On a recent Sunday, the writer Lamorna Ash observed an hour of silence in a North London Quaker meeting house, a small brick building with a bright yellow door. Sitting among mostly elderly people in silver pixie cuts and practical sweaters, Ms. Ash, 31, stood out in orange Adidas sneakers and cargo pants. She closed her eyes.
After the silent hour ended, a Quaker elder approached and kindly noted that she had not seen Mrs. Ash at Quaker meetings in quite a while. She had thought about reaching out, she said, but then learned that Ms Ash had “become an Anglican”.
“I move between them,” Ms. Ash said, smiling wryly.
“You’re bi!” » suggested the elder.
“I’m bi,” Ms. Ash agreed.
Last May, Ms. Ash published a book, “Remember We Are Here Forever,” about Christian conversions and the wave of curiosity about faith she had noticed among members of her generation and younger.
Toward the end of her reporting and research work on the book, Ms. Ash, initially agnostic, began attending an Anglican church.
Ms. Ash often spends Saturday nights at neglected house parties where DJs play trance sets, and her Sunday mornings in church pews. That wasn’t the case just three years ago, when Ms. Ash, a journalist who considered herself decidedly non-religious, decided to write about experimenting with different types of Christian prayers and rituals.
The idea came to her while reporting the story of a comedy duo from her university days who had decided to become Anglican priests; she looked around and, over time, noticed that so many people her age, in their 20s, seemed newly open to exploring belief in God.
“We are worlds away from the New Atheist movement of the 1990s,” Ms. Ash writes in her book, noting that many of the people she interviewed were shaped by the social breakdown of the pandemic and the isolation caused by screen addiction, which left them searching for a sense of wonder and community.
Ms Ash undertook a series of road trips in late 2022 in a pockmarked Toyota Corolla. She was looking to meet young people from across Britain in the process of Christian conversion. She stayed at a training school for aspiring missionaries, in a former monastery on a Scottish island known as the “cradle of Christianity” and in a convent, where for the most part she encountered pious strangers perplexed by Ms. Ash, a young gay woman asking sincere questions and scribbling in a notebook.
“A conversion can be an instant apocalypse or a gradual evolution,” Ms. Ash wrote in “Remember We Are Here Forever.” “It can come from nowhere, or from outside yourself, or already exist dormant within you as a latent tendency, waiting for its right moment to arise.”
Ms. Ash’s book — a bit of St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” a bit of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” — follows her 2020 debut, “Dark, Salt, Clear,” an account of her months living in a small Cornish fishing village and long periods at sea with the fishermen on their trawlers.
This book plunged readers into a distant world, which reeked of gutted cuttlefish and tasted of salty harbor air; the new one grapples with questions related to recent headlines about Christian nationalism, youth loneliness and political flux.
Ms. Ash studies the broader social trend of religious revivalism – a Pew poll last year in the United States found that Christianity was no longer in decline, a change driven by young people – but also, more personally, the texture of personal change. She rushes into experiences that have the potential to transform: “If I continued to put myself on the path to Christianity,” she writes, “would I end up converting?
At one point, as Ms Ash sat in a north London Pentecostal church, the pastor said her “prophetic gift” was telling her that someone in the crowded room needed to be saved. Then he pointed directly at Ms. Ash and said, “You.”
Sometimes publishing a book coincides with reaching clear conclusions. But Ms. Ash says her years of reporting on religious beliefs have made her more ambivalent, both about whether she believes in God and the simple question of where she should spend Sunday morning.
After the Quakers meeting that December morning, a church elder invited Ms. Ash to join others remaining there for tea and homemade oatmeal cookies. This low-key gathering was very different from his reporting at an evangelical Bible study group, where the pastor believed gay sex was a sin.
At the entrance to the Quaker House hung a sign reading: “You will decide for yourself. »
Throughout her reporting, Ms. Ash faced the disturbing experience of straddling two worlds: attending an evangelical Bible study group one evening, then another night, making out with a couple at a party in Tottenham; spending Holy Week at a pilgrimage site meditating on the meaning of Easter, then returning home to find friends celebrating spring and listening to music, their feet covered in dirt from playing barefoot volleyball.
At that meeting, Ms. Ash said to a perplexed friend: “Look, in the car home I had this weird thought that maybe I should become single. » She is part pilgrim but also part Martian, traveling between planets suspicious of each other while insisting that she came in peace.
“I went on a date and she said, ‘Yeah, my friends told me at a party that I shouldn’t go out with you because apparently you’re all Christians now,'” Ms. Ash recalled, laughing and then adopting an expression of pity and pleading. “I was like, ‘Oh no! You can still go out with me!’
After the Quakers meeting, Ms. Ash drove home and greeted two of her roommates, who gently teased her about these long, serious periods of religious struggle. They grew accustomed to finding Mrs. Ash in her pajamas in their kitchen, hunched over a Christian history book and muttering, “Why do there have to be so many denominations?”
Their three-bedroom home, located in the Gospel Oaks neighborhood, is slightly too small for four people and filled with books. Some are written by authors Ms. Ash considers models for her own writing, such as Gary Indiana, Iris Murdoch and John Jeremiah Sullivan, who in his book “Pulphead” writes exuberantly about his own rejected evangelical upbringing and the unexpected gang of friends he meets at a Christian rock festival.
Ms. Ash’s home was a refuge during years of writing that were not only intellectually perplexing, but also personally turbulent. Her mother began to show new signs of dementia as she wrote the book. When Ms Ash was reporting on the Cornish fishing village, she liked to call her mother to tell her what she had seen on board the trawlers. This time, she wasn’t able to share her work as it happened. It was like writing with a crucial ghost audience member.
Leaving the house and walking towards the British Library, past low-slung brick shops and a winding canal, Ms Ash said she had known for years that dementia was present on her mother’s side. It was partly this knowledge that made her so concerned with preserving experiences and remembering details. She’s obsessed with keeping notebooks: capturing the appearance of the moon behind a cloud of smoke one night on Parliament Hill, or what it’s like to be on a glamorous reporting assignment in Paris in the fall when she learns that her father has cancer.
“I went down late last night under a big white moon – somewhere you could see a ‘blood moon’, but not where I was,” she wrote in her journal recently.
Then in another: “Mom came from the garden crying because she didn’t know how to plant irises and she said, in tears, so little: ‘I had a brain.'”
On the way to the library, Ms Ash stopped at the bookstore where she was volunteering, a charity shop with a small corner devoted to books about faith. Ms. Ash, standing in front of the religion shelf, was amused to see that a book she had donated was still there, a version of the Bible rewritten in a conversational, youthful tone.
“First of all, nothing. No light, no time, no substance, it doesn’t matter,” the book begins by summarizing Genesis. “God starts everything and WHAP! Stuff everywhere!”
Source | domain www.nytimes.com
