolutely. And in the lecture, you go into some depth with people with mental health problems and, and the isolation they’re often facing. And, and the hope is that through the lecture that we can, we can tune in and learn how to what, overcome that or find ways in or what is it? Because there can be so much fear as well around mental health and people to connect.

John: Well, you know, fear always drives a wedge between people. And fear in relation to mental health is…the problem is that our construction of mental health comes from the media video or even from the movies. And so you know, you, you begin with a negative assumption about what mental health is and what people who have mental health challenges are, particularly if you have a big diagnosis like schizophrenia or something like that, you know, all the kind of cultural baggage that comes with that. And so you begin at distance and you continue with that distance. And some people who may well want to be with you, but you psychologically have already been programmed not to be with people. So let’s just try to overcome that simply by saying that, you know, the more time you spend with people the less afraid you’ll be with them.

Gillian: Yeah, and the need that we’re meeting and people that struggle with mental health is, is the sense that they want to belong, they want to be able to share what their life…So it’s it’s getting over the barrier so that we can just meet as human beings, I guess. 

John: That’s exactly right. So it’s the church’s task is not to be a therapeutic community in the sense that we deliver clinical care.

Gillian: Yeah. 

John: The mental health professionals do that, and they do well for the most part. 

Gillian: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. 

John: We have all sorts of problems in the system of availability. 

Gillian: Yeah. 

John: Actually what mental health professionals does is good. So the thing I always wondered is, well, what does, what does the church bring to the table of healing? 

Gillian: Yeah.

John:  In that sense, what it brings is just presence, friendship and the ability to move beyond labels and to see people. 

Gillian: Yeah.

John: And that’s not a small thing. 

Gillian: I tell you what, when we were filming yesterday and you were sharing people’s lived experience of mental health problems and sense of isolation. And perhaps suggesting the church can do more. I had in my head all day, this woman, whose name is two hat Pat and she’s gone to glory now. And, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me telling her story, because she, she sort of changed my life in terms of how I think about what church should be. 

So two hat Pat was called two hat Pat because she was called Pat, and she always wore two hats. And Pat had schizophrenia, spend some time in that prison and so on. And she came to church every day. She’s sort of a square woman, always wore layers of chiffon and bobbles and very colourful as well. And she came to church every single day. It was a church that was also a community centre. And, she was always around, always chatting. And, on a Tuesday afternoon, there was a group of people gathered with a mental health nurse, and I was just really sort of new and shiny and I was pastoral assistant, and I haven’t really experienced that much. And my job was simply to be around and chat to folk. So I had a lots of time with two hat Pat and lots of people in the church. But Tuesday was this group and the vicar said, look, go and chat. And I didn’t know who they were. So I sort of said, and I well, I kind of thought it was something to do with mental health. So I sort of rocked up and so is this group, the, NHS, support? And one of them just looked at me and said, no, we’re the mental group, and they were, they were all serious mental health. And the nurse would come meet them once a week all through the year and never took a break. And she dispensed medication, and they just came and hung out in the church. And then they met on a Tuesday. And Tuesday evening was our Eucharist. And, often they’d all come to the Eucharist. Having smoked a bit of pot outside for some of them, came into the Eucharist. We always had the maddest Eucharist. They were always dancing and singing, but there was something of the kingdom about that. Everyone was there and there was little sense of judgment, cause every single person there was struggling. And that’s what that was, what was common. So there was no pretending anything was any different. They’d been to the mental club, as they called it, and then we had the Eucharist together. I think that’s what we’re trying to do at GoHealth – is help churches have whatever that was, that level of acceptance or sort of this is, this is what it is. And let’s go to Eucharist anyway, right? Most churches aren’t like that. 

John: No most churches are not like that. But then most communities are not like that. I mean, the problem, I mean, churches should be like that. I can mean, if you could imagine the crowds of people that would have been before Jesus. And you always have this kind of this kind of idea that the crowd would just sit and listening and talk to Jesus. But it wouldn’t be…like they would be all sorts of people there, they’d be shouting things and they were responding to what is saying. And then they would be talking amongst themselves, and you’d have people who are just very similar, I imagine, to the kind of people you’re talking about. And so if you then transfer that into those who follow Jesus as an oh, as we kind of like church to be peaceful, we like it to be a sanctuary where you can just get away from things and so you forget about that, but you also forget that, you know, perhaps one of the most holy moments in history was the birth of Jesus. Surrounded by shepherds, shouting and swearing. Animals, things and smells and things like that. Maybe we have to think differently about what we mean when we talk about holiness and we talk about what it is to be a sanctuary. And that’s difficult because we’re used to a certain thing. But the other side of that is that oftentimes as soon as we think about mental health we think about disruption. How are we going to deal with people who are struggling? Most people who live with mental health challenges when just want to come to church be accepted and just get on with their lives. And to get to have that sense of spiritual fulfilment. 

