Episcopal Alien

Or doing all three at once. Perhaps you remember me being…extremely talented?

I was raised Catholic, which has its pros and cons.

Pros:

• Our music is fantastic.
• We get a workout during Mass because of the amount of times we have to sit, stand, and kneel. It’s like we’re being trained by Billy Blanks right there in church.
• We always put on awesome pageants and I played Mary a lot, which is kind of like playing Donna in Mamma Mia! but holier.
• The presence in the Eucharist thing is admittedly kind of cool.
• Rosaries. I freakin’ love rosaries. They are probably my favorite part of Catholicism that actually has to do with belief.
• Pope John Paul II was kind of a BAMF, but not literally.
• We’re one of the biggest Christian denominations.
• I got to pick a Saint name when I got confirmed. I cheated and picked Kateri Tekakwitha, who has only been Beatified (but that’s two-thirds of being a saint, so technically she’s a saint if you round up) and is the patron saint of the environment, orphans, and misfits (like Captain Planet plus Oliver Twist). Also she’s the only Native American saint/almost-saint and her name means “she who bumps into things”.
• Catholic organizations contribute tons of money to worthy causes like reconstruction in Haiti and battered women’s shelters.
• Catholics have a really strong sense of community and it’s sometimes really special to feel like a part of that.

Cons:

• Catholics are conservative. Marina is liberal.
• Catholic Youth Groups repeatedly harass me to join fun organized events that are about Jesus. I like Jesus and all but I can’t imagine that He wants me to watch Juno and then talk about how it made me feel.
• Catholic organizations also contribute a lot of money to support causes that I am 100% morally opposed to.
• Sometimes when I’m in my church I find antiabortion pamphlets with pictures of dead fetuses on them and I’m not really sure what to think except “Ew. Children at this church could see this and be scarred for life! I’m scarred for life after seeing this.” It doesn’t really make me have sudden opinions about how horrific abortion is (because seriously have you seen a picture of a placenta? It’s just as bad. Like a bloody veiny octopus pancake). It makes me want to hit someone in the face with a hymnal for putting this pamphlet here.
• Sometimes people at the church assume that I have the same views as the church does and then they’re like, “Hey, you should go to this pep rally to oppose teaching about birth control in public school!” or something equally inane and then I have to stand there and figure out how to tactfully say “Actually, I support teaching birth control in public school” without untactfully saying “You’re a moron. We need to teach birth control in public schools. Seriously.”
• Sometimes I feel like the Catholic church is just really judge-y and pretentious. This is not true of all Catholics or all Catholic churches or all Catholic priests, but certain individuals who I have associated with the church give off that air.
• This one totally isn’t the church’s fault, but my priest back home gave really long sermons (twenty minutes, maybe?) despite the fact that he came to several good stopping places along the way. Although I never got to really play it, I totally invented a drinking game for Mass: you take a shot every time he plows right on through what would—for people who do not want to be in Mass for ninety minutes—be a spectacular concluding phrase.
  

But my mom is Catholic so I’ve spent all of my years going to Catholic church and actually helping teach CCD (religious education) to grade school students. I’m not sure why the church wanted me to teach for more than one year, but I did it anyway. I like to think that I planted a little seed of rebellious conscientiousness in them, but mostly all I did was teach them how to go to confession by introducing myself as Father Remus Lupin and having them say the Act of Contrition (the “sorry, God, I kinda messed up. Please still love me” prayer). I also got to sing solos at the church a lot and be in all the pageants. The church is sexist and they wouldn’t let me play the lead role in the Living Stations of the Cross even though I’ve always wanted to wear the fake blood makeup, but I got to play the lead female role so it was okay.

And yet… something was missing. Going to Mass made me feel kind of like a misfit, as if everyone totally noticed when I didn’t say all the petitions because I don’t share all your worldviews, Catholic church. It was like I was at a vegetarian convention but I’d snuck in a rack of ribs in my purse because ribs are so damn delicious and then every so often the vegetarians would look around and go “What the hell? Why do I smell barbecue sauce?” and I would be like “Haha, what? Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no barbecue sauce here, or a rack of ribs. And I especially didn’t bring them in so they’re definitely not in my purse.” And then all the vegetarians would look at me judgingly.

