The Secret of Belonging
By Bree Snow
A young woman’s path to ordination teaches her that in season and out, in Christ we all belong.
I started out in church. Before my eyes could register the vague outline of my mother’s face, there I was, suspended over a marble basin. In that moment, I was named—not legally, but spiritually—sealed, marked, claimed.
Something happened to me that day, something that I—even in my vague Anabaptist phase in college—was never able to deny. I wasn’t conscious enough to receive it, yet there it was, water seeping over my forehead. “Laura Breeann, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own, forever.”
We were there, at St. Mary’s, on every holy day. Some weekends we’d go twice, building up “Mass credits,” as my dad liked to say. But even when the doors of St. Mary’s weren’t open, we found a way to wedge ourselves in the crack of someone else’s. That’s how my sister and I wound up two Catholic girls at a VBS in a Baptist Church in West Tennessee.
I felt strangely at home there, too, crisscross-applesauce on an ABC mat in a Sunday School room. My sister and I would reunite on the bus ride home, regaling each other with stories of snacks, mostly—ants on a log, Oreo mud pies. It was probably the free childcare that caused our parents to send us, but those summers introduced me to a feeling I’ve carried since. The feeling of having a foot in both doors—a feeling of belonging.
I imagined what it would be like to stand behind the real altar, to look out over God’s people all gathered together.
They were all men—the priests, the pastors in the turtlenecks and tweed dress coats, the adult Sunday school teachers, the lay readers—but I wanted to be them. I would stand in my bedroom and preach sermons to my stuffed animals, setting up a toy-box altar where I would celebrate the Eucharist with my little white missalette, Goldfish crackers, and water. I imagined what it would be like to stand behind the real altar, to look out over God’s people all gathered together, sleepy and eager and young and frail, all leaning forward with bated breath to try to glimpse Jesus’ body and blood.
At some point, St. Mary’s re-branded the acolyte ministry from “Altar Boys” to “Altar Servers.” This designation, benign as it was, horrified many members, and the girls prancing around the altar in their surplices scandalized most. My sister was one of them. One Maundy Thursday as the altar party stripped the altar, she stumbled and dropped a plant that was perched on a stand in the chancel. She recovered quickly, never sacrificing her solemnity as she suppressed her embarrassment. Afterward, a man approached her in the narthex and said, “I thought you were trying to rob the church.” He meant it. My twelve-year-old sister, guilty of nothing except trespassing on territory she had been invited into, remained an Altar Server. I never signed up.
The closest I got to the altar itself was the morning of my First Communion. I wore a white dress because I had to, but my grandmother clandestinely sewed a baseball patch inside the right hip to honor my inner tomboy. On the outside, I was an adorable Communicant. When I smiled for the pictures, however, it was the smile of a person with a secret. My baseball patch, my stuffed-animal Eucharists, and my failure to be a boy all excluded me from the space I occupied in front of the altar. Still, I knew that God had seen it all—that he had seen me in all my dress-hating, sports-loving, tomboy glory. Even though it was hidden from everyone else’s sight, God had seen it, and he was happy for me to feast on his body and blood just the way I was. I knelt in front of the altar and smiled—smiled to be so close, so seen, so loved.
I stopped belonging to St. Mary’s when I was sixteen. It wasn’t St. Mary’s fault. It was Jamison’s. The dark brown hair and blue eyes did me in, and that summer I became a Methodist. I would have followed Jamison to a mosque if he had asked me to, (I told him that once, as he and his husband cooed over my newborn baby, but that’s neither here nor there.) The Methodist church was familiar enough to my Roman Catholic proclivities that the differences were exciting. I memorized the liturgy, joined the liturgical dance team, and started attending youth group. That’s when I met her: Mrs. Betsy, the 26-year-old youth minister.
She spoke with confidence and grace, bearing the marks of motherhood and ministry as her simultaneous callings. She took us to concerts and preached for us and let us babysit her children. She taught the Bible without a moment’s reservation, never questioning if she was trespassing, never accused of overstepping the boundaries. At a Wendy’s one afternoon, I told her the secret that only God knew, the secret that I thought would revoke my membership: “I want to do what you do.” She smiled.
