So...

I think I'm an Episcopalian now.

And let me tell you, that came out of left field. If you'd told eight-year-old VM that she'd someday be attending an Episcopal church, and loving it, she'd not have believed you. Well, first she'd try to remember what "Episcopal" meant, outside of "One Of Those Poor Misled Not-Real Churches," then she'd probably have asked her parents, who would've told her anything from "Not A Real Church" to "Basically Catholics, Who As You Know Are Actually Secretly Satanists And Just Don't Know It." And then, so armed, she would have told you that she would never attend such a church, because that would be Wrong.

If you'd told thirteen-year-old VM that she'd someday be attending an Episcopal church, she would have looked at you skeptically and told you she didn't really want to talk about it, but she had a lot of ideas about Greek Mythology and Norse Mythology and the newly-discovered writings of C.S. Lewis that you might have a better conversation about.

If you'd told me, three or four years ago, that I'd be attending an Episcopal church, I'd have either snorted derisively and informed you that churches were deceptive haughty places where souls looking for redemption had the individuality stamped out of them and were led instead to the conformity of today's corrupt society. God, haven't you read your history? Churches just support wars and hurt people. That would be my response by day. My response by night would have been less flip, more honest: I want to believe that there's a church that would have me. But I'm more animal than human, I'm more wild than tame, I'm hurting and alone and I don't want the empty, shallow platitudes that the 'safe' churches have offered me, but I can't go back to the 'true' church because they would burn me and cast me out, unless I lied and hid who I am. I don't want to attend a church, and I never will again. No church would have me - not even Episcopals, or whatever you just said.

Then I moved to Ellensburg. As is my practice whenever I find myself in a new location, I started wandering. During the day, first short little walks around campus and to figure out where downtown was, then longer, and later, until I was walking for hours at a time in the darkest hours of the night, under a chill wind. Evening was best, though - I'd leave maybe an hour before sunset, pick a random direction, and start walking, usually out until well after dark.

Somehow, no matter what direction I started walking in, I always wound up coming back to Kiwanis Park. I'd sit by the creek and pray, or just think in silence, or occasionally write. I had walked past Grace Church a couple times, so in the back of my mind I knew what it was, and I knew, or thought I knew, that I wanted no part of it. But that's always where I wound up. In the depression at the very end of the quarter, when I was plagued by thoughts of suicide every minute of every hour of every day, I was there somewhat frequently, sitting on the rocks at the edge, my pocketknife a steady weight in my hands - bringing me back towards life, not away from it. The form of the building, tall and steady at the back of the park, did not occur to me as a shelter, but as a shadow. But it grew, in my mind, and occupied a steady place.

And then this happened. Specifically, this:

Our doubts lead us to question; and questioning is okay, it’s how we learn. I think the trouble comes when we demand immediate answers to our questions; or we desire easy answers that make us feel good. This, I believe, is at the heart of church shopping and hopping. People say they are looking for a place that feeds them. What they often mean, I think, is that they want a place that only offers what they like. But if St. Luke’s is a place of peace, then the admonishment to not move from house to house applies to us as much as the missionaries. Jesus tells us to remain here. Remain in this house of peace. Remain with your questions and doubts. Remain with those already here and struggle with us as we work through our questions and doubts together. Remain here and eat and drink that which you are freely given. Remain here and eat and drink with us those holy mysteries which are the body and blood of our Savior Jesus Christ.

I'd been reading his blog for a while, but that one was a bit of a thwack upside the head. And I went, "SIGH. Okay, fine, Lord, I'll give it a shot." And at that point, given that ReverendRef there had been commenting on Slacktivist for a while, and had generally been a voice of kindness, empathy, and some dry humor, and was known as an Episcopal priest, I had decided some time back that if I ever did give church a shot, it would be the Episcopal (also because of this, which I didn't fully believe, but did appreciate). So I showed up on Sunday, and an older woman with a cane who'd arrived a bit late as I, escorted me in. We sat in the back, and I stumbled my way through the liturgy. The sermon blew me away. I don't remember most of it, but I do remember waiting for the line about Hellfire and Judgement and The Dangers Of Secular Society, and being somewhat confused that I had nothing to push against. At one point, Fr. Vern identified the evil's of today's society as "extreme poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, the ever-widening gap between the very rich and the poor," and my jaw hit the floor. I still wondered whether I should go back. Something in my mind was convinced that a sermon which gave you nothing to push back against was theologically unsound, or un... something. Too complacent, maybe.

