51: Will this community help me?

Episode 51: Martin shares how he became first an Anglican, then later a Catholic, drawn by Ignatian practices of 'deeper, imaginative prayer.' He speaks thoughtfully of his lived experience as a gay Christian who has managed, through God's grace, to overcome hurt and resentment, and to 'keep my mind and my heart open.'

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St Beuno's Jesuit Spirituality Centre

Universalis for the daily readings

Farm Street LGBT Catholic chaplaincy

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Transcript

 You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways we're living our faith today. I'm grateful for Pope Francis, who used the image of a caravan, a diverse group of people travelling together on a sometimes chaotic journey together. And that image that Pope Francis gave us has helped to shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations. And if you're enjoying these conversations, it helps if you rate and review them on the platform where you're listening. Thank you. 

Listeners, thanks for joining today. I've got an interesting guest today called Martin and we're gonna have a really good conversation and see where the Holy Spirit leads us. So welcome, Martin. 

Thank you.

I was just saying before we began recording, Martin, that one of my listeners was in touch to say, Could we have some more converts rather than cradle Catholics? Because we've had quite a long run of cradle Catholics now, people who've been Catholics from childhood or birth. So you're somebody who became a Catholic as an adult. Tell us a bit about then how that came about for you. 

I have to go back a little bit. I will answer your question pretty swiftly. I came to faith having nearly lost my life climbing a mountain in North Wales, and it precipitated the question, What was my life for? I was terribly bored, trained to be a chartered accountant. Forgive me, chartered accountants. Back in 1977, we had a party for the the Silver Jubilee at which I met the son of some friends of my parents, and he was a Catholic priest. And so I had all these pretty adolescent questions, and I went to speak to him. And I got an answer that provoked a further question. And I nearly became a Catholic then. But he said, Why don't you try your own tradition first? And I'd been sort of nominal Anglican at boarding school. So I did, and I ended up becoming an Anglican priest. In about 2000, I started going on retreat to St. Bueno’s Jesuit Spirituality Centre in North Wales, and they helped me pray more and more deeply. I think without consciously seeing that as an invitation to join the Catholic community, it was building inside me. I became disillusioned with the Church of England, but I'd like to take the opportunity to say that some of it was my fault because I expected too much from the institution, and I think I conflated the institution with Jesus. The irony was the various directors of Saint Bueno’s helped me forgive the Church of England. It took me a while to realise that I was partly responsible as well. That was important. And this grew and grew and grew, and I went back year after year. And I made the exercises in Saint Ignatius in 2009, and that was kind of life changing. I suppose I just wanted to be part of this community, this community which prayed deeply and imaginatively, and as it seemed to me, without all the fuss of church as opposed to God. And then, I was coming up to retirement. I'm 72. I just couldn't see myself in Anglican parish. I very much valued my job as a hospital chaplain, helping those at the end of life, building a team of visitors, enjoyed being a colleague with other people, and enjoyed the sort of creative aspects of creating a prayer room that had some atmosphere, but was also open to people of other faiths, creating a garden for people having chemotherapy. And I was quite proud of it. But I just couldn't see myself in an Anglican parish when I finished, and it occurred that I didn’t need to. Had tremendous struggles. I went back on retreats. I was praying and praying and remembering the stole my grandmother had given me when I was ordained an Anglican deacon - and crying. And then it just came to me in perfect peace. I think it was the right thing to do. So that was kind of the emotional, spiritual draw. And then intellectually, it's kind of much clearer to me, really. I've always loved England. I live in rural Kent. Gorgeous. But I can never quite understand why it was the Church of England. Didn't seem big enough to me. So intellectual reasons, I guess, would be; the universality of the church is very important. Secondly, the centrality of the Eucharist because this is the gift of God in Christ to us. And for all that Evensong, the services of the morning prayer or praise may be important, but that direction is from humanity to God, whereas the Eucharist is from God to humanity, a deeper direction. The third thing was the history of the church going right back to the apostles and the accumulated wisdom of the centuries. Our faith didn't start in 1536. By that stage, I'd grown up a bit, so I realised that there was bound to be plenty wrong with the Catholic Church just as there was plenty wrong with the Church of England. But I wasn't going to make the same mistake. I was going to set out to value all that aided me on that spiritual journey, and I was going to leave the rest. I was naive when I became an Anglican priest, and I wasn't naive this time.

