Like many younger clergy I know, I became an Episcopalian as a young adult shortly after college. I was a Quaker at the time, but I was seeking a more outwardly sacramental tradition. So somehow—through the guidance of the Spirit no doubt—I found myself spending time with our local Episcopal campus ministry and its chaplain.

The first time I went to service was on a Wednesday night. It wasn’t a Eucharist like on Sundays. It was a centering prayer and Taize service led by one of my professors. After spending almost three years with Quakers, it felt familiar but different. We gathered around the altar on cushions and lit candles in front of an icon of Mary and the baby Jesus. It was the first time I heard one of my favorite hymns, “Ubi Caritas.”

After graduating college, I spent a semester at a Quaker-affiliated seminary in Indiana. But instead of going to meeting for worship, I went to a local Episcopal Church. The priest there taught me how to be a cantor and how to lead lectio divina. I bought a Prayer Book and started praying compline every night before bed. I even set up my own prayer altar up by the window.

When the semester ended, I decided to take a break from seminary and go back to the city where I went to college. As providence would have it, the Episcopal chaplain I had connected with in undergrad had a job opening as his assistant, so I became the assistant for ministry at St. Mary’s House in Greensboro, NC. Over the next couple of years I was confirmed, and then started the ordination process during my third year. My wife was confirmed shortly before that by Presiding Bishop Curry, who was our diocesan bishop at the time, and a couple of years later we made our way to The Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, TX.

Looking back now, I realize that I became an Episcopalian for three reasons. The first was that I was looking for an open and affirming community of faith, one that celebrated the LGBTQ+ community and ordained them. I had grown up in a tradition that was “don’t ask, don’t tell” and was tired of how that hurt people. The second was that I was looking for a community that celebrated the sacraments and practiced written liturgies, both of which I had come to love in my study of church history. Related to that, the third reason that I became an Episcopalian was that I was looking for a church that had deep roots, roots that went even beyond the Reformation. When I studied church history in undergrad, I fell in love with medieval Catholic mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and Francis & Clare of Assisi. I wanted to be part of a tradition that recognized saints like them, but that was open to seeing all Christians as saints too.

In so many ways The Episcopal Church was a perfect fit. It felt and still feels like home. But when I went to seminary, I started having doubts about where I had been planted. I struggled to find my place in what was a much wider tradition than I once thought, and I wrestled with older identities as I tried to integrate them.

Thankfully, I found my way and met friends, colleagues, and mentors who helped me find my voice in The Episcopal and Anglican traditions. By the time I graduated, I realized that I was something called “broad church” and found kinship in the writings of the Latitudinarians and Cambridge Platonists of the 17th century. I had also connected with my Celtic heritage, and found a familiar and compelling spirit in the writings of Mary Earle and Donald Allchin. Now, I serve as the priest-in-charge of a pastoral sized congregation that uses a combination of The 1979 Prayer Book and Enriching Our Worship (an authorized supplement), just like my home parish. We also have a Wednesday evening Eucharist where we light candles, pray for healing, and study the lives of the saints. It’s funny how things come full circle.

When it comes to liturgy, I’m not very fussy. I like to keep things simple and let the words speak for themselves. I tend to wear an alb and stole, and every once in a while I’ll put on a chasuble, usually on a feast day of some kind. My style of celebrating the Eucharist is also fairly simple. I don’t make a lot of hand motions or bodily gestures, and I usually have a smile on my face. Celebrating communion at Christ’s table brings me incredible joy, and as one of my colleagues says, whenever you celebrate it, you shouldn’t look like you’re getting a colonoscopy. I whole-heartedly agree.

The Episcopal Church can be really frustrating at times, especially on an institutional level. Sometimes I just sit there and scratch my head, or even shake it now and again. There are also some Episcopalians who seem to be really out of touch with the rest of the Church, and there are those who are incredibly opinionated about things that I could honestly care less about. But overall, I’ve found The Episcopal Church to be a pretty welcoming, authentic, and grounded community. Some days I do still feel out of place, but most days I feel pretty comfortable in my “Episcopal skin.”

In the end, our Christian identities should always be more important to us than our denominational ones. Bishop Wright of Atlanta once said in a sermon that “our language is Christian, but our accent is Episcopalian.” That fits my own thinking well, so I try my best to keep my language and my accent in the right order.

Episcopal worship is rooted in the idea that incarnation matters. When Episcopalians gather together to give thanks to God, we do so through sacraments—through physical signs of God’s spiritual grace. In some communities, we even posture our bodies in certain ways towards those sacraments or towards the altar that they’re celebrated on. We do that because for us, the Word of God has been made flesh in the Eucharist. We experience God’s living Presence whenever we come together to bless the earth-hewn elements of bread and wine and then receive those elements into our bodies. By doing so, we become little words of God enfleshed. We become Christ-bearers in the world.

Sadly, we live in a society that has a terrible habit of desecrating bodies. Many years ago, there were philosophers and even theologians who decided to separate the physical realm of reality from the spiritual. In doing so, they severed that of God from that of the earth. Then, as history played out, men were often associated with the spiritual or “greater” reality, and women were often associated with the physical or “lesser” one. 

In the same way, the earth became a commodity to exploit and was denied its rightful place as a bearer of the Sacred. This would also be done to those who had different pigments of color in their skin. The same separation has now been used to justify the marginalization of those who transgress gender norms and expectations of human sexuality. So in all of those ways, those who have been in power have abused the earth and its people. They have denied God’s goodness in creation and in themselves.

By participating in the Eucharist, however, we are reclaiming that creation is good and that embodied life matters. The Eucharist reminds us that we are not ethereal spirits floating around the void, but we are people who inhabit bodies—bodies that need physical nourishment to be sustained. Letting the Eucharist sustain us reminds us that God sustains us. It reminds us that the flesh and the spirit are woven together. They are, in every sense, part of the same whole. That’s why we often describe physical communion as a “sure and certain means” of God’s grace. The physical elements of bread and wine become Christ’s bodily offering to us and they unite us with him in his offering to the world.

The work of justice and inclusion that many Episcopalians participate in is actually an outpouring of that sacramental reality. When we work for racial justice, when work to safeguard women’s access to healthcare, and when we advocate for the full legal and religious inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community, we do so because embodied life matters. The Eucharist teaches us that every human body is sacred, regardless of its skin color or who that body chooses to love. All human bodies matter, because God has blessed them and called them good (Gen. 1:31). All bodies are equally capable of receiving and embodying God’s Presence to the world.

In the end, that’s why I felt called to be a “celebrant” of the Eucharist. As the late English priest Donald Allchin said in his book on Welsh poetry, I felt called to bless “the goodness that is latent in the world” and then lift up and celebrate that goodness for the sake of others (Praise Above All, p.6). To be a priest is to honor and celebrate that goodness, especially when it’s been forgotten, and to remind the world—through my embodies actions—that the physical world is irreversibly holy.