Jun 20 | A light in a hall, Part 2 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the second and final installment of my first set of writings on my journey to ordination. Part I can be found here.

PART II: AW HELL NO

As my heart soaked in music, my soul became refined like ore by the liturgy of the church. The rhythm was always the same. It lulled me, knowing what would happen next, felt safe and warm like an old winter coat.

When I returned to church after a few years of spiritual wandering, it was so easy to put that coat on again. But now, growing out of the earth laid there by my environment, my mother, and my childhood, there grew seedlings of my own understanding, new wisdom gained through the everyday struggles of a privileged life.

I rediscovered God after a difficult period of loneliness, bullying, and great uncertainty, appropriately enough in the beautiful city of Norwich, the home of St. Julian, mystic and anchoress, the first woman to write a book in the English language. Julian wrote rhapsodically about a God in whom there was no wrath or malice, and a mother Christ who nursed us with the milk of the Eucharist.

It was here, in the midst of my sorrow and terror, that I was gathered up into an embrace that my body and soul remembered but my mind had long forgotten. In the glow of my own revelation of divine love, I realized that my whole life would not be enough gift to thank the one who rescued me…but it would be more than accepted by Her. It would indeed be treasured.

As I matured in my newfound faith, I discovered that I wanted to share this amazing reality with others, for it was not only for me. All around me were people not only searching for meaning, but who had encountered a hostile church, one that robbed them of their humanity, which bullied them just as I had once been bullied, as a child and an adult.

I had never known that kind of church, and it filled me with sorrow and rage that something I had found to be such a sanctuary could turn around and defile the glory of a human being fully alive. It became imperative that I do as much as I could to show people a different way – not just of church, but of Christianity. It became imperative to demonstrate that this kind of Christianity was not something I had just made up. It was shared by many. It had a history.

One beautiful summer day, as I was walking home, I had a conversation with myself about how I could possibly serve such a glorious God. Ideas came and went, until I laughed inwardly.

Oh, what – you want to be a priest now?

A long long long inner silence followed.

Then, a voice which was inside me and yet outside as well:

Why not?

And another long silence.

Which I’ll fully admit was succeeded by Aw HELL no.

That was the beginning.

 

The space between that first question and the moment when the Bishop and my colleagues laid hands on me was ten years.

A lot of people are quite surprised when I say this. Others almost appear relieved. Yes, there is much wandering required. Also, pain and suffering.

And great joy.

Certainty, which I believe to be the true opposite of faith, should be rare. Unwavering confidence should be rarer. Rarest of all should be the idea of that holy hands-on moment as a prize to be won.

It is no prize. It is no reward, no treasure, no triumph.

It is something beyond description, something I only received through tears and terror and “sweat like great drops of blood.”

Some argue that it brings about an ontological change; some say that whole notion is self-important folly.

I have Anglo-Catholic sensibilities, so I happen to agree there is an ontological change in a person when they have been ordained. But it doesn’t make them better than anyone else. The Christian heart finds itself drowned in baptism and scored with fire in confirmation, and every Christian is called to struggle and pray for the kingdom to come, for when the kingdom comes fully there will be no need of clergy or institution or boundary between us, for all will sing the song of Love made incarnate and crowned emperor and, like Jeremiah writes, no longer will we need to be taught to know that Love.

But until the kingdom comes, we are all divided. We are divided by a society that lays claim to us depending on how we look, how we identify, who we love. We are in exile by our own hand, which seeks to grasp and dominate. We are in bondage to fear and avarice and arrogance. We need teachers and pastors who are willing to give themselves over to the institution, as flawed as it may be. We need lighthouse keepers to remind us of the promises we have been given while the world around us does its best to dampen those promises out of fear or jealousy. We need those who are called to a different sort of exile, what one might call a holy irrelevance, at its very best a port in a storm calling out that Love never changes.

There’s more: in the world we’re living in, Christianity has become more colonized by greed and power than I think it ever has before. I believe in my heart that this is because it recognizes that it is losing the influence it once had. It’s still wholly privileged, but that privilege is beginning to fade. And in the fear that that loss occasions, it is clinging desperately to its power.

This was never Jesus’s intent.

We were never meant to cling to this kind of power.

Those of us who are called to priesthood are called to be tradition-keepers, scholars, storytellers. We are called to always be interpreting the world through the lens of that history, and indeed speaking the needs of the world back into the church. We have to live into the diaconal role we once inhabited that still dwells within us. We cannot be silo’ed off from the world.

This is what I feel most called to do. I have never seen myself as a parish priest, which is probably why the road was so long to get to that moment where the hands came down.

 

I’m not sure exactly how to end this long series of strange thoughts.

Perhaps in the end, there is no real end at all.

I am only one small light in a long torch-lit hall toward the banquet.