T. S. Eliot said that “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” My church background certainly did not start Anglican, yet something about the liturgy and traditions I encountered when I began attending felt to me like coming home. I felt reconnected to something I had never been connected to before, reminded of something I had never seen. Though new to me, the traditions connected me to my own roots because they were a part of the history of the Body to which I am joined.

I stumbled upon the Anglican Mission in America as a nomadic college student. Perhaps because my family was living overseas or perhaps because our culture is shamelessly mobile and rootless, the rootedness of the traditions struck me as being as potent in my own faith as it was lacking in the culture around me. It spoke to me of a Faith that was grounded, not shifting with changing moods and cultural tendencies, that was relevant in our culture because it was true, not because it was whimsical.

As I absorbed the histories behind the traditions I encountered, I began to realize something that I as a history major had somehow overlooked: the Church had not been invented at a convention or by Jonathan Edwards or the Pilgrims or even Martin Luther. Somehow all my lessons in Church history had given me the impression that after the Apostles died there was a fourteen-hundred-year gap before the next movement of the Spirit. Interacting with these men and women who had passed the Faith down to me was like the day I met my great-grandmother who I had known in theory had once existed but who I was surprised to learn was actually still alive.

Every week I gathered with the Body, a Body that included those in the room and those thousands of years older than me as much as it did the future generations who would rise after me. I would kneel with this company to confess that I had not loved as God had called me to love, I would shake their forgiven hands as I greeted them with the peace of Christ, I would stand with them as we prayed to be forgiven as we forgave, and I would finally file with them to the cross where we would eat of the same bread and drink of the same cup. In a culture that stresses individualism as one of its chief virtues, I was comforted to be absolved of the responsibility of being an individual entity; I was suddenly bound to a living unit of humanity that included those who penned the words I prayed, bound by the Spirit through whom we prayed them.