Today I knelt in church. I’ve never done that before. It felt a little odd, a little uncomfortable, the cushion not quite right and the edge of my seat pressing into my spine. Yet at the same time, it surprisingly seemed right, natural, perhaps beautiful.
My faith journey has been one of unfolding and puzzled curiosity. I have learned about icons, why people talk to saints, about liturgy and language, what’s up with all the bowing, how making the sign of the cross can be a prayer, and how prayer can be whatever speaks to your soul.
It’s been a long journey. One of pain, of hurting, loss and bereavement, of feeling unmoored and facing the wrong way. To have been brought up with faith, the roots are in deep. To realise you can no longer stay in the embrace of what you so long believed to be the right answer – this is agony. It feels like abandonment, both mine of God and the path I was shown, and God of me, that everything I held to is slipping from my grasp, that God is not God, or that I am not me…
But wait. There is a pinprick of light in the blackness. A small faraway star of hope. Because I’ve been through the valley of bewilderment and fear, and I’ve come out the other side. The quicksand shifting has revealed another path, and the clouds have parted to new morning. And the most amazing thing is that God is not God as I knew him to be, but God is still God, and was there all along.
In my terror of letting go, my fear to explore in case the catastrophe happened, the silent dread that one morning I would wake to find my faith drained to nothing, I had foolishly imagined it would make a difference to God’s loving of me.
It has been a long journey. But it has been one of joy, of looking through a door and seeing sunlight streaming in. Of learning that God is always God, and I am still me, even when things are not as they were before.
So I’m learning, experimenting, being brave to do what I’ve not yet done, and still wondering at myself that it should require bravery at all.
Today I knelt, and it spoke to my soul.
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