OK, I guess it\u2019s time to talk about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was first really<\/em> alienated from the church of my upbringing about the time that the youth group was ordered into a multi-week course called \u201cThe Fundamentals Of Our Faith.\u201d It was rapidly apparent in the late 1980s that something was not the same as it has been. An innocent childhood question of \u201cwait, are we the Pharisees\u201d was pretty clearly being answered \u201cyes\u201d as we were hammered with one thing after another about the evils of rock music (without a single example from the past ten years) or anti-abortion propaganda that I think was more meant to scare us out of having sex than to warn us against terminating a pregnancy. And then, when the old church responded to an instance of youth suicidal ideation with a film about a prisoner who converted, it became apparent to me that the Southern Baptists had lost their way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve said before how Chapel at 6 was, with basketball, one of the two worthwhile things in my four years of undergrad. And yet, it wasn\u2019t enough to keep me seeking out the same experience once I was free of that institution. The occasional dabble into the Episcopal Church began in the mid-90s and carried on for a while, whether splitting the difference with my Catholic girlfriend on an occasional Sunday evening during the Vandy years or popping into a 5 PM service in Arlington, Virginia in the early 2000s. But at that point, the Irish Catholics of my acquaintance had made me ethnically Catholic: Irish nationalist, Celtic supporter, sympathetic to Notre Dame, the works. And a couple years of Catholic adult education and attending Catholic services with my family in California made me feel\u2026well, I don\u2019t know. It felt right, but it also felt like more of an intellectual and historical engagement than anything spiritual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And at some point, as the Obama administration wore on and the enemy showed its hand and its true colors, it became very difficult to reconcile what I had been told Christianity was growing up with my actual experience of it, and at some point – probably in my cups after being overserved at a Super Bowl party or something – I had to admit that in my heart of hearts, I didn\u2019t believe in God any more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I was right. Because I didn\u2019t. Because I was still stuck at some level on that Southern Baptist Old Testament version of God – a God who owned the only factory in your small town, where the pastor was the foreman and was very good at telling you just what God wanted you to do without you ever hearing it directly from God. And that\u2019s a God I didn\u2019t, couldn’t<\/em> believe in any more. And I still don\u2019t, and can’t, and won’t<\/em>, because that<\/em> God doesn’t exist – that’s a God that man created in his own image as a club to beat brown people with. That’s not snark, that’s not my own prejudice, that’s history<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know where things started to change up. The Trump years were no time to revisit Christianity, certainly not as is conceived of in America – because the mainline Protestants have long since abandoned the field. In the American mind – especially the East Coast media mind – there\u2019s Catholicism, there\u2019s \u201cthe black church,\u201d there\u2019s various permutations of Islam and Judaism and Mormons and such, and looming over it all is the Southern Baptist Convention at the head of a whole fundamentalist-charismatic-whatever blob that has displaced the old mainline denominations. Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, all gone, and the ancient depiction of the Episcopalians as \u201cthe Republican Party at prayer\u201d is wholly inoperative in the 21st century. And while there\u2019s plenty of religion around in Northern California, there isn\u2019t any in Silly Con Valley, other than the unbridled worship of bullshit backed by venture capital. People around here love to tell you that they\u2019re not religious, they\u2019re spiritual. Which\u2026what the hell does that even mean?<\/em> I believe in some kind of woo-woo thing that just happens to coincide with what I believe already? I have some vague sense of be-good that doesn\u2019t really actually require anything of me? I just want to seem deeper than you? All horseshit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think the switch really flipped for me on the day that I conceived the blog post about how God is the name we give to the idea that no one is above an ass-kicking. God is huge. God is abstract. God is not anthropomorphic At All, no matter what the telephone-game-translation \u201ccreated in the image of God\u201d might mean to you. God is too big and too much to get a handle on, and we can only get a handle on God through a glass darkly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that\u2019s where the whole Jesus part comes in. Baptists have a thoroughly illogical grasp on this. Jesus is the son of God. Okay, concede that point – so then what? It would stand to reason that the thing would then be to ask what Jesus said to do, and then do that. Instead, the Baptists go running straight to the original mansplainer, Paul, who probably didn\u2019t even write half the letters that Baptists rush to to tell us are what Jesus actually<\/em> meant and never mind those words in red in the pocket Bible the Gideons gave you. So my thought was, bugger that, I will read the Gospels. And then I didn\u2019t. And then it took me a year to make the effort to get all the way through Mark (generally accepted as first), and then Matthew and Luke (which interpolate both Mark and the \u201cQuelle\u201d source that was found in Nag Hammadi as the Gospel of Thomas or something), and I haven\u2019t even looked yet at John (which seems to be the artistic-interpretation version).<\/p>\n\n\n\n And what I have come to is this: God is very much beyond our comprehension. Jesus is providing the toolkit by which we ascertain what it is God wants from us. And what God wants from us is of a piece with what we owe to each other. Thus is the first and most important commandment on which all the law and the prophets hang: \u201cLove God with all your might and love your neighbor as yourself.\u201d And that is genuinely challenging. God does not have it for the rich, for the powerful, for the wealthy. God wants you to provide for others. God wants you to give it away. God wants you to reject the ways of the world and care for others, radically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is a lot<\/em>. This is challenging. This requires you to forgive a lot. This requires you to move the difficulty setting off \u201ceasy.