My Christian Larp

A sculpture outside St James' King Street, Sydney

In 2024 I developed an interest in Christianity (which I wrote about here). I read the Gospels three times. I read the rest of the New Testament once. I listened to a bunch of podcasts. I studied a bunch of websites. I read a couple of books. I bought some icons (of St Mary and St Olga) and tried praying in front of them. By 2025, after visiting a bunch of Orthodox churches and finding each of them focused strongly on specific cultural groups (Russian, Greek, Assyrian, etc), I developed the view that I should look into Anglo-Catholicism, which is a movement within the Anglican communion which emphasises a return to catholic practices and theology sans the Pope. The main draw card was ethno-cultural. It seemed to me that most churches revolve around ethnic identity so Anglicanism looked like a good fit. The experiment didn’t go well and perhaps I really should have known better. Not least because when my interest in Anglo-Catholicism started I had a highly unusual dream wherein the Virgin Mary spoke to me and she said just one thing: “the Anglican church is a desert”.

Visiting Anglo-Catholic Churches in Sydney

Sydney has half a dozen or so churches that align with Anglo-Catholicism (at least that is my understanding). I visited most of them and my experiences were as follows:

• St James’ King Street, CBD (oldest church in Sydney) The church walls are covered in memorial plaques of 19th century colonists, but otherwise it has little decoration. It is nice in the way 200 year old buildings are nice but with an unfortunate “modern” stained glass installation in one corner and abrasively bright electric lights throughout. The Sunday service felt like a grand performance. The organ was first class, the choir sang beautifully, the priest intoned even more beautifully. It felt a little bit like a Sydney Opera House production. Technically it was perfect but, though I admired it, it somehow felt rather cold and unspiritual.
• St John the Evangelist, Birchgrove (a highly gentrified inner suburb) Once this church would have been the spiritual centre in the area for working class Anglo-Aussies, but when I attended Sunday service there were less than a dozen parishioners, almost all of whom were extremely old. The church seems as if it froze in time sometime last century and has a dusty but charming feeling to it. A huge and very aged Union Jack hangs prominently and the stained glass behind the altar is a standout. The priest delivered an articulate sermon and honestly I rather liked the whole thing, though it felt like I was sitting in a church that would probably vanish within a decade or two. I had a curious text exchange with the priest a few months later and my impression was that, despite the name of the church, he wasn’t much interested in evangelising. I found this exchange rather depressing.
• St Luke’s, Enmore (a bohemian inner suburb) The church building was likely built when the area was almost a slum in the late 19th century, hence though it is old it is not beautiful. Even so it has a quirky charm about it. Pride flags and Indigenous flags feature prominently outside the building, and a huge black power painting hangs on one of the walls. An Aboriginal Virgin Mary with baby Jesus icon is displayed near the altar. It was all so flamboyantly woke that I rather enjoyed it, for it was so excessive. The priest was absolutely lovely. I went there for Ash Wednesday – he put an ashen cross on my forehead and gave me the best blessing out of all the blessings I’ve ever had (putting a hand on my shoulder and saying some lovely words that I can’t remember). The church is perfect for the local community that is there, but honestly it isn’t for me. 
• St Paul’s, Burwood (a very multicultural suburb) This is a huge and incredibly beautiful church, almost like a small cathedral, that was clearly built when the area was utterly unlike what it is today. Today Burwood is “vibrant and diverse” as the politicians say. St Paul’s isn't either of these things, but it is elegant and it has a certain je ne sais quoi. The parishioners were mostly older middle class Anglo-Australians, though there were a number of younger people. I liked the two services I attended but then I read a very odd article written by the priest in a recent “Rector’s Report” and realised it wasn’t for me. He spent four pages discussing the election of President Trump overseas – which he linked with neo-fascism, disinformation, etc. It was all a bit much, and I guess I felt this priest, though a very nice and cultured man, was just too much of a pearl-clutcher for me to now take seriously.
• Christ Church St Laurence, inner city This is the most hardcore Anglo-Catholic church in Sydney, and has been since it was built in the 1840s (a mere decade after the Anglo-Catholicism was kick-started by the Oxford movement). Its Sunday service has loads of incense, a truly sublime choir (honestly it is the best I have ever heard), grand robes and ritualism dialled up to maximum. I went there a couple of times and quite liked it, but my third visit was so terrible that I am unlikely to ever return – I describe why immediately below.

Loss of Confidence

The reason is this: last Friday morning a person from my son’s friendship circle attempted to stab my son in the neck with a knife. He held up his left hand to stop the blade and it cut through the tendons and nerves of three of his fingers. There is a very real risk he will now permanently lose at least some hand function and he will be at risk of his index finger needing amputation for some months. Initially, when he rang me in the morning to tell me about this, I was in a state of disbelief and so I was calm and practical. In the afternoon, as my son slept at my place, I went to St Laurence’s, intending to attend a service but I arrived half an hour early. As I sat in the pews waiting my knees refused to kneel (because I just wasn’t feeling it) and an intense feeling of sorrow overcame me as I began silently crying. My head was down but I’m sure it would have been obvious I was in a state of distress. As I was so upset I lost sense of time, until I was startled by the sound of worship coming from one side of the church. The service had begun, but I was in the wrong part of the church and I didn’t have a service sheet. I kept my head down and noticed the wooden floor was wet with my tears. The priest spoke a line in a monotone and the congregation answered back in a monotone for 20 or 30 minutes. I had an intensely surreal feeling of being in a Dark Souls game, with undead people chanting undead prayers. I was frozen in the horror of the moment, and so the moment continued. Eventually they moved into the main part of the building for the following service, where I sat. They stood, so when they stood I too stood, but my face continued to silently contort the way it does when people are trying to fight back tears. When they sat I sat. Finally after 90 minutes of this torment they lined up to take communion and I had found the right moment to quietly leave. As I did, with a puffy and tear-stained face, I walked past a congregant and he looked away from me. Three priests and dozens of parishioners all completely ignored me in the way that stiff-upper-lip Anglos do – emotion is just not done, keep calm and carry on and all that. 

