For three years after the ordination of women was approved, I wept every time I went to church, so I think I can claim to be as disaffected as the next fellow. I live moreover with the knowledge that a day may come when I will not be able to function in this church any longer and will have to depart for the Church of Rome, as one of my children has done.

But I hope not. I was baptized in this church. I met the Lord Jesus in it. I have been nourished by its sacraments. I would turn my back on her as unwillingly as upon my mother. Nevertheless, life in an Episcopal Church that seems determined to alter itself out of all recognition is, to say the least, not much fun.

In an effort to maintain my grip on my place in this beloved but endlessly distressing community, I have found profit in a few quotations from various sources. I write to share them with others who may recognize something like their own situation in mine, in the hope that they will be helped, as well.

First, and perhaps the most important, Oliver Cromwell to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland:

It is comforting to remind myself that the people whose success in pressing their views is causing me such pain may in fact be quite right in these views, and that I may be the one who has got everything wrong. Of course, I don't think that is the case, but it helps to remember that it may be so. If you think your wife has cuckolded you, it is a comfort if you are not sure. She may be quite innocent, and how wonderful that would be! The point is not that I should be right, but that the church should be right. It is easy to forget that, and to forget what is also true - that if I were to be persuaded that such was the case, that the church was right, all my troubles would be over. I don't want to be unhappy with the Episcopal Church. If I could only come to believe that what she is doing is really according to the will of God, I would not have to be. "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that ye may be mistaken."

My second quotation is from G. B. Shaw's "Pygmalion":

I used to be an Anglo-Catholic, but I was always a bit skeptical about the central Anglo-Catholic tenet, to wit, that the Anglican Communion, along with Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, is part of the Catholic Church in a way that the protestant churches are not. Partly, my skepticism had to do with the notorious "three-branch" theory, which seemed to comport uncomfortably with the oneness that is an essential "note" of the Catholic Church ("one, holy, catholic and apostolic"). "The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated."

But I was also uneasy about what many Anglo-Catholics seemed to imply by their conduct, and especially by their willingness to flout, with their missals and the like, the few rules we Anglicans do have. While they proclaimed aloud their faith that ours is a Catholic Church, their behavior often seemed to be muttering instead, "It isn't really a Catholic Church but we're going to make it into one" -never mind that the idea of a man-made Catholic Church is self-contradictory.

Here is another one (Psalm 131):

With all my heart I admire the great St. Athanasius, who in the fourth century stood against the entire Christian world in defense of the true, Nicene doctrine of God. He was a ferocious ecclesiastical warrior. He battled for God's truth, and he won. "Lord I am not high-minded; I have no proud thoughts. I do not exercise myself in great matters which are too high for me; but I refrain my soul and keep it low, like as a child that is weaned from his mother; yea, my soul is even as a weaned child."

But Athanasius was a saint and I am not. I cannot get involved in polemics without getting so steeped in anger and hatred that the Spirit of God would fly right out of me. Even Athanasius came close to the edge, and I would go right over it. And if God hasn't given me the talent for charitable and irenic controversy, I don't think he intended me to undertake the responsibility of fighting for orthodoxy. I am grateful that there are some in the Episcopal Church who do feel that call, although I think some of them get pretty close to the edge sometimes themselves. But, thank God, I don't believe this war is up to me to fight.

This from J.H. Newman, in a letter of Jan. 8, 1845, while he was still an Anglican:

For 16 centuries everybody believed that all the Christians in one place had to belong to the same church - that is, all had to be in communion with one bishop - and that all the bishops everywhere had to be in communion with each other. Anything else constituted the sin of schism on the part of those who separated themselves, and the schismatic conventicle they created was not a church at all. Of course, the members of the new body would claim that their group was the church and it was the others who formed the conventicle, but both sides agreed that one or the other was the church, not both. "This I am sure of, that nothing but a simple, direct call of duty is a warrant for any one leaving our Church; no preference of another Church, no delight in its services, no hope of greater religious advancement in it, no indignation, no disgust, at the persons and things among which we find ourselves in the Church of England. The simple question is, Can I (it is personal, not whether another, but can I) be saved in the English Church? am I in safety, were I to die tonight?"

The Reformation at first changed very little about this idea except the place of bishops as the symbols of unity. But it became clear in time that, in the new circumstances, the effort to keep all the Christians in one place in the same church could only succeed, if it could succeed at all, at the cost of terrible and endless bloodshed. Very reluctantly people therefore begin to accept the idea that the Christians in one place could separate into religious bodies that were out of communion with each other yet were all, in some sense, real churches. It became a matter of personal conviction which one you picked.

The name for that new situation in the church and new doctrine about the nature of the church is "denominationalism." Denominationalism was a lot better than religious persecution and warfare, goodness knows, but it was also a confession of failure. The kind of unity that for 1,600 years had been thought essential to the nature of the Church of Christ was beyond the power of Christians to preserve. What is strange, however, is how many Episcopalians seem to have come not merely to accept denominationalism as a sad necessity, but to take it as the natural order of things, even a positive good. We have come to think it perfectly unobjectionable to pick and choose among churches until we find the one that suits our own preferences, as though the faith of the martyrs were a spiritual supermarket where everyone is free to look for a brand he likes.

Newman sees it otherwise. I am comforted by his insistence that I am duty-bound not to leave the Episcopal Church for any reason short of fear for my salvation if I do not. I was brought up in the Episcopal Church. I did not pick it. It is the church in which God set me. In that sense it is for me the one church and has a prima facie claim upon me as the true and Catholic Church of Christ.

Finally, Matthew 16:18b:

God is in charge after all, not I. Whatever I do or do not do, or for that matter whatever Bishop Spong does or does not do, the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ's church. Whether that promise has any bearing on the future of the Episcopal Church is something we cannot yet know. God reigns. "On this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

The Rev. Merrill Orne Young is a retired priest of the Diocese of New York. He resides in Surry, Va.