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 keep thinking that this level of attachment to all things Episcopal is going to eventually wear off. I can’t imagine that it won’t at least change over time. On that note, I had an interesting realization this past Christmas Eve. I decided to go all out, and attend six different church services that evening. It was a long and lively night (and possibly worth its own post), but my experience at my own parish was definitely the most unexpected. This is the thing. There were a number of factors in my decision to convert, but social connections played a minor role at best. Yes, people had been friendly, and I’d even gotten to know a few of them (largely through participating in what’s called Education for Ministry, which is a program in which you study the Bible, history, and theology with a small group of people). But I didn’t feel very integrated into the community when I decided to get baptized a year ago. I was okay with that; I find that these things usually take time, and I very much wanted to do it for other reasons. And even now, a year later, I still don’t feel like I know tons of people in my parish. And yet—when I came to the late  service on Christmas Eve and barely recognized anyone, it was a let-down. It maybe shouldn’t have surprised me, given that there are Episcopalians who only come for Christmas and Easter, and also that (at least in my experience), Episcopal church is a popular destination for non-Episcopalians who are looking for a good Christmas service. In fact, I’d been known to show up to holiday services at Episcopal church in my own active Mormon days, so I certainly didn’t begrudge all the people from the community who’d come. Still, it was striking to me how much that aspect of it affected my experience. It was an amazing service in every way, and I definitely enjoyed it. But the magic wasn’t there for me in quite the same way. I left and thought wow, I’m maybe more attached to my particular community than I’ve realized. My connection to the Episcopal church has taken on other dimensions. I think this is a good thing.

I was talking recently to my friend and co-blogger Petra, and she was particularly interested to hear about my interactions with my parish. She reminded me of what I’d been like when we’d first met, in a university ward many years ago. I was at a very low point in my relationship with the LDS church at the time; after having spent too much of my life in wards where it was very clear that there wasn’t room for people like me, that was simply my expectation. I’d given up on any idea that I was ever going to feel at home in Mormonism, or feel that sense of community that people raved about in testimony meeting. I will not deny that I had a chip on my shoulder. Church was something I endured, and I wasn’t particularly open to making friends. Petra knows this well because she decided she wanted to be friends with me, and I wasn’t really interested. I just wanted to survive church and get back home. Nevertheless, she persisted, and of course now I’m very glad that she did.

But after Petra brought it up, I realized that I do bring different expectations to Episcopal church. When I’m traveling and go visit an unfamiliar parish, I almost unconsciously expect that they’ll be welcoming. And my experiences have reinforced that. This past spring, for example, I was visiting a small city several hours away for work, and I noted that the local Episcopal church had a short evening service. I decided to drop by. There were only a handful of people in attendance, but they not only warmly welcomed me, they almost immediately gave me a part to read, and invited me to dinner afterward. It had been a rather difficult day due to some work-related issues, and I was genuinely touched.  Episcopalians are a fairly correlated bunch (to put it in Mormon terms); there are of course differences from parish to parish, but the overall structure of the mass is always the same, and everyone uses the Book of Common Prayer to some extent (though often supplementing it with liturgy from elsewhere). I find that comforting. I like that I can show up and know what to expect. And it is notable to me that I don’t feel wary, or on my guard, upon walking into church. On the contrary; I find Episcopal spaces to be very grounding.

I don’t share all this, by the way, to make the case that church is entirely what you make of it, and you just need to show up with a positive attitude. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that; there are unfortunately places where the most positive of attitudes won’t help you. In wards where I felt deeply alienated, it was not helpful to be lectured that I simply needed to try harder. But it’s still interesting to see this dynamic, to consider how your experience with a religious community can shape your expectations, and how those expectations can in turn affect your future experiences. (And of course that’s not just a matter of interactions with individuals, but also what’s said over the pulpit, and what’s implicitly conveyed by the institution.)

