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I also knew that my gesture would have some symbolic weight in the congregation. Even the donating of my grandmother's piano for use in the sanctuary had seemed like good news to people at a time when most of the news, both inside and outside our congregation, was unremittingly bad.

While I knew that friendship and family ties were not enough, they gave me enough to act on. But it was not easy. I found a church congregation in utter turmoil, with its members behaving as badly as it is possible for grownups to behave. Secret meetings, anonymous hate mail, you name it. Lifelong friends suffering rifts so deep that they stopped speaking to one another.

Church congregations are complex organisms, and sometimes they fall into an evil pattern: people know how to scapegoat and rid themselves of a pastor (mostly by making so much noise and trouble that the situation becomes unbearable to everyone concerned). And because they know how to do this, it becomes what they do. Again and again.

Over the years, if a church is not healthy, this pattern of behavior takes a toll. If the pastors and laity who normally exercise proper authority have failed to do so, creating a power vacuum, chaos ensues. And it is not fun. It was not fun.

Not long after I had become a member, two perfectly sane women said to me that they had begun to wonder if the church had become possessed by the devil. It makes as much sense as anything, I told them. And then I had to laugh, and at myself. It was perfectly humbling, and a perfect evocation of what Paul, writing to the troubled church at Corinth, called "God [choosing] what is weak in the world to shame the strong" (1 Cor. 1:27). No one in our congregation could boast of strength, health, or wisdom enough to get us out of the mess we had made. All we could do was pray.

In retrospect, I can say that I joined the church out of basic need; I was becoming a Christian, and as the religion can't be practiced alone, I needed to try to align myself with a community of faith. And it proved to be the best possible time for me to do this, because I had to do it without illusions. My clergy friends, as experienced pastors, knew even before most people in the congregation that they would have to leave. Someone who saw me not long after they had told me this took one look at me and asked, "Did someone die?" It felt like a death, a death in the family. These people had been my main spiritual support as I struggled through the early stages of a religious conversion. The idea of working through the rest of it without them put me into a panic, and I was tempted to see some church members as not only their enemies but as my own. But I soon realized that I had to let my friends go, and with a grateful heart, because it was so obviously the best thing for them. I had no idea how I would get by, but I had begun to pray, and that gave me the faith that things would work out, somehow.

That "somehow" turned out rather well. One of the last things that I had done with this couple was to make a visit to a nearby Benedictine monastery. I had seen a brochure on their kitchen table on one of the many occasions when I'd gone to commiserate with them over their struggles at church. It advertised a program at an abbey in the region, two days of readings and lectures by Carol Bly. "She'll be worth hearing," I said. We all needed a break. And I had been handed something I didn't even know I needed—a wise and ancient spiritual powerhouse known as the Benedictines. Now they are like family to me, a family that I can never lose. And my finding and getting to know them was my first adult experience of answered prayer.

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April 3 2000, Vol. 44, No. 4