A Lot Like Eve

by Joanna Jepson

  Perhaps realizing that this would be our last conversation for a long while, Joe dropped his spiky facade, giving way to a confessional of fears, aspirations and unwelcome truths that he’d been bearing alone for too long. I wasn’t a priest but perhaps right then I wished I had been; I wanted to let words of blessing cover him, I wanted to say “Go in peace because you are loved, important and known.”

  Three days later I left Cheltenham with the conviction that I was going to fit in far better among theologians than I ever had on a nursing course. But first impressions suggested otherwise when a member of staff approached Dad to offer him a warm welcome to the college. Certainly my father, with his sandals and his Marks and Spencer jumper, appeared the more probable candidate for a theological education, I thought, as I glanced down at the crisp white shirt, pencil skirt and kitten heels I’d chosen to wear. I’d never found much interest in fashion among church folk: modesty and presentability were the sartorial compass by which Christian women dressed, and wives seemed to dress their husbands, such was the apparent lack of interest in clothes displayed by men. But sitting there in the large, sunlit dining hall that first week of term I couldn’t help but remark on the number of beards. “So it’s true vicars really do have to have beards as well as sandals then?” I questioned the woman opposite me. She twinkled knowingly and explained that it was a sponsored beard-growing fundraiser for a leprosy charity out in Mozambique. I wondered whether growing the hair on my legs would be a welcome way for women to contribute, but decided against it and made a small donation to the beardy guys in my pastoral group instead.

  Facial hair wasn’t the only way in which appearances left me feeling strange. For the first week in morning chapel the doctrine and worship tutor, dressed in black cassock and white angelic surplice, walked us through the service of Morning Prayer, teaching us how to say it. At Emmanuel Church the vicar had only ever worn robes once every five years, when the Bishop was visiting. Yet here we were now, firmly in Church of England territory, with a dressing-up box of robes, being taught how to start and end sentences in unison, how to speak at the right pace and leave the correct length of silence between responses. I had never had to be taught; surely it was the Holy Spirit who led us in prayer and worship? I peeked through the rows at this priest-tutor, looking for signs of a personal relationship with Jesus. But there would be no eruption of spontaneous prayer or exhortations by which I might gauge his spiritual authenticity. I returned to my prayer book, trying to locate the canticle being recited, and realized I was lost.

  I was 20 years old, in a college of mostly 38-year-old men training to be vicars. They had all done their thinking and reflecting, having been put through their paces in a searching process to discern their priestly vocation. They knew what their faith was about and why. They knew that they wanted to express faith and hope through a life spent ministering to the sick, the needy, the ordinary parishioners who lay two years down the line in a parish church somewhere. When they asked me why I had decided to study with them I had no clearly articulated answer, just a glimmering belief in God that lay buried somewhere beneath all the theology I’d inherited. When I was asked whether I wanted to be a vicar I didn’t tell them that I was trying to overcome the inbred prejudices against women having roles beyond wife, administrator and Sunday school teacher. When, on my second day, one ordinand jokingly asked if I was injecting some glamour into the student community, I didn’t say that I was experimenting with lipstick for the first time in my life, nor did I mention to anyone the surgery I had undergone and the anti-depressants I was still taking. I just took my place in lectures that began with a prayer; in a corridor of study bedrooms alongside matronly women of a certain age; and in a pastoral group of 12 students led by a twinkly-eyed professor of New Testament theology. On paper, it shouldn’t have worked. And yet it did.

  Living with the 44 other single students in Carter, the large house next to the college, I fell in love with these uncool men and women who ragged me like older siblings, and tickled my protestations by suggesting that I too might one day be ordained. They were intelligent, funny, dignified women and men whose faith was vibrant with authenticity despite the churchy robes they dressed in to lead prayer. Perhaps it was in their openness and humour that the robustness of their beliefs could be seen. The security of their faith showed up in the lightness with which they held the outward paraphernalia of religion. When the TV series Ally McBeal ended, the guys organized a fake requiem and black mourning bands were worn around college. Things that we would have called a prayer-meeting to deal with at church, here became fuel for satire.

  And I found in my tutor wisdom and kindness and safety to ask the questions that had always been shushed away. In those first early weeks he called me in for my first pastoral tutorial, which was seminary-speak for “Come and tell me your story and why you’re here.”

  For the first session I sat and sobbed and didn’t say anything coherent. He invited me to sign up for another slot on the timetable outside his door, which I did, and resolved to pull myself together for round two. The second interview wasn’t entirely tearless but his few, well-placed questions got enough information out of me for him to know what I needed.

  “The thing is, Tim, it’s as if I’m having an allergic reaction to this way of being Christian and I don’t entirely know how to rid myself of it. I’m a product of all this so-called sound, correct teaching and doctrine. Yet when I look at the way I’ve lived my life it seems that it’s all been an enormous attempt to appear to be good, to be on the Inside: one of Us rather than one of Them out there.”

  As I spoke I wanted to name the people I had tried over the years to drag over to my side of the fence: the Muslim boys, Louise and Jess, the lost and unsaved who existed out there on the wrong side of my judgements. And as I spoke it felt like I was taking bolt-cutters to the fence I’d built; I didn’t want there to be a fence any more. Just like it was with Joe and me.

