This is a study replete with disqualification, dislocation and misrecognition. Aged 29, decidedly with ‘no religion’, Lamorna Ash treated Christianity as ‘a single homogenous bloc aligned with all kinds of malignant social positions’, notably in relation to sexuality and a dubious colonial past (p.2). These seem to represent a generation of Guardian readers totally immune to any shades of Christianity. When space for more scholarly dedicated works is at a premium, why review this book? Its title is useless, its chapters lack description, and CE as against BC abounds.
Contrary to expectations, it emerges as a work of singular importance, for it speaks for a lost generation coming to the end of their disconnections with Christianity. They come not to inspect the tombstone of a dead God, the victim of declining church attendance, celebrated in the mass media especially in the BBC, so fixated on strategies of de-Christianisation where props of belief are capriciously knocked over. Everything seems locked in querulous identity politics, where gender fluidity renders nothing fixed, where everything seems post, secularity, feminism, modernity. All seems toxic, individualism rules, and loneliness abounds. Distrust and anxiety prevail. Against this hostile background, Ash’s seeking to become a Christian rises up phoenix-like leading her to present a singular witness to what seems improbable.
Her project took three years from 2021 to 2024. For it, she travelled around the country to different sites of Christian belief, interviewing over 60 seekers, ranging from Catholics, Quakers, Orthodox Christians to Evangelical gatherings and festivals. The search for a subsequent work to her study of a Cornish fishing town might account for the project, but it was generated by something baffling. Two young male comedians she knew at University let it be known that they wanted to become Anglican priests. She followed them around at services and at prayer. They saw something that sabotaged her scepticism thus generating a question: could she become a Christian in a year, to have what they had. Most often tales of transitions in regard to Christianity are of exit not entry. Hers goes in the ‘wrong direction, illustrating only too well that faith is caught not taught. She did not fear contamination by religious practice; she wanted it.
In The Confessions St Augustine set down the gold standard for accounts of conversion. Each is peculiar to all, those converted and also that attendant on their transition who gaze on in perplexity. Those who move pendulum-like from disbelief to belief fascinate. Huysmans, the inventor of decadence, moved via Satanism to becoming a Benedictine oblate; Gillian Rose shifted from Judaism and Marxism to Christianity on her death bed, and so on. It is the unexpectedness that unsettles. In some cases the basis of the transition is obvious, but in others it is not where there is no logic to the movement. Her account joins another recent, highly impressive work, also produced by somebody under 30, that of Guy Stagg, The Crossway. Afflicted with mental depression, he went on pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem to resolve his plight. As with Ash, he also encountered some young wondrous witnesses melded in faith. Despite these, he did not make it over to becoming a believer, which, oddly, makes his work all the more credible. Did Ash fulfill what she sought? The outcome is a virtual page turner.
Beautifully written, oddly wise, sympathetic to those seeking belief besides herself, there is an extraordinary alertness and humanity in this deeply moving and fascinating works. She is generous in disclosure without being self-absorbed, as she chronicles a deepening of faith aided by much Biblical reflection. For her, this was not a sort of ethnographic project but an account of wrestling with God. As she admits, the seeking is not triggered by any mental illness, other than a chaos of life, a certain emptiness and dissatisfaction. What follows is a tale of gradual immersion in Christianity, one that is incremental, where spiritual experiences come later in one who thought she was lobotomised from them. Her seeking in the face of all manner of scandals, difficulties and failures of others is remarkably persistent. Not for her being chased by Thompson’s hound of heaven but by a sort of golden Labrador who licked her along the route. As a window on a generation now turning towards Christianity, this work stands as of unique importance. It is vivid, smacks of authenticity and questioning that leads to a credible end. There is much of theology to be learnt from this work.
Her work is divided into three parts. The first part illustrates the diversity of forms of Christianity she encounters, which is rich in variety. The second part turns on her own personal journey through isolated places to attend on the demands of faith. Part III concerns those she met, whose faith had changed in adulthood and who moved her most, though some she encountered earlier had a profound effect. One unusual property to the work is the way a number of the males she felt had tales to tell. These relate to an unfolding issue of a ‘quiet revolution’ in generation Z as it turns its back on the ‘liberations’ of X, so that non-alcoholic drinking and celibacy, maybe involuntary, emerge as its character mark. The fascination of her work lies in the way she seeks to reconcile an identity, forged in a vocabulary of rights and individualism, with the sacrificial demands of Christian believing.