Gillian: Yeah. 

John: So maybe we shouldn’t begin with the structure, we should just begin with acceptance. 

Gillian: Yeah. And so that is often the conversation isn’t it. Like what will we do if and when and all the rest of it. And the church with two hat Pat, there’s quite often fights at the back of church, you know, break out over the royal family or something like that. And it just carried on. And what was so interesting in the church as well. It was…

John: It sounds like the rest of the church actually…

[LAUGHTER]

Gillian: Yeah. But there was something – it was all out there. And I tell you what, ministry was easier there. I’d come from a very well-heeled parish before, where it was more like a service industry. We are providing the religion for folk. The needs were still there, but they were really well hidden, you know, beneath layers of fur and jewellery and perfume. But the needs were there, but there were so well hidden. So ministry there is as vital, I would say than, in a much poorer. It’s much, but I think tougher in some ways. So how do we get below and scrape off the kind of layers of, I don’t know, class or I don’t even, but maybe it’s more, you know, we all want the world to be safe. We all want. So we all need to let go a bit in order to have presence and belong. 

John: Of course we do, the but I just think you need to to rethink the way that we frame mental health. So very often when we think of mental health, we think about pastoral care. Yeah, yeah. How can we care for these people or we how do we not care for these people in ‘inverted commas’? I think it’s much better to think about discipleship. So think of it as somebody who lives with, significant depression, and the question is not just how can we help them with the depression? That’s an important question, obviously it is, the question is how do we find their vocation? How do we help them to be the person their intended to be within the kingdom of God?

Gillian: Yeah.

John: How do we do that? 

Gillian: Yeah. 

John: In the midst of the complexities that they live their lives. That’s the most challenging way to think about it. It’s much more interesting and much more, I think, authentic. 

Gillian: Does it also take the pressure off from needing to fix people?

John: Yes, because people are always uncomfortable in the presence of suffering, because there’s nothing you can do. So the easiest thing is to distance yourself and one way of distancing yourself from suffering is by blaming the person –  ‘pull yourself together’. ‘Pray little bit harder’ or whatever. 

Gillian: Just try. 

John: And that way I don’t have to I can I can stand back and say, that person suffering is down to them. But if you’re sharing in suffering, it’s painful and difficult because suffering is is transmittable.

Gillian: Yeah. 

John: You know if you’re sitting with somebody who lives with anxiety, for example, you’ll come away from that encounter, you’ll feel anxious because emotions transmit. And so to be with people who are going through difficult times takes a certain form of intentionality. You have to really want to be there. You have to realise and recognise that, you know, you may feel they don’t want to be there sometimes. That’s absolutely fine, but not allow that recognition to prevent you from being there. And sometimes when it’s not the right place for you to be there. But beginning to think, how can I intentionally help this individual to have some kind of support in what they’ve gone through? That doesn’t mean to say, I have to fix them.

Gillian: Yes.

John: But I do have to be with them. 

Gillian: Yes. Yeah. So it sounds like…

John: If they want you to. 

Gillian: Yeah. Yes. It’s not doing things unto others because we think it’s a good idea. 

John: Enforced friendship’s not a great idea.

Gillian: No. And it sounds like there’s two things there. There is some skilling up, you know, just to know, don’t try to fix, don’t try to make it all better and go in there… and that’s a skill, I think, at times. I recently sat with somebody who, was at the darkest moment of his life. I mean, just, and there was no…it was just so awful. And I’ve been doing this for years. I trained people, and I was really fighting, not to say, oh, but Jesus loves you.

Oh, it’s going to be… I really had to really fight it, even though I know because it was so dark and I find a scary to be in that dark place with that person. And, you know, my, my instinct was, God, where’s the door? You know, this is really hard. That’s a real. So I think the skills about that and it sounds also that you’re saying, there’s a theology around that.

We have to then…of vocation and, this person, even in whatever they’re going through, they’re still called, they’re still a child of God, you know, even before they’re all fixed. And it’s, still something to do. Yeah. 

John: If you think about it, the Apostle Paul, he has this thorn in his flesh and nobody really knows what it is. Some people think he had back problems, something that people have eye problems from his blinding on the road to Damascus. Some people think it was a member of his congregation. 

Gillian: Oh, [laughter] that’s interesting. 

John: Either way he prays three times, and it’s not taken away from them. And so I imagine that Paul, the greatest missionary of all time, wasn’t having a crisis of faith, right?It wasn’t because he didn’t have enough faith, it’s because it was actually through the experience he was going through that God somehow or other brings about graceful outcome. 

Gillian: Yeah. 

John: And so if that happens to Paul it probably happens to all of us. It’s not taken away in the midst of that, you can find, if you like, showers of heaven if there’s such a thing.