\u201d This requires you to extend to others the same grace God has extended you, including people who absolutely do not deserve it. But deserve<\/em> doesn\u2019t enter into it. That\u2019s how grace works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know when exactly I started playing the podcast from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. It was before the pandemic, certainly. I think at some point, the despair of the Trump years made me look for something, anything that would give me some kind of light that we weren\u2019t just doomed in every respect. And\u2026slowly I began to find things out. Like how the Episcopalians were formed with the help of Scottish bishops only too happy to lay hands on American bishops who refused the authority of the crown of England. And how the apostolic descendants of those bishops consecrated women as priests in the 1970s and dragged the church along with them. And how despite threats – and with a bulletproof vest under the robe – they elevated a gay man as bishop. How the entire thing starts from a premise of \u201cyou are loved by God and therefore you are loved by this church, and you begin from being a valid and worthy creation of God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s a lot. That is a hugely<\/em> significant data point. When you come up through the hellfire of the Southern Baptists who seem to hate everything, even their own youth group, and who start from a premise of “you are lost and damned until you get saved”, it\u2019s unsettling and transformative to reject all of that, start over from first principles, walk into a church and begin by hearing that you are welcome and affirmed and worthwhile. And after watching the presiding bishop of that Church say just those things while marrying the Duke of Sussex to an American actress, it occurred to me, maybe I should give this a look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I reached out tentatively to an Episcopal priest, one of the ancillary participants in the Vanderbilt tailgate crew of which I myself am ancillary at best, and she was encouraging – but I still needed an actual church. I would Zoom into hers in Nashville periodically during the pandemic, but when she was exploring an offer to become rector of one of two different Episcopal congregations in easy driving distance, I decided that wherever she landed, I\u2019d start attending and give it a try. And then she wound up at St Mary the Virgin up in the city, which\u2026was not close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But one evening, while listening to the Grace podcast down the pub, the priest at Grace mentioned his former parish – and I hadn\u2019t even realized it existed, let alone that it was an easy five to seven minute drive from my house. And after some hemming and hawing, in a moment of existential despair (right around Election Day 2022), I just decided to show up at 8 AM and see what happened. Small crowd, short service, get in and get out and see what it did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first thing I noticed when I walked into the church was a smell. It was the same sort of old-books-and-time-lost smell I remembered from Yeilding Chapel in college. The second thing I noticed were the enormous floor-to-ceiling stained glass windows, which called to mind the four cardinal windows in different colors in Yeilding Chapel. And the third thing I noticed was the rector, a woman younger than me, who spoke movingly of her own struggles in college in a way that rather made me feel like I\u2019d been pinned in at right angles. I got out as quickly and politely as I could at the end without my voice breaking, sat down in my car, and said \u201cokay, you win. We\u2019re doing this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so I have. It was mostly the 8 AM service until we went off on our sabbatical trip last spring, after which I added the 9 AM adult education class on top of it for a few weeks – which was dealing with the history of the church in general, the Episcopalians in particular and Christ Church more specifically, and was basically the prerequisite class for eventual confirmation. In the last couple of months, it\u2019s switched to the 10:15 service, with hymns and music, some of which is familiar from Catholic services and some of which actually draws on stuff I know from childhood. And hearing it re-contextualized in this setting is\u2026not nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because the Episcopalians hold to the formula that the misdoings of an individual clergy doesn\u2019t invalidate the sacrament. No matter how far out of pocket the Baptists are, the baptism in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit I experienced in July 1983 is still held canonically valid. Even though I have rejected the wrong track I was on, the aspects of my upbringing that were true and right are still<\/em> true and right and count for something. Which means that the things I believed in childhood are still valid, and there is a thread of continuity there. That\u2019s not nothing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s the thing, the point of all this: this feels right. <\/em>Sunday morning at 10:15 feels like the thing that\u2019s been missing from my schedule. It\u2019s the possibility of community. It\u2019s affirmation. It\u2019s an opportunity to step out of time and set aside the things of the world for eighty minutes or so. It\u2019s a chance to meet people (a couple, close enough to walk over for dinner, a few years younger than us and of eerily similar background – proof that this is the right path for me to be on and that what I am is not alien here). It has reached equal standing with the Sunday night pub simulation as the thing I look forward to during the week that will give me an escape from my worldly cares and concerns and let me unwind. It\u2019s something to do that I\u2019m interested in and doesn\u2019t feel like a waste of time or a pointless exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There isn\u2019t an endgame here. This is not \u201cachievement unlocked, move on to the next thing.\u201d It means confirmation and membership, and from there, who knows – but it ticks so many boxes that I didn\u2019t realize were part of a God-shaped hole in my existence. And now that I\u2019m getting a look at that space and figuring out how to fill it properly this time, I feel better for making the effort. Because no one is making me do this. There is no social expectation that I will do this and quite a lot that I won\u2019t, actually. Every grown-up in that sanctuary at 8 or 10:15 is someone who wants to be there. And now, so do I.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OK, I guess it\u2019s time to talk about it. I was first really alienated from the church of my upbringing about the time that the youth group was ordered into a multi-week course called \u201cThe Fundamentals Of Our Faith.\u201d It was rapidly apparent in the late 1980s that something was not the same as it … <\/p>\n