I am an Anglican because this is where God has lead me. It is within Anglicanism that I have learned to be obedient to God and to God’s calling on my life, which has not always been an easy thing.
I have not always been an Anglican, nor have I always been a Christian. I was raised to be a liberal Roman Catholic. My father was Catholic while my mother was something of a hopeful agnostic (she has since found her way into the Episcopal Church). My parents tended well to my spiritual formation, but in the post Vatican II American model of Catholicism that I came up in I found little that I could hold onto. I was raised to ask tough questions and I found that Roman Catholicism didn’t have many answers. Besides which, most of the folks I knew were “cafeteria Catholics,” taking what they liked from the smorgasbord of doctrine and leaving the rest. I grew up with the dance of the Mass but in an atmosphere of little grandeur, with rented rooms, chairs instead of pews, no statues, no stain glass, and a nagging sense that the Church was some sort of feckless thug, always wanting to impose its will on me and on everyone I knew–usually to their detriment–without ever giving a reasonable explanation. I had some of the most insufferable Sunday school teachers you can imagine, excited more about their most recent trips to Fatima than by anything that Jesus was doing in their lives. In fact, I remember hearing very little about Jesus in my CCD experience. Lots of stories about miracles with holy water and prayer ropes, a dozen or so lectures about the moral threat of R-rated movies, and a lot of references to Our Blessed Mother Mary, but surprisingly little about who Jesus is and how one comes to have a relationship with him.
By the time I was fourteen and had been confirmed I considered myself finished with the obligatory part of my religious upbringing and thus finished with the Church. I still had a number of friends in church and even went on retreats with the church youth group, but it was always with the proviso that I was no longer a Catholic. One year I remember sitting with the youth group when the leader asked us all to comment on what we were giving up for Lent. When it was my turn to answer I said “organized religion” and watched with glee as a look of sheer horror fell over the leader’s face.
I never became an atheist. It didn’t make sense to me, the idea that we came from nothing, that all of this was just pure randomness. I always felt that there was some greater truth to it all, that I was part of something greater. I was even willing to call that something greater “God,” though I’d have given a hundred or so caveats. For a while I also became fond of calling it “the Goddess” and rattling on about the “sacred feminine.” I was enamored with ancient Celtic and Greek religious myth. I dubbed myself a Pagan, which was shorthand for saying that I was a jack of all religions, master of none. It was the next logical step in my evolution from cafeteria Catholic into pure spiritualist. I was one of those “spiritual but not religious” types that make up a large portion of my generation. This philosophy gave me the freedom, at least in my estimation at the time, to create a religious system that made sense for me.
I picked and chose what I wanted to believe, just as I did as a Catholic, only now I got to pick from a much wider menu. I could be a little bit Buddhist one day and a little bit Wiccan the next. I created my own rituals and read The Spiral Dance and Drawing Down the Moon and the Bhagavad Gita. I also read the Koran and the Sufi mystics. In college I made friends with a number of Muslims of various strands and I would grill them about what they believed and why. I met some Hindus too and even went at one point to a Hare Krishna temple. I also read Kabbalah, long before Madonna made it trendy. I even included Jesus in my pantheon, though I was much inclined towards the Jesus that I found in the Gnostic scriptures. If The DaVinci Code had come out while I was a Pagan, I probably would’ve eaten it up. Had you called me a Christian during that time, I’d have been a little insulted. I was much too enlightened for anything so dogmatic and oppressive. I continued along this path for a good while into college.
What brought me back to the Church initially was sheer weariness. The years of searching had left me lonely and discouraged. I’d made a few attempts over the years to organize groups of like-minded seekers into some sort of spiritual collective, but without any common reference point these experiments always ended in failure. I considered becoming a Unitarian, having known several in my time. The Unitarians I’ve met have always been kind and I’m grateful for that. I thought that Unitarian Universalism might afford me what I was looking for, a religious community that would support me in my individualistic quest for truth and a place where my strongly leftist political convictions would be respected, even celebrated. But I couldn’t make the jump. I could tell that something was missing from the Unitarian experience. I wouldn’t have been able to recognize it then as what I know it to be now, the absence of a clear understanding of divine revelation and objective truth. Yet I could tell that the whole thing was just a little too loosey-goosey to be worthwhile. There was no center to the Unitarian experience. Simply put, there was no there there.
Reluctantly, I found myself back in the Roman Catholic Church. Or, at least, I found myself back at Mass. I needed the ritual. I needed to be somewhere where we could all say “God” together and have it mean something. Above all, I needed the respite that comes from being able to stand together in worship and love. I needed the mystery of it. Protestantism just never appealed to me in that way, though for all intents and purposes I had a Protestant philosophy. But the idea of getting up early in the morning just to hear some guy talk or to sing a couple bad hymns was utterly uninspiring for me. I needed liturgy. I needed the Eucharist. Even if I wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing, I knew down in my bones that I needed to be receiving Christ’s Body and Blood. I became active in my parish. I even joined the music ministry at my college, singing at Mass every week. I dived back into Roman Catholicism with all the energy I could muster. But something still wasn’t right.
