Tracy Turley "Why Me?" Talk for the 17th of March - Passion Sunday

So, here we are, gathered as one, the thing she has feared and longed for most of her life.

 Why me? To understand that we must go back to the beginning.

 They call her Tracy, but she has had so many names. None of them made sense to her, except Christian. Only after her baptism, at the age of 50, did she come to an uneasy peace with her name.

 Asked to speak, the child within her cowered. That child was alive. So, she begged for another voice, one accustomed to the performance of sorrow, and of joy. A beautiful, honest voice. The reader or the read. In the end, we are all one.

 Psychology and spirituality are not easy bedfellows. This is the story of a girl whom God found out of the chaos of her mind. He found her out and brought her here, to the exquisite architecture of St John the Baptist, and to you.

 Locked in an attic and little, she would never know if this memory was real or imagined. Upturned dining chairs occupied the small space and the air smelled of disuse.

 But there was a light. The light poured through the skylight window in warm, yellow bars. She sat on the floor and held her arms tight to her body. She was not alone. There was a presence, a total good. She knew that It could see her. And she knew they would let her out soon. But she did not know her crime. She was four years old.

 The girl’s mother died when the child was an infant. Her father was a long-distance lorry driver. He could not care for his new daughter.

 She went to live with his mother, her grandmother. Forced to attend church three times on a Sunday as a child, the old woman hated it. She made off across the fields to the spiritualist church. I am a witch, grandma would say, because she was born on Halloween. And vowing never to force religion on her children, she left a Bible by the young girl’s bed and let her make up her mind.

 That Bible was Tracy’s grandfathers. His service Bible. Some of the pages had cigarette burns. She loved the old man while he was alive. After he had gone, she loved this remnant of his life.

 In the mornings, still dreaming, she walked with Jesus in Gethsemane. She was led by a feeling of otherness.

 The old woman was proud when the girl took herself off to the Methodist church in the village. But her grandmother seemed pleased when the girl stopped going.

 What had stopped her?

 Leviticus 18:22. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.

 Abomination. How that word pursued her. But didn’t that mean men? Was she, female, something even more unspeakable?

 She knew early on that she was different. While other girls ran after boys, she loved and worshipped in secret.

 Are you a lesbian? her father asked.

 What would you do if I were? she countered.

 His reply was definite. I would disown you, he said.

 Then the old woman died. Tracy never saw her father again. John 14 said, I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. But she was too busy getting drunk to listen for God. You are just like your father, the old woman would have said. And, for a while, she would have been right.

 Goodness and evil followed her. The goodness of God and the evil of that word in all its nuances. Abomination.

 Several years passed. She drank her rent money, she raged, she worked, she was sometimes empty. The psychiatrists labelled her.

 Evicted from her room, she was homeless. Her life was isolate and full of pain. Estranged from the world, she moved to a studio flat. She slept on a rolled-up rug on the floor and had only two changes of clothes. There was no other furniture. There was never enough. She grew thin. She walked for miles in the burning summer, convinced she was dead. She was dying to herself. She changed her name and began to hear voices. I AM they said, and she trembled with fright.

 Sometimes, at night, she woke to a knocking sound. There was never anyone at the door. Except, there was. Looking back, she would think of Revelation 3:20. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. For the first time, as an adult, she began to hear God's voice. And at five and a half stone, near death from starvation, she listened when He spoke. You are very ill, He said, and you need to go to A&E. This was the voice of a man in his thirties. It was still and calm. It drove out the voices, or the fallen angel, with which she wrestled.

 Hospitalised, the psychiatrist was one of only two in the country trained in a new therapy for PTSD. For a year, she relived the brute words and breakage of the past. Reliving was a kind of healing. When she left the ward, the doctor picked her up in a father's hug. How she loved him. When she went to empty churches to wait on God, she saw blue lights in her head. The millennium came. She was healing.

 Many years passed. Still more girl than woman, Tracy searched for God in the silence of open churches. She was afraid of, and felt unfit to, attend a service. She called herself Christian. But she felt incomplete. For a while she was a Christian/Tracy being. Two people in one body looking out of one set of eyes. She saw in the people she met the faces of the past. And sometimes she thought she glimpsed the face of Jesus. It was confusing. I just want to go to church and be good, she would say. It seemed impossible.

 But new possibilities were coming. She had therapy with a kind, American psychologist. He was her champion. She saw psychiatrists and community psychiatric nurses and occupational therapists. She met the GP who has cared and supported her now for twenty-five years. Slow, and sure, her shattered sense of self began to reform. She was different. It seemed to her sometimes that God was sending her the only form of love she could understand. A species of impersonal, professional love which went under the auspices of care - but it was still love.

 Then came friends. She had been alone so long; friendship was both a relief and a responsibility. The relief from isolation, the being known, made her want to turn and run. The responsibility weighed heavy on her. It seemed important to be kind and not to hurt. Sometimes, she got it wrong. Some of the friends who came, left. She was learning the lessons, at 35, that childhood should have taught her.

 Romantic relationships, too, came and went. They were few and wrought with pain.

 At the age of 45, Tracy went into therapy again. A female therapist, this time. Openness is the antidote to shame she told the girl, now grown, and a woman. You should go to church.

 In fact, she had been visiting churches for quite some time. Drawn to Catholicism, she struggled with the Catechism’s definition of homosexuality. Inherently disordered. Far from being an alien idea, the words echoed her feelings. She developed a relationship with Saint Therese of Lisieux. One of her customers at the bookshop told her, Saint Therese is working on you.

 And she had been praying with Saint Therese at Our Lady of Victories when she felt a powerful impetus to come to Saint John’s. The voice, absent so long, was now a part of her.

 See Father Neil, it said.

 But the church will not be open, she countered.

 Go anyway.

 Sometimes, we must stand outside of ourselves to get a faithful picture. Life in the third person somehow engages the three persons in one. And the truth.

 God intervenes. God follows us, even in our inability to follow our own behaviour. Time over time, the past is undone and remedied in the present. We do not listen. Or look. Or feel God’s presence, but He is ever there. Yet we sometimes sense His amusement at our antics. How he loves us as children. How boundless he is in compassion and understanding.

 The four-year-old in the attic. The confused twenty-something. The searching forty-year-old. The woman, who, at fifty, is intrigued by the path of an Oblate. The woman, who, at fifty, has an ever-growing family of cherished brothers and sisters, sons, and daughters. God has never seen her as anything other than a child in painful need of love and guidance. And of forgiveness.

 The word abomination no longer haunts her. Father Neil put pay to that. Reverend Dana in her intellectual kindness. Father James in his contemplative empathy. Father Peter in his avuncular gentleness. The clergy backed up the truth with their outreach. How grateful she is, to be a part of something larger than her own designs. Something that in her Baptism and Confirmation, looked very much like acceptance, and love.

 Father Neil, she said that day, the day of the inner prompting, I am gay and I am a bit Catholic.

 And Father Neil said the thing that Tracy wishes you all to hear this Lent. It was the one thing she might have learned as a child and forgotten. It was the one thing that no one had thought to tell her.

 Why me?

 Because (and these are the healing words Father Neil spoke that day) you are made in the image of God.