The Episcopal Church and farther reaches of the Anglican Communion keep turning up in a cascade of new books about childhood, school days, weddings, requiems, travels, politics, even recollections of vestry membership.

Once again we are reminded that the church touches many lives on occasions great and small -often profoundly and quite memorably. Varied uses of the prayer book and its hallowed cadences show repeatedly its intrinsic value many times in many places.

As for these current books, the turn of a page may even bring you face to face with events that correspond to your own life.

GLADSTONE A Biography BY Roy Jenkins Random House At Christ Church, Oxford (in the 1830s), the cathedral services were conducted almost as perfunctorily as those in the chapel at Eton School. The future Prime Minister William Gladstone, at the end of his first term, wrote: "Sacrament: as cold and unprepared as usual." He attended frequently but he got more spiritual sustenance from St. Mary's, the University church ... of which John Henry Newman had become vicar, from a variety of Oxford shrines ... and even from the extra-mural activities of the Rev. Henry Bulteel, a curate ... (who) soon got himself expelled ... by preaching in Dissenting chapels (that is, outside the communion of the Church of England) or in the open air-it is not clear which was the worse.

TOM: The Unknown Tennessee Williams By Lyle Leverich Crown [In Tom's grandfather,] the Rev. Walter Dakin, his congregations found a ... sense of the high drama of the Episcopal Mass, an attraction that he imparted to his daughter and grandson who would eventually devote his life to the theater ... When his grandfather took him by the hand to visit the homes of church members the boy saw firsthand the impact on grief-stricken families who had lost sons in [World War I] ... Years later, Tom claimed that he witnessed not only the sick but the dead ... The effect was traumatic and made death a lasting obsession. It was always to the warmth and security of his grandparents' home that he would return and this was the boy's fortress, his one great defense.

MY AMERICAN JOURNEY BY General Colin L. Powell Random House One summer the vestrymen [of St Margaret's Church, Woodbridge, Va.] decided to go on a retreat ... I enjoyed it, and so did the others, until, more quickly than expected, we were soulsearched out. On the second night one of the brethren said, "Anybody got a deck of cards?" Thus was born the St. Margaret's poker club, a biweekly game ... [but it] made the rector uncomfortable and sparked a theological debate. Was card-playing a proper pursuit for vestrymen? More important should we cut the pot with the church? In the end, we decided to respect the separation of church and state. There was no split.

(At Fort Collins, Colorado) the priest turned out to be Colin P. Kelly 111, son of the first American pilot killed in World War 11. "Why do we hold our service in a Catholic Chaplain's office?" I asked. There were too few Episcopalians, he said. I suggested that if the setting were more appealing, we might attract more. I knew many of the old barracks complexes contained wooden chapels. "Please find us one of those, Father," I said. I also asked him to consider replacing the folksy "Songs of Living Waters" hymnal with something containing the old hymns like "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God." He eventually found us a chapel and the service took on a more traditional flavor.

NOEL COWARD A Biography By Philip Hoare Simon & Schuster The official commemoration of Coward's life (in the form of a plaque) was in the Actors' Church, Covent Garden, in London. Westminster Abbey refused to allow a memorial service on the grounds that "he wasn't a church-goer"; however, on March 28, 1984, the Abbey invited the Queen Mother to unveil a memorial stone to Coward in Poets' Corner, inscribed with his name and dates and the words, 'A Talent to Amuse.'

A GOOD LIFE Newspapering and Other Adventures By Ben Bradlee Simon & Schuster St. Mark's School, in Southboro, Mass ... one of a dozen citadels of WASP culture that dotted the New England countryside ... specialized in fitting round pegs into round holes ... I and I square pegs were known as the "Dry-Hair-in-Chapel" crowd. Since they avoided sports at all costs, they didn't have to take showers after exercising in tile afternoon, and so they showed Lip for tile mandatory evening chapel services-one lesson, two prayers, one hymn-with hair uncombed and dry as a bone ... my first lesson in the whole complicated matter of insiders versus outsiders.

ANDREW WYETH A Secret Life By Richard Meryman HarperCollins On the death of the artist's sister: On the grass was a card table ... [and] beside the table stood a retired Episcopal clergyman, George Peabody, a stole around his neck. He read a short service from the Book of Common Prayer, "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed to [sic] us," Next a man in a leisure suit, the opposite extreme of the Reverend Peabody ... announced that he was following an ancient Chinese ritual ... One by one the mourners ... spooned a bit of Carolyn's ashes into a plastic sphere ... and together pressed a button on the card table ... The sphere rocketed out of the muzzle of a pipe into the sky ... (and] in a burst of blue and white stars, the pale haze of Carolyn's remains sifted down onto the field.

