There are moments in the span of our lives that you can point to and say ‘there, that is when things changed’. Big decisions made, small acts that don’t reveal there impact until years down the road, places on the map of our lives that act as pinpoints showing the time and spaces traveled.
In August I decided to travel to St.Albans for the day to see the cathedral there and the visit was one that became quite introspective. A new place bringing up thoughts of time gone by, places and memories invoked by name rather than sight.

For me St.Albans is the the church I grew up in back in Port Alberni and it acts as a marker point in my childhood story, or rather the end of our time there is the place I put in the pin. As a young child this provided the clearest indication of when everything changed, the leaving of the only home I had known, leaving the church building I had spent so much time giving us new spaces to explore and in my young mind at least the beginning of the end of my parents marriage. Children (well everyone to be honest) deal with major life changes in different ways, for me I retreated into the world of books. Reading became my way to escape and escape I did, I devoured any book I could get my hands on and you would have to physically move the book away from my face in order to get a response out of me. I couldn’t escape from the ugliness I saw in the church during that time however and how utterly abandoned a Pastor can be when he fails. In fact after I started University it would take me several years before I was willing to face a church again. I had to make the choice to embrace the flaws, brokenness and bias we all bring with us to the experience of ‘church’ regardless of the position being held and not use that as an excuse to write the whole thing off.

Through it all however I am so grateful that I have the parents that I do. Regardless of what they were going through they really made the effort to still parent us as a unit to the best of their ability and family dinners were a weekly occurrence throughout my childhood. Disagreements were had behind closed doors – and in another language – rather than in in front of us and major decisions were met with an ‘I’ll have to talk to your Father first’. As the family dynamics shift you’re relationships with your parents will change but I wouldn’t take mine any other way, so if you’ll allow me I’m going to talk about them briefly (if you would rather skip that then I’ll be talking about St.Albans after the next picture).

My mother taught us that you could be strong and be a woman at the same time. That intelligence was valued and we should know our own mind and who we were with our value never being determined by someone else. She is smarter than I’ll ever be and though at times I felt out of place living with her and my sister when I am much more like my father we could pull together and accomplish anything when we worked as a team. A particular instance of asking the two of them for help in biology and the look on their faces not understanding how I couldn’t ‘get it’ comes to mind, keeping in mind that Michelle hadn’t even taken that class yet! Though in retrospect I think that I mentally sabotaged myself with the mentality that science was ‘their thing’ while the arts were ‘mine’.
She has always had a heart for those less fortunate than us making sure we were aware just what a privileged position we were in and has followed that through with action. She is also the reason why I’ve never understood, or accepted the fact that you need men to complete particular jobs so I’ll build, or paint, or move whatever it is that I need thank you very much. More than happy to work with you on something but I don’t require you to do it for me. This attitude may have resulted in my Pastor shouting ‘Carmen, you’re so burly!’ across the church at some point in my life though if I’m honest I took it as the compliment I think he’d intended it to be. (Thanks Andy!).

My Father showed me you could be creative in a million different ways: painting, drawing, woodburning, building furniture, writing songs, books and poems or by renovating a house. I always felt that my creative pursuits were just as valid as if I had focused on something more ‘serious’.  I’m fully aware that my desire to renovate my own home someday comes from watching his house evolve and helping him lay the floors.
Dad also made sure that we talked about EVERYTHING whether we wanted too or not, in order to make sure that ‘you’re dealing with everything now so you don’t have to deal with it when you’re 40 like me’. Those conversations, usually held in the car, have had a profound effect on who I am and on my faith. Even though Dad wasn’t always tight with God in the midst of it all he did encourage our relationship with Him and to be free in that. I’ll never forget one of those conversations when things were rough and Dad told me that it was ok to swear at God if you wanted to because he was big enough to handle your pain. Another time when talking about different spiritual gifts he said that I should just ‘play with it because you’re not going to get in trouble if you do it wrong, at least you’re trying’. While he may have walked away from ministry for a while he couldn’t get away from the calling ministry had on him (though he would have probably denied it to his dying breath at the time). The idea of God as a loving Father is one that is easy for me to understand because I’ve always been secure in the love from my earthly one. He’s also shown me how to own your own story and never to be ashamed of where you’ve come from, but rather to use it as a way of helping point others towards God which he beautifully illustrated in his book Broken for Good. 

And all of this contemplation stemming from a name…St.Alban, a man I had never actually given much thought to. Everyone knows who a church is named after if it’s called St.Marks or St.Pauls but while I knew that he obviously had been someone, that was about as far as it had ever gone. It turns out that he is historically considered Britain’s first martyr though not much is actually known about him although this didn’t stop many fantastic stories about his life and death being written hundreds of years after his death. The general story is that he opened his home to a traveling priest and was so amazed by him that he converted to Christianity. When the roman leader sent soldiers to the house to arrest the priest Alban wore his robes and went in his place as a prisoner where he was scouraged and then later beheaded. The more elaborate versions include instances such as the bridge crossing a river to the execution site being so full of people that the execution party could not cross, Alban was so eager to become a martyr that he prayed and the river dried up so he could cross. The cathedral that stands on the site of his execution is one of the biggest I’ve seen and it definitely was a bit of a maze getting around inside.

The bit I found the most strange was behind the most elaborate alter (though there are 3 that run the length of the cathedral) where the shrine to St. Alban stands. As soon as I saw it the first thing I thought of was the Holy of Holies in the temple set beyond the place of worship where all could go. It also just felt very weird having a space dedicated to someone other than Jesus in a church though I know these shrines are quite common. The prayer that you’re supposed to pray while at the shrine is as follows.