You already know this if you read my last post, but the past few months of my life have been extremely difficult. After I hit a psychological crisis point in early January, I ran away to see my brother, who lives about four hours from me, to see if a change of scenery might help. My brother and sister-in-law have been beyond generous in letting me come visit over the years when I’ve felt unstable. But while initially things seemed to be settling down again, when I started thinking about the reality that I was going to have to come back to my life, I crashed again, and finally ended up in the ER, and then in a crisis residential facility. After I was released,  I once again had to deal with the prospect of coming home and trying to negotiate the various stresses and trigger points that had played such a significant role in my falling apart. My therapist is not one to try to dictate my decisions, but when I insisted on coming back as soon as I could, she did ask me some pointed questions about whether I was ready, and how I was planning to stay safe. It’s not that I didn’t think it would be difficult. But the prospect of dreading it for another week or so felt even more daunting, so I decided to just get it over with.

I wish I could say that it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but if anything it turned out to be worse. By my second day back, my therapist and I were talking about whether I needed to go back to the ER, and I felt not just the despair of being in that situation, but of being in that situation again, for the third time in under a month. That depression robs you of hope will not come as a surprise to anyone, but I find that when it gets bad, it’s not just hope that’s gone; it’s any sense that the future even exists. I don’t quite know how to explain it. I was talking to my therapist about having scheduled a psychiatrist appointment in February, and I remember saying something about how February wasn’t even real. I couldn’t process it. I couldn’t connect with any sense of time, perhaps because time suggests the possibility of change. It was like finding myself in a sort of atemporal moment of complete despair. (In the spring of 2017, when I was coming out of a very long depression, I started putting books on hold at the library. That might seem like a small thing, but for me it was a strong indication that something had shifted. I believed in the future again.)

But somehow I got through those first few terrible days of being back, even if sometimes just moment by moment. I was lucky to have a lot of things scheduled that at least provided some distraction, and to have the chance to connect with a few good friends. And life has gotten a little easier since that rough landing. On a scale of 1-10, in which 1 is overwhelming depression and 10 is no depression at all, I’ve found myself hovering around a 3, and maybe occasionally even a 4. That’s obviously nowhere near out of the woods, but after a long time of mostly being between 1 and 2, it’s not nothing.

Because of all this, though, I hadn’t been to my home parish since Christmas. While I was away, I went to Sunday services at the Episcopal church near my brother’s house, and I was glad I could do that, at least, but it always made me feel a bit homesick. One week a friend from my parish texted me a picture of our church, as well as a picture of the Book of Common Prayer open to a prayer for the absent, and I actually cried. It was such a sweet gesture. There were good things there; the parish where I was visiting had a contemplative Celtic service one Sunday evening, with music and prayers and meditation, and that was quite lovely. Yet I had a very mixed experience the first Sunday after Epiphany, which is the feast of the baptism of the Lord in the liturgical calendar. That was the day that I got baptized last year. We didn’t have any baptisms in the service I attended, but as is traditional, the congregation repeated the baptismal liturgy, renewing their baptismal vows. I love this particular liturgy, which has you promise to do things like “seek and serve Christ in all persons” and “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.” But that day, I simply sat and listened. I could not bring myself to participate, because it felt like implicit in the vows was a commitment to live, and I wasn’t on board with that. (That was the day before I went to the ER.)

We had a snowstorm the weekend after I got out of residential, which ecumenically led to the cancellation of both Mormon and Episcopal church, and I spent a relaxed day with my brother’s family doing things like watching Anne of Green Gables and playing board games with my 8-year-old niece. So while I missed church, it was not a bad way to spend a Sunday. But it meant that when I went to church this past Sunday, back in my home town, I hadn’t been to any church at all in two weeks, and to my home parish in over a month. Given all of that, I felt like my expectations were going to be inevitably too high, because I’d missed it so much, and I was trying to prepare myself for some amount of disappointment. The fact that I’m still in starry-eyed new convert mode does not mean that every second of every service is amazing, that I never get restless, that things don’t sometimes fall flat, that there aren’t ever awkward social interactions. I’m well aware that I’m overly romantic about Episcopal services—because I genuinely am that enamored of them—but wherever you go, church is a community of complicated human beings. (More than one person in the past two years has told me that because of my experience, they’ve decided to try Episcopal church, and I often find myself wanting to warn them that they might be disappointed. It doesn’t connect with everyone. I went to the occasional Episcopal service for years, in fact, without it really connecting with me, and I still can’t quite explain what exactly happened to turn me into the complete maniac that I’ve become. I’ve actually found it sometimes difficult to talk about the whole thing and how life-changing it’s been, just because I am so enthusiastic that I think it might sound fake, like the Episcopal version of a faith-promoting Ensign story. I wouldn’t blame people for wondering whether I’m wildly exaggerating.)