  “The things that Jesus actually talked about to do with love seem to be about relinquishing those divisions, about letting go of the need to judge and deny and oppose. Those are the things I would want to be about if I was a Christian but I can’t speak of them or share them because I’m not sure I’ve been changed by them myself. My measure of being a follower of Christ is whether I’m performing all the supernatural stuff … healings and exorcisms and conversions … and I don’t do those things. I suspect I’m more like the hypocrites that Jesus warned about, the ones calling him ‘Lord! Lord!’ who never actually knew him.

  (Pause for box of tissues to be handed to me.)

  “I’d have walked away from all this religion months ago, but it’s Joe and his friends – they have jolted me into not giving up. There’s something about them, the crapness of their lives, their authenticity, their need for wholeness and purpose and hope and healing, their need to give of themselves and make a contribution to the world … What matters to Joe isn’t a particular brand of theology, it’s knowing that God thinks he’s OK even though he doubts he’ll ever get his shit together.

  “And there … there at that point, I run into the thing that I can’t throw off: that God is. It’s where I find I really do believe, because there all religiosity and formulas fail and demand a love that is so much more immense … it’s like the shape of that need speaks of the presence itself … that’s all I can call It … or Her … for now.”

  Tim was unhurried by the need to mop any of this up. He waited, smiled gently and then, in his soft, matter-of-fact voice, responded,

  “Joanna, you know what you see going on with Joe is in part a reflection of your own story. You’ve been trying to respond to what those in authority have been telling you to be and to do your whole life. Now it’s time to begin integrating, to listen to that still, small voice within and to begin trusting. What you’re going to find is that these instincts aren’t simply going to go away. The worry that you’re not quite right, that you’re not really meeting their expectations of
holiness, goodness, attractiveness … these standards of perfection and righteousness aren’t going to disappear. But you’re in a new place here, it’s a safe place to face these things … to begin choosing to trust that you have a lot to give, that you can be who you are and it’s OK if that doesn’t meet others’ expectations. For now I think this season is about coming home to yourself.”

  I thought about that, about returning and staying with myself. He was right: this was an entirely safe place to do that. I was already beginning to get a sense of what it was like simply to inhabit my body as my strength grew after the operations. Cutting my hair, wearing clothes that I enjoyed wearing rather than voluminous things that just covered me and hid me.

  I went back to my room and sat at my desk overlooking the woods: a beautiful, tranquil place to come home to myself as Tim had suggested. I wanted to do that, I wanted to be whole; face, heart and soul. I wanted to reclaim everything I had pledged, altered and manipulated to please others. I sat unmoving in the stillness. There within me was a desire to embrace who I was. All of it. The things I hoped I would be able to give; the memories that embarrassed and shamed me; the attempts to coerce friends into the arms of Jesus; the arms I’d raised and prayers I’d prayed to look holy; the good, potential wife material I’d tried to appear to be: sweet, subservient, not too pretty, not too threatening to a man’s leadership. I recoiled but let myself feel every cringe of it. Every second I sat with it – with the revulsion, embarrassment, hopefulness, disappointment, allowing the memories and feelings to rise and be felt – was an act of faith, the opening of a door, enabling me to see that it all belonged, that something truthful could come out of these raw, misguided efforts. And as I stayed with every surfacing memory, I began to feel embraced by something beyond my own choosing. It was an awareness, resonating with unforced mercy, acceptance and love, covering me.

  Next to the window through which I was staring hung a large pin-board, covered with photographs. I looked again at the arrangement, the highlights of life and friendships that I’d chosen to display.

  Jane Addis and me on our third birthday.

  Tim, Bear, Tamsin and Olivia hanging out the windows of our minibus somewhere on the road to Romania.

  Seven-year-old Alastair with Rosalind in a headlock during a summer picnic.

  Charlie Fox with the Malvern Hills rising up behind him.

  Jane Addis hanging out of a tree at Smiley Week.

  Dad hiking with mini-me on his back.

  A portrait of Mum, tanned, gorgeous, happy, in Africa.

  Only now could I see what was missing: I’d eradicated every picture with me as a teenager. No selfies to be seen, this presentation of my life had been arranged so that I was absent, the one behind the camera instead of messing around in front of it. A whole part of my life – of me – was missing.

  There was a picture I needed to find, a photo that needed to be recovered and restored. I knew the exact one: Louise had taken it when we were fourteen and had posed together for black-and-white photographs. She looked perfect. Obviously I hadn’t. I had hated that photo, and I knew that that was the picture I needed now. It took a while to sort through the disarrayed packets of snaps that I’d lugged with me to college in one large box, but eventually, with piles of photos fanned out in rows across my bed, I found the one I was looking for.

