The first steps addressing my calling

My first step was talking to my rector age 19 (see previous post). My sense of calling died down again to just a niggle for the future. A classic discernment question is "Where is your calling? What does it feel like?" I always said it was at the back of my head, in a corner, and it was just a gentle, constant prodding, a soft poking.

My job as a freelance stage manager is very precarious but I have been either skilled or lucky (I'm not sure which) that from leaving college at the end of my degree July 2014, I have been in constant work as a stage manager. The life of a new graduate involves a lot of applications, CVs and cover letters, and for a new graduate freelancer, whose contracts are usually between 5 and 9 weeks, that process continues once you start getting jobs, to book in the next one, and the one after that.

I had a series of jobs with a week or less between them, always having the next one booked in before the end of the current. I did have a low bar for what I applied for, so I applied for a lot; I'm going to be open and honest here and say that I was extremely lucky that I was always able to fall back on my parents if it came to it, so I occasionally took low paid jobs and my dad supplemented my income, to support my career. Again, I realise that I am a Very Very Lucky girl.

After a year, I decided to become more specific in my goals, applying for jobs that paid a minimum I could live on, and only in the roles I preferred. This narrowed my number of applications down considerably, and unsurprisingly, the offers dried up completely. I got to the end of the last job I had booked in with nothing to follow and moved back to my parents in their little village, away from London, at the start of September 2015.

Two weeks. I was unemployed for two weeks, and I went a little mad. After a week, I lowered my bar again for what I applied for, but started making lists of things to do, hobbies to take up, skills to learn. Having not been in that position before, it ate at me immediately. Yes, this is middle class pathetic-ness, but this is my story, I can only tell it honestly. And with made up words like pathetic-ness.

One of the items on my many lists was to start writing again. I used to be a prolific story writer, doing things like NaNoWriMo, but my inspiration/leisure time had dried up. I sat down with pad and pencil, old school to get myself into the mood, and wrote a few pages of a scene, a girl in a church service, a young professional (sound familiar?)

A few days later, I sat down to expand on this scene a create a character, a world, a plot. This took me on a research rabbit hole, and I started developing the idea that this girl could take a sort of gap year to explore her faith - visit Iona and Taize, go on a silent retreat, that sort of thing, culminating in doing the Camino di Santiago, something close to my own heart as we have a group at church called the Camino group, as it is also known as the The Way of St James.

Abruptly, I looked at the mind map I was creating and realised it wasn't fiction I was writing - it was a wish list. I looked up how long to the Camino took and got it in my head that a lot of people did about six weeks, and suddenly, with my unemployed future stretching out in front of me like an empty void, I thought "I could do that." Excitement gripped me as the reality of that thought sunk in, but rather than booking flights and getting my rucksack out, I went through all the usual vocation websites that I had gone through several times - CallWaiting, CPAS, LondonCallings (my church's diocese vocation page), CofeE Vocations - then calmed down a little and wrote another email to my rector, subject: "Adrift...again."

Could I arrange with [the parish secretary] a time to have another chat with you about vocation and looking into the discernment process?

I talked to my best friend, the one I met at sixth form, my parents, my boyfriend. By the time my appointment with the rector came around, it was on the same day as two interviews for jobs starting at the end of September that I had applied for before this massive kick from my calling. When asked again where it was, the niggle had moved and grown, and now felt like a pervading presence covering the top of my mind, a presence over everything in my life.

That meeting was mixed for me. She probed me to get an understanding of my position, which at that moment was a bit dramatic, wanting to give up stage management and concentrate on following my calling, under the continuing delusion I mentioned in this post. I just felt a sense of urgency but I didn't want to make a big deal, a "look at me, I'm special" statement, nor did I have any idea what the next step was, except maybe there was someone who's job it was to deal with people like me in the diocese and I needed my rector to put me in touch with them.

She was very supportive and encouraging that we needed to keep the momentum up and explore that I was feeling. We booked in another appointment that was sadly cancelled when I got offered one of the jobs I interviewed for, the schedule for which meant we didn't have any free time in common until a month later, and I went off wondering if she was taking me seriously. In hindsight, I didn't give her much to go on and she probably rightly assessed that I needed to do my own digging to come up with what I wanted to do next rather than just giving me options like I wanted to, because it needs to be a slow process. I have moments where I'm chomping at the bit, angry even that I have put up with continuing this stage management career whilst my want to make this other thing me priority.

