First off, a fond hello to my Ascension family and welcome to anyone who may be visiting here, and thanks to Derek for setting up this whole cool experiment. If you are reading this post, it means I’ve successfully uploaded what I’ve written -- sitting here on my land in the wilds of Vermont -- to Ascension’s servers. Don’t imagine I’ve installed high-speed wi-fi on my land (yet!), there’s a wonderful internet café in town, and I also have a friend nearby, the organist for the town’s Episcopal Church, who has internet access at her house. All in all, it’s a great setup: I can hang out in the wilderness writing and thinking and listening to music, and then bike into town or to my friend’s house to recharge my computer and access the world.

I think I’m supposed to introduce myself a bit, so I’ll say that I was confirmed three years ago at Ascension after many years of feeling myself a “cultural” rather than a practicing Christian. I was raised in a musical and artistic family, so my familiarity with Christian culture came from music and visual art: I know the Passion story more from singing Bach’s St Matthew Passion as a teenager than from any Easter service. When my brother and I were young, my mother would every now and again get on a church jag, and if she found a minister whose sermons she liked, we’d go to church for a while, but attending church was not a regular habit in our house.

Although I sometimes regret how long it took me to find a home at church, I mostly regard this casual upbringing with respect to churchgoing as a wonderful gift. So many of my friends have angry stories about dogmatic teachers and judgmental clergy who offended them deeply enough that they refuse to even set foot in a church. While I have many reservations about organized religion and its history in general, I have very little personal history that has to be transcended for me to wholeheartedly participate in the life of the church, at Ascension at least. I am enough of a solitary seeker, not to speak of an anti-authoritarian troublemaker, that I’m pretty sure that waiting until my mid-forties to be confirmed in the church was probably the only way for me to go.

So the reasons why I suddenly made up my mind to join Ascension are basically three. First, it’s around the corner from my apartment(!) Second, the music and liturgy are really really good. And third, on September 12th, 2001 at the 6 pm service, Father Andrew gave a sermon that changed my life. I wrote about it at the time, and it's posted here:

http://www.evbvd.com/newsnotes/911/010916.html

Anyway, that’s about as much of an introduction as I think is necessary for now. Plus, my computer battery is running out, so it’s time for a break!