I could eradicate the terror of uncertainty with answers, with solutions, with certainty.
As it turns out, there are plenty of places to belong: country clubs and Crossfit gyms and university campuses. There’s something sacred about it, feeling like you’re in on the joke and worthy of carrying a membership card. I first got a taste of belonging in a secular institution when I was baptized into the holy waters of The Theatre. Our first production, a series of eight vignettes set in a town called Almost, Maine, was my ordination. I was on the stage for a total of six minutes, but in those six minutes I said a curse word, kissed a boy, and became a person that I would never be.
After eight whirlwind weeks of set design and production, painstaking line memorization, and a euphoric weekend under the lights, the production ended. I cried like I had lost a family member, hugging my fellow actors like I wouldn’t see them the next day in fourth-period Algebra II. Just when I had tasted the gift of the membership, it had been revoked, stolen by the march of time, never to be recovered.
So it goes. Country clubs lose their endowments and Crossfit gyms close and university campuses become unrecognizable with the incoming freshman class. Ultimately, it isn’t enough to hang your hat on belonging because, ultimately, belonging isn’t enough. I forfeited all sorts of belonging when I graduated from high school, leaving the Methodist Church and Mrs. Betsy and the Theatre. I plunged headlong into college—a Christian college in a Christian town in a Christian state. Surprisingly, it was there that I began to flesh out what I had first tasted in that theatre production: a membership in The Alternative. I worshiped at the altars of Plato and Aristotle (and, yes, booze and music), and I found that the belonging I had been searching for since I was that tomboy with a baseball patch in her communion dress didn’t have to be found in the Church. I could be a card-carrying member of another tribe if I wanted to be. I could have answers to life’s greatest questions. I could eradicate the terror of uncertainty with answers, with solutions, with certainty.
The answers that the Alternative offered were sexier and more satisfying than anything my childhood Sunday School teachers said. I found a variety of corner-markets for any imaginable brand of my own self-expression, realizing that I could live a different sort of life than the one I rehearsed in my bedroom as a child. The opportunities were endless: motivational speaking, stand-up comedy, counseling, creative writing. That season of my life was defined by a sort of philosophical puberty, wherein my zeal exceeded my wisdom and my hunger exceeded the boundaries of what secularism had to offer.
The certainty I sought crumpled in on itself when my parents got divorced my freshman year of college. Suddenly, my childhood flashed before my eyes without any infrastructure of security and stability. I grieved my parents’ marriage like a death, and the innate nihilism of the Alternative threatened to undo me. Then, by some act of divine benevolence, I wandered into a small church near my university campus one Sunday morning. I cried into my hands during the music and the sermon, passing peace with people I didn’t know and believing in their hugs and assurances in spite of myself. Then came communion. I limped forward, carrying now questions that I couldn’t answer and hurts that I couldn’t name and extended my hands forward as the pastor whispered, “This is Christ’s body, given for you.” In all my searching for answers and certainty, the only thing God had given me, in the end, was himself.
I was uneducated and inexperienced, I was new to the tradition, and, worst of all, I was a girl.
This is what Jesus promises, too, in John 6. His disciples and the Pharisees and the hungry and the sick and the lame are begging for anything—a sign, a loaf, an awesome display of power. In the noise of all of their clamoring and their frenzy, Jesus comes back from a lonely place and tells them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” The solution to their hunger and thirst and need, the solution for their quest for understanding or their hope for answers, Jesus says, is himself. I am the bread of life. Eat me, and you will never be hungry again.
Some leave, and Jesus lets them. His answer does not satiate their endless existential and physical hunger. It does not resolve the tension of beauty and horror, death and life, joy and sadness. The Alternative, at least, has the power to say that none of it matters, or that all meaning is in the beholder’s eye. He turns around to his disciples, his features containing all of God’s holiness and their frailty, and he asks, “Do you want to go away as well?” When faced with The Alternative, his stone-faced disciples plead a resolute, albeit resigned, oath of loyalty: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
I pledged that same resolute oath in the church by my college campus and came forward, Sunday after Sunday, with my hands outstretched. Eventually, my boyfriend Charles came along, and after a number of years, that same pastor handed out bread and wine at our wedding. In the sort of ironic twist that can only be orchestrated by providence, I ended up exactly where I started, standing by an altar in a euphoric whirlwind of love, commitment, and belonging.
