We receive Communion in a big circle during Easter season. A sprawling ellipsis in front of the sanctuary. At the piano, as the priest and ministers of the sacrament make their rounds, Pat will begin to play the Communion hymn, and voices sweetly join. I glance up, and see Mary, or Becky, or Alice, or William, or Tammy holding wee Brigid, or Sylvia, or Mark & Bill, and they're singing with such expressions of peace. Lauren's soprano voice ascends to stratospheric heights on the descant of this particular hymn, alleluias harmonizing with a host of celestial choristers.

And I begin to weep tears of joy. It has been thus almost every week of this Easter season.   How radically and really included I feel, and indeed am; how close to a loving God. Almost as if for the first time, in my fifty-fifth year.

Something like terror, the twinned micro-terrors of scruple and shame, would accompany my communions in the church of my birth and baptism: the despairing and disheartening certitude that within days, or even hours, I would have once again fallen out of "the state of grace" --- at least, according to the rules and regs. In nearly 30 years of adult practice in my former church, I was rarely if ever at ease. Never fully at home. Devotions and prayers were made from what Roman Catholics call "servile fear": they were frantic efforts to appease a perpetually vexed-off God.

This church, this particular Sunday community, is healing me on so many levels. Accordingly, this note of gratitude, both to the luminous humans of St James's Church, and to the wider Episcopal Church, embodying grace for me in so many ways.