4 Aug 21

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Psalm 19:14 NRSV

Irregular as it might be, I dare to set foot one on my path towards lay preaching with a query.

Who am I to believe that my lamp is bright enough to guide any to the gate?

Surely, I tell you now as I ever would have, that my story has caused some to clutch at pearls. More than a few tongues have clucked annoyance and consternation in my presence. I am aware that many prayers have been said with my name passing over pursed lips. Perhaps, they all are right.

I am the sheep of Matthew, chapter eighteen – the wanderer. I have meandered away from the flock several times in my life. Some journeys were intentional; a few were misguided. Yet I have always been returned from each jaunt strewn across broad shoulders with a fatuous shrug each and every time. But it’s the last rescue that has us here today.

My beacon appeared as a tiny white church with a fire red door, unpretentiously sandwiched in a row of modest homes facing a dilapidated and decaying mental institution turned prison. Willard, New York seemed to me a tiny blip of a town on top of a hill above the intensely deep and frigid vacillating currents of Seneca Lake. The irony of my placement in this spot was not lost on me. I identified very much as a vacant and once-bustling entity. Our relocation to this tiny town seemed fitting for the season of life in which I found myself.

For several years, I drove by the church weekly on my way to the water, the walking trail or the old cemetery where I would walk and pray over the nameless. I had given up on the Church nearly ten years earlier, when a political issue became too hard to reconcile. On my way home, I would climb the small hill away from the lake and avoid eye contact with the little white church.

I didn’t know or care what denomination the little white church was, but I thought about it often. I thought about the people who must live nearby, wondered how many of them could possibly attend it. My own church from my childhood had shut its doors a few years after my first wedding in 1999, due to what I later learned were church-political reasons. At the time, I felt like it was some version of justice, though I was open to being proven wrong.

My family attended Sunday School and services on Sundays, potlucks and bazaars as they sprang up throughout the year, and so many other local community events that I couldn’t even begin to start naming them. The church building is as much a key player in my history as my own home memories. I loved the church. As a child, I would find any reason to sneak in and sit in the pews in the quiet. It was my favorite place to be, although eventually some adult – usually the minister – would discover me sitting alone in the last row, or in the lofts.

All that quiet time led to many conversations that the well-meaning adults in my life weren’t willing to have. One moment that sticks out all these years later was during first grade Sunday School. We had a particular weekly lesson about Noah that caused me to get removed from class for ‘creating a distraction’ by asking too many questions. I was six and the logistics of the ark situation just didn’t make sense to me. The elders met and decided that a good compromise would be to place me in the Men’s Bible study group. They tolerated me for about a month or less, and I finally ended up back in my own age group – but with new rules, the primary one being to keep my mouth shut. And, I truly tried.

I knew from a young age that I was to be partnered with the church in some way. My protestant parents were very tolerant for several years when I insisted that I was meant to join a convent. They even gave me their blessing to begin attending Catholic mass with a friend in sixth grade. I put off my confirmation to the UMC because I was not sure that I wasn’t supposed to live a cloistered life, and that just did not exist for us as Methodists. I knew this was a huge lesson of some sort for my mother, but she never discouraged my seeking. As a grown woman with children and a family of my own, I now can appreciate the grace my mother was extending to me in the face of her own generational trauma.

My mother was born into a Roman Catholic family and followed all the steps such a child would do in their lifetime. However, she married into the United Methodist Church via my father, and we never spoke of it until I was seven years old. We had a few remaining relics of her childhood church experience in our home – a very old Rosary, and a print of the Lord’s Prayer that didn’t quite match the one I was used to reciting weekly.

One random day I found out that the reason we weren’t Catholic was that my Grandmother had been excommunicated for seeking a divorce from her chronically abusive husband. This man who had not only abused her but also several other female family members in various ways and always got away with it, was able to continue to go to mass, live his life and be protected by the same entity that was content to throw my Grandmother to the wolves. My mother felt that the only way to protect her daughters and herself from future abuse was to cut him and his enablers out of her life, including family and church elders who covered up his atrocities. To her honor, it mostly worked.

