My Journey Here - Maria Shepherdson

In 1965, on the day the Rev. Maria Byrne Shepherdson was born, the family lived in the last house on an estate on the outskirts of Dublin, Ireland. Her father had to run a half mile to the nearest phone box to summon an ambulance.

At that time, telephones were a luxury, as were automobiles. The Byrnes had neither. Her father worked as an musical instrument maker — a family tradition that went back centuries, but did not pay all the bills.

Maria, named after her mother and pronounced MAR – ia, was the first of three daughters born into a strict, staunchly Roman Catholic family where the church ruled virtually every aspect of their lives. The children knew better than to ask uncomfortable questions.

The three sisters played music every Sunday at Mass. They travelled to convents and monasteries to play and met many Godly priests and nuns “who poured their lives into good works.”

Nevertheless, life in Ireland was difficult.

“Growing up in the 60s and 70s in impoverished Dublin, we suffered from the difficulties of The Troubles,” said Maria.

“The Troubles” was a low-level war the Irish Republican Army waged against the protestant British government and its historic influence and mistreatment in Ireland. While mostly staged in Northern Ireland, it spilled over to the Republic.

Running the country was a government hopelessly intertwined — some would say under the thumb of — the national church.

“The power and control of the Catholic Church in Ireland ran very deep,” she said, adding that any young woman taking a trip to Britian very likely underwent a pregnancy test before leaving to ensure she was not seeking an abortion.

DOUBT & TRUTH
It was during her teen years that doubt and truth began to impose themselves on the well-ordered life of Maria. 

The Madeline Sisters Homes, Catholic homes for “fallen women” and their babies, ran profitable laundries, but were about to close in 1979 after more than 100 years marked by abuse, neglect, forced labour, a mass grave and other untold atrocities. 

“I was acutely aware of how close several friends were to being there,” she said of pregnant classmates in 1978/80 had the homes remained open even a year longer.

Maria described the church as an “imposed faith.”

“I remain eternally grateful for that part of my upbringing, but the God I was presented with was an old man with long white hair, with a tally chart in his hand,” she said.

If you had more ticks than Xes on your chart, you went to heaven. More Xes than ticks, you went to hell, and if you had a tie, you went to purgatory to work it off, she said.

“That bore no relation whatsoever as I encountered the teachings of Jesus,” she said. 

And she was beginning to learn about Jesus in a most unorthodox place — an Anglican church.

She was 14, on an errand for her father, when she slipped into a favourite building, the Anglican (Church of Ireland) Christ Church Cathedral. She was fascinated by its tale of the cat and rat, mummified and found perfectly preserved behind the organ in the 1850s and on public display.

“I arrived at the end of the consecration, and I heard ‘though we are many, we are one body because we share in the one bread,’” she said. “It was an invitation to the Lord’s table, and anyone who wanted to receive, could. No questions.”

She had been taught that the Catholic Church was the one true way. God was angry and judgmental. He sat in judgment of women, who, in the church in that era, were only allowed to clean and occasionally light candles. Thankfully, that has changed.

But to hear that everyone was the body of Christ, and anyone could partake, was an epiphany! 

“But I couldn’t go home and say, ‘hey, Mom and Dad…’” she said. “I was restless, but I couldn’t show it.”

UNIVERSITY
Maria was the first in her family to attend university, and she pursued higher learning with gusto. She studied history, Latin and the classics at University College of Dublin. At night she earned a degree in music and Italian and trained as a teacher for non-English speakers. She also studied holistic medicine, due to her arthritic condition which began in her teens.

But she learned more than academics. She discovered that any reference to contraception, adoption or abortion in a women’s magazine was removed before it went on the store shelf. 

“Imagine being a woman and being sexually assaulted in your small village,” she said. “If you spoke to a doctor about your injuries or a subsequent pregnancy, he told your parents and your parish priest. And that would lead to consequences.”

As her eyes were opened, she began volunteering at the Well Women’s Centre, where she helped support teen prostitutes who worked the docks. 

“It gave me a very real understanding of how easily people were drawn into decisions to keep food on the table. They were forced to do these things.”

CAREER
After a poor start, with very little work to be had, she finally got a job at a school for boys of all abilities and disabilities.

“That was absolutely fantastic,” she said, adding that she made lifelong friends at the school. 

One student, a boy of 16 who was musically talented, was undergoing surgery after losing his sight.

“I promised him he could play at my wedding, should it every occur,” said Maria. “He played me up the aisle in St. Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square.”

Her education career also saw her teach in Italy, South Africa and Libya.

“That’s where I met Phil,” she said.