But I have done some digging, like finding this amazing Guide to CofE Discernment, and done a few other things, and I've gained some perspective. More on that, and my second meeting with the rector, in my next post.

God bless.

My calling - the starting point

I've not had many bolt-from-the-blue moments, as my mother calls them. One was going to church. I noticed a sign next to my hostel in Australia for a baptist church, and the thought popped into my head - "It's Sunday tomorrow. I'll go to church." Just like that, on a random road the other side of the world, my church life began. 'The Road to Agnes Water'. Not quite as catchy as 'Damascus', but there we are.

Another was my confirmation. I don't remember it exactly, but at some point in the January of 2013, I thought "I want to be confirmed." Again, no hesitation, no turning over the idea as a possibility first, nor even this time any obvious trigger. But it was perfect timing, to spend a couple of months going over the basic tenants and scripture of Christianity with the rector before going to St Paul's at the end of March.

My calling was not bolt-from-the-blue. It crept up on me, slowly and quietly, so subtle that when I noticed it, I realised it had been there a while already. I feel like it must have been in my late teens that the niggle started at the back of my mind, but it wasn't until Feb '12, that I got my first small kick from it. I sent this email to my rector:

I'm not sure why I'm writing this email. My friend suggested I talk to you, but it's not that I have anything to decide, or any issue to resolve; I just have an idea, which doesn't really affect the near future, and discussing it with someone who knows what they're talking about seems like something I should do, now that I've thought of it. I kind of want to look at going into ministry. But not now, definitely way in the future, as a second career sort of thing. I've had the notion for a while. Because I really like the idea of being ordained when I'm older; I get the same feeling about it that I do about my choice to go into stage management now - a sense of vocation. But I don't know where this idea has come from, and whether I need do anything about it right now, or what it means that I had the idea in the first place, or whether I'm right to feel like it's a good one. I suppose I'm emailing you because of these questions, and I was hoping for your...advice? Perspective? I'm not sure. But I'm a bit adrift about the whole thing at the moment, and I'd be grateful for some help.

The subject line of the email was 'Adrift'. Because I did feel adrift, finding myself in an unfamiliar boat without sails, paddles or anything on the horizon. My trust in God was strong but that still didn't give me anything tangible to go off. I like tools, proactivity, LISTS. I'm not demanding a definite and clear, detailed plan for the future. Just a vague idea. Even if the plan changes, I just really prefer a vague idea, any vague idea, to absolutely no clue at all.

At this point, I felt like the plan had changed but in such a unclear way that my path, "the way I walk in", was totally obscure. As you can tell from the email, I wasn't contemplating veering off the stage management career path, so really the obscurity was whether I was right in that feeling. I had the suspicion that when one got a calling to ministry, you downed sticks and stopped your life, everything, and started again, and I didn't want to do that yet, so was that a betrayal? How could I feel a vocation for two different paths?

My rector arranged a meeting and listened carefully to my babblings and I came away from that meeting reassured that at 19, having just started a 3 year degree course in an industry I loved and had an affinity for, if I didn't feel ready to take steps in response to my calling, that was absolutely fine. My calling subsided back into its habitual place as an ignore-able niggle at the back of my mind.

So I carried on at college, and at church, graduated, without any worry. Sure, at some point way off in the future I would address the call to a second career, a second vocation, and it was a comforting thought. I eventually grew happy in the surety that I would go into ministry in my life; it was inevitable. But for now, be a stage manager, enjoy being part of church in all the other ways I could as a lay person. It would come years and years in the future, when I was a proper grownup....right?

...Nope.

God bless.

The last two years before the start of this blog

I can't believe I have a personal connection with a
globally recognised British landmark!

I got confirmed into the Church of England on Easter Saturday, March 30th 2013, at St Paul's Cathedral, London, by the Bishop of London, The Rt Revd and Rt Hon Richard Chartres. (see previous blog for my journey before then.)

