The church house was always dark when I would arrive at 5:30 a.m. I would walk down the long, red-carpeted aisle with respectful fear of what I might find there.

Occasionally a hobo would suddenly rise up in the pew before my face like a resurrected corpse and then casually ask me what time it was or when the coffee would be made, a neighborhood dog which had found its way onto the thick carpet of the nave would silently come up behind me and greet me with an unexpected warm lick of my hand, or a trapped bird would fly fiercely across the vaulted ceiling of the chancel with the flutter of a ghostly apparition.

These were the last days of unlocked sanctuaries in the city. It was my job to turn on the lights, sweep the entrance and the sidewalks, and turn on the large coffee urn before the early service at All Saints' Church in Birmingham, Ala. From time to time I had company, yet the visitors would leave as the sleepy-eyed communicants slipped silently into their familiar pews and onto their knees in preparation for 7:30 Holy Communion.

I was 13, and that unlit, long, carpeted aisle is my first teenaged memory of the church. In truth, I feared the hoboes, dogs and birds far less than I did the God who inhabited that still, dark sanctuary.

Later on Sunday mornings, as I was setting up the Sunday school rooms in the undercroft, I would hear the customary canticles of Morning Prayer rolling disturbingly down the stairs to me.

For the Lord is a great God and a great King

above all gods.

In his hand are all the corners

of the earth,

and the heights of the hills are his also.

O come let us worship and fall down

and kneel before the Lord our Maker...

And the "Benedictus" would echo close at the heels of the "Venite."

Blessed art thou that beholdest the depths, and dwellest between the Cherubim; praised and exalted above all forever.

This Episcopal God was no casual chum. To fall into his grasp was serious business.

My feelings of awe for this God were only confirmed when I was sent to St. Andrew's School at age 14. There amongst the mountains of the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, the monks of the Order of the Holy Cross carried a Bible in one hand and a board in the other and felt that the time boys spent on their knees was never wasted. Our daily retreat into that musty, stuccoed chapel, whose landscape was dominated by the wood-hewed, life-sized crucifix centered on the north wall, was a sojourn into the other world. Elizabethan English mingled with medieval Latin, incense so thick the altar appeared to be floating, and the chilling, crisp ring of the sanctus bells reverberated through our ears, disturbing our adolescent apathy with something more akin to quixotic urgency.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts:

Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.

Glory be to thee, O Lord Most High.

I would have scoffed at the suggestion that I was "religious" during my teenaged years. I can only remember electively praying before basketball games, trigonometry tests and dateless Saturday nights. But I was not quarantined from the spiritual world. What's more, I was spared empty, pietistic notions of a god who was fashioned more like a kindly great-uncle than the One who dwells between the winged cherubim and holds the very corners of the earth in his hand. I learned he was a "jealous" God, a "consuming fire," that he wanted all or nothing, and that the yellowing, tormented Christ on the chapel's north wall was testimony to just how serious God was. This was told to me by men and women who, for no rational reason, taught, pushed, coached, chided, nudged and urged me and a host of other hapless boys through our secondary education as if we had some intrinsic worth. God knows that was news to most of us.

Those Anglican canticles, Gregorian chants, papery wafers, and sweet port wine remained with me long after I exited the gates of St. Andrew's School, and so did the adult personalities who stood beside and knelt beside me in those padless pews. When I heard the call of God myself, I knew the gravity of the summons. I could remember what a Christ-centered life looked like - like those teachers, monks, nuns, coaches, and priests who worked for next to nothing so that we boys might become something; like those men and women silently sliding onto the kneelers at All Saints' Church on Sunday morning, ignoring any notion that Sundays were solely for sleeping in, fishing or for just lingering long over the funny papers; perhaps even like the hobo who sat patiently and talked to me as I swept the legion of pine needles from the steps leading to the narthex - "the son of man had no place to lay his head." I do know that I wanted to run when I heard the call of Christ, and did, and have again from time to time.

But the seeds of my conversion were planted deep within the soil by that throng of faithful Christians in my past, and that soil has been tended by the rhythms of the Episcopal Church's prayers and celebrations, so that my roots have grown stronger in the Lord. I cannot boast of my decision to follow Christ. Ultimately, he was fearfully irresistible. Yet I can say I love this church, for it is a place where the immanence of God is courageously tethered to his transcendence, and the confidence we have in Christ Jesus dwells alongside the mystery we encounter in his presence. q