How I Became Episcopalian...ish
The lore drop *some* of you asked for.
As I’ve said many times before, I was raised secular. My parents were not Ricky Gervais tier atheists, but they were both more or less agnostic and felt strongly about not pushing any particular religion on me. They came from different faiths themselves (my dad was raised Jewish, my mom was raised in what she calls “Nearist,” because her family just went to the church that was nearest their house) and despite these different upbringings, they were aligned on raising me with a clear code of morality and ethics, but no particular faith. They wanted my religion or lack thereof to be my choice.
I discovered I was half-Jewish when I was about four or five. I’m not sure what this really meant to me at the time, because my dad’s form of Judaism was very light on the religion and heavy on the jokes and fun Hanukkah presents. I knew, probably from kids at school, that this was more of a religious thing for other people and I was curious about that. One day (and I actually remember this) I asked my mom, “Daddy is Jewish, so I’m half-Jewish, but what’s my other religion? What are you?” to which she replied, “English.”
And being Jewish did feel like being English. For me, it was a culture, like any other that one might reference on Heritage Food Day in elementary school. Just as I did not attend church, I did not attend temple. I never learned Hebrew beyond what was necessary for an annual game of dreidel. Not a single word of Yiddish was spoken in my house except by my gentile mother who, by marrying my dad, had finally earned a pass to say things like “kvetch” for no reason. (I still recall her calling my second-grade nemesis a mieskeit, ie: Yiddish for chopped, kinda deep cut honestly.) We celebrated Hanukkah, but it was a very fun and secular Hanukkah where my dad did goofy voices for half the prayer to make us laugh, not unlike our very fun and secular Christmas, which contained more references to Burgermeister Meisterburger than to Jesus.
But I had some vague yearning for religion, in a way I couldn’t quite explain. I remember “praying” as a very young child, with no real clue of which religion’s God was hearing my prayer. Also, I’m pretty sure my prayers were mostly about unicorns and Barbies.
By grade school, I had discovered that Christianity was a thing, and that it was a thing my mother had experienced in a mostly negative way.
