Returning to faith

But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. -Rev. 2:4 

This was the reading my Book of Common Prayer showed for today. It's the Kindle edition, so who knows if it's correct. I'm not Episcopal, I wasn't raised in that church, and from 14 to 20 I didn't set foot in a church at all, except for the baptisms of family friends. I dabbled in Wicca, eclectic Paganism and chaos magic, but mostly I'd just say that I didn't know, that I was agnostic or atheist. The truth was that I'd lost the feeling I had when I was younger, the feeling of God's presence in my life.
My leaving the church coincided with both my own coming out as a bisexual, transsexual man, and my mom's coming out as a lesbian, acts which officially excommunicated her, in addition to contributing to her divorce from my Greek Orthodox priest father, and effectively excommunicated me. I couldn't reconcile the things that I felt with the things that everyone around me said about God. I couldn't imagine praying to a God who thought I was sinful, merely for having an accident of birth which caused my brain to masculinize but not my body, and for loving people regardless of their gender.
I can't blame my loss of religion for the ensuing depression, dissociation, and general fucked-up headspace that came to be my normal in the years that followed. Trauma, bad luck, puberty, dysphoria, bad relationships, and a sense of not really belonging anywhere stemming from all of the above plus my own social awkwardness all contributed to a general feeling of ill-being, lack of meaning in my life, and loneliness. But I can't downplay the role that losing faith had in my life. I lost a community I'd been in since I was born, and I lost a way of making sense of the world. To be honest, I'm surprised I didn't notice sooner what I had lost.
Over the past couple of months, I've been attempting to make a positive change in my life. I've stopped using my smartphone (though I still use it as a "tablet", it's nice to not be connected to data 24/7, to have it solely dependent on WiFi. Kind of a "smartphone methadone", I joked to my dad). I deactivated my Tumblr account, because I spent way too much time on that damn website. I'm trying to read more books, pay more attention in class, spend more time with other people instead of hiding from any kind of social activity. I'm trying to engage myself in life again. Things aren't great, but I've come a long way still. I've fully quit self-injury and smoking cigarettes, and in general I feel better about myself and about the world.
On the Sunday before Christmas, my mom and her wife asked me to come with them to the church they had joined, the Episcopal cathedral in their city. I joined them with some apprehension, like I said, it was the first time I'd attended church under my own steam in nearly six years. In fact, the last Sunday service I attended was the one where my father announced his divorce from my mother to the parishioners of his own cathedral - an almost unheard-of act, since most divorcing priests in the Greek Orthodox church are defrocked from their position due to infidelity causing the divorce. But I went with them. Why this particular Sunday, I can't explain. Nearly every time I've come to visit, they've invited me along, and I've always said "maybe", and then overslept. I was apprehensive, even though I knew this wasn't the same kind of church I was raised in, apprehensive that it wouldn't be formal enough to replace the highly liturgical services I was used to, apprehensive that it wouldn't be as accepting as my moms said, apprehensive that it just wouldn't feel right or that it wouldn't feel like anything at all.
I wouldn't say it was instantaneous, but it certainly wasn't very far into the liturgy when I realized something was changing in me. I felt good about being in church. It felt like coming home. I hadn't realized fully until now how much leaving church hurt me. But the sermon was what really brought the point home. The dean preached about Advent, about how there are two Christmases in a Christian's life. The first Christmas is that of a child, an excited, naive belief - in the birth of Jesus, in the presents behind closed doors, in "peace on earth and good will among humankind", in any of that. And then there's a second Christmas, one that comes after all of the promises that have been made to us are broken, after we stop believing in Jesus or heaven or Santa, after we become cynical. He talked about how the promise God made to David, which is read during Advent, that God would make David's line of kings last forever, was already long broken before it was written down. David's line ended, and the Israelites still believed in it and kept it as part of their holy book, long before the angel appeared to a teenage girl, promising to fulfill that long-broken promise. And she believed in it. "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word". He said that our second Christmas comes when, like Mary, we start believing in broken promises. When we pull ourselves out of the darkness, not because we know that there's light, but because we want so badly for the light to be there.
To me, that says that faith isn't about belief. It's about giving God a second chance. I'm still not sure that I do believe in God. But I think that's okay. I'm giving God a second chance. And I believe - or at least, I hope - that God will give me a second chance, too.
Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first.