As college progressed, I found myself completing a degree in film with a very liberal interdisciplinary studies minor. And I loved it. However, the freedom of exploration that I carved out for myself in my undergraduate career led to a new discomfort with the absolute certainty I found in my Baptist church.

I began attending an Episcopal church with some friends who had begun their search for a new kind of Christian expression. They, too, were Baptist exiles. They, too, had become uncomfortable with the spiritual places from whence they came. So, I fumbled and flailed and copy-catted my way through a few Episcopal services with the grace of the ballet-dancing hippos from Fantasia. I learned to bow and kneel and cross myself. I became comfortable with my female vicar and even the taste of real wine during communion (which is taken EVERY WEEK!).

I'm not entirely comfortable in the Episcopal church, though. I do not think it is the Anglican Communion that makes me uneasy, though. I think there are deeper personal and spiritual issues. I think that the fire in my soul, the fire of a love of God, is down to a faint ember. I can't really put my finger on it, but I am lost in a way that has shaken me. There are so many questions of belief as opposed to symbolic understanding. There is a sort of non-literal truth and community tradition reality that has made my Baptist-rooted consciousness uncomfortable. I'd thought that if you took any of the pieces away, the whole house of cards fell. But maybe the house isn't made of cards at all, and these crazy Episcopalians are trying to tell me that it's something else. That God isn't as worried about that one magic prayer as God is worried about how we treat others. And it just adds to my confusion.

So, I'm starting something different. I'm going on a pilgrimage of sorts. It isn't a pilgrimage to a physical place, but it is a pilgrimage to the farthest reaching places my soul can go. I'm going to visit houses of worship, meetings of practitioners, and have conversations with true believers of all different stripes. My hope is to genuinely connect with people of different backgrounds and traditions, and to see what it means to these people to believe what they do. I want to see this fire in others, regardless of what it's rooted in. I want to see if people actually are what they say they are, or if everyone is just spinning his or her wheels. I may even talk to some fervent atheists and agnostics along the way, you know, for perspective.

Brace yourself, though, because I get the feeling that this could be truly weird as I tramp through churches and temples and Kingdom Halls and synagogues and covens and circles and mosques. I'm sure I'll blunder through the majority of it, but I'll do my best not to be some sort of ridiculously insensitive asshole. My promise is to try.

The point of this is not buffet-style religion or some Po-Mo amalgamation, but to experience what it is that makes people believe. What keeps people coming back, and what orders the worlds of these believers? Is there something else out there?

So, hold my hand. It's time to go to church.

T