Her search starts with a Bible study class. This was decidedly Evangelical and was linked to Holy Trinity Brompton, a venue much associated with church planting. The sense of being there that characterises the study is wonderfully caught at these classes. Her first set back is that its charismatic leader resigned in solidarity with other same-sex friends. Undaunted, she carries on with the course ‘Christianity Explored’. She found another place to explore, an Evangelical Alliance church. It had a mass baptism where she found Alex there to be immersed. His tale, as with others, notably of Max in the next chapter, who was to be baptised in the Orthodox church, was of deep suffering only to be resolved by some form of redemptive baptism. Their tales elicited by an acute listener, are deeply moving. She then traveled on to ‘Youth with Mission’ feeling somewhat sad and with a minor depression. There she found another male, who endured sufficiently to travel on in belief from the demands made there. The scandals surrounding some of these Evangelical experimental zones are described unflinchingly. The value of her accounts lies in reflections on experiments to render Christianity as accessible as possible. It cannot be said that they emerge as persuasive.
In Part II she moves to Quaker meetings. At the age of 22, she started to attend these. There she encounters a bizarre situation of an atheist Quaker who taught her how she might approach Christianity. Again the fieldwork is excellent. The sense of waiting in silence is admirably conveyed. Her guide is another male. The Inner Light sought never came to her. It all seemed a preparation for three Christian retreats, more Catholic by heritage and form. One was at Iona, the other at Walsingham, and finally to St Beuno’s Jesuit retreat centre where her love of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins enabled her to gain access to resonances of faith. Starting with her Biblical studies class, and with this last retreat involving the Spiritual Exercises, her routes takes her into theological depths of sin, heaven, and hell that her generation is supposed to disdain. Not for her, superficial expressions of joy and love but something deeper and unflinching in demands made.
Commencing with pilgrimage to Iona, she found herself disconnected and homesick. There the issue of light arose again. She then went on to a Triduum retreat at Walsingham. At it, she encountered a new order of nuns, some young, and one who perplexed her over accepting the demands of celibacy. After her retreat at St Beuno’s, when driving away, she had her first religious experience sufficient to declare ‘my desert period was over’. What is evident is that her rhetoric shifts into deeper Christian reflection. It starts to seep into her identity. Chapter 11 takes the one odd turn in the book, when she goes to the Catholic Church of the English martyrs, Cambridge. Her interlocutor there is a female to male transgender individual. Viewed through this prism, she finds Catholicism estranging and goes no further into it, perhaps not surprisingly, as she seemed not to notice the mass there. In response, she journeyed on what is called ‘One Church’, an inclusive, non-denominational Church in Brighton. The visit was inconclusive. She returns to her Quaker Meeting House at Muswell Hill to recast spiritual matters. There she hears some female Quakers telling their stories. For Ash, the time had come to tell hers at a Quaker meeting and what she saw that engaged her utterly. There she encountered the outcome of her journeying.
Out of deference to all whose tales she heard, she felt unusually a need to stay the course, even if, as a priest had said, that it takes twenty years to secure a conversion. Might they stay and take root or move on?
This might refer to the stickability problems associated with converts. Dissatisfied with her wanderings she wanted something hard and bright, not on the borders of Christianity but at its centre. In the end, Ash found a church, that met a need for communion, community, ritual, and symbols. A new priest had come; hence, a sort of chaos reigning at her first service there. On the Second Sunday, 2024, she bowed her head and for the first time prayed. She unlocked and yearned. Prayer she realised came out of suffering. The ending of the book resonates of the finale of James Joyces’ short story ‘The Dead’, the realisation that out there is a realm, somewhere to place her mother suffering dementia. Reflecting the wisdom of the book she realises seeking and acceptance are beginnings not endings.
Almost like a piece of music that comes to a fulfilling end, a sense of arrival at a peace, of arrival at a station of grace. The vividness of her unexpected journey, its peculiar authenticity, renders her passage there all the more persuasive and absorbing. There is a caveat to this remarkable book. How could her editors at Bloomsbury have allowed such a work to appear with an irretrievable title? When it comes out in paperback, it needs a proper one.