Social life in Libya was limited, to say the least. There was the embassy crowd or the dart league. She chose darts.

“Phil was part of the darts league,” she said. “He’d just come from a trip to Egypt and Jordan with ladies who needed a safe man to travel with.”

After her one-year contract in Libya, she took a job in London as head of a school for children with severe emotional and behavioural disturbances, and Phil, an accountant, went on a planned tour of Africa. 

“I didn’t want to go back to Ireland,” she said.

MARRIAGE
Phil returned and they were married by the Rev. Clare Herbert, one of the first ordained women in the Church of England, at St. Martin in the Fields. Now a practicing Anglican, she knew her family would not attend unless there was a Catholic priest at the altar.

“We were saddened by the absence of my family, but delighted to see so many close friends who are family in all but name,” she said.

For Phil, from New Zealand, denominational faith was not complicated at all. But it was literally the core of her family’s identity in Ireland.

“In the 1980s and 90s in Ireland, it would have been easier to come out to my parents as LGBTQI+ or be pregnant [than leave the church],” she said. 

“My parents did the best they could. I can see that,” she said. “But they were coming from a place of theology so different from what I’ve encountered God to be.”

It took a long time, but only a few years ago, Maria was able to reconnect with one sister and her father before he died.

THE CALLING
“I didn’t want to be a priest,” said Maria. “I had my fingers in my ears.”

She’d wrestled with the question and felt she had the answer: no.

Nevertheless, God was not about to be ignored. Maria and Phil had just moved to Bristol for Maria’s new job, and Phil’s parents arrived from New Zealand for a stay. It was September 2001.

As they walked through the country lane to a new church, “I was feeling quite smug that my testing of a call to ordination was done. I’d won. I would stay as head teacher and serve God that way.”

As they entered the church for the first time, the elderly warden, Mary, rushed toward them.

‘Thank God you’ve come,’ she said. ‘You’re cutting it a bit fine. Where’s your robes?’

While Maria tried to convince the warden she was not the priest, it was not working.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve a white collar,’ said Mary, stopping abruptly. ‘I saw a white collar on you.’

Maria was not wearing a collar, of course, and explained that she had been exploring a calling but that the door was closed.

‘Well, I think he just re-opened it,’ was Mary’s reply.

Jumping on that bandwagon, the rector came calling that very afternoon! Within two months, she was on the discernment path again.

What she had in mind was self-sustaining ministry, a part-time vocation.

“I would be a teacher during the day and a priest on weekends,” she said.

But when she went to speak to the director of ordinands, ‘it was the most humbling, worst experience of my life.”
‘How dare you offer yourself to God with hooks?’ he demanded, meaning with strings attached.

“I realized that unless you disarm and surrender to God’s will fully, for any type of vocation, you cannot serve. It’s impossible,” said Maria. “You have to hand it over, and keep handing it over. That was a step in leading me here [to New Brunswick].”  

In 2004, she entered full-time stipendiary ministry training.

“It was a three-year process to bash me into shape,” she said. “That’s what it was — I was being formed. I was completely stripped away.”

She was ordained a deacon in 2007, a priest in 2008 and continued to serve in the Bristol area.

HEALTH
It was Easter 2008 that Maria got what she had long needed — a hysterectomy. She shared this information because she knows there are other women who might have similar problems and seek her insight on the long-taboo subject.

“I was losing a half pint of blood a day,” she said. “I could function, but it was getting in between my ministry.”

She noted God’s ironic sense of humour. Just after her surgery, she preached on the story of the bleeding woman who touched the cloak of Jesus for healing.

One of the highlights of her curacy was leading a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 2009.

A NEW ROLE
In seeking a more permanent role as rector, Maria applied for eight positions, and was rejected by all.
Later she had two more interviews, and the answer was no for the first one.

Her second interview turned out better. Ahead of the appointment, she visited and prayed in all eight churches in the five-vestry shared ministry of Upper Kennet.

She was so taken with the place, she felt certain this was her calling by the time she arrived for the meet and greet.
 
“Don’t you dare!” she told God. “Don’t you dare get my hopes up only to have me turned away.”

God provided her the perfect place. She has spent the last 12 and-a-half years “growing a team, with ups and downs, live streaming (for this dyslexic technophobe), delighting in finding common ground with people who walk a creation-centred path of God’s love.”

During that time, she trained to become a Mennonite Bridge Builder which helps facilitate change. She needed that training to help shepherd the five vestries through the process of becoming one.

AVEBURY
Hundreds of thousands of people visit the Avebury World Heritage Site, in her parish, each year. It’s something of a smaller version of Stone Henge, with the village in the middle of a neolithic standing stone circle. 

