It has been said that ‘The Church is the Fifth Gospel’ and in our services we sometimes feature an additional Gospel reading – from the Gospel of this Church.
On the last Sunday of 2025, we heard a reading from the Gospel of St Luke’s West Holloway, according to Gary.
‘‘I’ve always wanted to be accepted.
Since the break up of my family when I was a child, and going into care when I was nine, I’ve felt alone and rejected.
I’m in my sixties now but about four years ago things had become bleak and I was coming to the end of myself. I felt lost. I had to find some positives in my life when there was so much negativity?
Eventually I got the bottle up to come and poke my head in at St Luke’s Church. I knocked on the door of the vicarage and it was answered by Rev John MacKenzie.
I asked him how would I start coming to church and he invited me in. I explained the state I was in, what I’ve been through all my life. I shed a few tears but he took it all on board.
He said, ‘Garry, have you been baptized?’
I wasn’t sure.
‘If you want to be baptized,’ he said,’Let’s do it. We’ll do it fast. We’ll do it next week if you want.’
So we did, April 11th I think, a weekday, just me and him at the font and he sprinkled me with water and said the prayers.
When my parents split up my three older sisters could look after themselves but my dad took custody of me and my two younger brothers.
Dad couldn’t cope. Me and my brothers got involved in a gang, bunking off school and it wasn’t long before we were taken into care. Those six or seven years weren’t good for me. They thought I was a problem child but there was a reason I was being disruptive. I became very dejected.
At 16 I ran away, back to my mother in Islington. She took me in for a year or so but eventually kicked me out and this was the start of my life being homeless. That was to last all through my teens and into my thirties.
At first I was in the west country, living in buses and tents or squatting. I was part of something known as the peace convoy, a kind of traveling anarchist community.
It was a bit odd but also I felt kind of happy about it and slowly it pulled me out of the mire I’d been in since I was a kid.
But my relationships broke down, I let people down. This has been a trend in my life.
I headed back to London, living in hostels or squats, until eventually, in my forties, with my mum’s help, I got my own flat where I’ve been for twenty years.
With my own address I could get work as a labourer and the boss discovered I was good with gardening.
Whenever a new development was nearing completion I was the one given the task of sorting out the garden.
I became known as ‘the front and back man’ because I was the one they turned to to do the front of the house and then the back.
As soon as I’d finished a garden the boss put me back on the labouring but it was the gardening I loved.
I thank my dad for that and a trick he played on me when I was a kid. He wanted his garden dug over to lay a new lawn, so he started digging and a shilling dropped out of his pocket into the earth. He planned that, of course. I got digging to try and find it and that was when I realised I enjoyed the digging. It could be hard but I found it liberating.
Even in the years I’ve been homeless I’ve always turned to gardening. It’s kept me busy, given me a purpose.
Sometimes it earned me a few bob but often I've done it for for nothing, or for food and shelter.
There was always something pulling me towards the soil, towards the plants and trees, and I went to college to study landscape gardening and horticulture and got my NVQ.
If someone asks what I do I say gardener every time, although I might also say multi-skilled labourer, painter and decorator.
After John had baptized me at St Luke’s I thought I needed to start coming along to Sunday services but leaving my house and coming down the road I became full of thought.
I felt myself resisting it. Swimming, a bit anxious. Do I want to do this?
I was anxious about introducing myself to new people, about explaining the life I’d lived.
When I walked through the door that first morning, I was fine - although for a couple of months I still got anxiety about opening my heart to people.
There was a lot of negative forces inside me. In time they settled down and one morning when I walked to church I thought, ‘I'm not anxious anymore. I'm not worried about it.’
I appreciate the services, especially the quieter ones and it was in one of the monthly Iona services that something happened which I will never forget.
I was sitting there in a prayer and then there was a song and suddenly I felt like I was being lifted off the ground or as if I was being filled up like a glass.
I raised my hands in the air and felt goosebumps on my arms and back.
The hairs on my neck were tingling and I sensed there was a ball of light above me, something which is carrying me through my life and knows what I am going through.
I felt as if I could hear a voice saying, ‘You belong here. You are very welcome here.’
It touched me so deeply and after the service I wrote out the words of the song and I keep them pinned on my fridge door.
Take this moment, sign and space
Take my friends around
Here among us make the place
Where your love is found.
Take the time to call my name,
Take the time to mend
Who I am and what I’ve been,
All I’ve failed to tend.
Take the tiredness of my days,
Take my past regret,
Letting your forgiveness touch
All I can’t forget
Take the little child in me
Scared of growing old;
Help me here to find my worth
Made in God’s own mould.
Take my talents, take my skills,
Take what’s yet to be;
Let my life be yours, and yet
Let it still be me.
I'll stop by my fridge every now and again and read a little bit of it to myself.
All my life I’ve felt rejected and lonely - how my parents were not able to raise me and then my experience in that children’s home - but now I felt like I was accepted, I felt I was safe.
To someone like me, living with loneliness, the garden at St Luke’s and the people who help look after it, are a godsend.
The gardening helps me feel I am being useful, like I am contributing to the community.
In the garden it feels like God has got an eye on me, like God is watching me and looking after me.
Coming down down the road to St Lukes is only a short distance, but it's probably one of the biggest steps I've taken in my life.’