Temple Cloud

Dear Temple, All right, I have problems.   But why do I have a responsibility to myself?   Isn’t it selfish to want good things for myself?   I remember in Sunday School, when I was younger, singing ‘Make Me a Channel of Thy Peace’.   I liked the words, but the chorus worried me:   Oh master, grant that I may never seek So much to be consoled as to console To be understood as to understand To be loved as to love with all my soul   I thought, ‘But we’re children!   How can we learn to love, if it’s selfish to want to be loved?   How can we give what we haven’t received?’   But I knew that if the Sunday School teacher thought it was a good hymn for us to sing, then it must be the way we should pray, even if it didn’t make sense to us, because the teacher had been a Christian for longer than we had been alive, so she knew best. Phantom of the Library   Dear Phantom, This is what I meant in my last letter by not trustin...

Dear Phantom, First of all, you are obviously a real person, or you wouldn’t be asking these questions.   So you definitely have a mind and a soul, in the sense that you have consciousness. Whether there is life after death – whether we have immortal souls, as many religions teach – is something we can’t absolutely prove one way or the other.   But this is a different question from whether you have a soul in the sense of being a person, someone who thinks and feels and can make decisions. If being middle-class meant you didn’t really have a soul, you couldn’t be in danger of going to hell, could you?   And if you have a soul, then Jesus doesn’t want to send you to hell.   However, this is something I need to talk about in a separate letter – probably in several letters, because your idea of God is so different from most people’s. The reason mum thought you were ungrateful when you said you thought God was evil was that she didn’t understand what you meant, b...

Dear Temple, Why are you making it sound as if I’m under-privileged just because I didn’t get as much attention once my brothers were born?   I’m not under-privileged.   The problem is that I’m over -privileged!   My dad says by global standards, if you get to eat every day, it means you’re rich.   I don’t just have a house to live in, safe water to drink, and three meals a day, but I even live in a country where everyone gets education and medical care for free. So I’ve had more good things than I deserve, and I’m going to be punished for it.   Jesus says, ‘Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort.   Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will hunger.’   In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, it doesn’t say the rich man goes to hell for not helping Lazarus, just that he goes to hell for having already had all his good things. I don’t know why Christians are supposed to say thank you before meals, when we’re goin...

Dear Temple, You’re making it sound as though something terrible happened to me just because my brothers were born.   That’s not fair!   They didn’t do anything wrong by being born, and my parents didn’t do anything wrong by having them (except that they were twins, so that makes three of us when parents shouldn’t have more than two children, but that was just an accident).   Most older siblings get a new baby brother or sister when they’re three, and most of them are fine with that.   My parents didn’t neglect me or stop loving me.   They’re the best parents in the world!   Don’t you dare blame them just because I’m weird!   I’m weird because I’m autistic, not because of anything they did wrong. Phantom of the Library   Dear Phantom, I didn’t mean to sound as though I was blaming mum or dad.   They are good parents, and it helped that at that stage, mum’s father lived on the floor below us.   All three of them did their best...

Dear Temple Cloud, I left a note to Father Christmas saying this was the last time I’d be hanging up my stocking, as I would be a teenager by next year.   Okay, I’ve known Father Christmas was my mum since I was eight, and I think I’d suspected it for a long time before that, but I didn’t want to give up the ritual until I stopped being a child. ‘Father Christmas’ left me the fluffy teddy bear I had seen in a toyshop and thought was absolutely beautiful – and also some lipstick and mascara.   I love the bear; even if I’m not likely to drag him around everywhere the way I did with my other cuddly toys when I was little, he’s wonderfully soft to cuddle.   I suppose my mum gave me the make-up to say, ‘There are fun things about being a teenager, too.’   But I don’t see the fun in make-up, at least when you have to be subtle about it.   It’s not like painting your face to look like a tiger or a clown.   As far as I can see from the teenage magazines in th...

Dear Phantom, First things first: being a teenager does not mean you turn into a monster, and your dad certainly doesn’t dislike teenagers.   Why do you think he enjoyed being a mature student, surrounded by friends less than half his age, if he doesn’t like young people?   I know you make a distinction in your mind between ‘teenagers’ and ‘students’, but most university students are teenagers, at least for their first year or two. It’s true that there are some adults who are prejudiced against teenagers, and that they don’t seem to realise that being ageist against teenagers is just as wrong as being racist or sexist or homophobic (or being ageist against old people, for that matter).   A few years after the time when you are thirteen, in the early 21 st century, I remember the newspapers gleefully reporting that someone had invented a teenager-deterrent, a buzzer that plays an unpleasant high-pitched whine that only young people can here.   They praised this...