Daniel Gable "Why Me?" Talk for the 18th of February - First Sunday of Lent

My faith has revolved around two aspects growing up: liturgy, and death. The question of ‘why me’ fits into each of these for both positive and negative reasons.

I am hopefully still at the start of my life and religious journey, being only 23. I was born in south Wales, to Anglo Catholic priest and chemistry teacher. From this there has always been lively dinner discussions about religion, science, politics, and society, something my sisters and I, I suspect, always loved.

From a very young age I was instantly drawn to the church and her liturgy. According to my mother, by age 2 I had apparently figured out when the congregation was meant to stand, sit, and kneel, and would get cross when they didn’t follow out the plan I had created in my head. It is no wonder then that when my dad got a new church post in 2005 I also became a boat boy from my apparent interest.

Through the years in this child role I came to slowly understand more and more about what was going on around me during the service, thus the most memorable parts of growing up were asking questions and figuring out on my own certain aspects of the Mass and why it was done the way it was.

Growing up I adopted different roles before becoming the main thurifer in my teens, which lead to more questions and understanding. You might say I didn’t have what was the most typical of adolescences, instead of socialising and playing games, I would sneak books out of my dad’s office to read, a notable one was reading Ritual Notes at the age of 14, a somewhat infamous 19th century manual relating to the strict rubrics of how liturgy should be done. For those of you present who have read it and know me, this might go well to explain my personality.

Serving is something I feel very strong about, a cornerstone of my identity. If priests are the shepherd’s, then I feel that my place is the shepherd’s boy. Being at this church one can probably infer that the church liturgy and the roles I grew up with are still the ones I still love. Even if it took me time to return to them.

Growing up with a priest as one of your parents does grant you a vague sense of understanding about death from an early age. We’d have discussions about it at the dinner table, talking about how we’d like to go and what kind of funeral we would like. This was fine. I grew up surrounded by funerals of people I didn’t really know. There was a vague sadness, but no personal connection was really present at this young age.

But a vague understanding of both the concept and emotions doesn’t prepare you for when it might happen to someone you actually know.

We had just started college, I was 16, out of secondary school, trying to make new friends in my class, most of who were a few years older than me. For the most part I was quite successful, but then in our third month of the first term of our first year, tragedy struck. One of my classmates, someone who I had begun to be friends with, had committed an apparent suicide over the weekend. At this point I had no social media, no one knew my phone number, so no one told me until I came into class Monday morning.

Everyone was shocked, it is still one of the defining moments of my life.

It did, quite understandably, shake my entire world. A spiral of depression and trauma followed in its wake. And in all honesty, 7 years later the pain and loss is still there.

My faith suffered greatly from this. I stopped attending church, I became cynical and pessimistic, closed my self off from the world, from my friends, and from God.

For years I suffered from this, and it wasn’t until I was 19 that I started to consider the prospect of healing. It was at this time that someone mentioned the prophet Jonah out of the blue and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I had decided to read the book, and there was a strange connection, it both presented a picture of sorrow and yet a caring God. But what was weirder was I distinct lack of familiar connection that I had grown up with.

Something was missing in how I read Jonah, and it dawned on me that there wasn’t the familiar presence of Christ I had grown up with in hearing the Gospels. I flipped the pages forward to Luke, and sure enough, in reading Luke’s account of the Sermon on the Mount, the feeling of warmth rushed back to me, of personal connection, of opening my heart, and for the first time in my life, I understood an extent of what it meant to be a child of God. From this I returned to Church, still admittedly feeling broken but grounded in faith. My love of liturgy likewise rushed back and I started serving again – by this point I had moved to Falmouth to do my undergrad and I was able to find a lovely Anglo Catholic church. Not even Covid got in the way of refinding my faith.

But soon enough again, a tragedy once more happened in January 2021, another one of my friends had decided to take his own life. My reaction to this wasn’t as extreme as it previously was, but I was still very much shaken to the core that it somehow managed to happen again. I was still able to keep myself anchored in Christ, but the question of why me seemed selfishly very prevalent.

And once more, early last year, tragedy stuck my family, my 17-year-old cousin out in the States overdosed and lost his life due to the carless actions of his father.

Everyone will experience death in one way or another, it is not anything unique to have gone through this in a short amount of time. We only need to look at the worrying state of warfare on the rise in the world to understand that. But the pain and lose regardless are unique in how you experience them. To me, it has meant years of grieve, a loss of faith, then a rediscovering of Christ, and yet in that there has still been more lose. I would be lying if I said that these three deaths still don’t heavily affect me. But it is something that I have been slowly working on.

So where does this leave my faith? Well another look back into my childhood may hold the key. Back in the church I grew up at there was a 6ft tall crucifix above the east facing altar, it wasn’t quite life sized but it definitely looked the part in Christ’s face of sorrow and the number of wounds dripping blood across his coloured ceramic body. It always fascinated me and I think looking back it had a profound influence on me. During the services as I grew up I always looked towards it, and Christ’s face turned to the side meant I was always under its gaze.

The crucifix is not only a symbol of the death of our Saviour, but is also at the same time the faith of the Resurrection, the latter does not happen without the former. And growing up, serving as a child under the gaze of the symbol of death and hope, imparted on me the sense to always look towards Christ. The anchor that joins everything together for my faith, be it in times of sorrow, pain, death, great sadness or indeed great happiness, Christ is there, upon the cross in a moment in time where the world begins to changes forever.

It is no wonder that our siblings before us in the early church settled on the symbol of the cross to represent the faith. No doubt they saw more fully the ordinary cross for what is was, a horrific form of torture and execution, where not only Christ died but their friends and family, and themselves likewise ended up. But still through this, they clung to the hope that it represented, despite its death and agony.

And from this do I take comfort, because I do too, through the death, loss, pain I too have known in my differing contexts, the cross of Christ is where I will always look to too, and in this Lenten season, it seems quite apt that this should be the message of my faith that I have come to understand. We look towards Christ’s passion and death, but from this our hope and faith of the Resurrection flowers. My faith for me then is this moment, and it gives me comfort through all that I have gone through. The old hymn is true, Other refuge have I none; hangs my helpless soul on thee. Amen.