Gillian: That’s a nice phrase but it sounds…but that needs to be carefully balanced. I’m saying okay… this is okay…you’re really suffering but hey this is a really good opportunity for you to know…It’s nuance isn’t it? 

John: Well, yeah, exactly. You never say that to somebody. You should never feel pressure to to look for goodness in the midst of suffering. Sometimes something is just terrible, full-stop.  And that’s why I think along a theological vocation, you ought to have a theology of the Psalms. Because the Psalms are really good. If you think about it, you know the Psalms which are, Bonhoeffer called them the prayer book of the Bible. There’s more lament Psalms than any other kind of Psalm. And some of the lament Psalms run like we you have this big explosion of anger and frustration. God hasn’t been true to the covenant…this should never happen. I’ve lost all this, etc., etc.. And then in the middle of the Psalm, the Psalmist sees things differently, he says ‘but I trust in your your unchanging love or your kindness. And then he goes on to worship. And that’s, that’s one way of thinking about how you find God in your own personal storms. However, some of the other Psalms, like Psalm 88 ends ‘darkness is my only companion. And sometimes that’s right.  So having a proper, solid theology of the Psalms that enables you to, to have that kind of language, because sometimes you can find hope, but sometimes you can’t find.

Gillian: Yeah. Yeah. 

John: But that’s okay, because there’s a spirituality of darkness that’s built into our tradition, now most of us don’t like it very much, like we like to raise our hands and say everything glorious. But that’s not the way the world is. And that’s not where the Bible is. Yeah. 

Gillian: Yeah. There’s a Buddhist phrase I’ve come across recently about, I’m going to get it wrong, but it’s something like, the second arrow. So you’re going along and you get hit by an arrow, and that’s the suffering. And then you stand around going, oh, this is so annoying. I’ve been hit by this arrow, and now my whole life changed. But because you haven’t moved on. You get hit by the second arrow. So it’s the suffering that comes from the not accepting the situation that you’re going through.

John: It depends where the first arrow hits.

Gillian: It does a bit. Yeah. It’s so often the case, isn’t it, that stuff happened and that’s life. But we then cause ourselves more suffering because we’re angry that this has happened to us. So the healing often is, we’d love a cure, the healing comes when we accept that this is who I am now. So there’s something about the Psalms there that you’re talking about in the middle there. It’s a reorientation. 

John: It is a reorientation. And it’s fine to be angry but just don’t get lost in it. 

Gillian: Yeah. Yeah. So is anger something we can use, perhaps, to help us find the new orientation or the way out? 

John: I don’t think there’s a general principle. I think anger can be really helpful sometimes because it gets rid of the feelings. Articulate and anger can kind of get rid of the feelings that you have. Sometimes it can be destructive when you turn it on yourself. So I think it’s ambiguous. It can sometimes be helpful. Yeah. I mean, it’s always helpful to articulate your anger. But it’s also, it’s a strange thing because it moves inwards and outwards, inwards and outwards. And when it goes inwards that’s when you’re always angry at yourself. 

Gillian: Yeah that can be physiological can’t it.

John:  Yeah, it can.

Gillian:  But it can also be a clues to what’s going on, on in our life. I’m now thinking about…I want to talk about belonging with you a little bit more, and how we can find a more sense for belonging. But there’s something in the Psalms I, you know, it’s people finding belonging in themselves or in their own life. You know that when something goes wrong, we feel we don’t belong in our own world anymore. So is some of what you’re saying your lecture about helping people come home to themselves? 

John: Kind of. Well, I guess I’m in some senses, but there is this, I’ve been doing some work recently on ecology and looking at the, the relationship between ecology and mental health. 

Gillian: Okay. 

John: And there’s this idea that came from an Australian sociologist called, solastalgia.

And she noticed it first amongst Australian farmers and indigenous people whose land has been ravaged by basically capitalist enterprises – mining and various other things. So they’re still in the same space, but they no longer recognise it. So it’s still a home, but their homeless. So at home and homeless at the same time. And that leads to a sense of anxiety and depression and existential lostness, because the essence of where you’re rooted, particularly indigenous people, where you’re rooted in the land is fundamental to who you are. Which I think is really interesting, but I think there’s something similar goes on within that self sometimes. That we can be at home with ourselves and homeless at exactly the same time when we lose our sense of what it is that holds us together in our identity. Holds us together as a place where we’re familiar with and very often certain forms of mental health challenges will make you unfamiliar with yourself  – you’re at home but you’re homelessness.

So there’s something very important about finding a place, an external place where you belong, which is why I would think of a community, but also finding an internal space where you begin to recognise who you are, even if you’re having an enduring mental health challenge to come into terms with that, my new identity. Or part of my new identity, not the whole of your identity. So that you begin to feel at home with the things that are going on within your body and within your mind – not that there’s a separation. I think, I guess solastalgia is quite helpful. Very interesting. 