I think listeners will recognise how many times guests come back to Ignatian spirituality and the Jesuits. The Jesuits teaching them Ignatian spirituality, making a big difference in people's lives. That that comes through quite often with guests, actually. 

Oh, and I thought I was special. I'm so glad. 

There is something there that really speaks to people. That's the thing. This way of praying, so many people have valued it, having experienced it. I didn't quite work out what age you were when you became a Catholic then.

63. 

So it's taken you a while to take the plunge. And now that you are a practising Catholic, what is it that supports you? Do you continue to go on retreats? Do you continue to pray in an Ignatian way? Do you find parish Mass helpful? 

I continue to pray in an Ignatian way. I hope so. Apart from the odd day, I'll spend half an hour in the morning with Universalis. It's got the Collect, first reading, Psalm and the gospel. At that point, I stop, and I just try and meditate on the gospel. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I have been going back to retreats. The parish is excellent. We had a very inspiring priest who's now moved on, but the community really seems to actually care about God. You know, this was a little bit of a surprise to me in my cynical mindset. There's a sort of piety there. I mean, this is a terrible cliche, but like most cliches, some truth in it. If you go into a Church England church, you very often hear people talking. If you go into a Catholic Church, you very often see people praying. Now that's a profound difference to me. We have quite a lot of silence. There's kind of room for everyone. There are traditional devotions, which I am a bit naive about. The parish is warm and intelligent and friendly. Without realising it, over the last seven years, I've been drawn more and more in. So I run a film night once a month, something with a vaguely Catholic feel. We've had Hitchcock, I Confess. We've got Shirley Valentine. Now you might think, what's that got to do in the Christian faith? I think the point is because she becomes alive. This is a woman that is put down, and she goes and has an adventure in Greece, and she becomes who she's supposed to be. Who in my view, God wants her to be. I've been really enjoying that. I've just finished a Master's in Catholic Social Teaching. Fabulous to have some kind of external wrestling with this  - and principles. How do we practice the Christian faith in society? So I rolled out a program for that, for people in the parish. They've been quite interested. I was amazed. Daily Mass. Usually we go on Wednesdays followed by coffee. And I'm not too far from the Benedictine Abbey at Worth Abbey, and sometimes we go down there because, again, the silence is fabulous. 

Sounds very rich, your experience. It's always interesting to me, as someone who's always been a Catholic, to see how people experience the church coming later to it. I'm probably on the kind of cynical edge myself thinking, Oh, they won't like it. It won't be good enough in some way. So it's always interesting to me when people come and say, This is amazing. This is great. It's encouraging for people who might get a bit jaded over time because it's so familiar. 

Yeah. It's just got this structure which is a kind of supportive net for your spiritual journey. If the structure becomes too important, then it strangulates. But the point is it's there. And I read one of Pope Francis' recent encyclicals on the Sacred Heart, and he said a marvellous statement. Something on the lines of, Depictions of the Sacred Heart are variable in their taste. Full stop. This matters not at all. And I thought that was just so good. 

Yes.

I mean, there's wonderful Christian painters, particularly some of the modern stuff. Some possibly is not of such quality. It doesn't matter to me because there's a kind of sincerity to it, that it helps people. I find it very moving. Easter morning, one of my fellow parishioners was there, and I saw him touch the statue, and his eyes were filled with tears. You know, it's fantastic. 

I think that's right. It's easy to look dispassionately at these things, but, actually people aren't looking dispassionately at them. There's great meaning there for people.

