This is the beginning of an occasional series in which St. Mark’s members share their stories guided by these prompts:
- What brought you to St. Mark’s?
- What keeps you coming back to St. Mark’s?
- Where have you seen God at work in your life and/or at St. Mark’s recently?
Many thanks to ED GOWENS for being the first in this series and for sharing his story!
Growing up in South Texas, I was drawn to Christian faith by a childhood picture Bible. However, my family had no formal religion and didn’t join the Episcopal Church till I was a high school senior. Though I continued with churchgoing through my college and professional years, I lapsed from it after coming out as a gay man and moving to the West Coast. I’ve admittedly been a virtual agnostic for most of my adult life.
Other than dorm roommates, I’ve been single and lived alone in adulthood, having to assume life obligations without emotional support or even geographic proximity of family. I’ve not had success in dating to find companionship or even close friendships in the transitory, high-cost setting of San Diego. That’s been profoundly lonely for me, particularly since I’m not a social extrovert. As I have aged, I’ve tended to lean into nostalgia for mental health sustenance, and without affirming experiences in other realms of life, I decided to try church life again after the pandemic was followed by major upheavals to my life.
An auto accident destroyed my truck right when I bought my condo, and soon after, I had to have laser surgery for kidney stones. These rough experiences without surrounding support, along with daunting and ongoing home improvements, forced me to confront my life’s meaning and how I want to constructively fill my days outside employment.
In the last three years, I have started going regularly to the gym, and then church, and then volunteering in an elementary school read-aloud program as disciplines to anchor myself in meaningful giving of time, treasure, and talents.
I am grateful that St Mark’s is a small but mighty congregation committed to social justice and living the Gospel in its pantry and outreach programs. Its size allows some intimacy of engagement versus the anonymity of larger churches in which I might be as lost as I was in my unchurched decades.
Our faith calls us to believe in miracles, but they rarely happen in moments of astonishing magic. As in my initial occupation as a teacher, or in the agrarian societies that predominate in the Bible, life is mostly about planting seeds and nurturing them to grow, hoping that the Good News is spread far and wide to advance heavenly blessings of peace, justice, and love in the lives we live on earth.
Like the innumerable stars that illuminate the night sky as God’s legacy promise to Abraham, we are called to be the Light of Christ in our much-broken world, to offer healing to one another in our shared human existence. And those small acts of spiritual kinship become every bit as much as the miracles our Lord did to proclaim salvation to the world.
–Ed Gowens