For our Black History Month series, exploring our personal relationships with Black histories, Revd. Ayo Audu writes about his experience of being ordained in the Church of England. His perspective as a Black priest provides valuable insight into what it means to belong. Ayo ministers in the Oxford Diocese and is a member of the General Synod.
All eyes were on me as I walked into the cathedral to rehearse with the other ordinands from across the diocese just before we were herded off into seclusion for a three-day retreat. There, ahead of our ordination, we would pray and reflect and get to know one another in total silence.
Silence gave space to reflect. Why had I left home the day before and spent the night in a hotel just so I could be ‘on-time’ at the cathedral, only to arrive late? How had I managed to be the last ordinand through the doors? Tracking back over my morning, I could see myself dawdling; without the drive; lacking the vim that would have got me out the doors and to the cathedral on time. My unease came to a head at the retreat centre when it dawned on me that of about three dozen ordinands, I was only one of two black faces. What was I doing here?
Here, where my eye was not held or smile returned. Here where, though I was meeting other people like me, who the diocese had funded their training, it didn’t feel like I ought to be there. What does belonging look like and who gets to bestow it? It didn’t seem to matter that I’d been through an 18-month discernment journey culminating in a three-day BAP process. Or that I’d had 3 years’ training at a theological educational institution before getting to the point of ordination. I just didn’t feel that I belonged. Never mind that I was coming to the retreat with 20 years’ experience of lay ministry. Looking round that room, I just wanted to go home.
“What was I doing here?”
Home can become a conflicted concept as flags are deployed to delineate territory. When who is welcome and who is not is signaled through crimsoned cotton or tattooed asphalt. One’s sense of belonging becomes just as elusive then as when held in the unspoken non-welcome in the averted gaze at a retreat centre. Yet, who decides the test of who is welcome or who belongs ought, it seems to me to be the impulse of the creator Spirit, who calls us; as well as those who, to us, do not belong. (John 21:22).
“Home can become a conflicted concept as flags are deployed to delineate territory.”
Belonging meant burying all that I had been feeling during that rehearsal deep in my belly all through that diaconal year, clear as custard. Till I returned to retreat to be priested the following year and two fellow retreatants reflected with me separately about the addresses we received from the retreat leader. I could not understand their words: ‘Even though the Bible was opened, it did not speak”. And then I spoke to another retreatant, this time a woman who identifies as a lesbian. ‘Ah,’ she said, “he wouldn’t hear what was being said because the retreat leader is a priest who is a woman’. I had thought I was “the other’ because I was a black man. Now I realised it was possible to have multiple strikes against oneself in that retreat space. Thank God I was not a woman. Thank God I was not a lesbian. And thank God I was not a lesbian, woman priest. Oops! Did I just say that out loud?
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