In today’s Advent reflection, Archbishop Cherry Vann reflects on a lifetime of waiting, healing, and living authentically in God’s love.
I knew from an early age that I wasn’t going to get married and have children. Despite what was assumed by well-meaning family members, I knew I was different.
Later, when I was a teenager and discovering my emotional attraction to girls, I remember an uncle saying that all gay men should be lined up and shot.
Those kinds of messages, spoken and unspoken, shaped my life from my earliest years. The expectations that I should be something that I am not, the assumptions that were made about how my life was going to go, the pressures to conform to the social norm, right from primary school, all served to constrain and diminish. I learnt to hide my loves, my passions, my desires; my needs, my longings, my hopes.
It does something to your soul, having to pretend to be something and someone you are not. It compromises the integrity of who you are, having to wear a mask. It means learning to be dishonest, distrusting and conflicted, in order to fit in.
I have never doubted that God created me as I am and loves me for who I am. Despite what the church has said about people in the LGBTQI+ community and despite how I have seen Christians behave towards people like me, I have always felt loved and affirmed by God. But I lived in fear, terror even, of being found out, exposed and shamed by church and society, especially as I responded to God’s call to ordination.
I had to wait until God called me to Wales, to serve the Church in Wales at the age of 61 before I began to know what it feels like to minister and to live an open, honest and authentic life which flows out of who I truly am at my deepest and most profound level.
The healing began long before as I let first my sister, then my parents and then one or two friends in and I experienced the relief of their love and acceptance. Years in therapy began at theological college, as the strain of holding on both to my inner self and an external persona whilst being formed by God for priestly work took its toll and the cracks began to appear. It was hard and painful work. I had learnt so well the art of hiding who I truly was that to dismantle the defences that I had built around me took years; and all whilst I was continuing to serve in the public eye as a curate.
God blessed me with a partner who has loved me into wholeness for over 30 years and shown me how healing it is to be loved for who I am; warts and all. And through years of prayer, skilled spiritual direction and retreats, God has done his work of healing and reconciliation within me. Those years formed and shaped me and healed me for the work God has now entrusted to me.
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Reflect on your own story and journey to wholeness, share as you feel comfortable to do so, below.
Thank you ++Cherry for this moving and honest account of your life. I thank God that through all the turmoil and hurt you have remained faithful to your calling and you have now been set in a place of influence in the Church and society. May the CofE be encouraged by your example.