When I was in High School I was active in a Baptist church which today stands in near ruins, its stained glass windows having been extracted and used in an office complex.

The pastor took a special interest in me and when I turned sixteen and could drive my mother's Chevy, he suggested me as a Sunday substitute preacher at some smaller country churches.I had several prepared sermons and stuck to basic themes. On the debate team in High School, I was not bad on my feet.

When I look back on it I marvel at my parents' confidence in me---what must they have thought as I drove off into the wilderness with ten bucks, the family car, and my well-worn New Testament. If it had been one of my kids, I would have worried the entire time until they were safely home.

On one particular Sunday in January, somewhere on the banks of the Ohio River, I arrived at a church on its annual day of remembrance, a special tradition of that congregation. I was asked to keep the sermon short and then to conduct the Rose Ceremony. In the pulpit was a bouquet of red roses and a hand-written list of the deceased, some with dates going back decades, some from the year just past.

As I solemnly called out a name from the list someone in the congregation---a family member or friend---came forward, I handed them a red rose and they walked slowly down the aisle, out the front door, back along all the side windows in view of everyone inside, and then to a small cemetery in the back. The ceremony lasted two hours, after which I was well fed at a covered dish dinner before embarking on a three hour drive home. The images of folks walking past the church windows holding a single rose has stayed with me for a lifetime

My intent to become a minister lasted well into my Sophomore year in college which was just long enough to discover whiskey, women's colleges and Glee Club. A simplistic idea of religion, bolstered by absolutist beliefs, didn't stand up to the rigors of growing into adulthood, performing military service, getting married, raising a family, going to grad school and finding a job.

A grain of faith has endured in me throughout my life, but it is not very well defined. To completely deny the possibility of a Supreme Being in the Universe seems in the same vein of hubris as walking around with faith on one's sleeve. I think faith is a constant and spirituality is different by virtue of being a moving, changing pattern as one progresses through life. I get severe digestion when someone calls himself a "person of faith", as if he has just won the lottery and is now on Easy Street.

Music has been the link I have with the emotions originally experienced in those old Baptist churches in Ohio. For years my kids listened to me play Baptist hymns on the piano. I no longer could tolerate the words, but the music moved me and still does.

A few years ago in an a cappella choir I sang Randall Thompson's "Alleluia" in the 13th Century Ely Cathedral in Cambridge and that was the closest thing I have experienced in a lifetime to those original emotions I felt as a teenager up at the pulpit in full sermon mode. It seems that feelings of spirituality are strongest when least expected, when old emotions come to the surface, and it doesn't matter whether they are experienced in a cathedral in Europe or a Rose Ceremony on the banks of the Ohio River---these feelings are a comfort in the otherwise odd circumstances of being human.