Today started with a mistake. I was planning to attend Choral Matins at 10am at Westminster Abbey, then hop over to St. George’s Catholic Cathedral for the 11:30am mass. The only slight trouble unconsciously brewing was the fact that I didn’t know the exact way to St. George’s. But being my usual naive, smartphone-less self, I decided I’d just find my way there, using my general sense of the cardinal directions and the street maps on my way. 

I get to Westminster to realise that everyone in the queue outside is WAY more well dressed than me- and I thought I’d put some effort in! This makes unfortunate sense once I find a security guard to ask how I can get in for the 10am service. “Do you have a ticket?” he asks.

“Um, no?” 

He explains that today is special celebration and tickets are necessary…in other words, I should have checked with the INTERNET. The beast I’m trying to avoid (when I’m not writing this blog?). Looking at my watch, I still have 20 minutes to make it to the 10am mass at St. George’s. Perfect. 

Or not. 

The street maps become less and less helpful the closer I think I am to the cathedral. I’m between really caring and really not caring at all, ready to go to whatever church I end up at. Still, my mind is racing: “Aren’t I on St. George Street?” “Why is St. George’s School here and no church in sight?” 

I keep walking, worrying a little and singing a lot. A bunch of hymns, pop songs and coffee shops later, I’m standing in front of St. George the Martyr Church around 10:25am. “You could hang out in this area and catch the 11am Eucharist,” I tell myself. It’s appealing until I start walking again. 

Sometimes I just don’t know where I’m going and I have no desire to know. One of the stressful things about being 23 is being questioned about my long-term plans. I have ideas, stories, feelings, songs, but I don’t seem to have a road-map. Having all of Sunday morning until lunch around 2pm to just find a church is both nervewracking for my indecisive nature and liberating for my controlling instinct. At the very least, it’s a very real experience, both in the confusion of being lost in London and the providence of ending up exactly where I need to be. 

Yesterday, my sister had suggested Southwark Cathedral as a place to go to mass- it’s the cathedral she got to sing in this summer with her choir festival. “Yeah, maybe at some point during this year,” I’d vaguely responded. And someday very quickly and very strangely became today.

To quote one of my friends in the community here, malls are a great place to people-watch because they’re just full of humans being human. Under the sale prices and fluorescent lights, people are stripped of all defenses and pretenses. They’re just human. And I think, done right, church can be strangely similar in that regard. 

Being human in church today means agreeing to something I’m initially anxious to do- be part of the gift-bearing procession during the offertory, though I’ve never attended the cathedral before. It means crying during the sermon about debt and forgiveness that really hits home. It means laughing with the woman sitting next to me as babies walk on plastic cartons in the aisle next to us and topple gently over one another. 

But the most human moment of all is definitely during the triple baptism we celebrate. Two of the babies are pretty quiet and chill, but the girl in the middle just starts screaming when the priest pours the water on her head. At first I laugh, but then I marvel: 

“Maybe she really has a slight inkling of what this faith is all about.”

Christianity is risky! It involves being baptised into BOTH the death and resurrection of Christ. It means losing your life so you can find it, surrendering to mystery, admitting you’re vulnerable and sinful and also the recipient of grace that’s beyond you. It’s walking on water and breaking bread. In all, it’s a path not out of our human condition but INTO the heart of it, to embrace one another admist all the seasons of our lives. 

In the middle of the towering cathedral and the floating harmonies of the choir, I love this newly baptized child’s scream. It’s how I’d probably repond were I to be baptized today! Here she is, overcome with emotion and unknowing, sobbing and yet being held by the church around her. 

What I’m realising as I settle into life in the Community of St Anselm is that this path of prayer, study and service is not easy. It’s not well-paved, or littered with consolation. I believe this path is the way of peace, and that definitely doesn’t mean feeling peace all the time. And yet, each morning we pray for “hope beyond all hope,” and I have to resonate deeply with that. This is the hope that not by extricating ourselves from weakness, unpredictability, attachment and emotion do we come to live more “holy” lives. Instead, it’s the hope that in our vulnerability, we are loved; in our wrongdoing, intentional or not, we are forgiven; in our deepest rooted habit, there is a door for change. 

“God is not a Santa Claus god,” the priest preaches. “God doesn’t give so that we can have and enjoy; God gives so we can learn to become part of the giving ourselves.” Like the screaming girl, my initiation into this year in God’s time is not a VIP pass that exempts me from doubts or confusions. It’s a call to become more like Christ, at the crossroads of justice and mercy, of receiving and giving. Definitely something worth a bewildered scream once in a while. 

 It is, after all, okay to just be human.