It was the spring of 2019, and it had been over a year since I’d been baptized into the Episcopal church. I still felt like it was the best decision I’d ever made, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still haunted sometimes. I was sitting in a Taize service one Sunday evening and thinking about my decision to leave the LDS faith, and I started to feel sick. Some fears are old ones; some fears are laid down in your understanding of the world before you’ve even begun to develop a sense of self. I’d been told all my life that walking away from God’s One True Church was a terrible mistake with eternal consequences, and even though my conversion had been an amazing experience, that didn’t always cancel out the anxiety, or erase the years of General Conference talks given in ominous tones by human leaders who were one hundred percent positive that they spoke for God. I wanted conversion to be more straightforward, cleaner; I wanted it to be a light that was so blinding that I could no longer even see the past, and I had no choice but to go forward. But while it was undeniably life-changing, my past was still there, a part of me to be reckoned with. Read More
Showing all posts in Episcopalians
Choosing Life in an Affirming Church
I knew that I probably shouldn’t let myself be encouraged by the unexpected news a few weeks ago that BYU was softening their stance on same-sex dating. Over the years, after all, you learn better than to hope. I remember attending my first Affirmation conference in the fall of 2015, and being blown away by the faith of so many of the people there, the confidence they had that eventually the church would make more room for them. The sheer exuberance of that hope was hard to resist. Despite my skepticism, it infected me a little. I mean, here was a crowd of LGBTQ people, surely a demographic bound for apostasy if anyone was, and more than anything it felt like EFY for queer people—complete with a dance, cheesy music, and even a testimony meeting at the end. I looked at this crowd and thought, okay, maybe I’m too skeptical. Maybe the church really will come around on these issues. How can they possibly resist this sort of faith? Read More
Re-Thinking the Covenant Path: What Baptism in the Episcopal Church Meant to Me
(This is adapted from something I recently wrote for a writing group.)
A phrase that seems to have become popular in the Mormonism of recent years is “covenant path.” It’s after my time; I don’t recall hearing the term much, if ever, during my years in the church. But even from my vantage point outside the church, I’ve noticed the phrase appearing more and more. Honestly, it makes me flinch. I have some old baggage with the notion of covenants, and the phrase “covenant path” seems to be used, as often as not, to weigh in on the failings of those who are not on it. People left the covenant path, and terrible things befell them; the tale is told in many ways and in many contexts, but the moral remains the same. Read More
Evensong
When I was in the hospital a few months ago, I missed church on Sunday. Obviously I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter; I have yet to see a psych ward that would let you out for a few hours to catch a church service. (They’d probably be especially nervous about Episcopal services, come to think of it, with all those candles.) But I was a little surprised at how sad I was to miss even one week. Since I’d walked into my local parish in February 2017, thinking at the time it was just for a temporary change of pace, I had not gone a single Sunday without attending Episcopal church somewhere. Even when I turned into a somewhat manic church-hopper later that year, and tried to visit at least one new church every Sunday, the possibility of skipping Episcopal services was simply never even on the table. It had become too much an essential part of the rhythm of my life.
That Sunday in the hospital, I tried to look on the bright side—I’d been wanting to see a religious service in the psych ward, and indeed I got to go to one. It was very low key. A chaplain came and had a small group of us read a few things, and then talk about them. The predictable result was that we spent a lot of time listening to the not always coherent thoughts of two patients who always had a lot to say. I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to the chaplain more; she was warm and thoughtful, and seemed like an interesting person. I definitely appreciated her efforts. But I also thought about how only a mile away, my parish was holding its usual Sunday services. It was a blunt reminder of how much you’re cut off from the rest of the world in a place like that. The next Sunday, when I walked into church, being in the familiar building again actually made me emotional.
I Couldn’t Resist Happiness
I’ve often seen the inoculation model proposed as a way to equip people to deal with challenging aspects of the LDS church. The basic idea is that if you initially encounter the difficult things about Mormonism in a context that’s friendly to the church, you’re much less likely to get freaked out when you run across them elsewhere. I don’t know how well that works for everyone, but for much of my life I felt that to some extent that dynamic had been true for me. Maybe not always the friendly context part, but definitely the finding out earlier rather than later part. At the very least, by the time I hit midlife, I felt that I was in some sense inoculated. I never had the experience described by many people I know of stumbling across major things as an adult about which they had previously been unaware, and that shook them to the core. Read More
Getting Baptized
I didn’t actually have to get baptized as part of my conversion. The Episcopal church doesn’t have a clear policy on what do with Mormons—while Catholics and some Protestants have ruled that Mormon baptism is invalid and converts from Mormonism must be baptized, Episcopalians have been rather less definitive. There are certainly LDS converts to Anglicanism who’ve made the religious transition without being baptized (perhaps most notably a former Episcopal bishop of Utah). When I first started playing with the idea of converting, I figured I’d do it via confirmation only; I liked the idea of holding on to my Mormon baptism as a way of maintaining continuity in my religious journey. Read More