Why I Am An Anglican

In Which I Visit the Church of John Calvin

File:Calvin refuse la Cène aux libertins.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

For the first time since being here, it is raining like I’m used to in Binghamton or Oregon—the steady, gentle sound of drops on leaves and stones and roofs all through the night. The kind of rain you try to prise out of an app when you’re attempting to drown out the silence that keeps you awake during the night.

We spent most of yesterday in Geneva—a strange, jumbled, excessively rich city arranged around a lake and river so smooth, so voluptuous, so green, so beautiful, it’s hard to describe. It is the sort of water that made me want to give up and jump in and have a long soul-quenching drink, except that it would have frozen me to the core and also would have been dangerous and against the law. The gliding swans, smooth and silent over the water, though, made it almost unbearably tempting.

After restoring ourselves from the short train ride with a coffee and some sort of Swiss pretzel bun, we walked by the lake with its glorious fountain, passing by the heaps of tourists gaping over the flower clock, and climbed the hill to look at John Calvin’s church.

And, I’m not sure what I was expecting. I hadn’t really thought about what it might be like. I knew it was a Catholic Cathedral that became, essentially, Protestant without the place having to be torn down and left a heap. As an Anglican, it feels like my birthright to walk into any Catholic church anywhere in the world and feel perfectly at home. The shape of the Cross, the high sweeping arches, the windows, the pulpit, the organ, the altar—every piece of furniture causes me no anxiety, except when the faithful of God decide to go in for hefty amounts of kitch, which very often happens in humanity’s meager attempts to apprehend the divine.

So there I found myself wandering around one of the very seats of the Reformation itself, the spiritual home of that Great Doctor, and I must say I was sort of discouraged.

Wherefore, you ask? Why not be transported into theological realms of glory?