Pentecost and Coming Home

“Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.” — C. S. Lewis

Pentecost is not really a story about certainty.

It is a story about what remains after collapse.

Frightened people hiding in locked rooms after betrayal, disappointment, and the public destruction of the future they thought God was building.

And then comes fire.

Not the fire of empire.
Not the fire of religious performance.
Not the fire institutions use to protect themselves from truth.

The fire of God.

The kind that burns away illusion before it restores meaning.

I was baptized Roman Catholic in Glasgow in 1981.

My mother’s family were Irish Catholic with roots in Donegal. My father’s family were from outside Falkirk — Rangers culture, Protestant masculinity, working-class Scotland, inherited loyalties and inherited silences no one quite named honestly.

By the time I became an Anglican priest in Canada in 2008, I believed I had transcended all of that.

I had language.
A collar.
Authority.
A future.

But unresolved inheritance does not disappear because someone learns to speak intelligently about reconciliation.

And churches are often very good at rewarding gifted wounded men.

Over the last several years — through addiction, recovery, frontline mental health work, courtrooms, psychiatric wards, and the long process of beginning again — something inside me became much harder to fake.

The truth gets simpler after enough of your life burns away.

I relinquished my Orders publicly in 2020 and have not functioned as a cleric in years. I work in frontline mental health and addictions care now. I am not trying to recover status or reconstruct a former life.

This is more personal than that.

I look directly at a small Catholic church from my balcony now.

Years ago, while studying in Rome during the election of Pope Francis, I briefly met Cardinal Thomas Collins. He joked about me “coming home.”

Providence often sounds casual the first time you hear it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote:

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

When I was younger, I heard that heroically.

Now I hear it differently.

Not death as spectacle.
Death as surrender.
Death as the collapse of illusion.
Death as finally laying down the false self built for survival.

So this Pentecost, I am publicly acknowledging something I have been discerning quietly for some time:

I am returning to the Roman Catholic Church as a lay person.

Not triumphantly.
Not theatrically.
Not as an attack on Anglicanism.
And certainly not because I believe Rome is flawless.

I am returning because I no longer wish to live divided against myself.

I left the Roman Catholic Church before my marriage and ordination. Looking back honestly now, I can admit something painful:

I was not emotionally whole enough for marriage, priesthood, or public spiritual authority.

That does not erase the good I did.
It does not erase the people I loved.
It does not erase the grace I encountered.

But giftedness is not the same thing as wholeness.

And eventually the difference becomes impossible to survive.

Pentecost is the story of people finally speaking in languages others can understand.

Mine is simpler now.

I was baptized Catholic.
I left.
I became a priest.
I broke apart.

And now, after everything, I am coming home.