This Is My Church.
Table of Contents
I’ve found myself in a few churches in my life.
Christianity
I grew up in Christian schools and churches. My maternal grandparents were very very active in theirs - my grandpa played the organ in the little Folly chapel for 70 years, my grandmother was the social hub, laying on frequent coffee mornings, and my mother has also always ended up deep in the organisational bowels of any church she has been part of.
I went to sunday schools, junior church, senior church, youth fellowship, and had to attend the school chapel too. I went to religious festivals spanning long weekends full of music and celebrations. I joined the youth preaching team, touring the local Methodist circuit on Sundays and doing monologues and sketches (rarely sermons, who were we as teenagers to give a sermon?) to tiny, ageing congregations in some beautiful little chapels.
We used to put on plays in the church - once I was playing a small Roman centurion called Titchicus (the counterpart to a Maximus) in a play our preaching team leader wrote about the Passion, the time leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion. You can probably guess we were the comic relief, between some harder scenes. My star turn came when playing Edmund when we did The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - I still don’t like turkish delight very much, I ate too much in rehearsals! Method acting, or something.
Anyway, The community was wonderful. I loved the people. It was like a lot of extended family all coming together once a week (in my grandmother’s case it was exactly that, she had what seemed like infinite local cousins). I don’t see the church friends much any more, but they’re the kind of friends I’ll one day be roaring with laughter with again, even after decades apart.
Disillusionment
I can’t say I ever really “got” it though. Faith. I wanted to. I wanted to feel like the prayers weren’t just pretend. I wanted for other people to believe, and to feel the love and warmth. I got that from the community, but I never really got that feeling from God or Jesus. I enjoyed the rejoiceful feeling of singing together - but anyone who is part of a choir will tell you how amazing that feels, religious or not.
At a religious weekender I went to as a teen, the youth had their own section with cool bands and age-appropriate sermons and stuff (um, including advice not to date anyone who wasn’t Christian and never kiss lying down). One night the music went all low and hypnotic, we were instructed to stand with our eyes closed and hands held out as if to receive a gift. Prayers were murmured. Then people started dropping! Falling over, overcome with the Holy Spirit I guess. They’d been ‘touched’.
I was equal parts horrified and jealous. Why did I not receive a gift? Was I not Christian enough? Why couldn’t I just be a better Christian. Why don’t I get touched? A leader from the weekender team talked to me, she said that I was so affected it looked like I had been touched, and she started to celebrate me becoming a true Christian. But those were tears of fright and sadness and guilt, not joy and love. That’s not the Christianity I thought I knew, or wanted to continue knowing.
One of my church’s youth leaders later talked to me, as I remained upset for a long time after, and said she had never felt anything in response to her prayers either. Never felt ‘touched’, never had a big overwhelming feeling - but that she saw God’s love in other people. That helped. Thank you Glenday.
Later at university I went to occasional Christian events and felt very much not a part of it. I would talk 1 on 1 with the people there, or with the odd Christian I’d meet at parties. They couldn’t understand my situation - I wanted to believe! So why didn’t I just believe? What was there to get? You just choose to have faith, don’t you? Apparently I didn’t. I really tried.
Jesus was a good man, though. As far as I can tell, he was a radical leftist.
Anyway. At some point I decided to be free. Why did I need to continue feeling bad for not being Christian, or Christian enough? So I finally let it go. A lack of religion doesn’t mean a lack of morality - I am not looking out for only myself - so I guess I’m a humanist now.
Geeks
I looked for other communities. I was a student, and I found a local geek squad, but that life revolved around drinking and parties and after a while my body started to get pissed off at me for being pissed too often.
It was fun though. One person above is blurred because they became semi-famous and I’m not out to embarrass them! Some of my closest friends are from my residential hall in the fresher’s year of university, they’re good, solid friends, like those from my school and Christian church years. But that’s not what I’m talking about - I was still seeking a community, a new church.
I found a few online - it was the years of forums on the web - every big hobby I swung into, I also found a related forum to dive into. Overclocking, aquariums, fancy rats, photography, bicycle commuting - amongst others. I still have some friends from a few of those, who I met in real life and remain in contact with :)
Eventually forums stopped being the thing, and after a long stint where the only thing was Facebook (with some dabbling in tumblr on the side, but I already felt too old for it), I went to Reddit and joined r/TryingForABaby and its follow up (for the “graduates”!) in Discord. Of course by now I have far too many communities/servers listed down the side of my Discord app. But that baby-graduate community was my lifeblood when in the deepest weeds of early sleep-deprived motherhood.
Swing dance
The first non-church community that I decided was my new church, was the one I found in swing dancing. I don’t think I need to rewrite the blog post I already wrote on it, over a decade ago.
In short, the community, learning, physicality, and joy of the dance and its scene fulfilled me. I felt like a real central part of my local scenes (when I moved country I just slotted into the new one - boom, new country, new friends, no problem), I got so much out of it. It gave me a social life, a purpose to my leisure time, and I became much more connected to my own body and how it moves.