One thing I haven't got, and I keep trying, is the Mary thing. And I hope that doesn't offend people. Totally get the theology: Incarnation of God in Jesus cannot happen without Mary. I get a lot of the stuff from the gospels. ‘Do whatever he tells you,’ as she says to the servants in the wedding at Cana. But I don't get the sort of spiritual, emotional bit. So I went off to Lourdes to see if I could catch the thing, and I just didn't. I had a very good chat with an Italian friar who did his best to help me There's someone who contacted me about LGBT ministry, and she's Dominican. And she really helped me, actually, because she said, It's Jesus who commends Mary to the beloved disciple. And, of course, the beloved disciple - and this is wonderful John - both these people are real, but there's always another symbolic level to it. So which of us is not a beloved disciple? But I'm kind of waiting for Jesus to commend His mother to me. I suppose part of that is I just want to sort of belong, which is a bit weird. To understand the fullness of this.

I think there will be listeners now who are very devoted to Our Lady, who will now be bringing you into their prayers. 

Please do because I really respect you, and it's just something I just don't get. 

I wonder if the time will come, Martin. We'll see. 

So you mentioned LGBT ministry there, and I know from our previous conversations that you're a gay man. Tell us a bit about what it's like being a Catholic and a gay man. 

Well, first of all, I struggled within the Church of England, and I became very angry. I learned the truth of what - it's either Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela or it's Saint Augustine – ‘Resentment is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemy.’  So I realised that my resentment was mainly harming me. Several people said to me, Wasn't the Church of England more welcoming to LGBT? The answer is kinda yes, but a really important part of my becoming a Catholic was Gaudium et Spes, the pastoral constitution of the church. I will read you the paragraph about the primacy of conscience. And as Michael Caine would say, not a lot of people know that. They tend to think Catholicism is rules, rules, rules, rules, rules. Now I really respect the rules. I really respect the teaching. And this is part of the teaching I'm about to read you. Paragraph 16: ‘Conscience is man's most secret core or sanctuary. There, he is alone with God and hears his voice most intimately’. I knew something was, as I thought of it then, wrong, when I was about 12. In other words, in the beginning of sexuality. And it was a real burden. So I've had a long time to wrestle with this, to pray with this, to listen, to reflect on my experience and discern what it is teaching me. So that's important. So conscience is not a sort of get out of jail free card, and here's what the last couple of sentences of that paragraph say: ‘Yet not seldom it happens that conscience can be wrong through invincible ignorance. In this case, conscience does not lose its stature, but we cannot say the same when men have too little care in looking for the true and the good or when habits of sin gradually almost blind conscience.’  So I felt I've become a Catholic in good conscience, having wrestled with Catholic teaching, listened to my own experience, prayed that who I am is who God has made me. And my partner of twenty eight years has been God's gift to me and a blessing to me. That's been really important, and I respect church teaching. It's not like I say, Stuff it. Not at all. Part of that church teaching, unfortunately, is that I'm intrinsically disordered, and something evil is another one. I let that go off my head. I simply dissent from it.

I think that is really important, the way you've demonstrated that. I think it might be easy for people to think that, you know, you just ignore the things you don't wanna hear. But actually, you're demonstrating that, No, you've really wrestled with this. You've really thought about this. You've really looked into this. 

Lived it. 

Yeah. Lived it from the age of 12. This is who you are. I think it's really helpful for people to hear that. And, you know, when you mentioned the age of 12 there, I just, you know, my heart could break for young people hearing a version of the church's teaching, which is not the whole, and wrestling with that in their innermost core, as you were describing that conscience statement. I'm really glad that we've been able to begin to talk about that. You've done all that work, and you are at peace with who you are and who God made you, in the image of God. But I guess you still have to go into a Catholic church with an element of caution. Again, I feel terrible about that. But is that right? Is that your experience?

