I almost didn't make it to the church. Firstly I wasn't sure if I felt like taking the bus downtown to Saint James'. Once I'd finally decided to go and I ended up on the wrong bus. Mass started at five past twelve. When I asked the woman across from me on the bus what time it was and she said it was twelve, we were a good ten minutes from downtown. When I'd finally gotten downtown I forgot the order of the streets and got off of the bus two blocks too early. I must have wanted badly to experience whatever I had experienced a few days before.

There were more people there today, a whole crowd in fact, and they were the power of the Anglican Mass. When mass was over, they gathered around me, demanded my name and then invited me to lunch. So, after twenty-one years in the Roman Catholic church, being largely discontent, after nearly three years at one parish where no one has ever invited me to anything, her I am at lunch getting to know these people. That's when I know I had stopped believing in Christianity. No, I don't mean what people THINK is Christianity. I don't mean the dogma and doctrine. I mean the actuality of Christianity, the Lord's Table where the Lord's love motivates people to be open and kind loving. I have experience little lovingkindness from Christians in a long time and had stopped believing in it. That's really what it means to stop believing in Christianity.

I do not understand how God works. Won't claim to. I was on top of the world (And it's been a long time since I've been there) as I took the cross town bus back to my house. But the bus switched its usual route and then it just sat and stopped. It sat there in front of the house of someone who-- while I can't blame him for my leaving the church-- was certainly a straw on my camelback. He stepped out of his car, looking forlorn, jiggled with the hood and then looked into the bus, and just before he saw me (or maybe he did see me). The bus pulled off.

What, Jesus, was the purpose of that? Me: happy at what I'd found, angry at the memory of crap I'd been through in the last few years, angry with the memory of him and the people I had been surrounded by. Switching from anger to pity to anger again. Gratitude to God for what he had shown me, and thinking of my old friend who was left fiddling with his car and his sour personality, the desire to show him what I had found.

It would be easier to hate someone or love someone, pity people or despise them. Believe or not believe. Be happy and not be angry at the same time. But it would also be... a fantasy.