Sometime back Giles Frasier, host of Beyond Belief, a Radio 4 podcast featuring anodyne ecumenical reflections on Faith, interviewed Giles Coren, According to the episode blurb he 'was raised in the Jewish tradition, became an atheist and who now feels at home in a Christian Church'.
This wasn't quite accurate. Coren was not raised in any religious tradition. His parents, ethnically Jewish, were secular and had no connection to any Jewish tradition. He 'married out', began going to church with his son who, attending a CofE school had become an enthusiast, and found the church appealing and comfortable. Would he join, Frasier asked? Probably eventually, Coren said, but certainly not as late as on his deathbed.
I was amazed that Coren was so calm about his quasi-conversion. He was coming from exactly the place that I came from, even though I had glommed onto the Church earlier in life when I was 14 at Beaverbrook Music Camp. I must be unique in that my three summers there determined the course of my life – my profession and my religion.
I loved singing sacred music in Latin: the Schubert Mass in G, which first got me hooked, Mozart's 'Regina Coeli' and especially Haydn's 'Te Deum' because I was, and am, a Haydn fan. It wasn't merely an aesthetic interest. We were given translations of the texts and, in musicianship class when we were working on the Schubert, a lecture on the mass as a musical form and the theology. Every composer worth their salt had written one – including, we were told, our very own composer-in-residence, Bob Morris who, sitting at the piano, blushed.
I was drawn by the theology – and the vision: 'tibi, omnes angeli, tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabile voce proclamant sanctus, sanctus, sanctus'. That was the vision of Dante's mystic rose, the vision of a multitude, in the light. I loved it, wanted to be part of it – it was 'my soul in paraphrase'.
When I got back home from camp, I started investigating whether it was possible to join the Church. I'd never heard of anyone joining a religion on their own. I thought you had to be born into it or, at a stretch, married into it. I read what I could find at the mall bookstore and local library branch and discovered that it was possible. The bad news was that if you were Jewish it wasn't. Atheism was ok, in fact normal, but Christianity was not: to join the Church was to be self-hating, sick, and neurotic.
Like my cohort I was intimidated by Psychology: it was the ultimate authority. At dorm bull sessions we regularly discussed being neurotic and hoping that one day we would be unneurotic. We had no idea what 'neurotic' meant, and I suspect that no one else did either – starting with Freud himself. I thought neurosis was a matter of being socially inept and worried about various protocols – like how to deal with hair salons where there were unwritten rules, where conversation had to be made, and tipping was involved. Being unneurotic, the state we all hoped to achieve, was having friends, having sex and, more broadly, getting around the world smoothly and not being peculiar.
An interest in religion was, I knew, peculiar. Margaret Mead, whose parents were secular, agnostic academics, described joining the Episcopal Church at the age of 11 in her memoir, A Blackberry Winter, and how even then she knew it was peculiar: you weren't supposed to join a church voluntarily, to be interested in religion or to like it. The message I got about religion was the message Victorian women got about sex: you might have to do it, but you weren't supposed to like it.
After singing Hadyn's Te Deum I knew there was no way back: I would join the Church. But it wasn't as easy for me as it was for Coren, drifting into the Church, or for Margaret Mead. Maybe it was the difference in time and place. I lived in a secular world where Christianity was simply not done and, to the extent that anyone noticed it at all they were dismissive or hostile. The literature I read in religion classes and on my own, concurred – explicitly, at length, and with conviction. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, in The Death of God, announced that God had died 'in our time and in our Existenz' (whatever that was) and made the cover of Time Magazine.
More immediately the Church on the ground, instead of telling me that Christianity was ok and that joining the Church was a normal, reasonable thing to do, sent the message it was, at the very least, peculiar. By the time I got to college most campus ministries had shut down. My college had a nominal Presbyterian affiliation and a concrete semi-Gothic chapel but there were no religious services of any kind on campus, and the chapel was always locked.
When I'd finally nerved myself to contact the curate at the church in town he didn't take me seriously. Once I'd managed to join the church it had nothing for me. I went to a rehearsal for a folk mass in which 'young people' were invited to bring their instruments, thinking I might want to crack out my violin and have a go. The 'young people' were middle school children brought by their moms: it was clear that I wasn't expected to be there. Confirmation was church graduation and the expectation was that graduates would only return when they were married with children.
Insiders don't appreciate how removed secular people are from the Church or how difficult it is to get in. What's the problem they think? Just go to church, check it out to see if you like it, get acquainted, drift in. For me that would have been like going to one of the scary hair salons where there were protocols and unwritten rules. I was afraid I'd be noticed and recognized as an outsider, that I'd have to perform, that I'd be embarrassed.
From my perspective it looked like the Church's goal was to drive people away and shut down. I was taking religious studies classes and read the contemporary literature, most of which featured Modern Secular Man, a logical construction like Russell's Average Plumber, for whom religious belief was untenable. The end of religion as we knew it, the story went, was imminent and inevitable. And that was a good thing: churches would become vehicles for social service and political action; God was, as Harvey Cox said, a 'work partner' in the secular city.
I was not happy about this: I liked religion and thought it was worthwhile. I saw the Church, led by self-hating Christians, collapsing and doing nothing to promote its own survival, making no effort to get people in, making one dumb mistake after another. And I learnt over the years that as a layperson I couldn't do anything about it. I wanted to be ordained so that I could do something about it. I had lots of ideas for which I, as a layperson, wasn't taken seriously and which I couldn't implement.
There were probably a variety of reasons why I was turned down for ordination, but I suspect the fundamental reason was that they just didn't understand my motives. They wanted stories. Maybe that was why the COM-chair told me, after the whole business was over, that she knew I would never be a priest because I was 'so full of timetables and schedules' and why, decades earlier when I set out to join the Church the curate hadn't taken me seriously. I didn't have a story – I just wanted to know the procedure for joining the Church and then how to get on track for ordination, what qualifications I needed, and whether I could fit a year of seminary into my sabbatical plans.
By the time I tried to get ordained, I had a fair idea of what was expected and revealed nothing because I didn't have what they would accept as a plausible story. I wasn't looking for a job in the church; I wasn't interested in social service or political action or community organizing; I wasn't interested in any kind of pastoral work or any of the lay 'ministries' into which they tried to deflect me. I couldn't say that, so it meant I had no story. Maybe they were puzzled or thought that I had some ulterior motive. One of my Compuserve friends, a priest, conjectured that they might have suspected I wanted to be ordained to use it to my advantage at work. But that was clearly off: being a female Episcopal priest at a Catholic college wouldn't have done anything for me and I was, in any case, tenured.
I was at St. John's, where I was doing something-I-know-not-what for the church, when the bishop phoned to deliver the coup de grâce. When I asked whether there was a reason why I wouldn't be considered for ordination he said that it 'wouldn't be fruitful to discuss reasons', but that they 'saw no call' in me. This was utter rubbish because none of them believed in supernatural 'calls' any more than I did. But, as with natural deduction, conditionalization is everything: IF there was such a thing as being 'called' I was most certainly called to be a priest.
I gave it my all trying to get ordained. I just wanted to be in a position to work for the Church's survival. What mattered to me about the Church was the Church because what brought me to the Church was the Church. I didn't want the music to die.