In preparing mine, I reflected on at least a dozen years of memories of Sunday School, church camp, youth group and folk group at Grace Methodist Church in Wilmington, Delaware. It was here in a very uni-cultural, middle-class, Protestant, largely white environment that I acquired the basics for my understanding of Christian faith and community.

Greater maturity in my own spirituality came naturally with reading, prayer and life experience. A good part of the latter involved coming into contact with a wider, more multicultural society. As a Boy Scout, I interacted with other Protestant, Jewish, Catholic, and Baha’i Scouts and Scouters. We obviously shared ethical values in Scouting, and discussions I had with them about their faith beliefs caused me to conclude that their own religious convictions, sometimes quite different from my own, contributed to this similarity in personal ethics. This pushed me in the direction of considering how the God of my upbringing might be understood entirely differently by other faithful people. I found this to be reassuring, as I had struggled with the thought of people whom I knew and respected being cut off from God’s grace and the opportunity to abide in God simply because they believed differently from me.

During high school, I also became involved in the Jesus People movement, a very evangelical form of faith expression amongst youth in the 1970s (think Elton John in “Tiny Dancer” – Jesus freaks, out in the streets, handing tickets out to God). This was a very exciting, charismatic form of living and worship. One palpably felt the presence of Holy Spirit in meetings. This experience caused me to be more open about my faith. I wore a self-made, neon-orange cross everywhere, resulting in many conversations about faith with classmates, fellow Scouts and complete strangers. Ultimately, however, I sensed that the “differentness” or “holiness” that had attracted me to this group was actually perceived by fellow members as making them more righteous than others. This caused me to leave. I refused to believe I belonged to a group that somehow had a monopoly on God.

This nascent, inclusionary, personal theology was also nurtured through my befriending of foreign exchange students who attended my high school, one of whom was Buddhist. These were people whose ethics and values I respected, and I reflected on how remarkably similar their fundamental humanity was to my own, despite the greatly different social locations in which we had grown up.

This appreciation of cultural difference made the jump to hyperspace the year I spent as a foreign exchange student living with a family in a German village. I became accustomed to a different language, different foods & mealtimes, and different social norms, particularly in how one interacted with strangers. I also lived with a family who were Christmas-Easter church-goers. This experience, followed by college and graduate school, meant that my late teen and early adulthood years were spent largely without the ongoing influence of a church community.

Early married years continued this estrangement from established religion. Adjusting to this new relationship, a demanding job involving frequent international travel and simply being out in the world where “home” was no longer where I grew up kept me off my game when it came to religious practice. Still, however, I felt there was something major missing in my life.

Attempts to resume regular church-going were affected by the different religious traditions in which we had grown up, something I suppose is common in Protestant-Catholic marriages. After some searching, we hit upon the Episcopal Church as a happy medium. When we moved to this area, St. Luke’s became our church home, in which we started to raise a family.

In 1988, we moved to Geneva, Switzerland so that I could help negotiate international trade agreements with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. There we became regular worshipers at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church situated near the banks of Lake Geneva. Emmanuel’s parishioners were English-speaking Swiss and ex-patriots from countries around the globe, reflecting the multi-cultural nature of the city. This afforded an even broader set of takes on Christian faith to consider. In my work or personal travels, I also have had the privilege of being able to worship with Christian communities in over a dozen other countries across five continents. I have always found it comforting when living or traveling in a foreign culture to have a ready-made connection with fellow Christians when I show up in a church. And it is particularly welcoming to be able to experience that familiar Anglican liturgy, regardless of the language, that helps me draw nearer to God.

St. Luke’s was also my spiritual refuge during the difficult period of separation and divorce. And it was at St. Luke’s that I met and married Marjy, and our lives have become integrally intertwined with the living and affirming spirit of this church family. We both spent years mentoring St. Luke’s youth in the J2A program.

Recently, our spiritual journeys have been greatly enriched in three areas. For four years we have been in community with nine other faithful people in the St. Luke’s Education for Ministry (EfM) program. We have shared perspectives on Scripture, consciously reflected on God’s presence in the issues affecting our lives, incorporated new prayer forms in our worship and considered what the Holy Spirit is calling us to do at this point in our lives. We also have been breaking bread once a month with an interfaith group made up with couples from the Baptist, Baha’i, Latter Day Saint, Muslim and Unitarian communities, exploring the common and different elements in our faith traditions. Finally, we have felt called to become mentors for the St. Luke’s Sacred Ground Circles, exploring the important work still facing our society around racial justice and healing.

All of these experiences deepened my faith and reinforced my appreciation of Christian universalism. The contact with people of many different religious beliefs also cemented my belief that the Creator who loves all humanity might choose to reveal Godself to different peoples at different times and in different ways. I was thrilled, then, to encounter in our EfM readings this year the writings of John Hick and the pluralist school of theology with the metaphor of one mountain, and multiple paths up that mountain to God. And I look forward to that time when God’s glory will be the true light of the world.