WHITTAKER CHAMBERS A Biography By Sam Tanenhaus Random House Chambers found common religious ground with Henry R. Luce [his employer and founder of Time Inc.] for Chambers had rediscovered Christianity. In September 1940 he was baptized an Episcopalian at St. John the Divine, the immense cathedral whose dome towered, appropriately, over Morningside Heights, where 20 years before Chambers had undergone the "intellectual pulverization" that had pitched him, so he now believed, into the hell of Communism ... [but] in late 1941, increasingly uncomfortable as an Episcopalian, Chambers discovered a faith closer to his spiritual needs when he read the journal of George Fox, the 17th century founder of Quakerism ... In 1942, Chambers asked for an assistant, Calvin Fixx ... who had flirted with radicalism in the 1930s without ever abandoning his devout Episcopalianism. Taciturn but enormously sympathetic, Fixx was known as "the chaplain of Time Inc."

RAGE FOR FAME The Ascent of Clare Booth By Sylvia Jukes Morris Random House In the fall of 1911, Clare's brother, David, entered Racine College, Wisconsin, an Episcopal school with a strong emphasis on military training ... [In] 1915, she started as a boarding pupil at the Cathedral School of St. Mary, 22 miles from Manhattan in Garden City, Long Island ... Her mother had lied to get Clare accepted by this Episcopal bastion, claiming that her daughter was the grandchild of a bishop ... A bedroom window looked toward the Cathedral of the Incarnation, where Clare was obliged to worship twice every Sunday, and where she would be confirmed at the end of her first year ... In 1923 her brother escorted her to [her wedding in] Christ Church in Greenwich, Conn. Its precinct was loud with chimes and organ music ... [but] Clare's chief memory of the ensuing ceremony was the smell of alcohol on the groom's breath ... On Oct 3, 1932, Clare went to St. Thomas' Church on Fifth Avenue and wept over [her lover] Donald Freeman's coffin.

JUST AS I AM The Autobiography of Billy Graham HarperCollins [In London in 1960] the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, invited us to tea at Lambeth Palace. I accepted, of course, but was very nervous about it. "Honey," my wife reassured one, "any man who has six sons must be quite ordinary." How right she was. Dr. Fisher was a charming and delightful man, wholly without pretense. He became a great friend, although not all of the Anglican clergy approved of our method of evangelism. By meeting with us he was giving tacit approval to our work.

REFLECTED GLORY The Life of Pamela Churchill Harriman By Sally Bedell Smith Simon & Schuster [Pamela's marriage to Randolph Churchill] took place under cloudy skies a month after the outbreak of World War 11. The setting was several blocks from Parliament, at St. John's in Smith Square, a flamboyant structure of four ornate towers, oversize columns and pediments more in the spirit of Rome than London ... Each guest carried a gas mask in a canvas case. A number of the women used them as handbags, and Canon F. R. Barry, the rector, kept his in a special scarlet pouch ... A year later, St. John's, Smith Square, was a ruin of barbed wire and boarded windows, bombed by the Germans in the Battle of Britain. "It was a marriage done in a fortnight," said Randolf's friend Alastair Forbes. "And God struck down on the church after they were married."

THE LIFE OF NELSON ROCKEFELLER By Cary Reich Doubleday A few minutes after 4 o'clock in the afternoon on Monday, June 23, 1930, a limousine pulled up to the parish house of St. Asaph's Episcopal Church in BalaCynwyd, on the Philadelphia Mainline, and a young man in morning coat and striped gray trousers leapt out of the car. Bounding up the steps, he flipped his top hat into the waiting hands of the aged sexton and slapped the old man on the shoulder. "The best o' luck, sir," the sexton called out. "Oh, thank you," Nelson Rockefeller replied ... Outside the gray stone Gothic church more than a thousand spectators jostled for position as Mary Todhunter Clark took her father's arm to enter St. Asaph's ... [and then] The voice of the Reverend Benjamin Bird rang from the altar as he led the couple through their vows.

WRITING HOME By Alan Bennett Random House I wasn't intending to go to the service for drama critic Kenneth Tynan but his wife's secretary phoned, ostensibly to inquire if I knew the time had changed ... so I put on my grey suit, get on my bike, and go down to St. Paul's, Covent Garden, in London. Hoping I'm not early, I find the church packed [and] spotting a seat in the back row I slip in ... and just before we kick off a little figure in black is escorted down the far aisle-Princess Margaret. The priest is young and on the plump side ... He apologizes, as parsons tend to do these days, that we are in a church at all and says that though there will have to be a prayer at the end of the proceedings, it will not so much be a prayer as "an opportunity for our private commemorations." The actor Albert Finney reads a preface in his rich voice and others also speak ... Then out into the rain, with a vast crush in the doorway.

