CONVERSION & PANDEMIC
Perhaps it is fitting that the early part of my life, like my patron saint Julian of Norwich, is overshadowed by political intrigue and a major pandemic. Julian saw the start of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Plague; I have seen the war on Iraq, Brexit, a US president get away with impeachable offences, and now COVID-19. In such a time where social distancing is paramount and political polarization is clear and evident, little fanfare is made for major life changes. Graduations are being cancelled or postponed, large swathes of employees are being laid off, and baptisms are not being performed—certainly not in any normal capacity.
Additionally, my own reception into the Episcopal Church is on unstable ground. My parish in Philadelphia has (rightly) closed to the public to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Her magnificent red doors have been closed to the public, though mass continues to be offered by the clergy and religious who live at the church. Adult education and formation classes have migrated to an online format. The parish soup kitchen has also closed, poised to open again as soon as it is safe. We will likely not be together for Easter, making this Lent feel much longer and more daunting than usual. And finally, our receptions, confirmations, and baptisms are postponed until we can be together again in person.
This long Lent is a time to think of the homeless, whose “social distancing” long preceded this pandemic at no choice of their own. It is a time to pray for them. And pray also for the isolated, as social distancing can take a pandemic toll on one’s mental health. We are meant to be together. Pray also for me and others who have been poised for baptism, confirmation, or reception into the Church. The joy of such a momentous occasion has been stifled by the virus.
My long spiritual journey has spanned my young life already, and this pandemic makes it ever longer. I say this not in despair but in truth. I take it as a blessing to be temporarily suspended for the sake of others; genuinely, for the sake of the world. Today we see sacrifice, however little or great a sacrifice social distancing may be. We discover how sacrifice can protect the world, whether it is the sacrifice of social contact or the sacrifice made by medical professionals to endure it.
And at this juncture, I offer my journey as a sacrifice to God, that we may be delivered from this pandemic and that we may endure its remainder with serenity, solidarity, and constancy.
Entry into Christianity, initially, was easy for me—as it is for many others who were also baptized as infants. However, the ensuing journey has not been so easy. After wavering and wavering again, I have found myself returning and returning again. In my youth, I wandered from my nascent Roman Catholicism to atheism to evangelicalism. Then in my college years, I went from evangelicalism to secular Christianity. This was a moment in my life where I could assent to nothing but the death of God, after the style of Friedrich Nietzsche. It was a time where I felt so alienated from Christianity by virtue of my sexuality that I could only hope to have a vague cultural relationship to it.
At the time, I felt that no act of Christian kindness could undo centuries of invectives and abuses against people like me. Christianity needed to be overthrown and sublated. This would make the hierarchy of the Church impotent and God’s death would be made final. My anarchist impulses were not, however, strong enough to withstand the nagging sense of dissatisfaction I felt with my futile iconoclasm. A holy ghost whispered deep in my soul: “And yet I abide.” I needed to recover the depths of Catholicism, I thought. When I asked a friend, who had converted to Catholicism, whether I would have to get re-baptized if I recommitted to Catholicism, she laughed and quipped: “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.”
I opted, nonetheless, to attend mass as St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, partly because my friends had invited me and partly because the Catholic Church was not culturally equipped to take in someone like me. There at St. Mark’s, I felt something profound: When I could not yet believe in the Creed which everyone around me was praying, the Church around me believed for me. My will was there, but my intellect was not. And still, I wanted to find the beauty in Roman Catholicism. I dove deep into study: Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, and many more.
For four years, I floundered. At once I wanted to see in the church of my baptism—the Roman Catholic Church—a home, and yet found only comfort in the Episcopal tradition. I came to understand myself not only as an outcast but as an exile. For four years, in my spiritual exile, the most patient and most genuine of Christians cared for me. And at the same time, the most bloodthirsty of neo-traditionalist Catholics—a heretical horde of sedevacantists—were sending me death threats. Why? For holding positions that were more consistent with the Episcopal tradition (e.g. ordination of women, same-gender marriage), and discussing these openly with others.
In the bleak midwinter of 2019, I sat reading Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and felt that I should abandon my exilic condition. That winter, the Tiber River had frozen over and God’s revelation echoed off the ice:
What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Remain in this, and you will know more of the same. But you will never know different, without end. So I was taught that love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before God made us he loved us, which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had beginning, but the love in which he created us was in him from without beginning. In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end. (342-43)
This God, Julian’s God, I encountered most evidently and potently in the offering of the Eucharist at my Episcopal church. A place where the love of God was a real and present reality, which I too could experience when I needed it most.
