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.

From a Mormon perspective, I left the covenant path. It’s still odd to me, and a little unsettling, to be reminded that many of my former co-religionists see my recent religious journey as a tragedy, as turning my back on the truth and moving away from God. “We have to be honest,” said a recent blog commenter: “leaving the church almost always ends in disaster.” There is a way in which I understand this worldview; after all, it’s the world I grew up in. But there is also a way in which it somewhat baffles me. I don’t think I ever had that level of utter certainty. I realize that many church members would see that as a failing, and also a handy explanation of why I left. I was never really converted, they would say. I never really had a testimony. It’s no surprise that I couldn’t stay on the path.

When I think about why I left, though, and the story of how it happened, it does not actually seem predictable to me. Maybe others would see it that way. After all, I hit all three of Boyd K. Packer’s infamous trifecta: gay, feminist, intellectual. I think there were people both in and out of the church who saw it as only a matter of time before I was out the door. But for all my angst, for all the years of wrestling with my beliefs, that was not where I saw myself going. I’d tried to leave before, after all, and I couldn’t ever make it stick. I found that I could be incredibly angry, and even doubt pretty much everything, but I couldn’t not care. So I fell into a sort of revolving door mode, where I would be active and trying to make it work for a while, and then I would be taking a break, and then eventually I would go back, and the cycle would start again.

What finally lured me away, of course, was falling in love with another church. For all the years before that happened, though, that was never on my radar as even a possibility; Mormonism was such a profound part of who I was. It’s not like I didn’t know progressive churches existed. It’s not like I hadn’t attended them, and even joked about joining them. But I was incredibly determined to stay, to hold up my little bit of the Big Tent Mormonism that I so badly wanted to believe in.

Yet here I am now. When I was last in the hospital, they asked me if I had a religious affiliation, and I said “Episcopal.” That still doesn’t feel natural. I still feel slightly likely an imposter. I still can’t quite believe any of this happened. Last fall, I had an encounter with a Mormon who realized that I also shared that background, and encouraged me to come back to church. I said no thanks, I go to a different church now. I said it lightly, because I was wanting to keep things friendly. But this has been anything but casual for me; my experience has been so intense that I struggle to know how to talk about it. I don’t think I have another life change to compare to it. I’ve spent so much of my life studying religion, but I didn’t know you could fall completely in love with a church. I didn’t know that conversion—which from the outside, just looked like a really complicated, exhausting thing to go through—could bring so much energy and delight.

Once I finally decided to convert, which felt less like a difficult decision and more like simply doing the obvious thing, after a requisite period of pretending to myself that it wasn’t the obvious thing, I wanted to do it all the way. I wanted to be baptized. Initially I’d thought I wouldn’t go that route, that I’d maintain a sense of continuity in my religious trajectory by holding to my Mormon baptism, and just getting confirmed as an Episcopalian. But I was surprised by how much I wanted it, once I thought about it. The Episcopal baptismal liturgy is beautiful, and I loved that you promised to do things like seek and serve Christ in all persons, continue in the breaking of the bread, and respect the dignity of every human being. One of my major challenges as a Mormon was that I couldn’t bring myself to participate in the highest rituals of the faith, the ones that happen in the temple, because of my profound reservations about some of the covenants involved. I was excited to do the Episcopal baptismal rite because even though the promises were all of course very aspirational, and I knew I would never live up to them, they were aspirations I wholeheartedly supported. I also liked the idea of having a genuinely new beginning for my new faith, for starting out fresh.

I thought about getting baptized at Easter Vigil, which is my favorite service of the year, but once I’d decided to go through with it, I didn’t want to wait. So instead I opted to get baptized the day after Epiphany, the first Sunday in January. I am someone who tends to second-guess things, but I didn’t have any doubts about doing this. However, as the day got closer, I did have some nervousness about actually going through the ritual in a public space. What if I was the person who tripped walking to the font? What if I forgot what came next, and did something totally wrong? Knowing I was going to be the center of attention left me a bit on edge.

The night before my baptism, I read through the liturgy again to make sure I was familiar with everything that would happen. And this brings me back to the issue of covenants. I had grown up feeling like covenants were basically ways of judging yourself and realizing that you were constantly falling short. The sacrament, so closely tied up with the notion of “worthiness,” often just felt like a weekly indictment, a weekly reminder of how much I was disappointing God. Yet here I was, about to make another batch of promises, knowing full well that I would not keep them. The Episcopal liturgy does add a loophole: you only promise to do these things “with God’s help.” You’re not expected to be able to live up to them on your own. That felt reassuring to me. I also found that I felt a certain grounding in the five commitments of the ritual. They didn’t feel like clubs for me to beat myself up with forever after; rather, they felt like a moral structure that I could come back to again and again and center myself. I thought, if I spend the rest of my life working on these, I will not even come close to mastering them—but I actually like the idea of having them there. It felt like maybe I was finally grasping how these sorts of promises were supposed to function in your life.

But it wasn’t that shift in perspective, as helpful as it was, that really upended everything for me. What happened is still hard to put into words. But as I read through the liturgy and contemplated what I was doing, I had a profound sense that while these promises were lovely and worth making, that wasn’t the core of what was going on in this ritual.  My decision to be baptized was many things, but perhaps more than anything else, it was an act of faith in God’s goodness. After a lifetime of veering between belief in God’s love, and belief that God was a sort of tyrannical monster who was constantly angry with me, I was deciding to choose the former. I could feel the power of that decision. And completely unexpectedly, I found myself with an overwhelming sense that the most fundamental promise I was making wasn’t actually one of the five commitments listed in the Book of Common Prayer. Rather, the core of what I was doing was what I can best describe as a promise to let God love me. It hit me with genuine force that that was the starting point, and everything else—including these lovely commitments to do good—flowed from there.

I cannot express how radical this felt to me; even with my more positive view, I’d still been thinking about the whole thing in terms of exchange, in terms of committing to do something good and getting some sort of divine favor in return, in the way I’d learned that covenants worked. And now that entire worldview was turned on its head. God wasn’t asking me to be good enough. God was simply asking me to let love in. That’s what it was all about.

I have come back to that experience again and again in the time since, when I’ve found myself wrapped up in guilt and self-recrimination and despair. I remember that on a cold Sunday in January, I promised God that I would let God love me. I didn’t promise that I would get it all right and not make mistakes and bad choices. I didn’t even promise that I would do my best, or strive to be worthy. I simply promised that I would not close myself off to divine love. I won’t pretend that I have managed to live that out; I find that I lose sight of it easily, and have to be called back again and again. But I can say without hyperbole that it is the most profound and meaningful promise I have ever made.