Many of those visitors are pagan, creation-focussed worshippers, which sparked a curiosity in Maria.

In 2021 during her sabbatical, she undertook a research project to investigate the relationship between Christianity and pagan/alternative spiritualities.

“During the sabbatical, I went to Goth festivals, fairy festivals, steam punk festivals,” she said. “I sat with people confirmed in all the great faiths and brands of Christianity who had walked away from church, but not necessarily away from Christ.”

What she found from her research was that 85 per cent of the people had once been part of the Christian church.

“My report to the bishop included 129 requests from pagans and an equal number from Christians for setting up a centre of reconciliation, dialogue, interfaith training where the reasons why people were leaving could be explored, where training for priests and lay could take place, with a home for a pagan seminary,” she said.

The proposal is still on the table, but there are many hurdles. Maria had a sense that she had done all she could.

CANADA
At the same time, with the transition to one vestry in her parish almost complete, she began to wonder if her job there was done. She saw three vacancies in Scotland, but realized they were all wrong for her. 

So in May 2023 she sought the advice of Bishop Andrew. 

“That’s when I said the fateful words, ‘I wish God would send me an email.’”  

The bishop pushed her to say where she felt she might be called. 

“I found myself saying ‘Phil and I always had an affinity to Canada,’” she said, adding they had a dream to explore North America in an RV, but in retirement. They had always assumed they were too old to qualify for working.

After some discussion, Maria made a bold promise: If an ad appeared in the Church Times for Vancouver, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island or Newfoundland, she would apply. She said this knowing full well there hadn’t been a Canadian ad for a priest since 2017.

That was a Tuesday. On Friday, the Church Times was published — with an ad for the Parishes of Woodstock and Richmond.

“We laughed! My heart leapt! And I threw together a CV,” she said. “And I found myself being interviewed by the warmest group of parish reps I’ve ever encountered. The way we just talked back and forth was a delight.”

In the meantime, she met Archbishop David and Debbie Edwards while they were in the UK last summer. She had a chat with Shawn Branch, director of mission and ministry and the bishop's liaison in the Archdeaconry of Woodstock. 

She was shepherded through the process with much help from Cheryl Jacobs and Ben Bourque, “who kept me from pulling my hair out!” she said.

On Nov. 15 last year, Upper Kennet held its first meeting to elect a parish warden and vestry members, so the process Maria had overseen for so long had come to fruition. But throughout the months, the couple had doubts about their future.

“Phil and I had a huge wobble,” she said. “’God, are you really taking me away from these people? Are you really calling us to Canada? Can we really go there?’”

They decided to pray about it, sleep on it and ask God for answers the next morning. He did not disappoint. 

When the phone rang the following day, it wasn’t God, but Archbishop David, telling Phil the diocese needed a synod treasurer, and was he interested in applying. Shortly after, Maria’s employment contract arrived.

“We took that as a final sign, and that’s how we ended up in Canada,” she said.

As of March 1, Maria is the rector of the Parishes of Richmond and Woodstock. She and Phil are settling into their new jobs, as Phil was the preferred candidate in the search for a new treasurer. They live in the Richmond rectory. 

“The welcome we’ve received is beyond anything we’ve experienced in our lives,” said Maria. “To arrive to a clean rectory, with the lights on, heated, food in the freezer — was wonderful.”

Her plans for the two parishes are simple ones, she said.

“I want to help people find that God’s encompassing love is for all. I want to help deepen their understanding of the nature of God. I want to meet people where they are and walk with them to where God would have us go.”

Maria’s passion, she said, is for fairness and equality for all, for everyone is made in God’s image.

“If that is true, then we’re not complete until the diversity of God’s creation is represented in the Church. All are welcome.

“I was heartened to hear the people of St. Luke’s (Woodstock) say ‘we’re the church you come to if you haven’t got anywhere else.’ What can we offer to people who don’t feel they fit the mold?  And whose mold is it?”

The Diocesan Synod offers best wishes to Maria and Phil as they begin their Canadian journey.

PHOTO CAPTIONS:
1. The Rev. Maria Shepherdson has a long list of hobbies and passions in addition to serving God as a priest. Here she is riding a motorbike.

2. Maria was entranged from her family for many years after she chose to become Anglican. It took decades, but she was able to reconnect with her father before he died, and with her sister, Frances, seen here.

3. Maria, centre, leads a wassail plough Sunday parade through her parish, with husband, Phil, to the right, dressed in costume for a play at the same festival.

4. Maria loves music and plays the fiddle. Celtic rock is one of her favourites. 

All photos submitted