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A Pilgrim’s Progress: My Journey of Faith – Taylor Carey

 

Our next new regular contributor is Taylor Carey, a relatively new Christian. We have been following each other on Twitter for a while, and he responded to a tweet from Chris Fewings about Lay Anglicana’s search for permanent correspondents. (Let no one doubt the ripple effect of social media!)  I asked him to write for us about his own spiritual journey, but first this is what he says about himself:

“I’m a nineteen-year-old Anglican, born on the Sussex coast and for some time a pupil at Lancing College. I now read History and International Relations at the University of St Andrews, where I’m Secretary of the Mary’s Meals Society and Publicity and Events Officer of the Catholic Society. Aside from a ‘recreational’ interest in theology and religious philosophy, I blog at DemoCritic and The Student Journals on all things political – especially on issues of the environment, global development and the international political economy.  I stay active on social media: on twitter as @TaylorBCarey, on Facebook and on LinkedIn. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to Lay Anglicana, and hope particularly to bring a young person’s perspective on contemporary church issues and especially matters of youth engagement and outreach. ”

 


 

 Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all

For some reason, those particular words from Isaac Watts’ magnificent When I Survey the Wondrous Cross always return to me when I’m asked about my own spiritual journey. I can remember where I was when they first hit home: kneeling before the twelfth Station, a replica Calvary, in the grounds of the Anglican shrine at Walsingham. The moment was apt. I was shortly to leave for pastures anew – a university far away, fresh communities and different experiences – and I found myself repeatedly asking the same question of God. ‘Just how much do you want of me?’ That Lenten evening gave me the answer.

Chance (or perhaps the Holy Spirit) would have it that my first meaningful encounter with God, a deep-seated feeling of embrace and totality, would occur whilst I was on pilgrimage. Of course, the gentle nudging had occurred some months beforehand, when, as a non-baptised, daunted new pupil at my sixth form college, I found myself sitting through something I couldn’t even pronounce properly (a ‘EU-CHAR –IST…what on earth is that?’, etc). I’d never been an atheist – that relies on having at least a straw man to debunk – I’d simply existed without any notion of the Divine. I’m naturally rather sceptical of momentary encounters with God – the sort of revelatory experiences that lead to short-lived bestsellers and suspicions of drug misuse – but I sensed, in a very gentle, unhurried way, during that first exposure to a Christian service of worship, a drawing in, an invitation, an acknowledgement of the need to ‘say more’. That same sense led me to the chaplain’s classroom (I can still remember my slightly stoic opening words, ‘I’ve never been to church before and I haven’t been baptised: I feel the need to do both’) and then to regularly participating in the liturgy of weekly masses. I was blessed with a thriving Christian community: daily low masses at 7.30am, a weekly high mass in a magnificent chapel, regular evening prayer, benedictions, and countless long chats with ‘Father R’. That rhythm of worship, constant yet not overbearing, efficient yet unhurried, conducted carefully and with reverence but not fussily, began to harmonise itself with the constant sense of invitation and enticement within me. It was as if, momentarily, on the whispers of the breeze as a cassocked minister walked past after distributing communion, that sense spoke to me: ‘Now you’re beginning to see. But there is more. You still feel the need to say more, don’t you?’

And then came the pilgrimage.  On the surface, a school outing, and all that that entails – a noisy bus, multiple stops at service stations, regrettable fast food, and immature humour. Yet, below that, I knew that my very presence there was itself an answer to the haunting reality I was repeatedly faced with: ‘You still feel the need to say more’. I certainly did. I had begun to read, too: foundational, basic works of theology, but powerful ones. On the shelves of the school library, I had found a collection Herbert McCabe: his language conveyed to me that same sense of invitation, and the acknowledgement of capturing merely a transitory feeling of plumbing further into the depths of that invitation. Along the way, I’d had reason to check myself. I was relieved to discover Charles Wesley’s hymn:

“And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Saviour’s blood!
Died he for me, who caused his pain!
For me? who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”

I’ve found myself mulling over the lyrics of And Can It Be That I Should Gain? repeatedly, when I’ve been unnerved by successive ‘leaps’ I’ve had to make, and when I have begun to doubt myself. Perhaps when the minibus, hours into the journey to Walsingham, stalled on service station exit, I found myself looking into things somewhat disproportionately – but where there was invitation, excitement, acceptance and jubilation there was fear and vulnerability too.  To me, Wesley’s hymn captures that chaotic mixture of delight and danger perfectly.

