How I got here

Becoming a Christian

I was born in 1963, the eldest scion of a solidly working class family. Like many British people my age, I was christened when I was a baby and I was brought up as what might be called a “cultural Christian”. I went to church on Sunday with mum and dad: I’d been christened in the local Methodist church, so that’s where we went. I don’t remember too much about this, apart from there being a back-lit cross at the front and that Methodists seemed to be big on singing hymns. I quite liked the hymn singing and I also liked the sound it made when we said the Lord’s Prayer together. I must have also liked what the vicar was doing because apparently, the first thing I said I wanted to be was the vicar.

I also sang hymns and did prayers in school assembly, I learned Bible stories in religious education. As a family, we celebrated Christian holidays - presents at Christmas, hot cross buns on Good Friday, chocolate eggs on Easter Sunday - and was imbued with the general idea that there was a God, Jesus was his son and he died for our sins on the cross. I got bored with Sunday School, though and mum said it was OK if my sister and I didn’t want to go any more. So we didn’t. I seem to recall mum and dad stopped going to church as well, either at the same time or soon after that.

As a family, we weren’t really all that religious thereafter, until my mum took a left turn into Mormonism when I was 9, followed by my dad, me and my sister. Mormons are keen on missionary work and in the 70s, that work was mostly done by Americans. The elders who came to our house were young men in their 20s and they seemed impossibly glamorous to me with their clean white shirts, their smart suits, their beaming smiles and those accents I’d only ever heard on the telly before then.

I developed a prepubescent crush on Elder Storm, who had a buzz cut and was tall and broad. I was baptised again in 1972, by Elder Storm, in the Mormon chapel in Reading. Mormons insist on rebaptism: they don’t do infant baptism and you have to be over eight before you can go through the ceremony. They also do it by full immersion, which was kind of terrifying. I recall watching the huge baptismal font slowly filling up with water, trying to remember the instructions I’d been given beforehand and the moves I’d rehearsed with Elder Storm. I trusted him to hold me tight and not let me drown, and so it was.

Mormons baptise in the name of the Trinity, but they don’t actually believe in it. They believe God and Jesus are separate, physically embodied beings you can touch and embrace, with the Holy Spirit as a kind of ghostly presence that’s somehow also there. I later came to the realisation that Latter Day Saints aren’t really Christians because their beliefs, the deeper you get into it, are so far leftfield of Christianity, they form a separate religion entirely. When I returned to faith this year, I wanted to find out if my Mormon baptism had negated my Christian baptism - it hadn’t.

I genuinely believed Mormon doctrine until something happened around the age of 13 and I ended up dropping out of regular attendance. That something was the realisation that I was gay.

I came out to my mum shortly before my 15th birthday in 1978. There were a few tears along the way but I believed she ended up coming to an acceptance of this fact. Dad took a little longer; I was told years later that there was a period when he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me. They both kept it from me, though, and mum had a word with him so the foolishness stopped. Being naive, I thought it was all a done deal then but two years later, mum told me she wasn’t coping as well as I’d thought, and had sought spiritual advice from her bishop.

Mormons have a lay ministry and bishops are chosen among the priesthood members in the local church. There are layers above that, but I’m a bit hazy on the details. He clearly sought advice from those in the upper echelons and, as a result, I received a letter from him. It was couched in warm words but it said that being gay was an excommunication matter. It asked me to attend a bishops’ council to discuss the issue.

At 17, being full of piss and vinegar as you are at that age, I wrote a defiant letter back in which I stated I was not going to answer their questions about, or apologise for, my life. His reply was again warm and accepting of my decision; he told me that the door would be always open for my return if I wanted it but I would therefore be excommunicated. I seem to remember there being some sort of certificate confirming this. I think mum was more devastated than she let on, but I felt I'd struck a blow for gay rights. I was out of the church and, shortly afterwards, I'd be out on the gay scene.

As far as religion goes, that was about it for me. I declared myself an atheist, a belief I held about myself with varying degrees of certainty for a while. There was a brief flirtation with Roman Catholicism when I was doing my A-levels. I went as far as attending mass regularly and taking a couple of catechism classes. However, when I found the local gay scene, such as it was, that fizzled out.

But I guess a door had been opened up for me through which Jesus kept popping his head every now and then to tap me on the shoulder and see if I was ready yet. There was another brief brush with Catholicism when I was 26. Looking back, these dalliances seem to coincide with times when I felt lonely and lost.

In the early nineties, by which time I'd been living in London for 5 years and had started a relationship with the man I'm still with today, it dawned on me that I'd actually never really been an atheist; that belief in God seemed as much a part of me as being right-handed or speaking English. Nothing much came of this realisation, apart from the usual vague “spirituality” everyone was proclaiming at the time; something to do with crystals, mainly.

There was yet another toe-dipping into Christianity after my mum died. Again, there was that link with feeling lost. When a parent dies, one of the anchors of your life has suddenly gone and you’re drifting in a weird space where nothing makes sense any more.

Looking back, I think the Lord was reaching out to me at all these various times, gently guiding and directing me towards Him. I still wasn’t ready, though. I had a career to focus on. I sublimated grief through work, going out, having fun, buying things I couldn't afford, living off credit and getting into a financial mess. I thought I was doing just about OK. Then depression, which had always been hovering around since I was a teenager, decided to swoop down and really dig its claws into me.

In 2014, I had to take my first long period of sick leave. There would be two others. In the space of a handful of years, my infant great-nephew died four days after birth, my father died and my husband had a heart attack. Then came COVID, the lockdowns, the anxiety, the struggle of trying to work from home. The return to the office did not go well for me. I’d lost all interest in my job, lost all ambition and questioned the point of everything I was doing. I had another spell of sick leave, my third and last, and during it, I decided to retire.

I had some savings thanks to dad leaving me some money, I was due a couple of good public service pensions, my husband said I was angry all the time and I felt like I had nothing left in the tank. Even the fumes I'd been running on had been exhausted. New Year’s Eve, 2021 was my last official day of work, although I wasn’t there because I’d taken a lot of holiday time. The relief, the sense of freedom - it was glorious. But again, at the back of my mind was a sense of being lost. The structure of my life had changed, the purpose of my life and my future was as yet unknown.

The Lord bided His time before He came calling again this year. I was watching the Papal election on TV. A new Pope had been declared and the exhilaration of the crowd in St Peter’s Square was palpable. People were singing, nuns were praying and there was joy on every face. I felt so deeply the sense of community and I wanted to be part of it. That tap on the shoulder came and I said yes, Lord, I’m ready, I’m on my way.

So here I am, aged 62 and stumbling back to faith. I read the Bible every day, using a podcast that promises to get me to have read it in its entirety in 365 days. I’ve found a local Anglican church I enjoy attending. I pray, formally, twice a day using the Book of Common Prayer. I’m reading, reading, reading and I’m enjoying every minute. It feels like coming home. Thank you, Lord, for finding me and for your persistence in bringing me here at last.

Amen.