Grieving, reluctant and heckled by my own sarcastic inner-voice, I finally walked into a church. This is how it went.
Grief dragged me in. Doubt sat beside me. Something met me there.
This is an adapted extract from the book I’m writing about grief, doubt, family, and my slightly reluctant and totally unplanned move towards faith. After losing my Mom suddenly, I’d found myself circling Christianity in a way I hadn’t expected: reading, questioning, resisting, half hoping, half mocking myself for even entertaining it. For weeks, I’d also been followed around by a voice in my head: part inner critic, part devil on the shoulder, part sarcastic survival mechanism. Whatever it was, it seemed to have an unwanted opinion on everything. This was the morning I finally stopped reading about church from a safe distance and took the plunge by walking into one.
When the morning finally arrived, I didn’t feel brave or steady. I felt undercooked and out of place. Jeans. Hoodie. Slightly bleary-eyed from one glass of wine that had become three, or possibly more, the night before. No plan. No idea whether I even needed a plan. I walked in expecting eyes on me, like I’d turned up to the wrong place and everyone would know about it before I did. A tramp crashing a party at the Ritz. Like I was treading the muddy mess of my life straight across their clean and holy house without having the decency to knock or wipe my feet.
Walking the leaflet-laden corridor and pulling open the heavy glass door, I was confronted by a breathtakingly unremarkable scene, which went some way to banishing the image of old ladies in knitted cardigans and quaint biscuits eaten with tea drunk from proper teacups. In reality, they were older and younger, suits and hoodies, polished shoes and scuffed trainers, neat hair and uncombed, families, loners, couples - the same ordinary mix you run into in you average McDonald’s, Primark or Sainsbury’s. Somehow all so familiar in their ordinariness.
To my pleasant surprise, nobody seemed to be taking my arrival with anywhere near the heady mix of tension and vomit-inducing nervousness that I was. I don’t think anyone even noticed I was there; if they did, they either hid it well or were too polite to bat an eyelid.
Then - uninvited - that voice cut in again. Sliding itself up next to me with a grin on its smug face that invited the unholiest of language in response. The same heckling inner critic that had followed me for weeks, dead set on turning this whole thing into a joke before I had the chance to take it seriously. Just more material for the next pub conversation.
“Oh no,” he muttered. “This is worse than expected! They’re actually normal looking! This is how they rope you in, pal. You know, like that Scientology thing you saw on Netflix. Proper catfish territory, this is, mate. Careful now.”
An elderly woman smiled and handed me a thin booklet. I took it automatically, smiled back and sat down. I flicked it open and immediately noticed sections marked “All.” I scanned for context and my heart sank. “All” as in: everyone joins in together. I picked out one such instance at random:
Speaker: Lord, in your mercy.
All: Hear our prayer.
Call and response! Group participation! People saying things out loud together!
I wasn’t ready for this.
Didn’t they have a neutral section? Like the family stand at the football. Somewhere away from the singers and die-hards. No pressure to join in. No expectation to know the chants. Just somewhere to observe quietly with your arms folded and a sensible exit route.
My brain, entirely unhelpfully, transported me straight back to childhood pantomimes. The same call and response. The same cringey group participation.
“He’s behind you!”
“Oh no he isn’t!”
“Oh yes he is!”
My sarcastic inner devil voice, who I was starting to believe might actually be Satan himself residing in my jumbled head, was loving it. He chuckled quietly to himself, doing that thing they do in films where they hold their hand out and pretend to check their fingernails casually.
I was doing his work for him now.
To my pleasant surprise, nobody seemed to be taking my arrival with anywhere near the heady mix of tension and vomit-inducing nervousness that I was.
The opening of the service passed by in a blur, my self-consciousness consuming more of my attention than anything going on around me. Then the Bible reading started. Something about seeds being scattered and falling on different kinds of ground. Some landing on stony paths, others on fertile ground.
Abstract. Unfamiliar. Pointless!
Exactly like my first go at the Bible earlier that week. “In the beginning was the Word.”
What word? Whose word? Just say it in plain English, mate! It felt like nonsense dressed up as depth. Like I was supposed to nod along and pretend it meant something, when really I hadn’t got a clue what I was looking at, or in this case, listening to.
What was I even doing here?
