By Rev. Tianna Gocan
SOMEHOW, June 11, 2025 feels like it was both yesterday and a thousand days ago all at once.
The day that I had been waiting, praying, and hoping for since I first started discernment half a decade earlier had finally come.
During those five or so years I graduated from not one but two universities with two different degrees (my BSc and MDiv, from the University of Waterloo and Huron University College, respectively), went from being afraid to altar serve and preach to being excited to help set the table of our Lord and to write for and preach from the pulpit, and grew into the confident woman that I am now, with all the gifts and talents that I know God has given me for this life and vocation that He has called me to.
That confidence in my vocation was not something that I always had. When I first started, I was new to Anglicanism and to the discernment process and that made me nervous. During that time, there are so many moving pieces, so many requirements to fulfil, so many boxes to check, so many prayers that need to be answered, that you wonder if you’ll ever see the other side.
I remember, in the middle of my second year of my MDiv, reaching out to my friend, Rev. Allie McDougall, and saying “I feel like I’ve been swimming so long across this huge ocean, but I can’t see any land around me anymore. I’m getting tired of swimming, but I’m out too far to swim back, and there is no land in sight.” Then I asked, “Does that feeling get better as a postulant as time goes on?”
She replied “It does, but until ordination, the uncertainty lingers.”
While it did bring me comfort at the time, it still felt like I had a lot more distance to cover before I could even see the shore, let alone set foot on land again.
It’s funny, now that I reflect on this journey, I realize that, while that feeling was very much authentically how I felt at the time, it didn’t last long.
Sixteen months after that conversation, I received a letter from Bishop Todd informing me that I was now an ordinand, and that, God-willing, on June 11th, I would be ordained to the transitional diaconate.
When that letter came, all the doubt, uncertainty, and confusion melted away, and instead, I was filled with joy. Once I got that news it felt like this journey that has been so life-giving and fulfilling to me and has made me who I am today, was worth it. That call, which I had felt, believed in and that others had seen and affirmed, was about to be realized. And I was more than ready.
I remember that evening, before the service started, the Rev. Steve Greene, my past youth minister and now mentor and one of my presenters, asked me “Are you nervous?”, to which I replied confidently, “No, I’m ready, let’s do this”. I remember when he heard my reply to his question he almost couldn’t believe that I wasn’t nervous, but I wasn’t, not anymore.
God had prepared me for a time such as this, and I know that I am surrounded by my family, friends, colleagues, and all the saints, who were praying for me, encouraging me, and supporting me as I knelt and gave my “fiat”, my “yes” to the Bishop, to the church, and to God.
After receiving the laying of hands on my head, I was able to look out to all of them, beaming with ontological change, knowing that I was doing exactly what I was created to do, and how, my beloveds, can we be afraid when we are saying yes to God and following His will for us?
That night, my soul echoed the words of Saint Joan of Arc: “I am not afraid… I have God, my Lord… I was born to do this!”
Rev. Tianna Gocan is Deacon Assistant to the Archdeacon of Northern Huron.
Photos: Charlotte Poolton