Conversion, 30 years on

15 April 1995. Holy Saturday in Mt Airy, Maryland, spent with my bestie and her family. Just an ordinary Saturday back then. I can’t remember if I arrived in time to watch X-Files the night before (if only Fox had stuck to that and The Simpsons, and never moved into the news business), but I’m guessing I would have done.

Well, it was an ordinary day, until that night.

It was my first Easter Vigil in a world almost 6 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War, in a world that looked forward, though you could feel the momentum slow in the 90s, which should have been a sign that the ship was about to reverse.

It was before 9/11, the Iraq War, the murder of Yitzhak Rabin (which was only months away), the complete collapse of the Republican Party into blithering de-evolution at Flowers for Algernon speed (Newt Gingrich was already holding up neon signs, to be fair)…

…Liberal democracy and freedom was on the march across that shining bridge. It was a time of relative ease, hope, and ignoring the signs that there were cracks in the foundation of the world order. Not even Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and Bosnia gave us pause.

Closer to home, I loved teaching and the house I lived in. Relationship with family was an uneasy truce or almost non-existent, but sustainable, or so I thought. I could train as a eucharistic minister at my church. All was as it should be, as I stared out the door of my best friend’s and her family’s - a family I had chosen and who had chosen me a couple of years before. Oh, there were cracks in my foundation as well, but one of my super-talents was sublimating that uneasiness.

The road to this day had been long in coming…my mind drifted back:

“Daddy, daddy, you left Mommy in there!”

No response from the head I could see resting against the driver’s seat, so I repeated myself relentlessly as he drove off unheeding. As the cry reached its desperate crescendo, my 5-year-old eyes popped open and I found myself staring at my bedroom ceiling.

A dream. Of course. Even my kindergarten self knew how unlikely it was that we’d stop at the Catholic church that fascinated me every time we drove by it, let alone my mother getting out to actually walk in. However, none of that stopped me from telling my father, every time we drove past the church for weeks afterwards, that he had left my mother in there.

He finally turned to me in exasperation, “We’ve never been in there. We are NEVER going into a Catholic church or any church. Ok?”

As time passed and the dream receded into the background of study, Islamic Saturday school, struggling with a deeply dysfunctional family, an uncle’s sexual abuse, one might think that the fascination with a strange church might disappear into the depths without a trace or hope of return.

Instead, it turned out to be the faint, early glimmer of my road home.

No matter how far away I seemed, seeds of Catholicism found me. My paediatrician mother would get copies of Bible Stories to put in her waiting room and I would devour them before they left the house. In 1978, young me rejoiced when John Paul I was elected and sobbed when he died. Oscar Romero and Denis Hurley were my first clerical crushes, causing a subsequent priest friend to wryly observe, ‘No wonder the rest of us have disappointed you.’ But above all, even as a child, it was where I found home – my closest friends were Catholic, and the love I received from them became my first taste of sanctuary.

But those seeds could so easily have fallen by the wayside, on stony ground, or amongst thorns, where they could have been easily lifted, scorched, or choked. It took a long time to realise that I drew the road to me as much as the road drew me to it.

From the time I was very young, I could feel God brushing against my skin in all things – I’d even talk to dust particles as if they were sentient. That sense of an immanent God clashed with the Islamic concept of a God far above us who required submission.

At best, my parents’ Islam was cultural, so a child with a mystical bent was not an easy fit. Somehow, in the midst of it all, I had an unshakeable sense that you sacrifice yourself for that which is greater than you are: a child, the many, to end the suffering of others, for the One. Even before I had any clear idea who He was, I understood why Jesus was on that cross.

Eventually the rift between Islam’s theology and my innate understanding became too great, and in my adolescence, I lapsed, with all the requisite snark of a Generation Xer. It wasn’t until I moved out that I felt safe enough to do something other than rebel.

The path picked up with my lab colleague, Janice Briscoe, a convert to Catholicism, who, on hearing my childhood dream, muttered, ‘He DID leave your mother in there.’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’

I worried at that throwaway remark for years, during which time the two final parts of my journey slotted into place: my time as a teacher at the Hebrew Academy, a Modern Orthodox Jewish school, and my friendship with Anni.

In September 1992, I walked into Hebrew Academy with great trepidation because I knew it was reasonably obvious I’d been a Muslim. I need not have worried: it felt like home within a week. My work world was a school in which the sound of prayer punctuated the rhythm of the day; wonderful, warm staff who invited me to their Seders, Purim services, and cantorial concerts; cheeky students who patiently explained rabbinical commentary; affectionately shaking my head as I passed rabbis who argued in hallways and became good friends. I became immersed in a religion that was grounded in daily life, one that was a way of being, not just an identity ritual or something to learn on a Saturday. To this day, this homegoy™ (my friend Dorothy’s term for her non-Jewish friends) can feel the rhythm of the Jewish liturgical calendar in her bones.