Walsingham is a place to come home to. It’s tranquil, picturesque, idyllic, and everything else one would expect of a sleepy rural Norfolk village. But it’s also beautifully familiar, even to the first time pilgrim. Awaking early on the first morning of our weekend stay, I felt a great deal of excitement and urgency: to race down to the shrine church to pray, attend the 7.30am mass and soak it all up. Yet I also felt a mysterious sense of achievement, as if that perpetual ‘sense’ had finally conceded ‘You’re here now’. After that, I felt nothing at all – silence from on high. I had got to where I was aiming, ticked all the boxes. Now what? No answer. Perhaps that was what a nun, whom I was lucky enough to get to know, had meant when she said to me ‘beware the noonday devil’. She used that phrase as a cautionary note after seeing my post-Confirmation enthusiasm: everything seems fast-paced, exciting and wondrous now, so easy to follow along. But, one day, you might come across the sudden, terrifying feeling of having done it all, and having nothing left to discover. And letting that take hold can be dangerous.

It took me some time to appreciate what a place of pilgrimage like Walsingham centres around. Too many of us today often feel that, in a simplistic world of problems and solutions, one goes to x to solve y. As if by virtue of meeting the requirement of being at Walsingham, one is entitled to all it can offer, and one will receive it automatically. Perhaps it is no coincidence then, given the prevalence of such thinking across society today, that the Anglican shrine makes a point of inviting pilgrims to ‘enter the mystery’. Pilgrimages are not static affairs – any reading of Chaucer or Bunyan should pick up on that – but rather acceptances of an invitation to go further, to restore movement to what can rapidly become stagnant spiritual lives, taken over by the ‘noonday devil’. How tempted I have been to put my faith and my relationship with God ‘on a shelf’ as though they were worthy of display but of no use to my everyday existence. How easily I have slipped, on countless occasions, from attentiveness to God’s call to casual complacency towards His presence and reality. That first pilgrimage was an awakening for me: a jolt to shake off the afternoon lethargy that, already, was beginning to cloud my Christian witness. But, most crucially, it was an opportunity to rediscover that continuing invitation from God, and to renew my response to Him.

Without saying too much of the many issues that, at times, can make Walsingham a place of pain and saddening conflict, I think I have benefitted hugely from approaching difficult questions and issues within the life of the church with that same sense of a continued invitation to ‘go deeper’. For me, acknowledging that simple truism that seems to leap out at me so often when I consider my faith – ‘You want to say more’ – and accepting its invitation to ‘enter the mysteries’ more deeply, more perceptively and with greater humility, has been a backbone for my own enquiries, arguments and conflicts. The more I reflect on my journey to faith, I realise what an inappropriate label that is. Just as one cannot simply go to a pilgrimage, I realise that I have not simply ‘arrived’ at my current relationship with God. Rather, my journey has been a commitment and act of trust in itself – a journey of faith – which has enabled me, despite the stumbles, to accept and embrace God’s invitation to discover and ‘say more’, and be transformed by His love.

After all, kneeling before that twelfth Station, asking the Lord what He wanted of me, the answer was crystal clear:

“Love so amazing, so divine
Demands my soul, my life, my all”.

 

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Editor’s Postscript.

There are days when I am depressed at the future of the Anglican Communion in general and the Church of England in particular. And then there are days like today when I give thanks for Taylor Carey, Wendy Dackson, Chris Fewings and all the other contributors to this blog. A world and a Church which has such people in it is not yet lost!

I offer Grandmère Mimi’s Bloggers Prayer, from the Book of Common Prayer of The Episcopal Church (1979):

Almighty God, you proclaim your truth in every age by many voices:

Direct, in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read;

that they may do their part in making the heart of this people wise, its mind sound, and its will righteous;

to the honor of Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

7 comments on this post:

UKViewer said...
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Thank you for a powerful story of witness, particularly what happens when the excitement of those first times wear away.