That’s how I wound up in a Starbucks on a chilly afternoon, sitting across the table from a young priest with kind eyes and an old Bible on his lap. I was telling him this story, how I had found Jesus at the altar as a child, how the hunger of my soul had only ever been satisfied by his body, how the only place I had ever belonged was a place I was forbidden to go, a place where my imagination was welcome, but not my female body. Then he interrupted me. “Bree, I think you should be a priest.”
I laughed at him at first. That was one card I could never carry. That was one occupation I could never study or work my way into. He might as well have told me that I should be a prince. There were so many disqualifying factors: I was uneducated and inexperienced, I was new to the tradition, and, worst of all, I was a girl. He gave me a book and a homework assignment and sent me on my way. I rushed home to tell my husband, expecting him to be as incredulous as I was. He smiled, kissed our baby daughter on top of the head, and said, “It’s about time.”
So I cast myself, headlong, into the mysterious world of canonical examinations and bishops and seminary. I nursed my infant in the bathroom and then rushed back to my classroom to hear ethical objections to my presence there. I stood in the corridor as a former Marine who was twice my size pointed his meaty finger in my face and told me I needed to go home to my kitchen, where I belonged. I wavered not once, not twice, but daily as I made plea after impassioned plea with God to create a space for me where my voice would matter and my vocation would be accepted.
One afternoon, I cried in my advisor’s office, trying to back out of the commitment I hadn’t yet made. I lamented my lack of friends, the accusations that I was sliding down a slippery slope, and, worst of all, the continual insistence that I did not belong. Gently, he looked over the top of his glasses and said, “I think Jesus understands what you are feeling right now. I wonder if this could be a season of anachoresis, of departure, from the security of belonging?” I heard those words again, Do you want to go away as well? And that old oath of loyalty rang in my ears. I stayed.
So I read and studied and prayed, memorizing Greek and Hebrew vocabulary words and collecting A’s on my transcript. Others joined me in my anachoresis—theological and ethnic minorities who also knew what it felt like to be a trespasser. We linked arms and, while many of our classmates enjoyed the luxury of the sound of their own voices and took confident, principled stands, we sank deeper and deeper into the blessed unrest of mystery and Paul’s euphoric overture in Romans 11, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” Their quiet, gentle observance settled me, and their friendship became like my hidden baseball patch of yesteryear—evidence that I was still here, that it was still real, that God knew my secret and loved me anyway.
I approach the priesthood with the same trembling hands that reached out for bread and wine all those years ago.
I stand behind the altar now, in a white robe, yoked to the Bread of Life with a stole and a vow. I am welcomed here, and it seems, for now, that my anachoresis has ended. I know full well that belonging to Christ’s Body is not an easy call. Close friends abandon and betray in the name of sanctity. Fellow shepherds abuse and forsake their sheep. Some days, the loneliest place I can fathom is the place I occupy in our sanctuary. Still, when the hush creeps over the assembly, I look out at God’s people all gathered together, sleepy and eager and young and frail, and imagine the little girl who celebrated the Eucharist with goldfish crackers.
Last week, during the recessional, I held the Gospel Book high in the air as a visible reminder that Jesus really did dwell with us, that he really did make his home with us. For just a moment, I caught the eye of a little girl, about six years old. When she saw me looking at her, she beamed, and I tasted tears in the corner of my mouth. As I looked into her beatific eyes, it hit me. I am not certain. I offer more still silences than answers. I approach the priesthood with the same trembling hands that reached out for bread and wine all those years ago. But she and I—two girls who have been seen and known and loved by the Bread of Life—we belong here.
Photos by Unsplash photographers.
Bree Snow is a transitional deacon serving at Christ Church Anglican in Phoenix, AZ. She earned her Master of Divinity at Phoenix Seminary in 2022, and her writing has been published the Journal of the Evangelical Homiletics Society.She and her husband enjoy drinking coffee as their small children systematically destroy their home.