I was driving around Sacramento today listening to the soundtrack for Godspell, the movie, as one does, and thinking about religion.

My relationship to religion is not that complicated, actually. Some of my earliest memories are of going to St. Jude’s Episcopal Church in Cupertino with my mom and sister and Grandma Crawford. Hm, maybe my aunt and uncle as well; I’m just not sure. I was pretty young. As I recall, there was an orchard near the church, and AA used to meet in the parsonage at night. As I recall, my family and I went there for a number of years, but switched to a different Episcopal church — I forget which one — later on.

In college, I occasionally went to St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Davis, simply because I felt at home there. Of course, while in college I dabbled in many faiths. I was a Wiccan for awhile (though that was probably more because I was into a girl who was a Wiccan than because of any spiritual conviction). For awhile, even, I signed up with IVCF, the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship, which turned out to be far more conservative than I was comfortable with. I poked at Islám and still have two copies of the Qur’án. I studied Tao for awhile, and Zen Buddhism.

For a long while I explored the Bahá’i Faith. There’s much to recommend the Bahá’i Faith if you are a journeyer; they’re a spiritual successor to Islám, they are monotheistic, they teach the equality of all races and religions and sexes, and so on. I’m not sure how they feel about homosexuality and transgendered people. You’ll have to ask. Eventually I left them behind because I felt a call back to the Episcopal Church.

Of course I veered through the Methodist Church; Jennifer and I were married at the Dixon United Methodist Church and I have many fond memories of that place. But once we moved back to Sacramento, I felt a need to go back to my Episcopal roots, so I started attending Trinity Episcopal Cathedral downtown. Of course I haven’t been to church in over a year at this point. Stupid pandemic.

I’ll talk elsewhere about my actual belief system; suffice to say here that I’m still heavily influenced by certain Celtic beliefs and that the Episcopal Church is in my soul to stay.

Every now and then I’ll mention on social media that I have occasionally — in the distant past, not recently — considered going to seminary and studying to be a priest; and a couple of people have expressed surprise that I haven’t been to seminary. It’s true that I love the liturgy of the church and the scholarship, but I don’t have a pastoral bone in my body and would make because of that a very poor parish priest.

That’s it for this post. Carry on.