Focus on Life - Week 9

Oh my, week 9 already in Sally Russick's Focusing on Life photos challenge...

This week's prompt is Knock, Knock... a picture of a door, or a gate...

I knew exactly which door I was going to photograph as soon as I read the prompt...

This is the door to St Wulfram's, Grantham's parish church, which is almost a mini cathedral, and shows what a significant place Grantham was, when the church was first built in the 1300s.

But it has a very personal meaning for me, as I have returned recently to the Anglican Church, with which I have had a very long, often stormy, relationship!

I discovered, by chance, that St Wulfram's offers an Iona community communion service every other Wednesday, and so I have been attending for the last couple of months...

Crossing this threshold (not easy, as they have to open these impressively huge double doors, and put down a ramp, for me to drive my scooter in), marks a deeply significant homecoming for me to the Church of my childhood, and I am deeply grateful to the friendly helpers who have warmly welcomed me.

I was in the choir in my village church growing up - it was a place of safety and refuge.

I was very active in St Aldate's, a vibrant evangelical church, when in college reading Theology.

I went to Kenya for a year to be a missionary at a Bible College in 1987, where I met Nick, my future husband.

I took a Master's Degree at a seminary in California, when we were first married.

I trained to be a lay Reader when we returned to England, and was dedicated in the very impressive Southwell Minster.

But sadly, this is where it all became unstuck...

I thought I was being called to the ministry... but the Bishop of Southwell, at that time, was anti women clergy! The more involved I became in our local church in Newark, the more I felt the higher powers in the diocese against me...

The more I questioned the Anglican Church's (not our local church's per se) official stance on women, gays, and any who didn't conform to nice, middle-class values, the more I felt alienated, and eventually, closed off from the God I had known only as a safe place, a shelter, since childhood.

And, for more than a decade, I have been searching to find a god by whom I could feel comforted, and to whom I could feel connected.

I have been on a long spiritual journey and have finally realized the God I feel closest to, is the intimate Mystery encountered by the medieval mystics; the awesome Creator worshipped by Celtic communities, like the one at Iona. In fact, the God worshipped in the often wacky carvings, and the always lofty gothic structures, of the Church of England.

There is still a lot deeply disturbing about the organized Anglican Church, but there is, as always, pockets of sanctuary... and I am thankful that I have found one in this gloriously impressive church just down the road...