Littlest Sister’s daughter was christened today at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church near Dupont Circle. The pews were half empty until Pilgrim’s family arrived. I sat up front with Mother and Third Sister with my deaf ear to the aisle so I could talk to Mother. Across the aisle Littlest Sister’s daughter was wearing a white eyelet dress. She was calm. She walks already — late to be christened — having been born to great fanfare a couple of days after the President’s election.
At this point I must tell you I love churches. I love the whole mystery and grace of them. When I walk into a church I feel the way I do stepping through a door into a winter-scape newly enveloped in snow. The air is perfumed with incense and honeyed beeswax; alter boys and girls scurry to their tasks; the nave resounds with the solemn yet light tread of a white-robed procession carrying cross and Bible. It wasn’t always so.
As children, Sisters and I went each Sunday with Mother and Father to an Episcopal church in Georgetown. During the week, Sisters and I attended Beauvoir, the Episcopal primary school of the National Cathedral. In retrospect, it was a confusing religious education. Father was an atheist.
Father believed in family, tradition and the rights of the individual. That was about the limit of his belief system. Father used to say, after a tenant had run off without paying the rent, for example, or a friend hoodwinked him – a frequent complaint – that there was no one who wouldn’t sell him short at some point. He reserved his greatest distrust for institutions, where mediocrity inevitably rose, he said, like shit to the top.
In second grade I reported to Father that my class had prayed to baby Jesus, wasn’t that silly, because Our Family didn’t believe in that, did we? The general rule in Our Family was to tolerate religious tendencies in outsiders. At Easter lunch Father sang a falsetto ditty about the “little innocent lamb,” as the roast was brought to the table. He was less kind to actual believers, for whom he had nothing but pity.
Weekly prayer with my schoolmates at Bethlehem Chapel provoked desperate anxiety in me. I didn’t know when to kneel, and when kneeling, how to pray. I copied the students in front of me, jumping up or sitting down. I guessed we were praying for the priests’ benefit, in the same way we recited times tables for our school teacher. The priests at the alter carried a confusing array of chalices and plates. The priests’ greatest power, in my mind, was not that they commanded the entire chapel, cavernous and Gothic, but that they understood I didn’t know the prayers. Any moment they would swoop down to expose me, the way my teacher shamed me to my classmates for not knowing my times table.
In my 30s I flirted with raising my own children as Episcopalians but turned away. Then a year ago, two days before Obama’s inauguration, God leapt into my life and all Heaven broke loose.