Yet people sat engaged. And suddenly, the thought struck me that they had chosen to be here on a Sunday morning. I had too, I guess. But these guys…I assume they chose to do this most weeks. And there were millions more like them around the world doing the same thing. I briefly contemplated the magnitude of the whole thing. The Vatican, Christ the Redeemer, cathedrals carved into skylines, quiet little churches like this one tucked into corners of ordinary towns, people gathering, week after week, across centuries, all compelled by something that seemed - for now at least - way out of my reach. Surely this couldn’t be the sort of thing people nodded along to without really knowing what they were agreeing with. The grand buildings, the people, the history, the scale of it all. It couldn’t all be nonsense.
Could it?
I massaged my brow through the inner turmoil, as if doing so would somehow stir some form of comprehension and connection to the surface. The wrinkles in my forehead felt prevalent, maybe even multiplying under the stress.
Why was I stressed?
If I was stressed, I cared.
I cared enough to get myself into this state.
Then the sermon began. And slowly, so slowly I didn’t even clock it happening at first, the vicar took apart the neat little dismissal I’d arrived with and laid the pieces to the Bible reading out properly. He went back to the image in the passage: seeds scattered, not planted carefully, but thrown. Some landing on hard ground. Some among thorns. Some on shallow soil. Some, eventually, somewhere deep enough to take root. And instead of leaving it floating there like a religious metaphor you’re supposed to make understanding grunts to, whilst pretending it’s spiritually deep, he translated it into language I had at least a shot at understanding.
He spoke about how people hear the gospel at wildly different moments and in completely different conditions. How timing matters more than intelligence. My mind drifted back to my midweek Bible disaster once more. Maybe being clever enough to understand what that Romans and Galatians stuff was all about was never the requirement after all.
The speaker continued about how a person can be bright, curious, well-intentioned, and still not able to receive something true because their head is too full, their life too loud, their pain too raw, or their comfort too complete. He spoke about distraction, the kind that isn’t sinful or dramatic, just busy. The kind where you’re not hostile to truth, you’re just preoccupied. Better things to be getting on with and all that. And about cynicism, not as arrogance, but as a kind of self-protection you develop after being let down by life too many times.
Then he spoke about grief.
Not in a sentimental way. More like an acknowledgement that grief softens some people and hardens others, and sometimes both at the same time. That it can strip away the distractions and leave you raw, exposed, suddenly more open, but also more fragile.
I felt targeted.
Too close to home.
And I couldn’t for the life of me work out whether it felt like a divine cuddle or like my personal life and inner turmoil had just been put on loudspeaker for a room full of strangers to hear.
What really caught me was the suggestion that failure to believe doesn’t automatically mean the thing you’re being asked to believe is false. That sometimes ideas bounce off us not because they’re nonsense, but because the ground they land on is compacted by years of habit, or tangled up with other things: worry, ambitions, relationships, life. Simply not ready yet. Readiness wasn’t a moral achievement. It was a condition. You’re ready when you’re ready.
Had my years of cynicism, sarcasm and dismissal turned my heart into the stony ground I was hearing about? But here I found myself: in a church. Was I softening?
I felt something in me ease. Not relief exactly - more like permission. Permission to not feel stupid for entertaining it. Permission to admit that maybe I hadn’t rejected this stuff because I’d rigorously disproved it. Maybe I hadn’t scorned it or mocked it because it was obviously nonsense. Maybe it had simply arrived at me at the wrong time, in the wrong way, when I was too young, too distracted, or too smug to let it sit. The idea that truth could be patient - that it might wait, rather than force itself - unsettled me more than any argument would have. Because it suggested that what was happening now wasn’t a sudden conversion or an emotional wobble.It was a delayed encounter. The same seed. Different ground. But still the truth. The patient, unchanging truth.
Maybe.
Had my years of cynicism, sarcasm and dismissal turned my heart into the stony ground I was hearing about?
I still wasn’t ready to throw all my chips in just yet. Something was niggling in the background, stopping me from throwing myself towards it fully. Then he popped up uninvited again. I fought hard to keep the expletives from escaping my mouth, settling instead for an exasperated eye-roll. Did I just roll my eyes at myself? I was arguing with myself. I’d lost it! Grief had fried me. I had finally lost it!
“Whoa, steady on!” the devil gasped, with a panic I hadn’t heard until now. “This is how it happens. Bloke with a collar and mad robes talks the talk a bit, throws in a few gardening metaphors about seeds and soil, and suddenly you’re nodding along like it’s Countryfile. Don’t get seduced by compost and parables. You’re grieving, mate, not enlightened.”
I wanted to punch him by this point.
At first I didn’t register what was happening next. Just a subtle shift in the room. Chairs creaking. People standing. A low, coordinated movement that felt rehearsed, like everyone knew the next step except me. There was activity at the front - quiet preparation, deliberate hands. I watched a man step into the aisle and then another. Only when people began moving row by row did the penny start to drop.