SPLIT IMAGE: The Life of Anthony Perkins By Charles Winecoff Dutton A cousin recalls that his mother "was very upset that Tony had looked into becoming Catholic. He was searching, and then decided that maybe he'd become Episcopalian. He took instruction from some Episcopalian minister, and his mother said he'd told her that in the final analysis the guy had disillusioned him. She was angry that this man had left Tony with nothing. She couldn't believe how some people can be given positions of authority in religion, and then diminish all hope for others. She was just thunderstruck. Then she was always trying to get Tony into metaphysics."

CARL SANDBURG A Biography By Penelope Niven Scribner Near Flat Rock, N.C., the Sandburgs found ... pathways cut from Rock Hill to the nearby Episcopal Church of St. John in the Wilderness ... There family and friends gathered for a simple ceremony July 24, 1967. Esther Wachs, Sandburg's last surviving sister, came from California, frail and beautiful. Edward Stiechen, his brother-in-law, tore a bough from a Connemara pine tree and placed it on Sandburg's coffin ... Sandburg himself had outlined a funeral in 1920 in his poem "Finish" and the service followed that design. "Death comes once, let it be easy," he had written. "Ring one bell for me once, let it go at that./ Or ring no bell at all, better yet./ Sing one song if I die./ Sing John Brown's Body or Shout All Over God's Heaven/ Death comes once, let it be easy."

MERVYN STOCKWOOD A Lonely Life By Michael De-la-Noy Mowbray In Moscow [while Bishop of Southwark] he was on a parliamentary visit, in the company of six members of the House of Commons and one other from the House of Lords. His electric razor proved useless, and decked out in purple cassock, his episcopal ring prominent as ever .. he appeared in a barber's shop to be shaved - by an enormous and ebullient woman. The room was full of Muscovites being shaved too. His visit to the barber's shop coincided with the Orthodox Easter, and the woman shaving him spotting the ring and the purple, asked if he was an Anglican bishop. On being assured that he was, with one hand she raised Mervyn's right arm, and flourishing her razor in the other proclaimed, "Christ is risen!" To which her fellow Communists responded, to a man, "He is risen indeed!"

WALTER CRONKITE A Reporter's Life Knopf It was a big wedding at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Kansas City on March 20, 1940 ... but the bride had not arrived. The organist ... kept punching away at I Love You Truly. The wait lasted 45 minutes, or approxiinately 21 renderings of I Love You Truly. It turned out that Betsy's brother had burned up her new lingerie along with the gift wrappings, and she would not hear of any substitute. Her brother had to go downtown and fetch the exact replacements.

AFFAIRS OF STATE By Gil Troy Free Press Lyndon Johnson returned to Washington and began a long-distance campaign to woo Lady Bird. She read the Episcopal marriage service, contemplating the meaning of the lifelong contract ... On Saturday morning, Nov. 17, 1934, Lyndon called his friend, Dan Quill, to arrange a wedding in San Antonio that night ... Quill ran across the street and brought a dozen rings from Sears and Roebuck. Lady Bird settled on a $2.50 special. After the standard Episcopal ceremony, the good Reverend mumbled, "I hope this marriage lasts." Johnson never reimbursed Quill.

JOHN STEINBECK A Biography By Jay Parini Holt According to the novelist's wishes (and in spite of his atheism), his funeral was performed according to the rites of the Church of England. "I just don't want a bunch of people getting together to tell yarns about me,"' he had said to his wife. The service, attended by several hundred people, was held at St. James Church on Madison Avenue [in New York]. Henry Fonda, a friend since the filming of The Grapes of Wrath, flew in from Hollywood to read aloud from Petrarch's Sonnets to Laura, Tennyson's Ulysses, and some lines from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson that had been one of Steinbeck's favorite passages from English poetry. The Order of the Burial of the Dead was read from the Book of Common Prayer by the rector, as were Psalms 46 and 121 ... In California, on the day after Christmas, a special memorial service just for the family was held at Point Lobos on a cliff overlooking the sea. A young, longhaired priest in a white alb read from the Bible; lie picked up a handful of dirt and threw it toward the sea, crying, "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes," as seagulls squawked overhead and the surf crashed on the rocks below.

The Rev. James B. Simpson is editor of Simpson's Contemporary Quotations and Washington correspndent for TLC.