A short tale of...
RELIGION

I've always been very religiously minded.

I was raised Evangelical Lutheran, went to Lutheran parochial school, and was confirmed when I was 13. I was a member of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), which is pretty much the most conservative Lutheran body in the USA. (The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod is considered to be dangerously liberal by the WELS, and most mainstream American Lutherans look to the LCMS as being very conservative.)

When I neared 20, I began to realize that my sexuality wasn't developing the way I'd expected it to, and that my orientation was homoerotic. I also began to have serious questions about the morality of worshipping a god who would do the things that I was taught that God endorsed, and who would consign the majority of people who had ever lived on Earth to a horrific eternal punishment for not having the right set of beliefs. I turned to Neo-Paganism and Wicca, which affirmed my worth as a gay man and espoused beliefs in self-improvement, personal relationship with the Divine, and had an appreciation for ritual and its relation to spirituality. I also became involved with a fellowship of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and later with the Church of All Worlds, the oldest Neo-Pagan Church in the U.S., and Ár nDráoicht Féin, a Druid organization dedicated to scholarly reconstruction of ancient Indo-European faiths and their application to modern life and spiritual needs.

The Christian faith that I was raised with, however, kept returning to my consciousness, and eventually I began going back to church, especially when I joined Ron in Philadelphia, as he is Roman Catholic by birth; we occasionally attended Dignity masses while we were still courting. I became a confirmed member of the Episcopal Church, USA. I was confirmed by the diocesan bishop, the Rt. Rev. Charles Bennison, on May 5, 2002 at St. Mary's Church, Hamilton Village in West Philadelphia, the parish of which I became a member. I considered myself a progressive, universalist Anglo-Catholic (I loved high church ritual and catholic theology) and my particular influences were Marcus Borg, Matthew Fox, and Orthodox writers.

In early 2007, though, it became clear to me that as the swing in the global Anglican Communion began increasingly to hew towards the Evangelical and fundamentalist agenda of its Southern Hemisphere member churches, and as the seemingly never-ending turmoil in my own diocese ate away at my patience, that I was spending most of my time worrying, fighting and being disgusted with the Church and was no longer being spiritually fed by the tradition.

My path has continually evolved throughout my life; the latest loop has brought me back to the Pagan traditions with a better understanding and exemplar of virtue and love, a gift from some of the wonderful Christians I met in the church. My universalist convictions stand firm, and I wish them the best in the struggle for equality in the church; for myself, I have returned to the ADF tradition with gratitude for the 6 years of growth the Episcopal Church afforded me.

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last updated July 1, 2008