I joke that I nearly converted to Judaism, but bacon and shellfish got in the way.

October 1992 brought the final step in the road, in the form of my sister from another mister, Anni, a fellow Renaissance Festival dancer, whose parents took me in as if I were their long lost eldest daughter. Wrapped in that love, I learned that American Catholicism was as much about boisterous affection, fuzzy toilet seat covers, pictures of Our Lady and the pope, and ‘tuna casserole Friday’ as it was about going to church.

It was with Anni that I discovered the joy of Latin mass in the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception’s crypt church, where I was able to articulate my sense of the sacraments as being Heaven kissing our lives on Earth, invisible love made visible. It was about telling Anni, ‘The guy I’m dating just asked why I don’t become Catholic,’ punctuated with an eyeroll.

I could have saved my eyes the exercise. When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 1993, I suddenly realised that I needed a spiritual community, somewhere to fall. In one of our numerous phone calls, I said to Anni, ‘If only I could become Catholic.’

‘You can,’ she said.

My squeal of glee left her ears ringing.

RCIA had already started for that year, so I joined the next one in September 1994.

And here I was, about to become a Catholic at St Michael’s, Mt Airy, MD (USA) on 15 April 1995.

That night felt suspended in time, as if my world was holding its breath. I felt every detail, from my wet hair as I was baptised to the first nibble of the host… ‘Cardboard. Definitely cardboard,’ and the first sip of wine, ‘Oooh, like Manischewitz. I like it.’

And then the world rushed back in. What now?

You’ve come a long way, baby…but you’re just at the start of the road. I look over my shoulder at that 20something girl and think, ‘Oh, honey. You don’t know the half of it. Would you have started if you did?’

As a wedding is to a marriage, so is a baptism/first communion to a faith journey. Eighteen months after that, I left the cosy world of being a Eucharistic Minister at St Mike’s to come to Oxford for an MSc and stumbled over a church which had a Sunday 11am Latin mass. I rejoiced – a seamless transition, a church that would be a home here.

Let’s just say it was about as smooth as a Himalayan mountain road.

The Oratory received me as a toddler Catholic and shaped me more than anywhere else — through the sacraments, not least confession, where I became ‘irimtated’, not ‘irritated’ (I’ll explain one day), through wrestling with theology, sermons, bumping up against people, being blessed, being challenged (also a blessing), feeling shut out from the sanctuary, feeling held by those who became friends - and are still so today.

Fr Jerome taught me that I could lean left politically and love Latin mass - and not to trust my first impressions. The priest I wrote off when I first arrived as probably a Telegraph fan absolutely was not, and after I left, would always come to say hello. I can still see him the last day I saw him, on the forecourt, his face lighting up as he saw me.

Fr Dom was my confessor — he still is, in so many ways, as well as being a good friend — whose warmth, gentleness, and wicked humour was sanctuary in tough times. And that gentleness did not mean he let you off the hook in confession. I was walking out of the confessional once when he said, ‘I want you to do one more thing for me.’

‘Mmmmm?’ I turned around unsuspectingly.

‘I want you to think about what we mean when we say we’ll forgive, but we won’t forget. Because I think we often mean we won’t forgive. I might be wrong; come back and let me know.’

Busted. That time and so many others.

Fr Nick & I talked about anything and everything & could communicate layers of ‘What on earth was that?’ with a look. One of my prime achievements was finding him *10 Lindt bunnies on Holy Saturday* to give the servers. I’ll be cashing that chip in one day, Padre, just to let you know.

Fr Rupert and I became friends once I’d left and he’d arrived and our conversations run from theology across religions to wry observations to shoes, ships, and sealing wax…and as with Fr Jerome, despite initial uncertainty, I now can’t imagine my circle without him.

There was John, with whom there were trips to Walsingham and so. many. conversations…an even greater joy, through him, I found my sister from another mister, his wife, Liz, whose friendship is always sanctuary.

Also Liz the Second, who grew up 25 minutes from me, whom I met at the O, and we became friends later: another heartsister who is there through the good, the bad, and the ‘hey, this may sound a little crazy, but...’ in the way all your best friends are.

And the list goes on - Gillian, Jane, Asta, the Bales, Paul…

…some stayed, some did not, as I did not, but their friendship, love, challenge, and faith shaped me in myriad ways into someone that long ago young woman wouldn’t have expected.

Because of my own wounds, the Oratory was the crucible in which I came face to face with everything - where I fought the battles I couldn’t fight with my father, with my anger at my lost childhood, with feeling as if everyone was trying to amputate parts of me to shape me into someone they could handle.

