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I think I said earlier that I would talk about what I experienced when I first went (back) to Anglican church. Hopefully, recalling that now will inject some much-needed perspective and joy into this bleak, blogerific account of mine.

One day in our Christian Spirituality class (where we learn standard levitation and prayer techniques) my new friend told me that I should come to chapel with her for Wednesday Eucharist. Her enthusiasm was so infectious that I went the very next day.

It was a little strange to be back in Anglican church after so many years of careful avoidance, but at the same time it felt strangely as if I’d come…home. Something familiar and comforting and innocent: it felt like stepping out of a storm I’d been caught up in into a sweet space of beauty and calm. In these services where I didn’t know the words and couldn't receive Communion, I found a place where all my politics and struggle dropped aside, and I could just enjoy being with God again for the first time in a long time. It was a little pillow where I could worship the way I felt called to – in joy and a childlike exuberance and excitement. Sometimes, it even made me cry, the overwhelming feeling that God was there, that I was at peace with Him in His most remarkable Presence.

To say I was profoundly grateful does not do it justice.

What I was looking for wasn’t answers. All my life, the church had been content to give me answers to everything. But answers weren’t the key to my faith anymore. What I had hoped for was to find that God is enough to cling to so that, if the ground I was walking on became a little less than solid, I wouldn’t fall. I wanted to be able to watch everything I thought I knew be pulled out from underneath me like a rug and still have somewhere to stand. I didn’t want reasons to keep the answers I had, or even to find new ones. I wanted to get to know God better with my heart, with a feeling that falls outside of words, a faith that cannot ever be expressed.

I am still very emotional about Anglican churches, and about finding myself in them. Everything I feel is always connected to that first impression of comfort, solidity, home. But at the same time, I feel like an outsider, an interloper, and I worry that I will never really belong there, that I will never really be wanted or welcome. I have a lot of experience of not being welcome in churches.

The overwhelming part of it all is that the intensity of relief is always shaded with the feeling of somehow stealing something that belongs to other people who have worked for it. It is difficult for me to embrace a new way of worshipping and experiencing God.

Secretly, I also find it daunting to redefine my relationship to that first chapel when it has given me so much as an outsider. It is difficult for people to understand, I think, that it feels almost like I’ll be losing an important space if I embrace it as my own instead of as a refuge, a haven, sanctuary.