So now that I’m in college I decided to go to an Episcopalian church. I’ve heard that Episcopalians are “pretty much just like Catholics, but liberal”, which sounded totally like what I need. They let women be priests and they even had an openly gay bishop for a while. Also I was semi-drafted by my enthusiastic Episcopalian friend Lydia a few years ago:

Me: So I think I might be secretly Episcopalian.

Lydia: DO IT!

Me: …do what? There wasn’t an action verb in that sentence.

Lydia: DO EPISCOPALIAN!

Since there’s a four-hundred-year-old Episcopalian church right by my campus, I went on a Sunday evening. No matter what denomination you are, Sunday evening services are for students and people who are too lazy to get up for an earlier one.

By the way, the first font I used here is called “Catholic Schoolgirl”. Irony.

I know this isn’t true of all Episcopalian churches, but at this one, all the pews have names of famous people who used to go to the church. So I can sit there and think, “Oh my God, maybe I am sitting next to the ghost of Thomas Jefferson” during Mass.

Or service. “Mass” is just some way of putting it that Catholics totally made up just to mess with the other religions, I think.

Then Mass service started and I learned a few things about the music. For example, it’s totally the same as Catholic music. Except with different tunes. And the songs have different titles because sometimes Episcopalians think “Hymn 130” is catchier than the Catholic name for the song, “And He Will Raise You Up”.

Okay, maybe Catholics got that one right.

I had some fun adventures making up a new tune for the Gloria (Catholics sing it. Episcopalians kind of chant it to a tune with some music in the background) and not knowing all the words to their version of the Nicene Creed. Then the pastor (priest? Father? I’m not sure what he’s called in this case. Since apparently it’s not even a Mass anymore) started talking and he was British.

This is almost as good as the time we got a cute young Eastern European priest at my church. Except this time instead of pretending that I’m getting the sermon from Chekov, I can pretend it’s Sir Ian McKellan.

Everything else was pretty normal—readings and hymns and petitions, the usual—until we got to Communion. At Communion I would’ve been totally lost if I wasn’t sitting with a gang of Episopalian pals from my dorm. I just followed them.

Instead of going up to get Communion from Eucharistic ministers in an orderly and continuous line, we went up in bunches and knelt at an altar to get Communion from the priest. I’m really glad I had my Episco-Pals with me, because I totally would have just eaten the wafer when I got it otherwise. But since I was totally lost, I just watched them. They didn’t eat their bread. They just knelt there contemplating it like they could actually see Jesus’ face in it or something.

Mine totally didn’t look like this.

Then the girl came up with the wine and everyone dipped their bread in the wine.

Oh. My. God.

If you belong to a religion that regularly dips the bread in the wine, you cannot understand how cool this is. For me it was extremely cool. The girl giving the wine probably thought I was crazy, because when I got to dip the bread I was practically doing this.

Then we went back to the pews and no one else knelt for prayer. That made me feel all weird inside because of how well the Catholic church has trained me, so I knelt anyway and closed my eyes so that I couldn’t see my EpiscoPals looking confusedly at me. The Episcopalians didn’t kneel at any point during the service, so I can only conclude this is a Catholic thing and they were all wondering what the hell I was doing on the ground. No one else genuflected, either. It felt kind of like I’d been invited to dinner and then there weren’t any napkins—not really necessary to the dining experience, but most people are supposed to have those, really.

Still, it was a pretty good service and everything. As the processional was heading out, just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, the priest stopped and said, “Oh, by the way. There’s a free dinner for you guys right now. Come along to the parish building.”

The EpiscoPals and I quickly decided that yes we definitely want free food please, and skipped merrily along to a lovely dinner of pasta and marinara sauce and salad and delicious bread that was probably baked by angels. Then they served us an M&M tart. (Yeah. That’s dessert made out of candy.) Also they told me I could join the choir or volunteer to read whenever I want. And then they gave me a free shirt and told me that they’re going to give me free dinners every Sunday for the rest of forever.

Their Jedi mind tricks totally work on me.

So it looks like I’m Episcopalian now.