I attended Catholic mass with my friend for about a year before my parents revisited the question of confirmation. By this time, we had a new minister and not only was she the first female I had ever seen in that role, but she was young, intelligent and willing to have conversations that I wanted to have with spiritual people. I agreed that I might be willing to concede that our church was the right place for me, but still didn’t want to rush into the ceremony. I ended up confirming with a group during the next round, about two years later than the norm.

I had started attending a Wesleyan youth group during this time called CYC – Christian Youth Crusaders. A few of my non-Methodist friends also attended on Wednesday evenings. My mother had found the group and hoped it would be a place of growth for me. I suppose the truth is that I did find just that in those walls: growth, new exposure to God and Jesus, different interpretations of human experience. Even though even as a child I knew that denomination was not for me, the willingness of the people – the adults – of that church to accept my questioning without judgment, has never left me.

Summer 1992 I went to my first Baptist revival, held in the large auditorium of a local high school. I got dragged there by a friend from school and CYC, on the promise that it would be “a show to remember” with snacks afterwards. She did not lie. I remember feeling slightly overwhelmed, yet oddly compelled to participate. When the preacher shouted “Hallelujah!” We all answered with, “HALLELUJAH!” He said, “Canniget an AYYYY-MEN?!” And we screamed, “AMEN!” It was frenetic and enticing. In that two-hour span, I felt more energy around Jesus than I had ever experienced in my life.

The revival hangover the next day was intense.

A few weeks later, that same friend and I found another revival, but this one was to be held in a huge tent. The draw of curiosity was too much to bear. I agreed to tag along. There was plenty of singing, clapping, shouting and pointing. If you say nothing else about tent revivals, let it be that they are intoxicating. This one was my last foray into such things. They might have had me, up until the laying of hands and casting of demons part.

I was looking for Jesus, not an exorcism. I already had enough adults in my life telling me that I was dark.

K.H. Sprague

That same summer, I started attending an annual church summer camp. It was connected with the youth group. For a week each August over the next four years, we would gather in the woods to be wild, young and free of parental eyes – but not free from God. It was in one of those old forest buildings where I first actually felt the presence of Jesus. My whole life people had talked Jesus at me, but I had never quite understood what it was that we were doing. God, I got. God was easy. I opened my eyes in the morning and saw the fingerprint of God in my life.

But Jesus, he was always a bit of a runner.

And on that day, we caught each other. The youth pastor had been preaching about something I no longer recall. He reached a pause and asked us if we felt Jesus in our hearts. Did we feel compelled to accept that Jesus was with us? Were we ready to accept Him into our hearts, and to live our lives as His soldiers? I felt like I got sucker punched in the chest. I raised my hand along with some others, and we were prayed over. Baptism, confirmation, none of those had shown me Jesus. But He found me in the middle of the woods, in a primitive church, when I wasn’t expecting anything more than a sermon.

My confirmation mentorship was the first time I admitted to another person that I felt called to ministry, in those specific words. My meeting Jesus seemed to set it in stone for me. My father and my mentor tried to talk me out of it. I eventually quit mentioning it because I knew I did not have the support of my family, nor my own parish. They all felt I was too young to know what I wanted, and like so many other decisions made for young people in my circle, “that’s that.”

God has always felt accessible to me in the quiet spaces. Over the years, I have had to dig deep in my search to understand how to see God in the loud ones. Starting in my early teen years, it became harder to find quiet. My mother passed away when I was thirteen and nowhere felt sacred anymore. There were no more quiet places and my own head was the loudest of them all.

I continued to be as active in the church as ever, mostly because of my father and his family, and our ties to the church activities. Very suddenly though, I no longer had the mental space to appreciate any of it. I could not understand why this had happened to us, to me – or how to move into a role of caretaker. My sister was only ten and my father had to suddenly work all the time to support our household. To say that I was annoyed with God would be an understatement. Increasingly, the rule about keeping my mouth shut became impossible to follow.

The Jesus who had been so real and present just a few months earlier, was again missing. I was feeling the undulating deluge of emotions that boils us all in our hours of grief, but so was every other person around me. I tried not to give in to my angst and sense of injustice. But I was tired physically and mentally, and I just wanted answers instead of runarounds.

“Be careful asking all those questions; people will think you’re a mystic!”

