It is difficult to find writers of "religious books" who deal appreciatively with traditions other than their own. But British rabbi Lionel Blue does just this in his latest book. My Affair with Christianity is the story of his lengthy relationship with Christians and the Christian religion. He is, if you like, a very "ecumenical" rabbi. He has explored religious truth wherever it has led him - even when it has led him to people and places outside his own tradition.

This is what he says about his relationships with religious traditions:

"I had been married to Judaism all my life ... in some ways it resembled an arranged marriage because I had been born into it. I had never chosen it. It had chosen me ... So it was part of me whether I liked it or not, like my family, or my circumcision - the covenant cut into my flesh - which I could do nothing about. Though what had started as a fact of life had gradually turned into quiet, deep love.

"But this has not stopped me falling in love and ... having affairs with other loves, some of which stayed with me all my life, though they were spiritual or ideological in nature ... [And] it was my Christian affair that pushed me into the rabbinate."

When I read these words for the first time, they resonated in me. For I had not chosen my religious tradition either. I did not choose Christianity or the Episcopal Church. They chose me. Or, rather, like an arranged marriage, they were chosen for me. And although it is an arranged marriage, and arranged for me when I was but a few weeks old, it has been a long and good one. I was born into it, you might say, and since my father is a priest, there was a certain inevitability about it. The church and I celebrated 40 years together in 1998. For it was on Dec. 28, 1958, when, by water and the Holy Spirit, I was made a member of Christ's body at St. Paul's Church on K Street in Washington, D.C.

My life spans an important era in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. We have changed together, and I find that we have developed bulges and hollows into which we now slip quite comfortably together - like a couple who have walked arm in arm and cuddled close in the same way for many decades.

Of course, no relationship that lasts a lifetime is smooth sailing all the way. Sometimes one of us angers the other, or gets on the other's nerves, or makes the other a little uncomfortable. But we live in the knowledge that we are bound together in a way that cannot be broken.

Actually, this does not happen most of the time, or even very frequently. For the church is quite glorious, even when her face is a little dirty, and the Anglican tradition in which I have spent a varied and fascinating life still holds me firmly in a wonderful embrace. Like a living, growing partner, the church still reveals new secrets to me - secrets all the more alluring in those times when I think I have the church completely figured out. After all these years, it is nice to be taken by surprise now and then.

In an age when it is fashionable to confess one's transgressions in public, I shall admit to a couple of affairs during this lengthy, arranged marriage. I do not think that I behaved inappropriately, but I did flirt outrageously. Perhaps most conspicuously, for a couple of years when I was a schoolboy in London, I would serve the early Eucharist on Sundays in my own parish near Oxford Circus, and then (to save the tube fare) I would walk across Hyde Park to sing in the choir at the Russian Orthodox cathedral. There the great bishop and mystic, Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, would celebrate the liturgy in the dignified majesty of the Russian tradition. I shall never forget those experiences.

I even toyed briefly with the thought of converting. Although I had been raised an Anglo-Catholic, I had never been seriously tempted to become a Roman Catholic (as, over the years, some of my friends have been). But Russian Orthodoxy and I got pretty serious with one another for a time. Fortunately I was too young to make any rash decisions and elope, and those who were responsible for me, not least the Russian bishop himself who was used to making converts, would not have allowed a 17-year-old's enthusiasm to run away with him.

As with all affairs, the ardor eventually cooled. Yet even during that affair, I never missed a Sunday Eucharist in my own parish. And in the long run, of course, I never left home or my first (and only) religious spouse. I came to my senses and I realized that to live in a particular religious culture is to participate in a complicated mystery. I could never be a Russian. Or, perhaps more correctly, by my late teens I was already too pervasively an Anglican. So Anglicanism and I kissed and made up and moved on to a deeper relationship of understanding, respect, and - indeed - passion. By the way, I still see my old affair from time to time, and that relationship has mellowed and matured nicely, too. It is refreshing, and rare, to be able to remain friends with an old flame.

There are some experiences I have never had. Although culturally and intellectually I have had a cosmopolitan and international upbringing, in terms of my religious life, I am still a "homeboy." Like all partners, I have grown and changed, as has my "other half." But I am still with the spouse who was chosen for me all those years ago. I do not know what it is like to go through a religious divorce and re-marriage, but from what I have seen, such divorces and re-marriages are often pretty much the same as those between men and women. Guilt, anxiety, sadness and anger on the one hand; excitement, relief, a sense of beginning again on the other. And perhaps also a sense of nervousness that the new-found religious tradition may prove not to be the answer to all the questions after all. "Will I be hurt again, just like the last time?"

People say that one never misses what one has never had. That's OK. I am getting to the age where I appreciate more and more the phrase "I am built for comfort, not for speed." And I know what it is like to gaze upon the face of a partner and see one's oldest friend. For this is what the Episcopal Church has become for me - an old, comfortable friend with whom I live each day, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death - and all that other good stuff in between that makes our life together worth the living. o

The Rev. Canon Peter Eaton is the rector of St. James' Church, Lancaster, Pa.