I thought I had a handle on it, the whole cafeteria Catholic thing. I was reading Matthew Fox pretty heavily at the time. I’d mix in other Christian writers who shared my politics, like John Shelby Spong and John Dominic Crossan, but it was the Roman Catholic writers who really did it for me. Fox’s early work was a big influence, but I also read more center-left figures like Andrew Greeley and Thomas Day. I watched Kevin Smith’s great film Dogma over and over again. I took pride in being a part of a faith that included Teddy Kennedy and Michael Moore. In fact, I found it incredibly easy to be a theologically and politically liberal Catholic. Sure, I still found the things that the Vatican would put out to be highly offensive, but it didn’t affect me much. I was in a large liberal parish where things like abortion and homosexuality almost never came into the pulpit. Almost every Catholic I knew had a fairly Protestant and increasingly liberal frame of mind. And with overworked priests who barely had time to shake my hand if I approached them in the parking lot, I was assured that no one would be taking much time to investigate the state of my soul with any degree of rigor. I could have continued in the Roman Church forever without ever having to reconcile with the fact that I believed very little of what she actually taught.
It wasn’t intellectual, theological, or even political motivations that finally brought me out of the Roman Catholic Church. Sadly, I was more than content to let those differences be. No, looking back now, I realize that I didn’t really want to leave the comfort zone of my Roman Catholicism. I was happy in the Catholic identity I had carved out for myself. In many ways it would’ve been easy for me to stay. But I found after a while that my soul was not quiet, even though my mind and heart were at rest. A profound longing was springing up in me, a hunger for something deeper and wider. Though I have no way to rationally describe this, it was God who was pushing me to move on. I can’t explain it. It doesn’t make any sense. At the time I wouldn’t have even been sure that God could even work in this way. Yet that’s the plain truth of it, that the Holy Spirit had a hold on me and wouldn’t let me go. And though I knew almost nothing about Anglicanism at the time, I suddenly found myself weekly in attendance at an Episcopal church.
From the first day I knew that it wouldn’t be easy. My first experience of worship in the Episcopal Church was so awkward. I remember flipping around in prayer book and hymnal, completely unsure of what I was doing. I remember being highly confused by the altar rail when I went up to receive communion, unsure of whether to kneel or stand, and also unsure of how to drink from the chalice after years of walking past it as a Roman. I also remember being overwhelmed by people after the service, including the priest, the priest’s wife (which was something of a new experience in and of itself!), and parishioners galore who batted me back and forth, inviting me to pig roasts and asking me questions. For someone used to the safe anonymity of over-sized Roman parishes, this sort of instant attention was downright frightening. The whole experience of church that first day gave me a sense of anxiousness, a sense that this church would be different, that I could not hide here, that I would have to work at it. I was not totally at ease with that idea. At the same time, though, I had a strong sense that I had come home. From somewhere deep inside my heart, I felt a tug that said that this was where God wanted me to be.
Over the years, both that sense of anxiety and that sense of home have increased. It is not easy being an Anglican, especially in the current climate where we are daily at each other’s throats. I have cried more than once over the state of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion today. I have cried out to God more than once in my anguish, pleading that I be allowed to leave the insanity of Anglicanism for some saner shores. The temptation to do so is indeed sometimes overpowering. Yet I have stayed, because every time I’ve called out to God the answer has come back so clearly that I cannot plausibly deny that I’ve heard it: “This is where I have placed you and this is where I want you to be.” And while there are moments when I question the wisdom of that command, I cannot deny that over the years I’ve seen many fruits of the spirit develop in my life as an Anglican Christian. The truth is that if I’d remained a Roman Catholic I’d have continued to be no Catholic at all. Yet within Anglicanism I’ve come to know the Catholic faith and to live it. From within Anglicanism I’ve come to be fed by a rich life of prayer and to participate in a kind of holiness in worship that I’ve never known before. Though the phrase is overused and is not original to us, it is nevertheless true that within Anglicanism “lex orandi, lex credendi.”
Out of the wide and sometimes maddeningly undisciplined breadth of Anglicanism, I’ve come to know God personally and passionately. In Anglicanism, I’ve come to see why it is that I need the Eucharist so badly, why I yearned for it during those years I was absent from it, and why my heart soars when I’m merely in the presence of the sacrament. I’m not saying that it is impossible to have a similar experience elsewhere within the Church. Certainly there are those former Anglicans turned Roman Catholics who have something of the opposite tale to tell. But my tale has been that Anglicanism has made me into a fully realized Christian in a way that Roman Catholicism could not. Anglicanism has brought me repeatedly to the foot of the cross, made me face sin and death, and then lead me through to the other side to seek comfort and joy in the loving arms of the Risen Lord. More surprising than anything, Anglicanism has taught me obedience, not by hitting me over the head with an ecclesiastical two by four but by patiently and unwaveringly calling my attention back to the voice of God.
I became an Anglican in obedience to God. I have remained an Anglican in obedience to God. I have grown in my faith as an Anglican Christian in obedience to God. So long as it remains God’s will for me to remain an Anglican, then for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, this is my home.
