When I was 25, I lived on the edge of the Tenderloin in San Francisco, four blocks down from a towering gray cathedral. I knew at the time I could never be Catholic — too much patriarchy, too much guilt — but I also knew that the church up the hill was Episcopal, not Catholic. I wasn’t quite sure what the people there believed. But I’d been hounding my boyfriend, Bill, for a marriage proposal for more than a year, and after another 4 a.m. fight, we both needed relief.

“It’s Easter,” I said. “Let’s check out that church on the hill.”

Six months later I was baptized. Bill wasn’t thrilled. Raised Catholic, he rejected all things religious in his teens, and part of our initial bond had been a mutual atheism. He teased: Didn’t I see that Episcopalians were wishy-washy relativists? If I was going to join ranks with Jesus freaks, I should choose a denomination with backbone! But at the cathedral, I liked what I saw: ritual without coercion. So Bill and I broke up for at least the sixth time. I moved and didn’t give him the address.

Come February, Bill was back, and he was desperate enough to propose marriage. By March I was Bill’s betrothed, sitting in the park across from the cathedral, listening to its tolling bells and nauseated without understanding why.

Also by March, it was Lent. The idea of Lent was new to me. These 40 days were modeled on Christ’s 40 days in the desert, a season for self-searching. Though the Bible readings through this period warn against performing dourness for the sake of impressing people with your piety, the church itself goes stark: rough, burlaplike vestments instead of shiny finery; no “alleluias.” What odd theater, I thought. It seemed peculiar that a church of such positivity would still make a 40-day space for what our post-pop-psychology culture seemed to declare Americans should reject: guilt.