amma magda

ordained anglican minister, working in an anglo-catholic parish. mid-twenties. female. bi. lots of anxiety, often depression too. this is where i say the things i can't say elsewhere. thanks <3

[ammamagda]

so i used to understand the argument that it was important for the church of england to stay in communion with gafcon-aligned provinces. that if we split we would have no hope of changing things. that our role is to walk the difficult middle way, even when it causes a lot of pain. but if the reports about the meeting in canterbury are true, I don't think there's any hope of us having any meaningful impact anymore. some of that is our fault, some of it isn't. either way, there is no middle way here. there is death and there is life, and if we're struck in the liminal place that is the foggy dusk of allhallowtide, then we aren't ever going to reach the dawn of the resurrection. i'm thinking a lot about the breadth and depth and height and length of the love of god, and how the pelagian poison of the conservatives is not just heretical because st augustine said so, but because it projects hatred and fear and our own ideas about power onto the divine. because denying that grace underpins all human love allows conservatives to blackmail and threaten and refuse people the dignity of abundant life, all the while claiming that god is their sidekick. and i'm thinking about my wedding, about how I knelt with my new husband before the sacrament and caught a glimpse of the ineffable, the incomprehensible love of christ emptied into bread and wine. but i have loved women too, and it haunts me that we could never have known that moment. i wouldn't have seen it. perhaps it is a small thing, when so many around the world are dying for their love. but i can't ignore that so many dear to me can't perceive the love of god through the heavy cloud that is the church's homophobia. by my allegiance, do i repeat the sin? all the while, hatred lingers in me, towards me. the hands that ordained me push my profession of potential love for women back into my mouth, force it down, lodge it in my gut. i'm sorry for my church. for my self-centredness. but thanks be to god for the episcopal church, for their love of the poor and the outcast, for their strength and rootedness in that overwhelming love of christ. kyrie eleison.

[ammamagda]

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God. For just as the sufferings of Christ are abundant for us, so also our consolation is abundant through Christ.

ii Corinthians 1:3-5, evening prayer on the eve of mary magdalene

[ammamagda]

in seminary they talked a lot about being a “public christian” after ordination. with a collar on, you can’t hide your commitments. i thought then that it was just about people starting conversations about jesus on the bus.

then you’re torn from the college community and shipped off to start in a church, in a new place with new people, where everyone already knows your name. and being public isn’t just about being visible -- it’s also about the way in which you are visible. suddenly you are different. isolated. and the clothes you wear are not your own but of your church and your christ, whose gospel you’ve begun to proclaim simply by your being. you are still yourself, with all your idiosyncrasies and flaws. but you have also begun to represent something other.

christ came in weakness and vulnerability to the cross, but also in glory and power in the resurrection. christian ministers are not smothered by christ in our orders, but made more fully ourselves, more fully alive. perhaps the paradox of all these things will one day reveal for me a kind of polyphonic beauty. but right now, i hide the burdens of anxiety and depression within the folds of my new cassock, praying daily for the strength to find myself beneath its weight.

this is a new venture. i don’t know what community i fit into anymore, on tumblr or elsewhere. but I need a place to speak into the void, to breathe it in, to be myself fully and publicly in all my mess and pain

and not to be afraid.