Re: [Mgdln] What do you see as the features of Anglo Catholicism?

[Louie Crew <lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu>]

> Remember Louie and +XXXXX were once  Baptists, and they left, when their
> individual pressures got too great.

"when their individual pressures got too great"?  I would not explain my
experience using that emphasis.

I left the Baptists several years before I had accepted my sexual
orientation, so pressures over sexuality had nothing to do with my leaving
to become an Episcopalian.

TEC in 1961 was no more welcoming of lgbts than Southern Baptists.    If my
parents had been Episcopalians, likely they would have sent me off to a
psychiatrist, and that would have really screwed me up.   In 1961
psychiatrists still had homosexuality on their disease list.  I rejoice that
as devout Baptists my parents had a healthy distrust of tampering with a
person's identity.

In 1954 I enrolled as a freshman at Baylor committed to become a Baptist
preacher, certain I was called by God to that vocation.   At Baylor I
experienced radical and painful doubt once I understood how little "free
will" I had actually exercised in my life choices, including my views about
God, myself, and others.    I questioned the whole kit and caboodle.   I
became an atheist to the Baptist religion, or thought I was.

I am glad that Even when I was confirmed as an Episcopalian at age 25, no one 
pressed me hard for what I "really" believed.   I was not all that sure there 
is a God, but Episcopalians surely knew how to talk to God in prayers that 
got me out of my own narrow self interest and yet also let me come to God just 
as I am.

God had such infinite patience with me in all my tossing and turning.    She
still does.

Louie

Louie Crew, 377 S. Harrison St., 12D, East Orange, NJ 07018 973-395-1068
http://queereye4lectionary.blogspot.com/  Queer Eye for the Lectionary



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