By Morgan Sherlock
WHEN TANYA contacted me and invited me to do this today, there was immediate reluctance. I feel very uncomfortable doing this right now in my faith journey. I am currently in a space of conflict with my belonging in faith and journey uncertain at best.
Like I often do in times of hesitation or indecision, I lean on what best practice would I share with young people as a parent or as a high school teacher: read the question, process slowly, and commit to giving it your best shot. I do not speak about my journey with confidence, I share my journey with thanks.
Church has been a formative part of my life but initially only through the commitment and presence of my maternal grandparents. For them it was still part of social fabric of our small market town. On being in church I chose not to sing, my gran insisted I sing to “keep up appearances” and make it look good, I opened my mouth and let her rip, my gran who could see no fault in her grandchildren and would always defend her view that each of us was perfect, with great haste elbows me and says “stop singing, stop singing”.
However my faith didn’t really settle, grow and disrupt within me until I moved to Canada in 2015 and started to attend St Aidan's Church on Oxford St W. There I found a community and leader who were equally enigmatic, cohesively ambitious and hopeful, and composers of the symphony of liturgy, stewardship and discipleship. It is here I draw my faith statement from.
My sense of faith is a soggy mushy bag of matter that each of us tries to solidify on ongoing basis. Sometimes we are successful; and sometimes, after being successful, that solid state reverts back into the soggy matter until we’ve tended to it again. Currently, I stand here with my soggy matter unable to add substance, trying to tend to that bag with and in love, with and in daily life, with and in prayer. With my own mental health and my discomfort with transition, my church cannot offer the grounding and stirring up I currently am lacking.
My sense of faith is discipleship. One of best lines about church-going I heard came from a talented, well known priest. He said to another individual: “Going to church is not just about receiving, it is also about recognizing the gifts you have and the gifts you can share”.
Some of the most formative parts of faith for me have been in participation. It has been a journey to recognize why but from being in Education for Ministry (EfM), director of children and youth, regular bartender for events and involved in many adult education opportunities there has been a common theme. A healthy safe faith community is able to encourage participation that is embedded in the liturgy, sacredness and congregational elements of worship. For me as an individual these experiences were humbling moments of listening and learning. The pride, gratitude and focus that I sometimes egotistically long for, was held in the collective and a healthy church community truly felt like a sum of all its parts.
My sense of faith is learning. On discussions of hospitality I once remember the diversity of the St Aidan's community being questioned. How could we do good work with such a homogenous looking group? This perception – as real and heart-felt as it may be when shared – valued the community on the look of the few photos on social media and not on the depth of conversation going on inside, outside and about the community. EfM for me was the best representation of how I experienced this. Committee and group forming had be reframed so each iteration of EfM or any other gathering was not extra to the community but a microcosm and continuation of the community. It was a sacred grounding experience that regularly disrupted, challenged and settled my ongoing embracing of my faith. It held a rawness that empowered collective authenticity within the church community.
Today, even though I’m not attending church, I thank the church continuously for emboldening me with a sense of faith that I can be proud of.
As a teacher in teacher’s college I was told do not mention religion. Don’t mention faith, don’t make other people feel uncomfortable or alienated. As I look being a teacher and confronting some of our complex challenges with our young people, it is only when I mention Faith, only when I mention Grace, only when I mentioned the idea of prayer, that young people actually start being vulnerable, feeling safety and a sense of belonging –not because I’m telling them they should believe what I believe, but because they are seeing it’s complicated for me too.
Every day, we are rewarded in education with the new outlook and experience of the world around us for better or worse. It goes back to that messy matter of faith that I discussed at the beginning of this statement. Statements of grace and faith and leaning into prayer help me work collectively from this dysregulation to regulation. It’s not ironic, it’s not an accident that for me my grounding and my sense of principles as a teacher are found in routine, listening, community music, intentionality, grace, and baptismal promise. It is the same Aidan's community that lives within me every single day even though I can’t walk through those doors right now.
Morgan Sherlock is a parishioner of St. Aidan's, London.