Ash Wednesday I

Today is Ash Wednesday. I will go to Mass, get my ashes, same as last year. But this year it will be an Episcopalian church. Whenever I do something I used to do, have been used to doing for years, only in a new way, it makes me think of the old. I cannot think about being and Anglican without remembering being a Catholic, that my immediate famity is Catholic, all of my friends (though most set foot in church only when it suits them) are Catholic, that on Sundays I attend a Catholic church because it is the one I can reach. I know what many people don’t know when they change, when they convert, how there is no ceasing to be what you once were and becoming something else. There is only growing out of one thing and into the other and wherever you go you carry the roots of what you came from. So Rome will always be part of me. I don’t write that with any joy. I write that with a furrowed brow because I don’t much care for Rome. But there it is, and the bitterness of denial would be worse than the upset that comes from the conflict of starting out as one thing and becoming another.

To open the Book of Common Prayer is a joy. To walk into Saint James and get ready for Mass is a sort of dream come true, but to remember that I am an Anglican is to remember that I am not really a Roman, don’t believe in it anymore, is to remember why I left.

And that is not easy.

This is a day of penitence, right? Yet every ideological reason that I left the church I was baptized into has attached to it a face, a real set of stories that would set your ears to burning in your mouths to cursing. Religion is not a logical matter. It is full of story. Every religion is a story and this story of my religion was a pretty sad one. When I look back it is not a set of doctrines that turned me away (though I don’t believe in much of what I was taught). No, it was the things I did believe in that were always being violated. Being lied to, getting stabbed in the back, the treachery, the ignorance, people who carried out quarrels and sent hate letters to my house and then showed up to church singing in the choir and receiving communion. Me, struggling with my feelings, trying to make things right with people who refused to make things right but trotted out their Bibles or their Catechisms ( A Catholic catechism, by the way, is a large, large book with rules on EVERY facet of your life) to tell me how wrong I was. Ah, it was really enough to make someone stop believing. It took a while to see if wasn’t Jesus I had stopped believing in. Or even Christians. It was how I had grown up. And when I left I was not sad to leave.

It’s Ash Wednesday. If I were in the habit of lying I would say I have come to the point where I understand all the things that happened to me, or where I don’t matter, that I have reached a place of grace. But it’s really the opposite. The truth is after years of being graceful and penitent I’m actually a little pissed off.

And maybe that’s alright.