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A Change Begins

That’s pretty much how things remained until the approach of the millennium when, for various reasons, I began reevaluating my life centrally. This included questioning whether, in the way I was going about it, my social activism was making enough of a difference.

One outcome of my reassessment was that I made an even deeper and more active commitment to anti-racism and pro-reparations work. I began reaching out to other white people with a workshop on white-skin privilege and became the Communications Director for Caucasians United for Reparations and Emancipation (CURE).

To my good fortune, this work brought me in contact with a great number of people who were very serious about their religious beliefs and strived to put them into action. As I look back on it now, I believe that this provided the first tiny opening for me to get in touch with my own overtly religious feelings.

At the suggestion of my dear friend Barbara Davison, who is Co-Chair of Recovery Ministries of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, in 2002 I began volunteering at the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen. From the first day, I was hooked. I found that interacting with these disenfranchised men and women to whom we served lunch in the church sanctuary was a deeply moving, even spiritual experience. Feeding them fed my soul.

Also, at the request of Bishop Mark Sisk, the Diocese of New York had formed a Task Force on Reparations, and I was asked to be on it. I enthusiastically said yes. The very fact that a segment within the Episcopal Church was even attempting to grapple with the difficult issue of reparations to descendants of slavery caused my respect to shoot through the roof! My kind of church, I thought. They don’t just talk about God and Christ; Holy Apostles actually feeds the hungry, and this diocese has people who’ve got the guts to take on an issue as tough as reparations.

Though I had attended special worship services every now and then at Holy Apostles, I began attending more regularly. When I told the Rev. William Greenlaw, the church’s Rector, that I wanted to get baptized - probably in Houston, Texas where my mother lived - he asked me to consider doing it right there at Holy Apostles. He explained that in the Episcopal Church, baptism is looked on as a communal event, and that baptism is not about where you’ve been, but about where you’re going and who you’re going there with.

Well, as soon as Father Greenlaw gave me the option of getting baptized at his church, I knew it hit the spot. Along with the reasons I’ve already mentioned for why I gravitated towards Holy Apostles, I also liked and felt comfortable with the people I’d met there, clergy and parishioners alike. Also, somewhat to my surprise, week by week the Episcopalian rather “high church” form of worship was growing on me (I was accustomed to a more free-wheeling informal type of service), and, extremely important, I liked the decidedly progressive viewpoint consistently expressed from the pulpit.

Wrestling with the New Testament

Now, as the weeks had worn on, even though my original motivation for getting baptized had been to ease my mother’s mind, more and more that faded into the background. I was doing this for myself.

As I contemplated baptism, though, at first my biggest concern was that I didn’t really understand how Christ could have died for my sins, and I wasn’t sure I really grasped what it meant to accept him, as my mother expressed it, “as my personal savior.” No matter how hard we try, we can’t force ourselves to believe anything, and I didn’t want to have to fake it at my baptism, pretending to believe things I didn’t.

I thought it might help if I reread the New Testament in its entirety, so I set aside a Saturday for that. But far from helping, as I read it I thought, “Holy cow! What on earth am I getting myself into?” Instead of gaining clarity, the more I read, the more perplexed and - I have to say it - horrified I became. There were all sorts of things that either made no sense to me or seemed totally whacked out - like Christ cursing that poor fig tree because it didn’t have any figs for him to eat. That didn’t sound very Christ-like to me!

Fortunately, I had also begun attending the discussions that take place after Holy Apostles’ Sunday services. From the beginning, one of the things I really liked and found refreshing about the Episcopal Church was that discussing the Bible was fun. We actually have a good time as we tear into the meaning of the scriptures and try to see what they say to our lives now. And we don’t just take up “The Bible’s Greatest Hits” so to speak; we grapple with the stuff some might prefer to pretend isn’t in The Good Book.

After my Saturday foray into the New Testament, that particular Sunday the Rev. Barry Signorelli was conducting the discussion. I told him how floored I was by some of the things I’d read, and he immediately laid my mind to rest. He explained that while the Bible was divinely inspired, it was, nonetheless, written by human beings who were affected by the prevailing views of the society, time and place from which they came. He made it clear that I was not expected to accept the Bible whole cloth; the aim is to see it as a living document worthy of ongoing study. In other words, contrary to my fear, I didn’t have to totally understand or accept everything in the Bible - especially not before I got baptized. The important thing was the exploration.

Continue to Part III: “The Date Is Set”