  There she was: fourteen-year-old Joanna, sitting on a swing, hoping to be beautiful, just for one photograph, her wide, train-tracked smile tilted up to the camera. This is where healing begins. I took the snap and slipped it into a frame on my desk. This is how I begin to come home to myself and see what wholeness means. It means starting with her: with that frightened, hopeful girl, allowing love to cover her too. It means remembering her with compassion, because I’m the only person who can; the only person who can look at that photo and know the turmoil going on behind that toothy smile, and gather her up like a lost part of me. And so, with her looking up at me, I start to be restored, remembering her with all the kindness, understanding, affection and care I hadn’t felt before. She’s with me, I want to declare.

  There was another photo, among the piles, that also caught my attention. It was a picture of me with Jane, Louise and her twin sister, Jess, when we were seventeen. I’d invited them over for a dinner party – my first attempt, I served home economics cottage pie with Lambrusco – and we had felt incredibly grown up. I was wearing the suede miniskirt so cursed by my failed attempt to get into TIME nightclub. Three years on, it was still hanging in my wardrobe. I looked at the picture, at my hope of being transformed from gawky seventeen into something lovely and womanly. It was time for the suede skirt to be worn, to be redeemed, to be danced in all night long.

  At the top of Bristol’s Park Street, between Sainsbury’s and Lloyds Bank, was – and hopefully still is – an anonymous, brown, metal door leading down to the onomatopoeically named Lizard Lounge. A cheesy dive, loved and packed out by students almost every night of the week: it was perfect for my plan. Ground was going to be broken, dances reclaimed and trainee priests set free to find their inner J-Lo. I put up posters around the common room, canvassed the women on my corridor in search of a critical mass, and generally let it be known that the following Friday night we would be having a group outing to the Lizard Lounge.

  Possibly because these 30, 40 and 50-something singles knew that there would be few occasions left for disco dancing oblivion once they held public office and had a dog collar around their necks, or because there really was safety in numbers, I was joined that evening by 22 vaguely glammed-up ordinands – at least one pair of legs was clad in leopard-skin print – for divine takeover of the Lizard Lounge. We formed a queue at the doors and I stood at the front of it, ready to oversee the admittance of my gang. No ID was demanded and this time the slightly fazed reaction of the bouncers was caused by my insistence that they had to let every single one of us in because we were all together and it wasn’t often that theological colleges had outings to nightclubs. It worked: even the guys in anoraks – beige, not leopard-printed – were admitted. We were in and, being unfashionably early, we had the whole, though small, dance floor to ourselves.

  Hours later, when I asked the DJ for a shout out to the Church of England clergy, he thought he hadn’t heard right, but after repeatedly yelling in his ear that there really were a large number of trainee vicars on his dance floor he clearly felt this was a niche following which, as a DJ, he ought to nurture. Throughout the night there were special dedications to all the vicars in the house followed by thoughtfully chosen tunes he felt would be appropriate for us.

  Like a Virgin

  Faith

  Love Shack

  Like a Prayer

  You Got the Love …

  And we had. We loved it. It was my Eric Liddell moment. We danced until 3 a.m. and I felt God’s pleasure.

  In February came another outing. This time it was for our pastoral group to head across the nearby Welsh border, to a convent for a Retreat Day. No suede mini-skirts here, we turned up bundled in woollies and hats, taking seriously the warning that it would be cold. Up in the retreat house we were shown to a long, creaking, dark room with worn rugs, a piano at one end, and crocheted doilies on the dark, old coffee tables. Freshly picked grasses and foliage leaned out of small vases on the window sill and mantelpiece and sideboards. Outside the window stretched a long meadow that a doughty nun seemed to be taming from her perch atop a ride-on mower, her wimple blowing out behind her.

  The nun who came to lead our day seemed less doughty, awkward even, maybe unaccustomed to looking 12 strangers in the eye and talking at them for a whole day. But looks can be deceiving. With a warm, slightly fading voice she invited us to hand over our watches for the next few hours and tune into a different rhythm. Wondering what that rhythm would be, I popped my pink baby-G watch into the hat, intrigued.

  A bell tolled plaintively and we were led down through the meadow and into the convent’s chapel. Silence; winter su
nlight resonating on rosy stone; the odd black-robed figure shuffling books into place; the polished curves of a Christ-figure hanging on the cross, lovingly carved out of wood, the focus of the room. More nuns; candles being lit; readings found; silver accoutrements placed; sisters taking their places; eyes closed.

  Silence.

  A bell tolled again, followed by a tinkling bell, and nuns, with varying degrees of effort, pulled themselves to their feet.

  “The angel of the Lord brought greetings to Mary and she conceived by the Holy Spirit: Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus …”

  Uh oh. Praying to Mary: it was a big no-no for evangelicals to put any mediator besides Christ in the way of our communication with the Lord. It was up there with dabbling in wizardry. Only now I was more preoccupied by the sight of a young woman in the front row, just a little older than me perhaps. She had been ringing the bell with her back to me so I hadn’t seen that she was young. Now she’d taken her place in the pew and I could see that she was still a novice; her habit was grey instead of black like the sisters’, and she had no headdress. She was also the only person who could sing. Beside the fact that the musical bits of the liturgy might as well have had every note chosen at random, it was sung three octaves too high for all the croaking, deaf, elderly women whose job it was to sing them. It was terrible. Except for the novice’s clear voice that gave the rest of us visitors the chance to see what the tune should have been.