(Note to readers: Time for a break from Trump and doom and gloom. In this essay and the several that follow I am writing a short autobiography focusing on the highlights and lowlights of my spiritual journey through life.)

From a young age, I had the feeling that I was called to the priesthood of the Episcopal Church. My father was the senior warden of Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Nashville and my mother headed up the Women of Christ Church.  My junior year in high school she was elected president of the Women of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee. I attended Sunday school every Sunday most of my childhood and during my teenage years was very active both in the youth group at Christ Church and in the diocesan youth organization, “Episcopal Young Churchmen of Tennessee.” Even more important, the clergy at Christ Church visited me often when I was convalescing from polio when I was ten and then again when I was twelve and was recovering from a spinal fusion and confined to my bed. I was comforted and inspired by the clergy and wanted to be like them. During the summer of 1960 following my high school graduation I joined a dozen other high school Episcopalians from across Tennessee   to work in the highlands of a remote area in Mexico advancing the cause of the Episcopal Church in Mexico. The two young clergy who led the adventure were inspiring and charismatic, and I wanted to be like them too. This life changing experience was followed the summer of my sophomore year at Davidson College when I worked in an Episcopal “experimental” farming community at the base of Mt Yatsu, Japan’s second tallest mountain. Six or seven American college students, including my best friend from Nashville (and college roommate), were paired with an equal number of Japanese students to help build a road in an Episcopal missionary community called KEEP (“Kiyosato Episcopal Experimental Project”). Then the summer after my junior year in college I worked in the Lower East Side of New York City in a mission church of Trinity Church, Wall Street, teaching in vacation Bible school. My assistant was a Puerto Rican guy slightly younger than me, who was “vice president” of an infamous street gang, the Bopping Ballerinas. These experiences while not without some personal challenges were all character building, extraordinary adventures. Joining the Americans that summer were a group of college students from the UK, one of whom went on to become a very successful Anglican priest in the Liverpool area and has remained a best friend even to this day.

At Davidson, I attended the tiny Episcopal Church adjacent to the campus almost every Sunday and my senior year was elected president of the Davidson College YMCA, oddly at that time a position voted on by the entire student body and which carried with it dubious prestige. In part due to my position at the Y and my church involvement I was inspired to organize a civil rights march the spring of  my senior year (“The  March in Charlotte for Civil Rights”), which for the 500 plus people who participated (about 50 from Davidson College and others from HBCUs in the area and  many members of a Unitarian Universalist church in downtown Charlotte), was something most participants probably still remember. It certainly was such an experience for me though it caused quite a stir back home when a front page article appeared in Nashville’s conservative newspaper, The Nashville Banner, with the headline, “Bank President’s Son Leads Rights March in North Carolina.” To their credit my parents responded to condolences expressed by astonished friends at Nashville cocktail parties that they actually supported their son.

So, when it came time for me to graduate from Davidson, how could a bleeding heart like me not go to seminary? I was primed and ready. There was only one small problem. I was not sure that my Christian faith was what it should be or that I believed what Episcopal priests were supposed to believe. So instead of applying to an Episcopal Seminary, I decided to apply for a Rockefeller Fellowship, which at the time paid all expenses for college graduates, selected on a competitive basis, who were not sure what they wanted to do with their lives to give them one year to get a taste of what seminary was like. The idea I suppose was that some promising graduates might be enticed away from law school, business or med school to become Christian ministers. I was one of something like 25 or 30 people who got the award that year, the majority of whom ended up like me attending non-denominational Union Theological Seminary in New York City. At that time Union was the preeminent seminary not only in the United Stages but in the world. Unlike Davidson College and all Episcopal seminaries at the time, where students were all male, almost half the students at Union were women. A couple of years before I got the fellowship, Union had on its faculty the most famous Protestant theologians of the Twentieth Century, Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. It was also the seminary that the famous theologian Deitric Bonhoeffer attended before he returned to Nazi Germany to oppose Hitler (and was martyred). I remember the first few weeks at Union I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Even though Tillich and Niebuhr had retired, the professors who were there had all written books, were brilliant, and were well known in their fields. Finally, I thought, I have made it into the Big Leagues! I was back in the Big Apple, which I loved, and with fellow students who were, well, pretty much like me. They had done well in college where they were student leaders and were looking for a pathway to try to make the world a better place. They were also, like me, somewhat lost souls.

A few weeks before I left Nashville for New York City, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee was visiting Christ Church. He was a good friend of my parents and a feisty, Old School kind of guy from the Deep South, who was a committed evangelical with a twinkle in his eye and a hardy laugh. At coffee hour following the service, he came up to me and asked what my plans were now that I had graduated from college. When I told him I was headed off to Union Theological Seminary, his jaw dropped and without missing a beat, he knelt and crossed himself saying “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost!” The following week he sent me papers to fill out, which I did, and that is how I became a “postulant”–or candidate for the priesthood in the Episcopal Church.

The four years I spent at Union Seminary were the best of times and the worst of times, which will be the subject of Part Two of “Confessions of an Episcopal Universalist.”