And then I realized I had to accept the feeling, the feeling of being alone, that no one would help me. To let myself feel it. And there was a kind of peace in feeling it, in saying that is the way it really was for me as a child. Walking away from the center. That is the way it was, the way it felt. And I didn't die. Even without the felt presence of God, even without some other part of me trying to mother the wounded part, I didn't die.

Feb. 22, 1998: A Faith Autobiography

My parents are atheists. My grandmother was an atheist. My Christian education consisted of what we got in private school and going to Sunday school with a friend. I wasn't even baptized. (I remember one Easter being with a friend at an Episcopal church and wondering whether I should go forward for communion. I didn't and that was the technically correct choice because I was not baptized.)

My mother has been known to remark that maybe there is a God after all who is playing tricks on her by making her, of all people, have to go to church a few times a year. She goes because my sister, who is mentally retarded and has a seizure disorder, loves church so much. I have always assumed that my sister loves the music in church, but I saw an article that said that it is quite common to have intense spiritual experiences during epileptic seizures.

Back in the days when I was a Presbyterian, I sometimes said that predestination made a little bit of sense to me (Presbyterians try, with difficulty, to salvage the idea). I said that I didn't feel that I searched and found God, but rather that God reached out to me, brought me into the church with no help from me.

Since at least my early teenage years, I have had spiritual experiences of oneness with nature, something like the experience you describe. I never thought to connect those with a Christian God, but I did see a spiritual dimension to life.

When I moved to central Massachusetts for my first job, I was lonely and went looking for things to do to meet people. I signed up for a course on women's spirituality given by members of a community of religious women (in other words, nuns). They were quite radical--Catholic Worker and feminist--and by the end of the course, I had decided that if they could be that radical and still be Catholics then maybe there was some hope for the institutional church.

The next year, I moved to western Massachusetts. I wanted to join a group involved in anti-nuclear activism, and somehow I felt that this was an issue where it would be good to join a church group because it would provide some broader context of hope for working on depressing issues. I got involved in a group associated with First Congregational Church, Amherst, and also got involved with many of the same people in volunteering at a shelter for the homeless.

I started attending church fairly regularly and found a community. I don't think my beliefs were very strong, but I found little that offended me. The minister at the time was The Rev. Donna Schaper, who has since published a number of books. She was very careful to use inclusive language, she was married to a Jew, and she was pregnant at the time. I inquired about baptism, met with her for awhile, and was baptized late that spring. I was baptized in the names of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer instead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A friend who is Catholic was the only person there to see me, beyond my friends in the congregation.

When I moved to Virginia, I asked people what was the most liberal church in town, excluding the Unitarians (Congregationalists tell jokes about Unitarians). Everyone told me to go to the Presbyterian church. I found a wonderful community there: intellectual (every member of the religion department attended church there), activist (I facilitated Sunday school classes on feminist theology), and with a good group of unmarried women (including the associate minister).

When I moved to South Carolina, I joined the Presbyterian Church without thinking about it too much. I also attended some excellent women's retreats sponsored by an ecumenical organization called Faith at Work. But this Presbyterian Church was a much more conservative community, particularly after an associate minister we became good friends with left. There were few working mothers in the congregation, and Paul didn't like Sunday school, so while both kids were baptized there, we gradually drifted away. The last straw was some actions by the national organization (Presbyterian Church, USA) condemning people who had been involved in a meeting exploring radical ideas in feminist theology.

Three years ago, we switched to the Episcopal Church, and we have found it a much more congenial community in terms of the membership in this particular town. My theory in choosing the Episcopal church was that it is not necessarily more liberal, but at least it has a history of more tolerance of a diversity of views. I find that I love the ritual. It means a great deal to me to have communion every week (the other churches I had belonged to had it about once a month) and I like the tendency of the Episcopal church to see faith as more than just a matter of going to church on Sunday morning. It fits my growth from going to church for community to going to church to help me keep God important in my life.

When I first joined the church we had a wonderful rector, scholarly and a person who had come to liberal views through his own personal experience (eg. he was a chaplain in Vietnam). Then he retired after 25 years at this church.