The next week, at about one o'clock in the morning, this happened. I got the alert call from campus safety, woke up, took it, and then got up and wrote down the details on my notepad. I got a text from my editor maybe five-ten minutes later, asking if I'd gotten the call and could cover it. The following morning, at maybe six o'clock, I got up and walked down to campus police - the crime scene was in their parking lot. I took a picture, asked the cops for details, got my contact, and wrote the story. Short, you see there, but... big. I emailed it to the editor, and spent the next two hours in painful, tense alertness. Finally, at nine o'clock, I left. Walked past the church two, three times, sat at the edge of the park and stared across at the trees, trying to keep the panic attack at bay, with varying levels of success. At about quarter of, I walked into the narthex and service and I honestly do not remember what the homily was. I should. It meant a lot to me at the time. I remember - ah, talking about Lazarus and Martha and Mary as a very, very unorthodox household, and why that was important.

And then I went home, telling myself that it was okay. That I would be fine. That I'd written the story and sent it in (it was up by now, and our site's hits were skyrocketing by the minute), and the current wavering tension between "someone just died last night" and "that was a damn good, quick story that I wrote" and "what the hell is wrong with me" and a general hyperactive manic phase making things all worse, I walked back and forth in the room, pacing and tearing at my hair and on the verge of tears, probably driving my roommate insane, until I finally realized I badly needed to talk to someone, and walked down to the church. God was with me; Fr. Vern was still there, which is actually somewhat unusual. There was a couple leaving, and I stepped in the door, knocked on the office door, and asked if he had a little time.

One of the things he told me, in that long talk at one of the lowest points of my life, was that I had a choice in how I saw the world. That I could choose to see it as a place of light, not darkness, and that this was by no means the easy choice, but it was a better choice. He told me he'd been there; people often say that, when you are hurting and they want to help, but from him it was not an empty pat on the shoulder. And, for the first time in my life, the choice not to commit suicide was framed in terms of light, not duty. That had never occurred to me. The way I had stopped myself, for the past ten years, had been out of guilt: I can't leave my siblings alone, someone will have to clean up this mess, I will hurt too many people too badly, or at the very first, when I was young and relatively obedient, I cannot throw away the gift of life. However badly I wanted to. Not exactly wrong reasons... but that was not what he told me. "Choose to use your gifts in this life, to keep living, not because it would be a waste to throw them away - though it would - but because it will be a delight."

Twenty-two years old, and it had never occurred to me or been told to me that the choice to continue living could be a positive thing. It was always, as Hyperbole and a Half puts it:

...it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and — far in the distance — I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland. And for just a moment, I thought maybe I'd be able to stop and rest. But as soon as I arrived at the border of the less miserable wasteland, I found out that I'd have to turn around and walk back the other way.

That's what deciding not to kill yourself looks like, when you're depressed. I have a feeling, that if I wind up there again - if my strategies for stopping things from getting that bad don't work, if I find myself that far down without help, it will still look like that. But I will strive to know better - to remind myself that the universe is a place of light.

Holy crap did this post get away from me. I intended it to be a brief introductory "Hi! I was raised Baptist, really strict Baptist, but then a lot of crazy shit happened involving my mother's insanity, and Pentecostalists, and then I wandered alone and angry and very very lost for a bunch of years, but now I'm Episcopalian! And this is my blog."

So now you know. I'm Episcopalian, I like to talk about faith, and I have a blog with which I will address questions of faith and reason and grace and love, as I understand them, imperfectly. I'll also probably talk about church. And journalism. And birds.