In preparation for my confirmation, I didn't have the schedule to be able to fit in conventional classes with the other candidates in a regular slot each week, so I had one-on-one sessions with the rector, and she gave me the homework. Thus started my spiritual journal, a little green leather bound notebook that lives in my handbag for any moment I feel the need to put my thoughts about all things religious and spiritual onto paper.

This was another tool in my religious arsenal and is still an essential part of my relationship with God. Since the confirmation homework, I've had arguments with myself within its pages, taken notes during talks or sermons or from books, questioned God, there's a section where I clarified for myself what I thought about "Me, Christ and casual sex" - it's basically the place I can do extempore prayer. For me personally, I have to write it, rather than think or say it, otherwise I use structured prayer. But I've been historically terrible at getting into the habit of things like morning prayer as well!

After my confirmation, I carried on my involvement at my church St James' Piccadilly, helping where I could around my degree course in stage management, and in the last year, around my career as a freelance deputy stage manager.

It was easier at college, as we never worked on a Sunday, and Christmas/Easter time was school holidays. But the slow dawning of how important church was becoming to me was highlighted at Easter in my third year, a year after my confirmation.

I was invited to join my friend on his uni's Alpine Club annual trip to the Isle of Skye. I won't regret going, it was a glorious experience, with some wonderful people, and I climbed my first Munro, but it was over Holy Week. I left on the Saturday before, and returned late on Easter Saturday, so I missed Palm Sunday through the Easter Vigil, turning up exhausted for the 11am service on Easter Sunday, and got a surprise.

Easter morning is better than Christmas, it really is. The joy and excitement is just explosive; St James' decorates the beautiful wood/stone interior with greenery, and puts out its gold plate; at least three members of the congregation will be handing out small chocolate eggs; there's professional singers backing up the choir so it sounds loud and angelic; everyone is happy, wishing each other 'Happy Easter!" with hugs and grins, and every hymn and sung response feels alive.

Easter Day 2014, I just couldn't get into the spirit of things. Without the build up of Holy Week - processing around the church with a real donkey, singing 5 part harmonies for the tourists on Piccadilly on Palm Sunday; the sacred space of The Three Hours on Good Friday, noon til 3 with music, readings, meditations and silence, contemplating the Cross; going to St Paul's for the majestic evening service followed by going to St James' for supper; sleeping in the nave, taking an hour to maintain the vigil in the candlelit side chapel; waking early to go into the grey dawn garden and take the first Eucharist of Easter with bread baked the previous night; processing with song into the church to the font; crying at the beauty of the rector singing the Exsultet; walking down to Piccadilly Circus with drums and whistles and bells, handing out chocolate eggs; returning to church for a cooked breakfast and a break before choir practice - without all that as run up, I was emotionally at just another service, and could not tap into the feeling all around me.

I was gutted. As I said, I'm not going to regret going on the trip, but it taught me just how much being able to connect to my faith through church had become important to me.

I've had various other frustrations over the last year, like I couldn't go to the Three Hours again, and that was a factor is a decision I made in the summer. I had been writing in the journal whenever the moment suited me, but in a bid to always have something I felt addressed my personal faith, as well as going to church in my community faith, I set myself the challenge of writing just two of its small pages every week, collecting my thoughts about the Sunday I had had. First entry 2nd August 2015, 9th Sunday after Trinity

.

But, you'll cry, you haven't mentioned your calling yet! It's there in those pages back in August - when did you get the call? Isn't that the POINT of this blog??

All will be answered in my next post! My storytelling instincts have led me to first set the scene, establish the background, the bones on which the true flesh of this project will be built. The little I know of the discernment process is that it understandably personal; the church cannot assess my calling unless they can get to know me. Who am I? Hopefully I've answered the relevant basics of that question in this and my last post, at least as in depth as necessary for this blog.

Coming next will be a meaty dissection of...THE CALL.

God bless

Video: My faith story before the start of this blog

Now it is a reasonable hour of the day, as opposed to the dead of night like my first post, I'm going to set out a few more details of who I am, and my faith journey so far, to give a bit of background to where I am now.

