Losing my religion, and finding it again

From age 13 through my first year of high school, I always went to church alone. Every week, I was confronted by row upon row of nodding heads, clapping hands and waving arms, all moving in unison to a beat they had learned long before. No one noticed me, and I quickly took a spot in the back, glancing up at the cross hanging above the altar before joining in on the next prayer, one which I hadn’t recited for almost a decade.
My religious experience began in a preschool classroom at St. Michael’s Day School. Just before art and just after breakfast, we filed two by two into chapel every day, ready to pray with one eye open and sing about letting our little lights shine. I watched open-mouthed as the minister explained the invisible mark of baptism, envisioning God as my personal knight in shining armor. My mother told me God put a rainbow over the house to ward off witches at night, and that’s all I needed to fall asleep.
After leaving St. Michael’s for public school I never attended church; my father was a hopelessly lapsed Catholic and my mother was satisfied with getting me baptized and off to youth group with friends now and then. My faith was uncomplicated until I finally decided in middle school to try to take responsibility for it. Each Sunday, I forced myself to walk a block down the street and slid mindlessly through a throng of crew cuts and minivans to confront the red double doors of Christ Episcopal.
Every week, I discussed Paul’s letter to the Corinthians with five other girls, my best friend among them. As I recall, Corinthians is composed like a sermon, commanding not only fidelity to God and love for others, but also adherence to a set of nearly impossible standards for a modern setting. This, though, was our only basis for discussion of morality and diversity within the context of our own lives.
At youth group, my leader accepted the doctrine without question, and in time, I came to believe them as well-on Judgment day, Jews would have a chance to repent, and for me there would be no sex before marriage, no homosexuality, no breast implants. I promised myself never to be so vain as to dye my hair.
That year, my youth group attended a retreat. The keynote speaker warned that only a fraction of us would continue practicing our faith through college, and I swore to God and myself that I would be included in that minority. I had already decided to start confirmation classes in January, ready to transform my childlike faith into an adult belief system within a religious community. Unfortunately, in the process I failed to recognize that the dogmatic beliefs I newly embraced were perhaps even more limited than the blind faith I exhibited as a three-year-old.
The intolerant, irrational nature of my church did not strike me until I became a confirmation leader myself the next year. The new youth leaders brought an increase in conservatism, and while it was my job to guide another set of students to confirmation, I became acutely aware that I could not fully conform. The other leaders, horrified one night at my acceptance of the theory of evolution, cited the existence of a few pamphlets as having proven the glory of creationism. I was stunned, but resisted their disapproval.
As the familiar cliques of middle school manifested themselves within the walls of the church, I watched as my peers took the religion and the experience that I held to be sacred and made it into a club, capable of gossiping and excluding like any other. My passion in being part of such a community withered, and I stopped attending the services I had come to dread. They were no longer spiritual for me. I promised myself to find another church and to foster the relationship with God I could not find at Christ Episcopal.
In the four years since I last set foot inside the sanctuary that once thrilled me, a mixture of laziness and confusion has kept me from pursuing any such goal. My old church openly denounced last year’s ordination of New Hampshire’s gay bishop. Last month, it was decided that Christ Episcopal, acting in opposition to such a choice and refusing to fund certain initiatives within the Episcopal Church, would separate from the state diocese, thereby forming its own independent faith. Since then, half of the parishioners have left.
This is a sorrowful development for many, but I take pride in knowing that the fundamentalism of my former church is no longer affiliated with my faith, which has proven itself to be one of the most liberal within Christianity. Perhaps I’ll never follow through. Perhaps I’ll never return to church or pray the way I once did, but now I understand that acceptance, both of others’ and my own beliefs, remains a possibility within the religious community. And it gives me hope.