My own personal journey from doubt to faith has been a matter of beginnings and endings, of seeming short-cuts that became the long way round, of apparent detours that led at last into what I trust is the Way of Truth and Life -- the awakening of the soul to the wonder of creation, the human place therein, and the yearning to return, by life's long pilgrimage from Eden into history and, through Christ's atonement, on to paradise to the soul's birthing ground and final place of rest: the bosom of God the Maker, the Poet of all that is, the Author of those two great books that rhyme, Nature and the Bible.

Such a life had its beginning in May of 1949 when I was born in Shreveport, La., into a family of Southern Baptists. Each morning at breakfast my father read us a chapter from a red-letter edition of the King James Bible. The incomparable beauty of the rhythm and phrasing in this translation thrilled the innermost core of my being. The opening verses of Genesis and of the Gospel of John, the 23rd Psalm, the Beatitudes, the Our Father, and the Nativity story in Luke became for me touchstone texts of utmost truth.

But this image of the gathered family reading the Bible in the common tongue at home stands in contrast to a somewhat darker picture of time spent attending church itself. And yet in the seemingly endless sermons that left the soul enflamed with a heightened sense of supernatural evil (Satan was real), personal guilt (I was a wretch), and inherited original sin (the Fall had certainly occurred), in the contests to memorize long passages of scripture and in the races to be first to find an announced chapter and verse (I could easily open to Titus or Micah with a deft flip of the thumb), in the inwardlookingness that might expose deep-seated shadowy sins and glimpse any faint traces of the light of grace, in the soul-wrenching repetition of the refrains of hymns of invitation such as "Just As I Am" while the preacher waited in hope for that one additional sinner to break and walk down the aisle to publicly confess his faith, and most of all, in the assumption that there is a divinely inspired book made up of poetry and poetic prose thatcontains all things necessary for salvation -- in all of this I was marked forever by the north Louisiana protestant tradition.

I felt differently about the protestantism I experienced at Magnolia Baptist Church, an old, high-ceilinged, wooden church with belfry and deep-toned bell where I went when visiting my maternal grandparents in Saline, La. The church had no airconditioning (a nearby funeral home, eager to remind us that our mortal days are numbered, supplied the hand fans), and though, in summer heat, the combined odors of perfume, sweat, and flowers (known as "country Baptist incense") were all but overwhelming. I felt through my grandparents' secure place in that small town and the surrounding countryside a sense of belonging, including belonging to the church, which came all too soon to an end when my grandparents died and I, at 13, left that world behind forever, except in memories called up and shaped by the creative spirit that is God's shared gift to artists.

My 12 years in Louisiana colleges earning my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English and the first 10 years thereafter as a college professor were years away from the church. The fire-and-brimstone sermons for so long seared into my adolescent brain had taken their toll. My friend, the late Alabama poet John Finlay, described such sermons in his poem "Through a Glass Darkly": "I spent those summer nights / On tent-revivals' sawdust floors and heard / Preachers condemn this sinful world to fire / As if it has been made not by their God." Such preachers' burning words could drive one into Gnosticism or to a rejection of the ex nihilo theory of creation or into a dark form of Platonism -- gloomy ruminations that see the ultimate deity or else ideal concepts of things as removed from the irredeemable taintedness of the flawed, contingent world of matter.

God's redemptive love had came into my purview during my college years not through the church but through my study of writers of faith in the British literary tradition. My admiration for and study of the works of George Herbert, John Donne, Samuel Johnson, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and Geoffrey Hill led me to make several trips to England in the 1970s to work at the British Library, to visit my great aunt in Shrewsbury, and to absorb more of the Anglican religious heritage. And so, like countless others, I visited Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, gazed upon Donne's effigy in St. Paul's, stood quietly in Herbert's tiny parish church at Bemerton, and, on one fateful day, having long admired Eliot's play Murder in the Cathedral, went to Canterbury to see the spot where Thomas á Becket was martyred.

