07/09/2020 Five years later - now ordained!

See my previous anniversary posts: One year, two years, four years

My ordained team photo, taken outside my curacy church

My other anniversary posts might have been a bit late into September, but it is unfortunate this year that I have made it into October before getting round to it. I do think I can be given a bit of slack though, due to the global pandemic and the small matter of getting ordained. 

So it's finally happened. I'm sitting here in a clerical collar. And I must say I really haven't processed the whole thing yet. Let's start with a look over the last year.

It's been a much bigger shift than my last anniversary posts have covered. Last September I was starting third year, courting a curacy, and worried about my dissertation. I was part of a community, with a house full of friends, and I had a very full and exciting summer with lots of travel and new people and experiences. I felt like I was on a conveyor belt. 

Now the whole world has changed, and then my corner of it has changed even further.

I didn't get to enjoy my final term and engage in the the rituals of ending properly. I moved house in fraught and subdued circumstances, back to a city with a very different rhythm to the one I was leaving. An empty house with my three pieces of furniture, all on my own, my first time in full control of a household. I started a curacy without being ordained, and with worship a far cry from what is usually is. 

When you read the literature about stress, I tick most of the boxes for big life changes - moving house, new job, committing to a relationship, money worries, on top of times of uncertainty, lack of control, and additional responsibilities. I am very lucky that I have secure employment and housing, and I have not been bereaved, but I think it's still fair to say I have had a lot to handle.

Yet again, it is lots of life stuff, not so much God stuff that has taken most of my time and energy, and whilst everything has been turned on its head (again), the religious stuff is coming to the fore, but not so much my own spirituality. Learning and committing to a new church as one of its clergy, at a time when everything is weird and we don't know what Advent will look like, is bloody hard. All clergy have to put effort into maintaining their own spiritual lives underneath day to day ministry, but I think those of us starting curacy this year are at a disadvantage that we have more to get under without the benefit of years of practice.

Anyway, the ordination. Here's a glimpse of what I was feeling the day before it happened, and some snippets from the livestream of the service itself.

(the full ordination service is available here)

It definitely now feels like I've started something, I'm in a new chapter (and of course, I have joined deanery chapter, haha!). Who I am has now clicked into place with the life I've been living, and all the small inconsistencies have been smoothed out. Even just watching this video back a few weeks later, I do feel like a different person. It's not dramatic, but it is noticeable. And I'm not as worried about having a 'schema'; all the rhetoric about being yourself as a clergyperson rather than fitting into a set pattern of 'what a priest is' makes so much sense - who I am behind this collar is as much a clergyperson as my colleagues, but in so many different ways, and that's beautiful and marvellous.

My sense of self has definitely cleared up since I wrote about it in August. I am no longer fractured or unsettled. My identity is more certain. I cannot know how this all would have gone down if I had been ordained in July in a world without Covid-19, but no matter. 

How are me and God doing? Well, in a previous post I wrote "God and I have a very slow-moving relationship, because it is true that I do better at things in life if I get to work up to it in a thorough and methodical manner. God understands that better than I do when I'm being blinded by my enthusiasm and passion." This still rings true. I understand quickly but retain slowly, so building up to being an ordained curate by doing it as a lay one first might have been a bit of a blessing.

God is the undercurrent, as always. I get comfort and reassurance when I stop and check in. As per my MO, daily corporate prayer is an anchor point, particularly the eucharist on a Monday evening. The eucharist has also been a touchstone place for me and God.

Am I still on my axles in God's workshop? I haven't thought about this imagery much lately, but I re-read some posts and came across it. I thought when I last wrote about it that I would eventually "set down off the stand ready to hit the throttle into curacy, to warm up the tyres and get to grips with the upgrades, so that I can journey well in the rest of my life in ministry". I don't feel like I've necessarily hit the throttle as such. I was stuck revving the engine with a depressed clutch for a while, but I have nosed out the garage doors now. I can feel the sun on my new, novel parts, and I'm slowly testing out my new shape and features in the yard.

I can see the life-long learning ahead of me. Growing as clergy will happen every day - slow days, days off, bad days. I like who I have become in five years. I am where I should be, lucky son of bitch that I am. I love God, I love people, I love the Church (for all its flaws). I love being ordained, at least so far.