There were intense, searing times; there were tears; there was laughter; there were fights and reconciliation; all of it shaping me and others. But as with a butterfly beating its wings against a chrysalis, growth needs resistance, and that resistance turned out to be a blessing – the space to push against the patriarchy as an adult with the resources to do so helped heal the child who couldn’t.

Whether it was in my particular church, or more broadly with the growing neoconservative traditionalist movement, staying and pushing forced into clear relief what mattered, stripping my faith right back to the essentials: my relationship with God, my unshakeable faith in the events of Holy Week, my belief in the sacraments (particularly the Real Presence) as emanations of the holy into the mundane, my commitment to our social teaching, the oneness of G-d’s creation.

During this time, I wound up working down the road at Blackfriars, which means there’s an iteration of the Oxford Dominican community that will always be mine, frozen in the mid-noughts, a community that softened the sharper edges of that time. So much love to all of you, you know who you are, and know that your monastic steadiness, humour, and love kept me on the path more than you will ever know.

A special mention, though, to my Dominican friend of 28 years, Fr Peter Hunter, with whom I’ve laughed, cried, fought like siblings, leaned on, discussed everything from philosophy and theology to politics to family. Thank you, Durban surfer boy, you’re forgiven every time you’ve ever been late - and I always mean now now, not just now.

Eleven years ago, shortly after Easter, I began to edge away from the Oratory and stepped into another St Michael’s, an Anglican one, where I am now. I’m pretty sure it convinced Anni, my sponsor, that Archangel Michael was keeping an eye on me.

The first thing that happened was that Sarah Scheele came over and said hello, a week later asking me to help with the autumn fair, where I shared a tent with Malcolm, David F, and Will (I think!), and had a wonderful time. From watching Fr Gavin do a mean barbeque (as well as celebrate, preach, pastor, etc.) to long, heart to heart conversations with curates Samantha and Clare, Sarah and Jonathan (port!), to leaning on David when he and Sue came back from holiday early in my churchwardenship and his quiet, ‘We’re here,’ he and Sue offering sanctuary and foundation (as well as a lot of Traidcraft dried mango, Chilean honey, and coffee) to Claire reminding me that I needed to be Irim as churchwarden, not someone else to the Morrises with their open warmth and affection to everyone who welcomed me with open arms and laughed with me over coffee & cake or clearing the sanctuary.

And to those of you from OCMS, New Road, online, and everywhere else in my life, whatever your faith or non-faith may be, from Paul & those deep faith & theology discussions with a side of linguistics to Terry and our book groups & heart to hearts to David, Robert, Erica, Jon, Emily, Ed, Kirsty, and our conversations throughout the rabbit warren to my bhais Valour & Fox to my online theological family - Sanjee, Dean, Edward, Jonathan, and Jo - to Mike & Susan who held the space and my breaking heart the night before I flew to my dying father and so many more - thank you, so much more than I can say - you have kept me on the way.

That girl, 30 years ago today, would never have expected to be here: in another country, not teaching, discerning to do what her heart knew it wanted then, but thought it could never chase. She would never have believed that she would reconnect with high school classmates, deepening friendships. She’d have laughed you out of the Poplar Springs’ St Michael’s if you’d told her she’d go no contact with her parents, only to have her last words to her father be ‘I love you.’

She would never have thought that she would find her place in her own skin or in her family - of origin, of choice, of spirit.

To all of you named in this piece and to the many of you named only in my heart - you did that. You made that possible because, as Emma Thompson said of Alan Rickman, you saw me clearly, and you did not spare me the view. Keep doing that.

And to the Oratory and everyone in it, who did the heavy lifting with that hurting, confused, grieving, angry young woman, and kept the fire burning under that crucible, thank you more than I can ever say. As Rupert said after I popped into the 7.30 mass, later telling him it was a bit of a difficult anniversary, ‘Then it's good you were home with us for a bit this morning.’ No matter how far I wander, you will always be that. I’ll see you in the Lady Chapel.

Well. This absolutely did not go in the direction I expected, but I should have. When our G-d is a G-d of relationship, where else could it have gone but to the relationships that brought me to this road, alchemised me, and kept my feet on it and my eyes on Him? We do nothing alone; we are born, live, grow, and die in relationship - to ourselves, to others, to the world, to what we worship - and we all worship something or someone.

And so, as I turn from reminiscence to look forward, what now? Unlike her, I don’t know where this road leads…but I know I will love and be loved on it.

What I do know is that one day, I hope someone can say of me what Fr Samuel Wells said of Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani: She knows whose she is, so she has no problem knowing who she is.

May that faith keep my feet on the pilgrim road, my conversion new every morning, my prayer one with Charles Wesley’s:

Ready for all thy perfect will,
my acts of faith and love repeat;
till death thy endless mercies seal,
and make the sacrifice complete.