What Came Next

Walking out of that church was a relief. Young people joyously teemed around me as Friday evening kicked off. The mindset of the secular Pagan came on me and I rejoiced in the beauty and ephemerality of youth. I bought a delicious bubble tea, and some frippery (eyeshadow) so that I too would commune with that which is fleeting but pleasant.

When I got home I ignored my icons as any faith I’d harvested over these past months left me (most especially because I’d prayed before them for the protection of my son and it seemed now that repeated prayer had not been answered). Saturday came, I went to hospital with my son so he could have hand surgery but despite acknowledging the booking they turned us away (too busy they claimed). Such is the public health system. They told us to come back on Sunday morning. We did and they started operating around midday. I left the hospital to get a drink and as I did I noticed a protest had gathered so I sat in the park and watched as I ate lunch. Then I noticed another gathering of people at the steps across the street at St Mary’s Cathedral, so I went over there to see what was happening. Hundreds of people had assembled with Australian and Vatican flags. I thought perhaps it was a vigil for the ailing Pope. Since I was now at St Mary’s with time to kill I went inside and lit a candle for my son and sat in the pews for a bit. It felt natural and easy to place my knees on the padded kneeler and make a prayer while my son was in the operating theatre – it couldn’t hurt. As I did I felt a sort of hopeless desperation and mentally prayed “if you heal my son’s hand so he has full functionality of his hand again, and he does not die, or become maimed in some other way, I promise that I will regard that as a miracle and I will pledge myself to the Roman Catholic or Orthodox church”. I felt it unlikely this prayer would be answered. I walked around the church and looked up at the stained glass window depicting the Virgin Mary that had been instrumental in sparking my interest in Christianity last year, and in this moment I had no faith, no confidence, no feeling of anything special. As I looked I thought “I know I have no right to ask for a sign, but if you are willing to give me a sign please do”. Then I left the Cathedral and was met with an astonishing sight. A procession of priests had begun walking up the street with a statue of the Virgin on their shoulders. More than a thousand people walked behind them saying the rosary in unison. They walked joyfully – I have never in all the time I have lived in Sydney seen anything like this. Lucky timing for me, and no doubt a coincidence. I waited for the procession to pass so I could get back across the road and buy a bubble tea before heading back to the hospital – when I got back to the hospital I saw yet another crowd of people singing the Australian national anthem. I climbed the outside stairs of the hospital to get a look at them and realised it was the people who had taken part in the Catholic procession. They had stopped there for a while. Once the anthem was finished they turned back and once again the statue of the Virgin carried on the shoulder of the priests was in front of me.

Roman Catholic Eclipse

By this time I expected the operation to be over so I went inside the hospital but a nurse told me it would be at least another hour and I should walk around for a bit. I figured I may as well go back to St Mary’s – it was cool and quiet in there (on a hot day), and it was close by. I went back in and to my astonishment I found the entire procession of people were at that moment flooding into the Cathedral. I moved off to the side to be out of their way but I was soon in the middle in a crowd of people. Somehow I had unwittingly managed to find a spot that gave me a perfect view of the returned statue of the Virgin Mary and the altar with its crucifix. A woman with a beautiful voice started singing something in Latin and as the congregation joined her almost everyone got down on their knees, directly onto the stone floor (for the pews with padded kneelers could not hold all the people). I balked at subjecting my knees to such discomfort and attempted to semi-squat until I was shamed by so many others around me who seemed to think nothing of it. Once I was on my knees I found it was somehow not uncomfortable at all. A few more songs were sung. I didn’t know any of them and I really didn’t know what was going on around me but I found myself unable to resist the feeling of the crowd – I noticed this was the first church congregation I had seen that wasn’t focused around a particular ethnicity. There were nuns in white saris, monks in medieval looking brown robes, women wearing pretty dresses with lace veils over their hair and rosaries in their hands, handsome young chads in schmick suits, Islanders in bright traditional clothes, and all kinds of people of every age wearing all kinds of things. Then it ended and most of the people left. I knew my son’s operation would still not be over so I stayed and looked intently at each of the stations of the cross along the walls. I was struck by Jesus struggling to carry his cross, needing the help of another to carry it, falling again and again as he made the journey, and the allegory of it suddenly hit me – it was so obvious I feel foolish for never having noticed before. We are all like Jesus, we all struggle to carry our cross (the burdens of human existence), we all stumble and fall, we all need the help of others, and at the end we all die, and from what I have observed the very process of death is an undignified humiliation.

Concluding

I cannot decide if this triple encounter with joyful Catholics was the sign I asked for, but I cannot deny it all felt highly unusual and the lingering aversion I used to have for Roman Catholics (due to my Protestant ancestry and being raised by parents who were quick to say unkind things about anything relating to Catholicism) has now completely dissipated. If it can be said there is such a thing as a universal church then Catholics are the only ones who can lay claim to it, based on what I have seen.

I won’t know for months whether my son will recover the full use of his hand, and despite my hope that it will be otherwise I don’t really have faith that it will. If his hand does fully heal then I will find myself in an interesting bind – because I made a pledge and will feel bound to fulfill it. If it doesn’t heal then I am back to where I have often been, and where I am right now – hovering between Buddhism and Paganism, resigned to my fate, and riding the waves of pleasure, equanimity and despair.

Written by M' Sentia Figula (aka Freki), find me at neo polytheist and romanpagan.wordpress.com