Ohhhh. This was something you took part in.
My stomach tightened.
Bread and wine. That much I knew. Enough RE lessons over the years to recognise the outline, even if I’d never paid much attention to the detail.
This wasn’t observation territory anymore.
This was involvement!
The bread looked wrong when I finally focused properly on what the vicar was holding up, as he spoke about Jesus breaking bread and saying to the disciples, “Take. Eat. This is my body.” It was thin. Pale. Flimsy. More like something you’d snap than make a sandwich with.
A religious crisp.
That voice leapt on it gratefully, like a man spotting a fire exit.
“Oh, excellent. A poppadom. Very Jesus! Where’s the onion salad? Mint sauce? Bit of mango chutney? Grab yourself a beer, kid, and we’ll make a proper night of this.”
I was slowly learning not to react.
People kept moving. Nobody opted out. Nobody stayed seated pretending they hadn’t noticed. Even a woman in a wheelchair was served where she sat, the routine adjusting itself seamlessly around her. There were no loopholes in this thing. No polite observer’s badge you could flash. I started rehearsing exits in my head. Small refusals. A quiet shake of the head. A muttered apology. But each option felt louder, ruder even, than simply doing what everyone else was doing.
By the time the nod and smile came from a well-groomed man with lovely teeth and a good head of hair - gentle, expectant - my body had already decided.
I walked to the front and knelt.
Hands presented forward in a begging manner. I was copying what I saw around me. The devil tried to wedge a joke in about Oliver Twist or something.
“Please, sir. Can I have some more?”
I batted it away. I don’t know what zone I was in, but I was definitely in one of some description.
The wafer was placed into my palm. Light as paper. Tasteless. Dry. Words were spoken - something about the body of Christ - but they didn’t land. They slid past me like background noise, abstract and oddly ceremonial, as if I were overhearing a language I didn’t yet understand.
Romans. Galatians. In the beginning was the word.
Then came the cup. The wine was unexpectedly strong. Sharp. Real. It cut through the moment instead of blending into it. And this time the words said as it was passed to me didn’t drift.
“The blood of Christ, shed for you.”
Not whispered.
Not dramatised.
Just stated.
Plain.
Certain.
For you.
Shed for you.
The phrase lodged itself somewhere uncomfortable in me and wouldn’t move.
Without warning, I was back on a hard wooden floor, cross-legged in a primary school hall, legs numb, a teacher explaining to six-year-old me, far too casually, that Jesus had died for me. I remembered the irritation I felt back then. The injustice. What did I do? I don’t even know the bloke. I wasn’t even alive when all this madness happened. Back then, it had sounded unfair. Arbitrary. Like being blamed for something before you’d even entered the room. Sitting there now, decades later, with wine still sharp on my tongue, I realised the problem hadn’t been the idea itself.
It had been the lack of explanation.
The slogan without the substance.
The conclusion without the context.
As I walked back to my seat, the inner voice didn’t joke. Didn’t interrupt. It just hovered, attentive. Watching.
The service ended soon after. I left quickly. Probably too quickly. I didn’t want conversation. Or smiles. Or reassurance. I needed space to let whatever had just happened settle without anyone else touching it.
Sitting in the car, engine off, I tried to take stock. I didn’t suddenly understand what I’d just taken part in. It was still strange. Still abstract. Bread and wine that were apparently more than bread and wine, but not in a way I could explain without sounding ridiculous.
But the difference was this: I wasn’t analysing it from a distance anymore.
I had stepped into it.
Not reading about it.
Not mocking it.
Not standing safely outside with my arms folded.
Inside it.
And underneath the confusion, something else had started to form. Something that unsettled me far more than doubt ever had.
I realised I now wanted it to be true.
Not because it was comforting. Not because it neatly solved anything. But because the idea that this might actually be how reality worked, this abstract and loopy explanation for an abstract and loopy existence, no longer felt so absurd.
The questions were still there. I wasn’t converted. I hadn’t crossed some invisible line.
But I’d lost my neutrality.
And that worried me a little.
Because the moment you want something to be true, you stop being a detached observer. You listen differently. You read differently. You have to be more careful, not less.
A strange thirst had taken hold.
Not for certainty.
For understanding.
The inner voice stirred again. Not mocking now. Not relaxed either. Just there. Just alert.
And for the first time, its silence didn’t feel like confidence.
It felt like concern.