Being public property will get wearing. Working too many hours will be hard. Holding people through the highs and lows of life will take a toll. Meeting problems I cannot fix will wound my soul. I cannot predict what else this life is going do to me, or the people in my life. I cannot predict what my life will look like. But thank God I was called so young - the unexpected adventures ahead, the anticipation of the unknown, it's an incredible gift. I hope I never take it for granted. And I hope I can keep taking you along with me.

Video: Penultimate term as an ordinand

Video: This is what discerning feels like/DDO 5

This won't make sense unless you watch the video, which is clips from 5th December and 15th December so make sure you watch it first:

This post was written throughout the following weeks since the video over Christmas.

I will paraphrase the report, as it is a personal document between me, my DDO, and the psychotherapist who wrote it, so I'll try not to break confidence and quote it directly. The part that caused concern was it was felt that my emotional maturity still needed some development; that I didn't let or allow painful experiences affect me ie. I put truly difficult feelings at a distance. This led to doubts that I should go forward for selection at this time. It wasn't a 'no', just a 'not yet'.

Firstly, I'll step back and address why this was flagged; why, if it's true, this is a problem for a potential priest. Lucy was helpful in explaining this context. It has become an important part of the discernment process that as well as assessing whether someone has the call, would be good at the job, and would an asset to the Church and its congregations, etc, there's also an emphasis on assessing whether they will be able to handle the job, and can look after their own health and mental health.

Priests are under so much pressure and encounter so much of the drama of life, so much of other people's suffering, that without the proper tools - eg understanding how they work best, having a support network that is reliable, making good use of that network, having stable strategies to deal with their own emotions in emotional situations - they will probably eventually implode or explode, or 'burn out' as is the common phrase.

This is referencing Criterion D: Personality and Character, which says "Candidates should be sufficiently self-aware, mature and stable to show that they are able to sustain the demanding role of an ordained minister. They should be able to demonstrate how they have faced change and pressure in a balanced and flexible way and how they manage stress." To evidence this to the selectors, candidates "should be able to speak of how they have coped with difficult life experiences, how they have reflected upon them and incorporated them within their life and understanding."

Drawing further from the criteria, I don't think the therapist thought I am completely reconciled to my own vulnerabilities and limitations, and she had worries about my capacity to assimilate and deal appropriately with my own response to negative or difficult life experiences. If I were to be a priest like this, the chances are that it would break me.

Talking with Lucy was tough. I felt like she really jumped on this as a grade A excuse to stop me going forward, making suggestions of what I could do instead in September, like spending a year at a L'Arche community. I was glad I went to her, because she emphasised the importance of not thinking about the timing, not letting the practicalities cloud my thinking about the important stuff, which was in fact discerning something personal. But it was disheartening that she seemed quite so keen to stop me; she did say she would support me if I decided to continue, but with a look that suggested she was already trying to work out how to comfort me when I get rejected. But this could just be bias based on residual resentment from the first part of our exploration, when I was wrongly frustrated at her.

I have since talked to my parents, who have the advantage of coming at this report with a fairly comprehensive understanding of my emotional/psychological history, and I was unsurprised that it was this conversation that has been most helpful. I can now see the grain of truth that the psychotherapist was trying to point out. She didn't get it right, of course not, she met me for only 90minutes, so she over-estimated what she saw. But she did identify something that could be a problem if I went ahead unaware of it.

I do compartmentalise when it comes to crisis or problem-solving or being helpless. And there have been times that I have parked my emotional response to a situation over to one side and not dealt with it as well as I could have. But it's not something I do every time. Most of the time I do deal with it, but up til now it's not been a conscious process - I've been lucky that without realising I needed something, like to do something about the situation, or talk to my boyfriend, or go out with friends, or take a day to myself, or whatever the strategy was, I did it without thinking. So the times I didn't handle it well were the times that I wasn't lucky, that I didn't accidentally sort myself out. Now I'm aware of my lack of strategy, over the next few years I can put conscious thought into what I need and eventually those moments of failing to deal properly will be very rare and not based on accidental luck.

Pausing the discernment process now isn't going to help. Yes, there are things I could do to show I have started addressing the issue raised, and talking to my landlord who is studying to be a priest himself, I understand I can't just give empty reassurance that I will mature in my relationship with my emotions - they need hard evidence, so I will have to do one or two of those things, like work experience with a prison chaplain or volunteering for the Samaritans. Lucy was keen that I get more experience of being in situations where someone is suffering and I cannot fix it, which mean I can't respond with action, and those seem more plausible options than her main suggestion.