“Well maybe if God doesn’t want people to ask questions, He should have made living a little easier.”

a conversation with my paternal Grandmother, circa 1996

I was seventeen. Our family home had been lost to arson about six weeks earlier. I got grounded for two weeks without any inquiry. In those following moments, I felt truly abandoned by God and man. I decided right there and then that I would break out on my own path no matter what it took. I had a year of high school left and a shattered sense of direction.

It was around this time that I found solace in Earth-based spirituality. I spent most of my twenties trying to reconcile the unknowns of Christianity with the emotional knowns of Spirit. I chased Religion in academia, desperate to understand how so many humans could have gotten it so wrong. I bathed in Philosophy, learning how to shed labels and deconstruct human imposed error of thought. But I never could make peace with one thing: I met Jesus that day in the woods. Standard religions might have it wrong, but I wasn’t mental. Jesus was real.

The other thing I never could shake was my drive to share what I learned and experienced. I still occasionally went to church to make my Dad happy, but I didn’t feel welcomed in the building anymore. I didn’t raise my sons in the church, and my husband was OK with that. But in my core, I wasn’t OK with it. I had become a leader in pagan spiritual groups but against my own desires, I found fault with the dogma of pagan practices as well. It began to feel like everyone was hurting no matter what spiritual door had led them to their grief. By thirty, I was divorced, more confused than ever, and completely run down.

I stopped seeking everything for the first time in my life.

For about five years, I attempted to live an agnostic life. I just accepted things as they showed up. I did not participate in any religious or spiritual practices of any kind. I merely attempted to survive daily life, and maintain a sense of balance and goodness within myself. I didn’t believe that Jesus was a spiritual being anymore. I felt that God was just the energy of the universe, like our own heartbeat that we all called by different labels.

I was done worrying about the constructs of man, but God was not done with me.

It started with a promotion at work and a relocation to a new area. A few well-placed coworkers and gentle nudges in the form of the random mention of God or church. I started to feel pulled towards church again. I had no idea where to start. By the time we moved to Ovid, NY I had been searching for a new church home for about three years. The options were not many out there in our new hometown. None of the denominations available to me were any I had experience with. I didn’t know what an Episcopalian was, but I did have Lutheran friends.

I stalked the small Lutheran church down the road from me for about a year before I decided that it was probably seasonal or vacant. It was during this time that I found the Willard cemetery. The bodies of over five thousand souls are interred on that land, with not much more than a numbered metal disc to mark their existence. I found this profoundly sad, yet ironically fitting. We want to be remembered, but our humanness means nothing in light of our eternal spirit. I would walk the rows sprinkling whispered prayers over the site, hoping it meant something but mostly in comfort to myself.

I don’t know how many times I drove past the little white church with the red door before I noticed it. Unlike the stone Lutheran castle facing the shore of Cayuga Lake, this modest structure seemed loved. It felt alive and cared for, nurtured and nurturing. I googled the Episcopal Church and was flooded with information that might as well have been another language. I tucked it all into the back of my mind and proceeded back to the route of living.

Some time after that inquiry, I found myself newly remarried to my long-term partner, followed by the birth of our daughter in January 2019. We also had unexpectedly moved to Willard, around the corner from the little white church. I never thought much of it until one sunny April Sunday, I was out walking with the baby strapped to my chest in an effort to alleviate some of my postpartum anxiety and general winter funk. I was determined to make it to the lake shore, and we did.

On the return trip, I noticed people filing out of the door of that church. I decided right there that I would go the following week.

The following Sunday was Easter. I hadn’t planned it and even thought that maybe my reentry into a church should not be on Easter Sunday. I barely stifled a panic attack. It was warm again so I walked to the church, baby strapped to my chest, and entered the last pew on the right. There were so many more people than I expected and thankfully only the greeter and possibly the priest – a female priest! – had noticed us at that point. I think I cried more tears of relief in that short service than I have all the days of my life. I knew in a blink that my life was different, and it has been ever since.

In the two years since that day, I am no longer afraid to share joys or voice concerns. The church can be a safe place, and should be a living space. I finally found home. But even more amazingly, Jesus found me again. And I want others to know that their hurt is valid, but not all paths are equal. I would be overjoyed if I can do this through preaching, and perhaps even ordination at some point. But I will continue to tell my story regardless, because there are sheep in the hills who just want to come home.

July 2021