A relatively new Vicar (well, just over six months in), a new website for Saint James’, and the beginnings of a blog!
When I began at Saint James’ at the end of January, I was welcomed by the parish with a wonderful shared tea on the first Sunday afternoon. Just after I’d gone into the church hall for the shared tea, one of our older members asked me where it began, my sense of vocation and the journey towards ordination. So, I asked her how long she’d get to hear the answer!
And then at the end of the last week of the summer term, we had a Year 9 GCSE RE group come to visit us and share in our worship as part of the group exploring Christian belief and practice in relation to Holy Communion, or the Eucharist. Over refreshments at the end of the visit, one of the young people asked me what made me want to be a Vicar and what it’s like Training to be a Vicar. Again, a very thoughtful question with what could be a very long answer indeed.
Those two questions, the first at the beginning of my time here at Saint James’ and the second recently, made me think, ‘I guess people want to know about this vocation thing, so maybe it could be something to write about in the beginnings of a blog.’
So here goes!
I find it impossible to think or write about my journey towards ordination, and my experience as a priest, without thinking and writing about my journey of faith, which began in the Sunday School of the parish church where I grew up.
When my brother and I were young children, our parents thought that it would be good for us go to Sunday School and mix with other children. And so we went to Sunday School. I loved Sunday School, but my brother wasn’t so enamoured.
A bright, vibrant, young woman, who went on to become a Church Army Officer, was my Sunday School teacher. I have vivid memories of her telling us Bible stories and of us singing songs and doing craft activities and of her communicating such faith and joy throughout it all. And I have equally vivid memories of us being taken into church to join the Eucharist at the Peace. The church was in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, and communion was distributed at the high altar and we children received a blessing at the high altar. And the mystery and majesty of Anglo-Catholic worship made a deep impression on me.
As I reached my teenage years I got very absorbed in language and literature, not least because modern languages took me abroad in linguistic and cultural exchanges, and laid the literary and philosophical trilogy of beauty, truth and goodness alongside my childhood faith and sense of God.
Beauty, truth and goodness, as a way of looking at life, were tested when I was seventeen years old and my grandmother, to whom I was very close, died after a heart attack and stroke. What I saw my grandmother go though in the last weeks of her life, following the heart attack and stroke, was true, in the sense that it was really happening, but it wasn’t beautiful or good; far from it.
My grandmother’s suffering, and my profound grief at her death, raised all sorts of questions for me about where God is in our experience and about what it means to believe in a God who is creator, and who is loving, and who is present with God’s people in the midst of suffering. This sent me back to the church where I grew up. And as I returned to church, I was welcomed as a young adult, and my questions were taken seriously by the wonderful group of Christians who made up the church, who were all on their own journeys of faith.
Being welcomed and received, including with all of my questions, by that group of Christians was an experience of grace for me, pure and simple. And out of that experience of grace, I, in my turn, wanted to help others to experience the love and grace of God in the midst of their life circumstances, whatever those circumstances were. And that was the beginning of my sense of vocation, and it still underpins my sense of vocation today.
Alongside the very real experience of grace which I felt in the church where I grew up, I also had a very strong sense of faith seeking understanding which was nurtured through study groups and the Bishop’s Certificate Course. That sense of faith seeking understanding was an important part of my initial sense of vocation in response to grace. And it had to be tested out, and it was tested out, as I studied theology at the University of Manchester for my first degree. One of the most significant influences from my first degree was the introduction to practical theology which was made possible for me through the teaching and research of Canon Professor Elaine Graham, who is now Grosvenor Research Professor at the University of Chester.
I went on from my degree at the University of Manchester to train for ordination at Cranmer Hall in Durham and to complete an MA in Theological Research at the University of Durham. My two years in Durham flew by in a whirl of academic study and pastoral placements, including presenting a paper about the relationship between literature and religion at an international conference and serving placements in two very different parish churches, a psychiatric hospital, and Durham Prison. It was a very intense two years of preparation for ordination in Manchester Cathedral in 2000.
I served my Curacy in the Langley and Parkfield Team Ministry in Middleton, Manchester. Curacy is the first post that one serves following ordination and it is the final stage of ministerial training; it is a time when the training, and formation, happen predominantly through ministerial, missional and pastoral experience and reflection on that experience with an experienced supervisor, the Training Incumbent.
I was, and am, thankful for my Training Incumbent, Rev’d Canon Philip Miller, who promised that he was going to throw me in at the deep end and kept that promise in many and various ways across the four years that I served on Langley and in Parkfield! I was also very thankful, and remain very thankful, for the people of All Saints and Martyrs, Langley, and Holy Trinity, Parkfield, who through their faith and prayer, ministry and mission, pastoral care and witness helped me to know what it means to be a priest with and amongst a people of God, loving and serving in the name of Christ.
Julia Babb, August 2018