Exactly what happened there I do not fully know. But a few days later, sitting in the bar of the Gonville Hotel in Cambridge, I took a sheet of hotel stationery and wrote out a short poem called "Reliquiae" -- the remains -- wherein I tried to capture my deep sense of the loss of that redeeming love which, however obscurely, I felt all around me in Canterbury on the grounds of our mother church: "We walked at dusk from Canterbury close, / An image of Saint Thomas slumped in blood / Soon shut within the dark of mind and door. / A tide of shadow shrouded eastern walls, / Enfolding in its crests the crumbled graves / Where parting words had struggled from the stone. / With clumsy steps we moved among the dead, / Respectful of the rites that led them there / To threaten desolation with their faith. / Beyond the sunken dust the stars remained, / Ancestral lights no homage can allure, / Our wandering fathers careless of their kind. / At evensong survivors sang and prayed. / We turned aside to perish with the saved." A poem of loss and doubt, yes, but also one of yearning. What I was lacking was a humble, grateful relationship to my Creator and to the Spirit of Christ as found within those human beings in whom his Spirit lives.

Such a relationship was to be the cause of my return to the church: the birth of my daughter, Anna, my only child, in 1987. My wife, Fran, had been raised Roman Catholic, I, Southern Baptist, and neither of us was willing to return to the church of our youth. Therefore, we decided to become Episcopalians. The Episcopal Church seemed to contain the best of what we had separately known as children and teenagers -- the altar and the pulpit, both catholic and reformed. And it was reticent before mystery, including the exact nature of Christ's presence in the Eucharist. Moreover, one of the glories of Anglicanism is that it allows for honest doubt, discussion, debate, free scholarly inquiry -- no nihil obstat! -- and so I was welcomed into our little parish of St. John's, in Thibodaux, La., with all my heavy burden of doubt, old wounds, ignorance, misconceptions and yearning.

Fatherhood changed me even more than marriage, and I found myself trying to become a more humane, tolerant, and caring person as I felt the deep responsibility toward and love for this new life that I had had a part in bringing into the world. One poem for my daughter recalls her first awakening to the mysterious relationship between words and things when, on a car trip by night, she first saw the moon and named it. The poem closes: "'Moon!' you cried. I nodded as I steered, / For word and thing to you were nearly one / As in the dim beginning they appeared, / An imaged act of God both made and done. // At daybreak you gave in at last to sleep, / The moon absorbed with a greater light / It hurts to look upon, and yet as deep / As memory can be you'll keep this night, // A night in which the mystery, last and first, / That anything should be and as it is / Journeying toward the source from which it burst / Woke up a child who crossed that vast abyss."

And now, though a faithful churchman of almost 15 years, I still sometimes wonder -- is the journey largely over? Am I, short of heaven, at home here in my Anglican faith? There are still times of doubting, but such moments are rarer now, and so I wait with faith and hope here in the fallen human condition. Such waiting is at the heart of a recent poem based on J. F. Millet's famous 19th-century painting "The Angelus," which depicts two peasant farm workers in rural France stopping a moment in the fields at the end of the day to bow their heads and pray as a church's distant angelus bells are heard: "The Angelus of evening, distant bells, / Three for Ave Marias, versicles, / And nine for every collect low-entoned / By priests inside the far-off village church // Built up from Norman stone. The sky stays gold / Although the sun is gone and shadows pass / Over potato fields where standing still / In attitudes of prayer a man and wife / Think of the Incarnation of their Lord, / The flesh redeemed, creation made anew. / Bells pealing from the New Jerusalem / Through history back to Eden's speaking leaves. // Yet here between these dreams of paradise / Potatoes must be planted, tended, dug, / Then sacked on barrows pushed to winter bins / To feast on till the final angels come."

David Middleton is professor of English and poet-in-residence at Nichols State University, Thibodaux, La.