Sure I can see her concern that if I was plopped into a job as priest right now, I might not cope so well. That's what the psychotherapist thought as well. But I'm not going forward to be a priest now. I'm going forward to selection for training. Three years of academic study and formation at college, then three to four years of experience and formation in curacy - this will bring me to being a minimum of 31yo before I am officially able to work as an unsupervised priest, and 31yo me will look a lot different to 24yo me. She'll have learnt about herself and gone through years of life, and life generally matures you even if you resist. And now I'm forewarned of one of the issues to put some effort into developing, I'm doing the opposite of resisting!

This report hasn't been given to me to stop me. Like I said in the video, I would know something like that in my gut, in my bones. It's not got the feeling of a change in direction. No, this was handed to me as an opportunity to start digging into myself below the surface, and listen to the people around me. I had a similar experience in the first year at Guildhall, so God has precedent doing this in my life. That time I needed to become more aware of myself and some of my faults to get into the right frame of mind to train as a stage manager; this time I need to do the same and go deeper, building on everything my 8 years in backstage theatre has given me, to begin the second stage of my vocation, and become the priest I'm meant to be.

As Lucy and I discussed, this is what discerning feels like. This is the inward looking journey that I need to go on, because it's not just the Church that needs to get to know me - I need to learn more about myself as well. This has been hard. As you can see, I got this news weeks ago and it's only now that I'm getting a handle on what it means for me. I didn't want to acknowledge that I had issues to resolve - you can see in the video how determined I was in my initial reaction to circumvent the long hard look at myself to which Lucy pushed me. But this is what is needed. Even if I become the Archbishop of Canterbury - first among equals, primate, archbishop, bishop, priest - I am always laity first, a frail human being that is a single part of the body of Christ. If I don't know who I am as a person, I won't come to know myself as a priest.

I want to see Lucy one more time before I go back to the DDO and tell him I want to continue. Hers is always a useful insight and I want to further our conversation with the developments in my own thinking since our last meeting. I've also received a 'write something every day for 365 days' notebook for Christmas, and I've challenged myself to express my emotions in this notebook - not what I think, but how I feel, and it's already proving that I'm not very clear on my own emotions, so hopefully it'll be another useful tool in self-awareness.

Post Script
As for the priest's report, to be honest it was just really nice. He said I seemed to have two sides, a more precise side and a wilder side, and he said that as a compliment, he found me to be engaging; and it's also had quite an impact on me by pointing out that I do in fact have quite a dedicated prayer life, I've just been too perfectionist about it. This was useful to have pointed out, and I'm less anxious now about feeling inadequate vis a vis prayer. Those are the things that have stuck with me, so I'm not going to get it out and analyse further.

Happy New Year! (Next time you see me, I'll be filming on my new camera, wahoo!)

Video: Going through the Criteria again

07/09/2016 One year into exploration of vocation

As you can tell from the date, this post is tiny bit late, but the idea behind it is to do an anniversary blog, to look back over my vocation journey. You can see a summary of my progress so far on my page Steps on My Journey (recently nicked as a concept by my antipodes-based-vocation-blogger-turned-friend whose amazing blog you can find here).

I just watched my first, minute long vlog, which I did at 2am, having decided to start logging my journey, and in hindsight, it's bloody prophetic. In it I said that I was excited and whilst "not wanting to sound dramatic", I felt like I was on the verge of quite a big change. Sitting here, two weeks into being pastoral assistant at the church on London's Trafalgar Square, too right it's been dramatic, my life has changed entirely!

My second post was my faith history, and in the video accompanying the blog post, I said how putting it down as a sequence of events brought forth a coherent story. That feeling has been firmed up considerably in the last year. I've actually been aware of the story as it unfolds rather than only when looking back, and I think that's because I've been very slowly opening myself up to God and actually looking for God in my life, which is a big step that I'm still working on. As my last post said, God has been an underlying current in my life and often I've gone along without any awareness of God supporting me, carrying me, surrounding me, and loving me, at the time. This last year, probably more like this last six months, I've started connecting with God in the everyday fabric of life, and so catch glimpses of the pattern God is weaving.

As I said in the other post, it's been a task of submission, and I'm inching my forehead closer to the floor at God's feet, and getting better at looking at my life through heaven's eyes.

