Mystic Hunger and an Anglican Feast
I was a young child the first time I encountered the sign of the cross. It must have been on TV—probably watching The Sound of Music for the hundredth time. Having grown up in a staunchly non-liturgical evangelical home, I can’t imagine where else I would have ever seen such a gesture. It captivated me. Something about it struck a chord in the depths of my innermost being. It seemed special. It seemed mystical. I knew it was sacred.
Excitedly, I asked my mother whether I could do the gesture. It had to do with Jesus, so surely she would agree! To my shock and embarrassment, she said, “We don’t do that.”
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Sacred Hunger Pangs
That moment—accidentally, no doubt well-intended—began the suppression of my lifetime hunger for the sacred and the mystical.
I had always been an imaginative child, sensitive to faith and creative expression. One of my most treasured memories involves my dad building a massive bonfire on our land to burn brush and me holding a stick in the embers until it smoldered, then dancing around the yard waving the woodsmoke like incense. I wasn’t even seven years old the first time I spoke to Jesus as if he were standing next to me, asking him if I could please take my teddy bear to heaven one day. He must have smiled to receive such an honest and pure prayer.
As I grew, I lost some of that pure piety. Politics, video games, and the internet distracted me. However, at my core, I was still the little girl who loved gazing into the light of a candle and traipsing through her yard to look at the flowers and think deeply.
It wasn’t until I moved away to attend college that I started rediscovering my hunger for the mystical. My bohemian tendencies flourished during my years in and just after college when I was shopping at a hippie store in the mall, buying incense and salt lamps, wearing flowy garments, and hungering for something in my life to feel special. At the same time, I became obsessed with personality assessments, looking to letters, numbers, or humors to help me make sense of who I was and why I felt like I didn’t fit in the world.
A Sacramental Appetizer
Around this time, I became disillusioned with the denomination of my youth. The summer before my senior year of college, I visited an Anglican friend in another state and attended church with her. We went to a small chapel service on a saint’s day, and I had spent most of the service sniffing for heresy and growing increasingly shocked as I found none. Instead, I found ritual, beauty, and deep reverence. The candles, the bowing, the vestments—I’d never seen anything like it. Then came the Eucharist. Even in my childhood, I hadn’t experienced the Lord’s Supper in such a way, with wafer and wine mingling on my tongue. It unsettled me and clung to my mind unrelentingly. Something had happened to me.
Evangelical Distaste
When I returned to college that fall, I shuddered at the idea of returning to my church and realized it all felt wrong. Don’t mistake me—it was a good church filled with good people. I do not feel I wasted the time I was there. But I couldn’t square a church where the people talked to each other when I thought they should have been singing to the Savior. It didn’t feel right after what came over me when I dipped that wafer in that chalice.
My disillusionment deepened. During my senior year, I experienced some church hurt, including a personal betrayal by a member of the pastoral staff, which made me feel even less like I belonged in the world I lived in. I took a summer off from church attendance, trying out several other churches in town, but they all felt wrong. Each one felt shallow, disjointed, and profoundly irreverent. Eventually, I stopped going altogether, even though every week I kept Googling: “churches near me.” Spiritually, I hungered and couldn’t find a meal, even as I scrolled dozens of church websites and read their “What We Believe” pages.
Malnourished Mysticism
The next phase was astrology. Where once I had laughed at horoscopes, I looked at my natal star chart and thought that it seemed true, arguing that if all truth is God’s truth, then it must be okay. I turned to yoga for health and relaxation and became incensed by all the Christians on the internet who dared suggest that maybe I shouldn’t include that tool in my toolkit. I almost got into Reiki, energy pulling, sound bathing, and the like. I was listening to Norse neo-pagan music, with its rich tones and drumbeats making me crave a connection to a majestic past, a beautiful history. I even bought a pendant of Mjölnir, telling myself it was because I liked the Avengers.
All along, I claimed I still believed the Gospel, which I’m confident I did. But I was slipping, starving to death, and unable to find a place that the little girl entranced by mysticism could call home.
An Anglican Feast
The December after I graduated college, I finally listened to my best friend’s urging to find an Anglican church. On the Feast of St. Nicholas in 2015, I pulled into the parking lot and gave God my ultimatum: “This is the last church I will try. You know I still believe in you. But if this one doesn’t work out, I’m not doing church anymore.”
I walked inside, and when I sat down on the next-to-last pew, I, in fact, sat down to a feast.
Much ink has been spilled on the beauty and reverence of an Anglican service. But I experienced the tangible presence of the Holy Spirit that day for the first time in—years, maybe? As I moved my body through the service, awkwardly copying others’ liturgical gestures, I wept, terrified and overjoyed at once. This was full, embodied worship: rituals, candles, bowing, and—yes!—the sign of the cross.
I couldn’t get the service out of my head. I kept going back, and I became a confirmed Anglican the following November. I have now been an Anglican for nearly eight years. Since then, I’ve been able to wade into the deep, life-giving waters of healthy, true mysticism—real connection with God—and the contemplative life, following Jesus and Holy Scripture.
The Aches of a Longing World
While my story didn’t take a dark turn, it came close. The devil seems to enjoy preying on people like me especially: young women with sensitive souls, spirits hungry for something mystical—an aching sense that this world cannot be all there is and a desperation to connect to something bigger and grander than themselves.
When I look at young women who turn to crystals, sage smudging, manifesting, and all those other things born from witchcraft, I see myself aching for meaning in a world gone mad. When I see young women who veer into sexualities and gender identities that God never intended, I see souls who feel like they don’t fit, desperately trying to carve out somewhere that they can. I hurt for them because I have seen firsthand parts of all those struggles but have also experienced a beautiful solution.
One of the gifts the Anglican tradition offers is a chance to know Christ in his fullness—mysticism and all. It’s a place where that hunger for meaning and ancient rites finds healthy expression governed by Scripture and guided by tradition. This tradition is a gift from the Lord for those of us who crave to plumb the depths of his mysteries, one sign of the cross at a time.
Image by ArtPlus from GettyImages, courtesy of Canva.
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