And indeed, I did not walk into church on Sunday and suddenly have my spirits lift. This current bout of depression has been fairly intractable; I’ve had better moments and worse moments, but the overall gloom stubbornly remains. But it nonetheless felt good to be there, and to see familiar faces. One of the scriptural texts was 1 Corinthians 12, in which Paul describes the church as the body of Christ. The rector preached on that, on the value of each person’s individual gifts, and on having unity without requiring uniformity. It very much spoke to me. I was thinking about the LGBTQ gathering we’d had a few nights before, with people mostly from my parish but a few from other local churches, and how we’d talked about what it meant to be both LGBTQ and a person of faith, and how good it had felt to be in a place where I could bring both of those parts of myself. And I was also thinking about the faint possibility that even though sometimes my life seems like nothing but a long string of failures, maybe I still have something to offer. And when the rector said something along the lines of, “are you saying to your neighbor, I have no need of you,” it was a clarifying reminder that there are relationships in my life that I haven’t been handling very well—but in a way that made me want to do better, rather than despair about my mistakes. By the time we got to Communion, I was feeling a sense of peace and connection that I’d barely dared hope for. So while church wasn’t earth-shattering, I actually wasn’t disappointed. It was genuinely good to be back.

But it was the Evensong service we had late that afternoon that really got to me. I love Evensong (the word itself is already enchanting), and since at my parish they always have it at 5:00 pm, there’s a way in which works best in the winter, when it’s getting darker around that time. It’s beautiful in a kind of haunting way. I listened to the choir sing Psalm 19 using Anglican chant, and then sing the familiar words of the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis (the Song of Simeon from Luke 2), and it was absolutely gorgeous. It didn’t ameliorate the depression, but it added something, like for a little while I could see that the depression wasn’t the only reality. And then we said the Apostles’ Creed. In the Nicene Creed, we say that Jesus “suffered death and was buried.” But in the Apostles’ Creed, we say that “he descended into hell.” I was thinking about that being rather stark language—and then it hit me. I’ve been in hell for the past two months. I really have. But maybe I’m not alone. It was a surprisingly powerful moment. I don’t intellectually believe that my depression is the result of sin, but at the same time, my experience of it is that it’s always in some sense deserved, that I’ve done it to myself. Somehow that’s intrinsic to the experience for me. And I can go around and around in circles about the question of my own culpability. But for a moment, I could see something else, that maybe it didn’t really matter—that Jesus seeks us out in our darkest places regardless of how we got there. And for a moment I could even feel that, like a glimmer of possibility, like a brief intense hope that I was not yet beyond help.

I don’t want to spin this as a tale of how my faith cured me. My faith is not a static thing in any case, and I’ve found that my conversion has led to some of my beliefs feeling more in flux than ever. I am not in a place where I can even seriously think about recovery; my guess is that whatever that looks like, it’s going to take time. But on Sunday, despite how hard it had been to come back to my life, I was glad that I’d returned. Because I was reminded that there are things here that deeply matter to me.

There’s a traditional versicle and response found throughout Anglican liturgy that goes like this:

–O God, make speed to save us
–O Lord, make haste to help us

I like it a lot. Even when it doesn’t seem to me that God is in fact making much speed to help us with problems either large or small, there’s still something soothing about the repetition of the familiar words. And of course it comes from the Psalms, which are not really theological statements so much as human cries, often of desperation. “O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us.” I may not be able to pray with much faith or hope right now, but there is still something grounding about the language. “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.” It feels contradictory and strange in some ways to say such a thing in a state of depression. But it also feels like not giving up. Not yet. Not tonight.