Lenten Journey: Ash Wednesday Confession

It is Ash Wednesday, a fitting time for a confessional: I am a fraudulent Church-goer. Confession is much more to do with the need to unburden ourselves than to recieve forgiveness I think. Although it also contains the search for acceptance of how we really are as people, underneath. On Sunday I had to run away in frustration from the morning service. My need to flee from Church Services has not diminished as much in five years as I had hoped it would. I thought it would be easier than this by now. It isn't just me, Graham has the same problem, but his is more excusable somehow, what with me being the one who works as a Pastor. I love the people, my glimpses of God are in the ordinary exchanges and communal activities. Sunday services fail every time to give me the same experiences and what we do on Sundays never seems to link up with my experiences of God during the week. It is as though there is an unbridgable gap for me between what we do on Sundays, something which more often feels like 'what they do on Sundays', and what I do during the week. The times I spend with people outside of Sunday services are shot through with miracle. There is dramatic courage and a complete unawareness among the people I serve that they are the ones that show me God and not the formal services in Church.

My dilemma is that I love the people who do the Sunday Services. I find it so hard to tell them how I feel about something so precious to them. I go out of duty and loyalty, out of respect and pious as it sounds, I do not go for myself. The worst part about this is that it makes me a martyr and I am continue to simply view Sunday mornings with dread and resentment. I used to think this was due to some disobedience or rebellion within myself. The first reasonable question anyone might ask is 'if it is so bad, why have you persevered for so long?'. It is a question you would ask of someone filing for divorce. We always hope for better times. It is a basic human need to hope for improvement and when we want something to work out, we keep believing that it will. I thought at first that Church services would change and become more bearable. I also thought that perhaps it was possible to be instrumental in that change. I came to believe that I could be instrumental in that change. But like any relationship which begins with a premise that one person can alter another this was a doomed endeavour. Once I had realised this I embarked on a long period of soul-searching, reaching within myself for all the resistances and prejudices and barriers which were a result of my own being. I looked to my childhood and to other aspects of my life which may have led me to feel alienated from others. I looked at my propensity to compete and to improve and raise standards. I questioned my motivation for being in Church services. Seeing that this seemed equally unchangable I began to think that I must simply attend and block all thoughts of needing to change things and accept things as they are. This worked better than anything and I devised more and more strategies for blocking out the experience. I got very involved with baking cakes, reading Bible passages, doing the prayers and reading around the subject of Church services. I believed that if I read lots of books and tried really hard to grasp at the roots of this tradition and respected its value as something that had lasted and stood the 'test of time', that I would be less conflicted about it. But this is not sustainable and does not nurture a soul. By now I had been battling for years to overcome my issues with Church Services, I believed that something would heal within me and the bad memories of Church services I carried with me would dissolve leaving room for positive ones. The healing took place but the services continued to depress and frustrate me. I devised a new method, one which has been by far the most effective. I started to see the services as the rites and rituals of another religion. I tried to realise that what was being done was 'other' to any other experience and must be treated as such. I went to a service as an onlooker trying to observe dispassionately what was going on and I detached myself to a respectful distance so that I could feel as I did when I watched my Muslim sisters at prayer. This was much more comfortable. Seeing traditions as the traditions of others makes them seem much more valuable. But nonetheless it seemed like cowardice and even seemed patronising to attend services like a sociological experiment.

Something wonderful did happen though, and this is the thing which has kept me attending despite all my tortured confusion. Communion began to matter. I found it really helpful and a point at which I abandoned reason and thought and entered into a different world. I thought that this would help, and to a certain extent it did because it motivated me to go to services and endure the rest of it. This was a positive development and at least at one point in the hour and a half proceedings on Sunday mornings I was engaged with what was happening. But it had its downside. The moment of transformational experience was five minutes long in a one and a half hour ordeal and then I became very confused about why we needed to do the rest of it. I began to wonder if I was an Anglican at all. Or whether it was an accident of birth. So the torment began afresh with me going out of necessity for about five minutes of an entire morning, and the exquisite intensity of that moment made the rest of that time interminable and excruciating. It was like taking a masterpiece of art and rolling it up and putting it in a corner and putting a blanket over it.

Now I feel I am back at the beginning of my five year journey. It is a feeling of complete failure to live up to my own expectations. It is also a deeply frustrating sense of having put heart and soul into trying to acknowledge the need for Sunday formal worship and trying every possible means with which to engage with and tolerate it, with a disappointing outcome. I am an Anglican and this means that I am part of a tradition which values consistency and repetition. I long for variety and the tradition imposes regularity. I long to be involved and use my skills to frame this beautiful thing, I want to be able to hear a voice that is a different voice. Anglicanism is an Episcopal religion with a comittment to Ordained ministry. I must accept that my place is to sit and endure it and to attend on behalf of those who cannot, or to go at a different time in a different context.

The worst time for going to a Church service is when we are most in need. Those desperately depressed or anxious will never go to formal services. It is too hard. Those who have been abused will never risk The Peace which involves physical contact with strangers. Those with claustrophobia will find there too little liberty with which to flee without making account of themselves. Those with secrets will not want to spend time with people asking 'what is wrong'? Those who cannot engage with what happens in Church on Sunday morning will mostly be kind honest people who would not want to offend those who need these rituals. Those with consciences will not be prepared to say things they don't believe (something which to my shame I do every Sunday).

I feel such terrible shame over my feelings towards Church. Most of the people I deeply love have dedicated their lives to this passion. I don't want to hurt them. But when I sit week after week, desperately trying to distract myself, thinking of all the contributions I might never be able to make, with skills I desperately hope one day to use I am on the verge of tears most of the time.

Am I such a total fool not to have embraced my own difference? I think so. I think I am on the edge of a wonderful discovery that it is not a thing of shame to be unable to relate to this thing that is of such an alien texture in such a foreign language. It is a wonderful pleasure and privilege on the few occasions when I do not feel despair at spending yet another hour and a half of my life watching people I love enjoying a banquet which is not to my taste.

Sometimes following the teachings of Jesus is sacrificial in ways we might not immediately suspect. For me, my cross to bear, is the formal proceedings which those I love hold so dear. What I must remember is that they will forgive me. I have given it my best shot. I am not a coward and I am tenacious. The people who love me acknowledge that and might even be pleased for me that I have reached a point in my life at which I am no longer going to beat myself up for being someone who is alienated by Formal Worship. They have always known that I can't help it and that it is who I am. My Church-going friends have always known better than I have that it is that very isolation and marginalisation which makes it so instinctive to me to insist upon proper unequivocal hospitality. That hospitality is to the stranger in myself.