Fr Alvan Ibeh: Are You a Weed or Wheat?
August 13, 2026This is an abridged version of an article originally published on the website for Churches Together in Norfolk and Waveney.
The room was full of sound before the service had properly begun. Not the low murmur of a congregation settling, nor the quiet that gathers in a Catholic church before Mass – that particular stillness which is itself a form of preparation. This was something altogether different: music with a driving rhythm, voices already raised, bodies already moving. I was attending my first Pentecostal service, at a Churches Together in England conference for ecumenical officers, and within moments of entering I knew I had stepped into a world whose grammar I did not speak.
I stayed. I listened. I watched a young Black Pentecostal lay woman deliver, without notes, a stream of testimony that moved between scripture, personal witness, and direct address to the spiritual forces of darkness with an ease and authority that was remarkable. She spoke of the daily battle against the devil, not as metaphor, but as a lived reality that was the ordinary condition of her faith and her community. I found her completely sincere and entirely credible.
There is a temptation, in writing about ecumenical experience, to move too quickly towards the reassuring conclusion and say: “I was moved, I learned, I was enriched.” All of that is true, of course. But the danger is that it papers over something that deserves more careful attention, which is the specific texture of the strangeness itself and what it might mean.
As a Catholic who has knelt for years at the consecration, I do not merely hold a doctrine about the Eucharist – my body enacts that doctrine. The kneeling is not illustrating a conviction; it partly constitutes it. What I experienced that day was, in a real sense, a collision between two different bodily grammars of prayer. The expressiveness, the physicality, the spontaneous testimony, the raised hands – these were not a different style of doing the same thing but a different way of being a body in the presence of God. The constraint I felt was not a failure of openness but an honest registration that something genuinely other was happening.
There was a further layer to the strangeness, one that requires, I think, more courage and honesty to name. Standing in that room, surrounded by the visible passion and expressiveness of those around me, I felt (briefly but unmistakably) that my own faith might be weaker than theirs. That their certainty, abandon, and willingness to be physically and emotionally unguarded before God spoke of a depth of commitment I could not match. I have since spoken to others who have had similar experiences crossing liturgical boundaries. It is not an uncommon feeling, and I believe it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing.
It brings to mind the philosopher Iris Murdoch, who wrote of what she called the fat, relentless ego – the self’s tendency to pull all experience back towards its own anxieties and self-image. Against this, Murdoch argued for the practice of unselfing; namely, the disciplined direction of attention away from the self and towards what is genuinely other, held in its own reality without being filtered or quietly evaluated. She drew on Simone Weil’s concept of attention, a loving, receptive presence to the world as it actually is, and identified this quality as both the foundation of moral life and the closest equivalent to prayer.
For me, the ecumenical encounter, at its most demanding, is an exercise in precisely this kind of unselfing. That moment of feeling that my faith might be weaker than those around me was not a humiliation but a gift – the ego’s comfortable self-image being punctured by an experience it could not absorb. And that puncturing is precisely when reality gets through. The discomfort of genuine ecumenical encounter is not a problem to be managed, but a sign that the self is being asked to attend to something it did not already contain.
The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote of a constellation of charisms within the Body of Christ – different traditions bearing different, irreplaceable gifts, each incomplete without the others. To believe this is to believe that what I encounter in Pentecostal worship, or in the gathered silence of a Quaker meeting, or in any other denomination’s worship, is not a lesser version of what I know, but something I genuinely do not possess and (actually) am not meant to. That recognition enlarges the soul. It also, however, costs something to sustain.
After that conference, I sought out Mass as soon as I returned home. What I remember most clearly is not relief, exactly, but a quality of recognition – knowing what I was doing without unfamiliar distraction. The liturgy, the gestures, the movement towards the altar, the words of consecration – my body knew all of this. And within that knowing, I found I was enormously thankful. Not grateful to have escaped the strangeness, but grateful for the experience, and, at the same time, deeply grateful to be here, in this particular place, with this particular Catholic form of encounter with God.
My Catholic parish is Walsingham, itself a site of ecumenical complexity and beauty, where Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox pilgrims have long shared holy ground and common devotion. Returning there after ecumenical encounters has taught me something I could not have learned any other way. That belonging to a tradition is not simply a matter of familiarity or preference; it is a form of love that is particular, historical, embodied, and directed towards specific practices, prayers, and modes of receiving grace. Far from being diminished by exposure to other traditions, that love has been strengthened by it. I understand my own Catholic faith more clearly because I have stood, however briefly and uncertainly, inside a different grammar of prayer.
Saint John Henry Newman, reflecting on his own long journey in faith, wrote of conscience as the place where the human person encounters moral and spiritual authority as something personal and commanding – not abstract reasoning but a living voice. His sense that belonging to a tradition involves both gift and sacrifice, both homecoming and self-surrender, speaks to something in the ecumenical experience that I have not found better expressed elsewhere.
After my conversation with that young Pentecostal woman, I found that I believed her completely, not in the sense that I adopted her theological framework wholesale, but in the sense that her witness was clearly grounded in genuine experience, genuine faith, and a mode of relationship with God that I could recognise as real even where I could not fully share it. We were, unmistakably, in the same theological universe. We were also, equally unmistakably, in different rooms within it.
That image – different rooms in the same house – is perhaps as far as I can honestly go. The tensions described in this reflection are not resolved. I remain both fully Catholic and genuinely strange in ecumenical space. I have come to believe that this is not a problem awaiting a solution but a vocation to be lived with as much honesty and as much love as I can manage.
To return to my Catholic parish after all of my ecumenical effort – to kneel, receive, and be still in a liturgy my body knows – is not a retreat from the desire for Christian unity. It is, I have come slowly to understand, its necessary condition. Those who wish to act in order to fulfil the desire of Jesus for Christian unity will only gain the confidence, hope, and encouragement to do so if they are not only open and receptive, but also fully grounded in love with their own tradition. The one who steps out into strangeness needs the one who knows how to come home.
The original unabridged article, which includes references and further reading, can be read by following this link:
Dr Ian Watson serves as County Ecumenical Officer for Churches Together in Norfolk and Waveney, where he works to promote and support Christian unity across the region. He worships in the Catholic Parish of Walsingham. He can be contacted at nwct-watson@outlook.com.