Yes. It very much is. I just have to say, What good am I looking for? I'm looking for Jesus. I'm looking for his gift of himself to me. Will this community help me? And if it does, can I just leave aside that other stuff? You know, I could just go up to Farm Street all the time or twice a month, but I'm not only, I'm not a label. I'm a person. I don't feel like I have to get just to Mass with other LGBT people or people who graciously accept me as I am. I don't live there, and I'm part of this community where I am now. But I suppose I have to be discreet. So I took time to know the previous priest and that he came to meals with us. The current one we have is very much more traditional, so I'm just keeping my counsel there. But I thought something was a lesson in that, actually, because, you know, I was one of these very radical Anglicans. Nothing wrong with that. But I don't want to be a member of a part of the Catholic Church. I want to be a member of all the Catholic Church. So I want to learn from more conservative people. What is it they have to teach me? What can I learn from them? That's important as well, keep my mind and my heart open. 

I think that's, I don't know what the word is. It's a very balanced way of looking at things when, as you say, you could find yourself in one narrow track with a label on, this is for these people. I think it's very, I don't know what I'm trying to say, but given that you could be very hurt by a sense of rejection from some people in the church, to actually approach the whole church openly and want to learn from different groups of people, I think that's amazing.

As far as it's happened, it's grace. Because I said in the start there, I was very angry and very hurt going back to the past - I was an Anglican then. One very good thing is, I look back to that time when I spoke to the child of friends of my parents who's a Catholic priest. If I had become a Catholic then, and I was quite tempted to, it wouldn't have lasted because I didn't have the maturity. I would have become very hurt, and I would have behaved in the Catholic Church just as I behaved in the Anglican church anyway. And then I'd have had nowhere to go. That is God's grace again. The other thing we haven't mentioned, but it wasn't a deciding factor, was Pope Francis' ministry, which I think has been fantastic. His whole tone towards LGBT people is much better. It wasn't a deciding factor because I decided long ago that Pope's change. I wasn't going to let that influence my decision. But let me just say, it hasn't done us any harm. He was just so lovely. He met us. We went on LGBT pilgrimage to Rome. We went to one of these big audiences, and we were just a few feet away from -  I very much like languages. So I just love the fact the Gospel was translated to all these different languages, trying to work it out. And then I thought, Well, that's very nice. I got up to go, and the guy came to me. He said, No. He wants to speak to you. We were a group of 10 or 15, so he chatted to us. 

Listeners, you'll have spotted that this episode was recorded just before Pope Leo XIV was elected. We look forward to seeing how he continues Pope Francis' ministry with the LGBT community. So we're working towards the end, Martin. I wonder if there's anything you might say, if there's anyone listening who is wrestling with their sexuality, is there something you might like to say that might be helpful to them? 

First of all, I'll pray for you. Secondly, try to go back to the God that we see in Jesus. Ask yourself whether it is conceivable that He would turn you away. Thirdly, try not to become obsessed by particular bible verses which are used against us. Understand there's a whole context of those verses that needs understanding, that scholars have wrestled with for 1500, two and a half thousand years. Fourthly -  are we on four? I think we are. Look for what is good and nourishing in the church. Try and let go of the rest. And fifthly, maybe, as Jesus said, pray for your persecutors. Just try and understand what may be going on for them. They may be wrestling with their own spirituality. They may be feeling the world is going to hell in a handcart, and all moral standards are being thrown out of the window. They may be hurt themselves, and want without realising it, somebody further down the line to kick, saying, Well I may be bad but I’m not as bad as them. 

Thank you, Martin. I hope that helps somebody. I'm sure it will. I did want to, however, in our conversation, make sure that that whole person is here taking part in this conversation. And as we've said, it's not all about one label, and I hope we've done justice to that. I hope we've heard enough of your life for listeners to feel they've listened into a dialogue with you and encountered you, I suppose, is the right word. So thank you for being here and taking time to have this conversation. 

Do tell your listeners, I'm an ordinary person with ordinary failings and gifts. I have a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. I'm mad about classic cars but can't afford them. 

Well, I think the spaniel has probably captured a load more listeners now. Thanks ever so much, Martin.

You're most welcome. 

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday. Follow All Kinds of Catholic on the usual podcast platforms. Rate and review to help others find it. And follow our X/Twitter and Facebook accounts, @kindsofCatholic. You can comment on episodes and be part of the dialogue there. You can also text me if you're listening to the podcast on your phone, although I won't be able to reply to those texts. Until the next time.