It takes time for an adjustment to the real life situation to strike. This is where the mystery remains, but the excitement drains. The part where you once again, despite prayer, worship or spiritual encounters with others, feel empty and bit like an empty drum being beaten on handed, the other hand is missing.

I’ve been through this, sometimes called ‘the dark night of the soul’ where you feel desolate and abandoned. But eventually through perseverance in prayer and worship something comes back. The empty well is gradually refilled with a well of grace and joy in the knowledge that despite ourselves, God love us, want us and is with and in us always. We just need to look in the right place in the right way.

I still have off days, when I can’t even pray, but I just let it be, knowing that its perhaps another test of my faith – something which seems to happen all of the time. It’s how we react to those tests that seems to matter. If we welcome them and go with them, we are healed, if we resent them and rail against them, we just seem to get worse.

Loving your story and Mimi’s prayer.

Taylor Carey said...
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Thank you for those kind words and your own reflections – the ‘dark night of the soul’ really hits the nail on the head.

I’m reminded again of Michael Ramsey (I always seem to return to his words): ‘If you can’t want God, you can at least tell Him that you want to want Him’, etc.

Your words are a great comfort; thank you once again.

06 August 2012 19:56
06 August 2012 18:37
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Thank you Taylor…I was immeidately pulled in by the beware part..for me, it´s being aware that I don´t have to fill up every breathing moment of every breath each day…I could learn to relax and nature, and the Holy Spirit, could move about, in and out, quite freely with me ONLY ¨being¨ me…my quest was often unnecessary when I´ve been able to take comfort and even TRUST God and the authentic version/likeness of God in me…whew, what a gift.

Taylor Carey said...
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Thank you Leonardo – That’s a wonderful way of putting it: the trust and freedom to simply ‘be’. I think that, as you suggest, that might help us all to see God in others, too – even when that’s a challenge!

The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi comes to mind: ‘Lord, make me an instrument of your peace’.

Yes: let’s let God use us, and not assume the other way round!

Thanks once again for your thoughts.

06 August 2012 20:42
06 August 2012 20:23
Wendy Dackson said...
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Thank you, Taylor! There is a wonderful story about Archbishop William Temple’s mission to Oxford University (1933, I think). St Mary the Virgin (the University church) was packed out on the last night of the mission, and the hymn was the one you cite. Just before the last verse, Temple stopped the organist, and addressed the congregation. He said,’Read the words. If you believe them with all your heart, sing as loudly as you can. If you don’t believe them at all, don’t sing. If you believe them a little and want to believe them more, sing them as softly as you can.’ Then he signalled to the organist to play.

The entire congregation…WHISPERED the hymn.

Glad to know there’s still power for younger people to feel that!

Taylor Carey said...
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Thank you Wendy – what a wonderful story, I’ll remember that one!

07 August 2012 05:41
06 August 2012 22:00
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¨I think that, as you suggest, that might help us all to see God in others, too – even when that’s a challenge!¨ Taylor

Now, that IS a challenge!

Thanks for the observation (I feel as if I´ve been taken by the shoulders and given a little ¨wake up¨ call)…once upon a time (a true story) I tried to discern good from bad (in myself) and then thought the very ACT of discerning good from bad (in others and myself) was keenly important to having any kind of wholesome relationship with fellow human beings…I had to learn how to quit ¨portraying¨ good (the ¨bad¨ came quite naturally but sometimes was hard to self-recognize) and I had to learn how to say NO to myself, and others, when it was clear that acting/pretending I was spiritually fit and emotionally healthy was very unhealthy! I had learned how to lie to myself and others–a really good ACTOR!

In the last couple of decades I´ve been given example after real life example in my daily life about how learning to say NO to myself and others is essential to having peace of mind and TRULY caring for others… having a active mind (as opposed to a lazy/passive one or a dodgy/frightened one) gives me the emotional/spiritual stability to say NO, say YES, to say MAYBE and sometimes CHANGE my mind entirely…trouble is, I´m still trying to embrace balance by remaining open to loving fellow human beings to the extent that I think Christlike…this, I must leave mostly to God because personal perfection is far, far away from me…but, I try and keep my eye on the ball.

07 August 2012 00:09

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