This piece was first published in issue twenty-nine. You can buy the issue here or subscribe here.

You pay a pound, you light a candle, you pause, you walk on out of the church. It’s religion at its least threatening. It doesn’t look like a risk. It looks like nothing at all.
Yet when I think of how our journeys of faith began to converge, this is what I think of. It was a cold and overcast day in Rochester. We explored the Norman keep, shared some chips, went into the cathedral. “Do you want to light a candle?” Chris asked me. “Yes,” I said. So we lit one each, and stood and prayed for a minute or so. Then we walked back out into the dusk.
I had never lit a candle before. No one but I heard my silent and automatic no. Only I knew that my yes was an experimental one, a “what happens if I say yes?” kind of yes.

Months later, we found ourselves sitting in a small church office with the vicar who would conduct our wedding. It was after work. “I’ve had a bad day,” was the first thing I told the reverend. The trouble with getting married is that people expect you to be excited, and we were both frazzled and raw. Yet here we were and now we had to talk about the big things.

It was strange to hear out loud our very different stories. Chris is a heterodox Catholic with a battered crucifix pendant. He combines loyalty to Rome with a suspicion for some of its doctrines. He crosses himself in church, prays the Lord’s Prayer, prays to the saints on occasion. “The saints are like having a better-behaved elder brother talk to your parents on your behalf,” he says.

I don’t understand saints, but his explanation makes me smile all the same. I was brought up in churches so plain that they might as well be garages. My spiritual beginnings were strong on the Bible and a direct path to God, suspicious of ritual and icons. Lighting candles was something other people did. These days, I know where the centre of my faith is, but I’m rather less sure about the edges.
It was strange to hear our stories through someone else’s ears. How differently they began and how effortless their convergence felt. Yet it hasn’t been effortless, of course. Like the first candle I ever lit, it has been a series of tiny decisions and small risks. When piled together, these look a lot like the hard work they never seemed. Each one is an experimental yes; with each the no gets fainter.

First published in Oh Comely Issue Twenty-Nine

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