Part 1: Faith in the flesh

Liberation, wholeness & the stories that make us

Please press play and invite your body to rest while you listen to this 8-minute audio.

I once attended a gospel church in the coalpits of Sheffield in the U.K*. My school friend wanted to show me how they prayed without knees back in Nairobi. The church was a run-down school hall crammed with oscillating bodies. Most people held up the ceiling with their palms while others humbly swept the floors with their eyelids; their combined breath provided enough condensation to wash the skylights clean.

It was raw and beautiful, but I did not have the kind of faith that could help maintain a building. So, I stood awkwardly, shuffling from side to side, hoping a light hip-dusting would suffice.

From the cold, mildewed pews I’d known before, this ‘church’ was full of light and texture. Even the chairs were upholstered and locked arms with one other like the people who swayed before them.

I thought to myself, this is how I’d like to pray, with my body.

As we jostled and rubbed against strangers, it felt as if our friction could light a holy fire; exhales coalesced into a single fan that enflamed the embers of devotion.

After a while, the preacher on stage demanded silence. Like freshly caught fish, we still shuddered occasionally, as if the body needs more time than the mind to come to a complete standstill. He sliced a finger through the crowd and invited anyone to raise their hand if they needed saving.

I raised mine.

At 16 years old, I felt like I needed saving.

…

A week before, I had sat with my mother in a Methodist church that stood humbly against the blustering sermons of the Yorkshire moors. My mother was testing each religion out in the local area as if they were open houses.

We were on a mission to find a place of belonging. We had just moved to the area and were linguistical misfits. True faith cares little for dialect, however, and all we needed was a Sunday refuge that possibly included tea and scones.

My mother was determined to find the kind of God who didn’t mind if she attended service with a pink, faux-snakeskin bag flung across her polka-dot-clad shoulder, or if she pinned glittered frangipanis in her hair.

I wanted that kind of Tropicana-embracing God too. I wanted the kind of God who didn’t mind my Che Guevara t-shirt or the spell book I kept in my pocket.

A friend of my grandmother’s told me once that Orthodox Catholicism was the best religion to go for if you wanted to stay Pagan. She wore a wig and kept her false eye in the same glass as her teeth. I remember being afraid of meeting her in the hallway past midnight…

What she lacked in body parts, however, she made up for in kindness and wisdom.

She told me that many cultures were able to hide Animist gods in Orthodox mysticism, symbolism, and ritualism. I liked this. I wasn’t keen on my God being ethereal or boiled down to evaporation status. I wanted my God to live inside of things that I could touch and take care of. I wanted gardening to be a sacrament and sadness to be made into a physical pilgrimage.

After attending a dozen services while my father waited in the car park with a copy of the Sunday Times, we left our search for a forever-church in a way that made us feel like we had thoroughly slammed the door. It was the kind of closure you need when you feel like the door was never really opened.

One Sunday, mid-sermon in the local Anglican church, my mother’s bejeweled mobile phone begins to ring. And because she carries the kind of bag that can fit an emergency cooked chicken in, it takes a while for her to find its vibrating body.

The church becomes eerily still and her cheeks flush crimson. She apologizes profusely while deploying a frantic hand into the snakeskin bag until it reaches past her elbows. While the vestment-clad minister waits for silence, my mother decides to make for the exit and begins shuffling through tightly knitted knees jutting out from the pews.

Her head bows down low, hoping the minister will appreciate her ability to maintain respect, while her hand, still submerged, stirs the snake’s insides in panic.

She finally makes it to the door and fishes out her phone. Laughing nervously, she lifts the mobile to the congregation, still ringing, and rolls her eyes with an, oh, dear kind of look, and then walks out. The Ricky Martin ringtone that had been echoing through the 14^th-century building finally comes to an end, and I slink out the back door in pursuit.

…

Shortly after my mother introduced the saucy Latin singer to the Church of England, I was invited by a Kenyan friend to meet her at a large school hall in Sheffield. And after raising my hand as if I were drowning, the volunteers hurried down the aisle to fetch me.

I was taken to a locker room beneath a net-less basketball hoop and sat in front of an older woman who ‘interviewed’ me. She asked why I had raised my hand and to be honest, I didn’t know – because I didn’t know how to recognize Grace. It’s also hard to pick up the scent of inherited trauma when all you can smell is sock sweat and talcum powder. I just knew that I wanted to belong to something, anything.

After hearing how little I knew about her God, she handed me an informational pamphlet about how he could save me. I was under the impression she could, but apparently, she was just his spokesperson.

I read the pamphlet on the train home, and it told me to put myself in His hands, commit to a life of faith, and serve Him through my good thoughts. I didn’t have much to offer him then. This didn’t sound like a saving either, it sounded like investing in stocks where you may, or may not, see a return.

I needed more than blind faith at that age, I needed a life raft and a torch.

Something I could physically hold on to and aim toward. And I needed something that would hold onto me in return as we navigated grief and exile together.

I needed to know that praying without knees was in itself an incarnation and not a symbolic act separate from the divine.

Like many of us here, my search for liberation and wholeness started with belonging – or lack thereof. This story continues in Part Two.

Question:

What was your early experience with religious-based faith - and has it served as a solid foundation or a deep crevasse to what/who you consider God, Source, Universe, Pure Consciousness, Emptiness, Brahman to be now?

Thank you for listening or reading and I look forward to reading your comments!

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1. *A useful reference for those who don’t know me is that I was raised on a peach farm on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg to a mother who grew up in Zimbabwe and a father who grew up in Zambia. My grandparents were a mixture of Northern & Eastern European descent who found their way (either as prisoners of war, refugees, laborers, or immigrants) to Southern Africa during WW2. We left South Africa for the UK in the 1990s as the radical segregation of apartheid was violently coming to its end.