Then I watched this video after my third talk with the rector, on the 30th Nov last year, and two things struck me. I said we talked about how my stage management skills and ways of being need to be used outside of the theatre as well, and I didn't know it at the time, but I think this new job is exactly what I need to make that happen. Who I am professionally is being overlaid and interwoven with who I am at church (because I'm now professionally at church!) and that's part of the larger journey of my identity reforming as more in Christ, because I am tangibly serving God everyday. I've always said I'm not wired to be a good 'secular Christian', and sure, I'm only two weeks in, it's too soon to really say, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to prove myself right on this one.

Second thing from the video was the laughable hope I had that Lucy would send me to the ADO in January. Ha ha I laugh at myself. I have audio visual evidence that setting up expectations and deciding my own timeline for the future is utterly pointless and again, I should submit to God, be taken along by the river and just try and keep paddling in the same direction.

So many things are actually happening now. Over the last year, I have had many moments of frustration, feeling like nothing was happening at all. But looking at that list of Steps, I've been rather busy. But I shouldn't be surprised - God and I have a very slow-moving relationship, because it is true that I do better at things in life if I get to work up to it in a thorough and methodical manner. God understands that better than I do when I'm being blinded by my enthusiasm and passion. If I were able to tell my past self from a year ago that by now I would still not have seen an ADO, past-me would have been angry and sad, dismayed that what felt like a real pushing drive to follow God's call is being acted upon on a timescale that doesn't match.

But that's past-me. Present-me has grown an acceptance of the situation. I've pretty much relinquished control to God, though I still get the odd twinge of anxiety when contemplating my future. And now I'm in this job, it's enough to keep my busy and distracted, whilst at the same time obviously itself being God's tool to shape me for that future. Lucy and I are also making headway, and as you'll see in a future vlog, I'm meeting others that will be part of the journey too. Things are moving, I am changing, and I'm just so pleased with where my life has brought me.

Video: Eighth visit to the rector

One of the things that I didn't mention in the video was at one point in our walk, I said something about God being a river that flows in my life, which was an idea I hadn't hit before, so I wanted to explore it a little

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Excuse me a moment as I indulge in my love of Disney classics. There are two lines about rivers I want to reference from the film Pocahontas

Chief Powhatan sings to his daughter "As the river cuts his path, though the river's proud and strong, He will choose the smoothest course - that's why rivers live so long. They're steady, as the steady beating drum."

Proud and strong

Pocahontas, after he has left, says "He wants me to be steady like the river. But it's not steady at all!" then she sings "What I love most about rivers is you can't step in the river twice; the waters always changing, always flowing."

You can't step into the same river twice

And as much as it's one of Disney's heavy-handed metaphors, both lines are useful to me in describing a little of God's role in my life. God operates as both types of river, the strong, steady one that knows the best course, and the water that is never the same, bringing renewal and surprises just around the river bend.

Rapids of being caught up in divine intervention

The metaphor can go further. God as water is a common Christian theme - life giving, cleansing, pure, necessary, naturally occurring trinity (solid, liquid, gas), precious, etc. As a river specifically, there are lots of tributaries within my soul that run into and join God at the centre; sometimes God is a still pool within me and I can float on the surface, reveling in being surrounded and held up by God; sometimes God's a ferocious rapid that whips me off my feet and carries me off on a bumpy ride where I can only catch glimpses of the direction/destination when I manage to break the surface for air before being sucked under again.

Do you still wait for me, dream giver,
 just around the river bend/?

What I was thinking of as I strolled through the park with the rector and her dog was that God is a continual current running under me as I sit in the boat of my life. God catches my eye occasionally with a dazzling sparkle, or sends me down the unexpected fork, or just suddenly becomes a waterfall. But even though I sometimes lose sight of the river, and am deluded that the boat is all there is to reality, it doesn't matter because God is still holding me up, guiding me down if not the smoothest course, then at least the one of God's choosing, steady in the sense that God is always there, immovable and relentless.

More and more unexpected waterfalls

I think my problem is sometimes I take God for granted. The fact that I can trust in ending up on the
right course doesn't mean I don't have a responsibility to maintain and improve that boat in response to the river's design. It's a smoother ride when God nudges me towards a different fork if I change my sails to line up with that, and even paddle in support of the new direction. I've learnt a lot of that submission in the last year as I've become more aware of the need to 'listen' to the river on my life that is God, the need to expand my knowledge so, like a theological Bear Grylls, I can read the workings of God around me, in me, and through me, and respond to work in tandem with that river, not against it.