Tape Talk
by Breda Sunderland

TAPE REVIEW:
Life is Difficult
by Page Prewitt

These tapes shatter the myth that "life should be comfortable" and replace it with the fact that "life is difficult." Teaching in New York almost a decade ago, Page Prewitt cuts right through the frequent denial of heartache, problems and pain to build from that famous opening sentence of Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled. She shows how the truth of "Christ in us as us" provides the answer to acknowledged pain.

These tapes are irresistible. Having explained the scriptural basis of pain and heartache they then detail the way through to a transcended life. The root cause of the problems is in the Fall; the answer is in Calvary. In terms of Body, Soul and Spirit the tapes focus especially on soul. Satan tempts us to live from believing a negative thought or feeling (e.g. I am shy or sad or depressed…) rather than living from the Spirit fact that I am Christ in my form: "Thoughts and feelings just well up as part of our humanity. They are not wrong." What a relief! However, I do have control over what I believe about "soul stuff." The value and importance of getting in touch with feelings is so that having acknowledged and accepted them we move on to the spirit truth and transcend them.

As always when Page teaches, her illustrations are perfect. She images suppressed feelings needing to be acknowledged and then transcended as a boil excruciatingly painful to the touch; or as an atomic furnace fuelling walled-off feelings beneath a steel sub-floor.

One feature of the tapes that I love is how Page repeatedly high-lights the biblical parallel for modern psychological parlance. "Denial" in biblical terms is "having scales on your eyes." "Intimacy" or a "game-free relationship" is a laid-down self-for-others life. Transcended living is "whole and complete and not lacking anything" (James 1:4). These tapes also contain wise insights into shame, anger and intimacy. My favourite quote comes when–after considering Scott Peck’s and Keith Miller’s excellent definitions of intimacy–Page sums up thus: "Intimacy is when your insides and your outsides match."

I’ll conclude where Page starts: "You will never know a thing until you commit yourself to it." Why not commit yourself to the truth recorded on these tapes?