One of the thrills of my teenage summers was visiting an adult friend and her family in Washington DC. I'd met her when I was in 3rd grade and she brought slides of her travels in Europe to school as an addition to our geography classes. We became friends despite the age difference (and trust me, I went through crushes on both her sons who were around my own age) and remanded so to the end of her life a few years ago. She was Episcopalian and I went to church with her during my visits. I'd visited a couple of other churches back home thanks to the Girl Scouts (Methodist, Roman Catholic and Baptist) but the first time I went through an Episcopal service I knew this was something different, something immensely important and to which I immediately felt connected. It was so much of what my own church wasn't --- I didn't hear what a rotten sinner I was (except in the General Confession), the final hymn wasn't stopped after every verse for another exhortation to "let Jesus into your heart", there was a lot more scripture read than just the verse the preacher chose for the sermon that week, and most of all, the hymns had a beauty and dignity rather than a simple, romantic (in the sense of appealing to the sentiment) poetry that emphasized God's goodness and our own human guilt and hand-wringing. In DC we visited other churches and even a mosque (a favorite place of ours: beautiful, quiet, and with a presence of God there as well) but my very favorite place was the National Cathedral. We revisited it every summer. It just wasn't a complete visit unless we did. How to become a part of all this, though?
The answer came in college. There was an Episcopal church near the campus and so I went and asked to be part of the confirmation class during my freshman year. I gave myself a birthday present that year when on the day before my birthday I was confirmed into the Episcopal Church. I did ask my adoptive father's permission before doing it, partly because I felt I needed his approval and partly because I would be in a sense repudiating the church he still believed in even though it had ultimately treated both him and Mama somewhat shabbily. Having his permission and without anyone from my family present, I felt the bishop's hand and that was that. A couple of years later our college choir went to the National Cathedral to sing for a 10am Sunday morning service. I can't remember many experiences that came close to that one. I wasn't just worshiping, I was a participant, an active one, and hearing our music bounce off those stone walls and pillars, hearing the organ booming from all around and seeing the sun shine through the stained glass windows of the yet-unfinished place I'd loved for a long time, it was intense. My only regret was that we were not permitted to take communion that Sunday because of our place in a gallery above the cathedral floor.
Typical Episcopalian. As the old joke says, "Confirm them and you'll never see them again." I went walkabout for some years. I graduated from college, taught school for a year, got married to an agnostic and had a son. I did have my son baptized in the base chapel in the Philippines. My husband didn't particularly approve but had no real objections. Again, nobody from my family was there any more than they were when i sang in church or was confirmed. Anyway, that was the end of the churchy-ness until after my divorce. I played the organ at the local Roman Catholic church in the town in Oregon where we split but stopped when the job I got transferred me to San Francisco.
Still no church involvement. It was easier to give up on it than to try to... Even though I was divorced, some of the lessons my then-husband taught me stuck like
"the worst thing your old man ever did was send you to college," and "lotta good your religion does you, you don't act like a Christian." To be fair, he and I stayed friendly through the divorce and afterward mainly because it wouldn't be fair to make our son a ping-pong ball in a battle of parents, but yet I still felt like I had to follow his wishes about the church. As a side note, he remarried as did I --- me to a Roman Catholic, him to a Jehovah's Witness. I still get a sort of laugh out of that.
I remarried a good guy with strong religious beliefs. For a while I tried to be a Roman Catholic but I just couldn't do it. There ware too many things my thoroughly Protestant soul couldn't go for -- the emphasis on Mary, the lousy contemporary music (in a church ht at had such a glorious musical history), the incessant rules and return to feelings of guilt for just about everything up to and including breathing sometime. A friend invited me to her church for Christmas Eve -- a church just down the street from the house we had lived in for 5 years or so and which happened to be Episcopal. I fell in love with it all over again.
I slowly put my toe in the ecclesiastical waters -- first choir, even though I hadn't sung a note in years because.. well, that isn't important, then as church secretary, then adding Altar Guild. I loved it. I had a great boss in the priest. He and his wife (and his cat, Emerson) and I became good friends which we are to this day, 20-some years later. When he left I worked hard during the interim, including trying to help keep things on an even keel even when one of our interims committed suicide. He had seemed fine in the office that day but that night ---. Anyway, may he rest in peace. The new rector fired me and so I left, not wanting to be where I wasn't apparently wanted. I went to the Cathedral for a while and loved almost every minute there. Eventually, though, we got another rector and I tried again.
Some years later we got yet another new rector but with a difference -- this one had long hair and had a clergy spouse who was male. It took a while for her to be completely accepted but we felt we'd really gotten a winner. She was graceful when celebrating, an excellent preacher, a terrific teacher. I did something I hadn't done in years: I returned to Bible study. I found a way of reading the Bible and studying it that I never dreamt existed. I found it was okay to question, to wrestle, to argue, to be passionate about something other than being "saved" or saving others. It was a tremendous gift.
No comments:
Post a Comment