Who am I? From a secular point of view, I grew up in a rural village in a middle class county in the south of England, with my mum, dad, and younger brother. I was schooled at a private girls school and a mixed state sixth form, spent a gap year first on work experience then travelling (see this blog) and I realised I was bisexual age 14 (see another blog. You can see I like blogging). I went to drama school to do a degree in stage management, and I have been working in the theatre industry in London as a freelance stage manager since August 2014, so for just over a year as I type. This in itself was a vocation that I wanted to do since I was 15, but I have since realised that it was a step within my greater vocation ie. my calling to ministry.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. My mother is an atheist and my father is a non-practising pluralist. It wasn't that I grew up without God or being told God didn't exist, God just wasn't mentioned. I was baptised, but my parents really did it for social and cultural reasons. But my uncle gave us various children's Bibles so I had one as my favourite book for a while as a young child, without any real understanding of the stories as 'scripture'.

When I was 6, I spent two years at a Church of England primary school, so I learnt the Lord's prayer, said grace at lunchtime, sat through assemblies given by the local minister, and went to church twice a year, Harvest and Christingles services. I didn't like Harvest because it was at the really modern URC church (we had an ecumenical partnership in our village) but Christingles was in the tiny, ancient parish church that backed onto the fields. My love affair with the church started in those services, dark and cold but lit by candlelight with the magic of Christmas in the air, with the bonus of being trusted with open flame, and sweets of course. I'd blast out Shine Jesus Shine in the same way others my age sang the latest chart toppers or Disney tunes, and even when I left the school age 8, my dad took me each year for the next decade.

Consciously engaging with Christianity as a philosophy began in my Religious Studies classes at my new school. When I was about 12, my teacher answered a girl's question about what she personally as a Baptist thought counted to be Christian. She said if someone believed Jesus Christ was the Son of the one God, and he lived, died and was resurrected to save us from our sins, everything else was arbitrary, and even the how/why of those statements was up for debate. I looked down at the textbook on Christianity on my desk and realised I have thought of myself as a Christian since primary school but never thought about what I believed. It was more of a cultural default, part of being British. But I knew in that moment I did believe those two statements, so for the next years of school, I digested and dissected the different beliefs and practices of the different churches and navigated my own belief system.

When I was almost 14, I started noticing a girl around school who had a crucifix necklace, and I

On holiday after starting to wear
a cross. I still have that one.

asked for a cross necklace for my birthday (ie. one without a figure on it). I've worn a cross around my neck at all times since, nine years so far, and I've amassed a collection of different styles.

It was at sixth form, age 16, I met a girl who would become my best friend, who had grown up in a Church of England household, so knew a lot more about community worship. I knew the theory of worship styles, but had yet to find the motivation to go to a Sunday service or become involved in a congregation. So we would have discussions about our shared but basically very different religions, and she took me to one Sunday service in our two years studying for our A-Levels, as well as helping me pick out a Bible, which I had never actually thought about buying before, oddly.

On my gap year trip, I started going to church. It happened quite naturally, almost incidentally. My work experience had been with a Christian theatre group on tour, so I had had a little go at being with other Christians, like church-lite, but one day in a town called 1770 on the Australian coast, I went to a Sunday service and every week after that I googled the local Anglican wherever I woke up on the Sunday morning. I also picked up a devotional so I read that and the readings from my Bible, which I took with me, every day for a couple of months until it ran out.

Moving to London, one of my priorities was finding a church where I could throw myself in and really go for it. Having spent years working on my personal faith, time for some community faith.  [This is a view I have gained retrospectively. At the time, none of it seemed liked the steady step by step progression it was.]  I had met the associate rector of St James' Piccadilly in New Zealand, and I went along a few months after starting uni, and fell deeper in love. I could go on and on about St James', but for the purposes of this blog, the main things that SJP has done are: I go to church every week, I'm a reader, server, alto in the choir; I run the youth discussion group, gave a talk at the general discussion group. run the LGBT group including marching in the Pride parade with the Christians, do the tea and coffee after the service once a month; and I was confirmed in St Paul's Cathedral.

IN SUMMARY
6yr I went to Christingles
12yr I turned to Christ
14yr I wore a cross
18yr I went to church
19yr I found my church
21yr I got confirmed

I'll cover the last two years of my life in my next post. See you then!

God bless.