If you've seen The Sound of Music, then you know what Maria thinks about the beginning of things: "Let's start at the very beginning. A very good place to start."
Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp in The Sound of Music (ABC News/ Youtube)
The thing is, beginnings can be hard to find. They're certainly hard to write.
I've told this story to a few people now, and I start it out when my kids were young, and I'd taken some time off work to be a mom, and drive them to preschool, and wander around Target with spit-up on my shirt and a glazed look in my eye. We'd only been living in Virginia for a year, and I was trying to find a community of friends and some sort of purpose in my life outside of Elmo's World.
I turned to the church.
And then-- let's speed this up a bit, in the interest of time-- imagine a movie montage of me getting involved in this church, and volunteering for things, and joining the crew that put on the Friday soup kitchens. And now, zero in on a close-up of the priest, who is charismatic and gregarious and makes a point to draw me out of my shell, get me connected to the others there, and make me feel welcome.
It's all so wholesome! I feel like I'm a part of something! The church becomes a valuable place in my life. My husband and I are middle class and college-educated, politically progressive, enamored of Whole Foods even if we can't afford to shop there, and I'm also making time in my life to study the Bible-- to learn about it from an open-minded place, a place that knows it's not a history book or a series of etiquette lessons or a giant hammer to beat down the LGBTQIA+ community. I'm reading the Old Testament and the New Testament and learning about how it was all put together, and picking up the thread of the Gospel, and feeling a deep connection to the Jesus who kicked over tables and made room for the least, the last, and the lost.
I start to feel a sense of calling. It's exciting and weird and I have no idea what to do with it all.
Sidecar to all of this, before having kids I'd been a children's librarian, and I'd put that down and away and wasn't sure I wanted to go back to it. I was open to going in a different direction with my life, and into this vacuum raced an idea: becoming an Episcopal priest.
Church-type folks will tell you this isn't so much an idea as it is a God-moment-- a touch from the divine, a nudge from the Holy Spirit, an elbow-rub from Jesus himself. Let's set all of that aside for the moment, but understand that even as much as the Church-with-a-capital-C is prayer groups and casseroles, it's also a well-oiled machine with policies, procedures, and processes. If you want to become an Episcopal priest-- and that's where I felt I was being led--there's an intense amount of vetting and psychological exams and meetings upon meetings and a whole rabbit-warren of steps. It's a WHOLE ENTIRE THING, and you're required to have a priest assist you, and I turned to the priest from the soup kitchen, and then I ended up having an affair with that priest and everything in my entire life went up in flames and it's been 8 years now and I'm just turning the knob on writing about it.
So this is the beginning. This is the place I'm starting from. This is the secret shame I've carried with me every single day since 2014, and the thing that has muzzled my creativity because how could I ever write about this, but how could I ever write again if I didn't write about this? So here we are, in pseudo-anonymous blog territory: anonymous to the many, known to the trusted and few that I think can read about this and hold it alongside what they know of me, and what I hope to convince myself of with this blog: that I'm not a complete and total piece of shit, but a person who survived a combination of spiritual abuse and the ways demons from her past led her to race past red flags and make the worst mistake of her life.
Image description: Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp stands in a still-shot from the movie The Sound of Music, her arms stretched wide, her mouth open in song. The mountains are visible behind her, and she wears a black dress with a pinned, striped kirtle in front.
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