Gillian: And how do people know they found that. What’s the symptoms of belonging?

John: The symptoms of belonging. The external symptoms of belonging in relation to your community is when people notice that you’re not there. So to belong you have to be missed as well. So they get to miss you. They look for you like the prodigal son’s father looking for him – ‘where’s he gone, where’s he gone’. In terms of belonging, I suppose it’s just when you feel at peace with yourself. When you feel that you found a space. The thing I think about internal belonging is it’s always transient, because of the kind of people we are. Creatures that we are, that sometimes we feel we belong, sometimes we don’t. So our emotions and feelings move us backwards and forwards so that’s slightly different. Your community can be stable, but your internal things are more complicated. Because all of our emotions are, you know, which is why I think that it’s so important to have people around you that when you are oscillating in that way, they can kind of hold on to who you are, even if you can’t quite do it yourself.

Gillian: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s really beautiful. That’s the experience of life, sometimes you feel or you might have fleeting moments of, feeling deeply connected or deeply at peace. That doesn’t last all the time does it, because something knocks you off. 

John: Yeah, it can be really frustrating…

Gillian: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or feeling bad that you did feel…

So. And so if somebody is listening today to our conversation, thousands I imagine and, they want this, they, you know, I think we all do. It’s a good question to ask, you know, what can we do each day as individuals to increase our sense of belonging? Or if we want to reach out to others who we know, either in our own lives or don’t even know, but we know that they’re that don’t, what can we do to foster belonging within our communities? So sorry, two questions in one. 

John: So my basic answer to that would be to learn to be kind. To be allowed to be kind to yourself and to be kind to other people. And it’s interesting, Julian of Norwich talks about the kindness of God. And by that she means, not that God acts kindly, but that God is kind, in and of himself, and that in Jesus, Jesus becomes our kind. He becomes a human being, he becomes the kind of people that we are.

So I think fundamental to what it means to be a Christian is to be kind, and that that kindness is to offer kindness towards your neighbour and towards your, the people that, particularly strangers, which I think is topically interesting because we’re not too good with strangers at the moment in this country, in other countries. But also being kind to yourself.

So Jesus says, love your…the essence of the law and the prophets is to love God, love your neighbour, love yourself. So some of us are good at loving God, some of his loving neighbours. Most of us are not so good at loving ourselves, but it’s a command. It’s all part of the same thing. Because you recognise how much, how loved you are that you offer that love to your neighbour. And your neighbour offers it back. Why? Because you’re worthy of love. So kindness is a beginning point for opening up that space you’re talking about. 

Gillian: Yeah. That’s lovely. So we need to draw to a close. So can I ask one final question?

John: No.

Gillian: Oh tough, I’m doing it, I’m in charge, my podcast.  So, the lecture. We’re having a live launch event on the 30th of January. If you’re listening after the 30th of January, there’s a whole course you can engage with in this, in this area of belonging and presence. So, John, what do you hope to inspire in people who will listen into our lecture, join us on the 30th or do the course after the 30th. What do you hope to inspire in people who are going to tune into your lecture? 

John: Well, I hope to help people to see the importance of what a community is. And begin to know how to recognise what it means to be part of a community. But beyond that, I really hope to help people to see that if you have a mental health challenge, you’re not different for everybody else, all people are just people and never be distracted by somebody’s diagnosis. Just always focus on and who they are. And rather than thinking about fixing people, think about how can I become this person’s friend. How can I really get to know this person in a way that it’s never going to be easy? Or maybe sometimes it’s very easy. You just have to make that first step. So that’s what I like to people do. How do you become friends with people that very often people don’t want to become friends with? 

Gillian: John, thank you so much for chatting on the podcast and for, offering your lecture as well. And the weaving together of deep theology of something that will tackle the problems we see out of our windows every single day and practical actions we can all engage in just being kind as well, so it’s deeply inspiring. And I’m really looking forward to the launch on the 30th and the course beyond that, and the difference it can make the world.

If you’d like to hear John’s lecture filmed live in Aberdeen and asked John a question directly, you can book a free ticket to the event on our website. John is going to be there live. There will also be live music and prayers and me, I’ll be there too. We’re going to be picking up the conversation about presence and belonging, the theme of John’s lecture over in the Go Health Community, a group of people who are committed to explore how to flourish faithfully today and be a healing presence, bring the belonging and the presence into the world.

I’d like to thank Rosie Dawson, our producer, and Wendy Lloyd from the Go Health team for all of their work on this series and this podcast. Please do hit share and let others know about the work of the GoHealth community where together we seek to flourish and to be healing presences in the world today. John, thank you so much.

John: Pleasure.

Gillian: It’s great.