I went to beginner classes, intermediate, advanced, lindy hop, balboa, collegiate shag and authentic jazz classes. I went to workshops, exchanges and dance camps spanning long weekends or whole weeks full of music and parties. I joined a swing dance teaching team, touring local nightclubs, museums and pubs giving charleston crash courses to eager and initially unco-ordinated couples.
The last line of the post says “I keep dancing because to stop dancing would tear a hole in my heart.” …Oof.
A couple of years later, we started a family, and the world went into a pandemic just as I was giving birth to #2. I got tired, and busy, and you know, isolated. I have barely danced for years now. I miss it terribly. But social partner dancing is really an ideal virus-spreader. I managed to get a few dances outdoors late this summer (2023) when a jive band played a big local city park. It was lovely - but of course autumn and winter brings more coronavirus waves, so I’m avoiding it again. That I’ve caught COVID-19 in January and December 2023 anyway just rubs salt in the wound.
That isolation in my second maternity leave stemmed from the pandemic and sudden evaporation of baby groups, open coffee shops, childcare for the toddler, or any of the other social things you can do with a baby that helps keep you sane. I was exhausted and depressed.
Dancing has been sitting on an almost permanent back-burner ever since. For a while I was very impatient for the COVID vaccine, because then I could dance. But I’ve since had 5 doses of vaccine, and it still doesn’t feel safe to dance indoors. I have to prepare for the idea that it may never feel safe again. There is indeed now a little dance-shaped hole in my heart. So be it.
Web development
(a.k.a. Geeks, part II)
Well, my social life was canned. I didn’t go hunting for a community this time - but eventually I found myself in a new one.
After a fair bit of therapy it became clear I needed to do something about my (non-)career. I had nice bosses and colleagues, but I wasn’t earning very much and I had stagnated. The motivation was gone. I was very much a tech generalist (hardware, mostly) and needed to find a path into a specialism I would enjoy.
Aside: Yes being a generalist is also great, and if you want to be an entrepreneur or take management positions it’s even useful - but I wanted to do neither of those. I wanted to find employment where I could just do the work and have someone else worry about the business, legal, HR and payroll side of things.
I thought back to what I had really enjoyed in my jobs over the last 2 decades (!), and it always came back to visual stuff and coding. The longer story is in my side-stepping blog post - but suffice to say it became clear that front end web development was going to be my bag.
But I wasn’t there yet. I applied to lots of jobs, and the few interviews I got BOMBED and, oh. Yeah I was going to have to retrain, wasn’t I. I did do a couple of smallish courses, including one that was a full stack boot camp (but quite a narrow one, where I decided halfway through that I was done with it).
What really helped? Twitter. In 2021 into 2022 it became the centre of my world for communicating with web developers. I became friends with so many fellow learners, and chatted with helpful experienced developers who were super encouraging and collectively took the place of a mentor. I used all the spare time I had (not that there was much of that with 2 small kids, my poor husband didn’t see me much during this period) to take my teenage hobby web-design experience from 20ish years ago and upgrade it to encompass modern web development.
Aside II: I suspect some people might object to “upgraded” in this context - but even if you’re very suspicious of all the frameworks and abstraction that now exists around the web platform (totally get that); JS had really changed with ES6 and whatnot, node was a completely new thing to me, HTML had even gone up a version and CSS - whooo, boy. So much cool new stuff, that just keeps coming!
It was through Twitter I saw the job ad for the position I currently hold. It was contacts on Twitter who gave me pep talks and consoled me after bad interview experiences. It was the web dev community there that got me turned around and helped me into a new job.
My new church
Shortly after I started in my new position, Musk bought Twitter and I fled. I moved over to Mastodon at just the right time, when a whole load of other web dev types all shifted over at the same time, and were very follow-back happy. I found myself suddenly being mutuals with people I’d been admiring on Twitter for the two years previous, and I couldn’t believe my luck - still can’t - that I can chat with these most excellent people on the daily.
There continues to be a trickle of new contacts, not necessarily in web development, but with a mindset similar to my own. I really value all these connections to genuinely interesting people around the globe.
The worlds of my leisure and work have collided - and I am having to be careful as that can easily lead to burnout - but for the first time in a long time I’m really enjoying my work. Small frustrations aside, it is great solving problems and building stuff for a living.
A lot of my work is done from home, and while I do enjoy going to the office and I really like my colleagues, I also like the cosiness of my home office and enjoying the background chatter of Mastodon during my working days.
In my leisure time, I enjoy going to the non-node part of the web and tinkering in the native web platform, and you all are with me there, too. But we also talk about kids, about food, about caring for the varied and wonderful people of this world, about nonsense, about anything and everything.
My new church keeps me company. It amuses me when I am bored. It helps me through when I am stuck. It consoles me when I’m struggling.
But it’s not all about me. I like to help, when I can. Whether that’s by adding some levity, helping someone with a CSS problem, donating to mutual aid, or making sure someone else doesn’t feel alone.
I know a lot of us don’t know each other beyond the words on a screen and our avatars, which are only sometimes of our actual faces. But there are so many words! We show each other our many inner worlds, with an openness that can take years and years to foster with friends in “real life”.
This is real life. You are my church. I see God’s love in our community.