Video: Oralsong! (aka Ordinand life update)

LGBT ordinand

A sermon by a bisexual ordinand

 in a school chapel, 

speaking on LGBT history month.*

*including my story, bisexual nuns, Peru, Frida Kahlo, and textiles.

Video has no visuals, just the audio, as I was at a school, so cannot show the footage that includes the children. My audio equipment failed, so the sound is just the inbuilt camera mic - I recommend putting on the subtitles (button bottom right of the video) to follow more easily.

Towards Ordained Ministry: Session Five

This post details my experience of Session Five of the Towards Ordained Ministry course. See my previous posts about session one, two and four to find out what the TOM course is.

--

Spirituality - Will you be diligent in prayer, in reading holy Scripture, and in all studies that will deepen your faith, and fit you to bear witness to the truth of the Gospel?

The person who was supposed to take this session phoned the organiser an hour beforehand to say they were ill and wouldn't make it; so Neil himself had to do it. Revd Neil Evans is the Director of Ministry for the London Diocese, and it was encouraging that 20 years of ministry stood him in good stead to cover the entire topic of spirituality in ministry with only an hour's notice!

He started with the classic reassurance that we all struggle and wrestle with prayer, and there is no such thing as a expert in prayer, followed by the hackneyed but true "pray as you can, not as you can't".

A bit of background on him and his experience of prayer started with his training at Mirfield, where he learnt monastic prayer, which is regular, communal and supportive. Once he left the community, he had to find a new way to pray, and he explained three ways he has found useful.







One is apostolic, or 'on the go', which is living in a prayerful way, going out in the world but always being firmly based in an underlying spirituality.



The second is the daily office which is tool that you can hold onto, and he has found it has rooted him; morning prayer is a great place to start the day and go out from; and not being able to choose favourite chunks of scripture is good, being given them means you engage more thoroughly.




And the third is an annual retreat, always finding space for it every year.


He asked us to discuss with our neighbours "What does prayer mean to you?" and the answers that were fed back included
- liturgical vs charismatic prayer has a difference for each of us
- the acronym PACTS is useful - Pause, Adore, Confess, Thank, Supplicate
- there are examples to follow in the Bible
- working in a church really cements the difference of private vs corporate
- pastoral, with people in the moment
- discipline as there is no substitute
- bring everything to God including the mess
- we don't have to pretend and yet we are still loved
- there is space for spiritual gifts as different expressions of awe
- not just speaking to God as Father but also approach as Creator
- counter to common perception, it is not just asking but more being in the presence

There are very different ways to pray but one can't disagree with somebody's else's way - it's not wrong. just not right for me. Church buildings soak up prayer and cathedrals are saturated with it, but the key to any type is 'is God being honoured'? The "gift of the CofE" is that that can be done in many traditions! If God is worshipped, disagreeing with a tradition is meaningless.

So what works for somebody comes from who they are; the sort of person I am invites me to pray in a certain way. All personality preferences are valid (though you can take it too far) as God will not desert us where ever we are. We are entering into the presence of God, putting ourselves in the way of God, by and for finding ourselves in that presence.

There are dangers in praying, pitfalls we can easily fall into, such as telling God what to do, avoiding getting things done ourselves, and also in such environments like prayer groups, falling into gossiping. There's also a lot of complexity around prayers for healing, and Neil only touched briefly on the subject, basically saying that miracles do happen but there are no simple answers and ultimately it boils down to "Thy will be done".

He moved on to 'ministerial development review' and the question of how one went about judging a priest's prayer life, but basically, in an intangible way, people do just 'know' if their priest is praying. More tangible measurements are questions like 'who supports you in your prayer life?' which he posed to us and some answers that came back included:
- spiritual director
- having a day off
- I said my agnostic/atheist boyfriend and a woman across the room empathised that her similar husband had also helped her
- tools eg emails, apps - structure
- other broken people you can't fix
- room mates who are also 'bad at prayer', collectively providing accountability
- church prayer ministry team
- being around someone who is themselves disciplined, by example or 'osmosis' as it were
- social media - both friends and strangers

We finished with as form of praying scripture (Mark 9.2-29) which wasn't really for me but I did get an interesting moment or two out of it.

--

The previous sessions were:

- Authority - Do you accept the discipline of this Church and give due respect to those in authority?

- The Bible - Do you accept the holy Scriptures as revealing all things necessary for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ?

- Doctrine - [I missed this one] Do you believe the doctrine of the Christian faith as the Church of England has received it, and in your ministry will you expound and teach it?

- Ministry - Will you be a faithful servant in the household of God, after the example of Christ, who came not to be served but to serve?

The last one will be:

- Mission - Will you lead Christ’s people in proclaiming his glorious gospel, so that the good news of salvation may be heard in every place?

What's the purpose of my being a priest?

In January, 11 months ago, I wrote this post about my existential crisis 'is being a priest what I was born to do', how will I know if I've succeeded at life, and should I try and plan my life with goals to achieve?

Since then I have surrendered to God, plus started the discernment process which will hopefully lead to a conclusive answer to the question of my calling. But these last few months working at St Martin's, I've begun to be plagued by questions going beyond whether I'm meant to be a priest.

If the answer's yes (of which I am convinced) then what is the purpose of 'Rev. Georgina'? This person in my future, who is she called to serve? Basically, as the kitty says:

So even though I swore off vocations events, a few women from the SMITF congregation were going to London Calling: Young Women, so I went along as a veteran to support them. It was a great event, and I actually got a few things from it.

• Liz Adekunle, the Archdeacon of Hackney, was pretty cool, and she used the phrase about women priests being "used creatively" which was the first thing I wrote down, as it struck a chord.
• The chaplains Julia Candy and Natalie Garnett spoke of being a 'point of contact with God' and "letting people know they're precious".
• Carys Walsh said that mission and evangelism means "enabling the people of God".

And since the event, I read this in a book by my vicar, Sam Wells - "the person who speaks to God for the people and speaks to the people on behalf of God."

These sort of things have been stewing in me as I contemplate how to be who I am for other people, and what that might look like once I'm a priest. I'm not expecting to figure it out any time soon. I've spent the last 10 years figuring out who I am and what a priest is and how those two go together; if I get recommended to training, I'll be spending 6-7 years figuring out what's beyond that.

The question has been asked and the process has begun, and of course it's not ultimately down to me - God will take me through it and revelation will happen when all is in place and ready. I know that; this isn't me trying to set out a career plan. This is me realising that having accepted who I'm meant to be, and whilst the Church are deciding whether they agree, I should start contemplating why I'm supposed to be a priest.

What am I meant to do with it? What am I meant to do with all the blessings and opportunities I've been given? What's it all for? What does God want me to do once I am a priest? What's my purpose?

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

-

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.